3. Chapter One

Chapter One

The problem with flying from Melbourne to Brisbane was always the outfit. When Ollie had left her home in Brunswick at seven a.m. that morning, it had been eight degrees. She’d ducked from her front doorstep to the Uber, wrestling her wheeled suitcase and trying pointlessly to dodge the shards of tiny raindrops flung up by the breeze that sliced right through her puffer jacket, carefully stepping around puddles in her leather boots.

Now, as the plane began its descent, glaring sunlight bounced through the portholes and the pilot announced the ground conditions with sudden brightness in his crackling voice: thirty-three degrees and sunny. A few passengers actually cheered, ready to holiday. Ollie looked down at her tight black jeans and winced. There was no way to win.

It wasn’t until she stepped out of the terminal that it really hit her: a wave of humidity so hot and sudden it was like walking smack into a wall. She actually felt the moment the moist air hit her lungs, a warm mist filling her breath like a bath. This, she supposed, should feel like home.

It didn’t though.

The hire car was a gleaming little Toyota Corolla, a hybrid, swift and quiet. She didn’t need the navigation system to find her way to the highway north; she’d moved from the state seventeen years ago, but the road to home was written in her veins.

Sunglasses protecting her from the glare and the air conditioner blasting, she still felt the heat baking through the windscreen as she travelled up the Bruce Highway. The view wasn’t much, just scraggly trees and oversized petrol stations, but there was still something so Queensland about it all in the occasional burst of bright red or purple flowers popping through the foliage, or the low scruffy spikes of a pineapple farm at the roadside. Always something chaotic, teeming with unstoppable life. Even with six crammed lanes of traffic surrounded by the ever-present roadworks, there were glimpses of an almost decadent lushness battling to survive against the concrete.

She passed a plastic sign planted on the road verge. Koala Killed Here, it read, with a cartoon of a fuzzy creature crying. She winced. A tradie in a ute tailgated her needlessly; she was going a hundred and ten in the centre lane and the right was empty. She was tempted to tap her brakes to make him back off, but the likelihood of a methed-up twenty-two-year-old behind the wheel made her sigh and indicate into the damn fast lane, letting him speed by unchecked. He must be going a hundred and forty. A brief image of a screaming, crumpled and impossibly small body flashed into her vision and she gritted her teeth until it passed.

She drove past billboards featuring the ever-present smile of Steve Irwin cuddling outsized crocodiles as she passed the zoo, then turned off, up into the hills. Here the lushness took over: wild bamboo, grasses higher than the car, unstoppable trees that leaned across the road, creating green tunnels of rainforest briefly obscuring the sky. The road wove up the mountain, slipping through bustling tourist towns, along the range, past buffalo farms, macadamia groves, strawberry fields and banana plantations, before dipping back down a winding back road of lush forest. Road signs warned of wildlife she hoped still existed, but equally hoped existed well away from her car tyres. As the sky widened beyond the trees, she saw a pair of eagles slowly circling above an empty field.

A strange sensation opened up in her chest as the road began to climb again. She was almost home! She was so far from home. The cognitive dissonance almost split her in two: Dr Gabrielli, thirty-five years old, the sophisticated, urbane Melburnian; Ollie, the grubby-kneed, backwoods, Queensland country girl. She rounded the bend and saw the road sign. Welcome to Ribbonwood, Winner of the Hinterland’s Cleanest Town 2003!

She didn’t drive into town. Vintage awards for cleanliness or not, she almost never did. Ollie’s visits stayed short and sweet - at Christmas, if she could wing it on the roster - and Ribbonwood itself held no draw for her. Instead, she turned left almost immediately after the sign, driving the single-lane winding road out into the lush wilderness, rainbow lorikeets swooping and screeching above the car. Ten minutes later, she reached her old mailbox, where the school bus used to drop her. With her heartbeat escalating, she took the long gravel road up through the sun-filled olive grove, trying not to ping too many rocks into the rental car’s previously pristine paintwork.

A motley collection of farm dogs raced out to shout at her as she pulled up before the house; Ollie counted four. A wily-looking Kelpie, a mouthy collie, an authoritative yet miniature Jack Russell and - quite ridiculously - a dachshund?

“Who the heck are you?” she asked over the sound of aggravated barking as the small, sleek sausage jumped up to put his dusty paws on her black jeans. He eyed her seriously while the others circled and blustered.

“I could ask you the same thing,” came an outraged voice from the wide wooden porch. The screen door banged open and out stepped a harried-looking woman with grey-streaked hair, flushed cheeks and a t-shirt splattered with something red. “Viola Gabrielli, I will murder you dead ,” her mother announced before she swept down the porch steps and wrapped her arms around her in a fierce hug. “Shut your mouths!” she blasted the dogs, the volume blaring directly into Ollie’s left ear.

Ollie closed her eyes, tears leaking from her lashes. Her mum’s hug was almost smothering in the ridiculous heat of the middle of the day, but she didn’t want her to let go. She smelled of fresh herbs and also herself, some indefinable scent that the primal part of her brain still recognised as mama. Her mum was crying too as she pulled back .

“How dare you?” she said, her eyes blazing. “I should have known you’d pull something like this.”

“I didn’t want you to fuss.” Ollie rolled her eyes. “I knew you’d drag everyone down the bloody mountain and make a big deal at the airport and it’s totally unnecessary.”

