Those Brisbane Romantics, page 30
The bottle of antidepressants in her shirt dug into him. He pulled it out of her pocket, read the label and tossed it away.
“You don’t need those.”
They passed a farm where someone was ploughing.
“Ah,” Bill said, “the mysterious ritual of ploughing at night.” Cass dug him in the ribs with her elbow. “They’ll plough with their lights on,” he said, “ ’til the moon comes up.”
Tara pointed to the new moon rising above the horizon. “There’s the moon now.”
“That bloody moon,” Cass said. “I told you before it was always rising.”
Tara smiled. The moon was a ring of fine gold that threatened to imprison her, eerily drenching the stubble, lighting the way for the soft-eyed cattle grazing on the now-cool hillsides.
Cass stopped singing for a moment. “Night’s fallen.”
“Crash,” Bill laughed.
They went back to their singing.
Tara saw the night like a fallen warrior. “Do you think he will recover?” she asked.
“I doubt it.” Joe’s arms tightened around her ribs, and she shivered at the thought of what the coming night would bring.
The headlights of a car backing out from a homestead’s garage raked the distant hills like searchlights. For a few seconds, Tara was entranced. Who was the person driving? What was their life like? All these separate beings, their lives mysteriously intertwined. Interacting, doing, being. Like the dust motes she’d seen in the shaft of sunlight in the storeroom at Oakey.
Soon the road changed direction, and the moon was behind them. For the next fifty minutes of the drive into town, the moon followed them. Sometimes it fell into the waters of a creek they were fording. Sometimes it became entangled in the branches of a dead tree. But it was never far behind.
A star fell, streaking across the horizon ahead of them.
Tara savoured her happiness. She savoured the wind in her face and Cass and Bill singing. She savoured the last of her childhood.
END
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I have so many people to thank for this book that took so long to see the light of day. First and foremost is Norman Lonn, without whose help the first draft never could have been written. His help and encouragement was invaluable.
I’d also like to thank the people who read my manuscript in all its various stages over the years and gave useful comments: Carolyn David, Tara Sariban, Shaune Lafferty Webb, Tony Moore, Beverly Lang and Nathan Bransford.
To those on my mailing list who responded to my pleas for feedback on possible images for the cover, thank you. That feedback helped immensely. Thanks also to Joleene Naylor, who did the two covers for the cover-images feedback test.
Greg Gaffney rescued me when my old secondhand PC finally bit the dust, and held my hand through all my digital woes.
The State Library of Queensland and the Brisbane Supreme Court Library provided valuable research assistance, as did the Royal Historical Society of Queensland and the New Farm and Districts Historical Society.
Jake Howes of George Hartnett Metropolitan Funerals solved the mystery of the location of the funeral parlour in Adelaide Street.
Matthew Lambourne kept the moons accurate (few tides in this one), and Paul Smith kindly answered all my queries about digital images.
A big thank you to Allan Lloyd, who created a beautiful cover for the proof and helped immensely with publicity.
Last, but by no means least, I have to thank Dr Susan Geason, who said, “This is a lovely book, Dan. You must finish it.” And proceeded to go through the last four-bar-one drafts with me, beating what had been a rather recalcitrant novel into its final shape.
Thank you all.
Danielle de Valera
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Danielle de Valera is an award-winning Australian writer whose short stories have been published in such diverse places as Australasian Penthouse, Cutwater Literary Anthology and the Australian Women’s Weekly. With cowriter Louise Forster, she won the Emma Darcy Award for Romance Manuscript of the Year 2000. Her first novel MagnifiCat was published in 2013. This was followed by her collection of linked short stories, Dropping Out, which was shortlisted for the Woollahra Digital Literary Award in 2017. Those Brisbane Romantics is her second novel. An earlier draft was shortlisted for the Byron Bay Writers’ Festival Unpublished Manuscript Award and the UK’s University of Exeter’s Impress Prize.
For a more comprehensive bio, an interview and a complete list of her published works, see: smashwords.com/profile/view/DanielledeValera.
For the long genesis of the novel see: https://bit.ly/3aFrZ2Q.
Join her on Facebook at facebook.com/danielle.devalera.
To join her mailing list: contact her at: danielledevalera@gmail.com She’d be happy to welcome you and give you the outtakes from the novel (around three thousand words).
Lastly, leave a review: Finally, if you liked this novel, please consider leaving a review. Books live or die on their reviews. Writers might write, but it’s readers who have the power. Remember, it doesn’t have to be a long one.
Danielle de Valera, Those Brisbane Romantics
