Odd One Out (11 page)

One year later

Sylvie and Mill were sitting on the swinging chair on the verandah, sipping from cocktail glasses. It had been a warm autumn day with sunshine and blue sky. Through the open French doors they could clearly see the TV set. On screen a bride and groom were dancing. The footage was shaky, as if filmed by an amateur. As the couple did a twirl, the husband tripped and went flying across the dance floor into the wedding cake. The footage ran forwards and backwards, all with a comical musical soundtrack.

The host appeared on screen, a backdrop of the groom with wedding cake all over him behind her. It was Leila. She put her hands on her hips and gave a big laugh. “That’s what I call trying to have your cake and eat it too! That’s it for tonight. Please keep your videos coming in. Don’t forget, if Calamity Calls, call me! Goodnight!”

As soon as the credits had rolled, Sylvie picked up the phone beside her and rang a Melbourne number. “It was fantastic, congratulations.”

“You think?” Leila said. “I’ve been hiding under the bed since I recorded it last week.”

“You’re a natural.”

“What did Mill think?”

“Mill, what did you think?”

“A little ripper.”

Sylvie and Leila had kept in contact since Sylvie left Melbourne. Leila’s career had got a sudden boost six months previously with her appearance on a fledgling comedy show on one of the community stations. A TV scout for one of the bigger networks had seen her. She was edgy and kooky, apparently. Just what he needed for the host of a new show of video bloopers from around the world. Each program would begin with a monologue from Leila telling about her latest catastrophe. She had no problem finding material, she told Sylvie.

Her relationship with Max had lasted only two months. A mutual decision. “I’m not surprised,” Leila had said. “Why should my love life be any less disastrous than the rest of my life? At least we’re still on speaking terms. My last boyfriend nearly took out a contract on me.”

Leila had been up to stay with Sylvie and Mill twice. She loved the house. “It would make me want to take up jazz,” she said the first time. “How long will the students get to stay here?”

“A year, but then we’ll help them find other accommodation,” Sylvie explained.

Her sister Cleo had been disgusted. “Wasting a beautiful house on scholarship students? Mill should sell it and move out into the suburbs. What a waste of money.”

“It was in Vincent’s will,” Sylvie explained for the third time. “He wanted Mill to use her inheritance to further jazz studies.”

“Couldn’t she have bought a few CDs and given them to a university?”

“Vincent was from the country,” Mill had explained to Sylvie in her first week back in Sydney. “He wanted me to do something to help other young musicians.”

It had been Sylvie’s idea to turn the house into a home away from home for music students. Establish a trust that would continue long after Mill, or indeed Sylvie herself, had died. To also use Vincent’s healthy royalties to fund three scholarships.

Vanessa was just as horrified. “So you have to live with her and be her glorified secretary with no promise of a hefty inheritance at the end of it? You’re mad.”

Twelve months earlier Sylvie had known nothing about jazz, or composing, or the difficulties young musicians faced. Now, she couldn’t say she was an expert, but she was definitely a fan. The house was filled with music, talk of music, music magazines. At the moment, there were three students living with her and Mill. A piano player from the Hunter Valley, a trumpet player from Alice Springs and a double bass player from Perth.

There were great plans for the future, too. Open days twice a year, so visitors could stroll through the house, learn about Vincent’s career, look at original sheet music, hear old recordings and read about the jazz scene in Sydney from the late 1950s onwards.

Sylvie was busy five days a week. Every day was different. Mill was the ideas person, but she left most of the work to Sylvie. It worked best that way, they’d discovered. And lately, Mill had been otherwise occupied.

Sylvie had dropped a collection of her tips into the local free newspaper. Since then, Mill had been contributing a fortnightly “Ask Mill” column. She read each letter that was sent in and spent some time drafting her replies. The questions had been about cooking and housekeeping to begin with. These days, most of the hundred or so letters she received each week were about relationship problems. A producer from one of the radio stations who lived locally had read several of the columns and invited Mill on to his show. She had unfortunately sworn in the first broadcast, but once the fuss died down (there’d been twenty calls of complaint, apparently), he hoped to bring her back for another show.

“He’d better hurry up before I die,” was all Mill said about it.

