The Bellbird River Country Choir

by Sophie Green

Genres: Friendship

Synopsis

A warm-hearted story of fresh beginnings, unexpected friendships and the sustaining power of love and community, from the Top Ten bestselling author of The Shelly Bay Ladies Swimming Circle and Thursdays at Orange Blossom House.

Bellbird River, 1998: Teacher and single mum Alex is newly arrived in the small NSW country town of Bellbird River after escaping the city in search of a change of pace and the chance to reconnect with her young daughter. Across town, well-known matriarch Victoria and her globe-trotting, opera-singing cousin Gabrielle find themselves at a crossroads in their personal and professional lives, while local baker Janine and newcomer to the district Debbie are each secretly dealing with the consequences of painful pasts. With its dusty streets, lone pub and iron-lace verandahs, Bellbird River could just be a pit stop on the road to somewhere else. But their town holds some secrets and surprises - and it has a heart: the Bellbird River Country Choir.

Amid the melodies and camaraderie of the choir, each of the women will find the courage to leave the past behind. And together, they'll discover that friends are much closer to home than they'd ever realised.

'This is a warm treat of a novel, filled with great music and small-town charm' The Australian
'Full of great characters and topical themes, this is a very engaging and inspiring novel' Canberra Weekly
'Charming and nostalgic ... Fans of Tricia Stringer and Joanna Nell will devour The Bellbird River Country Choir. It's a warm treat' Better Reading
'An easy read packed with song, friendship, country warmth [and] surprises' Courier Mail

Praise for Sophie Green:
'Atmospheric and incredibly descriptive, reading a Sophie Green book is the greatest escape' Who Magazine
'A tender, heartwarming read' New Idea
'Reading this book was like snuggling beneath a warm beach towel after a bracing dip in the ocean' JOANNA NELL
'Heartwarming, fulfilling and Australian as a lamb roast and full-bodied shiraz' The Australian Women's Weekly

Release date: July 27, 2022

Publisher: Hachette Australia

Print pages: 432

Sample

‘It’s really brown,’ Kim says.

Alex half-turns her head towards her daughter, who’s sitting in the back seat, and sees her gazing out the window.

‘What is?’ she says, quickly turning her head back. She’s not used to driving on country roads. Her old colleague Garry warned her that she would need to pay attention or she’d find herself in a paddock – or, worse, crashing into a tree. Long, straight lines, he’d said. So easy to become bored. And that’s when they get you.

‘Everything,’ Kim says with a sigh and Alex hears her turning a page of her book.

‘I really don’t know how you can read in the car,’ Alex says, laughing. ‘It always made me sick.’

‘This is making me sick,’ Kim mutters.

‘What, bub?’

‘Nothing.’

Alex emits a sigh of her own. She has been telling Kim for weeks now that they’d be moving away from Sydney. It’s the city of both their births but as it’s built up to the 2000 Olympics it’s become a different place – fast and breathless and crowded. More cosmopolitan and more interesting, yes; harder to live in, also yes. Every day there seem to be more cars on the road and fewer parking spots, more new buildings and not enough space for them. It feels to Alex like the city is swelling, as if it’s a blister heading for bursting, and she doesn’t want to be there when that happens – which will probably be around the time of the Opening Ceremony.

It might have been easier if she had an extra set of hands to help her – someone to run Kim to her Saturday sport, for example, while Alex did all the housework that accrued during the week. Her mother, Marta, helped a little bit but she didn’t drive, nor did she live close by, so Alex knew she had to rely on herself most of the time. And for a gal on her own trying to bring up her kid, Sydney was tough. It took her an hour to get to work each day and often more than that to get home. On the nights when Marta wasn’t looking after Kim, Alex would arrive to find her daughter asleep on the neighbour’s couch. It was great to have such a friendly neighbour but Alex decided she’d rather see Kim more. So she told the Department of Education that she’d go to a country town, she didn’t really care where, and they sent her here. Bellbird River, New South Wales. A pit stop of a place along the road to Tamworth. Not that Alex knows anything about Tamworth other than stopping there once on a school trip.

