Family Baggage Read online

  ‘Mum …’

  ‘Oh, Harriet. Harriet.’

  She needed her mother to come over and hold her, to make it all right, to make it better, but she stayed with Lara and James. Austin had moved over to them too. The four of them were holding on to each other.

  Harriet looked at them. ‘Were you all here? Was I the only one who wasn’t?’

  ‘Harriet, it was so quick,’ Austin said. ‘You couldn’t have known.’

  She didn’t answer him. She needed to know exactly what had happened. ‘Where were you when you heard, Lara?’

  ‘I was in the office.’

  ‘On a Saturday? Only Mum and Dad work on a Saturday.’

  ‘I was working on that new tour.’

  ‘Where were you, James?’

  ‘At home. With Melissa and Molly.’

  Austin came over and touched her arm. ‘Harriet, stop it. It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘Yes, it does. It does matter.’

  ‘Harriet? Come here, love.’

  She turned. Her mother opened her arms. Harriet moved into them and cried until it hurt.

  They closed the travel agency for two days. Gloria volunteered to keep it going, but they wanted her with them. Having her in their midst made it easier, held them together, stopped the shock from completely overwhelming them. She and Melissa quietly and methodically organised what needed to be done. Their mother was too distraught. The rest of them were too shocked.

  Simon kept apologising, over and over again. It was his fault she had been in Melbourne. His fault for losing his mobile phone so she hadn’t been able to ring him. She was calm with him. ‘I wanted to go. It’s not your fault.’

  Gloria noticed something was wrong. She seemed to guess it was to do with Harriet not being there when her father died. ‘I know it’s hard, Harriet. But would it have been better if none of you were with him? If he had died on his own on the golf course? Would that have made you feel better?’

  ‘No, of course it wouldn’t.’ But why did it have to be me who was missing? She didn’t say that out loud. She felt so guilty, so terrible even thinking it, but it came from somewhere deep inside her. She should have been there.

  Gloria moved closer, taking Harriet’s hands in hers, squeezing them. ‘Harriet, you can’t change it. That’s the way it was. That’s what happened. It would hurt no matter how and when your dad died, or who was with him. It’s awful, but it’s the truth.’

  They all wanted to speak at his funeral service. Austin and James went first. They spoke simply, briefly. They had loved their father very much. Harriet was supposed to be next, but she wasn’t ready. Austin touched Lara on the arm. She glanced at Harriet, as if seeking permission. Harriet watched through her tears as Lara walked from the pew to the altar, adjusted the microphone, so calm, so collected. Her speech was brief. ‘Neil welcomed me into his home as if I was his own daughter. I loved him for that, and I loved him for his kindness and his humour, and for all the parts of him that were special. I loved him dearly and I will miss him so much.’ She cried then, but she managed to finish her sentence.

  Harriet wasn’t able to get past her first line. She had been up until two a.m. trying to write her tribute. Trying to put into words what her dad had meant to her. Trying to reduce thirty-one years of being loved and cared for and encouraged into three minutes. ‘I loved my dad.’ It was the past tense that got her. When he was alive she had been able to say to him ‘I love you, Dad.’ Now he was dead. Now he was in that coffin, in the middle of that aisle, and all she could say was that she had loved him. Because she hadn’t been able to say ‘I love you, Dad, please, Dad, get better. Please, Dad, don’t die,’ like the others had in the hospital room. If she had been there, would it have made the tiniest bit of difference that his spirit might have needed?

  She started crying and she couldn’t stop. Her mother didn’t speak either. She broke down on her way to the altar.

  Two months later, unbelievably, horribly, it happened again. They had all gone back to work, still numb with the hurt and grief, their father’s empty desk a reminder every day of their loss, yet none of them wanting to sit there or move it out.

  It had been a normal day: the phones ringing, customers calling in to book holidays or to show photos from a previous tour. A new set of company brochures arrived from the printers on the outskirts of Melbourne, two hours away. Harriet was the first to notice there was a problem with the photographs on the front page. The colours were out of alignment. Normally, that was something her father would have sorted out, quickly and easily. He’d have jumped in his car and driven there, and been back within the afternoon.

