‘Yes!’ John and I hollered along with the rest of the crowd at the pub as Joel Coombs put through the goal that guaranteed the Rangers were the new Premiers.
My cheeks were burning and my head spun – how much of that was from alcohol and how much was from passion was hard to tell. Seconds later, the final siren blew and John and I leapt into each other’s arms.
Nick Harding played an absolute blinder, staying true to the form that had taken the Rangers all the way to the Grand Final. Throughout the game, the cameramen kept cutting across to his mum and Lily in the crowd, so I found myself confronted by her smiling face whenever Nick did something spectacular, which seemed to be every few minutes. John poked his elbow into my ribs every time just to drive the point home further.
She still had such a hold on me, Rapunzel from the café. She’d never looked more beautiful than she did there in the crowd, and it created such chaos in my head that when the minute I’d been waiting for my whole life happened and my team finally won a Grand Final, my overriding thought wasn’t that the Rangers were Premiers but how much I missed Lily.
It had been four months since we last saw each other, when I walked in on her with her ex-boyfriend. I analysed and reanalysed that night a hundred times over. Had anything actually happened between her and Ben or could I have jumped to the wrong conclusions? But the way she broke up with me completely out of left field was just too coincidental. And she was in her pyjamas that night when she was with him. The sexy ones.
I wasted a stupid amount of time obsessing about it – my entire drive to Queensland, and the first weeks afterwards. I spent hour after hour making myself crazy imagining them having sex.
But then when July rolled around, my mentorship with Keith Rayner began and the new job saturated every brain cell I had and it cured my fixation with Lily and Ben.
Keith and I started most days out on location at no later than five in the morning and we stayed out until the sun was at its highest. Then it was back to the studio to play around with editing software before packing the equipment back into the truck to catch the afternoon and evening light.
Even after fifteen years of dabbling in photography, I discovered on my first day – no, in my first hour – with Keith, that everything I knew actually amounted to fuck all.
The man was a genius. A patient genius, who was prepared to wake up at 3 am, drive for hours and then spend the next seven hours lying on his stomach in long prickly grass, letting the mosquitoes and bull ants eat him alive and the sun dehydrate him, while he waited for the rare Richmond Birdwing butterfly to fly down to the patch of daisies where it had been spotted by a ranger the day before.
And when the butterfly didn’t come, he did the exact same thing the next morning. And when that day yielded nothing, he set his alarm for two-thirty in the morning, went back for a third day and waited until the magnificent insect fluttered down onto a flower close enough to photograph. When it picked at the pollen, its striated, almost fluorescent wings opened fully, and all twenty centimetres of those magnificent wings lit up with the morning sun’s rays shooting through them. And it was all caught on camera.
The pair of us took close to three hundred photos of that butterfly and we spent the rest of the day and night running filters through forty of the best then blowing them up to poster size to check them for clarity.
After getting my opinion, which he disagreed with, Keith chose the best five to send to National Geographic.
All five were photos that I took and would be credited for.
I sent John a text:
My photos will be in National Geographic next month!
He replied:
Cool. How much are they coughing up?
I rolled my eyes.
Doesn’t work that way. I’m on $200 a day, it’s not commission based.
His reply came back quickly:
Bahaha $200 a day!
I sent the same message to Dad about my photos being chosen. At least he would be happy for me.
‘You’ve got to be joking!’ I said out loud in my empty bedroom when Dad’s reply came.
Excellent news Toby! How much did they cough up for those?
I let that text go unanswered.
There was nobody else to tell really, I hadn’t made any friends in Mission Beach. And I didn’t have any real friends back home either. I had done here what I did there, made loads of acquaintances – like the dude who operated the canoe- and blokart-hire place on the beach, the lady who owned the bakery, my retired neighbours. But no real friends.
It didn’t bother me, I’d never needed people. My family and a girl to love were all I ever needed. I had neither of those here in Queensland but I wasn’t unhappy. The job was enough. I was satisfied at the end of a day’s work for the first time I could ever remember, and what I learned during the week I practised on the weekends.
I took day trips to different parts of the Far North every Saturday, and in each place I found more magic than the one before. The dense tropical foliage, the white sandy beaches that were every bit as stunning as the ones in Western Australia, the mountains, the gorges. Any wonder Keith chose to base himself here, you could never run out of inspiration.
One Sunday morning as dawn broke, at a watering hole southeast of Cairns called Alligators Nest, I took a shot of a lavender orchid, with water droplets clinging to its silver-rimmed petals.
