if she was soothing a baby in her arms. It occurred to Nina that she’d hardly ever seen her own mother relax. She’d watched Wanda wait hand and foot on her father and brothers, and remembered vowing that her life would be different. This thought was enough to stop her at last. She was sitting in her chair with her book in her lap, dozing, when excited squeals echoed across the lake.
‘A fish! Ohmigod, look, I’ve caught a fish!’ Meredith came belting through the bracken dragging a plastic bucket with a still-flapping fish in it—as if it was the last thing she could possibly have expected to haul from the lake on the end of a fishing rod baited with a raw prawn. ‘Annie says it’s a black bream! A beauty! We can cook it over the open fire for tonight’s dinner.’
‘But I was going to do that chicken. I’ve got three fillets ready to go under the grill,’ Nina whined. Meredith stopped and stared. Nina herself couldn’t quite believe she’d said it.
The awful, silent moment was interrupted by the sound of an engine bumping down the track and two heads turned, alert as wallabies. With a loud grinding of gears, a four-wheel drive towing a tinnie with an outboard motor hove into view.
Nina and Meredith exchanged a glance—the idiots from last night! That morning, while Annie was still passed out in the top bed, they had been relieved to see them pack up and drive off. ‘Hopefully, that’ll be the last we see of those two morons,’ Meredith had declared. Now, as she watched them stop the car, she groaned. There went the peaceful solitude of their perfect camp. She shoved her bucket of black bream behind the back wheel of the RoadMaster. Two door slams later and Annie’s drinking buddies were crunching over the gravel towards the van.
‘G’day! Great day for it,’ the tall one with the black goatee called.
‘Yep, sure is,’ replied Meredith.
‘Top rig! “King of the Road”! The only way to go. I’m Zoran. This is Matty.’
‘G’day. Pleased to meet you.’ Matty, the shorter, shaggy blond-haired one, scuffed at the dirt with his boots, nodded and offered his hand.
‘I’m Meredith.’ She stepped forward and pumped his palm vigorously. ‘And this is my partner, Nina.’
Partner? Nina looked at Meredith with barely disguised astonishment. What sort of ‘partner’? Fishing partners? Then she felt Meredith fumbling for her hand and noted her silly affectionate smile and raised eyebrows. Meredith couldn’t mean that Nina was to play the role of her lesbian lover, surely? Meredith squeezed her fingers. Bloody hell! That’s exactly what she meant.
After a secretive nudge from Meredith, Nina took her cue and greeted the boys in a low voice: ‘Howdy.’
The owner of the goatee sneaked a look at his mate. ‘You ladies here by yourselves?’
‘Are you blokes here by yourselves?’ Meredith shot back. She’d always hated that question. The assumption being that, without a man present, women must be alone. She’d had a snappy comeback for it since the days of the wimmin’s group.
‘Yeah. S’pose we are,’ said Matty. He spied the fishing rods on the grass. ‘Anything biting?’
‘Nup,’ grunted Meredith. ‘Been at it since dawn and haven’t caught a thing.’ Nina nodded dumbly in agreement. She was in awe of Meredith’s improvised performance.
‘Yeah? That’s no good. We better push on for Eden then,’ he said. ‘Ah . . . before we go, we met this chick . . . er . . . woman in Lakes Entrance last night. Annie Bailey. You know her? She was travelling up the coast in one of these units.’
‘Hmm . . .’ Meredith rubbed her chin. ‘Well, we’ve got a bit of a convoy going. We’re expecting a couple more rigs like this to get here in the next hour. Six women on board, but there’s no Annie with us. Sorry, can’t help you, mate.’
‘OK. We might get going then. Have a good one . . . ladies.’ The tall one smirked through his hairy face furniture.
‘No worries,’ added Nina in a voice so ludicrously butch that Meredith pinched a roll of fat at her waist in rebuke.
The two men shuffled back to their 4WD, heads down, hands jammed in pockets. The engine roared into life and the tinnie trailer fishtailed in the gravel, throwing up a derisory cloud of dust. Meredith and Nina heard them explode with laughter once they figured they were out of hearing range.
‘I still can’t believe you did that.’ Nina leaned over and slapped her