  It was as if all their reactions had slowed when he died. Harriet knew her mother was still dazed. Time after time she had looked up and seen her staring out the window, not hearing phones ring, not realising someone had asked her a question. She had aged in just a few weeks, as if the spirit had gone out of her. Harriet noticed it again that day. Her mother was staring at the brochures as if she didn’t know what they were.

  Harriet needed to help. She desperately needed to try and make things better. ‘Mum, do you want me to take them back to the printers?’

  Her mother’s smile was childlike in its relief. ‘Oh, Harriet, would you?’

  ‘Of course. Do you want to come with me? For a drive?’

  Gloria looked up. ‘Penny, you’ve got that lunch today, do you remember? Out at the golf club? And then Austin’s arriving after lunch?’

  ‘Oh yes, I’d forgotten. I’d better be here when he arrives too. Harriet, thank you anyway. I would have liked that. We’ll do it another time.’

  Harriet was about to ask if there was anything else she wanted her to do while she was there, when the memory returned of asking about the curtains the day their father died. Instead, she picked up the brochures and her car keys. ‘I’ll be back as soon as I can.’

  She planted a quick kiss on her mother’s head. Her mother briefly touched her arm. ‘Thank you, Harriet. I don’t know what I’d do without you.’

  Afterwards, the words had swum round and round Harriet’s head. Is that what she’d said? Without you or without you all?

  She had driven the two hours to the printing plant and spent nearly an hour with the production manager, trying to sort out the problem. She’d stayed calm, not even getting annoyed when he took a personal phone call on his mobile midway through, laughing for five minutes while he set up a football outing with a friend. How could that bother her? Her father had died. What could be worse than that? She was walking out of the printworks when her mobile phone rang. James.

  Afterwards she couldn’t remember whether she had said hello or whether James had started speaking first. She vaguely remembered getting into the car, turning it around, ignoring the angry blast of someone’s horn and then driving back to Merryn Bay. She needed to stop for petrol halfway. She got out of the car, filled the petrol tank, went in and paid, like a robot. The whole time James’s voice replayed in her mind.

  ‘Harriet, thank God I got you. Mum’s in hospital. Quick, get back as soon as you can.’

  She drove straight to the hospital. She was too late. At the bedside she listened, staring at her mother’s lifeless face, as James, Austin and Lara told her what had happened, over and over, needing to give her the details, as if they could make sense of it that way themselves. Lara had been driving back from dropping train tickets to an elderly client outside the town when she found their mother slumped at the wheel of her car beside the road to the golf course, the car engine still running. The ambulance had been called. She’d had a second stroke soon after she was admitted to hospital. A fatal one.

  Her funeral was held in the same church. She was buried next to their father. His grave was still a mound of earth. They hadn’t been able to face organising his headstone yet. The wake was held in the same hall.

  The whole family was devastated. The aftermath was as traumatic: the changes in the company, James and Melissa and their d
aughter Molly moving into the family home, the shifting and changing as the family came to terms with what it all meant, personally, professionally.

  Everyone had felt the hurt and the grief. Harriet knew that. But underlying everything for her was one desperate, unassuageable fact. She was the only one who hadn’t been able to say goodbye to her parents. The only one who hadn’t been there with them when they died. Not just once, but twice.

  The grief, the hurt and the shock at their deaths twisted into anxious feelings deep inside her, a constant watchfulness that something like that could happen again with someone else, without warning, without the chance to prepare or say farewell.

  It began as a constant nagging unease. Over the following days and weeks it grew into something as pervasive as a migraine or a toothache, an anxiety, dark and encompassing, deep inside her mind, seeping into every part of her life.

  She began to worry from the time she woke up until she went to bed. About small things at first. Checking and then having to double-check if she had enough petrol or if the brakes in her car were working. Having to go back home in case she’d left the iron on, left a tap running or the front door ajar. She started worrying about other people, especially people travelling anywhere by car. She kept imagining burst tyres, rogue truck drivers changing lanes without warning, faulty railway crossings. She started insisting her family, Simon and her friends phone her when they arrived at their destination so she would know they had got there safely.

