by Lucy Gordon
She did look at him then, with all the distrust in the world. His heart twisted.
‘When I left … I never meant to hurt you,’ he said.
‘You did hurt me,’ she said, flat and definite. The emotion of that instinctive hug was gone; remembered hurt was back. ‘I wrote to you. I worried about you. You never wrote back.’
‘I needed … to protect myself.’
‘Then that’s all right,’ she said stiffly. ‘All explained.’
‘I was a kid. I was stupid, not to keep in contact with my best friend.’
‘We were teenagers,’ she conceded. ‘Sensitivity isn’t a teenager’s strong suit. Forget it. Go to bed.’
‘Sensitive or not, I’ve regretted it. More and more as I grew older.’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘It did to me. It does. I am sorry. That’s why I came tonight. I wanted to see you. It’s what I wanted to say.’ And before he could think it through—because if he had he never would have done it—he stooped and he kissed her. His kiss was light, a brush of his mouth against her forehead. It was a kiss given because he couldn’t bear not to. A kiss of apology.
It was a dumb gesture. She pulled away as if he burned.
‘That’s enough of sorry,’ she told him brusquely, harshly. ‘It was all a long time ago. It doesn’t matter any more; just go.’
‘Are you planning on bucket-emptying all night?’
She sighed. Looked at the buckets. Didn’t look at him. ‘They’ll be okay.’
‘They’ll flood.’
She’d been thinking that, in the fraction of her mind that wasn’t taken up by him. An hour ago the leak had been a drip. The drip was becoming a trickle and the trickle was threatening to turn to a gush.
‘I’m sure it’ll be fine.’ Some things weren’t worth worrying about. No way was she getting up on the roof in this weather.
‘It’ll be the corner of the roof, where the spouts meet,’ he said. ‘The water’s banking up; there’s too much for the drainpipe to cope with.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I’ve coped with more than floods over the last few years. Once upon a time your dad let me up on the roof with him. I can remember the set-up, and I know down-pipes.’
‘You understand plumbing?’ She was incredulous.
He grinned. ‘Hey, I’m a doctor. Plumbing’s half my med training. Plus my work has been practical in more ways than one. So now, not only am I offering my professional opinion, I’m proposing surgery. Though I’ll need to put my dinner suit back on. There’s no way I’m getting Bill’s robe wet.’
She wasn’t listening to the end of his statement. She was too intent on the first. ‘You can’t get on the roof. Are you out of your mind? Have you seen the lightning?’
‘I have,’ he agreed, grateful that here was something concrete he could do, something to lessen the emotion. ‘It’s sheet lightning, not fork. Fork’s bad. Sheet’s not great but we also have trees, much taller than the house. Plus there’s two chimneys, both of which would be hit before the house itself. I’m not proposing to stand on the roof acting as a lightning conductor. I’m proposing to stick a ladder against the corner of the house while you hold the bottom, then climb up and disengage the down-pipe. I might need a hacksaw. Do you have a hacksaw?’
‘I … might,’ she said, flabbergasted.
‘Excellent. With just a hole instead of a pipe, the water’ll stop banking up under the eaves.’
‘How do you know?’ she said, suspicious, and he grinned.
‘Trust me, I’m a doctor.’
She didn’t grin back. ‘You’d go outside again—into the storm?’ She was still hornswoggled. ‘Plus you have a lump the size of an egg on your head.’
‘Hero material, that’s me,’ he said, trying to make her smile. ‘But I’m not too heroic. The lump’s already subsiding and I know what I’m doing. But I do need my sidekick—that’d be you in your sou’wester.’
‘I wouldn’t need to get up all night,’ she said, dazed.
‘There’s my board and lodging paid for. What about it, Mardie? Deal?’
She struggled to shut her mouth. Stop being flabbergasted. ‘You’re proposing we brave the tempest?’ she managed. ‘With a ladder? I don’t mind a bit of rain. Rainstorms are when most of my lambs seem to be born. But you … You’ll need to put that disgusting dinner suit on again.’