In Melbourne, Sebastian and Donald were still together, still happy. She heard snippets of news about Max from Sebastian. He wasn’t working in the bookshop anymore. He had been offered work with a touring comedy production. It had come to Sydney but Sylvie had been away with Fidelma at the retreat that week. She went away with her mother every few months. It always coincided with Ray’s visits to see his children from a previous marriage. Sylvie preferred it that way.

She sent the occasional email to her father. He sent the occasional one back. So far they had written only about books they’d read and films they’d seen. Each sentence seemed heavy with other meaning, but Sylvie didn’t know where to start and didn’t know if her father wanted her to. Fidelma still hadn’t asked about him. Sylvie hadn’t mentioned him either. She had reached no firm decisions or conclusions about him, or her feelings for him. She was taking Sebastian’s advice, going slowly and letting it unfold in a way they both could cope with. No happy ending, but the best they could do.

“So have you seen Max yet?” Leila asked now on the phone.

“Max? Seen him where?”

“There. He’s in Sydney. He got a one-year contract with the Sydney Theater Company. I gave him your number last month. We caught up for a drink before he left. He said he was going to call.”

“No, he hasn’t.” The sudden pang surprised her.

“I’ve got his number if you want it.”

“Sure,” she said, sounding as casual as she could, while her heart started beating faster. She took down the number.

Beside her Mill was making a show of looking at her watch. They were due over at Gorgeous George’s house for dinner. It was apparently to celebrate his third child’s fifth birthday, but Sylvie knew it was any excuse for a party. George and his wife Sarah had become Sylvie’s good friends in the past twelve months. They had hit it off immediately, from the moment George picked her up at the airport.

She said a quick good-bye and another congratulations to Leila, then hung up. Mill had her eyes shut, head leaning back against the verandah rail, the near-empty cocktail glass in her hand. Mill was taking lots of catnaps these days. Not surprising, she was seventy-four years old. And working hard for a woman of her age.

“Mill?” Sylvie asked.

“Mmm?”

“There hasn’t been a call for me recently that you forgot to pass on, has there?”

“Man or woman? Friend or foe? Family or non-family?”

“Man. Friend. Non-family. Called Max.”

“Now I think of it, yes. Last week.”

“What did he say?”

“Asked to speak to you.”

“What did you say?”

“Said you weren’t home.”

“Was I?”

“Nope.”

“Did you forget to tell me or decide not to tell me?”

“It never hurts a man to have to do a bit of running after his prey.”

“I’m not Max’s prey and you know it’s rude not to pass on messages.”

“You’ve got his number now, haven’t you?”

“Were you eavesdropping then?”

“Of course. That’s why I got the hearing aid installed. So I could hear.”

They took simultaneous sips from their cocktail glasses.

“Mill, can I ask for a tip?”

“Ask away.”

“If you had met someone and thought that something might happen between you but before it did, something happened to make it impossible, but then it looked like you had a chance to make something happen, what would you do?”

“I’d ring him,” Mill said. “Declare your intentions. Show your interest. As soon as possible.”

“Now, you mean?”

“Now,” Mill said. “Before we go to Gorgeous George’s.”

Sylvie went inside to make the call. He answered on the fifth ring.

“Max?”

“Sylvie?”

This time she didn’t want to make a mess of it. She wanted to be clear. “Max, I’m sorry to launch into it even before we catch up on each other’s news, but can I please ask you three questions?”

“Of course.”

“Are you seeing anyone at the moment?”

“No, I’m not.”

“Do you still hold a candle for Leila?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Would you come on a date with me one night? A proper date?”

She could hear the smile in his voice as he answered.

“I’d love to, Sylvie.”

She came back out to Mill. “He said yes.”

“Of course he did.”

“What do you mean, ‘of course he did’?”

“I told him when he rang last week that if he messed you around again, I’d kill him.”

“You didn’t.”

“I did. That’s what families are for, isn’t it? To look out for one another? Now, hurry up or we’ll be late.”

Read on for a preview of international bestselling author Monica McInerney’s funny, fabulous new novel,

HELLO FROM THE GILLESPIES

For more than thirty years, Angela Gillespie has sent to friends and family around the world an end-of-the-year letter titled “Hello from the Gillespies.” It’s always been cheery and full of good news. This year, Angela surprises herself—she tells the truth. . . .