  The anxiety spilled into her working life. When she was typing up tour itineraries, she couldn’t stop imagining catastrophic events. Bus drivers having heart attacks and crashing off the road. Viewing platforms on the edges of canyons or cliffs collapsing, taking groups down with them. Planes crashing. Trains derailing. Food poisoning outbreaks. She decided it was an omen of some sort, that she had to make doubly sure to check all the tours were properly organised, and that every possible safety measure was in place.

  Everyone started to notice. James insisted she take some time off. She protested. Gloria was drafted in to take her home and put her to bed. She couldn’t sleep. The worry turned from work to her personal life. She sat up, three nights in a row, thinking about Simon. He was away on a week-long conference. They had been together for four years, and had lived together in his rented flat for the past twelve months. They had started to talk about getting married, buying a house together. She inspected their relationship from every angle, made lists, went over every moment of their time together, paced the house. She didn’t answer the door, or any phone calls. She was clear in her head when she rang him at the conference at six o’clock in the morning to tell him she was very sorry, but she had realised there was no future between them and she had decided it was best if they split up. She was as kind as she could be to him. She felt genuinely sad but she knew she couldn’t give him any hope for a future reconciliation. He was extremely upset. Her family were shocked. Despite the anxiety, she knew it was the right thing. She moved out of the flat they shared, found a small house for sale four streets back from the beach on the opposite side of Merryn Bay, put down a deposit, all in the space of a few weeks. She ignored any advice that she was moving too quickly, acting irrationally. There was an urgency, she realised. She had to move quickly before anything else bad happened. She had to try and keep one step ahead of it.

  She worked longer hours so she didn’t need to go home to her empty house. She volunteered to do any extra tours going. She worked weekends. She did anything she could to try to block the anxious thoughts crowding into her brain.

  Two weeks before she was due to take a group on a five-day tour of the Flinders Ranges in outback South Australia James took her aside.

  ‘Harriet, are you sure you’re up to this? I can take over, or Lara can, if you’re not.’

  ‘I’ll be fine. Why? Who said I wouldn’t be?’

  ‘No one said anything. It’s just you’ve checked all the arrangements at least six times already. The hotel in the Flinders Ranges rang me. They’re worried we don’t think they’re up to scratch.’

  ‘I was making sure of everything, the way we’re supposed to, the way Mum and Dad taught us to.’

  ‘Harriet, we’ve been staying in that hotel for more than ten years. You know they’re good.’ He paused. ‘The helicopter company rang too. They said you’ve been querying their safety record.’

  ‘I have to do my job. I can’t take people up on a sightseeing flight if I don’t have faith in the company.’

  ‘Harriet, you’ve rung them every day this week too. I think you might be taking this all too seriously. Maybe it would be better if —’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Just this once. Maybe you need a break. You’ve been working flat out since Mum and Dad died and maybe —’

  ‘No, James. We’re all in this together. We’re all sad. We’ve all been working hard.’

  ‘Yes, but not all of us have ended a relationship and moved house in the past two months too.’

  ‘Everything’s under control, James.’

  ‘Look, if you’re sure. But if you change your mind, if you want to be taken off the tour …’

  ‘I can do it.’

  ‘Okay.’

  It had gone wrong from the start. The group was a party of middle-aged car yard managers and their wives. They wanted the back-to-the-bush experience, and had asked Turner Travel to put together a tailored tour, combining luxury travel with some outback adventure. Harriet had organised short bushwalks through Wilpena Pound, the crater-like mountain visible on the desert horizon for hundreds of miles. She’d arranged for meals of emu pâté and kangaroo steaks in a luxurious pub at the end of a long dirt road. A scenic helicopter flight. One night of camping in luxury tents, the rest in an authentic bush hotel. Authentically renovated, anyway, to a four-star standard.

