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Joel s spinach, and something he calls apple ambrosia, which
I have never heard of but think I may become addicted to.
I suppose I am becoming an accidental vegetarian. I used to
eat vegetarian food sometimes in London, when Nash and
I were particularly broke, but now it feels like something
I could live with consciously, for the rest of my life. I don t
even mind Joel s lectures any more. In fact, I m beginning
to understand the point of them. All those farting cows
and global warming  how could it possibly hurt to eat
asparagus instead?
Oh my God. Suzanne was absolutely right in her last
email. Thanks to Joel, I am turning into a fully fledged,
card-carrying Aussie hippie chick.
The days roll by and the heat builds  abnormally so
for late summer, according to the locals  and we make
plans for the autumn, to make ourselves feel cooler.
Joel and I continue to say a polite goodnight to each
other from our caravan doorways, then wake each other
the next morning with billy tea, boiled in a tin billy on
a campfire and served with unpasteurised cow s milk,
with blobs of yellow cream on top. We could just plug in
a kettle, of course, but Joel prefers his tea this way. He s
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a romantic. And yet, for all our late-night stargazing and
convivial beer-drinking at the Federal Hotel, we seldom
seem to get any closer.
I long to talk to Suzanne about it, but she s so busy
that even when I manage to get through on the phone,
all I get is her voicemail. She seems very, very far away.
Sometimes, when I m particularly missing her, I look at
an issue of Twad in the Bellingen newsagency. It comes
on a ship, the newsagent tells me, which is why it s always
three months out of date.
I am dutifully pulling out more weeds near the concrete
slab on another intensely hot morning when the postman
delivers a kind of instant Christmas  Aunt Helena s trunk
and all the boxes from Nash, both sent on from Bark s of
Byron Bay. I kiss the trunk, which has been squashed inside
a wooden crate. Thank God for Nice Heidi. She must have
talked Nasty Dani into sending everything on, because her
aunt still refuses to reply to my emails.
I notice something stuck on the side of the trunk  a
polite note from Dani on Bark s of Byron Bay writing
paper, decorated with the usual dogs wearing crowns
and carrying orbed sceptres. Perhaps she s forgiven me
after all and I won t wake up one day to find myself
issued with a deportation notice from the Department of
Immigration.
Joel helps me carry the crates into my caravan and I rip
off the tape with the bread knife. Suddenly, all that remains
of my old life in England is decanted onto my bed.
 You look like you re going to enjoy this, Joel says,
smiling.  I ll leave you to it.
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I prop myself up with pillows against the caravan wall
and sort through the bits and pieces of my recent past.
Nash hasn t included a note. It s still strange to see his
handwriting on the boxes though.
I pick my way through my grandmother s button
collection, which he s wrapped up in one of my old pink
towels. I wonder if I could make jewellery from them
and sell them at the Bellingen Market? The market is my
discovery of the week, along with a chicken-food recipe
that s supposed to prevent fowl pox.
I find a black beret that saw me through several hard
winters in London. If I wore it here, our new black-hating
bees may attack me. I try out a half-full tube of concealer
that I made Nash send, and a lipstick I used to love. I
squint at myself in the sunlight in a tiny hand-mirror also
from the box, now cracked on one side. Not only is my
face divided into two halves, I look like a Goth panda.
The red lipstick is too hard in the bright sunshine, and
the concealer is far too white. Without even trying, I have
picked up a tan in Bellingen.
My A-Z of London is in the second box, scribbled
with arrows pointing to long-forgotten locations of job
interviews, all the way from Kentish Town to Putney. There
are other scribbles on the dog-eared pages, reminding me
of parties I went to in the days when it was still possible
to have a good time with Nash.
Oh, look. He s sent me The Best of Motown  now
there s something I never thought he d let me keep. He s
such a dictator about music. I can t believe he s passed up
the opportunity to edit my collection at last  but no, he s
carefully packed it into the box with everything else. My
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God, all those petty annoyances seem so far away and so
long ago. I wonder how The Believers are faring with
Sarah on board? The news must be either very good, or
very bad, because in either case Nash is saying nothing
about anything.
I unpack old soap-making equipment, four fat, dusty
paintbrushes left over from my pottery days, a stripy scarf
hand-knitted with glittery wool. These were all ideas I had
before Vintage Alice. Suddenly I m not sure if I should feel
comforted by my old possessions or depressed by them. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]