that was one of my favourites. And “Feminism Spoken Here”. I liked that one too. I used to carry a black texta in my bag.’ She paused. ‘I’ve got beeswax lip balm now.’
Annie laughed at the irony of it. ‘Hah! Like to see you try to deface an ad for Australia’s Next Top Model with lip balm.’
‘Well, there you have it. In the end we didn’t achieve anything really. Look at women in the media today—porn stars and princesses—that sums it up, doesn’t it?’
‘But at least girls today get to choose what they want to be,’ Annie pressed on. ‘That must have been the point. That must make it all worthwhile when you look back.’
‘And what’s Sigrid chosen? To get married at twenty-four!’ Meredith huffed and planted her bare feet on the dashboard.
‘You had Sigrid at twenty-five,’ Nina reminded her.
‘And that’s what I’m saying—nothing’s changed. I’ve told her she can do anything with her life, be anything she wants.’
‘Maybe you should have been more specific,’ Annie quipped.
Meredith’s toes scrunched with annoyance. ‘That’s just a stupid punchline, Annie. You know what I’m saying.’
‘Well, maybe she’s rebelling,’ Annie offered. ‘The way you did with Edith.’
At the mention of her mother’s name, Meredith turned her face back to the wall of trees flashing by her window. ‘What’s Sigrid got to rebel about? It’s just damned stupid. She’s doing it to punish me, that’s all.’
‘But that’s what rebelling is,’ said Nina.
The home truths were coming too thick and fast for Meredith’s liking. She wanted the conversation to come to a dead stop. ‘Neither of you has daughters. You just don’t understand.’
Before Nina could open her mouth to protest, a road sign announcing they had arrived in Mallacoota came into view and Annie’s memory was kick-started: ‘I do remember! We all stayed in tents in Jaslyn’s boyfriend’s backyard. Ooh, he was gorgeous! A woodworker. Dirty nails. Smelled of linseed oil. We had quite a torrid secret affair during that festival.’
‘What!?’ Meredith and Nina were both appalled at the casual confession.
‘You were screwing Jaslyn’s boyfriend?’ Nina turned from the road to look Annie in the eye. ‘But we all had a pact about that, didn’t we? Wasn’t it strictly “hands off” each other’s men?’
‘Absolutely.’ Meredith backed Nina. ‘It was supposed to be a sisterhood that expressed women’s solidarity, and part of that was being honest with each other, not letting men come between us. We were supposed to be beyond the “male gaze”.’
Annie sputtered into her water bottle at the mention of the ‘male gaze’. She hadn’t heard that term in years and didn’t know what it was supposed to mean . . . then or now. Something to do with being seen as a sex object, she supposed. Well that war, at least, was won. Didn’t women these days have the right to view men in exactly the same way?
‘Hey!’ She shrugged off their disapproval and wrapped her arms around her knees. ‘Like Meredith just said, it was a lifetime ago. Maybe it was an aberration. You don’t think we still believe in all that “women need men like fish need bicycles” stuff, do you?’ There was a long pause as everyone digested what Annie had just said.
‘No we don’t. But we bloody well should!’ roared Meredith.
‘Amen to that!’ Nina pounded the steering wheel with delight, and to a rousing nostalgic rendition of ‘Sisters Are Doin’ it for Themselves’, the mighty RoadMaster Royale rolled into town.
A $110 tank of petrol, a bucket of potato wedges, a packet of cigarettes and a bag of frozen bait later, and the RoadMaster was heading purposefully back out of town towards Genoa on the very same road.
They’d made a brief tour of Mallacoota and pointed out the landmarks they remembered. The town had been remarkably untouched by the past two decades. But they’d rejected the camping ground. Too crowded. Meredith wasn’t keen for a repeat of last night and, besides, Nina had in her mind a virtual postcard of the place where she wanted to spend the evening: an isolated, shady flat clearing in the bush with a picnic table, a water view, kookaburras, wallabies . . . and no rock music or mosquitoes. Nothing less would satisfy her.
She turned off the highway and skilfully negotiated the van down various potholed dirt fire-trails leading to the South Arm of the Top Lake. Meredith peered ahead anxiously for low-hanging branches which would surely tear off the roof. Every scrape of gum leaves on aluminium made her jaw ratchet and tighten.