Lyrebird Hill (2 page)

I glanced over to find Rob watching me. His brown eyes looked nearly black in the early light, and for an instant – a heartbeat, a breath – he wore an expression I hadn’t seen before; intense, focused . . . and unnerving. I shifted on the bed, drawing my fluffy gown tighter about me.

Then he smiled, and the intensity vanished.

‘You’re nervous, babe. That’s all. You haven’t seen your mother in – what, three years?’

‘Four,’ I reminded him, searching his face for a sign that anything was amiss; but if he felt any guilt about the bra, it didn’t show. ‘What if it’s awful, Rob? What if we argue like last time?’

‘Honey, it’s natural to have qualms. This is just one of those curve balls that life throws you once in a while. You’ve got to learn to deal with it. What do I always tell you?’

‘Stop catastrophising. Embrace the fear. Let it go.’

He went back to his reflection. ‘Problem solved.’

I stared at him. Muscles rippled beneath the pristine white shirt. His skin gleamed, and droplets of water clung to the stubble on his scalp. He licked his lips and began to sing again, but this time I didn’t recognise the song. My chest tightened. Rob was a decent man, a good man. A respected therapist and author, a loyal friend. He’d never cheat, never do anything to hurt me.

Would he?

Stop panicking
, I chastised myself.
When I confess my fears, Rob will probably just shake his head in dismay. He’ll offer a logical explanation and we’ll have a good old laugh. He’ll call me his little worrywart and tousle my hair, then we’ll go to bed and everything between us will be roses again.

But the thin elastic of the bra strap continued to cut off my circulation. The prickling hotness in my fingers grew more intense. It spread into my hands, up my arms and through my shoulders. It burned across my chest and burrowed deeper until it settled like a sickness around my heart.

‘I thought you said your mother was sixty?’

I searched the crowd. The gallery was a huge converted warehouse on the outskirts of Armidale. The high, whitewashed walls were as smooth as icing, their pristine surface broken only by my mother’s huge colourful canvasses. At the epicentre of
the cavernous room, surrounded by admirers, stood a willowy figure in a shimmering evening dress.

‘She
is
sixty.’

‘You’d never know it.’ Rob swallowed a mouthful of Heineken. ‘She looks amazing.’

The admiration in his voice irked me. I shuffled uncomfortably as old insecurities flocked back. Yes, my mother was slim and gorgeous; no, I didn’t resemble her. And I didn’t remember hearing Rob enthuse about
my
appearance tonight. I glanced down at my all-black clothes. Why hadn’t I worn something less businesslike? The pantsuit I’d bought now seemed severe and unimaginative; worse, my new shoes were eating my toes, and the elasticised shape-wear that was supposed to sculpt my flesh into pleasing curves was cutting off my blood supply.

Sweat trickled along my spine as I watched my mother flutter from patron to patron like an elegant turquoise butterfly. She’d pulled her dark auburn locks into a stylish chignon and her skin gleamed like porcelain. The sequinned fabric of her dress hugged her slender figure, glittering riotously as she moved through the crowd. I’d long suspected that people attended Mum’s shows as much to see her as to view her latest paintings. She glowed, vibrant and mesmerisingly alive, a flaming supernova against the static backdrop of her canvases.

‘Hey.’ Rob nudged me with his elbow. ‘Stop looking so glum. Remember what we talked about?’

I stared at him blankly.

He sighed. ‘Let it go, okay?’

‘Sure,’ I muttered, fretfully tugging a strand of dark hair loose from my ponytail. ‘I’ll try.’

Rob smiled indulgently and kissed the top of my head, then returned his attention to the crowd. I glared at him from the corner of my eye. He looked good. No trace of tiredness after the drive from the coast, not a button out of place. The navy
suit and crisp shirt made his eyes seem bluer, his teeth whiter. I sighed. I’d been looking forward to this moment for weeks; looking forward to showing Rob off, proving to Mum that I’d got my act together, stepped up in the world, done well for myself. Met a man who was not only hunky, but successful as well. I should have been triumphant; I should have been holding my head high, pink-cheeked with happiness.