‘It’s not disgusting.’
‘If it’s not yet, it soon will be,’ she said darkly. ‘But this is an offer I’m not refusing. Okay, Superman, you’re on.’
He fixed the leak, by the simple expedient of climbing the ladder, hacking the drainpipe out of the spout, clearing the worst of the banked-up leaf litter and letting the water gush free. He even managed to do it so water didn’t land on Mardie’s head as she held the ladder below. It seemed simple, except she couldn’t have done it. Balance in the rain and handle a hacksaw as if accustomed to it. Balance while not noticing the lightning.
He was steady and sure and fast.
She felt …
She felt …
She had no idea how she felt.
He came down the ladder. Brushed against her, which made her feel … as if she didn’t know how she felt. Grinned, a triumphant small-boy grin she remembered. ‘Flood averted,’ he said. ‘Much better than a finger in the dyke, don’t you think?’
‘Much,’ she said faintly, because she couldn’t think of anything else to say.
When had he got so big?
When had he got so … male?
They stowed the ladder, they came back inside and he dripped in the hall.
‘Would you …’ she started and then she stopped. She simply didn’t know what to say next.
‘Would I like another towel? Yes, I would. And then bed.’
‘I … Thank you.’
‘Enough of the thank yous. Let’s call it quits.’ He touched her lightly on her cheek—and she flinched and his smile died.
She got him his towel. He nodded his thanks and headed straight for bed. Up to the attic where he’d stayed when he was a kid.
She headed back to the kitchen. She’d told him she was staying up to eat toast.
She’d lied.
She was staying up to think about Blake.
Blake Maddock was in her attic.
Blake Maddock had fixed her plumbing. Blake Maddock had kissed her.
Blake Maddock had touched her cheek, a gesture of farewell, and her cheek still burned.
For this was a new Blake Maddock; the grown-up version. He was a guy who’d pulled away her flooding down-pipes as if he coped with manual labour every day of his life.
That was what he looked like.
Whatever he’d been doing for the past fifteen years, it hadn’t made him soft. He was lean—almost too lean—but his muscles made up for it. And his body … As he’d come back down the ladder, his soaked clothes clinging, he’d looked … he’d looked …
A girl shouldn’t think how he’d looked.
And he’d kissed her.
So … what? He’d kissed her for the first time when she was six years old and she’d given him her sandwich. She’d giggled and her friends had said ‘kissy kissy’. They’d all giggled then. She and Blake were best of friends.
Not any more. They weren’t even minor friends. Friends would have sat up for an hour or so, catching up on what had happened through the years.
He didn’t want to catch up. He was stuck here because his car had crashed. He’d fixed her down-pipe because he felt sorry for her. He wanted to get the night over and get back to Sydney.
So why had he kissed her?’
‘Because he’s arrogant and he has more money than anyone has a right to. He thinks he’s aristocracy.’ She said it out loud but it didn’t make sense.
He’d never acted rich. All the time she’d known him, he acted as if his family’s money was something he didn’t want to know about.
He never talked about
his parents, then or now. Everything she knew, she knew from scant town gossip.
Tonight … she should have asked what he’d been doing. She’d assumed he was a city doctor, but he looked so weathered … he must have been doing something else.
Neither had asked the important questions. Neither had told.
She should have told him her mother wasn’t here. He could have slept in the front bedroom.
Would he be able to sleep in the tiny attic bed?
It didn’t matter, she told herself, sticking bread in the toaster without thinking. Their friendship was over. She hadn’t seen him for fifteen years and after tonight she wouldn’t see him again.
She shouldn’t mind.
Quite suddenly, quite fiercely, she minded.
What would her life be if she’d gone to Sydney with him?
Maybe she’d be a doctor’s wife. A rich doctor’s wife. They’d have a gorgeous house, a couple of kids, piano lessons, mid-week tennis. Society functions. Ladies’ lunches.