‘I want to spend more time with you,’ she explained to her only child. ‘If we move to a country town the school will be around the corner. Won’t that be better?’

Kim gave her the baleful eyes she’d perfected as a toddler. ‘What about Grandma?’ she said.

Well, Grandma had told Alex not to leave Sydney.

‘Don’t take my Kimmy so far away!’ she’d said, laying on the guilt the way she likes to. The way she did when Alex, aged eighteen, told her she was pregnant and her mother had asked her why she wanted to ruin both of their lives. As Alex used to joke to her friends: ‘Marta by name, martyr by nature.’

‘Get rid of it,’ Marta had said, as if the foetus was a pot plant that hadn’t made it through a stinking-hot summer. Now that foetus is Kimberly, all she wants to do is keep her near.

Alex knows why: Kim is her mother’s chance to get things right. She thinks she failed with Alex – pregnant in her last year of high school, never saying who the baby’s father was, not finishing her Higher School Certificate, even though she did it two years later and got into uni and managed to find a good, stable career – and if only Marta can keep Kim in her clutches she’ll right that wrong.

Alex appreciates all Marta has done with Kim – Alex could hardly have managed without her in the early years – but she wants to stand on her own two feet now that Kim is older. She chose to have Kim on her own but she’s felt like a kid herself for most of the time she’s been a mother.

Now she’s almost thirty Alex needs to stop reacting to things and take action. Motherhood just happened to her. Teaching just happened to her in a way – it was the career that made the most sense when she had a child to think about. She really wanted to be a lawyer. Lawyers are in charge. Lawyers have comfortable lives. Lawyers can afford to take nice holidays. But she’s not a lawyer, so moving to a town where she will be paid the same as in Sydney but won’t be paying Sydney rent is a chance for her to save up some money and maybe take Kim to the Gold Coast for a trip. Maybe even put a little away each month so she’s not always worried about whether or not she can cover the bills.

She couldn’t say any of that to Kim, of course. Money worries aren’t something children should have to hear about – which Alex knows because they’re all she heard about growing up.

So when Kim asked about her grandma, Alex smiled brightly and said, ‘Bellbird River isn’t so far. It’s just five hours. That’s nothing in a country this big!’ And certainly not as far away as Moree, which was the department’s other offer.

Alex rotates her head just a little so she can keep one eye on the road while observing the landscape. It is brown – and also golden in parts, and khaki in others, depending on how the farmers are working it, by the looks. There is land with furrows in its soil and staccato stands of eucalypts. Ahead she can see a dam, and galahs at the water’s edge.

Then the speed limit changes to sixty and a few hundred metres on is a small white sign with black writing: Bellbird River.

The real estate agent told her the house she’s rented is on the main road, so when Alex spies the sign saying Town Centre she puts her blinker on and turns left onto Drury Street. Although she doesn’t remember the address being Drury Street and she’s left the slip of paper in her handbag, which is on the floor below the passenger seat.

Kim keeps sighing as they drive slowly past heavy-brick single-storey shops with wrought-iron lace adornments, a pub whose heyday was clearly several decades ago, some weatherboard homes and a couple of solidly constructed two-storey houses that look as if they were built around the time Queen Victoria entered her dotage. There’s a stone School of Arts built in 1901 – the first blush of Federation – and a town hall dated 1904, as well as a park with a slippery dip, swings and a cenotaph. The park has a vibrant stand of roses of various colours, almost in defiance of the sunbaked palette of the natural landscape around it. There are several bushes with lush pink blooms, a few with vermilion, a stumpy white rose bush and a pale yellow that is taller than the rest. Clearly someone cares enough about this park to go to the trouble of creating an oasis of colour.

‘Look at the roses, Kim,’ Alex says. ‘Aren’t they beautiful?’

