A place to ponder

I usually write about Venice, but this time I'm celebrating the opening of our intrastate borders with a short story. It won second prize in a competition about three years ago. It's called SISTERS.  The two girls sat side by side on a wooden bench. Eucalyptus trees cast quivering shade, meagre protection against the sun's heat. Leaves rustled in the easterly wind. Sunday School had finished half an hour ago. Nine year old Annie held a book of religious scenes in one hand and the sweaty palm of her sister, Hannah, in the other. The starch of Annie's Sunday dress prickled the back of her legs, and she was tempted to lift the dress and place herself directly on the bench. But then there was the question of splinters. Or worse, ants. Annie's dress - and Hannah's - had been made by their mother. Her Singer sewing machine churned out an endless supply of clothing for the girls, from simple play dresses to the elaborate costumes Miss Murdick favoured for their ballet-class performances. Today's dresses were full-skirted and floral, made stylish (Annie believed) by the circular pockets trimmed with binding in a contrasting colour. The girls were always identically dressed, down to the last bow and button hole. Annie and Hannah liked that. Annie waited with growing impatience. Her thoughts were already at the coastal town where the family would spend the next two weeks of the summer school holidays. In Annie's mind the holiday would start the minute her parents arrived to collect them. Wherever were they, she wondered, looking down the highway for the familiar blue Holden station wagon. ******************************** Annie gazed through the car window at a landscape that was sparse and muted in colour. Waves of wheat crested the low hills and stretched into the distance, oceans of dull gold surging across the land, breaking onto the horizon of blue-grey hills. The low metal roofs of farmhouses glinted beneath trees, as if pressed into the earth by an enormous sky. It was the dry, hot panorama of an Australian rural summer. Annie's legs stuck to the vinyl of the car's back seat. A moist pull had replaced the crisp scratchiness of her dress and she moved her legs from side to side, attempting to find a cooler position. She discovered a new game. Pressing her legs down on the seat and then abruptly lifting them brought about a satisfying squelch. Hannah followed in giggling imitation. Hannah's legs were sturdier than those of her elder sister, and the sound as they parted company with the vinyl was memorable. It was early evening when the family arrived at the small town where they planned to stay overnight. A hotel provided the town's only accommodation, and it stood proudly on the main street, in the manner of most country hotels. Two storeys high and rather grand, it had been built at a time when optimism infused the Western Australian psyche, and new farming lands were opened up for soldiers returning from the Great War.It was a time when the world wanted wheat rather than weapons. To Annie the hotel was a palace. The family sat at a table set with white linen and silver, positioned beneath a whirring fan which sent her napkin skittering across the polished floorboards. Annie ordered grilled fish with chips and salad, the dish she believed represented the pinnacle of sophistication. The basis for this assumption she could not really say. Annie's parents and Hannah ordered roast beef and vegetables. Annie's mother told the children about a beautiful film star who had fallen in love with a prince. The prince loved her too, and married her, to make her princess of his kingdom. The children's mother had a gift for story telling. But this was true, she vowed to Annie and Hannah, as they sat at a formal table, in a little country town, in sweltering heat and dressed in their Sunday best. Dusk was falling as Annie stood on the upstairs verandah after dinner and looked across the town and the paddocks beyond. Eastward stretched farmland until the dessert took over, sweeping on to the silent heart of Australia. To think of it. A princess. Could anyone do it? Marry a prince and become his princess? She felt like royalty already as she leant over the balustrade of ornate iron work. The bedroom she shared with Hannah opened directly onto the verandah, and the gauze curtains across the doorway billowed outward, tickling her legs. The easterly wind had started again. Hannah came out to the verandah. She held the latest Famous Five book, a sticky finger marking her place in the literature of an eight year old. 'I think I'll be a princess when I grow up,' Annie informed her. Hannah gave a snort of the calibre only an eight year old can deliver. She turned back to their bedroom. The vastness was of no interest to her. ************************************ Heavy rain tore down. I ran to the kerb as the taxi pulled up alongside parked cars, then darted back into the traffic. A yellow beetle, edging between vehicles, accelerating and braking.The horn registered the driver's disapproval of other road users. It's a beautiful noise, coming up from the streets ... He'll sing that song tonight. I'll be in the front row ... I rubbed to clear a patch on the fogged-up window, and saw we were nearing Times Square. Ten years a resident, and taxi drivers still registered my Australian accent as that of a new arrival and chose the longest way to any destination. I'd learned not to argue. And