The Beautiful Land
Sam and Roni
South Australia, August 2000
Sam knew many things about his sister, probably more than a brother ought to know once the intimacies of childhood and trials of puberty had passed, but he’d not known until a day ago just what Roni was capable of.
He was sitting on the veranda of the Highland Valley cabin, in the balding hills east of Adelaide, where he and Roni were holed up. She was beside him on the bench, her unruly brown hair tipped back, her eyes skyward, fingers spread wide on her knees below her ridiculous pink safari shorts. All around them, the stillness of the landscape promised they were safe.
Yeah, right.
Sam pulled his cap down, shivering slightly, though the air was still warm. The memory of yesterday hung over him.
It was not as if his twin’s nightmarish stunt required some special brilliance. The process was straightforward, the timing a little complicated, but both were within the grasp of most of humankind. And the notion itself: how much did that faze anyone these days? With all you saw on the telly, in the papers, in the everyday turmoil of life, where a car might take out a bicyclist or a thug knife a stranger. We were used to all that.
But the will to do such a thing? That was exceptional.
He peered at Roni, her curls now hiding all but the slightly protruding, chapped mouth, the burnt nose and long lashes. She twisted a little to acknowledge his stare, and for a moment her eyes glittered: a copper rim circling pale-blue irises. Still the same young woman. But for him, no longer the same.
He dug a thumbnail into his palm. He should have seen it coming. The crazy girl, from age four or five on, had repeatedly pulled him into her illusions of ‘Sam and Roni against the world’. Sometimes the half-imagined fight was with their bitter parents, sometimes a teacher or relative or a stranger. Throughout their childhood in that dull little Cornwall village, he’d played along ̶ reluctantly really – not believing this obsession of hers could be anything serious. It was just a game, it was his wild and erratic twin seeking refuge from their bickering parents, whose fights stunk up the house like a dead badger. That was all.
He clawed a hand through his rank hair, unwashed for a week. No wind came across the big wooden deck where they sat; it was so still, so innocent this day nearing its end. Midwinter, yet oddly comfortable sitting atop the steep, roughly grassed slope, with only a few gum trees and dipping swallows for company.
Okay. So, maybe he’d not been that reluctant when he’d colluded in her fantasies. Truth was, it wasn’t just Roni’s weirdly possessive ways that had tapped at him like a dirty fingernail all these years. It was his own unthinking collaboration. He’d liked it.
Until a day ago.
Hands gripping the bench, he stared at the grand view before them. The sun, low behind their cabin, was tinting the clouds a soft orange. The eucalyptus trees in front shivered their silver-green leaves, while beyond the scraggy lot of them, the ground fell away in a gentle slide, then rolled back up into banks of pale green hills dotted with dark bushes. The sky, still inexplicably blue, arced above them.
There’d been the ear-shattering explosion of sound. The sickening shock. The collapse of his senses. The dawning awareness that everything had changed.
Chapter 1
London, England. Ten months earlier: October 1999
Sam pressed his forehead against the taxi’s cold window, and for a moment watched his breath erase the world. Out there, Trafalgar Square lay wet and lurid in the rainy night. Beyond the fogged-up glass, the tourists scrambling for cover melted into mere blurs of colour. Only the towering white glow of Nelson’s Column remained intact. Like a warning. Like a middle finger raised.
Sam closed his eyes and knotted his hands. Bloody hell.
Beside him in the semi-darkness of the black cab, Tina was silent, her pale profile pointed ahead. She was trussed up in an orange woolly jacket and dark blue skirt. Not exactly standard-issue escapee garb, but you couldn’t tell the beautiful woman anything. He extended a hand to her, palm up on the cold leather, and waited – one, two, three, four – then withdrew it. Never mind. She’d get over it. For better or worse, they were stuck with each other now.
He chewed on his unshaven upper lip. His body felt sweaty and uncouth in his office suit under a damp mackintosh. Should have changed. Better to be in joggers and a jumper. Forgot in the panic of packing and the turmoil of his doubts about what they were doing. A cigarette would sure help. A year, it’d been since he quit, and still the craving gnawed like a tick on his brain.