‘S’pose so,’ Kim says and Alex can hear the shrug in her voice.

It’s only when they pass a sign pointing to the council swimming pool down a side street and the dwellings run out that Alex realises she should stop and check the address of the house. It’s on Jumbuck Way, number 98. And Jumbuck Way is … the road she turned off, which she knows because her instructions were to take the Kamilaroi Highway from the New England Highway, passing through Quirindi, then the ‘tourist route’ on Jumbuck Way. If she kept going on it she’d reach Tamworth, if she didn’t choose to turn off to Gunnedah. In other words, it’s the main road. The main road into town, just not the main road in town.

‘Where are we going?’ Kim says as Alex does a U-turn and drives back along Drury Street.

‘I must have missed the house,’ Alex says, turning left onto Jumbuck Way. She feels unsettled, as if she’s made a mistake coming here. ‘Look out for number 98.’

She passes the service station, then about three hundred metres along there’s one house, and another. A couple on the other side of the road too.

‘Ninety-eight!’ Kim shouts and Alex pulls the car onto the shoulder outside the house.

‘Charming country cottage’ was how the real estate agent described the place, which Alex leased without inspection because she didn’t have time to drive ten hours to Bellbird River and back just to look at a house. As Alex gets out of the car she sees that the charm of the cottage is debatable. Although maybe it’s meant to come from the fact that it’s old. About the same age as the two-storey houses she saw on Drury Street but not nearly as well preserved.

Kim hops out of the car, her Trixie Belden book tucked under her arm.

‘What do you think?’ Alex says, squinting into the afternoon sun.

‘Um …’ Kim also squints as she looks up at the dilapidated roof. ‘Is this really it?’

Alex looks down the road to her right, where the next house is a good fifty metres away, and to her left, where there’s a vacant lot sporting some old tyres.

‘I don’t think there’s much room for error, bub.’ She raises her voice as a passing semitrailer rumbles over her words. ‘This is number ninety-eight.’

Kim glares at the back of the truck. ‘I hope there aren’t many of those.’

‘There might be,’ Alex says. ‘For fifty dollars a week we probably can’t expect much. And this is a highway.’

‘Great,’ Kim says, rolling her eyes.

Alex wants to laugh – at eleven, Kim is still cute enough to be funny when she’s mad – but that would just make Kim cross at her. It’s so easy for a mother and daughter to get on each other’s nerves when there’s no buffer between them. Instead, Alex makes a face at her child and pulls the house key out of her jeans pocket. She picked it up from the real estate agent on the way through Quirindi, along with the instruction: ‘Don’t lose it, love, it’s the only one.’

The lock turns easily, and they walk into a short corridor and turn left into a light-filled room.

‘It’s nice!’ Kim says, sounding as surprised as Alex feels as they go back into the hallway and on to the sitting room.

Alex leased the place furnished – the real estate agent said the owner’s late mother used to live here and he’s never been inclined to sell her furniture – so Alex was expecting lace doilies on everything and embroidered cushions with quaint designs. Instead there’s a couch that’s definitely out of style but in very good nick, highly decorated lamps that look sturdy, and armchairs that appear not to have been sat in for many years.

‘Let’s find your bedroom,’ Alex says, nudging her daughter, who skips back to the hallway.

Alex takes the room at the front of the house, Kim the cubby-like room next to the kitchen, which isn’t as old-fashioned as Alex feared.

‘The beds are coming tomorrow,’ she says, because secondhand beds were where she’d drawn the line, and the agent had agreed. ‘So we may need to sleep in the sitting room tonight.’

‘That’s fine!’ Kim skips again, this time out the back door and its flyscreen into a small garden that has two lemon trees, a cumquat in a large pot, and native plants that Alex knows she should be able to identify but can’t.

‘Can we call Grandma?’ Kim says breathlessly as she inspects the garden.

They’ve never had a garden of their own – their apartment block in Meadowbank just had a concrete courtyard – and Alex can see curiosity on Kim’s face.

