Girl in Between Page 16

  I’m in the dairy section, attempting to decipher Mum’s handwriting, when I hear a voice that, ridiculously, sets my heart racing. I spin around to see Helen walking towards me, a huge smile on her face.

  ‘Hello! I haven’t seen you in ages!’ I say as we hug. To be fair, because I’ve been trying to block out thoughts of Oscar I’ve been avoiding Helen like the plague, timing my runs to the mailbox and reversing out of the driveway when I know she’s safely inside.

  ‘Yes, it has been a long time, Lucy,’ she says. ‘Jolly well done to you on the Connor Silver interview! Oscar and I heard it in Sydney.’

  ‘Oh, really?’ I say. So he did hear it! I think.

  ‘Yes, Oscar must have played it half a dozen times, chortling away like a mad thing. We both thought you were just delightful and so funny.’

  ‘Ha, thank you,’ I say, grinning as a piece of me crumbles at her kindness. Little does she know how much credence I place on her words, and how I wish, for some unknown reason, that I could tell her.

  Until I’d run into Helen, I’d been so distracted by my Connor Silver rollercoaster that I hadn’t been thinking of Oscar as much, but as of this afternoon he’s back, leading a marching band through my mind. Would he like me more, now that I’ve interviewed old Con dog? I foolishly wonder as I walk Glenda to Rosie’s unit. If I studied medicine, would I be more attractive to him? I continue to undermine my own confidence until I stop in my tracks and say aloud to the towering eucalypts, ‘Lucy! You’ve got a lot to offer as you are! Remember that!’

  After tying Glenda’s leash to a fencepost in the shade, I let myself into Rosie’s unit. The sound of The Wombats leads me to her bedroom, where she greets me wearing a puffer jacket and flinging clothes backwards from the wardrobe in the direction of an open suitcase on her bed.

  ‘Rosie,’ I yell above the music, ‘what’s going on with the aircon?’

  ‘I’m trying to acclimatise for London,’ she yells back.

  ‘You’re mad! I’ve got goosebumps!’

  ‘Well, I’ve got a goose-down jacket on! You’re the one who’s mad!’

  Knowing this conversation will go nowhere, I spot her remote and switch off the air-conditioner.

  She turns down the music.

  ‘How’s things, stranger?’ she asks, unzipping her jacket and tossing it onto the pile of clothes. ‘All going well with your new bestie Connor?’

  ‘Hardly,’ I say and sit on her mattress. ‘I doubt I’m making his Christmas card list. Anyway, it’s you who’s been hard to track down this week!’

  ‘That’s because I’ve been spending every minute trying to track down fucking tracksuit pants. Big W, Best & Less and Kmart have all sold out. The first sign of cold weather in this joint and everyone goes friggin’ nuts!’

  ‘What about—?’

  ‘Target? Yeah, Target came through with the trackies. Although they’re maroon and three sizes too big.’

  ‘Ah well, they’ll be good for watching the State of Origin at the Walkabout!’ I joke.

  ‘Yeah. And by the time I’ve had a few years of pints and pies over there I’ll probably need the size sixteen.’

  We both grin and I realise how much I’ll miss our silly conversations. Then Rosie’s expression turns serious and she tells me she’s flying to London in a week.

  As I look at her in horror she explains that she wasn’t planning to leave so soon but then a friend in London emailed to say a great room in a Putney share house was just about to come up. She tells me she’s already joined a recruitment agency as well, and the woman at the agency assured her Aussie dentists are still highly sought after.

  ‘Oh, Rosie, I can’t believe you’re leaving me,’ I say, burying my head in her suitcase and attempting to zip up the lid around me. ‘There’s nothing for me in this town. You’re, like, the best and only thing I’ve got going.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Luce,’ she replies, laughing. ‘You’ve got a hell of a lot more than me going for you. You just have to let yourself see it.’ She pauses. ‘And if I am the only thing you’ve got going for you, then jeez, heaven help you! Besides, you’ve got your mum and dad and Glenda.’

  ‘They’ll always be here.’

  ‘Well, you know you can join me. Anyway, what have you been up to these past few days?’

