The bar my Aunt and Uncle owns also serves food and is open from six in the morning to serve breakfast, or brekkie, as the Aussies call it, until late, which basically means when the last person either leaves of their own accord or is thrown out.
I have been eased in gently since I arrived; my Uncle John had warned me, though, that I would receive no special privileges. “I don’t give a rat’s arse how rich and famous you are in London or LA, George; you come and stay with us, then you’ll pull your weight. Brooke and Kathy will teach ya what ya need to know for the bar, and Jax will show ya the ropes for his gig, but I just want ya to know, we don’t pander to princesses around here.”
I nodded, feeling like I was a child being told off. Over the next few weeks, I swept floors, wiped tables, chopped veg and salad, and peeled God only knows how many potatoes. Between all of that, I had taken surf lessons from Jackson and had ridden horses with my cousin, Brooke, who I also worked with at the bar. She is twenty-eight and absolutely wild; she reminds me a lot of Jimmie, Ash and myself when we were younger. Watching her in action makes me realise what a wild bunch we were; Brooke’s twenty-eight and we were up to these kind of things when we were fifteen—fifteen and so indestructible, our lives all planned out. The only difference between us and Brooke was that we never slept around; well, apart from my mad six months before Cam, my ‘BC days’ as I refer to them in my head.
Brooke has a man’s attitude towards sex: straight sex, no strings. If they were good, she kept them around for a while; if not, she kicked them out of bed in the morning and didn’t invite them back for the return ride. She begged and pleaded with me the past few weekends to go with her into Sydney, but I just wasn’t ready and I was terrified of being recognised. So far, not one person has commented on who I am since my arrival; all they know is I am Kathy’s niece from England. They laugh at my accent, want to talk about cricket and tell me how much I look like Kath and are generally genuinely nice people.
Despite the fact it is only early November and still out of season, the bar is pretty busy and all of this means I am fairly exhausted by the time I fall into bed at night. I am staying in the apartment above the bar with Brooke, so on the weekends when she goes down to Sydney to stay with her sister, my other cousin, Jodie, I have the place to myself and I love it.
Jodie is thirty-three, just a year older than me, and works for a big promotions company. She is currently heading the setup of a new mega-club in Sydney; on completion, it will be the biggest in the Southern Hemisphere. She had flown up to see me the first weekend after I arrived and we had talked, laughed and cried together. Sean and I had stayed with her in Sydney when we took our year out. Jackson was living with her then and we had really gotten along well, but I I’m just not ready to go back there yet, maybe not ever. She told me all about the project she is working on. The club is laid out over four levels and will house a venue for live bands, an ice bar, and three different nightclubs, all catering to different types of music. The fourth floor is a nightclub, VIP area and restaurant, all with a rooftop terrace and infinity pool, from where there are panoramic views across Sydney, the harbour and bridge with just a glimpse of the roof of the opera house. It is due to open on December the first, and I promised her I will travel down for the opening. She hasn’t realised the significance of the date, and I really don’t want to be the one to bring up the fact that the first of December was the day life dealt me the worst kind of blow; one from which I will never fully recover.
I haven’t decided when I will return to England yet, but it won’t be any time soon. Most of the stories about Sean and his supposed infidelities had been disproved, but there are still a few floating about. I don’t think they are true; I want to believe I knew my husband well enough to be sure of the fact he would never father a child and not tell me about it. But there is one thing stopping me from being totally convinced and that is my guilty conscience caused by my own infidelity. If I could do it, then why couldn’t he?
Chapter Four