2
Sisters
It had been glaringly obvious to Libby that within five years of marrying the man Jayne had regretted it, but by that time she’d had Tamsin and she never had been one to give up once she’d set her shoulder to the plough. After fifteen years of it she was just about ready to leave him, though—by that time he was retired with a giant super pay-out, he’d been on a headmaster’s salary for twelve years or so, he could afford to pay a housekeeper—but then he got sick. Contrary to popular myth this didn’t soften him, and Tamsin never did get those roller-blades that had been the immediate cause of Jayne’s coming over to Libby’s place, bursting into tears on her second-hand sofa, and confessing she was ready to leave him, she couldn’t stand another minute of it.
The bastard had now been dead for nearly two years and Jayne was just about over it. Not so much that she could see herself as a woman, though, let alone as a woman with a lot to offer, but Libby and Tamsin were working on that. Well, Tamsin, mainly, as Libby acknowledged ruefully to herself; she could see Jayne had a lot of potential but she was buggered if she could figure out how to bring it out. Tamsin, however, besides having been firmly on her Mum’s side all her life, had enough determination for sixteen women sixteen times her size. Which was a fashionable size 8, and the determined runs in the morning and twice-weekly gym visits combined with the sensible diet kept it that way.
Libby herself had no potential either professionally or personally and had long since given up thinking that perhaps she might have. Mum was probably right and she probably was just like her father. She often thought wistfully of that holiday at Dad’s place when she’d been eighteen, but she’d never managed to save up enough to go back again. It was so easy-going! Laid-back, was probably the more modern phrase, ugh. And even though he’d since taken up with Jan Harper and was running the property as an ecolodge rather than just offering fishing holidays to trout fishermen that didn’t care what sort of shambles the house was, it still sounded pretty much all right. Jan sometimes wrote to her, in fact one winter when Dad had a broken arm she’d written instead of him, and she sounded very nice. It was obvious to Libby that she must’ve gingered Dad up to the extent of agreeing to do the place up and call it an ecolodge, but she admitted herself that it was a glorified motel with a dining-room, only since there was an ecolodge bandwaggon going they’d thought they might as well be on it. And that it was about as eco as any dump covered in manuka scrub in the EnZed backblocks. So—after a certain amount of research and translating, “backblocks” turning out to be the Kiwi equivalent of “Outer Woop-Woop” and “manuka” being tea-tree—Libby decided that Jan couldn’t be too bad, could she? And let’s face it, Dad had needed a bit of gingering up.
Libby herself wouldn’t have been capable of gingering anyone up, not even the meek Jayne, so it was just as well that Tamsin was there to do it for her. Being as bad as her father, in fact worse, in that she’d never managed to attract a male equivalent of Jan Harper, Libby had never managed to do anything with her life. Certainly not according to Alison Ledbetter. After that long-ago holiday in New Zealand, which her after-school and weekend gardening and babysitting jobs had paid for, Libby had worked part-time in the local branch library, because Mum had walked in and demanded to know if they had any jobs going, done a not-very-good B.A. and a library qualification because Mum had decided that she had the experience and it was all she was fit for, since she didn’t want to go into teaching like Jayne and she’d be a hopeless nurse, and then got a full-time job in the main library in town. She would have still been there except that ten years back her section head, a go-ahead young woman some five years her junior, spotted that there was a job going at the library of the State Art Gallery and forced her to apply for it, since she liked art books. Meekly Libby applied, getting the job thanks to her rewritten résumé, a selection of half-truths smothered in periphrastic modern jargon which she herself couldn’t have produced to save her life. Martine, the section head, had rewritten it for her, earnestly explaining that she didn’t want to lose her, but she could do better for herself. Apparently if you could, you had to, in the last decade of the twentieth century. Libby went meekly off to the State Art Gallery library. There she did almost exactly the same work as she had done in her old post, though there was more indexing as well as the cataloguing she was used to, that was quite interesting. Unlike many of Australia’s state institutions it was a well-funded, modern, exciting, go-ahead gallery, specialising in modern art. Unfortunately in modern art which Libby could only rarely relate to. Some of it was fun and most of it had a message, but, um, was that art? When you couldn’t see anything aesthetic about it? On the infrequent occasions when she was asked by a colleague if she liked such-and-such—most of them just assumed she shared their own opinions—Libby managed to lie and say something like: “Very interesting” or “I found it very stimulating.”
Spending almost twenty years in the back rooms of libraries wasn’t the way to find a compatible mate if you were heterosexual and female, and so Libby hadn’t. Not that she had much of an ambition to be a household slave, which as far as she could see was what most married women still were, whether or not they also had fulltime paid jobs—so perhaps that was part of the trouble: perhaps it wasn’t just her being hopeless again, but you had to really want it for it to happen? The sex bits might have been good, but endless years of being told the tea was late or cold or inedible or both, and doing the washing before breakfast and the housework and the supermarket shopping after work or in the weekends and spending the rest of the weekends chauffeuring the kids to their endless sports fixtures? The picture didn’t appeal and Libby never stopped and asked herself where she’d got it from. The which might have produced the answer: “‘From Jayne and Bill Dahlenburg, mainly.”
However Libby, though the fact might have surprised her mother, had managed to have a sort of a sex life. Some of the girls at the library when she’d first started had been pretty much swingers and had kindly invited Libby to their parties. Unlike them she’d never managed to hook up with any bloke on a more permanent basis, but there had been a fair number of one-night stands, and even a couple of things that had lasted for nearly three months. Which apparently was about the time it took for it to dawn that she was more interested in books and in the serious type of English TV drama—not The Bill—than she was in them, at least at the precise moment when they’d knocked back the beer she was buying for their benefit and put their hand on her thigh, and that when they asked where she was going for her holidays and she said nowhere, because she was saving up to buy a CD of Tristan und Isolde, it wasn’t a joke.
There had been a longer relationship in the wake of the Gazzas and Bazzas and Dave-os—perhaps just as well, or Libby, who didn’t buy the women’s mags, would have remained convinced that on the frequent occasions on which these gentlemen came before she did and left her up in the air, it was all her fault. Terry taught her better. He was, astonishingly enough, a librarian. A very high-up one, but that didn’t dawn until quite some time after she’d met him. Of course this was at a conference—where else did unmarried gullible females in their thirties meet older males who were ready, willing and able to show them that all the Gazzas and Bazzas and Dave-os of their lives didn't know beans about sex? It was a joint conference of the Australian and New Zealand library associations and a very big affair indeed and it wasn’t until quite some time afterwards that it dawned on Libby that if Terry had been on his home turf their affaire would never have happened, he was much too shit-scared of what his colleagues might think to do anything risky or that might filter back to his wife. It was a pure accident that their paths ever crossed: Libby had only recently started her job at the art gallery and had been supposed to be going to the cataloguers’ and art librarians’ sessions of the conference—not because her boss had told her to or anything like that: just at the dictates of her conscience. She and the two other staff members who had been sent to the conference weren’t staying in the same hotel: the other two, the Librarian and her Deputy, were long-time friends and had booked accommodation together, but Libby had chosen one of the cheaper rooms at a hotel/motel that looked closer to the conference venue on the map. When she got there she found it was actually at the other side of the Adelaide CBD but as the CBD was very small, the initial taxi ride to the conference took her very much by surprise, and after that she walked. The weather was lovely and mild and the walk only took twenty minutes.