‘Not yet, bub,’ she says and smiles cheerfully. She wants to feel settled before she has to listen to Marta’s guilt trip. Plus she has to get the phone turned on.

‘I’ll bring in the suitcases,’ Alex says, turning back into the house.

‘I’ll help!’ Kim says, but she has her nose buried in a gardenia. Which is where it should be. Her daughter shouldn’t be carrying her mother’s baggage.

‘It’s fine. You explore.’

Alex walks down the hall, taking in the vague lavender scent of the house, and heads out the front door to the car.

She’s congratulating herself on having found such a great place to live when she sees a woman across the road, a hand on her hip and a glare on her face.

‘Hi!’ Alex calls and waves, only to see the woman turn swiftly and walk up her front steps.

So maybe the congratulations were premature. Maybe that’s one friend she’s not going to make in this town. She’ll have to worry about that later, though. For now she has bags to unpack, a child to feed, and no bed to crawl into as she contemplates the changes she has wrought on both their lives.

The house has never seemed so empty. Perhaps because it has never been this empty. Victoria has lived in it all her life; her father grew up here, and so did his father. Or, rather, no – Grandpapa built the house. Right in the centre of town. Or was it Great-Grandpapa who did that? Someone at the library will know. They keep all the records there. All the local stories. Plans. Maps. Et cetera. Victoria has never needed to know because this house is an extension of her, and she of it, and there is a timeless quality to that.

At least, there was. Before she found herself alone in it. Her children have their own homes now. And Victoria has no brothers or sisters to make a claim on her ownership of the house. Until this morning her husband was here, but he won’t live here again. Not if she has anything to do with it. No doubt his mistress doesn’t want him living here any more either.

Victoria would love to have a story of hapless discovery and righteous confrontation to tell the women at the badminton club when she sees them on Thursday. She’s fairly sure they all know that Arthur has been having an affair. Hard not to, as his mistress is the wife of the mayor. Except Victoria didn’t know. Had no clue. Didn’t even go looking for clues. Hence she didn’t make any kind of discovery about his misdeeds and had no opportunity to confront him.

Arthur simply appeared before her this morning and told her he was leaving her for this – this – this Celeste because they were in love.

‘In love?’ Victoria shrieked. Shrieking seemed apt in the moment. ‘In love?’

‘I don’t expect you to appreciate my emotions,’ he said condescendingly in the same tone he used to refuse milk in his tea when they were visiting friends. I don’t expect you to remember that I don’t drink cow’s milk.

‘That’s because you don’t have any!’

She was outraged, of course. They’re in their sixties. Affairs are meant to happen when you’re still of an age to have the energy to carry them off. When they had two children under the age of three Victoria might have been relieved if Arthur had had an affair and saved her the bother of looking after his needs as well as the children’s. But, no, he had to wait until now, when the children are grown and it’s been just him and her trying to fill the many rooms of this grand old house in this formerly grand town. Now, when they’d settled into a companionable groove. Or so she’d thought. Perhaps she should have taken his willingness to tend the back garden as something other than an interest in helping to beautify their home. Perhaps one should never trust a husband who starts discussing the merits of American Beauty roses after a lifetime of indifference to flowers of any kind. Perhaps one should take it as an indication that he has developed an interest in a woman who is known for carefully tending to the roses in the mayoral garden.

‘That’s unfair,’ Arthur said after her outburst, and she thought she saw a pout. ‘Celeste says I’m very sensitive.’

‘To yourself, perhaps,’ Victoria said, looking around for a missile to throw at his head. She might never have the chance again, and forty-two years of marriage really deserved a big send-off.

‘You have to understand, Vicky—’

‘Don’t call me that,’ she snapped. ‘You’re no longer entitled to it.’

‘Celeste makes me feel like a man,’ he went on.

