Stone Castles (11 page)

He grunted.

‘What?' she said, taking umbrage.

‘Sorry,' he said, glancing over at her. ‘Only I was thinking that sounds a lot like farming.'

And Pip deflated like a balloon.

She'd tried to impress him with how special her job was; she'd tried to make herself sound special, but all she'd done was sound like a pretentious wanker.

Of course he knew about work that required passion and commitment and sheer bloody hard work. For a girl who'd been raised in a farming family, it was funny how that hadn't occurred to her before. And she'd tried to make out like her job was somehow special.

‘Yeah, doesn't it just?' she said, crossing her arms and shifting lower in her seat.

She was withdrawing again, looking out that damned window as if her life depended on it. He'd seen the way she'd caved in on herself when he'd made the crack about farming. He hadn't meant anything by it, it's just that he'd been struck by the similarities and opened his mouth and seen whatever bubble she'd been blowing pricked into nothingness right there.

And sure, she'd been blowing that bubble up, making it sound like her job was something so goddamned special it should come with an inferiority warning for all other mere mortals, but at least she'd sounded like a woman and not a shell.

He liked it when she sounded like a woman with a bit of passion and spunk. And he liked that the twang that flavoured her voice now and again wasn't half as noticeable as it had been when they'd bumped into each other in town.

Because now she was sounding more like the Pip he once knew – able to string an entire sentence or more together in his presence – and less like somebody who was here in his car under sufferance.

‘My job's better though,' he said at length, because he'd been trying to find a topic that wouldn't immediately either have her on the defensive or the attack.

She looked across at him, and when he glanced at her, he could see the wariness in her eyes. ‘How do you figure that?'

‘Because I get to take my dog to work.' He ruffled the fur on Turbo's head. ‘Don't I, mate?'

And Turbo put his head up.

‘Yeah,' she said. ‘There is that.' She pushed herself a bit higher in her seat and held out a tentative back of her hand to the dog.

Turbo sniffed it and then nudged her fingers, letting her know it was okay to pat him. He looked at Luke then, tongue lolling out his mouth, his expression saying,
I don't know what your problem is. I can be friends
.

Luke's eyes narrowed. He'd bought the dog a year into his marriage, thinking a puppy would cheer Sharon up because god knew, nothing he did could. But bringing Turbo home had only proved to be one more crime in a long line of them, and by then he was so far up shit creek without a paddle, he'd figured he might as well keep him.

But Turbo was supposed to be
his
dog. He wasn't sure he wanted him fraternising with the enemy.

He noticed as Pip ran her fingers over his collar and scratched behind his head and his disloyal dog lapped it up. ‘So, how long have you two been together?'

‘Six years now, haven't we, fella?' He laughed, because it almost sounded like they were an old married couple. And the temperature in the cabin warmed up a few degrees, melting the ice as they talked about dogs for a while. Luke slowed the car and grinned as they approached a town. ‘Speaking of hounds, remember this place?'

‘Paskeville? Sure.'

‘Remember that kid on the school bus, the one that used to howl every time we went past that sign?'

She smiled. ‘Yeah. We called him The Hound of the Paskevilles.'

‘He tried to get us all to do it and the bus driver always threatened to stop and throw him off the bus.'

Pip laughed. ‘And one day we all did! Oh my god, I can still see his face as the driver told him to get out and drove away. I'd forgotten that. What was that kid's name?'

Luke shook his head. ‘Neville . . . Neville something?'

‘Schroeder!' she said. ‘Neville Schroeder!'

Luke howled and Turbo cocked an ear and howled a duet with his master, and Luke and Pip laughed as they headed through the almost deserted town, the softly fluttering teardrop flags advertising the church-turned-gallery the only sign of life.

Pip recovered first, wondering what the hell she was doing. She didn't even like the guy and he was making her laugh.

But then he'd always been able to make her laugh.

‘Whatever happened to Neville Schroeder, do you know?' she asked, because it was easier to talk about the buffoon on the bus than about how it was before.

‘I don't know. Didn't his parents split up when we were in high school?'

She shook her head. She didn't know. She'd spent most of her high school years in college in Adelaide. And she didn't want to think about those years because sooner or later she'd think of that final year, and what happened afterwards, and . . .

No. She wouldn't think about it. She wouldn't let herself.

