The Painted Sky Read online

  Out of habit, Nina touched her locket for reassurance. It was one of the few tangible things her father had left behind.

  ‘I want to see it again before I do anything,’ she blurted out, amazing herself.

  ‘There’s no need to come all this way. I could send you some photos if you really want, and sell the furniture in a clearing sale. I’ll take care of everything. It would be my pleasure.’

  Nina stood up straighter. ‘No, I need to see The Springs again,’ she repeated. ‘My father grew up there.’ She gripped the locket in her fist. Maybe it was the news story she’d read yesterday, but now it seemed important not to let this slide.

  ‘Well, it’s up to you of course,’ said Harrison, his voice careful. ‘But you don’t want to jeopardise the sale. I’ll be acting for the buyer. How about if I take a deposit and tend to the paperwork with your lawyer?’

  ‘How big is it again?’ Nina asked, stalling.

  ‘Twenty thousand acres. That’s nothing much around here. It was originally part of Durham Station, one of the grand old squatters’ runs. The remains of the original homestead are near the house. I don’t suppose you remember?’

  Of course she remembered. Durham House was the gothic ruin in the painting at the flat. And she had plenty of memories of playing there for hours with the boy next door – what was his name? He’d been Luke Skywalker and she, Princess Leia. To escape the storm troopers they’d crawl through the long grass and take cover behind the scattered blocks of stone. She could almost taste the silky dust and hear the caaark of crows, waiting to pick the eyes out of their dead bodies. She smiled.

  ‘Russell’s place has gone downhill in the past few years,’ said Harrison. ‘You’d only be disappointed.’

  ‘I’ll be there next week. Monday.’ The voice coming out of her mouth didn’t seem to belong to her, and yet she’d never been so sure that she was doing the right thing. Harrison Grey was a messenger from the future. She would do this thing and she’d do it properly.

  ‘Who’s your solicitor?’

  ‘Peter Pappas. His office is in Marrickville.’ He was Theo’s uncle – he would do.

  She could dip into her slender travel fund for spending money for the trip out west. Helen would be furious. Her credit with her boss must be close to finished, but if she had to, she’d resign. Another job would come along.

  The solicitor sighed. ‘Okay. Come to the office in town first. This isn’t Woolloomooloo you know. It can get rough out here.’

  ‘You’ve obviously never been to Woolloomooloo,’ Nina laughed. ‘I’ll see you Monday.’

  On the way back to her desk Nina hesitated by the lunch-room window, looking down at the people weaving their way along Macleay Street. Soon she’d join the backpackers and tourists, take the road to a real destination, maybe even find out more about what happened to her dad. She was sure there were still paintings by her father at the old house, though how many she couldn’t remember. They, at the very least, would be coming home with her. It was time, she could feel it. She started making a mental list of things to pack.

  Nina shifted her weight and dragged one sweaty leg over the other to balance her tablet. Being squashed into the back seat of a city bus during her lunch break was not her idea of fun, but Olivia had insisted on meeting in Chinatown for yum cha. She flicked through the designs of the light show artwork that Olivia had been developing. She always seemed to land on her feet and Nina was sure her friend would make her mark on the art world one way or another.

  Nina couldn’t imagine Olivia slogging it out working on shoe-store websites, that’s for sure. She felt a dull weight in her stomach. It would be different if she thought this work with Helen’s agency was likely to teach her something or lead anywhere. But how else was she supposed to keep the flat? Her mother’s determined economising meant at least some of the mortgage had been paid off, but the debt that was left still ate up three quarters of Nina’s salary.

  She blinked and stared out the window. It was hard to believe her mother, that wise, steady port in any storm, was no longer in the world. She was only 57 and beautiful when the stroke took her. She had always joked that marrying a man a decade younger had kept her youthful. Even when he wasn’t there to see the results.

  One night, when they had had a few glasses of wine after dinner, Julia had wanted to talk about Jim. ‘He was an easy guy to love. He could talk you into anything,’ her mother had smiled ruefully. ‘Funny, too. But he couldn’t stick at anything. Not at a job, not at a relationship, not even at rearing a child. There’s a lot of Jim in you,’ Julia had said, tucking Nina’s hair tenderly behind her ear. ‘You’re talented, like him, but indecisive, too. Unfocused. Be careful, love, or you’ll end up the same way, with a head full of dreams but no way to bring them to life.’

