assembled the electric drill and pushed in the correct attachment.
After he lifted the painting into position, he stood back alongside Jem to admire the scene of Melbourne’s Brighton Beach bathing boxes sitting proudly on golden sands. Although they remained as they did over one hundred years ago, licensees often differentiated the boxes by painting them different colours, or by adding their own design. In this painting, one bathing box had the Australian flag painted on its door; another had a mermaid; others were an array of banana yellows, turquoise, baby blues and pillar box reds.
‘It reminds me of some good family times,’ said Jem. ‘Grandad Bernie and I used to watch you play in the ocean for hours, and then we’d all bundle into our little bathing box when the sun got too much, or when the summer rain started, and we’d play cards. Do you remember?’
‘Of course I do.’ He hugged her. ‘I must say thank you to Stan when I next see him.’
‘He’s home from hospital now.’
‘Stan?’ Evan shooed away Jem’s offer to sweep up the debris and crouched down with dustpan and brush in hand.
‘He had a growth removed from his leg. He was lucky, mind.’
‘Why’s that?’ Evan ran the brush along the ridge of the skirting board and knocked the dust he had created with his handiwork into the pan.
‘The lump turned out to be nothing, but it could have easily been worse. Getting older you have to be careful of these things. I’ve always been good at getting myself checked. You know, women’s checks.’
‘Yeah, I don’t need the details.’
‘All I’m saying, Evan, is that it’s better to be careful, and you need to act quickly if anything is amiss.’
He wondered whether Jem really did have a sixth sense when it came to knowing things about her family. She had known when Holly fell pregnant with Ava, even before Holly had taken the test herself; she had been the one to leap on his instant attraction to Maddie by instigating him asking her out. And now, the poignancy of her words were a reminder that nobody, young nor old, could afford to be complacent about their health, least of all him.
When he left that day, he knew Jem’s words had given him the kick up the arse he needed. It was time to stop burying his head in the sand; it was time he had that lump checked out.
Chapter Three
Maddie squeezed past the group of teenagers huddled beside the doorway of the tram and tracked down the last spare seat towards the back, next to an open window. She watched the suburbs pass by as the breeze delicately toyed with her hair. Her hand rested on her Kindle, but instead of tapping in her password and diving into her latest book, she found her thoughts drifting back to last weekend.
When she had finally made it to the bachelorette party, a whiff of alcohol had snaked through the air, and she’d laughed with the gaggle of girls crowding round and pointing at several peculiar-looking attempts to fashion a penis out of clay.
But that wasn’t the party that had stuck in her mind.
Jem’s party had taken up a considerable amount of her thinking time over the last few days. She could still picture Evan’s smile, his height, the stubble that hypnotised her when he spoke.
Typical. The girl opposite was talking into her phone at a volume more suitable for a nightclub than a tram full of commuters.
‘Did you see the news feature on Ground Zero this morning?’ The girl spoke with an American accent.
Maddie’s heart quickened. She pulled her iPod from her bag – perfect for this sort of emergency – as the girl’s voice rose above the volume of the other commuters.
‘I still think of all those people, their families …’ the girl continued.
The American accent, combined with the topic of conversation, felt like tiny hammers beating away inside Maddie’s head as it brought everything flooding back to her. Her hands shook as she fumbled with her headphones, and she only relaxed when the sounds of Pink belted out so loud that the girl shot her a turn-it-down-I’m-trying-to-talk-here dirty look.
As the tune pounded her eardrums, Maddie was right back there on the morning when she had woken to the terrible telephone call, that split second when her life moved from what was so familiar to what she never imagined it could be.
On September 11th 2001, the world’s worst terror attacks in New York had changed her life,