  The bus driver was a sixty-year-old called Des. They’d used him several times before. He was brusque, but fine. Taciturn – they couldn’t rely on him to add any local information or colour – but he knew the roads.

  For the week before the trip Harriet had trouble sleeping. She was in her new house on her own, so at least she didn’t have to worry about Simon making comments all night long. ‘Come back to bed, Harriet.’ ‘What are you doing up, Harriet?’ ‘Can’t you forget about work for a minute?’ She would try to sleep but each time she lay her head on the pillow a detail would come to mind that she hadn’t checked off. What if there was a vegetarian on the trip? What if Des got sick and they were out in the desert? Would she be able to drive the bus? Should she check if any of the group had heavy-vehicle licences, just in case?

  The group met at the airstrip near Wilpena Pound and drove to the hotel for the first night. She had to go back to the airstrip twice to check they’d picked up all the luggage. The first time Des didn’t mind. The second time he was cranky. ‘I counted the bags, I told you. They counted them, too. It’s their luggage, why couldn’t you believe them?’

  ‘I had an idea I’d left something behind.’

  She worried about the seating arrangements on the bus and kept trying to move them around. They told her to relax. ‘Harriet, we’re old friends, we don’t care where we sit.’

  She was up all night, checking the map Des was using against an older one she’d found in the hotel reception area. She knew outback roads were often washed out by sudden rain storms. It wasn’t the wet season but flash floods happened out of nowhere. Everyone knew horror stories of people camping in dry creek beds and being woken in terror by a ten-foot wall of water sweeping them away in the middle of the night. She woke Des at five the next morning to see if he would think about changing their route, just in case.

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’m worried about flash flooding.’

  ‘No way, if that first no wasn’t clear enough. You’ve got problems, missus.’ He shut the door in her face.

  She’d hammered on the wood until he answered. ‘I’m worried about the wellbeing of the group. Ab
out something happening to them.’

  ‘If anything happens to them it’ll be because you woke me up too early. I’m going back to bed.’

  She became fearful of hygiene problems and started checking the kitchen before and after each meal. The chef complained, and suggested if she wasn’t happy she should move somewhere else.

  She cancelled the helicopter ride, upsetting the group.

  ‘But that was going to be the highlight,’ one of the men said. ‘It’s a perfect day.’ It was, too. Clear, blue. They would have been able to see for miles.

  ‘I had a dream that it crashed.’

  ‘You had a dream?’ The man was incredulous. ‘You cancelled our thousand-dollar flight because of a dream? Then you’d better have another dream that the helicopter takes off.’

  He rang James. James rang the helicopter company. Then he rang Harriet.

  ‘Harriet, what’s going on? You can’t cancel things like that. What’s this nonsense about a dream?’ She started to explain how real it had seemed. She’d seen the helicopter fall from the sky, crash and burst into flames. She’d heard the screams. She had woken up drenched with sweat, terrified. James spoke over her. ‘Look, it was a dream, okay. It’s not going to crash. That flight is the high point of their trip and it’s going ahead, Harriet. This afternoon. Promise me.’

  ‘I can’t go, James. I won’t be able to watch.’

  ‘Are you getting enough sleep? Sounds like you were up all night with those nightmares.’ When she admitted she was sleeping badly, his tone changed. ‘Harriet, take the afternoon off. Go to bed. I’ll get Des to take the group to the helicopter pad by himself. You take it easy and you’ll be right as rain tonight.’

  The group returned later that day, exhilarated from the helicopter flight. They talked about seeing hundreds of miles of red earth, deep gorges and dry river beds; wedge-tailed eagles, kangaroos, emus and camels; Wilpena Pound looking like an ancient bowl. None of it eased her worries. She managed to have dinner with them, hear all the stories, even put up with the teasing. ‘See, Harriet, we survived.’ But she was barely able to eat, and didn’t join them in the bar afterwards. She couldn’t sit there, talking and laughing. The feeling of dread had multiplied, except now she didn’t know where the horror was going to come from.