Chapter Thirteen #2
He waited until the kids had disappeared into the crowd, then turned to Jodie.
‘You were so sweet with them.’
He grinned. ‘Come with me.’ He grabbed her hand and set off, weaving his way through the back of the candle stall, where kids were dipping wicks into coloured liquid wax, then behind a food truck serving lamb kofta, and then to a section near the side fence where the string of coloured lanterns hadn’t quite reached and the noise felt a little less frenetic, and where the sky above could be seen: endless indigo blue and twinkly with stars.
Thank you, serendipity , he thought.
He pulled Jodie in close to him. ‘At last. Just you and me. Where have you been? I’ve been looking all over.’
She smiled at him. ‘Keeping my nerves at bay. Carol abandoned all committee duties once we got here and entered the judging tent to keep an eye on her darling cake. I’ve been standing guard, watching for Joan Sloane to make sure the two of them didn’t find themselves alone in the cake tent together.
Then I came looking for you when you texted me. ’
‘I’ve seen Joan. She entered the pub garden via the gate by the river about thirty minutes ago, carrying a large catering box, which I can only assume is her darling cake.’
‘Oh, crap.’
‘Yep. She made a beeline for the judging tent and I haven’t seen her since.’
‘Are we thinking they’re standing at twenty paces, cake knives drawn?’
He chuckled. ‘God, I hope not.’
‘Maybe now’s our chance. We leave. The pub, Clarence, the Northern Rivers. Let’s spend the rest of our lives in a different state under assumed names.’
‘Nice try.’ He grinned then checked his watch. ‘We have about ten minutes until judging and I was hoping to have a word with you before then.’
‘Oh. Okay. What sort of a word?’
‘An under-the-starlight sort of word.’
But the very next second, as though serendipity was tired of waiting for him to get to the point, the fairy on stilts entered their small, shadowy space.
‘Fuck, I hate kids,’ the fairy said, pulling a pack of smokes from her pink-glittered cleavage, lighting one up and sucking down enough smoke to give her stilts lung cancer.
Will raised his eyebrows at Jodie, who gave a little snigger in return.
‘Let’s go,’ he murmured, and without waiting for an answer, pulled her through the crowd in the direction of the wheelie bins.
Romantic? No. Place most likely to be uninterrupted within a hundred metre radius?
Absolutely. Even a mean fairy wouldn’t follow them there.
He came to a stop when the hubbub was muffled by the six-foot timber exclusion fencing and faded, industrial-plastic dumpsters.
‘You know,’ Jodie said, looking around, ‘if there was suspense music playing I’d be wondering if you and I were both characters in a crime novel, and one of us is about to end up face down under a bunch of garbage bags with a knife in the chest.’
‘You have quite an imagination. That’s just one of the things I don’t know about you.’
She frowned a little. ‘What do you mean? One of the things you don’t know?’
He cleared his throat. ‘I mean, there’s lots we don’t know about each other.
But we seem to be, you know, getting close.
’ Bloody hell, this was difficult. Especially as he wasn’t sure if Jodie was even over the last bloke she’d had feelings for.
All he knew was that contentment was no longer enough for him.
He wanted more. He wanted everything life could throw at him.
Especially if that meant he could have Jodie.
‘What I’m trying to say, somehow, if I can just bring myself to stop gabbling on, is that I have feelings. For you. Big ones.’
Her frown left her face. She grinned, even. ‘Big ones?’
Was she making fun of him? Was this like pulling his hamstring all over again? Was she about to walk away?
But no. She wasn’t. Instead, she said, ‘Well, that’s good. Because I have feelings for you.’
Okay, now what he wanted to say seemed less difficult. ‘Love feelings? Are they as big as love feelings?’
She blinked, and he realised how ridiculously he was rushing things.
‘Don’t answer that—answer this instead. Here’s what I’m thinking.
If Katoomba has no hold over you … why don’t you stay here in Clarence?
I’d like you to. Carol’s asked you to. You and I can see whether this—’ he touched his finger from his chest to her collarbone and back again, ‘—is what I think it is.’
She just sighed, and said, ‘Big feelings,’ again, like she’d stopped listening to actual words. And he knew, he just knew , that she was in this—whatever this was—as deeply as he was.
‘Or, I could go there with you. For a while. See what life could look like for us. I could help you with the drive back, maybe, if you weren’t ready to make a decision.’ She hated driving, he knew that; she had issues about driving and road carnage and speed. He could be there for her.
The timer on his phone buzzed.
‘Oh, shit,’ he said. ‘It’s showtime.’
‘And the winner is …’ The judge, Thelma Kong, who was also the Mayor of Clarence, according to her ten-minute monologue about herself and all the wondrous things she had done for Clarence, paused to look down at the white envelope in her hand.
Jodie cared who won the fruit cake contest. Of course she did, and hadn’t she been involved in a Very Important Way herself with all the booze brushing she’d done in Carol’s kitchen?
Only … it was hard not to just stand there in a sort of dreamy daze. She and Will … exchanging words. Promises. Hopes, dreams, feelings . Could this moment be any better? Who cared about cake when their heart was bursting with joy?
‘Hmm, such a lot of glue on this envelope. Anyone would think this award was hotly contested,’ the mayor was saying.
The woman was dressed in the sort of padded-shoulder power suit Jodie hadn’t seen since she’d spent a summer binge-watching eighties romcoms, and her heels were high.
As in high —so high that when a commotion began in the cluster of people nearest the display table, Thelma wobbled perilously.
Jodie turned her head to see what was going on, but then an urgent male voice was making itself heard above the noise of the crowd in the marquee: ‘Bloody hell, someone’s collapsed.’
There was a collective intake of breath before the crowd all started exclaiming at once.
Was it Carol? Please , Jodie thought, beginning to elbow her way through the crowd despite the way her innards had grown rigid and the pressure in her eardrums had begun to pound. Please don’t let it be Carol .
She could not cope with more loss. Not now. Not ever, probably, but definitely not now , just when she’d started to heal. Just when she and Carol had been getting to know each other as friends as well as relatives.
Jodie and Will had arrived too late to get a front row seat to the judging, so she was not well positioned.
She could just make out the trestle tables through the shifting crowd, where over a dozen fruit cakes were displayed, their stocky, fruit-studded shapes missing identical wedges where the samples had been taken, but the rows of plastic chairs between her and the cakes were full, and the judging area had been roped off by some officious committee minion.
She was closer now—elbows and determination were working—and soon she was close enough to see through the inner circle of people.
She looked up, and eyes met hers from the small modular stage.
The judge-mayor-lady in the suit. Will’s dad, Robbo.
A heavily built man with a bald head and a seventies cop moustache who Carol had introduced her to but whose name now escaped her because her thoughts had started to jumble.
He—moustache man—jerked his head in her direction in a come here quick way.
And then he said what she didn’t want him to say: ‘I’m sorry, love. It’s Carol.’