Hello from the Gillespies Read online

  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 when they weren’t in use by Errigal’s contract shearers. At last count, nearly five hundred people had stayed 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 dramatic landscape, pointing out not just Wilpena Pound, St Mary’s Peak and Rawnsley Bluff, 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’d heard them all from Nick, from their Aboriginal stockmen, from their neighbours. She loved sharing not only the stories, but all the statistics too. Their property was 70 000 hectares, 700 square kilometres. At its peak, before the drought, it had been home to ten thousand sheep. Huge numbers, but the property still took up only a tiny part of this enormous country.

  Even after Ig’s surprise arrival, Angela had continued to host visitors, bringing him along in his car seat in the four-wheel drive. She’d taken her guests to all the best lookout spots, enjoying their delight in photographing not just the scenery, but also the kangaroos, emus and lizards. They were a part of day-to-day life for her now, but still a wonder to overseas visitors. She’d shared stories of the area’s Aboriginal history, about the Adnyamathanha people who had first lived there. She’d talked about the Irish Gillespies who had settled here in the 1880s, taken her guests into the now-disused woolshed, let them feel the wooden rails and floorboards made smooth from years of lanolin-rich fleeces. Sometimes they even camped out under the stars. She’d learned all the constellations over the years – the Southern Cross, the Pointers, different stars to the ones she’d known growing up in England.

  Reading the comments in the visitors’ books always brought back many memories.

  This place is one of the world’s best-kept secrets, please stop advertising!

  A once-in-a-lifetime stay, thank you so so so much.

  Ig was often mentioned too. What a cute kid! Come visit us in the US some day, Ig! He’d featured in many of their guests’ photos over the years as well, looking the part of the wild outback kid with his mop of hair, his shorts and T-shirts no matter the weather and, more often than not, his bare and dusty feet too.

  This couple from Chicago had been among her favourite guests. Everything they’d seen, from the smallest bird to the most vivid red sunset over the nearby ranges, had been declared ‘absolutely one hundred per cent awesome’. Their email was as enthusiastic. We miss you, Angela! Chicago is too noisy for us now. We miss Errigal and the bird sounds and that huge, huge sky, and the colours and the quiet and most of all we miss you looking after us, spoiling us every hour of every day! She was tempted to read on, but there wasn’t time now. She had work to do. A letter to write.

  It did feel like work for once.

  Come on, Angela, she thought. Get started. She moved her chair closer to the computer. Her fingers hesitated over the keys. Just do it, she told herself, feeling a headache start to pulse. Get it written, get it sent out and then you can go and lie down. Even if only for a few minutes.

  She finally started, summoning the usual cheery tone she used for her letters, recalling opening sentences from previous years, hoping no one would notice they’d been recycled.

  Yes, it’s Angela back again! Can you believe twelve months have passed since I last wrote to you? Where has the time gone? Everything is great with us, after another action-packed and fun-filled year for all the Gillespies. I hope it’s been a good year for all of you too!

  She stopped there and thought back over the past year. She thought of all her Christmas letters over the decades. All those bright, happy letters, putting the best possible spin on their lives, making it sound as though the Gillespies were the luckiest, loveliest, most successful, well-balanced, supportive family in all Australia, and possibly even the world. She had always skipped over any troubles. Avoided mention of any tensions. Edited out any sticky subjects. It had felt like the right thing to do, even if she knew her family sometimes sounded too good to be true.

  She felt her headache pulse faster and rubbed at her temple automatically. It wasn’t just the headaches that had kept striking with regularity lately. At the age of fifty-five, something else had started to happen. She’d talked about it with her neighbour Joan, a station wife and former nurse. In her mid-sixties, straight-talking and kind, Joan was Angela’s best friend in the area, the one person who had genuinely welcomed her when she arrived, a wide-eyed, secretly homesick English girl. They didn’t often meet in person – they lived nearly seventy kilometres apart – but they spoke on the phone regularly, sometimes daily. Angela had shared her worries with Joan several weeks earlier.

