Chapter 17 #2
She clicked on one of Georgie laughing, tousled dirty-blonde hair falling over a tanned shoulder.
In another she sat back, pensive, staring into the lens with a serious intensity, T-shirt tied at her midriff, a smattering of tiny freckles across her nose.
It was as though she was balanced precariously on the cliff’s edge between childhood and adulthood.
A sexy girl or a girlish woman. Take your pick.
As she scrolled back up, Meg’s eye was drawn to the follower tally at the top of the screen: 32.
2K, it said. Thirty-two thousand? She frowned and looked back over at Georgie.
That seemed like a lot for a small-town barmaid.
Get to know me better, her bio read. It included a link.
Meg clicked on it and a new window opened an OnlyFans profile.
In a banner photo, Georgie lay on her side, one hand suggestively close to her crotch, the other on her breast. She was braless, her nipples clearly visible through the thin fabric of her white T-shirt.
Poor Georgie. Why was she doing this?
Meg frowned, wondering why her default response was pity. It wasn’t very progressive of her to assume that sex workers were victims. Maybe Georgie liked it. Maybe she found it empowering. How would Meg know?
Still. She couldn’t help thinking it was a shame. A subscription was five dollars a month. Five! Five bucks was nothing. You could barely buy a coffee for five bucks. It made it even worse, somehow, although Meg was unsure what logic she was using to reach that conclusion.
Meg searched Georgie’s friends list for Chrissy’s Instagram profile.
Christina Baxter. Her profile was sparse.
Six posts, the first dating back to Georgie’s first day of school.
Tiny Georgie wore an enormous uniform that came down to her mid-shin, one parent on either side.
Meg studied Georgie’s father, wondering if he was still around.
He was salt-of-the-earth handsome, with sandy hair and pride in his glassy-eyed smile.
Chrissy looked the same as she did now, but younger and less weathered.
Meg chided herself for focusing on how much the woman had aged.
What did she expect? The photo was taken, what, fifteen years ago?
Georgie was now working behind a bar. And selling naked photos of herself online—
Meg inhaled sharply as a thought struck her.
Chrissy was Christina.
Christina.
Meg’s heart raced. Was Chrissy Jenny’s Tina?
She took a deep breath, trying to slow her racing thoughts. In her mind, she replayed the moment when she’d asked Chrissy about Tina. At the mention of the name, Chrissy’s walls had gone up. She’d become fixated on the coaster, avoiding eye contact. And then she was gone.
Chrissy. Christina. Tina.
Meg was right. She was sure of it. She was bloody right. Chrissy was Tina.
But who was Tina?
Frenetic adrenalin pulsed through her. She stood up, pacing.
A balding man at a nearby table gave her a curious look, so she pretended to study a family tree on the wall.
That feeling she’d had when she first saw Chrissy in the café—and again at the pub—it was the feeling of knowing, the sense that she knew her.
Not that she’d met her, but that she knew her. Somehow.
Could Chrissy be her mother’s … sister? Meg’s aunt? She could hardly bear to let the question form in her mind. She’d been here before, giddy with hope, and it had only ever led to disappointment.
Families belonged to other people. It was just how things were.
She’d learnt that time and time again, when well-meaning people asked simple questions she struggled to answer.
School was a minefield. Even something as simple as Grandparents’ Day had stirred up a feeling of being somehow deficient.
Inadequate. As though she was missing something simple yet wonderful, that everyone else took for granted, like eyelashes.
It was always just Meg and her mum. No father.
No brothers or sisters. No aunts or uncles or grandparents or cousins.
It was just the two of them, eating chops and mashed potato, at their Formica table, which they moved from one thin-walled, two-bedroom rental house to another, up and down the east coast. Meg had been to eight schools by the time she finished year six.
It felt like the moment she made a friend, a real friend, they would be packing boxes into their station wagon and leaving town.
She looked back at the long-dead family tree.
They were all Ashworths, she realised, as she looked more closely.
A sepia-toned photo sat alongside each name.
The men bore bushy moustaches. The women wore elaborate hats.
They all had the blank facial expression common in old photos: a creepy, empty glare.
It felt like they were mocking her. Families belong to other people, they seemed to say. Not to you.
She’d made a family tree once. When was that? She could picture the classroom. It had green carpet and low ceilings. Bangalow Primary School? She must have been in year two.
‘We’re going to start working on a new project!
’ Mrs Holly had said, with the sparkle-eyed excitement of an entertainer at a children’s birthday party.
It was early in term one and Meg had only been there since the start of that year, but she was already a little bit in love with Mrs Holly, a plump, motherly type with a warm smile and a laugh that sounded like honey. ‘We’re going to make family trees!’
Meg had felt a twinge of something she didn’t quite understand.
‘Who knows what a family tree is?’
Meg wasn’t sure but she didn’t like the sound of it.
She avoided Mrs Holly’s gaze by pulling at the loose stitching on her shoe.
The hand of a serious, studious boy shot up.
He informed them all that a family tree was ‘a way of naming all the people in a family and showing how they are all connected’, and even stood up to draw a diagram on the whiteboard.
He wrote his own name, then drew a vertical line up to his parents, who he connected to each other with a nice, neat, horizontal line.
Then he added his two brothers, and he was about to add his grandmother when Mrs Holly stepped up.
‘Thank you, Darcy!’ she said, taking the whiteboard marker.
Mrs Holly handed out large pieces of paper and sent them back to their tables to get started.
Meg stared at the blank page. Her chest felt tight.
Beside her, Sophie Stevens was making speedy progress, her brow furrowed in concentration as she wrote the names of her older siblings.