At this period in time Libby McLeod was about a size 16, 14 in some cuts, with a narrow waist but wide hips and bust. Normally these attributes were shrouded in the subfusc shades which she considered suitable for work: never mind the Queensland climate, neat black or charcoal grey linen-look suits were very much the thing for work, which of course took place in the chill of expensive air conditioning. True, a couple of her colleagues also owned neat pastel linen-look suits but although she admired them Libby wouldn’t have dared to buy one, they were too pretty for her. Perhaps fortunately for Terry Harrigan, one suit had been left behind at the dry-cleaners and, waking to a clear blue Adelaide day with none of the humidity that was endemic to Queensland, Libby had experienced a surge of loathing for the other and decided that since no-one else from work would be at the cataloguing sessions she’d jolly well wear her jeans! Not pausing to ask herself why she was being so defiant about the matter, the more so as when last sighted the Librarian had been wearing a casual floral blouse and pale green cotton slacks and the Deputy had been wearing an apricot tee-shirt and black and white striped cargo pants. The unobtrusive, collarless white or grey blouses that went with the suits were all revolting so instead she put on the tee-shirt that she’d only brought in case she got a chance to go to the zoo or something like that. It was pale pink, not a colour that Libby normally bought, but it had been on special, a really good buy. She normally wore it loose but today she tucked it defiantly into the jeans, why not? She’d gone to the trouble of taking in the waistband, a horrible job because of all the double stitching and stuff, so she might as well! The morning wasn’t as warm as all that but she didn’t have anything that would go with the pale pink. Libby went over to the wardrobe in which she’d carefully hung her clothes as soon as she arrived—incidentally skipping cocktails with her colleagues and causing them to shake their heads and conclude, though they hadn’t known her very long, that the conference wasn’t going to take her out of herself and they might have known—and defiantly grabbed the jacket that she'd bought on impulse and never worn. It had probably originally been part of a suit, but a tragedy must have happened to the skirt because only the jacket had been on sale at a ridiculously low price in a boutique that Libby would normally never have shopped at, its prices were too high and its clothes too fancy for her. The jacket had been on a rack by the door and had caught her eye as she was passing. It was a lovely shade of lemon. Queensland or not, Alison McLeod’s dicta had more than ingrained the notion that one did not combine pink and yellow—and in fact a large portion of Queensland, certainly the ultra-conservative middle-class suburb that Alison McLeod had chosen, was of the same opinion, popular myths to the contrary. Defiantly Libby put the pale lemon jacket on over the palest pink tee-shirt. The result looked so good that even she couldn’t persuade herself otherwise. So to spite the lot of them she shook her thick, curly dark brown shoulder-length hair free of the clip which usually held it neatly and boringly at her neck and, though usually she chickened out and just had a cup of instant coffee and a biscuit in her room at conferences, marched off to breakfast in the public dining-room. Unaware that at the far side of the room a gentleman in a suit who was breakfasting alone looked at her with considerable interest.
The conference was being held in and around one of the universities, with the plenary sessions in the Festival Theatre, another ten minutes’ walk away. On this particular morning Libby had scheduled herself for what promised to be a particularly boring and incomprehensible session on automated cataloguing with an American speaker. She was quite early, so instead of heading straight down that path there between two old stone buildings, which would take her straight to the right lecture theatre, she edged further along the street and further along… She’d already had a look at this pretty little stone building: it looked like a chapel but was actually used as a concert hall, so she wandered along to the next, also very pretty… Crikey! Libby stared up open-mouthed at what she was almost nearly sure must be a barrel-vaulted ceiling! All wood panelling and… crikey.
“Astounding, isn’t it?” said a male voice with a smile in it.
“Yes!” she gasped, forgetting Mum’s dictum that you never replied to strange men who spoke to you. “Is that barrel-vaulting, do you think?”
“I think it must be,” he said, tilting his head to look at it admiringly—thus giving Libby a very good view of a strong and very masculine-looking neck above the white collar and discreet silk tie. He turned his head and smiled at her. “I think I saw you at the hotel this morning. With the joint ALIA-NZLA conference, are you?”
“Um, yes!” gasped Libby, her hand going automatically to the label which she’d conscientiously pinned to her lapel. He must be a New Zealander: he had the accent—though it wasn’t very strong, the way he said “with” wasn’t quite “wuth”—and he’d said “Ah-lia,” not “Ay-lia” like we did.
“Me, too,” he admitted with a grin. “Seriously thinking of wagging it this morning. I’m slated for the Management session: something frightful on cost-cutting and down-sizing disguised as something jaw-cracking from an American speaker; how about you?”
“The Cataloguing session: cost-cutting in automated cataloguing from an American speaker!” gulped Libby.
He laughed. Cripes. He was awfully good-looking: dark, something of the Pierce Brosnan type but with heavier features—more manly features, really, decided Libby with approval. The hair very dark but, unlike Mr Brosnan’s, naturally silvering at the temples.
“Um, you’re not wearing your label,” she offered in a small voice.
“Mm? Oh—no. I can see it very clearly,” he said on wry note, “sitting on the chest of drawers in my hotel room, where I carefully placed it when I took it off my other suit last night.”
“So as you couldn’t possibly forget it!” squeaked Libby, collapsing in giggles.
“Yes,” he said grinning, and coming closer and looking at her label. “Libby, is it? I’m Terry. Well, Libby, I’ll wag it if you will!”
It wasn’t to dawn on Libby McLeod for a whole five years after this that the reason that Terry Harrigan had looked hard at her label was to make sure she was from an obscure library in a different branch of their profession from his and that the reason he hadn’t told her his full name was just in case she had heard of him even though art librarianship was a very specialised branch of their profession and had nothing in common with public librarianship. He was, in fact, head of one of New Zealand’s largest public library networks, in charge of a budget of millions, and a very big frog in what was, in Australian terms, a very small pond in which everyone from the tadpoles up knew everyone else. Meeting her in fact must have been very restful for him! Libby was to reflect angrily five years later when it had all gone pear-shaped.
At the moment her blood had gone all fizzy in her veins and she was far too excited to have any second thoughts or suspicions at all, and merely said with a giggle: “I’d love to! What shall we do, though?” To which Terry, not giving the obvious reply—he was quite a prudish man, though not so prudish that the reply didn’t spring to mind—replied temperately that as this building seemed to be the Department of Archaeology and there was an interesting-sounding little exhibition of Roman art on upstairs they might start by looking at that, and then perhaps the art gallery? It was just next-door, and said to have some excellent Aboriginal dot paintings. To which the innocent Libby replied: “Ooh, dot paintings! Ooh, yes, let’s!”
So they did that. And at Terry’s suggestion nipped on a bus and then on a rattly old tram, great fun, and lunched together down at the end of the tram line on a pretty bay. It didn’t occur to the innocent Libby that as he’d been to Adelaide before he more than knew what he was doing and this manoeuvre was designed to get her well out of the orbit of any of his colleagues who, if not officially invited to any of the bars at the university with the other senior conference delegates, were bound to be lunching at the choicer cafés offered by such up-market establishments as the art gallery they’d just been in.
Coincidentally the ride back into the city on the rattly old tram deposited them just down the road from their hotel so, having casually ascertained that none of her colleagues were staying there—he already knew that none of his were, though it was true he hadn’t chosen the place on purpose—Terry took her back there and began teaching her all those things that Gazza and Bazza and Dave-o and Kyle hadn't managed to. To give him his due he wasn’t a womaniser and he certainly wasn’t in the habit of picking up young women at conferences, but he was certainly much more experienced than any of her cloddish ex-boyfriends had been.