  ‘Is it a secret symptom of life after menopause, one that no one talks about?’ she’d asked.

  ‘I’m still not sure what “it” is, exactly. You need to be clearer with me. Have you developed blue spots? A forked tongue?’

  Angela tried to summarise it. ‘It’s like a constant urge to tell the truth.’

  ‘Oh, that!’ Joan said, laughing. ‘That’s just wisdom setting in. You’re losing patience with beating around the bush, you mean? You want to get straight to the point all the time? I always feel like that these days. Go for it, love! Let it rip! Tell the truth! It’s good for you.’

  But how could she change overnight? Angela had thought afterwards. Not after years of being the person in her family who smoothed things over and kept everyone happy. So she’d continued to be the good, kind, polite woman she’d been brought up to be. The Angela that Nick had married. The mother her children knew. The welcoming host and tour guide. The neighbour who could be relied on to help out, lend a hand . . .

  But the new, peculiar sensation wouldn’t go away. It truly was starting to feel as if there was another Angela inside her, struggling to get out. As if the headaches were a symptom of it, evidence of the ‘real’ her trying to break through the ‘polite’ her. A growing urge to be different, to go back to being the Angela she was when she first came backpacking to Australia all those years before. Adventurous Angela. Full of hope and anticipation Angela. Not the Angela she had become. Ordinary Angela.

  Anxious Angela.

  She turned and gazed out of the office window behind her. It was still bright outside, but the shadow cast by the deep verandah allowed her to see her reflection. Her head of black curls was now threaded with silver. Her once pale skin had seen too much sun since she’d arrived nearly thirty-four – how could it possibly be so many? – years ago. She took off her reading glasses and leaned forward. People used to tell her she had beautiful eyes. Such an unusual blue. Nick had often told her they were the first thing he’d noticed the night they met. But after three decades of squinting into bright sunlight, even they seemed to have faded. She still noticed the strength of the light here. At home in England, the weather was soft, misty, blurred around the edges. Here, the weather was a wild creature, fierce, untamed, with a mind of its own. Oh, you must love all that sunshine, English schoolfriends had written over the years. Aren’t you the jammy thing! Weren’t you in the right place at the right time when that property heir dropped in for a beer!

  She’d told the story so many times, not just to neighbours and friends, but to her station-stay visitors too. They always wanted to know how an Englishwoman like her had come to live in the outback. Everyone seemed to love the whole romance of her and Nick’s first meeting, the sheer chance of it. There she was, a twenty-two-year-old English backpacker filling in behind the bar for one night for a friend who’d got food poisoning. Nick was twenty-ei
ght, from South Australia, in Sydney for one night to go to a big rugby game. He’d arranged to meet friends, got lost and walked into her pub to ask for directions.

  She still remembered her first sight of him. Was it fate or destiny or sheer chance that she had looked up just as he came in the door? She’d been reading Wuthering Heights at the time, her head full of thoughts of Heathcliff. It were as if an Australian version had walked in. It wasn’t his looks or his height. He wasn’t conventionally handsome. It was the energy coming off him. A vitality. She’d have guessed even before he told her that his job was a physical, outdoors one. It wasn’t just his tan. He looked fit; strong too. His hair was as dark as hers, his eyes a deep brown. Irish colouring, she’d learned later. She’d helped him with the directions, even drawing a rough map on a beer coaster. On impulse, she offered him a drink on the house. He accepted, but only if he could buy her one at the same time. She was due a break. Over their drinks, they talked. And talked. And laughed. He noticed the time first. He had to go or he’d miss the match. They arranged to meet for a drink afterwards.

  They spent more hours together that night, more talking, more laughing, the physical attraction growing between them by the minute. He wasn’t like any man she’d met before, in England or Australia. He was curious. Thoughtful. Clever, but he wore it lightly. If his eyes were a window to his soul, she could tell he was kind, intelligent, amused, admiring. That night, he walked her back to her hostel. She added good manners to his list of qualities. They didn’t kiss then. They met for lunch at his hotel the next day, kissed as they were saying goodbye and were still kissing twenty minutes later. She flew to South Australia a week later to see him again. That was when she learned he wasn’t just a farmer but heir to an enormous property on the edge of the outback. Oh, it’s so romantic! her friends said. He’s like an Australian Mr Darcy!