Opposite, Oscar Wells had already connected himself to his mother and father, and two other people too, next to his dad.
Meg wasn’t sure who they were. Aunts or uncles, maybe.
She looked back at her page. Meg Hunter, she wrote in the centre.
Above her name she wrote Jenny Hunter, mum.
The tightness in her chest felt heavy now, like a big stone was making it hard to breathe.
She looked over at Mrs Holly, who was crouching beside the next table.
‘Good job,’ she said to Meg’s classmate as she stood.
Meg looked back at her page, with all its empty white space.
She traced over the letters of her own name so it looked like she was working.
‘Good work, Oscar!’ Mrs Holly had appeared beside their table to check on their progress. ‘I remember your big brothers!’ She looked at Meg. ‘Come on, Meg. Who are you going to add now?’
Meg shrugged. ‘There isn’t anyone else,’ she said, quietly.
‘Pardon?’ Mrs Holly knelt by Meg’s side, enveloping her in a cloud of sweet perfume. ‘I didn’t catch that, sweetheart?’
Meg spoke a little louder now, but not loud enough to be overheard by Sophie or Oscar. ‘There isn’t anyone else.’
‘Of course there is!’ Mrs Holly said, with the confidence of someone who’d grown up with a tribe of siblings and cousins.
Meg didn’t want to disappoint her. She drew a line sideways next to her name.
She’d always wanted an older sister. What would she call her?
She shuffled through her favourite girls’ names.
Josie. A warm feeling spread through her.
This must be what it feels like, she thought, to have a proper family instead of just a mother.
She looked sideways at Sophie’s diagram. ‘Who’s that?’ she asked, pointing to where Sophie had written ‘Wendy’ on the page.
‘That’s my auntie Wendy, she lives in London. Last time she came, she brought me a money box in the shape of a red double decker bus.’
Sophie looked at Meg’s page. ‘You haven’t even done your daddy, silly billy!’
‘I’m just writing him down now,’ Meg said. She hovered her pencil over the white space next to Jenny’s name.
Sophie’s dad’s name was Luke. His name was written carefully next to her mum’s. Luke and Alison. Meg sat up higher in her chair, craning her neck to see Oscar’s diagram. Sarah and James. Mum and Dad. Just as it should be.
Meg wrote ‘Tim’ in the space where her dad’s name should go.
Tim ‘The Toolman’ Taylor. He was the only dad she could think of—they watched Home Improvement on Sunday nights— and Mrs Holly needed her to write down a dad.
She sat back and looked at her page. It looked much better. She thought about aunts now.
By the time Mrs Holly announced it was packing-up time, Meg had a father who played the guitar, two aunties who spoiled her when she visited them during the school holidays, and a grandmother called Mary, who would read her Roald Dahl stories.
It was sort of like creative writing. She loved stories.
Mrs Holly had told her she might be an author one day. Yes. It was just like that.
‘You’ll probably have some blanks on your family tree,’ Mrs Holly said. ‘Have a chat to Mum and Dad tonight to fill them in. Tomorrow you will present your family tree to the class.’
Obviously Meg didn’t mention the family tree to her mum that night.
Jenny was not in the mood—Meg had seen her put the empty wine bottle in the bin before dinner was ready—so that was lucky.
And anyway, it was surprisingly easy for Meg to present her family tree to the class. Mrs Holly seemed pleased.
The following week was the Learning Showcase. Meg wasn’t sure what that meant, they hadn’t done that at her last school. It turned out it meant the parents were invited into the classroom to hear about their learning. Mrs Holly had created displays on the pinboards with examples of their work.
Meg’s family tree had prime position, front and centre, directly under a sign which proudly proclaimed these were OUR FAMILIES.
‘You have a lovely family, Mrs Hunter. Meg speaks so highly of all her aunties and uncles and cousins,’ Mrs Holly said, stopping to stand beside Jenny, who was studying the diagram. Meg felt like she might cry. What would Mrs Holly think, when she found out Meg had made them all up?
She looked up at her mum’s face. Jenny’s lips were pressed together in a thin line. Then she said, ‘Yes, we do. We’re very lucky—’ she put a hand on Meg’s shoulder, ‘—aren’t we, Meg?’
Meg nodded.
‘Is Dad coming tonight?’ Mrs Holly asked.
Meg frowned and shook her head.
‘He’s working late, unfortunately,’ Jenny said.
Mrs Holly made a sad face. ‘Shame,’ she said, before moving on to greet Oscar’s mum, who had a chubby baby on her hip.
In the car on the way home, Meg waited for Jenny to ask her why she’d lied, but she didn’t. She just reached over and held Meg’s little hand all the way home. They never spoke about it, then or ever. They moved again a few months later.
Meg went back to the table and picked up her phone, studying the photo of Chrissy. Was she Jenny’s sister? Or was Meg getting ahead of herself? She had a tendency to do that, to run headlong down one track. She needed to slow down. These were all just thoughts. Mere speculation. She needed proof.
DNA. A ripple ran up Meg’s spine as the idea struck her.
She had done a DNA test a few years before, but it had been a disappointing exercise.
Her only matches had been distant cousins, but that might change if Chrissy did one.
A DNA test would turn Meg’s suspicions into facts.
A DNA test would prove she was right. Or wrong.
How would she get Chrissy to do one, though? She couldn’t even finish a conversation once Meg said Tina’s name. Meg could hardly turn up at the café, DNA test in hand, and announce, ‘I think you might be related to my reclusive mother, would you mind spitting into this tube?’
That wasn’t an option, clearly. She looked at the screen. As she clicked back to Georgie’s profile, a thought crystallised in her head: Georgie and Chrissy would share the same DNA.