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‘Where I’m going with this story is that the second I got a chance to take a break from the Miles family—and that doomed romance—I took it. The January after I finished school I got a uni offer in Sydney, and I was on the next train south. Couldn’t get out of here fast enough.’
Oh, she had a bad feeling about what he was going to say next. This was exactly the sort of reflection she wanted to avoid. Cause and effect, choice and responsibility, coping and not coping. She pressed her hands to her cheeks.Please don’t let those awful symptoms come back.
She took a breath of the clean country air. It smelled like flower buds and spring rain and warm, beer-sloshed farmer. No spotty vision, no achy chest, no raging throb in her temples. This was fine … keep the conversation on Joe, and far, far away from her.
‘The thing is, Kirsty, I didn’t think about who I left behind. About what they thought about me clearing off to a new life.’ His voice was sad. ‘Guess I found out today.’
She cleared her throat. ‘I’m sorry. There did seem to be some … tension.’
‘Hashtag understatement,’ he said. ‘So … what are you running away from?’
‘That’s not up for discussion.’
‘We can start small. What happened the day before you arrived in Clarence?’
Shoot, crap, okay, she could go backwards a little … just until that point in time that she wasn’t thinking about, ever again if she could help it. ‘I spent the day in the driver’s seat of my ute. White dotted line to my right, a white solid line to my left, miles and miles of black bitumen beneath me.’
‘A literal storyteller, I see,’ he said. ‘Give me a moment to adjust. I come from a long line of drama queens. By this stage in any Miles family road-trip recount, my mother would have fought off a wild emu, and my father would have baked a zucchini loaf that won over a town of hippy-hating bauxite miners. Let’s go back another day.’
Some things would be safe to say, and some things would not, so she chose her memories carefully. ‘I was at work—the sunrise shift—about to take off on a routine patient pick-up. A copper from the police station near my house rang just as I was getting clearance from the control tower. They’d caught my mother breaking into my laundry window and they—’
‘Oh wow. Yourmother?’
He sounded startled, and no wonder. She pictured the Miles family earlier, all nine of them, squabbling and laughing and noisy, and then after Robbo fainted, all of them so concerned and leaping to action … versus the dysfunctional, secretive little duo that was her and Terri Fox.
‘It was fine. Mum does things like that. She’s not very responsible.’
‘And you don’t mind?’
‘Yeah, sure Imind, but she’s my mum. And she’s always trying to do better, but she … well, she has this theory that the Fox family has a curse that she’ll never escape.’
‘Sounds as nuts as Patty’s auras. What’s this curse then?’
Somehow or other her shoulder was now leaning up against Joe’s, and their backs were up against the wall she’d so recently painted, and the evening air was so gentle and peaceful, it was hard to believe that anything as ludicrous as a family curse could be true.
‘Bad shit happens to Foxes,’ she said.
‘Excuse me?’
‘That’s the curse. Mum’s convinced it’s a thing. And when the bad stuff happens, she ups stumps and finds someplace new to try her luck. She has a problem with poker machines, so finding new and luckier places is like her life’s mission.’
‘Oh. That’s rough.’
‘I didn’t understand when I was little. I thought pokies was a job, you know, like being an astronaut or a secret agent. Of course I eventually worked out that the reason we shifted towns so often was that she had an addiction that was wrecking her life. And mine, too, if I’d have let it.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘In a way, I got out the same way as you. I received an offer to a flight school operating out of the Territory, and the fees were funded by a government program that deferred them until I began earning a wage. I took off. Mum comes and stays with me when she’s having a bad patch, and I have to pay down her credit cards from time to time or she can’t eat.’
Joe was warm next to her. ‘I’ll bet that’s been hard to forgive, time after time.’
She frowned. ‘I don’t make bets. Ever.’
He ran his thumb over hers. ‘Sorry. Dumb choice of words. What I mean is, it sounds like your mum’s using the family curse as an excuse for her addiction, instead of sorting herself out.’
She stiffened. Beer might have made Joe a lot more forthcoming than usual, but it hadn’t addled his perception. ‘I don’t want to talk about that.’
‘Okay. Sure, but … we’re friends, aren’t we? We could talk about it. If you wanted to.’
‘I’m not so sure that we’re friends.’
‘Because you’re clearing off any minute now, is that right?’
Sure. She’d been saying it to him, and to herself, and to anyone else who’d listen since the day she drove into town. Only, Clarence had started to feel like someplace she might like to hang around in. Not forever … Kirsty Fox couldn’t do forever … but for a little while longer at any rate.
‘What if I don’t want you to go?’ he said.
She closed her eyes, which were stinging for some stupid reason. ‘It wouldn’t change my mind,’ she said. Her mind had been made up since she was a kid. ‘When I’ve done what I came here to do, I’ll be gone.’
