“Christ,” he muttered to himself.
As if he needed more signs that his return to Melbourne was doomed. He stared up at the departures screen above his head. There was a flight to London in two hours. He could buy a return ticket right here and now, go back to the clean streets and corporate camaraderie he’d come from. Only…his apartment had been sold and his job transferred. He’d taken his nice girlfriend, Amy out for dinner and told her he was sorry but their relationship needed to end. She merely smiled and said ‘It’s probably for the best. We’re hardly Harry and Meghan, are we?’
No, they weren’t. Nothing about his life in London had that kind of passionate energy, which was why he’d moved back to this hot, unruly country where everyone made fun of his accent and called football ‘soccer’ and rugby ‘football’, and AFL ‘football’ as well.
He exhaled, trying to relieve as much pent-up stress as possible before heading to baggage claim.
Twenty minutes later he was in a taxi, speeding toward his new address.
“New in town?” the cabbie asked.
“In a way.”
“Which means…?”
Scott stared at the driver in the rear-vision mirror. He had a thick black moustache and smelled of cigarettes. He looked like an actor you’d hire to play a cabbie in a soap opera. “I used to live in Melbourne when I was a child. Now I’ve come back.”
“Just visiting? Or is it permanent?”
A very good question. “We’ll see. I’m fond of London.”
The cabbie smirked and Scott knew it was either his accent or his use of the word ‘fond’ that had the guy grinning. When he was eighteen, his British enunciations had been present only in words like ‘dancing’ and ‘castle’ but within a week at Cambridge, he’d been speaking with his mother’s accent—as though the past decade in Australia had been no more than a summer holiday.
“Do you have family around here?”
“No,” Scott said automatically, because it felt true. His father was here—from here, but he hadn’t seen him in years. Three times since his mother’s death, to be precise. Whatever his reasons for coming back to Melbourne, it hadn’t been to reconnect with Greg Sanderson who’d so foolishly dragged him and his mother here when Scott was eight. Depositing them both in that big empty house next to the DaSilvas’.
His father hadn’t done his research. If he had, he’d have moved them anywhere else on earth. He hated the DaSilva family from day one. Hated that their patriarch had long hair and was covered in tattoos, hated that their matriarch fled a mere week after they arrived. He hated that the three daughters were loud and happy and swore so regularly, his mother took to wearing headphones whenever she went in the backyard.
But if he’d known the truth—that the eldest DaSilva girl was going to utterly reshape his son so no woman would ever provoke such a reaction in him ever again—Scott imagined his father would have gone ahead and burned the DaSilvas’ house down, the way he threatened when Scott was a kid.
Samantha DaSilva, he thought, rolling the hills and rivers of the name around his head.I did not come home to see Samantha DaSilva.
The cabbie swerved hard into the right hand lane. “What made you come back to Melbourne?”
Scott wondered if he could read minds. “I don’t know. I turned twenty-eight and I realised I’d been doing the same job for seven years and my girlfriend wanted me to marry her and…”
“Had to run away, ey, mate?”
That was the easiest explanation. That was what everyone heard when he said he was moving back to Melbourne, anyway, but it never felt true. He wasn’t afraid of roots, he saw himself getting married and having children, he just couldn’t imagine the house or wedding. It was always fuzzy, like the picture on old black and white TV. After his twenty-eighth birthday, a quiet mania took over him, a buzzing restlessness no workout, whiskey nor wank could cure. He fought it. God, he fought it, but after six months, he knew he’d have to change or become one of those arseholes you found propping up bars the world over, trying to drink away their bitterness. He’d taken a holiday by himself, but as he wandered the streets of Barcelona, all he could think about was Melbourne. Once struck, the idea refused to leave and after a month of fighting, he’d decided to make his plans.
“You got a job lined up down here?”
Scott wondered if he was about to be offered some cash-in-hand work. “Yeah, I’ve transferred from my company in London.”
“What company would that be?”
“Hydrus. Banking.”
“Ah,” the cabbie said. “You know what I reckon about banking?”
The conversation took him all the way to his new South Melbourne apartment. He paid the driver, got out of the cab and extracted his luggage from the boot, intent on nothing but a cup of tea and sleep.
“Scott.”
The hair on the back of his neck stood up. It couldn’t be… No, if he ignored it, he’d be fine. He was tired, he was very tired.
“Scott, are you gonna turn around or what?”