At the end of the conference he simply came back to Brisbane with her. He was due for a break, and his wife and their two teenagers were away: spending the mid-term break with her sister in Los Angeles: she’d be shopping and the kids, though old enough to pretend to despise it, were headed for Disneyland. Even Libby wasn’t too naïve to realise that they must be pretty well off, though the fares from Auckland were a bit lower than those from Australia. Terry at this stage admitted he was a public librarian but this didn’t say anything much to Libby: there were a great number of public library systems in Australia, some of them large, but some of them quite small. She just nodded and said: “I see, that’s why you were down for the Management sessions,” and he laughed and shuddered and agreed.
During the next five years he managed a remarkable number of trips to Brisbane: mostly tacked on to conferences or visits to other public libraries. They didn’t manage to hook up at the succeeding ALIA conferences, though he admitted he generally came to them whether or not they were joint ones with the NZLA, but of course Libby quite agreed, once he’d pointed it out, that it wouldn’t be discreet. There was no-one in Libby’s life in whom she could really confide, though she did admit to Jayne than she was seeing a bit of him but it was pointless, as he was married—so there was no-one to ask who the Hell, exactly, was Terry Harrigan? The sweet-natured Jayne did go so far as to say anxiously was it wise, it could only result in unhappiness for her, but Libby merely replied with a laugh that it wasn’t serious.
The shit hit the fan on the day that Libby’s boss, having previously been all steamed up about the failure of the initial joint Australian and New Zealand national libraries’ mega-database project in the wake of the Kiwis having got fed up, pulled out and gone their own way, and the subsequent failure of the contractors to deliver, was getting steamed up all over again about the new system the National Library of Australia was going ahead with. It, or possibly they, had done something else impossible and she shoved the monthly shiny mag that the National Library produced as a piece of promotional material on the taxpayers’ hard-earned, not to mention the database participants’ fees, under Libby’s nose, crying angrily: “Look at that!”
Normally Libby never read this product, it wasn’t relevant to her job and it was really boring, but she looked obligingly. It wasn’t full colour, the National Library didn’t go that far on the taxpayers’ hard-earned and the database participants’ fees, but it was very shiny and very good quality printing. What the offending article actually said she never knew. All Libby saw was a lovely clear photo of Terry Harrigan with the National Librarian, someone high-up from some library in Canada and some federal Minister or other. Terry was over here to arrange to lend some rare books his library owned for an exhibition at the National Library in Canberra and the Canadian was gonna lend… He was the top boss of that library system? Libby burst into tears of shock.
“What’s the matter?” cried her colleagues in horror.
“I thought—he was only—middle—management!” gulped Libby.
Her colleagues rolled their eyes at one another.
“The suit,” mouthed Sue. Kathleen nodded hard. Libby’s occasional escort over the past five years hadn’t gone completely unnoticed: Brisbane—or at least those parts of it Terry Harrigan considered fit to eat in—wasn’t that large.
Considerately no-one asked questions and they decided kindly she’d been working too hard and Kathleen ordered her to take some sick leave and Sue drove her home.
Exactly why it was such a shock to discover that Terry was the boss of a very big library system, in fact population-wise, it must be New Zealand’s biggest, and not just middle management, Libby didn’t ask herself. Perhaps the main point was just that he’d seen fit to keep it from her.
Once the initial bout of sobbing wore off she was so angry that she did something she’d never done before in her life: she made an overseas phone call. She was so wild that she competently got her computer up, found his library’s website on the Internet and got the number. She couldn’t remember whether New Zealand was two hours ahead of us or behind us but anyway the library switchboard answered and she asked for Mr Harrigan and was put straight through, just like that. Though she had been quite prepared to lie and say she was ringing for her library, if necessary.
“It’s Libby,” she said flatly when he answered. “I just wanted to say that you’re a snake and a liar and you could have told me you’re the boss but I don’t care anyway and it’s over and don’t dare to try and see me again!” Crash!
He rang back two minutes later but Libby, having picked it up in case it was Jayne with an emergency or Tamsin ringing to say could she possibly pick her up from wherever-it-was and not to tell Mum, said loudly: “Shut UP, Terry! I saw that stupid photo of you in the National Library’s stupid mag with the National Librarian and a flaming Minister and now I come to think of it, Kathleen met you and your wife at a stupid gallery opening and it isn’t true you never do anything together and of course I never realised it was you but it was! And leave me ALONE!”
He tried to protest that he’d never lied to her and what was all this, she was making a mountain out of a molehill, but Libby shouted: “Not telling is the same as lying, Terry Harrigan, and come to think of it you never even told me your surname for eighteen whole MONTHS! Go to HELL!” Crash!
He rang back but this time she was sure it wasn’t Jayne or Tamsin and didn’t pick up.
He did write to her but Libby tore the letter up into very small pieces without opening it—she was afraid if she read it she’d weaken—and flushed them down the toilet. Since it was airmail paper the pieces floated, so she had to sacrifice a lot of expensive pastel toilet paper from the roll that she’d had to buy because the supermarket had been out of the cheap packets that day, in order to drown them and make them go away, but she managed it eventually.
After that she tried very hard not to give him another thought. Not that it entirely worked, but at least she didn’t have to see him again. And she refused utterly to go with Tamsin to see anything that Pierce Brosnan was in. And luckily when Tamsin urged her to come to something that had Gabriel Byrne in it they were right outside the theatre where the film was on and there was a great big poster with him on it, so Libby, shuddering at the recognition that he looked even more like Terry, was able to refuse in time. And remained deaf to Tamsin’s wails, as their bus bore them away from the poster, that it was ace. She didn’t volunteer for any more conferences, to Kathleen’s distress: she wasn’t furthering her career or keeping up with her subject! Sue entirely concurred in these sentiments and almost got to the point of saying if that was where she’d met the suit, never mind, they could all stick together, she wouldn’t have to speak to him again, but thought better of it. Libby had never said anything much about her private life, except to admit that she had a sister and niece, so…
Perhaps fortunately for Terry Harrigan’s reputation, the picture that had upset Libby was on a page that featured two other photos of possible candidates, though Sue was almost sure that one of them was gay, and opposite a page that featured a group photo of fifteen people from the National Library, so even though some of them were women and some of them were definitely gay, there was plenty of choice. Though the phrase “thought he was only middle management” was food for thought, rather.
Since there was no-one in Libby’s life in whom she could really confide, there was no-one to ask what the matter was and why had she withdrawn into her shell? Let alone to ask if suddenly finding out the man was the boss of his library was really a good enough reason for busting up with him and if, in fact, he really had meant to hide it from her. Jayne of course was going through a pretty bad period in her own life at the time, or she might have noticed something, and Tamsin was too young to see her aunt as a person. Though after a while she did point out that Libby hadn’t bought any new clothes for ages and would she like to come shopping down the mall with her? Libby went, admired everything that Tamsin thought she ought to admire, bought Tamsin two pairs of shoes, a tee-shirt, a skirt and a quantity of junk jewellery, not to mention the junk food, and nothing at all for herself. Even the teenage Tamsin, having retreated to her room to gloat over her new belongings in private, did eventually realise that her aunt hadn’t bought anything for herself, and made a face over it.
