It obviously wasn’t listening and after some restless tossing and turning, I sat up and accepted the plane food offered by the Thai stewardess. I even had a beer to calm my thoughts. That didn’t work either. So as the cabin lights dimmed, I lay back down and forced myself to think of what lay ahead.
After landing in Sydney in the early morning, I was headed for a town called Darwin right up on the northern tip of Australia. From there, I had to take another plane to the town of Broome. What had really irritated me about this when I’d booked my flights was that I had to fly straight over both places down to near the bottom of Australia, then all the way back up again. This meant extra hours in the air, never mind the time spent in transit at Sydney airport.
I’d looked up Broome on the internet at the airport and, from the photos, it looked like it had a really cool beach. These days it was a tourist spot more than anything else, but long ago, due to what I’d learnt from Kitty Mercer’s biography, I knew it had been the centre of the pearling industry. I wondered if that was where my legacy had come from . . .
If there was one thing that the past few weeks had taught me, it was that the cliche of money not buying happiness was absolutely true. I thought of Ace, who was obviously super rich, but lonely and miserable. I wondered if he was missing me. Tonight, I was really missing him . . . Not in a soppy way, like I couldn’t live without him or anything, or longed for the touch of his hand on mine. I mean, the sex had been fine, and much better than any I’d had before, but the bit I’d enjoyed the most was the closeness, just like I’d had with Star.
Ace had filled the yawning gap she had left behind. He’d been my friend, and even my confidant up to a point. That’s how I miss him, I thought, just the fact that he’d been there beside me. I knew that in the real world outside the palace, our paths would never have crossed. He was a rich City boy, used to blonde female twigs who bought designer handbags and wore five-inch stilettos.
It had been a moment in time: two lonely people cast adrift on a beach, helping each other through. He would move on, and so would I, but I really hoped we’d always be friends.
At this point either the beer or the ‘sleepy pills’ kicked in, because I was conscious of nothing more until the stewardess woke me up to tell me we were landing in Sydney in forty-five minutes.
Two hours later, I took off again on a far smaller plane to retrace my earlier flight path back up across Australia. As we left Sydney behind, I looked down and saw emptiness. Nothing, literally nothing, except for red. Yet it was a red that wasn’t really red . . . the closest I could come to describing the colour of the earth beneath me was the paprika spice that Star sometimes used in her cooking.
Immediately I wondered how I could replicate the colour in a painting. After a while I realised I had ages to think about this, because the paprika earth went on and on and on beneath me. It was mostly flat, the landscape reminding me of a gone-off tomato soup: browning at the edges, with the odd thin dribble of cream that had been poured on the top of it to indicate a road or a river.
Yet as we neared Darwin, with my final destination close by, I felt a sudden clutch at my heart that sent it beating faster. I felt oddly exhilarated and tearful, in the way I did when I watched a moving but uplifting film. It was like I wanted to slam my fist through the Perspex window, jump out and land on that hard, unforgiving red earth that I felt instinctively was somehow a part of me. Or, more accurately, I was a part of it.
After we’d landed, the elation I’d felt was soon replaced by abject fear as I boarded what looked like some kind of plastic toy plane, it was so tiny. No one else around me looked worried as we bumped and bounced in the air currents and then descended into somewhere called Kununurra, a town I’d never heard of and which certainly wasn’t Broome. When I made to get off, I was told that this was just a stop and Broome would be the next port of call, as if we were on a bus or a train. The scary flying bus took off again and I took another sleepy pill to calm my nerves. When we finally touched down on an airstrip that looked not much longer than the average Geneva driveway, I actually crossed myself.
Out on the concourse of the tiny airport, I looked for the information centre and saw a desk, behind which sat a girl who had skin just about the same colour as mine. Even her hair – a mass of ebony curls – looked similar.
‘G’day, can I help you?’ She smiled at me warmly.
‘Yeah, I’m looking for somewhere to stay in town for a couple of nights.’
‘Then you’ve come to the right place,’ she said, handing me a heap of leaflets.
‘Which one do you recommend?’
‘My favourite is the Pearl House on Carnarvon Street, but I’m not meant to give personal preferences,’ she added with a grin. ‘Shall I find out if they have a room?’
‘That would be great,’ I replied, feeling my legs twitching beneath me – they’d obviously had enough of carrying me thousands of miles across the globe. ‘Could it be on the first floor? Or the second? Just not on the ground.’
‘No worries.’
While she made a call, I told myself that I was being ridiculous; spiders could climb upwards, couldn’t they? Or along drainpipes into showers . . .
‘Yeah, Mrs Cousins has got a spare room,’ she said as she put the phone down, wrote out the details and handed them to me. ‘The taxi rank is just out front.’
‘Thanks.’
‘You French?’ she asked.
‘Swiss, actually.’
‘Come here to see your relatives?’
‘Maybe,’ I said with a shrug, wondering how she knew.
‘Well, my name’s Chrissie and here’s my card. Call me if you need some help and maybe I’ll see you around.’
‘Yeah, thanks,’ I said as I walked off towards the exit, amazed at both her friendliness and her perception.
I was already sweating by the time I climbed into a taxi and the driver told me it was only a short journey into town. We stopped in front of a low building overlooking a large green, the wide road lined with a mixture of small shops and houses.
The hotel was basic, but as I entered my room, I was glad to see it was spotless and, having done a thorough inspection, spider-free.
I went to check the time on my mobile, but the battery was obviously completely dead. All I could go by was that dusk was falling, which probably meant it was around six o’clock at night. My body was telling me it was time for sleep, even if my mobile couldn’t.
I stripped off my plane clothes, climbed between the sheets and eventually fell asleep.
*
I woke up to see a really bright sun glaring in from the naked window. I showered, dressed and hurried downstairs to see if there was anything to eat.
‘Can I get some breakfast?’ I asked the lady on reception.
‘That was cleared away hours ago. It’s almost two in the afternoon, love.’
‘Right. Is there anywhere local I can get something to eat?’
‘There’s the Runway Bar down the road that does pizza and what have you. Best you can do this time of day. There’s more places open later.’