‘What have you been prior to this point?’ she said, spying the large leather-bound Bible her father had left on the sideboard and which had stayed in its place since he died, Victoria not being a fan of the good book after she once asked a teacher why Jezebel supposedly deserved to be put to death for wearing eye make-up and never received a satisfactory answer. Because, as she knows now, there wasn’t one. She picked up the tome. Time to avenge Jezebel. Or just make herself feel better.

‘What are you doing?’ Arthur said.

‘I plan to hit you.’ She felt the heft of the old book – it would be the perfect weapon to use against an adulterer.

‘Victoria, you’re being ridiculous!’

She turned, Bible in hand. ‘Am I?’

‘Celeste said you wouldn’t understand,’ he said disdainfully.

‘She’s clearly a very perceptive woman.’

She stepped closer and Arthur held up a finger.

‘I don’t know what you think you’re proving,’ he said, ‘but you’re making yourself look pathetic.’

She stared at him, at his drooping eyelids and his sloping shoulders and his slack waist. All the things that a wife forgives – overlooks, even – because if she doesn’t she may start to question her choices in life.

‘I’m pathetic?’ she said sternly. ‘You’re sixty-six. She’s forty. Get a grip.’

With that, the urge to strike him left her. What would be the point? He’d go crying to Celeste, and possibly to the police, and she really didn’t want to end up spending the night in the cell at the local station, no matter how agreeable the constable is.

She put the Bible back on the sideboard and remained facing it until he left the house.

Since then she’s been wondering not about how he could have cheated on her – that’s a turn of events so commonplace it’s almost banal – but about how many people in the town knew before she did. How many of her friends kept this from her? Because there is just no way, in a place as small as Bellbird River, that the wife of the mayor can have an affair undetected. Let alone Arthur, with his prime position at the Rotary Club and his prize-winning fruit cake at the local show.

Shame. That’s what she’s really thinking about. That’s what she’s been insulated against most of her life. She was captain of the primary school and of the hockey team. She was head prefect of her Sydney boarding school. She married the first young man who even breathed in her vicinity.

She supposes she should feel sad. She and Arthur have known each other for a long time. He was the head prefect at their brother school, a height of responsibility he never reached again. He was given money by his father to invest in various businesses that did moderately well but did not reap the fortune Arthur felt he deserved. Then he started asking Victoria’s father for money to invest and still the fortune failed to manifest. But he did well enough for them to maintain their respectability. It was important to Victoria that they be respectable. If a person doesn’t have her dignity she doesn’t have much at all. Accordingly, not once in her life has she done anything to bring shame on herself. Yet here it is, visited upon her.

Failure. That’s also what she’s thinking about. Despite her efforts, she has failed to keep that shame away and in doing so she has let down her parents. They’re long dead, but there are still people alive in this town who knew them. How awful to know that they’ll soon know – if they don’t already – that Victoria has failed to protect her family’s good name.

She jumps as the phone jangles.

‘Yes,’ she says. She doesn’t have the energy to be anything other than curt.

‘Vicky?’

‘Who is this?’

‘It’s Gabrielle!’

Her cousin. Who did not sound like that the last time they spoke.

‘What’s wrong with your voice? I didn’t recognise you.’

‘I, ah … It’s a long story. I’ll tell you when I get there.’

‘Where?’

‘Bellbird River.’

‘Why are you coming here?’ Victoria is not in the mood for a house guest, no matter how fond she is of her cousin, and a house guest is what Gabrielle will expect to be.

‘I’m moving home.’

Victoria’s mouth opens but nothing emerges. Gabrielle moved away when she was a teenager and their contact with each other has been mainly in the form of postcards and letters, and the occasional expensive phone call, as Gabrielle sang with one opera company or another around the world. Victoria is proud of her. There have been write-ups in the newspaper and even the occasional album documenting her magnificent voice. But there are no opera companies in Bellbird River, so Victoria has no idea why she’d want to live here again.