The Gillespies are far from the perfect family that Angela has made them out to be. Her husband is coping poorly with retirement. Her thirty-two-year-old twins are having career meltdowns. Her third daughter, badly in debt, can’t stop crying. And her ten-year-old son spends more time talking to his imaginary friend than to real ones.

Without Angela, the family would fall apart. But when Angela is taken away from them in a most unexpected manner, the Gillespies pull together—and pull themselves together—in wonderfully surprising ways . . .

Available in November 2014 from New American Library.

It was December first. Angela Gillespie did as she’d done on that date for the past thirty-three years. She sat down at her desk before dinner and prepared to write her annual Christmas letter.

After doing so many, she had the process down to a fine art. It was a matter of leafing through her diary to recall the year’s main events, writing an update about each member of the family—herself, her husband and their four children—attaching a photo or two, then sending it off.

She’d written her first Christmas letter the same year she was married. Transformed from single traveler Angela Richardson of Forest Hill, London, to newlywed Mrs. Nick Gillespie of Errigal, a sheep station in outback South Australia, she couldn’t have been further from her old life, in distance or lifestyle. She’d decided an annual letter was the best way of keeping in contact with her friends and relatives back home. As the years went by, she’d added Nick’s relatives, their neighbors and her new Australian friends to the mailing list. It now went to more than a hundred people worldwide.

Her early letters had been in traditional form, typed on an old typewriter on their big kitchen table, then taken into Hawker, the nearest town (almost an hour’s drive away), photocopied and posted. It was much easier these days, the letters sent instantly via the wonder of e-mail. Even so, she still printed out paper copies and kept them stored in the filing cabinet beside the desk.

She knew the children found the whole idea mortifying—they, and Nick, had stopped reading the letters long ago—but perhaps in years to come they might like to see them. Angela hoped so. She secretly thought of them as historical documents. All the facts of their lives were there, after all, recorded in brief dispatches. She’d read back through them all only recently.

She’d written about her first years of marriage: “Nick and I couldn’t be happier! I am loving my new life on the land too. I can now name five species of native birds by their calls alone, four varieties of gum trees by their bark, and last week I drove a tractor for the first time. There’s hope for this London-born city girl yet!” She wrote about the arrival of the twins less than a year after their wedding day: “We already knew it would be twins, but it was still an incredible surprise to see two of them. One is so dark; the other is so fair; both are so beautiful. We’re naming them after my grandmothers, Victoria and Genevieve.” Three years later, she wrote about Lindy’s arrival: “A third girl! Another beautiful brunette. The twins can’t wait to get their hands on their new little playmate. I get to name her too (Nick and I struck a deal on our wedding night: I name any girls; he names any boys). I’ve chosen my favorite name from Shakespeare—Rosalind. The twins are already calling her Lindy!” The next two decades of updates were about outback station life, family holidays, academic results, hobbies, pets and funny incidents involving the girls, each report chatty and cheery.

Eleven years ago, she’d included a piece of news that she suspected had shocked her readers as much as it had her. At the age of forty-four, she was pregnant again. She’d thought she was menopausal. She’d discovered she was almost five months pregnant when a routine visit to the doctor led to an unexpected pregnancy test and an even more unexpected result. Two days after the birth, breaking with tradition, she’d sent out a special midyear e-mail to everyone on her mailing list.
It’s a boy!!! Our first son!!! Nick gets to name one at
last!!!!

She’d used far too many exclamation marks, she noticed afterward. Postbirth endorphins at work, she presumed. Either that or delayed shock at the names Nick had chosen for their son. At her hospital bedside, he’d confessed he had promised his long-deceased and sentimental grandfather that he would name any future son after the first Gillespies—two male cousins—to come from Ireland to Australia in the 1880s. Which was why their fourth (and definitely final) child was baptized Ignatius Sean Aloysius Joseph Gillespie. One of Nick’s friends had been very amused. “He’ll either be the first Australian Pope or end up running a New York speakeasy.”