Ten years after she’d first met Terry Harrigan and five after she’d broken up with him, Libby McLeod owned one black suit and one charcoal-grey suit, both over ten years old but still good, and the discreetly null blouses that went with them, one dark brown linen-look trouser suit that she hated but that Sue from work had assured her was very smart and the latest cut, three years back when she’d bought it on sale, the same pair of altered jeans that she’d had ten years back, one pair of newer jeans that were very baggy around the waist but that she hadn’t bothered to take in, one now very faded, in fact almost pale grey, once-pink tee-shirt, one depressing grey tee-shirt that was three sizes too big for her and that even her niece hadn’t claimed had street cred, no frilly nighties at all, they’d gone in the bin with the two negligees Terry had bought her, and no lovely lemon jacket, it had gone to Tamsin who, since the style was really out, y’know? had removed a large part of its skirt and all of its sleeves, turning the jagged result into a waistcoat that, with the addition of a lot of bling, looked wholly sick, y’know?
Libby was still a size 16 or in some cuts, 14, and still with a waist that, as Terry Harrigan hadn’t failed to note with a happy laugh, gave her a positively hour-glass figure, she ought to show if off more, darling, but it was true to say that it was some time since anybody had been given the chance of noticing these attributes. The more so since the brown linen-look trouser suit was loose in the bum and legs with a long, loose jacket. The thick, very curly brown hair might still have been, as Terry had said, a real crowning glory, but no-one could have suspected this: she now usually wore it twisted up tightly in a hideous plastic clip and didn’t wash it as often as she should—the helpful Sue in fact having given her a bottle of “daily clarifying” shampoo last Christmas along with the more traditional packet of nuts and dried fruit tied up in cellophane with a jaunty gold bow. After the sobbing episode Kathleen and Sue had both been quite worried about her, but they had their own lives to lead—they were both married with families as well working fulltime—and as time wore on and there were no more bursts of tears and her work didn’t suffer, they had come to take Libby’s silent presence in the library’s happy group of workers for granted.
Libby wasn’t unhappy in the job: cataloguing had sufficient intellectual challenge to keep her mind occupied, and of course her co-workers were very pleasant. There were a lot of worse library jobs she might have been in. And it was well paid: Queensland was a very prosperous state and salaries were high. This was just as well, because way back when she got the job, her mother had talked her into buying a house. Not a flat, a whole house. It wasn’t big, true. Nevertheless. According to Mum it would be an investment for her old age and she’d never regret it. Libby had regretted it since the day she’d signed the papers. She had to get two enormous mortgages: all her savings had gone on the down-payment and in addition to the bank loan Alison and Gary Ledbetter insisted on lending her several thousand at the usual extortionate rate of interest. It was really horrible being in debt to them but she hadn’t seen how to get out of it. So she paid it off as fast as she could. There was still seven thousand left in it when Jayne’s husband died and she inherited the lot: he’d had an enormous insurance policy as well as quite a few shares, and the house was completely paid off, so Libby thankfully let Jayne lend her the seven thousand and that paid off Mum and Gary. She still owed the bank megabucks, but for the first time in over ten years she was able to save a little each fortnight and even think about a holiday. Tamsin was all for this and so, until Tamsin suggested that Mum needed a holiday, too, was Jayne. Tamsin also thought that her aunt oughta sell the house and buy a nice flat but Libby, though she hated the house, couldn’t face the months of flat-hunting and another load of debt. Besides, she did like the garden.
Where the idea of going over to New Zealand to see Dad had come from she couldn’t have said: it just suddenly popped into her mind. There were a lot of flights and they weren’t too expensive—mainly because the Queensland tourist industry got a huge amount of business from New Zealand and of course the tourists had to fly home again in something—and if she was staying with Dad she wouldn’t have the expense of a hotel. Though maybe she ought to pay for a room at the ecolodge? She offered, but got a letter from Pete rubbishing that suggestion and telling her a lot of incomprehensible stuff about trout flies and his boat. Or possibly two boats? So she thought she could swing it. And she hadn’t had a proper holiday for ages because of not being able to afford to go anywhere, so she was owed lots of leave! What say Jayne came, too, and they could have a really good break—yes, and of course Tamsin, it’d be the uni holidays! Jayne wavered but both Tamsin and Libby could see she was about to give in, so Libby happily applied for leave: this year’s plus the two years she was owed. It came to nearly three months, what with weekends and public holidays.
At which point she was turned down flat. An impartial observer would have had to say it was very like the bust-up with Terry Harrigan: Libby was so angry she didn’t stop to be nervous, she marched straight off to the relevant office—by now she’d been in the system so long that, retiring as she was, she knew everybody—and shouted: “I’m owed this leave! What do they mean, I can’t take it?”
The answer was, and this was not Megan Griffiths’s fault, nor Bryce Chapman’s, that she hadn’t taken it before and she must of had the warning notice, ’cos they all had and Bryce had had to use his up his over last Christmas, and Christmas in Kakadu was not fun, don’t let anyone tell you different: one was just soaking all the time, forty-five degree heat plus the wet season? He hadn’t slept a wink for two weeks solid!
“But they owe it to me!” cried Libby angrily. “It’s not legal!”
“Um, ’tis, Libby,” said Megan unhappily, “’cos they’ll say they sent us the notice, see, and Shona Green from Accounts, well, she lost two weeks, see, they wouldn’t let her carry it over into the next month, even, and even one of the Curators lost three days!”
This gave Libby pause for a moment: the Curators, capital C, were a power in the land.
“It’s still not legal,” she said grimly. “I earned it.”
“Um, well, you could ask Kathleen,” said Bryce uneasily, “but she’ll tell you the same thing. It’s not just us: the whole of—”
Ignoring this, Libby marched out.
“It’s ruddy John Howard, grind the little people down, y’know?” said Bryce glumly.
“Him plus so-called Labor Beattie, ya mean,” sneered Megan.
Usually Bryce was a red-hot Labor supporter but at this he just nodded glumly.
“They’re right, Libby,” said Kathleen in distress. “We did get the notice: didn’t you read it? It came with our pay-slips. Ages ago,” she added lamely. “Um, actually I think it might have been around the time your brother-in-law died… I’m sorry, Libby, I should have checked that you knew.”
Libby took a deep breath. “None of it’s your fault, Kathleen, but enough is enough. I’ve earned this leave and no matter how many stupid pieces of paper they send out, it’s not legal to take it away from me. I’m sorry, but I’m resigning. I’ll type my resignation out now.”
“Libby, don’t be silly!” cried Kathleen.
Ignoring her, Libby marched out to her desk.
Kathleen rushed after her and tried to talk her out of it, but Libby was adamant. It was unjust and it was illegal and she was sorry, but it was the last straw. She wouldn’t be in tomorrow, she was starting her official leave—this financial year’s, she added bleakly—and she was legally entitled to go at the end of it, it was the required amount of notice. Over Kathleen’s numb protests she typed up the resignation, gave her a copy—poor Kathleen cringed—and went off to hand it in at the Director’s office. Noting bleakly as she disappeared that she wasn’t expecting him to do anything about it, people that high up in the system didn’t notice what was happening to the little people, did they?
Kathleen tottered back into her office and collapsed onto her ergonomic chair, closely followed by Sue. The consensus was that Libby had gone mad, though she had a point, and Sue was almost sure it was illegal and she could take them to court—whether she meant Peter Beattie’s Labor government, the state Public Service or just the gallery unclear—and Kathleen couldn’t imagine what she’d meant by the last straw, because she’d always thought she was happy here, and they weren’t that bad—similarly unclear—but of course what with her sister’s husband dying like that she hadn’t had an easy couple of years of it, had she? And she, Kathleen, ought to have kept a closer eye on her!
