Chapter Five
Carol’s cottage in Clarence was over a hundred years old and dated to when timber getters settled in the valley.
A simpler time, when a family didn’t need more than two bedrooms, a dunny out back and a living room where the missus of the house could show off the crockery she’d received as wedding presents in a glass-fronted cabinet.
The cottage also had a room Carol called the sleep-out: the old side verandah, screened in and louvred and too long and thin for any furniture to really fit.
Despite the dimensions and the gaps in the floorboards, sleeping there in the narrow single bed, with the oscillating head of the pedestal fan whooshing a white-noise breeze over her, tucked into ancient bed sheets sporting tiny mustardcoloured daisies, Jodie was having the best sleep she’d managed since a Katoomba police officer had come knocking on her door in the middle of the night to tell her that Peter had become another statistic at a blackspot on the Great Western Highway.
She was sleeping so well she was barely conscious when she became aware of a figure looming over the bed.
‘Carol?’ she said, groggily.
‘You, young lady, have some explaining to do. My kitchen. Five minutes. Do not make me wait.’
What on earth? Jodie threw back the sheet and looked down at the T-shirt she’d been sleeping in.
Too short for wandering about the house.
She pulled on the clothes she’d worn yesterday, because a five-minute command did not give her time to wrestle with the cantankerous showerhead in Carol’s bathroom.
Kitchen drama first, shower and clean clothes later.
She was sliding into an orange vinyl kitchen chair just as Carol was plonking (well, slamming, more like) a teapot onto a quilted trivet on the table.
‘I didn’t realise it was so late,’ Jodie said, eyes on the clock. Eleven o’clock. Eleven o’clock! She must have been asleep for thirteen solid hours. Had that annoyed her great aunt?
Or maybe Carol had been on the phone to Jodie’s mum.
Janelle had waved aside all Jodie’s objections to being sent here under false pretences when Jodie had called her.
In fact, her mother had gone on to suggest that if Jodie wasn’t so caught up in her own headspace, she’d see for herself that Carol was too old to be living alone in a house and managing its upkeep, and Jodie needed to stop being so mopey, and to see she’d be doing Carol a kindness by encouraging her to see the move as the best idea since sliced bread.
‘Losing your business has made you very selfish, Jodie.’
‘My business partner dying has made me very sad , Mum. Losing my business while grieving was just fate giving me an extra kick in the pants, in case I wasn’t already hurting enough.
’ Jodie and Peter had been indulging for several months in a whole friends-with-benefits thing.
Not quite a commitment, but not not commitment, either.
And she’d been having feelings . Strong ones.
Ones which involved her heart, and about which she’d now never have a chance to speak.
Did Mum know this? No way. Chatting about Jodie’s love life was so not a feature of their relationship. Nor was chatting about the sense of loss that had dogged her ever since the funeral: lost opportunities, lost moments—and maybe, possibly (probably) lost love.
Talking to Janelle could easily have put the cranky look on Carol’s face. The two of them were women who liked to get their own way and backing down was a concept neither of them quite got.
‘Has … Mum called you?’ Janelle had certainly threatened to now that Jodie had proved to be such a disappointment as a packer-upperer.
‘She has. I took great delight in telling her to mind her own business. She’s my niece, not my guardian.’
Jodie admired Carol’s confidence; she would never be so bold as to tell her mother to butt out.
‘I’ve been out at a committee meeting for the Christmas Twilight Markets. What I learned there—’ Carol shook her head, as though she was still reeling.
Jodie felt a tightness in her chest and despite the summer sun beaming through the open kitchen window, her back and neck and arms turned into gooseflesh.
‘Has something terrible happened?’ Please, no.
Please don’t let her have to bear witness to any more bad news.
Was the highway closed? A pile-up? A car through a guardrail?
Had she slept through the sirens? Please—
‘Will tells me he injured himself the other day, saving you from falling over, and you didn’t even try to help him.’
Jodie blinked. This was the terrible thing? ‘The publican? But he—’
‘He can barely walk. He’s refusing to go get his leg seen to at the doctor’s. He thinks it’s a big secret that he’s averse to medical help, but of course I know. Everyone in Clarence knows, but nobody mentions it. You need to go over there and help that young man.’
‘Help him?’ Jodie couldn’t even help herself, let alone the town’s brown-eyed publican. She clutched at a straw: ‘You said yourself he’s averse to medical help.’
‘You’re a physiotherapist, not a doctor, Jodie. That’s different.’