  Nina remembered pouting. ‘I’m not like that, Mum. I’m just not.’

  But now she realised how well her mother had known her.

  And then there was that other conversation.

  ‘There are things about your dad that you don’t need to know,’ Julia had said. ‘He had a double life, in a way. I should hate him for running out on us. But I can’t. I pity him because he never saw you grow up, beautiful girl. I still miss him. It’s my guilty secret.’

  It was one of the last talks she’d had with Julia a week before her death. With only the two of them, and her mum’s relations all in the UK, they’d been closer than most mothers and daughters.

  The sweaty bloke next to Nina squeezed past her to make his way down the bus. Yes, she needed Olivia right now. Her friend had been a constant in the difficult months just past. Under her colourful exterior was a shrewd counsellor, who often saw into the very heart of a dilemma. You always left Olivia’s company feeling better about the world.

  At the door to the Golden East 15 minutes later, Nina scanned the room and spotted Olivia’s pink head.

  ‘Babe!’ She swooped down to give her a half-hug. Stepping back, she surveyed Olivia’s outfit. ‘Wow, I like the Gaga–Matador mash-up,’ Nina smiled.

  Olivia was wearing a pair of pale green satin matador pants with a row of tiny black bows marching up the centre. The skin-tight pants reached to just below her small breasts and were held in place by a ridiculously short set of black braces. Under the braces, a candy-striped boob tube provided a nautical accompaniment to the sailor hat perched on the side of her head.

  ‘What, this old thing?’ laughed Olivia. ‘It’s what I wear when I just don’t care.’

  Nina sat and signalled to a waiter pushing a steaming cart of dishes.

  ‘God, I’m so hungry I could eat a buttered monkey. So how goes it, Miss Nina?’ Olivia looked up at her with a smile.

  ‘Well, work sucks as usual,’ Nina said, pouring soy sauce into a small bowl.

  ‘How can anything to do with shoes suck exactly?’ asked Olivia, grabbing two of the seafood dishes from the trolley.

  ‘One: because they are in digital form only, and two: because every single time I try to make them seem real, magical or even vaguely interesting –’

  ‘Or create really cute ones in your enormous size –’

  ‘Yes, that too,’ said Nina, ‘then I always get shot down. Seriously shot down.’

  ‘So what else is new?’ asked Olivia. ‘Work is designed to suck. See, this here is your boss, okay?’ She grabbed a large calamari tentacle from one of the dishes in front of her. ‘And this here is your soul.’ She indicated a scallop dumpling. ‘And this is what’s going on.’ She wound the tentacle around the dumpling with the end of her chopstick until the small, white morsel was engulfed.

  ‘I know, I know.’ Nina groaned.

  ‘They pay you, right?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Well, that’s better than standing outside the Australia Council with a begging bowl waiting for a grant, like me. Which reminds me, you’re paying for this.’ She popped one of the dumplings into her mouth.

  ‘My pleasure,’ Nina laughed. Olivi
a lived on the smell of an oily rag, never caring about what the future had in store as long as she could lose herself in one of her art projects. She had lived that way since the two of them had left art school five years ago. Her friend’s careless optimism made Nina’s heart feel lighter. She reached across the table and squeezed her hand.

  ‘I’ve got news, Liv. I had a call yesterday from my uncle’s solicitor out in the boonies.’

  ‘Mmm,’ said Olivia, and swallowed. ‘Yeah, I remember from before. The property.’

  ‘I’ve decided to go out there.’

  ‘What?’ Olivia’s attention snapped back to Nina. ‘Wandalla, wasn’t it? Are you crazy, girl? Days of driving, driving, driving to a flyblown one-horse town with no dancing!’

  Olivia had been raised in Dubbo, a regional centre halfway between Sydney and Wandalla. She’d made a run for Sydney as soon as she’d finished school.

  ‘It’s a desert – a desert landscape, a desert of the heart, the mind and the soul.’ Olivia collapsed dramatically on the white tablecloth with arms outstretched. ‘Don’t do it! Hang on, are those spring rolls?’ She perked up suddenly. ‘Two serves please.’