Instead, I was a wreck.

Rob nudged me again. ‘Here she comes.’

A glimmer of turquoise, the flash of a familiar smile. Mum paused to greet a bald man and they spoke quietly for a while, nodding and looking mutually fascinated. Suddenly Mum threw back her head and laughed.

The warbling bell-like sound of it caught me off guard.

Suddenly I was a child again, a gangly twelve-year-old standing in the kitchen of our old house. The air smelled charred from the toast Mum had just burned. She’d been gaunt and grey-faced back then, her eyes shadowed by grief, her mouth turned down. Her hair had been long and unkempt, and she’d smelled of alcohol. There’d been no smiles, no hint of warbling laughter. Tears were all she had to give. Tears and blame.

What happened that day, Ruby? Why can’t you remember?

Jamie was Mum’s firstborn, her favourite. Three years older than me, Jamie had inherited our mother’s fine features and slim frame. She’d also been outgoing and bubbly, the way Mum was. My sister and I were both dark-haired, but that was where the resemblance ended. I’d always been weighty, even as a child. I was shy and wore glasses. Books saved me, but neither my sister nor my mother ever really understood my addiction to reading. They didn’t exactly disapprove, but the word ‘bookworm’ always seemed to be spoken in a way that made me squirm.

After Jamie died, amid my pain and confusion and guilt, I’d entertained the hope that Mum’s favour would transfer to me.
I waited through the tearful years; waited for Mum’s grief to wear thin, for her smile to return, for her trilling laugh to once again ring through our house. Eventually it did, and there even came a time when she could look at me without crying. But I’d given up waiting for Mum’s favour. Jamie had died, but she had never been forgotten.

‘Ruby!’ Mum waved. She excused herself from the bald man and hurried over. ‘Darling, how lovely to see you!’ She pecked my cheek and gave me a swift hug, then stood back to appraise me. Her smile slipped. ‘I see you’ve let your hair grow. A pity, it looked so nice short.’

‘Hi, Mum.’ I attempted a smile, but there followed an awkward moment in which I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

Mum turned her attention to the man beside me. ‘Hello there, you must be Rob?’

Rob beamed, engulfing my mother’s slender hand in his large one, pulling her imperceptibly closer. ‘Delighted to meet you, Mrs Cardel. Ruby has told me so much about you.’

‘Please, call me Margaret.’ She smiled, then seemed to hesitate, as if uncertain. ‘You look familiar, Rob. Have we met?’

Rob gave a sexy chuckle. ‘If we had, I’d certainly have remembered. You’ve probably seen my ugly mug in a bookshop window somewhere. My third book’s just come out,
Emotional Rescue
. Maybe you’ve noticed it around?’

‘Not yet, but I insist on hearing all about it. You’ve obviously taken time out of your busy schedule to travel up here to see my show. I must say I’m flattered.’

‘Wouldn’t have missed it for the world, Margaret. Ruby speaks so glowingly about your paintings that I had to see them for myself. Very impressive they are, too. Good thing I brought my chequebook,’ he added, patting his pocket.

Mum linked her arm through his. ‘Then I must show you my favourite piece before someone else snaffles it up. It’s a still life, the subject is a wonderful old Singer sewing machine I inherited
from my grandmother. It dates to before the first world war. Are you interested in family history, Rob?’

His smile smouldered. ‘It’s one of my passions. In all honesty, I can’t think of a more fascinating topic.’

I softened at his words; Rob loved history, all right – other people’s history. He never spoke much about his own family. He’d tried once and got all choked up.

In the first chapter of
Let Go and Live
Rob described his childhood. A mother too smacked-out to care if he went hungry. A string of violent ‘fathers’. Stints in remand homes. And then, life on the Sydney streets. Drugs, car theft, destitution. One stormy night, huddled under a bridge in a sea of mud and shattered glass and syringes, sixteen-year-old Rob had felt himself crushed by hopelessness. The pain of his existence threatened to swallow him. He picked up a broken bottle and pressed it against his wrist, thinking death would bring relief . . . but then a voice had spoken softly to him through the haze of his despair.