‘Don’t worry,’ Gabrielle says, laughing nervously, ‘I won’t ask to live with you.’

‘I’m not worrying,’ Victoria says quickly.

‘Yes, you are.’ Gabrielle pauses. ‘Vicky, I just need to come home.’

Her voice contains longing and a certain weariness that Victoria understands, mainly because she’s a decade older than Gabrielle and weariness comes with the territory.

‘Then come,’ she says more gently. She glances around the vast sitting room and down the empty hallway beyond it, thinks of all the bedrooms and no other occupants, and feels her resolution thawing. ‘And you can stay if you like.’

There’s a little noise of satisfaction on the other end of the line.

‘Oh good,’ says Gabrielle. ‘I arrive in four days time.’

‘Come to the house,’ Victoria says. ‘I can’t imagine I’ll be anywhere else.’

‘Lovely.’

There’s a pause.

‘I’ve missed you,’ Gabrielle goes on.

‘No, you haven’t.’

Gabrielle emits a husky laugh. ‘I’m glad you haven’t changed,’ she says, ‘but I really have missed you. We haven’t seen each other since …’ There’s a sigh. ‘Milan, 1995.’

Victoria smiles into the handset. ‘That’s the blink of an eye ago.’ She’s missed her cousin too, but she’s not going to tell her that yet. Gabrielle can work for it – that’s what she gets for being away for so long.

‘See you soon, then. Bye, Vicky.’

‘Ta-ta.’

Victoria hangs up but doesn’t replace the handset. Instead she leaves the phone off the hook – something she has never once dared to do in her whole life – puts her feet up on the couch and closes her eyes for a nap that turns into a ten-hour sleep.

‘Did the boys behave themselves at breakfast?’

Debbie turns at the sound of her employer’s voice and quickly works out that Bea means the workers, not her own sons. Mainly because her sons are standing on either side of her, holding their sports bags. Ready for Debbie to drive them to tennis lessons in town because their mother will be too busy to do it and, besides, driving is part of Debbie’s job description.

Housekeeper wanted

Wattle Tree, near Bellbird River, NSW

Must be able to efficiently clean and manage large

house and outbuildings

Experience in cooking for large numbers valuable

Sewing and dressmaking a plus

Must have driver’s licence

That was the original ad. ‘Wattle Tree, near Bellbird River’ turned out to be a thousand or so hectares of a mixed-use farm that has a modern house for the owners – after the original was torn down, Debbie was told – as well as cattle yards, three cottages for the workers, various sheds and a semi-successful attempt at a large vegetable garden. The workers are the large numbers needing cooked food. And ‘Must have driver’s licence’ turned out to mean ‘must be willing to chauffeur school-age children to school on weekdays and sports on weekends, because their parents are too overwhelmed to do it’.

Debbie hadn’t had a lot of other employment options at the time. In fact, she’d had none. Bea hadn’t asked questions beyond whether or not Debbie had the skills she was looking for, but Debbie wanted to tell her everything – didn’t want there to be secrets. Wanted Bea to know that her driver’s licence was the first thing she attended to when her sentence was up, because she wanted to be free.

Debbie didn’t care that she had to take the test again, as if she was a teenager on L plates. The licence was her ticket away from her past and towards the future she hoped to salvage. Towards her children, who were living in Tamworth with their father, who’d divorced Debbie after she was jailed. He had custody of the children, so it was simple for him to take them wherever he wanted to, away from her and the prison visiting hours that would keep the kids in touch with their mum. Debbie had had no recourse. Both parties didn’t have to agree to a divorce provided they’d been separated for a year, and Greg didn’t find that hard to prove after Debbie’d been in prison for that long. She was hardly in a position to go to the Family Court to say she didn’t want the divorce or demand that Greg brought the kids for a visit here and there.