  ‘Oh,’ I say, taking my head out of her suitcase. ‘I’ve had the focus of a Jedi master with this novel, Rosie. I’ve written three chapters since I left TROPPO. And I’m that bloody busy writing for HomeHints I’ve hardly had time to wash my hair!’

  ‘Well, I’m pleased to hear that,’ she says.

  ‘Though who in their right mind would want to buy flippers with a torch in the end of them I don’t know,’ I say.

  ‘Ha!’ she says. ‘What’d you call that one?’

  ‘Flippin’ Good Idea!’ I reply. ‘Hey, do you want to go to the Gardens Kiosk with me and Glenda and get one of those cordials in the plastic kangaroos? I’m cashed up.’

  ‘You had me at kiosk,’ she replies.

  As we sit beneath a canopy of fig trees in the gardens taking selfies with our plastic kangaroos, my phone chimes with a Facebook notification, which says Jeremy is engaged. I’m surprised that I feel almost relieved. Relieved to know I’ve heard the news I’d secretly feared hearing for so long and how it completely pales into significance compared to my sadness about Rosie’s imminent departure.

  Congratulations, Jeremy! I post on Jeremy’s Facebook page, genuinely meaning it.

  I swivel my phone around to show Rosie and she grins and high-fives me.

  Marjorie Beaumont’s appetite for my copywriting appears to be insatiable, and as a result I’ve been up most evenings this week, penning what I hope are witty captions for absurd appliances. A reflective iron board cover? Eye-on You! A sonic denture cleaner? Sink Your Teeth Into This! Fish deboning tweezers? Make No Bones About It!

  Tonight, though, I’m staying as still as I can because my gorgeous little niece Isla is lying beside me.

  Max and Brooke and the kids have driven up for a couple of days before Max and Mum fly out to China and I’ve been totally focusing on Jack and Isla after I finish writing at midday. I adore their company, and I know they love mine too, although I do take a back seat to Dad with Jack, and I’m definitely second fiddle to Peppa Pig and, bizarrely, a UK reality TV medical show called Embarrassing Bodies with Isla. I’ve caught her a couple of times this week with Max’s iPad on my bed, watching British doctors perform the most outrageous surgery. ‘What is this one?’ she’d asked with the cursor hovering above an episode titled ‘Erectile Dysfunction’.

  ‘Oh no, Isla,’ I’d said quickly, ‘that’s all about doodles.’

  She’d then stared me down and, with a cheeky glint in her eye, replied, ‘I want that one!’

  As if that wasn’t bad enough, this morning I returned to my room after a shower to hear a Pommy medico say, ‘And if you’re still constipated, then we’ll have to flip you over and put coffee up your bum.’

  ‘Isla!’ I’d exclaimed, grinning down at her in mock horror as she giggled up at me. ‘What on earth are you watching?’

  Later today, as I’d lain beside her reading, she’d pressed pause on Little Princess and said to me, ‘Alright, Lucy, flip over, it’s time to put coffee up your bum.’ We were in stitches.

  I wake the next morning to find Isla and Jack have gone to see Trolls with Mum and Dad, and Brooke and Max have left for a drive to the beach. After the carnival-like atmosphere of the past few days, the house is now beautifully calm. I’m staring into the fridge when I hear my phone buzz on the bench with a message. My heart thuds when I see it’s from Oscar.

  Hey, Lucy, just wanted to say congratulations on the Connor Silver interview. I’ve heard it like three times in Sydney! Well done! By the way, I’m up this Friday. It would be great to see you if you’re up for it?

  I read his message again. And again. If I’m up for it? What the hell does that mean? I wonder before
texting him back. Sure, Oscar! We’re all heading out for dinner at the Wild West Saloon on Friday night if you’d like to come. Rosie is leaving for London on Monday!

  I stare out the kitchen window above the sink. Did that mean anything? I ask the mountain range. Probably not, I answer in my heart and delete his message to prevent further analysis. Just then my mobile lights up again.

  Sounds great, Lucy. Is it okay if Kate and Mum come too? Of course :) I reply, and then erase his number from my phone.

  Later in the morning, as I lie reading in bed, a third text message comes through. It’s from Rosie. She’s written one word. London?

