decorated with painted daisies and couldn’t imagine anyone finding the time to paint such a godawful thing, and then anyone paying good money for it. Except perhaps the tubby woman in the stretch-knit slacks and Akubra hat, handing over her credit card for the matching egg cups.
Nina and Annie ignored Meredith’s acerbic commentary and headed for a pile of vintage embroidered tablecloths. Annie inspected them and found the needlework to be nowhere near as fine as Nan Bailey’s. She checked the price tags and had a new respect for her mother’s glory box stuffed with embroidered fancies. If Annie could convince her mother to let her put them on eBay, the profits could easily fund a new water tank. She must remember to mention that when she called home. A wire stand crammed with real estate brochures next caught Annie’s eye. There was a property, just for her, on page thirty—five acres, organic orchard, goat proof, chicken secure, creek water, vegie garden: $310,000. She was already hanging a hand-painted sign reading ‘Annie’s Farm’ above the wooden gate.
Nina flipped through a clothes rack with a practised eye and found a navy-blue hemp shirt for Brad. But what could she buy for the boys? If it wasn’t made out of plastic, or couldn’t be ordered online, she knew they’d turn up their noses. She tracked down some fossilised mosquitoes inside chunks of amber. The thought that these 120-million-year-old insects from the Cretacean Age could one day be revived by scientists to suck human blood should give three teenage boys at least ten minutes of entertainment.
Nina was doing what she did best. She was a gatherer, trotting purposefully up the sun-dappled street with her woven dillybag over her shoulder. She had to notice, however, that hers wasn’t the only tribe of women on the block. Everywhere she looked there was another group with their heads bent over a felt scarf or a pair of earrings. Nina looked on as four women shrieked with laughter at the fifth, emerging from a changing booth in a ghastly crimson goat-hair coat. They seemed to be having a better time than she was having with Annie and Meredith. Maybe she had ‘friend envy’. Had Dr Phil ever done a show about that, she wondered?
Annie perused more real estate agents’ windows in the main street. The tiny farm she wanted to buy was a poor cousin to some of the properties available: ‘Only minutes from the pristine beaches of Mystery Bay, five hours south of Sydney, three hours east of Canberra’. She smiled to think that being three hours to the nation’s capital could be a selling point. How far was Tilba from ‘Bailey’s Flat’ at Tongala? She reckoned it to be about six hundred k’s as the crow flies—a solid day’s driving. This was the first roadblock in her path to freedom. She had no brothers or sisters and knew that one day everything would fall to her. With her father not well and the farm on hard times, that day could come sooner than she liked to think. Her hand-painted sign, threaded with ivy, creaked and crashed into the dust. Annie walked into the next shop and bought a handcrafted glass fruit bowl for her apartment back in Melbourne.
After an hour or so of shopping, Nina and Annie were done. They were now toting biodegradable eco-bags jammed with jars of preserved Burdekin plums, lemon myrtle tea sachets, packets of ground quandongs and tubs of mango moisturiser, macadamia-seed facial scrub and ti-tree-honey lip balm. Nina had found a hand-carved red-cedar spoon-rest she thought Wanda might appreciate, and had it gift-wrapped so Meredith wouldn’t spot it.
Just as Annie and Nina thought Meredith might as well have been wandering the aisles of Target back in Melbourne, they heard her swoon: ‘This is magnificent! Stunning!’ They found her standing transfixed in front of an oil painting of a shimmering watery scene. A woman floated on her back, silvery hair spreading like jellyfish tendrils.
Everyone agreed that it was indeed ‘magnificent’, and would make a perfect wedding present for Sigrid. Meredith was convinced to have it when the gallery owner informed her it had been painted by a local artist from the hills back up behind Tilba, a ‘rising star’ who had recently been included in an exhibition in New York. Nina duly handed over a cheque for the artwork and it was bubble-wrapped with infinite care. It was only some way down the street that Meredith realised what she’d acquired .