‘Aunt Opal,’ she would say (Freya only called Opal Aunt when she was remonstrating with her), ‘Aunt Opal, you are not doing the boys any favours. They need to learn to organize themselves. How else will they develop into clever wonderful men who will make marvellous husbands?’
‘Well, Brian’s going to make a marvellous husband already,’ Opal would insist. Brian was getting married at Easter to Elizabeth, a primary school teacher. ‘And you know what Steve’s like, God love him. He’s hopeless with the washing machine.’ Given that Steve was a computer programmer, Freya felt this was a particularly feeble excuse.
David was the most dutiful when it came to tidying up. The sensible, soft-hearted and handsome one who had inherited the best qualities of both his parents, David knew how to use the vacuum cleaner, knew that the same dishcloth could not be used for three weeks running and understood that toilets occasionally needed to have bleach poured down them. Freya couldn’t help smiling when she thought of David. Her best friend, Kaz, had a long-range crush on David because he reminded her of the guy who played the lead in Australia, and would go puce whenever David said hello to her.
‘He is so like Hugh Jackman, I wish he’d notice me,’ Kaz would wail.
‘You are many years too young for him, that’s why he doesn’t notice you,’ Freya would explain. ‘It would be like a first year fancying you.’
‘Eurgh,’ Kaz said. ‘Point taken.’
With a last fond glance back at the house with its shining turquoise front door, Freya swung out the gate. Ned had put his foot down when it came to painting the exterior woodwork. ‘I had to,’ he’d told Freya. ‘I mean, the whole place would be pink if I’d let her. Imagine the lads …’ His voice had trailed off into a shudder at the thought of his three big strong sons coming home to a pink palace. ‘At least turquoise can be sort of manly.’
Thanks to Opal, Freya knew everyone on the street. On one side was Molly, who liked to drop in every day on the hunt for sugar, a drop of milk, or the newspaper, because there was a nice article she’d heard about and wanted to read. Aunt Opal always said that if a day went past when Molly didn’t drop in for something, the world wouldn’t feel right.
On the other side was shy, sixty-something Luke, a widower who had vowed he would never remarry after his beloved wife had died.
‘Not that it stops some of the ladies on the road from dropping in with cakes and pies and things,’ Opal would say. ‘Poor Luke, he really does want to be on his own.’
‘Why don’t all the women realize that?’ asked Freya.
‘Some women think it’s unnatural for a man to live by himself,’ Opal said sagely. ‘They’re waiting for him to see he needs someone else. He’s such a dear, they’re all determined to be the one.’
Next to the beleaguered Luke’s house lived the Hiltons, a young couple who had managed to produce four small children in three years. Their garden – unlike Luke’s, which was tended by his lady admirers – was a disaster zone of overturned trikes, weeds taller than the children and a dead tree in a pot outside the front door where Annie Hilton had desperately tried to inject some beauty into the front of the house only to forget to water the damn thing. Freya had babysat the children a couple of times and she could understand why the tree was dead. Watering a tree had to come very far down Annie Hilton’s list of daily chores.
The terrace curved as it got towards the main road and Freya looked in, as she always did, at the house where Meredith’s one-time best friend Grainne lived. Meredith was the only one of the cousins Freya didn’t see regularly. In fact, Meredith was something of a mystery to her. And Freya didn’t care for mysteries.
Meredith was the eldest; she’d moved away from Redstone as soon as she left school, and hardly ever returned. Oh, she’d show up for a big event like Uncle Ned’s sixtieth birthday party, but Freya couldn’t quite get a handle on Meredith. She seemed to have distanced herself from her family, and Freya, who adored Opal and Ned and her three cousins, simply couldn’t understand it. Why would anyone blessed with such a wonderful family turn their back on it?
And the Byrnes weren’t the only people that Meredith had turned her back on. Since her divorce, Grainne was back living at home with her parents, along with Teagan, her sweet four-year-old daughter. Freya always said hello to Grainne and Teagan if she bumped into them on her way home from school. Although she was thirty-something, the same age as Meredith, Grainne looked about seventeen. She was always smiling as she walked down the road holding the back of Teagan’s pink bike as the child wobbled along on her stabilizers.
‘Any news of Meredith?’ she might ask occasionally, and Freya would fill her in on the latest details.
‘The gallery’s going very well, apparently. It’s the Alexander Byrne Gallery now – there was a big write-up in the paper about it.’
Freya didn’t let on that Opal had proudly cut out the clipping from the paper and put it in the scrapbook she kept about Meredith. Nor did she say that Meredith hadn’t rung to tell her mother of this great event, which implied that she was now a full partner in the business. No, Opal and Ned and the boys had had to read about it in the paper. ‘She was asking after you,’ Freya would lie. And every time she said it she’d wondered why, because what was the point of lying about it?
Meredith never asked about anyone. Her phone calls were brief, as if she only rang home out of a sense of duty. On the rare occasions she visited, she never asked about anyone in Redstone. It was as if, in leaving home, she’d somehow distanced herself from the place totally – and that included her old school friends. Still, it was worth the lie, Freya decided, just to see the smile on Grainne’s face.
‘Send her my love back, will you, and tell her we must meet up next time she’s in town. Explain I don’t get out to cool events like her gallery openings,’ Grainne would add. ‘Not with this little bunny here—’ And with that she’d grin down at Teagan, who’d dimple back at her.
Freya wondered yet again what had happened to Meredith to make her walk away. Although her cousin was perfectly friendly on the rare occasions they met, it was obvious that something had changed her. One day Freya was going to figure out what it was.
Freya’s ten-minute trip to school took her past the crossroads, and if she had the money for a takeaway coffee she’d stop at the Internet café, where cool-looking guys sometimes hung out. Freya noticed everything. She liked Bobbi’s beauty and hair salon, too. Bobbi was Opal’s best friend, going back years. Outwardly, she was the complete opposite of Freya’s aunt, in that she looked as tough as old boots, but under the patina of foundation, platinum hair and a killer glare was a woman with a heart of gold.
Deciding that she was too late for coffee today, Freya crossed over at the lights, walking past the new lavender-painted shop where the old off-licence had been.
The new shop was as different from Maguire’s Fine Liquors as it was possible to get. Maguire’s used to look as though it had been dipped in a combination of nicotine and scotch, and the smell of both swirled around it. The lavender of the new place looked fresh and beautiful; Freya imagined that when the shop finally opened for business it would smell of a combination of fragrant French roses and wild lavender. A cast-iron sign with swirly writing hung at ninety degrees to the shop over the glass door and