So she changed the subject. ‘Are your parents still on the farm?'

‘Nope. They're retired down to a place on the coast near Stansbury. Dad decided the day I got married that he was moving on and making way for the next generation.'

And she buried the flash of concern that his parents wouldn't be there to play chaperone at the farm – it would just be her and Luke – because there it was, lying fat and pregnant right there in the open between them, and all she had to do was ask.

‘I heard you and Sharon broke up.'

‘Yup.' A muscle twitched in his neck.

‘I didn't know it ended until Trace told me the other day.' She saw the way his fingers tightened around the steering wheel. This was not comfortable territory for Luke Trenorden. ‘I was sorry to hear the news.'

He sighed, raising his eyebrows. ‘Ah well, shit happens.'

She could feel his hurt and taste his bitterness. And suddenly she was his friend once again, and not the woman estranged from him because of what had happened in the past.

‘How long were you married?'

‘Two years, seven months and three days – which strangely enough was exactly two years, seven months and three days too long.'

‘What happened?'

‘She left me,' he said with a hollow laugh. ‘Just like you did.'

‘Ouch,' she said, and turned her gaze out the window again.

‘Hell, Pip,' he said a moment later. ‘I didn't mean it to sound that way.'

‘I think you did. You probably think it's fair too.'

‘Isn't it?'

And the fragile camaraderie that they'd found amongst the bones of the past crumbled into ash.

Chapter Fifteen

H
e turned off the highway onto Melton Road, and the car rattled and bounced along the gravel road. Pip grabbed the handle above her window and held on tight for the few kilometres until what was left of the old town emerged, a few tin-roofed houses and sheds and the spaces where other houses had once been.

And then her stomach rattled and bounced, not only because she and Luke had sparred, but because she knew the house she'd grown up in was no longer there. But knowing it was one thing. Seeing it – that would make it real.

They met up with the main road, asphalt again, the going smooth, and she looked left down the highway as the car turned right, thinking it wasn't only the house that was gone. She'd have to go there sometime, to visit that place where the crash had happened. And an old familiar guilt knotted itself tight inside. They'd been on their way home from a Christmas party, her mum driving because Gerald was a stickler not to drink and drive, when the car had collided head on with the grain truck.

A Christmas party she'd wheedled her way out of, pretending to be sick, because she'd had plans to meet Luke.

She shut her eyes against the pain, but the guilt was still there.

It was always there.

They were almost through the town when she opened them. The train had once travelled through Melton, ferrying passengers and freight from Adelaide to Kadina and on to Moonta, but the service had stopped long ago, most of the tracks ripped up, pine trees sprouting in the space the lines once were, so now all that remained were the rails buried under the Upper Yorke Road, the bitumen wearing over the metal as though the old lines refused to be forgotten.

Another bend and they were out of the town. One more and they would be heading down the long straight where her old house was.

Where her old house had been.

She frowned as the car travelled down the road, searching for the telltale trees that once marked the approach to the house. ‘I can't see anything.'

‘Pip. It's gone.'

‘But where are the trees? There were trees you could see coming around that bend. Slow down!'

Luke sighed and slowed the car, and they reached the bottom of the long dip and she saw a gap in the roadside bushes and what looked like a patched up fence and an old tank on the other side of the road. ‘Here,' she said. ‘Stop here!'

Luke pulled off the bitumen and she clambered out of the car. ‘Pip,' he said, following her to the fence line where she stood blinking disbelievingly across the paddock.

‘It's gone,' she said. ‘All of it, gone.' Even though he'd told her, she'd expected to find something. Anything. A house didn't just disappear without a trace. But the house was gone, and with it the windmill and the huge sheds and the wall around the garden. Even the trees were gone, and all she could see was a paddock filled with a crop of ripening barley, their heads dancing in the breeze.

Mocking her.

‘I told you,' he said, behind her.

And she wheeled on him and said, ‘But you didn't tell me there was nothing left! Not a tree or a wall or a windmill or anything. You didn't tell me someone had planted a crop.' She shook her head in disbelief. ‘It's like we were never even here!'

‘Pip, what would have been the point of leaving anything?'

‘It would have said that once upon a time someone lived here. People who had lives and dreams and hopes. People that had laughed and cried and worked the land and raised a family.' She sniffed. ‘They could have left a sodding tree.'