Well, sure it was. Less pay, for starters. A fraction less study. More hands-on and up-close-and-personal and less antibiotic scripts and dispassionate conversation.
‘I’m not open for business at the moment.’
‘Why?’
Jodie didn’t want to answer that. Hadn’t Mum filled Carol in on the bare bones? Talking about it felt like ripping adhesive strapping tape from a very hairy limb. She couldn’t face it.
Carol just kept looking at her, steadily, patiently, as though it was all one to her if the two of them sat there at her green Formica table until the end of the world if Jodie didn’t answer.
Damn it. She crumbled. She rushed through the bad stuff in as few words as possible.
‘My physio practice in Katoomba had to be sold. My business partner died in a car accident, and without him bringing in fees too, I couldn’t meet the loan repayments for the property we’d bought and the refit we’d had done.
’ And she’d been in no state to work. It wasn’t just Peter’s fees that had dried up to zilch.
‘So what have you been doing with yourself?’
Nothing, was the answer, but Jodie couldn’t bring herself to say the word out loud. Not here in Carol’s kitchen, where it was hard to imagine a day where ‘nothing’ had ever been allowed to happen.
She shrugged. ‘Just … getting by,’ she said at last.
Her great aunt would pat her hand any minute now, Jodie knew it. Carol was fierce, but she was kind . She’d let her go back to sleep in her mustard and violet floral sheets and hide away until she was ready for more.
‘Well, it’s about time you reminded yourself what being a physiotherapist feels like. I’d like you to pop over to the pub this afternoon and see what you can do for Will.’
But … what about the sleep-out? The pretty sheets? The time she needed? Jodie felt breathy and shaky and shocked all at once. ‘No way am I doing that.’
‘You are absolutely going to do that. We help each other in this town. We don’t just walk off when someone’s been injured.’
I’m injured, she wanted to say.
‘Who do you think built those fancy new steps at the front of my house?’
‘A handyman?’ Jodie said hopefully.
‘Will. His sister Daisy helped, and so did his little niece. Out of the goodness of their hearts, Jodie.’
‘My heart’s not in great shape, Carol.’ It was pulp. Not a skerrick of anything whole, let alone goodness, to be found.
Carol’s hand rested on hers. ‘It’s not going to get into any better shape lying in my spare bed until the day’s half over.’
‘I’m dealing with my—stuff—in my own way.’
‘Now, the pub is quiet in the afternoon,’ Carol steamrolled over her, ‘so I’d recommend popping over at two o’clock.’
‘You’re not listening, Carol,’ Jodie said, ignoring her tear ducts, which had given in to the pressure within and were now overflowing.
‘I’m not capable at the moment. Of doing anything.
I don’t know why Mum thought I’d be in any fit state to pack boxes and help you move, even. I couldn’t even pack a suitcase .’
Carol took the lid off a tin beside the teapot and passed her a biscuit. Jam drops. Jodie’s favourite. She sniffed as she bit into one.
‘What say,’ Carol said, ‘you and I make a deal?’
‘What’s the deal?’
‘You go to the pub this afternoon and see if you can help Will, and give me a hand with the projects I have on the go, and I will agree to visiting—just visiting!—the old fogeys’ home.’
‘But you were so adamant you were never going there.’
‘That’s because I’m not senile or incapacitated, so there’s no need for me to go live in some institution that smells like boiled cabbage and denture cream.’
‘Well, I’m not helpful or good in the heart, so there’s no need for me to go to the pub and inspect some publican’s probably trivial injury.’
Silence fell, broken only by the sound of Jodie biting into a second jam drop.
‘It seems we’re at an impasse,’ said Carol.
‘Seems like.’
‘I wouldn’t like to be you, pet, when Janelle finds out you had a chance to get me inside the gates of Clarence Gardens and you blew it.’
Jodie sucked in a breath. ‘Carol! You wouldn’t!’
Carol laughed. ‘Now, Jodie, stop acting like the world is ending, just because I’ve asked you to be kind to someone. Go see Will this afternoon.’ She had her hand on Jodie’s again. ‘For me. Please.’
Jodie sighed. Carol had opened her home to her, fed her tea and biscuits and meat-and-three-veg dinners, and this was the one thing she’d asked in return.
She put her free hand over the chasm in her chest where her heart lay bruised and inert.
Something stirred there. Was it gratitude?
Love for her great aunt? A death roll? She didn’t know.
Maybe it was shame. She had left an injured man to hobble off on his own.