At first Angela tried to insist everyone call him Ignatius, but it was a losing battle. She’d long realized that the shortening of names was a national pastime in Australia. He was Iggy within a day of his baptism. A week later, even that was shortened. He’d been called Ig ever since.

She could hear his voice now, floating down the hall from the kitchen. The homestead was big, with six bedrooms, two living rooms and a high-ceilinged dining room, all linked by the long hall, but sound still carried well. Ig and Lindy were playing—attempting to play—a game of Scrabble before dinner. Angela could also hear the faint strains of Irish music coming from the dining room. She knew Nick was in there working on his family research. Over the past six months, the large polished table had slowly become covered in stacks of hardback books on aspects of Australian and Irish history. Not just books, but also shipping records, hand-drawn family trees and photographs. They weren’t just in the dining room either. The office too. In fact, every surface in the house had started to accumulate history journals or family tree paraphernalia of one form or another. The previous week Angela had searched for her car keys for nearly an hour before finding them beneath a pile of ancestry magazines.

Beside her, the six o’clock news jingle sounded from the radio. Angela blinked. She’d better get a move on if she was to send her letter tonight. She clicked on her template document, with its border of Christmas trees already in place, along with her traditional opening line in Christmassy red and green letters (“Hello from the Gillespies!”) and equally festive farewell (“A Very Merry Christmas from Angela and all the gang!”). All she had to do now was fill in the blank middle section with her family news.

One minute passed, then another. The words just wouldn’t come. Perhaps she should break with tradition and choose the photos first. She opened the folder of digital shots she’d collected over the past twelve months. She usually sent a group one, but the family hadn’t all been together and in front of a camera for nearly two years. Could she just send separate and recent photos of each of them instead?

She clicked through the possibilities, starting with the twins. No, Victoria wouldn’t be happy with any of those going into wide circulation.
Wide
being the operative word, unfortunately. Not that Angela would ever say it to her, but Victoria had put on a
lot
of weight since she’d moved to Sydney nearly two years earlier. Comfort eating, Angela suspected, after the stressful time she’d had in her work as a radio producer. She still looked lovely, though, Angela thought. Like a pretty, rosy-cheeked milkmaid, with her blond hair curling to her shoulders, and her blue eyes. But she might not appreciate Angela’s sending out photos just at the moment.

As for Genevieve—the most recent photo she’d e-mailed from New York wasn’t really suitable for public viewing either. For a hairdresser, and especially a hairdresser working in the glamorous American film and TV world, Genevieve took a very devil-may-care approach to her own hair. She looked like she was on the way to a fancy dress party in this latest shot, her newly acquired bright blue dreadlocks tied in a loose knot on top of her head, her dark eyes heavy with eyeliner, as usual, and alight with mischief, also as usual. She’d explained it all in her e-mail. A hairdresser friend had needed to practice dreadlock extensions for a film she was working on and Genevieve had volunteered as the guinea pig.
It’s only temporary, promise!
she’d written.
Thank God for
that!
Angela had e-mailed straight back.
Ig said to tell you
that you look like a feral Smurf.
Genevieve had been very amused by that. Genevieve was very amused by most things.

There were several recent photos of Lindy, but unfortunately she looked like a prisoner on the run in most of them, wild-eyed and panicky. The camera really didn’t lie, Angela thought. Poor Lindy
was
a bag of nerves these days. Her general air of disarray wasn’t helped by the fact she’d taken to wearing her long brown hair in two messy bunches, like a little girl. It was the in fashion in Melbourne circles, she’d told Angela. Which circles? Angela had wondered. Kindergarten? She hadn’t said it aloud. She’d learned the hard way over the years that there was no teasing Lindy about her appearance. Or about anything, really.

At least there were dozens of photos of Ig to choose from. He loved being in front of a camera. But none of them was suitable either. His dark red curls badly needed a cut and she hadn’t gotten around to it yet, deciding to wait until Genevieve and her scissors were home again. In the meantime, he looked more like her fourth daughter than her only son. If she attached one of those photos to her Christmas letter, she’d receive a disapproving e-mail from Nick’s aunt Celia. Celia had very strict ideas about suitable haircuts for boys. Celia had very strict ideas about everything.