Um … how about that for a stereotype?
She could have gone to university as he’d wanted her to. She’d been smart enough. Maybe she could have been a doctor, too.
A doctor? Her favourite subject at school was art, and she still remembered the adolescent Blake’s disparagement. ‘It’s all right for a hobby but not for a career.’
He’d had ambition. She didn’t, or not ambition as he saw it. She’d never wanted to leave Banksia Bay.
Apart from Blake. She’d wanted, desperately, to go wherever Blake went.
At school he’d been quiet about his future, telling no one, even hugging his desire to study medicine to himself. He kept lots of things to himself. Even to her, his best of friends, he’d seldom talked of his family, his future, or his past. Maybe that was wise. His family’s wealth made him different from most kids in Banksia Bay. The eccentricity of his great-aunt made him different. The fact that he had fabulously wealthy parents who never came near made him really different.
He was still … different.
He probably had a wife, she thought suddenly. He might even have cute, piano-playing kids.
He wasn’t wearing a wedding ring. She’d noticed.
‘Don’t go there,’ she told herself, and ate the toast without thinking about it.
Bounce opened one eye and watched with hope. She gave him a crust, then offered another to Bessie, but Bessie didn’t stir.
She was a smaller dog than Bounce. Sweet.
Blind.
‘Don’t think it,’ she told herself, but she knew she was thinking it.
She couldn’t. It’d be cruel to keep a blind working dog. It’d be sentimentality at its worst.
‘And it’s not as if there’s any spare money to spend on operations.’ She was still talking out loud. ‘Even if it’s possible.’
A thunderclap rolled across the night and made her shudder. Instead of heading behind her legs, Bounce simply nestled closer to Bessie.
Bounce had a new best friend.
Which left her alone.
Bed. Alone. Without even Bounce.
‘That’s a dumb, sad thing to think,’ she told herself. ‘Ooh, who’s feeling sorry for herself? Go to bed and enjoy listening to the thunder. And don’t keep thinking of Blake. He’s nothing to do with you and he’s out of here, first thing in the morning.’
He should have sat up and talked.
He lay in the dark and counted bruises to distract himself. The crash hadn’t left him completely unscathed. His head ached. Something had thumped his shoulder and that ached, too.
He’d been barely civil downstairs. He hadn’t asked anything of her life for the past fifteen years. How dumb was that?
She’d think he was just using her.
He was using her. This was the closest place to stay out of the storm. Even if they’d been strangers he would have asked for shelter, and she might have been kind enough to say yes.
Of course she would. This was Mardie, still feeling sorry for strays after all these years.
What had she been doing all this time? Married? He should have looked for a ring.
Surely not. A husband would have made himself obvious.
Her mother? Etta hadn’t appeared either, but Etta had suffered from appalling arthritis fifteen years back. She’d occasionally been bed-ridden even then. How was she now?
He should have asked.
He should have asked lots of things.
Once upon a time he’d known all there was to know about Mardie. They’d been lone children on adjoining farms. When his parents had sent him here, seven years old, deeply traumatised, he’d missed his twin as if part of him had been ripped away. Mardie had helped fill that appalling void. They’d spent their childhood together. Best friends.
And then … Six months before his final exams he’d suddenly seen Mardie differently.
Theirs had been a fumbling teenage love affair, as painful as it was sweet. But it meant, for the first time, he saw a possibility for sharing the load into the future, of having someone by him as he carried his burden of guilt and grief.
How unfair was that? He’d never even explained—how could he? Help me make up for my brother’s life?
He’d said simply, ‘Follow me to Sydney,’ and she’d said no.
‘Write,’ she’d said.
He’d thought at first that he could, but what he hadn’t realised was how much it hurt. Those first months in a huge, anonymous university college, away from anyone he knew … Losing Mardie … It had been like losing Robbie all over again.
But he had to leave. Banksia Bay was where he’d been dumped. It had become a refuge but he’d always known he had to leave.