Sue, proffering the box of tissues with a scowl, then delivered herself of the pronouncement that if you asked her it was the last straw on top of that awful suit, but alas, this fell flat, the incident was so long in the past that Kathleen just looked blankly at her over the tissues.
In a way, though, possibly Sue was right: Libby’s strong sense of fair play—if you like, of justice—had been insulted both by what she saw as Terry’s deviousness and by the withdrawal of the leave that she’d earned. She had trusted both Terry and her employers and in her eyes they’d broken faith with her.
“This’ll suit you, Mum,” said Tamsin very firmly.
Weakly Jayne got into it. Tamsin had insisted on taking her and Libby shopping before they left for New Zealand—which was mad, Dad sounded completely down-home and Jan sounded very easy-going and she was sure they wouldn’t care what they wore. But no, they evidently had nothing appropriate. Well, she didn’t need anything for herself but she had to admit she’d be glad to see Libby in some colours and out of that dreadful old dark grey tee-shirt that she wore in the weekends or that awful brown trouser-suit that she mostly wore to work these days and according to Tamsin had been proposing to wear on the plane. But as to why they were shopping here—!
Queensland, like the rest of Australia, basically had two types of clothes shop, the one very common and the other not. Ordinary people went to shops like Kmart and Target at the lower end of the range, or reasonable boutiquey-type things that were actually chains, like, um, Sussan—if that was still going—and, um, Jayne couldn’t think of another one at the moment but there were loads of them, and for something a bit special to the nice department stores like David Jones. They didn’t go to the very, very expensive boutiques like the ones at Double Bay—Jayne had never shopped there, of course, but she’d seen them that time she and Bill had been to Sydney to a headmasters’ conference and she’d been able to have a good look round while he was at the conference sessions. They were the sort of awful place like that one in Pretty Woman where that poor girl hadn’t been able to get served, that scene had been just so realistic! And then she’d gone back with his Gold Card—was it?—some card like that, anyway—which funnily enough out here you had to sign for, but maybe the American ones were different—anyway she’d gone back and rubbed their noses in it, hah, hah. Only the very rich ladies from, um, well, Double Bay itself or the mansions on Sydney Harbour or the rich houses in Brisbane—Jayne had thought she’d seen rich houses until she got a look at the ones on Sydney Harbour—only that sort of lady could possibly afford to shop at those. There were some in Brisbane but of course she’d never done more than look wistfully in their windows.
But because Queensland was a tourist mecca there was another whole layer of shops where most Australians normally didn’t shop at all. Touristy boutiques, usually full of funny-looking tee-shirts. Their neighbour, nice Jim Cooper, had bought one for a joke when they were on holiday up in Townsville: it had an Aboriginal design, probably ripped off, there’d been a court case over that sort of thing some time back, and this certainly didn’t look like the product of a firm that had paid for their design. The tee-shirt itself was a glowing purple, in that very heavy cotton jersey weave they made the tourist tees of and that you’d be mad to wear in our climate, and the design, which showed a crocodile and some skeletal fish surrounded by dots, was in very bright pink plastic paint. Raised. Of course the thing was in the most appalling taste—it was a really traditional design and if you thought about it, it could have been considered an insult to the Aboriginal culture, actually, but Jim’s point, which he hadn’t needed to make, Jayne had got it straight off, was that it was funny. So wrong it was funny, see? Madeleine Cooper was really furious with him for buying it and had forbidden him to wear it in public, so he wore it when he was mowing the lawn or scooping out the pool or if he was doing a barbie just for the family. On one occasion just for them and the Dahlenburgs and the O’Reillys on their other side, and Madeleine had glared at him the whole evening. Kev O’Reilly had thought it was funny, though.
“Mum!”
Jayne jumped guiltily. “Yes, dear?”
“Pay attention! You were miles away!”
“Sorry, Tamsin, dear, I was just thinking about that funny Aboriginal tee-shirt Jim Cooper got up in Townsville.”
Tamsin turned puce and glared. “This isn’t a tourist boutique!” she hissed.
Well, actually it was, but it was one of the other sort. The sort that sold hugely bright, elaborate garments for leisure wear. Ken Done designs, that sort of thing. On silk, usually. The sort of thing that only the tourist equivalent of the ladies from Double Bay could afford. You sometimes saw American ladies in this type of place, fingering the clothes with puzzled expressions on their faces. Well, they always looked puzzled to Jayne. Possibly because they hadn’t seen anybody else at all on the streets wearing anything like them. The Japanese and Chinese ladies looked puzzled, too, but you couldn’t count them, they always looked puzzled, even at McDonald’s. Though to give them their due that might have been because they were wondering if the hamburgers’ bottoms were always cold in Australian McDonald’s.
“Mum!”
“Sorry, dear, I was thinking about those cold hamburger bottoms at that McDonald’s we used to go to behind your father’s b— Never mind!”
Tamsin eyed her tolerantly. “He’s dead now, Mum, he can’t hurt us.”
He’d never actually hurt them, he wasn’t a violent man.
“Right,” agreed Libby. “You can go to McDonald’s any time you like. –I liked that tee-shirt of Jim Cooper’s, too.”
Tamsin glared. “We are not going to buy stupid faked-up tourist tee-shirts!”
“They’re fun,” said Libby wistfully. “And we are on holiday.”
“Bulldust, Aunty Libby.”—Tamsin called her Libby when she thought about it, largely because her father had forbidden her to and she wanted to assert her independence, only quite often she didn’t think about it.—“What do you think of this on Mum?”
Libby looked at it uneasily. Jayne was a tall woman, slimmer all over than she herself was, but if you took the actual measurements, in fact even bigger in the cup size. But her back was narrower, so she took a smaller bra size. The garment Tamsin had got her into was leisure wear of the worst kind. Very bright, and no discernible pattern, just splodges and streaks. The overall effect was blue but there were about fifteen shades in there, ranging from royal blue through sky blue to powder blue and out to turquoise. With extra streaks and splodges, here and there, of lime green and lemon yellow. It wasn’t that blue wasn’t Jayne’s colour, but…
Jayne had a creamy skin with a light tan—many Queenslanders were the colour of old mahogany but, contrary to popular myth, many were not, as they lived inside with their huge ceiling fans and air conditioning and worked in air-conditioned, icy towers. Jayne had always spent a reasonable amount of time outside, in the garden or walking to the shops instead of taking the waggon as Bill Dahlenburg fondly believed she always did—his word was law, right, and like many dictators he’d never stopped to wonder if the proletariat actually obeyed the senseless dictates when his back was turned. The skin colour was definitely the shade that could wear blue, whereas many tanned or naturally dark skins looked dreadful in it—Greek girls, for example, looked terrible in blue and so did most Indians—but…
“It’s, um, a very smart, um, outfit, Tamsin.”—It wasn’t a dress, it had long, but very wide pants, but it wasn’t a trouser suit either. More like very up-market overalls with a, um, not a jacket, a loose blouse over them.—“Um, but I wouldn’t say it really goes with her new hair style!” Libby ended on a desperate note.