He put a hand to her shoulder. ‘Pip.'

‘Don't touch me!'

She sniffed again, swiping at her cheeks with the back of her hand. ‘Where did it go? After they levelled it. What did they do with it all?'

‘Some went to salvage, the tin and windows and any bits worth saving. And the rest they pushed into a pile in a corner of the paddock, where the old stone mounds already were.'

She nodded. That would be right. She'd had dreams once, dreams that were formed amongst those very mounds when she'd played with Luke and her kid brother and they'd built their castle strongholds amongst the stones. And later, when she'd snuck out late at night with a torch and a blanket for clandestine meetings with the boy she'd planned to spend the rest of her life with.

And look what had happened to those dreams.

Why not pile what was left of her shattered family home on top and crush the first eighteen years of her life completely?

‘Take me there.'

‘Pip –'

‘Or I'll walk myself.'

‘In those heels?'

‘They're wedges, and they're not that high.'

She turned and started walking along the gravel edge of the road and he rubbed the back of his neck with his hand and said, ‘Okay, hop in.'

It was only a few hundred metres further on, but she felt a weight pressing on her chest as they approached and she wondered if she'd been hasty in wanting to come out here now, with this man, who'd spent so many long hot days out here with her in the past.

The long ago past
, she insisted, even if that past still seemed too raw, well drawn and less blurry-edged with the passage of time than she'd have liked.

Why was it so easy to remember these stone mounds?

Why was it so hard to forget?

She breathed in deeply, finding resolve as the car pulled up nearby. Because it was almost inevitable that she'd end up here, where it had all started.

She undid her seatbelt and opened her door and took in the view.

Mounds of stone were piled up in a corner of the paddock where they'd be in nobody's way, stone mounds that were nowhere near as large or as romantic as she remembered, with random ears of grain springing up between the scattered rocks around the edge, mottled shade from the scrubby trees and the smell of summer on the dry dusty air.

*

There was a makeshift gate structure so the fence could be pulled aside when needed and he pulled it aside now so she didn't have to clamber through the wires. Not that he wasn't sure she would if it came to that.

She might be all New York gloss in that dynamite blue dress that skimmed her perfect body in a way that said class act, but he had no doubt she could switch to bulldozer mode and head straight on through if she needed.

‘After you,' he said, and she didn't spare him a glance. Her eyes were on those low stone mounds, searching for a trace of her past, a hint of the life she'd lived in a house long gone. ‘And whatever you call those things on your feet, just be careful where you put them.'

He smiled as she suddenly paused, looking down at the ground in front of her. Message received, loud and clear. Good.

He watched as she clambered up over the stones in that thoroughly inappropriate footwear, pausing every now and then to pick something up and examine it, more often than not only to discard it. He watched her, choosing not to accompany her on this pointless task, not really fussed about being back here amongst these remnants of their adolescence.

Not with this woman. Not when there was so much history here, so much shared past. Who could forget those long hot days? Those long hot nights? Jeez, he'd taken fifteen years to get this woman out from under his skin and here she was again.

Nope, no way was he getting up there with her.

Turbo was happy to follow her though, skipping over the stones alongside her and sniffing at gaps in the rocks as if it was playtime, looking back at him every now and then as if to wonder why he wasn't joining in the game.

But this was no game. This was Pip and it had never been a game. It was serious.

Damn.

He still had to get her home to show her the furniture and then take her back to Craig and Tracey's before dropping her at her car. What the hell was she doing wasting time here?

‘Pip, we should go.'

‘In a minute.' She stooped down to pick something up and Turbo went from playful sniffing to ballistic barking, his hackles raised, and Luke knew what that meant and was already striding towards her as a big brown snake near her took off across the stones with the dog in hot pursuit.

She was shaking when he reached her. ‘Jesus' she said, one hand over her mouth. ‘That was a big one. I haven't seen one of those in a long time.'

‘I guess there aren't too many snakes in New York City.'

She looked up at him then, still white as a sheet, ‘Not the reptile kind anyway.'

And he had to hand it to her, she could still make him smile. There were smudges of dust on her blue dress and on her stone coloured shoes, and bits of her hair had worked their way out of their twisted knot so they hung around her face, and suddenly she looked more like the Pip of old than New York Pip and he had to check himself.

