whole new life. ‘But it’s not like your kids are babies.’
‘I know. It’s just that I’ve never been away from them this long since they were born—apart from that time I had my veins done—and I’ve been trying to get them on the phone. I know we all promised but . . . anyway, there’s no answer.’ Even as she said it, Nina could hear her sons telling her she was ‘Duh . . . retarded! We’re not going to die while you’re away, Mum!’
‘In fifteen years? Never?’ Meredith was incredulous. ‘You mean you and Brad have never had a holiday—even a weekend away—just the two of you?’
‘Brad always had football on the weekends . . .’
‘What about the summer?’ Annie wasn’t about to accept Nina’s pat excuse. ‘He doesn’t manage a cricket team as well?’
‘We went away camping quite a bit. We even went to Fiji once. But the boys always came with us, so . . .’
‘Forget all that,’ Meredith spoke up. ‘It’s the constant nagging. Bossing us around. It has to stop.’
Nina had heard it all before. Brad was always telling her she was a nag. She grimaced into her glass. ‘Actually, it’d make a good k.d. lang song. Constant nagging . . .’ she sang.
Annie leaned over the table into Nina’s face. ‘Very funny! But you should hear yourself! You’re driving us fu—sorry . . . nuts.’ Uh-oh! She saw that tears were imminent.
‘I know,’ Nina snuffled. ‘But if I’m not there for them . . .’
Meredith wasn’t about to let a few tears put her off. ‘What, exactly, could happen that Brad couldn’t take care of?’
They just didn’t get it, thought Nina. Everything could happen. Marko and Anton could be trapped in a horrible bus smash on the way to Canberra, and she wouldn’t be there to drag them from the tangled metal. Jordy could take some party drug and fall into a coma, and she wouldn’t be there at his bedside playing him his Red Hot Chili Peppers CD, even though all the medical staff said he was beyond hearing it. She wouldn’t be the first thing he saw when his eyelids fluttered and opened. The dog could get out and be run over, and she wouldn’t be there to scrape its flattened carcass from the road and bury it before the boys came home from football training. Brad could be in bed right now, undoing a lacy black balconette bra embroidered with rosebuds . . . Stop! She didn’t dare bring any of this up.
‘Nothing,’ she said finally. ‘But they’re so useless without me, and I just want to make sure—’
‘Enough!’ Meredith held her palm up to Nina’s face. ‘Ring the boys when they get home from school, if you really must. Tell them you love them and then, for God’s sake, just let them be.’
‘And try to enjoy the trip,’ Annie pleaded. ‘You’re the one who was desperate to come. If you haven’t been by yourself in fifteen years, try to remember what you were like before you got married and had kids.’
Nina reached for a table napkin and blew her nose. ‘What was I like? Tell me, I’ve forgotten,’ she implored, looking up at them with big possum eyes.
Annie smiled and sipped at her wine. ‘You? Hah! You were as sexy as hell.’
‘I was a lot thinner then.’
‘No you weren’t!’ said Meredith. ‘Not much. You were the blonde, voluptuous one with the cleavage all the boys wanted to take home.’
‘Why didn’t someone tell me?’
Annie had to laugh at Nina’s naivety. ‘Because, duh, there were seven of us, remember? It was a fight to the death for the couple of sunken-chested SNAGs who were brave enough to chat up a femmo gospel choir.’
‘And you’re forgetting,’ Meredith narrowed her eyes, ‘Corinne had already screwed all the cute ones.’
Annie and Nina pelted Meredith with table napkins and cushions, and harmony was restored. Not quite note-perfect, but then, they were still in rehearsal.
Soon enough they were back on the road and looking for the turn-off to the Mimosa Rocks National Park. Meredith had been studying the names of the local lakes and inlets on the road map—Wallagoot, Wapengo, Wallaga, Wagonga. The lyrical Aboriginal names sang to her like a lullaby. She was rocked back to the far-off days of her childhood and the tradition of the Sunday Drive.
When Meredith was a girl, it seemed every family in her street in Camberwell took to the road for a Sunday Drive. The ritual had been imported to