Jayne touched her hair uneasily and looked uncertainly at the unlikely reflection in the mirror, licking her lips. “Um, no, nor would I, Tamsin.” The long, very thick hair was a much lighter brown than Libby’s, a soft golden-brown shade, with only a few silver threads in it that Tamsin hadn’t yet managed to get her to have tinted away. It was naturally wavy but as Bill had always made her wear it in a big bun this hadn’t usually been apparent. Tamsin and her friend Davina at Visions—they didn’t just do hair, they did full makeovers—had tried out innumerable styles on her and even Francesco, Mr Visions himself, had come and given them a hand, cooing over Jayne’s long, thick, beautiful hair. But all of the spiky, extreme knots with wisps sticking out of them had looked really silly above Jayne’s placid oval face, so they’d fallen back on something a lot more old-fashioned but ace, y’know? Not Today, but it looked good on her. It was pulled back gently off the face and sort of rolled into a big bundle on the neck, with a large tortoiseshell-pattern plastic clip in the middle of it. A very soft look. Francesco himself had supervised the wisps at the temples and above the neat little ears, refusing to let Davina straighten them with gel and just encouraging them to curl in a very natural look. The subsequent make-up job and photograph that followed it had astounded both Jayne and Libby but Tamsin, Davina and Francesco were thrilled with it and even proposed using it in Visions’ next set of advertising—TV and the papers, dear—as an illustration of what could be done for the slightly older woman. So Jayne hadn’t expressed her private thought, which was that it made her look like a screen siren from the Forties with a tummy-ache. She’d washed it all off when she got home and very fortunately Tamsin didn’t have the skill to replicate it. The hairdo itself was lovely, though she couldn’t do it by herself, Tamsin had to do it for her, so it wasn’t exactly practical.
Scowling, Tamsin declared firmly that it was leisure wear—Jayne and Libby exchanged glances and quickly looked away again—and Mum would be wearing her hair loose with it, it’d be entirely appropriate!
“Loose?” said Jayne, very faintly. “At my age?”
“Yes. Try this one on, Aunty Libby.”
Jayne watched numbly as poor Libby got into it. It was pretty much a sister to hers, except that it was pyjamas, not a pair of overalls with a blouse—how was she going to go to the toilet in the overalls, just by the way?—and in shades of what could loosely be called pink, not blue. Screamingly bright watermelon pink, she could just remember Mum having a skirt of that, it must have been not long after they came to Queensland, glowing, no, glaring coral, streaks of tangerine and apricot, huge splodges of candy pink, and dots and dashes of buttercup yellow, help.
“It doesn’t do up!” discovered Libby in dismay.
Swiftly Tamsin retorted: “That bra’s a disgrace, we’ll get you some nice undies right after this—not Kmart,” she added evilly before her aunt could open her mouth. “And you, Mum!”
“Her undies are very respectable,” objected Libby.
“They’re all white!” she snapped.
Libby subsided, picking nervously at the front of the buttonless blouse.
Swiftly Tamsin stepped forward, grasped the drooping front corners of it, and knotted them.
There was a short silence.
“My bra still shows,” noted the victim.
“Um, yes,” said Jayne uneasily. She had a fair idea what was coming next: she’d been exposed to Tamsin and her mags much more than Libby had, of course.
Sure enough, Tamsin riposted swiftly: “It’s supposed to, but not that thing, of course! We’ll buy you a nice one—coral’d be good, if they’ve got them in your size—that thing’s a size too small, by the way: it’s very bad for you and it gives you those unsightly bulges above the cups, you know—and maybe a nice singlet as well, bright pink’d look really good, or a buttercup yellow for a contrast. Buttercup yellow over coral… Yes,” she decided, screwing up her eyes and envisaging it.
After a moment it sank it and Libby gulped: “I’m not gonna go round with my bra showing! I’m not a kid of your age, and I’m not a size 8, either!”
“Bulldust, Aunty Libby, everybody’s wearing them like that. We’ll get you a bikini top, too.”
“With my figure? No!” she gasped.
“You can just wear the top, nobody wants to see your tummy in a bikini, I can tell ya,” replied her niece in a hard voice. “You need to lose at least twenty kilos.”
“What’s that in pounds, shillings and ounces?” said Libby in a feeble voice to her sister.
Jayne gave a giggle and then looked guilty. “Um, about two pounds to a kilo, is it? Or is it the other way? Um, no, I think that’s right. Well, forty pounds—that’s an awful lot, Tamsin. Um, fourteen into… Blow. Hang on, seven sixes are forty-two, so, um… not twelve stone, that’s a whole person!”
“Three stone,” said Libby drily. “Bad enough. A five-year-old, maybe?”
“She can’t lose that much, Tamsin!” said Jayne in alarm.
“You’re probably right,” replied Tamsin drily, “but she ought to. Try this on, Mum.”
“Buh-but I thought we’d decided on this one for me?” she faltered.
“You need more than one outfit. Try it on,” replied Tamsin in an iron voice.
Meekly Jayne got out of the blue-streaked overalls—she was never gonna manage going to the toilet, you know—and into it. Help! “I never wear green,” she said very, very faintly.
“You ought to, it really suits you,” replied her daughter grimly.
“Isn’t it a bit tropical for New Zealand? Only going by Mum's whinges about the house Dad used to have, admittedly,” said Libby.
“Take that off, we’ll take it, and try this one on,” responded her niece grimly.
“Lots of yellow. I’ll have it if you don’t like it, Libby,” said Jayne on a hopeful note.
“Ya won’t, it’d make ya look yellow all over!” snarled her daughter.
Smiling sadly, Jayne looked in the mirror at a vision of tropical green leaves liberally splashed with, um, small mauve possible orchids and, um, small pink possible frangipani—well, you could get them in pink, the O’Reillys had a lovely one—and small blue dunno whats, tropical flowers didn’t usually come in blue, and—ooh, tiny parrots! Gold bits, too. She picked gingerly at them but they didn’t come off so possibly they’d last more than three washings. It was far too long, where did Tamsin imagine she’d wear it? “I like the parrots,” she said incautiously.
Tamsin swung round. “What? Oh—only small ones. Parakeets, I think, Mum,” she said tolerantly.
“Budgies,” said Libby drily.
They were about the size of budgies. Small budgies. Jayne gave a guilty giggle.
“You don’t get budgies on dress material, and hurry up,” ordered Tamsin in an iron voice.
Jayne watched, biting her lip. Oh, dear. From a distance it just looked like swirly yellow patterns but now that Libby had it on you could see they were actually huge butterflies. Really huge. Like in that scene in Pretty Woman: “Big mistake, big. Huge.” These were Big butterflies, big. Hu—
Jayne collapsed in agonised giggles, gasping: “Sorry! Sorry, Libby, sorry, Tamsin!”
Tamsin glared.
Jayne wiped her eyes. “Pretty Woman,” she said unsteadily to Libby,
“This dump’s as bad as that snooty boutique where they wouldn’t serve her, yeah,” she agreed.
Jayne cleared her throat. “Big,” she said unsteadily. “The butterflies, Libby.”
Libby looked down at herself. She looked at herself in the mirror. Abruptly she collapsed in agonised giggles, gasping: “Huge!”
Tamsin took a deep breath and waited it out. It was their age, of course. But at least Mum was capable of laughing again, that was a really good sign.
What with the hours and hours of shopping and the results of it, not to say the time it had taken to get out of the parking building when everybody else was heading home too, Jayne just tottered off to bed when they got home. Surprisingly enough Tamsin didn’t say she was a strong, healthy woman of only just forty-five and what did she think was doing, going to bed at this hour, like Bill had always done. Well, not forty-five, of course, but whatever age she’d been. Instead she appeared in her mother’s room about half an hour later with a tray.