As for recent photos of herself and Nick together . . . It felt like they’d hardly been in the same room for months, let alone in front of the same camera. She turned and looked at the back wall of the office. Thirty-two photos of her and Nick looked back at her. The photos were another tradition she had started the year they were married. An annual photo of the two of them in the same position, standing in front of the homestead gate, the big stone house behind them, that huge sky above them, all space and light. Each year she’d sent one print back home to her parents in London and framed another for this wall. As the years had gone by, the children had appeared in the photos with them too. Angela stood now and looked at each of them in turn. Not at her own image, but at Nick standing to her left in every photo, six foot one to her five foot five.

He hadn’t changed much over the years, as tall, lean and tanned in the most recent photo as he was in the earlier ones. She reached for the first photo, studying it closely, clearly remembering this early moment of their married lives. It had taken them eight tries to get the self-timing camera to work properly. They’d been about to give up when it clicked. She was looking straight at the camera, wearing a cornflower-blue cotton dress the same color as her eyes, her hair a mass of black curls, her smile wide, if on the verge of frozen, after so many attempts to get the shot. Beside her, Nick was dressed in dark jeans and a white shirt, the sleeves rolled up. He wasn’t only smiling but laughing, completely relaxed, indulging her, gazing down at her with such amusement. Such pride. Such love.

She felt that jolt inside her again. Like a sudden pain, a pang. She still couldn’t put an exact name on it. Was it sadness? Fear? Confusion? All of those and something else. It was the closest she’d felt to homesickness since she was child. A longing for someone. The feeling of missing them, wanting them so badly that it physically hurt. It was how she had felt about Nick for months now. She couldn’t understand it, no matter how much she tried. How could it be that her husband could be physically so close to her every day, beside her in bed every night, yet so far away, so distant, so—

“Ha! I win again!”

The cheer from the kitchen interrupted her anxious thoughts. They would get her nowhere; she knew that already. She also needed to concentrate on her letter. She decided to forget about sending individual photos. She’d do what she’d done with her previous letter and attach a family group shot from a few years ago. She hoped no one would notice she, Nick and the girls all looked younger and that Ig appeared to be shrinking rather than growing.

Back at the computer, a chime alerted her to an incoming e-mail. She opened it, secretly glad of another distraction.
Thank you, Angela, our Outback Angel!!!!
the subject line read. It was from an elderly couple in Chicago, just home after their once-in-a-lifetime trip to Australia, including a week staying on Errigal.

Angela had joined the outback station stay program thirteen years earlier, after the three girls had left home, and before Ig arrived. It had initially been a financial decision. The drought had hit them hard; the wool industry had collapsed. Like all their neighbors, they had needed some extra income. While she’d often helped out with the practical side of station life, Nick had never discussed the station’s finances with her, despite her frequent requests to be involved. Angela had known, though, that every extra dollar would be useful. To her own surprise, she’d discovered she didn’t have a flair for just hosting visitors and tour guiding, but for promotion too. She’d joined forces with local tourism associations, advertising Errigal’s isolation and beauty wherever she could. She’d done the occasional interview on the radio, in newspapers, even once on TV. “The English rose of the Australian outback,” the interviewer had called her.

She’d started small, doing up the old governess’s quarters that adjoined the homestead, welcoming couples and families, one or two a month, from March until November. The numbers had grown as each year passed, expanding to include school groups who were happy to sleep rough in the shearers’ quarters if they weren’t in use by Errigal’s contract shearers. At last count, nearly five hundred people had stayed with them on Errigal, not just from all over Australia but from overseas too—Europe, Asia, America—all seeking a taste of life on an isolated outback station with Angela as their guide.

While Nick had been busy elsewhere on the station, moving stock, maintaining their property, she’d taken her guests on long drives through the empty landscape, pointing out not just Wilpena Pound and Rawnsley Bluff, two landmarks of the Flinders Ranges, but the smaller, less well-known peaks and valleys too. Everything had a name and a story attached. Over the years she had heard them all from Nick, from their Aboriginal stockmen, from their neighbors. She’d loved sharing not only the stories, but all the statistics too. Their property was 170,000 acres, 265 square miles. At its peak, before the drought, it had been home to 10,000 sheep. Huge numbers, but they still took up only a tiny part of this enormous country.