the breakers. She caught a flash of smooth white glistening thigh and was reminded of the Royal Doulton figurine of a mermaid she had once bought for her mother.
When Edith died last year and it had been left to her to pack up the contents of the old house in Camberwell, Meredith had dropped her father, Bernard, off at the nursing home and then returned to the house to find the key to the crystal cabinet. She had chosen a hammer from the neat shadow board in the garage, carefully laid newspaper on the Axminster carpet and then smashed every teacup, teapot, serving platter and gravy boat. The mermaid was saved until last. One blow had taken its head clean off.
Why had she even bought her mother that mermaid? she wondered. With her tight springy perm, permanently pressed slacks and neat blouse, there was no-one more unlike a mermaid than Edith. Now that she thought about it, she had never seen her mother wet. Not even from the bath, or the rain. Meredith was horrified to realise she was humming one of Edith’s favourite songs, Rod Stewart’s ‘We Are Sailing’. She pounded all the way back to the caravan park in silence.
Eight
‘Do you remember when we played here at the arts festival?’ Nina asked as the van trundled towards Mallacoota. The day was still, and unseasonably warm. Nina was loving the drive through the Croajingolong National Park to the sleepy coastal town. She was deep in the Australian bush now. They’d all been silent for a good hour, savouring the tangy smell of the eucalypt forest.
‘I know it was in the mid-eighties, but I can’t remember a lot more than that,’ said Annie who, after a sheepish apology, had finally been readmitted to her perch between the front seats. In fact, a good many of Annie’s memories of that decade had sunk beneath a tide of drugs and alcohol. The places she had been and people she had met now swam up to her like apparitions from the Lost City of Atlantis.
‘I first came to the Mallacoota Festival with Briony when we were doing comedy,’ said Meredith, who had wound down her window to feel the breeze on her face. Both Nina and Annie hooted with derision. The Epidurals! They’d forgotten about that time in Meredith’s life when she had styled herself as one half of a comedy duo. Meredith had almost forgotten too. Had that insane woman with the hairy legs and armpits and spiky hair really been her?
The Epidurals had first met at their weekly mothers’ group at a ‘wimmin’s space’ on the first floor of the Fitzroy Food Co-op. Meredith’s children were preschoolers then—Sigrid three, and Jarvis a baby. Briony had eighteen-month-old Artemis. The two had bonded over mashing lentils, pausing only to salute each other with organic carrot and parsnip juice. They were sure the vegetables were straight from the farm because the juice tasted slightly of dirt. Clean, pesticide-free dirt, they smugly reminded each other.
Briony always carried a small vial of Dr Bach Rescue Remedy in her wicker basket and would administer four drops of Cherry Plum Flower Essence on Meredith’s tongue in the case of emergency, to ‘restore emotional balance’. In the beginning Briony hadn’t been sure that lentil vomit on an alpaca wool poncho actually qualified as an ‘emotional emergency’ but when Meredith began to hyperventilate, Briony thought she could make an exception in this one instance. After that, Meredith called for the Rescue Remedy even as she hauled her stroller up the wooden stairs to the ‘wimmin’s space’, and Briony was happy enough to administer the dose. After all, it was about wimmin taking responsibility for their personal emotional, physical and spiritual well-being.
In the early eighties Meredith’s husband, Donald, had been starting out as a filmmaker. He’d scored some work on The Man From Snowy River. In the dim kitchen at the rear of the tiny terrace in North Fitzroy Meredith had measured the seconds and minutes until he came home by the individual grains of couscous, barley and oats she ran through her fingers. She had spent hours boiling, steaming and rendering them into something the children would stomach. When the kids discovered cornflakes at her mother’s place she reasoned that corn was a grain after all, and was quietly thankful she’d found something they’d swallow. She didn’t feel the need to mention this to Briony. One of Briony’s favourite cautionary tales was about the scientific experiment with rats that fared