“Unnecessary? Listen to you! You’re only our youngest child, living on the other side of the world, driving all this way on your own. Anyone would think nobody loved you!”

“Melbourne isn’t the other side of the world.” A smile sneaked from the corner of her lip despite herself. “It’s a two-hour flight.”

“What is that, a rental car?” Her mother looked at the gleaming vehicle like someone had dropped a turd on her kitchen table. “How much is that costing you? Who did you hire it from? Your father and Matty can drop it at Hertz back down at Caboolture this afternoon for you. What a waste of money. You can drive the ute.”

“It’s fine, really-”

“It’s unsafe! Look how small it is! There’s not even a roo bar-”

“Those things don’t work, Mum, they actually make the car more unsafe-”

“Tell that to your father! He’s only alive because of that bar. That bloody kangaroo was bigger than a horse, he said, and if it had of went through his windscreen-”

“That guy is full of horseshit,” interrupted a gruff voice behind her and Ollie whirled around to see a wiry figure with a cloth hat covering what was once a fine head of hair, huge hands streaked with soil.

“Dad!” Ollie hugged him.

“You came,” he said quietly. He hugged her back firmly, his arms hard and strong.

“Of course I did.” Her eyes stung again.

“Well,” he said, “now you’ve done it. She’ll be so pleased to see you, she’ll never bloody die now.”

Ollie’s jaw dropped. She met her father’s wet eyes and they both burst out laughing .

“You’re both as bad as each other!” her mother scolded. “Any minute, one of you is going to get struck down by lightning, and you’ll deserve it. Help her with her bags, Vanni. Make yourself useful.”

Inside the house, it could have been blessedly cool. There was ducted air conditioning for god’s sake - top of the line, the best deal possible - her father had insisted; he knew the guy. But to Ollie’s deep dismay, instead the windows and doors were all open, as if a non-existent breeze was about to drift through the screens and cool the house down.

“You’ve gotten soft,” her dad scoffed when she protested. “We don’t turn on the air-con until it gets to thirty-six. Waste of money.”

“ Dad. I’ll pay your power bill myself. Please can we cool this place down?”

“Pay it? We’ve got the money,” he bristled. “It’s the principle of the thing. Besides, it’s bad for the environment. Thought you Melbourne Greenies were all about that kind of thing.”

“Go and get changed, for goodness’ sake.” Her mother put her hands on her hips, surveying her jeans with judgement. “I’ll come with you,” she added, her eyebrows suddenly shooting to her hairline. “I haven’t made up your room yet since you told us you were coming tomorrow. It’s in a state-”

“Mum. It’ll be fine. Let me dress myself, would you?”

Ollie trailed along behind her father, who insisted on lugging her suitcase for her, all the way around to the back of the house to her childhood bedroom.

“Thanks, Dad.” She practically had to shut the door in both her parents’ faces as her mother followed along behind, fretting about dusting and whether there were enough coat hangers. She sank down on the bed for a moment, trying to get her bearings.

The room was stuffy with heat but as neat as a pin, just as she’d known it would be. Her mother would have been prepping for her visit for days. Gone were the band posters and athletics trophies that had scattered the room, but her parents still referred to it as hers. The bed was a snug double with a slightly too shiny doona cover, about eight too many pillows and there were knickknacks on the bedside table she couldn’t even begin to understand, but she could still see it the way it had been when she was a child, staring around at these same four walls.

She pulled herself to her feet and flung open the windows. It only let in a wave of damp heat, but at least it was fresh, the scent of hot earth and green leaves. She gazed out at the view. Her family home was a big old Queenslander - large, wooden and up on stilts, ready for the Summer rains - with a wide wraparound deck on three sides. Her room was in the back corner, with no deck, just a drop down to the ground and a view over the hills. She looked out at the neat rows of vines, Sémillon, chardonnay, shiraz, merlot, the source of her family’s livelihood, along with the olives in the front. The family business .

Sweat trickled down between her shoulder blades and she turned and pulled off her jeans, gasping in relief as she shed the clinging denim from her clammy skin. She opened her suitcase and sought out a pair of small linen shorts and a light cotton singlet. It felt weird seeing her legs free after a Melbourne winter that seemed to go forever, even now, in what was supposed to be the middle of spring. Neither state seemed to know what it was doing.

She was putting her clothes on hangers and into drawers when she heard the dogs beginning to shout, the crunch of gravel under car tyres, her brother Matty’s voice cheerfully bellowing for the hounds to shut the hell up and she smiled even as she shook her head. She’d been home all of ten minutes and the family was already starting to arrive as if it were an emergency to see her.

Ollie leaned her hands on the windowsill and took in a deep breath of the subtropical air, her lungs now adjusting. She steadied herself. Then she slipped out of her room and down the hall. She was too late; she could already hear her mother’s voice drifting out of the room two doors down.

“Stop fussing, Alessandra,” she heard her saying, “let me get the wheelchair and bring you down-”

“I don’t need that thing-” came the frail but irritated response and Ollie blinked back tears as she smiled. She stuck her head around the door to see that her mother was the one fussing and the elderly lady in the armchair was looking on in exasperation, clearly ready to leap out and try to make a run for it. Both women looked up as if with a sixth sense for her presence .

“Hi Nonna,” she said softly.

“Viola.” Her dark eyes lit up. “All I had to do to bring you back home is start dying, huh?”