The taxi lurched and sprang out of the square’s churning traffic into the dazzle of The Mall, heading west towards Buckingham Palace. Sam checked his new gold watch. Already 9 p.m. They couldn’t miss their flight.
In the front seat, the cabbie relaxed back, and whistling through his teeth, reached for the radio. He whizzed through the stations, a track faded up and the brash rap, rap, rap of a hip-hop artist pitched into the back seat. Sam flinched. His long fingers, normally disciples of Bach, Chopin, Schubert, began to tap along with the throbbing beat. Traitors.
‘Bin bloody cold, even for late October,’ the cabbie suddenly spoke up. He lowered the music. ‘You two headed somewhere warm?’
Sam’s stomach shrank as the man’s curious eyes hooked on to his in the rear-view mirror. A burst of rain lashed the taxi, and for a minute no one spoke.
‘That’s the plan,’ Sam said at last, his voice tight.
‘Yeah?’ The driver adjusted his backside and his beaded cushion rippled along the seat top. ‘So, where are you off to? Spain? Italy? Turkey? Turkey’s cheap, but you can’t beat the Italians for great cooking, I hear. Some good-lookin’ blokes, too.’ The man winked at Tina in the mirror. She didn’t twitch.
Sam cursed silently. Just their luck to get a cheeky scoundrel full of small talk. Let Tina answer this time. She’s supposedly the mover and shaker here. A pulse in Sam’s neck clocked the seconds as no one spoke. Tina remained still, mute as a house plant. Damn it, someone had to say something.
‘Yes, Italy,’ Sam spoke up.
Tina stiffened beside him.
‘Been there before?’ the cabbie came back.
‘Yes,’ said Tina.
‘No,’ said Sam simultaneously.
‘Weelll, it’s just a business trip. Nothing special,’ Tina said, as though this explained everything. The mocking vowels of her West Midlands accent sharpened the mood in the cab.
‘Nice.’ The driver brightened in the mirror, ‘But you’ll get out ’n see the sights, right? After all, it’s Italy. Them fancy ruins and bikinis and all that.’
Sam glared at the back of man’s shaven head. This had to stop. He leaned across to Tina, blocking the cabbie’s view. Irritation – or was it fear? – made his voice needle in his own ears.
‘What do you think, love? Try for some of them fancy ruins, maybe?’
Tina’s eyes remained fixed ahead, her arms hugging her giant handbag like a favoured child.
‘If we ever get there,’ she said.
The two men shut up.
Sam slumped. The awkward exchange was eating at his confidence that they’d get out of London unnoticed. There’d been no time to think, damn it. The past week – it had been too torrid, too chaotic. Just three days ago, word had emerged that the stock exchange prima donnas were looking into a dodgy stock sale that reeked of insider trading. Then two days of raw uncertainty. Until this morning, when he’d launched out of bed after Tina rang to say their Channel Islands solicitor had suggested they run for it.
He peered aside at his lover, her face flickering in the passing headlights. So deceivingly fragile she appeared: her eyes alert, the dark cropped hair almost touching the corners of her skewed red lips. Looking even more alluring now than when he’d first seen her eight years ago, standing in the big-windowed space adjoining the boss’s office. A vision she’d been. A gazelle amongst wildebeests. As every male in the merchant bank knew only too well.
Yeah. A gazelle who’d now kicked both of their arses with her recklessness.
As he watched, she slid away just a little. Sam sniffed and frowned at his hands. Pushing up a damp sleeve, he slid his fingers protectively over the face of the gold watch.
‘What?’ Tina frowned down at his wrist.
Sam let his cuff drop back and folded his arms, avoiding her eyes. He should never have told her the watch was a gift from Roni.
‘Nothing,’ he said.
She sniffed, frowned and shook her head.
Behind them, a low whine rose above the hiss of traffic. Quickly it closed in and turned into a metallic blare, skinning the air around them. Sam spun around. Police. The cabbie was pulling aside. Tina’s eyes opened. Sam’s closed. So, this was it. Fished like a cockroach out of a bathtub. His throat tightened and his mind went numb. A story, they had to have a story.
