shoulder. ‘He shouldn’t have shouted at you like that, but he was just being blokey old Brad. My dad still yells at me about my car.’
‘Bastard!’ Nina wailed. ‘He always makes me feel as if I’m some kind of bloody idiot. Like I’m in training, and if I don’t perform properly he’ll put me on the bench. I’m sick of it.’ She wiped her eyes with her sleeve. Damn Brad! She should have been miles down the road by now, speeding past open paddocks, flying free as a bird. Instead she was still earth-bound and pecking through the table scraps of her marriage.
Meredith felt on safe ground here. She was good at this ‘tough love’ stuff and used it with all her interior-decoration clients when she could see that emotion was standing in the way of clear-headed judgment. ‘Well, in that case it’s a good thing we’re heading off. He’ll have a fortnight to think about what life’s like without you. And those boys of yours will have to smarten themselves up as well.’
Nina frowned at the mention of her sons. Meredith sensibly caught the warning and moved quickly to explain: ‘I mean, they will have the chance to prove themselves as young men. Think of this as boot camp for the Brown boys. In the best-case scenario, you’ll come home and they’ll appreciate just how much you do for them. You’ll have your own life back at last. I always insisted on carving out my own space with my family.’
Annie and Meredith sneaked a sideways glance at each other. Here was Meredith handing out advice as if she had all the answers, but she was alone in her massive house in Armadale. None of them had figured out how to ‘have it all’ and it wasn’t for lack of wanting, or trying. Having it all still meant women had to do it all. And until the world changed around them, it always would.
It was a confirmation of how special women’s friendships were—how very, very special—that this wasn’t mentioned and the coffees were consumed over a spirited round of the drawing of the short satay skewer.
In the end, Annie scored the top bed, Meredith the rear and Nina drew the short skewer for the smaller middle bed which could only be made up when the table was stowed. Nina had expected it. She was, after all, a leading exponent of the ‘burnt chop’ syndrome, that celebrated condition in which, after the lamb chops have been grilled for the family meal, the mother automatically takes the incinerated one for herself and leaves the perfectly cooked morsels for her deserving brood.
This gesture of the burnt chop could be interpreted in one of two ways. Either it was a demonstration of just how downtrodden a woman really was—and ‘Woman is the Nigger of the World’, as John Lennon so famously sang—or it showed that a woman was a self-sacrificing martyr who would always put the well-being of her children above her own paltry needs. Nina had always thought of herself as the latter, but did have to wonder how the Nobility of the Burnt Chop had come to be reduced to the Ignominy of the Crap Bed. Was she a doormat for her family and her friends, she wondered?
Nina climbed into the driver’s seat and rechecked the Melways for the best route out of town. Her mobile beeped, signalling a message. Nina sneakily pressed the phone into service and scanned the screen. The text was from her mother. Barely half a kilometre down the road and Wanda’s apron strings were already trying to ping her back, like a floral bungee. She hit ‘delete’, switched the wretched thing off again and dumped it into the storage well in the van’s door.
Soon the 7.2-metre, 3.5-tonne RoadMaster was barrelling down the M1, with the afternoon sun behind it and the warm breeze off the highway funnelling into its four-cylinder 2.2-litre Mercedes engine. The Melbourne skyscrapers were shrinking to Lego-land in the rear-vision mirror but the drive out of town was taking longer than they had expected.
‘You know, my father used to say, “I remember when all around here used to be bush”,’ Meredith marvelled as the van took a rise on the road and another vast expanse of brand-new black-tiled roofs spread across the landscape like a melanoma. ‘I can’t believe it. It’s insane. We’ve been driving for almost an hour and we’re still in the damn suburbs.’
The irony of the charmingly named Woodland Park, Heritage