woman and she runs her eyes up your whole body—from your toes to the top of your head—like she’s doing this inventory. Sizing up a piece of furniture or . . . an overripe avocado.’
Nina guiltily ducked her head. She’d done it. Surveyed Annie’s trim figure, checked the size of her diamonds, taken note of the fabric and cut of her sleek black jacket, and her red lipstick, matching finger- and toenails. What had she deduced? That Annie must be looking at her and thinking she’d let herself go to hell. Nina caught her reflection in the mirror and saw that her hair looked like grated cheese piled on top of a baked potato.
‘And men don’t have this hideous insecurity about their looks and their lives,’ Annie went on. ‘Or if they do they’re better at keeping it to themselves. I couldn’t stand having someone constantly ringing and whining for reassurance. It’d be exhausting. Bore the shit out of me.’
Nina chose to ignore Annie’s detour sign and ploughed on: ‘I was thinking, while I was going through my scrapbooks, that you are the two friends I’ve known for longest.’ She chased flakes of chocolate around her plate with a plump thumb. The rest of the sentence was left unsaid, a silent accusation: And you never ring me, ask me how I’m going, take any interest in my life.
Annie thought of her pack of cigarettes in her satin purse. She silently cursed the ‘no smoking’ signs and raised her hand for a Flaming Sambucca.
Meredith sneaked a look at her watch and peered into her half-full coffee cup. She took a deep breath. ‘So, Nina, how is everything with you?’
Some time around midnight—over the sound of waiters stacking chairs and clearing glasses from nearby tables—there was an incident. It had begun tidily enough as a polite conversation between acquaintances but had quickly slipped into a maudlin, syrupy morass of shared tears and secrets no-one had quite anticipated or was in any way prepared for. The result was—and everyone was hazy on the details of who said what, when, exactly—that they agreed they needed more than a few hours together to celebrate their loving friendship of the past twenty years. The unlikely plan Nina hit upon was to drive all of them in her father-in-law’s motorhome from Melbourne to Byron Bay. It was a two-thousand-kilometre journey and she estimated it would take ten days. And if her father-in-law picked up the van in Byron, they could fly back after the wedding and be home in less than two weeks.
When she was later accused of setting up an ambush, Nina was prepared to accept liability . . . up to a point. It was true that she had first brought up the idea because she was the one with the vehicle in her driveway, but it was, in fact, Meredith who had cried. That had been a shock to everyone around the table, no-one more so than Meredith. If there hadn’t been tears, they could have made their excuses and moved on. It would also have helped if Annie hadn’t taken Meredith in her arms and given that heart-wrenching speech about ‘mothers and daughters’ and ‘once-in-a-lifetime opportunities’ and ‘eternal regrets’, and then brought up her own latest depressing tarot card reading for good measure.
In the end, they were all culpable—including the waiter who had brought the complimentary round of 70 per cent proof grappa and said it was a wonderful ‘digestivo’.
When they said their goodbyes that night on the footpath, they had hugged and kissed and squealed with excitement at their forthcoming adventure. No-one dared to voice her misgivings and bear the bad karma of ruining the Oprah Ah-hah! So it wasn’t until each of them was driving home (after joking that the alcohol in the tiramisu had probably put them over the limit, and deciding to chance it anyway) that all three began to panic and individually consider driving their cars straight off the Punt Road bridge into the Yarra River at the prospect of spending almost two weeks on the road together and talking to each other forty times a day.
Wrestling steering wheels back from the road’s edge and checking rear-vision mirrors for flashing blue lights, each began to trawl their memories for the details on how their fellowship had survived the past two decades. Did they even qualify as friends, they wondered? If the length of time they had known each other counted for anything, then they were. But how much