  I look around my familiar old bedroom, scanning the walls I’ve allowed to comfort yet confine me for so long. I know in my bones it’s time to move on. As Rosie pointed out, I can write my novel anywhere. And I’ve managed to save almost all my TROPPO FM and HomeHints money so I have a decent cash buffer now. I tell myself I will probably never feel one hundred percent certain that the path I choose is the right one, but that’s not a dilemma unique to me. I just have to make a choice.

  I decide to clean my room thoroughly while I mull over what I’m going to do. I start off by attacking the cardboard boxes that have been underneath my bed for years. I cough through the dust storm I create as I drag them out. Sitting on the floor going through them, I shake my head at the sight of photos, journals, notebooks, maps and trophies dating back decades. And though I’m tempted to slide the boxes back, I also feel compelled to cull the past.

  Sifting through the first box I flick through photos of my travels with Rosie in Italy, Spain, Thailand and Croatia, as well as snaps of us living in London.

  I chuckle at one particular shot of Rosie and me in Spain. We’re sitting beside a stream, each nursing a bottle of wine and eating bread and cheese—a couple of carefree twenty-five-year olds enjoying their youth and funding their adventures with ridiculous jobs. We look so happy—and so ludicrously young.

  I skim through a journal I’d kept during my time in the UK, and pause on one of the entries. My observations about working as an au pair for a posh British family in Hampstead make me grin, but as I continue to read my heart sinks as I realise with dismay that the thoughts and concerns I had as a twenty-five-year-old are eerily similar to the ones I have now. My mind has the same self-defeating and second-guessing patterns that it did more than seven years ago.

  I flip through another journal, and see a consistent theme of confusion and lack of confidence. I can now see how my limiting beliefs have played out in many aspects of my life—with my finances, with regrets about The Headline Act and with Oscar. And I see how my thought patterns continue to undermine my future, causing me to feel incapable of choosing one path over the other and making a plan.

  I take a deep breath and glance at the pile of self-help books stacked on the floor beside my bed. They tower so high an Olympic pole-vaulter would struggle to clear them. There’s Wayne Dyer’s Excuses Begone!, Gordon Livingston’s Too Soon Old, Too Late Smart, Louise Hay’s You Can Heal Your Life—and many many more. And I haven’t really benefited from reading them. I stack them all into a box for Vinnies and take it out to my car.

  After that I go through my wardrobe and ruthlessly cull clothes and shoes. What thirty-two-year-old wears lace-up Rockports? Out they go!

  I turn the room upside down and by the time I’m finally finished the shelves are sparse, there’s hardly anything in the bedside dresser, and the wardrobe is bereft of daggy clothes and old hangers.

  After heaving two more boxes into the car boot I dust and scrub the room from top to bottom. Two hours later I lean back against the wall and think, Fuck it! I’m going to move to London!

  On the drive home from Vinnies, my mind is alive with images of Buckingham Palace guards and parks beside the Thames. There are red buses and scurrying squirrels jumping from one synapse to the next as I consider the prospect of returning to London. Then, in the next instant, as I spot a car with Victorian plates attempt to reverse angle park outside a bakery, I think of Desley and how content she is to live in Rocky. I wonder then whether it’s me who’s been looking at Rocky through a faulty prism. Now that I’m on the verge of deciding to leave, I question whether I’m shooting myself in the foot, thinking I’m too good for the small-town life and that the grass will be greener in the UK.

  I pull over near the water tower that overlooks the city and recognise that Rocky is a new adventure for Desley, a town that holds no history, a place full of undiscovered delights. But to me Rocky is a pair of ugg boots—super comfortable, sturdy and secure.

  Would the new Lucy be wearing ugg boots in this next chapter of her life? I ask myself. No, I decide as I pull out of the parking bay. She will be wearing stilettos.

  When I arrive home I find Max staring blankly into the fridge and persuade him to come for a walk with Glenda.

  ‘Have fun breaking that news to Mum,’ Max says with a smile after I tell him of my decision to move to London.

  ‘Can you help me, please?’ I ask as we walk briskly beside the Yeppen Lagoon. ‘You’re the golden child. It’ll be easier if you back me up.’