When I showed it to Keith he said, ‘We’re going to sell that one, Wattsy.’
And he did, three days later to a Japanese art collector.
Then Keith refused to take a cent for it. ‘Just remember me when you’re rich and famous.’ He smiled.
I sent John another message.
$6k for a flower with a raindrop on it.
He replied:
Bullshit.
So I sent him a screenshot of the payment and then had a laugh at his reply:
Go fuck yourself Toby.
It was the middle of August when I realised I wasn’t pining for Lily. It was around then that I also started thinking seriously about making the move more permanent. The rent on the apartment I lived in was astronomical and eating up the funding I’d been given, because it was a short-term lease one block from the beach. I was so busy with work that I barely saw the beach anyway. I was after a cheaper place further inland I could get long-term. So I went to see a real estate agent.
And her name was Carly.
‘Same again?’ John interrupted my thoughts.
‘Yeah, yeah, that’d be good.’
He returned a few minutes later. ‘She’s fucked you around this arvo, hasn’t she, that Harding chick?’ He clinked his glass against mine.
‘What do you mean?’ I played dumb.
‘Barely had a word out of you all night, mate, and the Rangers just won the Premiership. That’s not the Tobes I know. You’re sitting there spewing that you’re stuck with that ball and chain real-estate agent waiting for you in Queensland, when all you want to do is screw Harding’s baby sister, right? I don’t blame you, mate. I’d tap that for sure.’
I shook my head at him. ‘She’s not a that.’
He snorted. ‘Good deflection, Tobes. Truth hurts, huh?’
I ignored him and pulled out my phone to text Carly. I had to do something to quash the guilt. Because John was spot on. I did want Lily. I wanted her a lot.
Miss you Carls. At pub with John xx
Missing you too, hun. Go Rangers! Tell John to piss off from me ☺. I’m sure he’s said something by now to deserve it . . .
Carly. Gorgeous Carly. She unlocked a vacant apartment for me one particularly humid Saturday afternoon, and I was so aroused by the way she’d been coming onto me during the drive there that when she announced with a sexy smile, ‘So, want to see if the shower works?’ I answered with, ‘Fuck yes.’
Seconds later we were ripping off each other’s clothes. After some of the hottest sex I’d ever had in three separate rooms of the apartment over the next few hours, I felt it was only right to rent the place from her.
By the start of September, I was settled in with a two-year lease and I gave Dad the go-ahead to sell the building business.
I never planned for it to be anything more than a bit of fun with Carly, but it developed into more than either of us had intended and we were happy. Really happy. Lily had slipped further and further from my mind.
Which was all well and good until today. Until I found myself staring at her on a giant flat screen and realising that I’d been kidding myself. I still loved this woman as much as I ever did.
‘Marcia was telling me how lovely it was to see you last night, Toby,’ Mum said.
John and I were drinking coffees on our parents’ back deck, a few hours after the Grand Final was over.
‘Has she had any counselling or anything, Mum?’ I shuddered at the memory of Marcia draping herself over me the night before at Mum and Dad’s anniversary party. Her hot breath that reeked of rum had hit me in the eye.
‘No, she’s refused to see a counsellor. It hasn’t been easy on poor Pete or Luke.’
‘Pete was telling me he’s found a good rehab place for her,’ Dad added. ‘He can get her in there on her doctor’s say-so, whether she wants to be admitted or not. But he’s not sure if he can make the call. Poor bugger.’
‘Toby,’ Mum touched my knee. ‘Go around there and say hello again, love. Just for a few minutes. It would be so appreciated. What do you think?’
‘No, Mum.’
As sorry as I felt for them, I had no sense of obligation to go next door and no guilt at saying no. And I felt no pull towards Jen’s grave either. None whatsoever. I’d finally done it. I’d let her go.
‘Do you really have to leave on Monday, love? Can’t you stay for just one more week? You only just got back,’ Mum pleaded.
Dad looked just as hopeful.
‘Sorry, Mum. I’m on assignment this week. There are shoots already lined up for me in Kalgoorlie and Esperance before I drive back home. Promise I’ll stay longer next time,’ I said. ‘You guys should come visit me. I really want you to meet Carly. We can’t leave it that the only family member she’s met is him,’ I nodded at John.
I really did want them to come and visit me next because no way was I coming back to Perth any time soon. Perth was where Lily was and Lily still messed with my head. Perth was a place I needed to keep away from, for as long as it took me to get over her.