“Tea. Eat, you’ll feel better,” she announced.
Jayne looked numbly at the tray. It was really beautiful. She’d used one of the embroidered linen serviettes that had belonged to Bill’s mother and were a real bugger to iron as the tray cloth, and one of the deep blue plates with the curly edges that Bill’s sister Noelene had given them a set of for their fifteenth wedding anniversary and that Bill had only let her use when Noelene and Kerry were coming to dinner. And there was a stalk of tiny white orchids in a bud vase. Jayne bit her lip. One of her father’s sacred orchids from his orchid house that they’d never been allowed to pick. Oh, well! And the actual tea looked really lovely! When you looked closely you saw it was one of those frozen chicken Kievs, they were really yummy, even if it wasn’t real butter in them, and they weren’t too garlicky, whatever Bill had said, and on top of it there was a sprig of basil that somehow made it look just like a restaurant meal! On the side were some cherry tomatoes and frilly lettuce leaves and a small square of polenta, Tamsin had found an up-market little place that sold it along with the expensive King Island Brie and so forth. The Picnic Basket was its name, but its food was much too up-market for picnics, more like little dinner parties for the top people from the horrible Education Department or the awful Davisons that Bill knew through golf, he drove a BMW and she drove a Volvo that was the same model as Bill’s. Tamsin probably hadn’t warmed it up, she never did, but never mind, it’d taste yummy anyway. And she’d made little flowers out of the cucumber slices, lovely!
“What are you bawling for?” asked Tamsin in alarm as tears slid down her mother’s oval face.
“Nothing!” she gulped. “It’s just so lovely, darling! Thank you!”
“Then don’t bawl,” replied Tamsin, looking smug. “It was easy, really. I saw how to do those cucumber flowers in a Woman’s Day. –That’s Perrier in that glass, by the by: it’s got bubbles in it, so don’t be surprised, will ya?”
Jayne loved it, but Bill had never let them buy it, it was too expensive and there was no justification for buying imported water when there were plenty of Australian brands on the market and in fact no justification for buying spring water for home consumption at all: there was nothing wrong with tap water.
“Puh-Perrier?” she faltered.
“Yeah. It’s not that expensive: see, the Frogs have got their heads screwed on, are they gonna price themselves out of the aerated water market?”
“Um, I think it’s natural, dear,” said Jayne very faintly.
“All the better. Got everything you need? Want the TV on?” Tamsin had forcibly moved the small TV from Bill’s study in here. And off her own bat sent all the heavy, varnished wood furniture from the study to the auction. The auction place had charged so much for collecting it that she’d only made twenty-five dollars out of it but as she said, at least they’d never have to polish it again as long as they lived.
“Um, yes, I have, thank you, dear. I won’t have the TV on, it’s so horrid at this time of day, that lovely English Antiques Roadshow programme’ll be over.”
“Have a video. What about Pretty Woman?” decided Tamsin.
Meekly Jayne let her put it on. She knew it by heart, but never mind, it was always lovely.
“Cinderella myth, with a touch of Beauty and the Beast,” said Tamsin, going over to the door. –She was doing some very strange subjects in her degree, but never mind, they were what she wanted and at least Bill could no longer argue with her.
“Surely not Beauty and the Beast, dear?” said Jayne faintly. “Richard Gere’s so lovely!”
Tamsin sniffed slightly. In her opinion he was a ferret-faced wimp, Mum was blinded by the hair and her memories of An Officer and a Gentleman, he had been quite good in that, had a bit of muscle tone, but not a patch on the Black guy. “Think about it. That chicken okay?”
“Mm, lovely!” she beamed.
“Good. I’m off to the gym. See ya!”
“Righto, dear,” said Jayne vaguely, her eyes on the screen. Jason Alexander, he was a very good actor, he’d been wasted in that stupid TV thing but he was very good as the nasty man in this…
Tamsin went out, refraining from rolling her eyes until she was in the passage. Never mind, Mum deserved a bit of fantasy in her life and if Pretty Woman was what she fancied, let her!
Libby turned up two days later, laden with shopping carriers.
“More shopping?” said Jayne faintly.
Libby winked. “Where is she?”
“Gone to the beach with Kyla Watson and Gerri Gardener,” replied Tamsin’s mother.
“Good. Come on, these are for you!” She led the way into Jayne’s garden room that had originally been the lounge-room that Bill hadn’t let them use except for formal entertaining. A month after the funeral Tamsin, with her aunt’s willing help, had bodily swapped its furniture with that of the much pokier room that her father had decreed had to be the family-room. The renamed “garden room” had a big row of sliding glass doors with a view of the patio and Jayne’s forest of lovely broad-leaved plants, some in big pots, some just flourishing in the ground in the Brisbane climate. Two of the pots—all Tamsin and Libby could manage to budge between the pair of them—had been brought inside. The outdoors indoors look, y’know? Tamsin had the mag to prove it. The big room had looked a bit empty so she’d bought a set of cheap white-painted cane furniture. The little sofa was too hard and narrow to sit on for anybody with a normal sized bum, but never mind, Tamsin had made a seat cushion for it and Peter, her very new Dalmatian—her father had vetoed a dog, of course—had immediately taken possession of it. She’d then gone slightly overboard and re-covered every cushion and upholstered surface in there with fabrics in various patterns of black and white—zebra patterns, spots, plain stripes—but who cared, the result looked, if surprising, really good, and all the new pot plants that Jayne happily acquired once it dawned that the veto on unsupervised trips to the garden centre no longer applied softened and brightened it. And Jayne loved it, she was always in there now when she was indoors, whereas before, she’d never used the family-room, she always used to lurk (her daughter’s word) in the kitchen.
As usual, Peter was in proud possession of the little cane sofa. “Does that pooch ever walk?” asked Libby idly.
“Well, he wasn’t a young dog when she got him, Libby—and how anybody could be so horrible as to dump a lovely dog like him at the SPCA is beyond me! He likes to have company on his walks, that’s all.”
Yeah, something like that. Libby sat down on the two-seater sofa with its zebra-pattern loose cover (over a rather nice fawn leather, actually: Bill Dahlenburg had been a mean man, especially in small things, but also an extremely house-proud one). “Now!’
“Libby, you shouldn’t have,” said Jayne faintly, coming to sit beside her.
“Wait until you see them!” replied Libby with a chuckle. She delved in the first bag.
Jayne gasped. The bag itself said “Chez Noellé”—inaccurate, yes: Queensland up-market didn’t equate to educated. What Libby had just produced from it shouted “Souvenir shop”.
“The dinkum oil,” said Libby with relish, shaking it out.
It was a genuine fake-Aboriginal tourist tee! Very, very bright pink, not purple like Jim Cooper’s, and its raised plastic paint pattern was turquoise, and together the two sort of—of flickered, ’specially if you glanced away for a moment. The picture was a turtle, again looking awfully genuine, and the whole thing was gloriously ghastly.
“Where did you get it?” she croaked in awe.
“Oddly enough I didn’t have to go up to Townsville. Or Cairns. That little souvenir shop on the main drag: you know that new up-market juice bar that does the revolting grass drink that Tamsin wanted us to try?”—Jayne was shuddering and nodding, with her eyes closed.—“Yeah. Just along from that.”
