The Shadow House(22)

The vibe was extremely friendly; I waved and said hello to the few people I’d already met: Jenny; Paul and Simon and their dog, Al; the two artsy women, the surfy family of five, and the retirees I’d met with Kit my first day. Names went in one ear and out the other, but no one seemed to mind. In fact, I was surprised how much effort people made to ensure I was included. I was given a trowel and a pair of gloves, and soon I was kneeling in the dirt, elbow deep in mulch and having a surprisingly nice time.

And though there were no twinkly lights or vine arbours, the greenhouse turned out to be the perfect place for an alfresco supper. The setting sun provided a honey-gold glow, and everywhere I looked there were flowers: a snowy white delphinium in with the radishes. A perfect lily, sprouting between the peas. Roses, lisianthus and gloriously full dahlias, all growing unexpectedly among the herbs and veggies. The advantage of building on a former flower farm, I supposed.

When Kara got bored of sitting in the pram, I pulled her out and plopped her at my feet, where she immediately set about trying to shovel as much soil into her mouth as possible. ‘No, don’t eat that!’ I cried, scooping her away from a vegetable patch mulched, apparently, with chicken poo. She gazed up at me, gurgling with contentment. Ollie, however, was not as easily convinced. He stood next to me with his arms folded, refusing to join in.

‘Come on,’ I said, selecting a trowel. ‘It’s only mud.’

‘I am not kneeling down in that,’ he hissed.

‘Oliver,’ I said, standing up. ‘Can you please stop being such a—’

‘Sorry to interrupt,’ said Kit at my shoulder. There was a teenager standing next to him; a girl with blue hair and square-rimmed glasses. ‘Just wanted to introduce you to someone. This is Violet. Violet, this is Alex and Oliver.’

Ollie and I immediately dropped our battle stances. ‘Hey,’ Ollie said, sticking out his hand for the girl to shake and I baulked. His grin was sort of … wolfish. When had he started to look at girls like that?

Violet, it turned out, was the older daughter of Layla, the single mum who’d dropped round with a carrot cake on our first afternoon. She was around Ollie’s age, maybe a little older (fifteen or sixteen at a guess, but it was hard to tell with girls) and wore a glittering stud in her right nostril. Behind her glasses, black kohl lines flicked from the corner of each eye. She was, I thought with mild dismay, extremely cool.

‘A few of us are hanging out over there if you want to join us,’ she said, nodding to a spot on the road where teens were riding bikes and skateboards. ‘Unless’ – she shot a pained look at the vegetables – ‘you’d rather stay here?’

‘Oh, no,’ said Ollie, quickly. ‘Nope. Definitely not. I’ll come.’ And off he went.

Layla herself then appeared and reintroduced herself. Like me, she was new to Pine Ridge and had recently separated from her partner; she and her two girls were also on the collaborative living list and looking to buy land. ‘Violet has really struggled with the move,’ she confided, kneeling down in the dirt and helping me discourage Kara from eating more poo. ‘But she’s at that age. You know, hates me, hates everything. We fight roughly 200 per cent of the time.’

‘Thank god,’ I said. ‘I thought it was just me.’

‘Believe me, it’s not. Living here is helping, though. And luckily my younger daughter isn’t quite so fiery.’ She nodded at a meek-looking girl with a sharp fringe sitting on a plastic crate a short distance away, her head in a book. ‘Isn’t it funny how two people can be raised in exactly the same way but turn out so different? Violet is a beast, but Amy is so shy, so sensitive. It’s all I can do to get her to say hello to anyone.’ She sat up on her haunches. ‘Hey, sweetheart,’ she called. ‘Wouldn’t you rather go on up to the road and hang out with the other kids?’

Amy shrugged, then went back to her book.

Layla shook her head indulgently. ‘Bless her, she’s still my baby. Not literally, thank Christ! I couldn’t handle an actual baby right now, not on top of teenager mayhem. I don’t know how you’re doing it.’

I made a big mental note to make friends with this woman.

‘You guys,’ Layla called to a group digging for potatoes. ‘Come and meet Alex, she just moved in.’

I met an environmental scientist from Iceland, a botanist from Cairns and an architect from Melbourne. I talked to couples who’d fancied a sea change, singles who wanted to live ‘alone but together’. Kids were pointed out and names were thrown around. Jesse. Naz. Remy. Will. Phoebe. Felix. Taylor. I looked for the kid on the bike who’d told me the spooky witch story but couldn’t see him; there were just too many people. Everyone smiled and waved. Welcome, welcome, welcome.

Best of all, I discovered parents just like me. Dads with bags under their eyes, mums with egg on their shirts. Hallelujah. Two of these mums, Shannon and Mariko, had absorbed Layla into their regular meet-ups for coffee or lunch while their kids ran around, and right away I knew that they were my kind of girls. They demonstrated their zero interest in small talk by skipping right over it and instead diving happily into haemorrhoids, sleep deprivation and postnatal hair loss. When they invited me to join them at Layla’s place for their next ‘mum hang’, I accepted so fast it made them laugh.

There were a few people who weren’t so friendly – which, I supposed, was to be expected for a community of that size. There were always one or two rotten apples. One resident in particular seemed particularly stand-offish, a dark-haired woman called Maggie whose face was dominated by horsey teeth, a square jaw and a permanent frown. Instead of greeting me warmly like the others, Maggie said a terse hello then beat a hasty retreat as if I might be carrying something contagious. Never mind, I thought, as I was introduced to a doctor from the Northern Beaches. You can’t please everyone.