The taxi braked, and Sam’s eyelids flew open. Beside him Tina was staring white-eyed into the side mirror, her nails curled into her thighs. The merciless wail closed in, blue lights ricocheted against the dashboard, and then – the patrol car sped past.
Sam drooped. He reached in his coat pocket, pulled out a crumpled tissue and wiped his neck. Found a half-eaten Snickers bar and jammed it in his mouth. The taxi left the heart of Westminster now and sped up, humming through Knightsbridge, along Cromwell Road, nosing past Earls Court, then shooting through Hammersmith and over Chiswick Flyover, finally joining the teeming motorway. Sam checked his watch again. They should make it. Soar away from the cruelty of winter and arrive to the onset of spring. In Australia. Where everything was upside down.
And left behind in England would be Roni. The one person, the one-of-a-kind sister who truly loved him, and who any moment now would discover his betrayal of her trust. The loyal twin who would awake tomorrow or the next day to learn from the radio news that he was gone. He dug his fingers into his temples, shut out the thought.
Ahead, a haze of airport lights glimmered on the horizon. Not long to go now. A few more minutes and then – a calm to be maintained and a smile to be smiled as he handed over his boarding pass. After that, he and Tina would be high in the night air, looking down at London’s glittering entrails. Goodbye to England. Goodbye to the Square Mile and the roads paved with gold. Goodbye to a fool’s game that was never intended to end like this.
He leaned across the seat. ‘You ready for some of those good-lookin’ Italians, then?’ His wry grin almost soothed his own nerves.
Tina faced him, her chin high, her grey eyes amused and conspiratorial.
‘Bring them on.’
Chapter 2
As she twisted away from Sam in the dim light of the taxi, Tina felt the weight of his gaze. She pulled up the corners of her mouth, feeling too knackered to offer her lover anything more. By rights, she ought to be going to pieces, what with their last-minute decision to leg it and the huge unknowns ahead. Maybe it was exhaustion – or resignation – that explained the cold calm enveloping her.
Well. She wished. Her heart was going like a rocket.
It was unbelievable to think they were actually fleeing the country. Of all the things she’d been through since escaping Birmingham fifteen years ago …. Like abandoning her family and hating herself for it; like cramming nights in a seedy Tower Hamlets flat to pass her business exams; and, at the end of all that, having to put up with the poncey bankers at work who smiled as though they could see through her fine clothes, her proud glare. As though. The bastards. They saw nothing of her or of what she could be.
She peeked across the seat at Sam, now staring blankly ahead. The spray of wheaten hair, the big head, which by its bloated size alone gave him a kind of listing look, his skinny body in a wet coat, the big feet in brown derby shoes. And the long, almost girlish, fingers splayed on his knees.
Now it was her and Sam. Not exactly as they’d planned it months ago, when their office affair had morphed into a risky financial partnership. She and the piano man. Sweet and faithful Sam, who’d risked all. For her. For himself. For them.
Hot-headed young Sam, who she’d loved as best she could.
She rubbed her neck. Sam’s presence was a comfort, but he was not the partner she would have chosen at a time like this – sure as hell not once it got as dire as this. Sam was bright, even canny, but he could be volatile. Unpredictable. Especially when it came to any mention of that wimp of a sister of his. Look at him, even now – doting on his new gold watch. Like a ball and chain Roni latched on to him. Self-centred little sprite that she was. Rich bitch from the provinces who seemed to think she owned Sam.
Tina hissed softly, pushed off her heels and stretched her stockinged toes. It would be a long night.
When she next opened her eyes, the pink aura of Heathrow filled the sky. She drew back her shoulders, breathing long and evenly. Here goes. She slipped on her shoes and ran her tongue over her teeth, not happy to find her mouth tight and dry. Swallowed and cleared her throat.
She was smart. She was confident. She had come too far, for too long, to mess up now. Maybe part of the plan had gone awry, but what mattered most was not yet out of reach. Not yet, anyway. She would make this work.