  They were married within a year. She was pregnant three months later. The twins arrived a week before their first anniversary.

  ‘A marriage written in the stars,’ her father said in his effusive speech after their wedding in a cathedral in Adelaide. It was a Gillespie family tradition to be married there, even though Angela had secretly hoped they might get married in the tiny chapel on the Errigal property. But how would everyone fit? Nick had said, smiling. After a moment she’d smiled back. She’d been joking, she said. But she hadn’t. She’d loved that tiny chapel from the first time she saw it. She wasn’t very religious, that wasn’t what appealed to her. She’d loved it as a beautiful building filled with history. The old golden stone, the hand-carved wood, the pews polished to a high gleam by all the farmers and their families who had travelled miles over the years to meet there and pray . . .

  It wasn’t a chapel any more. It had long been deconsecrated. Fifteen years earlier, an electrical storm had blown off a section of its roof and knocked out a side wall. It was now little more than a ruin. Even so, she liked to walk across the paddocks to it as often as she could, even for just a few minutes of peace and quiet. She’d sit on one of the remaining pews, look up at the open sky and simply listen. She’d hear the wind slinking through the leaves of the gum trees. The galahs with their squawks, like scratches down a blackboard, a sound to make you wince but one she’d grown to love. If she sat very still, she’d hear more. Lizards skittering across the stone wall beside her. The distant rusty grind of the windmill sails. Sometimes, rarely, the sound of a car on the dirt road, tyres on loose gravel. Eventually, the stiller she became, she would hear her own breathing, slow breaths in, slow breaths out . . .

  Then always, before too long, a voice. Or two voices. Calling for her across the paddocks. ‘Mum? Mum?’ She’d wait for the second call, able to tell even at a distance whether it was urgent or not, whether she could walk back slowly across the scratchy soil, or whether she should run. Only twice had she needed to run, both in recent years, to rescue Ig from physical predicaments. He’d got his head trapped in the rungs of a kitchen chair one day. Another time, he was up on top of the pantry cupboard and couldn’t get down. It had been so different raising a boy. Her three daughters had never got themselves into all these physical scrapes, had they? If they had, she’d conveniently forgotten them. But having a son had taken her by surprise in so many ways. Her intense love for Ig had taken her by surprise. What was that joke? ‘If your mother tells you that she doesn’t have a favourite child, then you’re not her favourite child.’ That didn’t apply to Angela, though. She didn’t have any favourites. She loved her four children equally. Of course she did.

  She stood and walked over to the window. She couldn’t see much from this side of the homestead, but she knew what was out there. The lawn they tried valiantly to keep green for at least a month or two each year, using water that was always so precious. The old stone toolshed with the blue wooden door that now housed her secondhand pottery wheel and drying kiln. She’d taken up pottery as a hobby in recent months, for reasons she still didn’t quite understand herself. Beside it, the rose bush that Nick had planted for her as a surprise first-anniversary present, which still miraculously produced bright-red blooms, despite the droughts and heatwaves it had endured. All the other station buildings, the woolshed, the shearers’ quarters, the machinery shed. Beyond the station itself, the vast paddocks that one day soon would sprout mining equipment, exploration vehicles . . .

  Further away again, kilometre after kilometre of long straight dirt roads, with the curving hills of the Chace Range visible on one side, views across to the Flinders Ranges and the distinctive crater shape of Wilpena Pound on the other. Then tarred main roads, then wide highways leading to small towns and to a city, eventually. But overwhelmingly, all around their old stone homestead, there was nothing but wide open space, for as far as —

  ‘Don’t be mean!’