  ‘I’m not moving there, you idiot.’ Nina leaned over and took the sailor hat off Olivia’s head and perched it on her own. ‘It’ll be two weeks at the most. That’s all I can afford anyway. I used up all my paid leave after Mum died.’

  ‘So, you’re just going to do all the legal stuff and sell the place, right?’ Olivia pushed one of the spring rolls onto Nina’s plate and the rest onto her own.

  ‘Sure, there’s that,’ said Nina slowly. ‘But remember, Dad grew up there. This is a chance to find out a bit more about what happened to him.’

  ‘You saw that article on Saturday, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘I knew it would stir you up.’

  Nina avoided her eyes and scanned the illuminated tanks on the wall. Lobster, crab, abalone, fish. ‘Dunno,’ she said, looking down at the grooves her fork made in the tablecloth. ‘It’s just, now that everything with Mum’s settled, I’m curious about Dad. I don’t even know if he’s still alive.’

  A slim waitress in a gold embroidered waistcoat took their empty teapot away.

  ‘Mum said something about Dad having a double life.’

  Olivia raised her eyebrows.

  ‘I’ve turned the flat upside down. It’s stuffed with Mum and Dad’s things, but there’s nothing about any double life, nothing to say where he might have gone. There must be something out there to give me a clue. In Wandalla.’

  ‘Ten – hours’ – drive,’ said Olivia. ‘It’s just a whole lot of nothing out there. Not even fences.’

  Nina took a bite of her custard tart, holding her friend’s gaze.

  Olivia sat back in her chair and held up her palms. ‘Okay, okay,’ she said. ‘But you can’t drive it in one day. You’ll have to stay with Mum and Dad in Dubbo overnight. But I’m warning you, it won’t be pretty. Flannelette sheets with pussy cats on them may be in your future. And chops. Lots of chops.’

  ‘Thanks, Liv, that’d be great.’

  Olivia leaned forward. ‘Do you remember being out there, with him?’

  Nina smiled. ‘Yes. The Christmas before he left us, when I was eight. It was so hot, you can imagine …’

  Olivia rolled her eyes.

  ‘There was a kind of big round pool at the back of the house,’ Nina continued. ‘Muddy on the bottom and it smelled like eggs but we played there all day, me and the kids from the next property. Dad and Uncle Russell rigged up a kind of diving board and we just ran and jumped in the water over and over again. I had such a crush on the oldest boy – can’t remember his name – major, major crush.’ Nina could feel again the heat of the sun on her bare skin and smell the sulphurous water.

  ‘Oh, well, if the strong-smelling silent types are attractive to you, you may do okay out there.’

  ‘Dad used to tease me, say he was a bit of all right and stuff like that. I mean, we were kids, you can imagine how embarrassed I got. Dad used to run and jump with us. He was like a kid himself, sometimes.’ She shook her head. ‘But out there, in that house somewhere, there has to be something. We never went back after Dad disappeared, so who knows?’

  Olivia nodded, but she didn’t look convinced. ‘What are you looking for?’ she asked.

  ‘A letter, an address book, I don’t know. It was early days for email and Facebook hadn’t even been thought of. On cop shows they always search places people have been before. Question the people they knew. I don’t think anyone’s done that out at Wandalla.’

  ‘Wish I could come with,’ Olivia sighed. ‘Only, Benedicta would kill me if I took time off now, so close to the festival. Besides, I’m broke.’

  ‘Text you every day,’ Nina smiled.

  Olivia grinned back, and clinked her teacup with Nina’s. ‘Bon voyage.’

  CHAPTER 2

  The road to Wandalla pointed at the heart of the horizon like an arrow, mile after mile after mile.

  At least there was no chance of getting lost, Nina thought as she brushed away the limp curl that kept falling into her eyes. Olivia had been half-right about the landscape, she decided. True, it was the same grey dust, khaki leaves and gold grass wherever she looked. But it did have a sort of soothing quality, almost a hypnotic effect.

  Grey, gold. Nina drove on. Green, grey. She yawned. Grey, pink. Pink? Whoa. Her eye caught a moving carpet of pink and grey galahs feasting on the side of the road. Bach yapped and pawed the window at passing emus.

  On and on they drove west. It was more than four hours into the second day of her journey. Nina’s eyes drifted closed. She pulled over and stepped out onto the road, followed by a drooping Bach.