This was the woman who had dumped him and walked away. The old Pip wasn't something he necessarily wanted back.

Turbo came bounding back then, looking like he was grinning, pink tongue lolling out his mouth, eyes bright, his work done. ‘Good dog,' said Luke. ‘Now let's get the hell out of here.'

A rock shifted under her foot and she wobbled. Instinctively he reached for her free hand and this time she didn't pull away but let him steady her down from the stone mound. Smooth skin. She'd always had smooth skin. His must feel like sandpaper to her.

Not that he felt bad enough about it to let go. She was the one who'd insisted on clambering up here. By rights, he should let her go and let her find her own way down. But he didn't. He liked the feel of her hand in his. Even if it was the hand of a woman who had as good as hung him out to dry.

Besides, it was only polite.

‘What have you got there?' he said, noticing the other hand at her waist, cupping whatever she'd found amongst the stones as they clambered down.

She raised her hand and opened her palm for him to see. ‘Pottery. Pieces of Gran's old dinner service.' She held up a few shards of china and the curved handle of a tea cup decorated in the unmistakeable blue on white of the willow pattern.

He nodded and tried to understand why these fragments were so important. Maybe if someone had levelled his place and his gran and all his family were gone, he'd be desperate to find something that reminded him of the past too. ‘What are you going to do with them?'

‘I don't know, but Gran loved her willow pattern. I'm thinking they belong with her.'

And because she looked so determined and he was totally unprepared for that answer and whatever it might entail, he said lamely, ‘That sounds nice.'

She didn't speak during the short ride to his place, a couple of hundred metres as the crow flies, but more than double that by road. The rock had wobbled under her foot and he hadn't hesitated. He'd reached a hand out and taken hers to steady her and he hadn't taken it away.

And she'd left it there.

What was happening to her?

When had holding hands with Luke Trenorden featured on her list of things she must do while she was here?

Never, that's when.

She needed to get back to New York. She was unravelling back here. Forgetting. And she couldn't afford to forget.

Or forgive
.

He didn't pull up near the house as she'd been expecting – perhaps naively. He pulled up behind it, near the shed.

It was a place they'd spent hours as children, as young adults.

A place she remembered in excruciating detail.

Images from the past flashed through her mind, crowding out the present in a flood of memories. They'd danced together out here, to old records they'd bought in second hand shops. They'd kissed and ended up on one of the old sofas. They'd given each other their virginity and afterwards, he'd kissed the tears of wonder from her eyes and told her he loved her. Right there. In that shed.

Crap.
Today was fast becoming an exercise in revisiting all the haunts of their shared past.

Maybe she should have asked him where he'd stored the furniture all this time. Maybe she wouldn't have come if she'd known. She'd just assumed it was in the house.

She'd never once imagined he'd leave it out here.

But then, why would he want her stuff in his house? If the old place had been in such dreadful condition, maybe what was left of the furniture was only fit for a shed, but in that case, why had they bothered keeping it?

Maybe they should have just trashed it. Then she wouldn't have to be here at all, deciding whether or not it would be fit for use in the B&B.

She cursed the fates that had brought her to this place. The fates that had mocked her plans to avoid Luke, and just kept right on mocking them.

And then he opened the big sliding shed door and she held her breath as the dust motes danced in the slanting sun and that familiar scent hit her. Hay and dust and engine oil.

It was like being in a time capsule.

It was like snatching a memory of her past from the air and breathing it in. The sheds at their house, the ones she'd played around when she was a kid growing up – the sheds that were long gone – had smelled the same way.

It was comforting and welcoming and warm but at the same time it was unsettling too, threatening to throw her off balance more than any wobbly rock on a mound of stones had done.

Because she didn't want to feel comfortable here.

Not here, in Luke's world, where so many ghosts of the past still resided.

He snapped on a light and the sun's rays and dust motes disappeared under the all-encompassing, shadow banishing fluoro lighting.

And Pip sent up a silent prayer of thanks because it helped wipe the shadows from her mind too. She didn't need pesky shadows or ghosts getting in the way of what she needed to do right now. Which was to look at furniture. Make decisions.

She made decisions all the time. She analysed markets and trends and made recommendations to increase or reduce the bank's exposure, decisions with implications in the multi-millions – if not billions – of dollars.