‘Stay there until we all forget,’ his father had said. Even at seventeen he’d known forgetting was never going to happen. Staying in Banskia Bay seemed like a long, continuous betrayal of memory.
So he had to leave, but if he’d phoned Mardie, if he’d heard her voice, if he’d made any contact at all, then he risked crumbling. And how could he do that?
Robbie, his ghost, his shadow, was driving him.
Behind Robbie … His parents, running through inherited money as if it was water, squandering their lives, losing Robbie in the process. Consciously forgetting their son.
His great-aunt, floundering after an ill-advised love affair, locking herself away in Banksia Bay, as far from what she thought of as civilisation as she could get, using her inheritance as a shield from the world. Consciously forgetting her lover.
So many lives, wasted. Including Robbie’s.
For Robbie’s sake, the squandering would stop. The forgetting would stop.
So he’d decided that contacting Mardie would simply keep the wound open. Then, by the time he was settled, by the time the ache eased, it seemed too late to rekindle friendship. He’d burned his bridges, and now he had to pay the price.
The price was that tonight she’d welcomed him almost as a stranger. He’d kissed her and she’d backed away. He’d touched her and she’d flinched. And he’d gone to bed without even asking about her mother.
They’d have time to talk in the morning, he thought. He’d ask … and then he’d leave.
Again.
He stirred uneasily. The spare bed always had been too small, too hard. He ached.
The storm kept on, unabated.
He lay awake and thought of Mardie. Of a life long past.
Of a seventeen-year-old who was desperate to save the world, to do something, but who wanted to carry Mardie with him.
Why remember it now? Theirs was a childhood friendship, faded to nothing. He shouldn’t have come.
It was just … the invitation to the reunion had seemed almost meant. He wasn’t sure why he’d kept thinking of Mardie during this last long illness, but he had.
The Mardie of his childhood.
The problem was, he decided as he drifted towards sleep, it wasn’t the Mardie of years ago he was thinking of now. It was the Mardie
of now. Mardie hugging him joyously in that first instinctive burst of surprised welcome. Mardie in her vast sou’wester, holding the ladder as if this was the sort of work she did every day of the week. Mardie, as she was, but a thousandfold more.
Why had he returned?
Sleep was nowhere.
The night had no answers, and neither did he.
CHAPTER THREE
BLAKE finally slept—and he woke to the sound of singing.
For a moment he thought he was dreaming. He was in a tiny attic room. Whitewashed walls. A narrow bed.
For that instant he was back in his childhood, and then he was wide awake. The events of the night before flooded back.
Mardie was outside, somewhere below his bedroom window. Singing.
He glanced at his watch. Silly o’clock.
He swung himself out of bed and winced. Yes, the airbags had saved him from injury but he was still battered.
He also still suffered aches from illness. Haemorrhagic dengue did that to you. He stretched cautiously. Ouch.
The singing went on. It was something operatic, ridiculous, sung at the top of her lungs. Mardie at full caterwaul.
He found himself grinning, remembering early grade school. The whole school had been learning Christmas carols for the annual concert. An ambitious music teacher had listened to each child in turn. Divided them into sections. Soprano, alto, baritone, tenor.
She’d listened to Mardie, grimaced and given her a section of her own.
‘You can be the drum,’ Miss Watson had decreed. ‘Stay at the back and boom along to the beat. Just sing “Pum Pum Pum Pum Pum.”‘
But what Mardie lacked in talent she made up for in enthusiasm. The night of the school concert, Mardie’s ear-shattering “Pums” had practically drowned out the choir, and the audience had dissolved into delighted laughter.
Mardie had laughed as well.
He grinned at the memory, his aches receding as he pulled open the shutters and looked down.
She was milking the cow. One cow. This was sheep country, not dairy. She’d be milking for personal use.
Or not. One cow made a lot of milk.
Who was living in this house with her?
The house was silent. The storm of the night before was past. The early-morning sun was glittering on the wet paddocks.