“Um—oh, yes, with all the souvenir spoons in its window, and those lovely koalas made from real rabbit fur that Tamsin said they oughta be shot for in this day and age.”
“Right, and the tea towels with maps of Australia on them, and the baseball caps,” said Libby with horrid relish, delving in the bag again. “Want one?”
She hadn’t! Ooh, help, she had! One of the really awful ones in that mixture of gratingly harsh dark green and grindingly awful bright yellow. The technical term for the cap itself was probably “parti-coloured”. Its map of Australia was yellow, edged with a different shade of green stitching, and the word AUSTRALIA was in gold paint that’d undoubtedly flake off.
“Tamsin’d kill me,” admitted Jayne on a longing note.
“Let her. Go on!”
Jayne’s big hazel eyes sparkled. She bounced up and put the frightful tee-shirt on over her respectable little sleeveless cotton blouse; then she put the cap on.
Libby gave a shriek and collapsed in hysterics.
Grinning pleasedly, Jayne did a model-walk around the room, one hand on her hip, feet positioned carefully exactly one in front of the other, swaying gently… Then she fell onto the black and white spotted cushions of one of the cane armchairs and broke down in helpless hysterics.
Libby wiped her eyes. “I got the matching Australia tee-shirt, but they only had one left in an adult size, so ya can’t have it. ’S good: yellow background for a change, with a green map of—”
Jayne was off again.
“I couldn’t find one of those John Clarke ones,” she admitted regretfully.
Jayne blew her nose. “Eh?”
“You know, with ‘Astraya’ on it.”
“Eh?”
“You know! A,S,T,R,A,YA,” she spelled carefully.
Jayne gulped. “That’s apocryphal,” she managed.
“No, it isn’t.”
“Well, what was it in? The Games?”
“I can’t remember,” admitted Libby regretfully. “But I didn’t imagine it, honest! I almost choked to death over it but when I mentioned it at work none of the library ladies thought it was funny.”
“They wouldn’t. Mind you, he is a New Zealander,” she said cautiously. “I don’t suppose most Australians even realise that that’s how they usually pronounce it.”
“Or that other people might think it was funny—no,” agreed Libby drily. “Anyway, the souvenir shops don’t seem to have latched onto it, unfortunately. I didn’t get you a boomerang, I couldn’t see how you could manage to annoy Tamsin with it.”
“Don’t,” said Jayne, biting her lip. “She loves me, Libby, and she’s been so good!” She told her all about the lovely tray in bed.
Libby could see that alongside the genuine good intentions a slight ulterior motive had been the idea of picking one of her bloody father’s bloody orchids, but she just nodded and smiled and produced a wrapped parcel from another carrier bag. That had originally contained the immense collection of expensive underwear her niece apparently deemed necessary for a trip to New Zealand, where all she was gonna do was see her elderly Dad and maybe go on the lake in his boat and do a bit of sun-baking if the sun was out, which Mum’s jaundiced descriptions of New Zealand summers indicated it might well not be.
“Not for me again?” said Jayne weakly, clutching the bulky parcel.
“Yes. If you don’t like it I can find a home for it, but anyway, open it.”
Jayne opened it. She goggled. After quite some time she managed to say, very faintly: “Libby, dear, I am forty-five.”
Libby’s lower lip protruded so that Jayne was reminded vividly of that time when she herself had been nine and Libby had been six and Mum had ordered her to wear shoes and socks to school. Libby had had just that defiant pout on her face when she’d stopped round the corner on their way to school—Mum had always made them walk, she said it was good for them and it wasn’t that far—taken off the shoes and socks, shoved them in her schoolbag and produced therefrom the rubber thongs that Mum—alone of all of Queensland, in fact probably of all of Australia, Jayne had not been too young to recognise at the time—only let them wear to the actual beach. And put them on.
“You can still have it,” she said grimly. “If you want it.”
“Yes,” said Jayne shakily. “He’s really lovely. Thank you, Libby, I’d never have bought one for myself.”
Libby knew that. She gave a relieved smile. He—why Jayne had instantly determined him to be a he she had no idea—was a big grey koala. Almost life-size, made of soft grey rabbit fur. Rabbits of course were a pest in Australia but in these days of animal rights possibly Tamsin wasn’t wrong about such tourist-trap artefacts. Too bad.
“Don’t you go and let Tamsin talk you out of him,” she warned.
“No,” said Jayne calmly, resting her cheek on the koala’s head. “I won’t.”
We-ell… Though it was true she hadn’t let Tamsin throw out Bill’s orchids, pointing out that the orchids themselves were really lovely and it wasn’t their fault they’d belonged to him. Libby let it go, with certain mental reservations that she didn’t express to her sister.
When Tamsin got home Mum had her feet up on the big three-person sofa covered in the simple black and white stripes that was actually a dress material but that looked really good, while the CD player played something nauseating. Cuddling something.
“What on earth have ya got there, Mum?” she asked tolerantly.
“Sturdy Koala,” said Jayne in a dreamy voice.
Tamsin blinked. “Eh?”
“Ssh, I’m listening to this.”
The thing moaned on. “Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme…”
“Simon and Garfunkel,” said Jayne, smiling at her daughter. “Turn it off if you like, dear, I don’t much like the next—” Tamsin was turning it off.
“Mum, where on earth did you get that koala?” she said on a weak note.
“Libby gave him to me. Isn’t he lovely? Sturdy Koala,” said Jayne again.
Tamsin swallowed.
“Don’t let Peter play with him, will you, darling? He’s been sniffing at him.”
“Probably because it’s real rabbit skin,” said Tamsin on a grim note, copping a proper gander at the thing. She looked at her mother’s face. “Um, yes, it’s a lovely koala, Mum.”
“I thought that we might go down to Kmart tomorrow, dear. Well, you don’t have to come, but I will.”
“We’ve done our holiday shopping,” she said uneasily.
“Mm. Not that, dear. No, to put something under the tree for the children. To compensate for him,” said Jayne, smiling at the koala. “I’m sure she spent far too much on him but I’m afraid I haven’t got the moral fibre to give him up.”
“Why should you?” cried Tamsin loudly. “And Granny’s a mean ole beast and I hate her, and if you think I’m giving her a Christmas present this year, you can think again!”
Jayne swallowed. “I see. Did Libby tell you about that time she wouldn’t let me have a koala?”
“Well, yeah, but she didn’t have to, I can see for myself what she’s done to the pair of ya!” she said fiercely.
“Um, she did what she thought was best for us, dear. She loves us, in her way,” said Jayne wanly. “And I suppose twelve was a bit old for soft toys.”
“Huh!”
“Have a hug of him, if you like,” she offered. “Fluffy, isn’t he?” she beamed.
Limply Tamsin took the toy koala. “Um, yeah. Um, Mum, he’s a bit firm, isn’t he?” she said uneasily.
“Of course! He has to be, to hold his shape, don’t you, Sturdy Koala?” she beamed.
Right. Goddit. That was its name. Smiling feebly, Tamsin gave it back, and telling her firmly she’d get the tea, tottered out to the kitchen. “They both need HRT and if it wasn’t too bloody risky I’d make them go on it,” she said grimly to the fridge. “I wonder if ya can get like, herbal HRT stuff? I’ll try the health food shop in the mall tomorrow, when we go to Kmart,” she promised grimly. “Bloody soft toys? At their age? Don’t tell me it’s not compensation!”
Next chapter:
https://summerseason-anovel.blogspot.com/2022/10/first-impressions.html
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