  The voice – Ig’s – made her jump. The game of Scrabble was obviously over. An argument had begun. What was the trigger this time? Angela wondered. Lindy teasing him about his long hair, perhaps? Angela wished she wouldn’t do that. At twenty-nine, she really was old enough to know better. Or was it about whose turn it was to set the table? Even at the age of ten, Ig spent more time arguing about children’s rights than it would take him to do the task in question. And Lindy seemed to have decided she was back home as a guest, not as a family member with housekeeping obligations.

  In less than a fortnight, the twins would be back home too, arriving with their jumble of suitcases, their constant chatter, taking over the house with their two big personalities. They were powerful enough apart, unstoppable together. Genevieve had put it into words once, at just the age of five. ‘You can never win, Mum. It’s two of us against one of you.’

  Not only them. Nick’s Aunt Celia would be here soon as well, trailing a cloud of too-strong musky perfume, her sharp eyes noting every fault in Angela’s housekeeping, her over-cultivated voice airing her ever-ready opinions about the children.

  And Nick? Once, they would have laughed about it all together. She’d have had his support, his listening ear. It would have been the two of them united, his wit and humour helping her cope with anything life threw at her. But now?

  Her head started to throb again, just above her left ear. The headaches had started five months ago. She’d waged a quiet war against them since then. Her doctor in Port Augusta had sent her for different tests, even a brain scan. She’d been given the all-clear, but the headaches had continued. Since then, she’d tried medication, massage, acupuncture, to no avail. She’d talk to her doctor about it again in the new year. There was too much else happening now. Not just the twins coming home, Aunt Celia’s arrival, Christmas to organise. The Gillespies were also this year’s hosts of the mid-December woolshed party. The station families took turns hosting an annual gathering, and it was the Gillespies’ turn again. Angela had been planning it for weeks. Their freezer was already full of party food, and there was a delivery due the next day of all the hired tables, chairs, glasses and crockery.

  No, t
here definitely wasn’t time now to worry about a headache. It would have to wait until January. Perhaps she could combine a visit to the specialist in Adelaide with a shopping trip. She could even treat herself to a nice solo lunch afterwards in one of the restaurants near the river. She could sit there with a book and a glass of wine, take as long as she liked. Perhaps she could even stay the night before the four-hour journey home again. Yes, that’s exactly what she’d do. Have some peace and quiet. What did they call it in the magazines? Having ‘me time’?

  But not tonight. There was no time for any of that tonight. She had a Christmas letter to write and send. She turned back to the computer, fighting that overwhelmed feeling again. She thought back over everything that had happened to her family during the past twelve months, wondering how on earth she could turn it all into one of her cheery Christmas letters. Joan’s voice suddenly came to her mind, as if she was standing there beside her.

  Go for it, love! Let it rip! Tell the truth! It’s good for you.

  She actually laughed out loud. Tell the truth? How could she?

  Go for it, love! It’s good for you.

  Angela stared at the screen for a long moment. Then she started a new letter, typing faster than she’d ever typed before.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Hello from the Gillespies!

  Yes, it’s Angela back again. Can you believe a year has passed since I last wrote to you all? I hope you’ve had a great twelve months and are now looking forward to special family Christmas celebrations together.

  It’s been a terrible year for the Gillespies. Everything seems to have gone wrong for us.

  I’ll start with the children.

  Genevieve: I’m worried she’s been away in America for too long, working in a fake TV world with fake TV people. She’s always loved to gossip and I’ve loved hearing her stories, but it’s gone beyond fun chitchat now. She’s become obsessed with celebrity news and is far too indiscreet about the people she works with. I’ve tried to warn her, but she just laughs it off, like she laughs everything off. She’s also started talking in a strange hybrid Australian-American drawl whenever she rings us (which isn’t often – she sends us most of her news via Facebook or Instamatic or whatever those internet things are called). She’s such a talented hairdresser, I’m not surprised that she’s found work with Hollywood film and TV stars, but I’m worried she’s got too swept up in all the gossip and glitter of it, and has lost sight of who she really is.