Christmas at Remarkable Bay Read online

  She hadn’t, but she also hadn’t told him that. She was far more savvy with her money than he would allow. She swallowed and said, quietly, firmly, ‘I’ll be fine.’

  ‘You’ve still got your share from the sale of Mum and Dad’s house although it’s tied up in a term deposit for another year. Do you need any of it?’

  Roma gripped the edge of her sleeping bag with her free hand. ‘No, I don’t. With the money from the sale of our house, and Tom’s superannuation and the … his life insurance … I’m okay for a year, at least. You do know that I used to manage budgets at work, don’t you?’

  ‘Yeah, of course.’ Leo paused. ‘So I guess there’s no need for me to start sending food parcels then?’

  He always knew how to make her laugh. ‘Hang on, let me double check. I seem to be out of chocolate and wine.’

  ‘You’ll have to wait for Christmas.’

  ‘But that’s four months away.’

  ‘Toughen up, princess.’

  ‘Well, in that case, it’s socks and jocks for you then. White ones. Big old grandpa ones.’

  They were silent for a moment, remembering one of their father’s jokes. He’d been a happy father, a generous one. He’d had a good heart and a booming laugh. He’d always said he wanted for nothing: he’d won the heart of a woman he adored, fathered two children who were the light of his life, and worked in a job he could tolerate. ‘All a man ever needs is new socks and jocks,’ he’d announced every Christmas morning when they’d gathered under the tree to open their presents. He was never disappointed and laughed along when the socks became more cartoonish as the years went on. Dancing Santas. Surfing cats. Giant tomatoes.

  ‘I still miss them, Leo,’ Roma said softly.

  ‘Me too, Romes, but … you can’t bring them back by buying a house in the place we used to spend summer holidays.’

  ‘Of course I know that,’ she huffed. But did she really? Was that the draw for Roma? Was that why she’d bought Bayview?

  There were so many memories tied up in these streets, in the whispering fronds of the Norfolk Island pines in the distance, in the grains of sand on the beach and in the waters of the bay. The town had been sunshine and summer holidays during every summer of her childhood, and for her mother and her mother’s family for generations before that. Her parents had rented a house right on the beach for two weeks from New Year’s Eve until mid-January, and there had been years of holidays in which the winds blew in cool from the beach to calm tensions, and dripping ice-creams marked each afternoon. Roma and Leo enjoyed sun-kissed days and evenings filled with laughter and music and board games and holiday-home records on scratchy record players. Roma had loved it, the freedom and looseness of those two weeks every year. Leo’s commanding personality was evident even then; within days he’d corralled together a troupe of holidaying kids and they’d roamed the beach and the cliffs all summer, following him. Those same kids returned every year: city kids, country kids, some from the State’s southeast. Lawyers’ kids and doctors’ kids and farmers’ kids. Boys and girls. For two weeks every summer, Roma had been part of Leo’s tribe and she’d been in heaven. It was fun until it wasn’t and then, once Leo had gone to university, and when the attractions of a city summer were so much more entertaining than the beach, those summers faded. Eventually, Roma stayed up in Adelaide when her parents holidayed down at the Bay, and finally their parents moved to Victor Harbor, the biggest town nearby, to retire. Remarkable Bay had already been too small for them by then: it was without a doctor and too far from the hospital for their liking. They’d ended up needing both: they’d died within a year of each other, of cancer, lung and breast.

  ‘Hey,’ she said. ‘Remember that ice-cream shop on the corner of Ocean Street? The one by the church?’

  ‘The one that had the waffle cones and the Golden North honey ice-cream?’ Leo’s voice sounded boyish, and Roma suddenly saw him as fifteen again, tanned and slender, his colourful boardshorts slung low for effect, his dripping cone between his fingers and the melting ice-cream dripping on to the black of the bitumen road like globs of tears.

  ‘Yeah. That one.’

  ‘Man, that was the best ice-cream …’

  ‘Don’t get too sentimental. It’s gone. And the church is a craft shop now.’

  ‘What the fuck? That’s it. I’m definitely going to Noumea. Listen, Romes, I’ve got to go. I’ll call you next weekend and I’ll see you at Christmas. Call me if you need anything, all right?’

  ‘I will,’ Roma promised and she half meant it.

  But Leo didn’t hang up. She heard a deep sigh. ‘Damn it, it’s probably a good thing about the ice-cream place. My personal trainer would kill me if he found out I was eating ice-cream.’

  ‘You have a personal trainer now? How Sydney.’

  ‘I know. I’m such a cliché but I look hot.’ He still didn’t hang up.

  Roma knew what was coming. She unzipped her sleeping bag and tiptoed over the icy wooden floorboards to the French doors. The windows were fogged from condensation and she wiped a circle with her palm. It didn’t do much for the view. The outside was filmy with sea spray.

  ‘Listen. You really okay?’ he asked quietly.

  She tensed. There was no simple answer to his question. Some days, she was okay. Yesterday, moving into her new house in Remarkable Bay, she’d been … okay. For a while. Other days she started out okay and then a smell, a taste or hint of memory would suck her back down into the void of grief. Her psychologist had told to expect this waxing and waning, this pull and push of happiness and despair. She’d hung on to that advice on the days when she felt there would be no heaven to her hell.

  ‘Oh, you know. Each day is better than the day before until I have a bad day and then my life feels like it’s snakes and ladders.’

  ‘Shit, Roma …’

  She wouldn’t say any more. She’d been too honest. It scared people, she knew that, and Roma chided herself for the slip. She knew first hand that people accepted that there would be grief at a funeral and then for perhaps a month or two after a terrible loss. But then you were expected to get over things, to move on. To find what people liked to refer to as ‘closure’. Closure. How she hated that damn word. Getting over grief—if you ever could—wasn’t like closing the last page on a book and putting it on a high shelf so you didn’t have to look at it every day. Grief was like driving a car and the road ahead of you was endless and long and dark and there was nowhere to pull over and eventually, maybe one day, you might find that you weren’t driving so fast anymore, your fingers weren’t gripping the steering wheel until you were white-knuckled. One day, you might let go of that wheel for just a moment so you could reach for the gear stick to change gears. Fourth to third. Third to second. But you were always on that road. Every day.

  And Leo’s question was the subtext of every conversation she’d had with him for the past two and a half years. Are you really okay? he’d asked her over and over.

  ‘Every day is better, Leo, I promise.’ She knew Leo needed to hear the words. Roma was so used to saying them, so practised in automatically reassuring people who were worried about her, so used to pleasing everyone, that they came out as naturally as blinking. ‘So, I’ll see you at Christmas?’

  ‘You just want a present,’ Leo said, relief in his big-brother voice. Relief that he thought she was moving on, relief that she’d changed the subject.

  ‘Damn right I do. You’d better bring me something good.’

  ‘Don’t I always, Romes?’

  ISBN: 9781489297150

  TITLE: CHRISTMAS AT REMARKABLE BAY

  First published in 2017 in the collection A VERY COUNTRY CHRISTMAS

  Copyright © 2017 Victoria Purman

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