Hello from the Gillespies Read Online Free PDF Page B

but she found fault with every part of that too, from the food I served to the cake I baked to the fact that the weather was so hot, as though that was somehow my fault too. Her husband (Nick’s father’s brother) died two years ago, henpecked to death, Joan joked one night. (It was actually lung cancer; he was a very heavy smoker.) He asked Nick to please take care of Celia after he was gone. Nick was always so loyal to his uncle, and so fond of him too, he’s done his best to keep his promise. Celia’s due here in a week, coming up from Adelaide on the bus. There are flights into the Hawker airstrip, and I know Nick offered to pay but she hates flying. She hates lots of things: spending her money, music, vegetarians, politicians. My cooking. My housekeeping. My marriage to Nick. My children. Me. I keep imagining the person who has to sit beside her on the four-hour bus trip. She’ll fit in a lot of complaining in that time. Celia could suck the joy out of Christmas, to borrow a phrase from my own dear late mother. I just hope she won’t suck the joy out of our Christmas this year.
    It now took Angela longer to find the right words.
    Which brings this letter to me.
    I think something is wrong with me. Something serious. Not just with my marriage, with my children, with these headaches I keep having. It feels deeper than that. Not just physical. I feel so out of place these days. Overwhelmed. Not myself any more.
    I seem to be yearning for something all the time. For everything to be different. To be a different person in some way. To go back and start again, somehow make things better, make the right choices.
    Draw up a list, Joan advised me recently when I was trying to explain how I felt. Put what you really want down in black and white and see what is actually achievable. A wish list, she called it. I’ll try it here now.
    1. I wish Nick would start talking to me again, properly, like he used to. I wish he would tell me that I am imagining things, that he isn’t having an affair, that he does still want to be married to me. That he still loves me. I wish I could turn back time to when we had a good marriage, a beautiful marriage. Because we did. We really did. But I am so sad and so scared that he doesn’t want to be with me any more.
    2. I wish the children were all happy and healthy and independent (Ig aside, I’m happy for him to stay at home for a few more years). I wish I could feel I’d done the best job possible raising them. I always expected that when I got to my age, when I’d been married for this long and had grown children (half-grown, in Ig’s case), I would have everything sorted; I would be calm and wise and content. Instead, I feel like I have nothing under control, that I haven’t been a proper mother, let alone a proper wife, that everything going wrong with my family is somehow all my fault.
    3. I wish I had ignored my mother-in-law’s advice. I wish I’d insisted that Nick involve me more in the business side of the station. I couldn’t have stopped the drought or the drop in wool prices, but perhaps if I’d insisted he talk to me about it, we would have come up with a different solution than this mining lease.
    I don’t even know how much debt we’re in – Nick won’t ever tell me – but surely it can’t have been so bad that we couldn’t have worked through it, together?
    4. I wish I was more artistic. I wish I could create a piece of pottery, even one piece, that I could be really proud of. It’s taken me by surprise how much it matters to me. I only took that pottery course in Port Augusta to fill in the gaps between my station-stay guests. I was feeling so lonely out here, with Nick so distant, Ig at school and the girls living their own lives. But I loved it from the very first lesson. It felt so good to work with the clay, to learn how to make practical things like vases, and to be encouraged to try small sculptures too. And it felt like a sign, an omen of some