‘We’ll celebrate with Aunt Lily and Moss,’ he said, climbing back into the car. He grinned broadly. ‘Plenty to celebrate, mate. I think we can safely say that we’ve passed stage one.’
Finn shook his head in disbelief. So now it was not only a project but had a stage one, implying God knows how many other stages. He had to disentangle himself somehow before it became public knowledge.
When Sandy burst in with the news, Moss was privately stunned but his aunt was sanguine.
‘I must admit that I thought it was a silly notion at first, but if the shire engineer thinks it’s a good idea…’ The old lady trailed off vaguely. ‘Well, it must be a good idea, mustn’t it?’
Finn bit into his sponge slice and tried another tack. ‘Your Memorial Park project’s coming on nicely, Sandy,’ he said. ‘You need to be sure this other thing doesn’t take your time from that.’
Moss remembered the green oasis and the cenotaph. ‘What project’s that, Sandy?’
‘Well, when the lawns started to die and we weren’t allowed to water, I brought in synthetic turf…’
‘Synthetic turf?’ Nothing was quite what it seemed.
Sandy shrugged. ‘No other solution, as far as I could see. Some people objected, but once the lawns died off completely, the council gave the go-ahead. Helen Porter and the girls from the Country Women’s have done some replanting of the gardens with drought-resistant shrubs. A couple of them use some of their waste water on the trees.’
‘So there are some people who haven’t given up, then?’ said Moss.
‘Really it’s just me, Helen and one or two others. Everyone cares, but the job just seems too big, so a lot of them have given up trying. They’re happy enough to survive, but I want more. I want us to progress.’
The other three looked at Sandy. A visionary without charisma. An eccentric with a passion. An obese, sweaty giant with a tiny voice and lonely eyes. A little boy who was broken by his father, thought Mrs Pargetter. A kind man who keeps Errol alive and fills my letterbox with wool. She patted his arm.
‘Have another doughnut,’ she offered. And he heard echoes of his mother, Rosie.
11Jilly Baker and Amber-Lee
JILLY’S MOTHER, PATTY, HAD BEEN a wilful child, and with the onset of puberty she became uncontrollable. Her family were ‘nice’, as people say, and her parents spent many sleepless nights wondering if she’d been raped and pushed off the pier or had crashed on one of the motorbikes that revved impatiently outside the house as she applied another coat of mascara. They felt an odd relief, then, when they found out she was pregnant, at the age of seventeen, to a nineteen-year-old apprentice carpenter.
‘This will slow her down,’ her parents agreed. ‘She’s a bit wild, but a good girl, really. And he does have a steady job.’
His family were less pleased, but in a manner that harked back to another era, the young couple were married in Black-pool at St Stephen-on-the-Cliffs while the bride still had a waist. Patty was radiant in white, and her mother tearful in violet. Her sister, Ellen, was sceptical in cerise chiffon.
Jillian Maree was born seven months later, and the young parents were delighted to show off their pretty daughter. But despite her parents’ optimism, Patty failed to settle down to motherhood. The wedding and the birth had only temporarily satisfied her need for attention and excitement, and domestic life in Blackpool left her irritable and discontented, her love for her baby being tenuous at best. Fortunately for the child she had a sweet little face, and Patty would play at dressing her, sometimes changing her clothes four or five times before she was satisfied. Her parents took comfort in the fact that at least she was giving her daughter some attention.
Her young husband would come home to find that his wife had bought an expensive new dress for their daughter and one for herself in a matching colour.
‘We can’t afford to spend that sort of money on clothes,’ he would say, holding his wife’s hand. ‘When I finish my apprenticeship we’ll be fine, but for now…’
Patty would pull her hand away. ‘Well, I’m sorry if I want our daughter to look nice. Thank goodness one of us loves her.’
But Andy Baker did love his daughter. He had loved her from the moment he saw her wizened little newborn face; he loved the way she crawled to the door when she heard his key in the lock; he loved the way she giggled when he blew on her tummy. She was his little Jilly-muffin, and when he bent over her cot to kiss her goodnight he felt his chest tighten with love and fear.
Like Moss, Jilly’s earliest memory was of the seaside. It was a mild summer day, and her parents took her for a paddle and ice-cream at Blackpool Pier. Her Aunty Ellen and family came with them. Jilly’s cousin Meg brought her dog, a King Charles spaniel called Mr Pie, a puzzling name that seven-year-old Meg had insisted upon. They asked a passerby to take their photo; this would be the only memento that Jilly had of her childhood. There they were, holding ice-creams in various stages of consumption. Her mother pouted and posed in her denim shorts and halter-neck top. Aunty Ellen was holding baby Matthew, and Meg was grinning down at Mr Pie. Uncle Harry was scratching his ear, and her father, a dark-haired young man of twenty-four, was holding Jilly’s hand. She remembered the strawberry ice-cream and the warmth of her father’s body. She remembered how, later, he put her up on his shoulders and danced with her along the pier. She’d been afraid of the clown. He had a scary white face and false red smile.
No-one understood why Patty took Jilly with her when she left. Perhaps it was to spite Andy. Maybe, at the last minute, some maternal feeling prevailed. Nevertheless, she had Jilly with her when she disappeared with a New Zealand tourist called Brad.
Family relationships are complex, and it was almost with a sense of reprieve that her parents realised that Patty was now beyond their assistance. They felt a burden lift as they came to understand that they would no longer have to justify her actions or bear witness to the daily evidence of her selfishness. But they could not so easily reconcile themselves to the loss of Jilly. She had been a happy and affectionate little soul and they missed her dreadfully, mourning her as though she were dead.
Andy Baker had accepted some time ago that he no longer loved Patty. He didn’t even like her much, and would have celebrated her desertion if it weren’t for the fact that she took their daughter-his daughter-with her. He was nearly mad with grief. Coming home from work with the forlorn hope that she might have returned, he would pause at the front door and listen in vain for the sound of her little voice calling to him: Is that you, Daddy? Here I are, Daddy. And his arms ached to swing her up, and his face longed to feel her soft little cheek against his. He spent every spare penny trying to locate her.
He finally tracked them down to Sydney, where Patty and Jilly were living with a new man, Serg. Court orders were issued giving him access to his daughter, but Patty was always on the move and changed her name many times. The trail had gone cold by the time Patty-now calling herself Monique Tyler- and her daughter finally settled in Perth with Brian who, unlike Patty’s other lovers, tried to be a father to Jilly.
Jilly had pined for her own father, of course, and Patty judged it wiser to tell her that he’d died. In a car accident, she had explained. You mustn’t be sad, though. You have Mummy and Brad (then Craig, Harry, and so on).
Meanwhile, Andy had begun to drink. He would come home from work, pause at the door and then head for the fridge, gulping down a can of beer before heating up a pork pie or sending out for a pizza. Some nights, if he remembered, he’d bring home cod and chips. Whatever he ate, it was always washed down with a couple of cans of beer, and he’d drink another three or four before falling into his bed, never quite drunk enough. The house he’d been lovingly renovating fell into disrepair. His days were grey and his nights black. On -Jilly’s birthday each year, he’d get very drunk and cry. He always imagined her as she was when he had last seen her. For him, she was forever five years old.