it fits me as well as a hand in a glove. Yes it does. Yes it does. I have an invitation to the post-performance party ... I'm going to meet him. I loved the New York, loved its vibrancy and pace. It fitted me perfectly too. The taxi driver slowed to make way for incoming traffic. He turned to me, ignoring the shouts from other drivers. Had I heard, he asked, that Princess Grace of Monaco had died in a car crash? That's when the memory came, racing across the years to join me on the back seat of a New York cab. Two sisters with their parents in a country town. Their mother's story of a beautiful princess. A hotel verandah, looking out to the wheat paddocks that lay beyond the slanting roof of the Pioneer Bakery. Sheets of gold, thrown across the landscape, stretching off to a distant horizon. For years at a time I'd given no thought to the vastness, to those far off horizons. I'd raced toward others instead. **************************************** The telephone message light winked. Annie was back in Perth, just returned from her evening walk. She listened to the messages. 'It's your sister Hannah,' an unfamiliar voice said. Annie and Hannah were no longer close. It was more than twenty yeas since they'd last spoken. Annie had moved away from her family, from all of them, on to another life in another world. Family was a blur, seen through a dusty window she had no interest in wiping clean. Annie and Hannah. The little girls who had looked down from the upstairs verandah of a country hotel. One had seen further than the other. Hannah's recorded voice continued. 'Our mother died this morning.' Annie replaced the telephone and walked down the hallway to her bedroom. A table swathed in Venetian lace held a lamp and several photos. It was one of Annie's keenest pleasures, to turn on this lamp each evening. The light glowed down on the photos. The photos. She'd kept some of her childhood snaps with Hannah because she liked the frames holding them and had never found time to change the photos. No sentimentality was involved. At least that's what she told herself. Annie picked up a photo, held it close. There it was, the image of Hannah standing beside her, head lifted and a smile unfolded across her plump face. Hannah's hair curled inside the frame of a bonnet, tied beneath her right cheek with a large, fussy bow. Ballet slippers peeped from beneath her dress. It had been Easter, Annie remembered, the Easter following their summer holiday and overnight stay in the country hotel. She and Hannah were dressed in their Easter bonnets for one of Miss Murdick's productions at the Town Hall. Their mother had made the bonnets and the identical tulle dresses they wore. Annie looked more closely. She had never noticed before, not in all the years she had kept the photo. Hannah glowed with assurance as she smiled at the photographer, their mother. Her little feet established a confident tenancy on the cement paving. How different Hannah was from Annie's long-ago self. Just the faintest smile shaped Annie's mouth and she looked beyond the camera, as if her attention had moved on. Annie stood on tip-toe, feet raised from the paving. Her arms were crooked at the elbow, ready to drop the handfuls of tulle she held and be somewhere else. *************************************** The rented SUV glided over hot bitumen, windows closed against the east wind. Air conditioning thrummed with modern efficiency and coolness washed over Annie. The leather seat felt smooth beneath her jeans. She pressed the CD play button, then decided against it. Silence better suited her mood. Bittersweet. Familiar-yet-not-familiar scenes flicked past. Paddocks of wheat shone. Roadside trees proliferated, a response to changing weather patterns that threatened fertile land. Open-mouthed dams waited at the foot of low hills, muddy water rising to their lips. It had been a good season. In a bad season it was red, dry heartbreak. Annie drove away from the small town, heading south toward Perth. Tomorrow she would pack her suitcases and leave for New York. Loose ends had been knotted off. Steps retraced. A return to where the fork in the road had first branched. She and Hannah, standing on that verandah at dusk. Annie had dared hope an immense hope. And Hannah. Sweet, smiling Hannah, unwilling to embrace the same vision. Annie pondered a might-have-been life, a life different from the one she had chosen. She thought about the people she had left behind. A cloud blotted out the sun. There was no way of knowing what might have been. And Annie knew there was nothing she would change, nothing whatsoever. The map of her life had been signposted with love, excitement, adventure. But oh, to think of it. Annie and Hannah, who had waited after Sunday School, sitting on a bench and holding hands. Annie and Hannah, waiting in their identical dresses. Annie glanced at the speedometer and her eyes continued downward. One of her sandals was missing its bow. It must have fallen off somewhere, probably back at the hotel. Two feet with vivid red toenails rested side by side. Feet wearing shoes that had been identical until something was lost. Annie smiled a wry smile. The bow could stay where it had fallen, back at the hotel. Stay there, along with her memories. She pressed the play button and the first CD slotted into position. Mick Jagger, still looking for satisfaction. He couldn't get any. *****************************************