Let go, Rob. Let go of the pain and find a way to live.

He felt a spark of hope – he later wrote – as if a light had winked on in his heart. He dropped the bottle, got to his feet, and walked through the long night, letting the rain wash away the mud and blood and loneliness. After that, he turned his life around. He’d gone to uni and majored in psychology, but then branched off with his own radical ideas. Contrary to popular opinion, Rob believed that dredging up old wounds was counterproductive. His resulting book,
Let Go and Live,
was an overnight hit.

The trick is not to resist your fear
, he’d written.
You have to smell it, taste it, embrace it, allow it to overwhelm you. And then simply let it go.

Rob’s sexy laugh lifted above the babble of voices, followed by my mother’s musical trill. I sighed and turned away from the crowd. Mum’s cool reception of me hadn’t been a surprise; she was always aloof when we met, which I supposed was how
she protected herself from my nagging curiosity about the past. But sweeping Rob away and leaving me standing around like a wallflower – well, that hurt.

Did Rob even care? Clutching my bag against me, I thought about the tangle of black lace crammed beneath my usual layers of dross. Tonight, I silently promised, I would confront him and learn the truth.

I headed for the outskirts of the room.

Bright halogens illuminated Mum’s paintings, making them focal points in the otherwise dimly lit gallery. A quick scan told me they were all interiors, but it wasn’t until I’d approached the first one – a large room furnished only with a bay-fronted 1940s desk – that my breath caught. The huge canvases were eerily beautiful, their jewel colours seeming to breathe under the intense illumination, as though they’d been rendered from living light rather than mere paint. There was a stillness about the rooms they depicted, a sense of quietude and desolation that drew me in.

I wandered from image to image, spellbound. The gallery around me faded. The chatter grew muffled, the clink of glasses ceased. I might have been alone, moving through those familiar rooms in silence.

There was the kitchen where Jamie and Mum and I had eaten breakfast. And there was our old lounge room. Years ago, it had been cluttered with tables and a piano and a wrought-iron day bed upholstered in brown linen. In the painting, it seemed almost bare; the clutter had been cleared away, the only furniture was a lonely pair of ornate chairs.

Further along was a smaller canvas showing the bedroom I’d once shared with Jamie, with its cabinet of spooky antique dolls and light-filled window shedding sunbeams onto a pair of neat single beds.

Ghostly fragments of memory wafted back to me, formless and elusive. Two little girls running through the long grass. Sunshine warming bare arms and legs. The sweet, spicy scent of
stringybark blossoms. My sister’s voice, whispering with heartbreaking clarity in the back of my mind.

Hey Ruby, you wanna collect wildflowers? I found some rock orchids near the river; we could press them and make a card for Mum. Bring your togs, we’ll go for a dip while we’re there . . .

Best friends. Doting sisters. Thick as thieves, Mum had called us.

I dug under my hair, rubbing the sudden knot of tension. Jamie had died a long time ago, I reminded myself. Eighteen years. I should have put her behind me by now, made peace with her death, and moved on – but she haunted me even now, and probably always would.

The next painting was Mum’s old sewing machine, the one she’d been so eager to show Rob. It was smaller than the other canvases, more intensely colourful. The antique Singer sat on its cabinet in a narrow room, the window above it aglow with afternoon sun. The black curves of the machine’s body were chipped and scarred by age, its flywheel worn shiny by the touch of countless fingers. The decorative scrollwork was picked out in gold leaf, which glimmered softly under the lights.

I went closer, drinking in the gummy faintness of oil paint, the sharp tang of turpentine. Closer still, until the sewing room was no longer merely a painted image, but breathtakingly real.

Mum had used that old Singer to make our clothes. Floral tank tops and hippy pants, dresses in crazy patterns. Pink for Jamie, green for me. We’d teamed everything with boots and thick socks, even the dresses. It was an unusual fashion combo, but Mum had always insisted we dress sensibly in case of snakes.