Besides, prisons are no places for children. Even Debbie understood that, no matter how often she felt that by taking them away Greg had punched a hole in her chest that will never fill up. The only thing that can fill it is spending time with her children to make up for what’s been lost. And the issue with that is she’s the cause of that lost time. She, and she alone, stole money and was found out. So she is the cause of her own devastation, and suspects she’ll never forgive herself for that.

It has occurred to Debbie, usually when she’s driving Bea’s sons around to visit their friends or play sport, that it’s strange Bea trusts her with these children but Greg can’t trust her with her own. That’s what he said when she told him she wanted to make arrangements to see Emily and Shaun on a regular basis. It was after that phone call that she realised she’d need to move closer to them to try to make it more inevitable for him to say yes. Also because he told her he’d remarried and she can hardly believe that another woman spends more time with her children than she does.

‘Deb?’ Bea prompts her.

‘Sorry – away with the pixies.’ Debbie smiles as brightly as she can.

She always wants to be the no-trouble employee. Needs to keep this job. Doesn’t know if anyone else would be as prepared to ignore her past as Bea has been. When Debbie confessed it Bea had nodded slowly and said, ‘We all make mistakes.’ Then looked at her meaningfully, as if there was more she could say but she was choosing not to.

‘Did the dogs wake you up?’ Bea shakes her head, looking annoyed. ‘I swear to god, I told Phil to move them further away from the house but he seems to think they’re guard dogs. I keep saying they are working dogs. We don’t need guard dogs out here. What are they guarding us from – snakes?’ She snorts. ‘They’re more likely to get bitten than we are.’

‘Mu-um, we’ll be la-aate,’ says Ryan, the youngest of Bea’s two and the only one who’s keen on the tennis lessons they’ve been attending in the school holidays. This will be their last lesson; school starts soon and they’ll have to switch to a weekend sport.

‘Sorry, darling, I know.’ Bea makes a pleading face at Debbie. ‘Sorry, Deb, I’m holding you up. But were the boys all right at breakfast?’

‘Oh – yes. Fine.’ Debbie thinks of the five burly workers who crowded around the table in the shed, inhaling the food she’d toiled to prepare. ‘But they finished those rolls so I’ll pick some up in town on the way back.’

Bea nods. ‘Just let me know if any of them get, you know …’ She makes an awkward face. ‘Rude. I don’t want them driving you away!’

‘I can handle it,’ Debbie says, thinking of everything she’s dealt with over the past three years. It would have been five but she was so well behaved she barely even had to apply for parole, and no one fought her application to report to the police in Bellbird River instead of what used to be her local station in Sydney.

That’s her – well behaved. Most of the time. She became an accountant because that was the sensible thing to do. Changed to being a bookkeeper after Emily was born so she could manage the work around the kids. A sedate occupation. She’s not a drinker, nor a smoker. Doesn’t take drugs. Doesn’t eat junk food. Just likes to gamble and doesn’t know when to stop. That’s why she needed that money. No, that’s wrong – it’s why she took that money. From her clients. Slowly, and over time, she fiddled the figures enough to squirrel away money to fund her habit. Or her hobby, as she thought of it. What a pity she became worse at that hobby over time.

‘Mu-ummm.’

‘All right, Ry,’ Bea says sharply. She regularly seems to be mildly irritated by her children and it makes Debbie want to grab her and tell her that, yes, children can be irritating but you should never take for granted how much you’d want them to irritate you if you didn’t have them around any more. But she doesn’t say that. Because, as she’s figured out, if a parent hasn’t experienced what she has, they just don’t understand.

‘Come on, kids,’ Debbie says chirpily. ‘And don’t worry, Ryan – I’ll put the pedal down until we hit the main road.’

She grins at Bea, picks up the car key from the hook by the back door and leads the boys out to the carport.

‘Stop it, Steven!’ Ryan says as his older brother shoves him. They always jostle for position before getting in the car. Maybe Debbie’s own children do it; there’s no way for her to find out.

‘Boys – in,’ she commands.

They fuss and squawk but eventually settle themselves into their seats and click in their belts.

In the re