  Standing on tiptoe, she stretched the heels of her hands up through the dry air to the sky above. What were those green and yellow bowling balls scattered on the railway line running parallel to the road? Paddymelons. The word came to her – something Mum had told her years ago. They looked edible but were no good at all.

  The sealed road was in good repair, raised on a causeway above the plain. It must flood, she thought, but it was hard to imagine rain falling here. The puffs of cloud on the horizon would never hold water, and the trees were small and thin, as if it was too dry even for eucalypts.

  ‘Here, boy, jump in.’

  Bach left his sniffing and scrambled up to the passenger seat, his head poised to catch the breeze. Black puppy eyes flashed at Nina, as if to say ‘Let’s go’. Nina leaned over and gave him a good scratch.

  On the day of Julia’s funeral Olivia had been driving Nina back from the service. Nina had glanced out the window and seen the pup beside the motorway, trapped and terrified by the roaring traffic.

  Olivia swerved over to the side of the road and Bach had come racing up to Nina, prancing on two legs and pawing at her knees as she opened the car door. He was thin and dirty, but his eager eyes and beating tail won her heart in an instant.

  ‘Let’s call him Bach,’ Olivia had suggested as they drove on to the wake. ‘Sounds like woof-woof but spelled like cello concerto.’

  She and Olivia had been friends so long that Nina had instantly understood. Throughout the service a string quartet had played her mother’s favourite pieces by Bach, the mellow warmth filling the church.

  ‘Perfect,’ she’d replied, smiling. Perhaps her mother’s spirit had arranged this introduction, to provide some kind of comfort. One life lost, another saved. Mum would have liked the synchronicity.

  She turned on the radio. A lovelorn cowboy crooned his despair over a cheatin’ woman. Nina punched the buttons. Cattle prices, weather report – no rain, and again mournful country music. She turned it off and scrolled through her phone. Jeff Buckley’s ‘Hallelujah’ filled her hatchback – so small in that vast landscape.

  The previous night in Dubbo, Nina had stayed in Olivia’s childhood room, curious to see what her friend had been into as a teenager. Boy bands and
cheesy American TV series by the looks of it. Not that her own teenagerdom had been any cooler.

  A huge dinner of roast lamb and pavlova had been provided by Olivia’s mum, Beth. Olivia’s parents had been keen to talk over all the details of her life in Sydney, and her time at college with their daughter.

  Once Nina had snuggled under the flannelette sheets and pink chenille bedspread on Olivia’s single bed, Beth knocked and entered. She placed a steaming mug of hot chocolate on the side table and leaned to kiss the top of Nina’s head. ‘Nigh-night, love.’ Just like her own mum.

  Nina could only whisper ‘Goodnight’ in reply.

  The next morning, Olivia’s dad slammed shut the bonnet of her car as Nina brought her suitcase from the house. Beth carried Bach and a green supermarket bag.

  ‘Oil’s fine and I’ve checked the tyres. All good.’

  ‘Thanks, Allan.’ Nina wondered how long it was since Olivia had been home and if her friend knew just how fortunate she was.

  Now, cruising the straight road at more than 100 kilometres an hour, Nina noticed a ute parked up ahead. As she approached, Bach woofed at some kelpies in the back. Nina smiled to see other dog-lovers, but as she passed she noticed a dark shape hanging off the side of the ute. What? She peered into her rear-view mirror. God. It was a black pig, tied by its back legs, its muzzle pointing to the ground. Two spotlights were mounted on the vehicle’s roll bar. Pig shooters. She’d heard of them, but only as a joke. Gross. Beyond gross. Olivia would love this. It would confirm all her stories about the west.

  The further they drove from Dubbo, the lonelier the road became. At last the roofs of Wandalla appeared out of the shimmering heat haze. A Welcome to Wandalla sign estimated the population at 3096, less than a tenth the size of Dubbo. Nina had expected to see broken-down shanties, but the main street was broad and elegant, shaded by wrought-iron balconies. She parked at the end of the street under a massive river gum. Dry heat took her breath away as she climbed out of the air-conditioned car and surveyed a wide, brown river far below. Bach gulped water from his bowl and Nina ate the lamb and tomato sauce sandwich Olivia’s mum had packed for her.