Excerpt: Clear

Carrie cleared her head, steeled her heart and stepped out the front door, tea in one hand, bowl of Chocolate Rock icecream in the other. Her father smiled with lopsided warmth, no doubt with hopes higher than his tallest Surfers Paradise apartment complex. He noted, with but a hint of suspicion, Carrie’s capricious choice of breakfast. Carrie sat.

Albert had come to the point with few words. ‘Tell me you’ll come back to Melbourne and run King Enterprises with your siblings.’

Her response had been similarly forthright. And not taken at all well. After the initial word ping pong, which had him steaming far quicker than even Carrie had suspected, he begged for elaboration. This was in the form of rhetorical questioning to challenge even the most steadfast peace keeper. But Carrie was, strangely enough given her bleeding, her sunburn, the absence of her wonderful Jack who was out with the kids for their end of year Karijini trip, up for it this morning.

‘I can’t.’

He was stupefied. ‘What have you got here anyway?!’

‘My life, my work, the sunshine, my fiancé.’ It had been two years now since she and Jack had settled in Port Hart. In truth, those two years had involved plenty of demon battling for Carrie. She had severed herself from the womb - the suffocation of her sisters, the expectation, the city itself, breathing dank and terminal through her lungs each winter – and run. Far. This place, another world, had been an awakening. Yet she had felt the fear. As if she was going to let on to Albert, but only in recent months now had Carrie begun to wake up in the morning without a complete sense of disorientation and distress plaguing her. But now, even with three miscarriages behind her in six months, the clear blue sky filtered a sense of hope into her window. Every day. And there she was, living on the edge of the earth surrounded by rocky red desert, Spinifex and sturt desert peas growing wild in the gutter. If you walked to the end of her street, you would actually fall off the end of the earth. Truly. And then there was Jack France, her favourite man, who made her pancakes or toast or icecream for breakfast and complained that Carrie never did enough cleaning around the place. But it was her place. Theirs.