  ‘Hmm,’ he says, ‘remember that time you told me the spa at Rydges had no steps and I jumped in and almost broke my legs?’

  ‘Max!’ I begin, before he talks over me.

  ‘And that time you dobbed me in to Sister Carmel for putting mangoes up the bishop’s exhaust pipe?’

  ‘I thought his car would explode!’ I protest. ‘Anyway, what about that time we were on the beach and that Rottweiler was pelting towards us and you put me in front of you like a human shield?’

  Max chuckles.

  ‘And the time Mum caught us looking at Christmas presents in the boot of the Commodore and you blamed it on me!’

  He’s suddenly serious. ‘That was bad! We were naughty.’

  ‘I know; Mum was so upset.’

  We walk along, both sombre at the prospect of Mum being that upset again.

  ‘Alright,’ he says eventually. ‘I’ll back you up.’

  Mum and Dad do not take kindly to the idea of me moving to London, despite the backing of their golden child and my admitting that I’ve already bought a ticket. They tell me I’m being unrealistic and that to move to London without a job is madness. They point to the uncertainty of the UK economy post Brexit and the volatility of world affairs. Mum reminds me how much I hated the cold weather in Melbourne and says, ‘How on earth will you cope with London’s constant drizzle and darkness?’

  ‘I don’t know why you’re still searching,’ she says to me, close to tears. ‘You were always such a happy little girl. I never dreamt you’d be the one I worried about.’

  Deep down, I know she’s concerned the move will just place me one step further from her dream of seeing me settled with someone and having bubs. I think she’s also upset that, try as she might, she can no longer understand me.

  I tell her that I need to get my life back, that I can work on my novel anywhere and that, while I might fail spectacularly, at least I’ll be trying again. I promise her I’ll continue to write for the HomeHints catalogue in London and start looking for a job on arrival; that I’ll come home at the first sign of political unrest or influenza; that I’ll give myself a timeframe and if things aren’t working out, I’ll return.

  Max, for his part, tries to make light of the fact that Mum, Dad and I are all bustling about packing identical red Samsonite bags for different trips, and joking about what would happen if Mum got to China and opened her suitcase to find fishing lures and Bushman mozzie repellent. His humour falls completely flat for once.

  That’s when I decide to put on Cher’s Believe album in the lounge room and ask Mum if she’d like to dance.

  She bursts into tears and says she will miss me terribly and that she’s got so used to me being around that it will be an awful shock not to have me here.

  I tell her I love her very much, and I’m not planning on starving or living in s
qualor or letting myself get murdered.

  Mum says she isn’t worried about that so much as my falling in love with a Pom and moving with him to the Outer Hebrides. She says she can’t bear the thought of not being able to see me and my children easily, and I tell her to take a deep breath and understand that I have no intention of living in the Outer Hebrides. She hugs me just as ‘Strong Enough’ finishes playing.

  ‘Lucy,’ she says, ‘you will be the death of me.’

  ‘You’ve told Rosie, I assume?’ asks Dad the next morning, peering at me over the pages of Queensland Country Life.

  ‘No, I thought I’d surprise her tomorrow night when we’re out for dinner,’ I reply, grinning. I can’t wait to see the look on Rosie’s face when I tell her I’ll be touching down in Heathrow three days after her.

  ‘So, you’re happy as Larry now, Dad, aren’t you?’ I ask. Now that I’ve got an escape route I wonder whether I gave enough time to Dad while I was living with him and Mum.

  ‘Oh well,’ he says, lowering his paper, ‘I must admit that London came as a shock, but Denise insists you’re doing what you think’s best and if it means—Shit! What’s happening with Glenda while we’re all away?’

  Upon hearing her name, Glenda sidles out from under the table and lies at my feet.

  ‘Oh, my little mate, I’m going to miss you,’ I say, feeling a bit teary. ‘But I promise I’ll be back. And Mum and Dad will look after you almost as well as I do.’

  Mum walks into the kitchen, wearing togs, and says to Dad, ‘Kennels for a couple of weeks until we get back,’ before searching through the laundry basket for a towel.