OVER THE SEA AND FAR AWAY
Linda and Rowena have had a passionate one night stand but can this ever go further given the fact that Rowena is still very much a Christian? Can she have a foot in both camps or will she have to give something up? She's not the only one facing choices though, Linda is facing up to her own inner demons but a chance meeting with another woman might just change the dynamic. I'm not sure if there are more stories with these two characters but I'm not closing the door yet. There will be a series about Petra though.
Author's note: I would like to thank all of my readers for their support in 2018, your comments have helped make me a better writer and I wish you all the best for 2019. I won't be around for the next two weeks as I'm off to Denmark and Sweden but I will be back soon.
Cheers, Shaima.
*****
Bridget and I are polar opposites and when we were younger we fought like wildcats, much of it had to do with the two year difference. I was constantly wanting to be involved with her friends and she was trying to be cool in front of her friends. It was only when she moved to New Zealand that we actually drew closer together, which is an odd thing to say but there you have it. Bridget initially went there for summer work at a hotel and ended up with the head barman who was doing a course in management in his spare time. Daniel and Bridget perfectly complement each other in that way, they're both highly organised and competent managerial types. They run a bed and breakfast hotel outside of the town centre but Daniel is part owner of a bakery and she runs her own accountancy business from home.
Only Bridget could manage to do that but she's very much a boots and all woman, she's either right into it or not interested at all, she has two speeds, pedal to the metal or a standstill. In that way she's probably more like Rowena because she's constantly having to keep up appearances, she has a very active lifestyle and is a keen hiker and cyclist. She's also very much into DIY and if something breaks down she's more likely to try and fix it before replacing it. I remember one time an electric kettle broke down and she actually hooked up an old coat hanger to use as a switch, it was only when I turned up that she gave in to her husband's nagging and bought a new kettle.
Another thing that drew us together was our mutual distrust of mum. I mean don't get me wrong, she is our mother but mum lives interstate and is very involved with her new husband, she's onto man number four and that's just the ones she's married. We're from the first marriage and whilst she is maternal it kind of self destructs whenever she decides to come visit because once she's in your house she has to organise not just your house but your life. Thus the fact she'd decided not to come to her oldest daughter's birthday party was a relief.
"Imagine if she came over, I had a minor heart attack when she said she was mulling it over but then she came back a few days later and said she couldn't make it."
"Probably too busy with Max."
When it comes to homosexuality Bridget is quite supportive, she once admitted she was actually relieved when I came out because it meant there was no chance I would get involved with any of her boyfriends and she was quite sexually active even before she moved to New Zealand. Because she's older than me I tend to bounce ideas off her but even so I was still a little reluctant to broach the curious case of my 'Christian' girlfriend but she must have read it in my eyes because as we drove away from the airport she asked who I was with now.
"I'm not with anyone, kind of."
"Uh huh," her eyes shifted, "so, who is she? You haven't looked like that since Wendy."
I winced at the mention of my ex girlfriend and managed to mumble something about it being a bit complicated.
"Why? Is she with someone?"
"Um no, she's um, she's Christian."
"Whoa," her eyes widened, "you never did things by halves. So is she coming out or staying in her closet?"
"The second I think, which is why it's complicated," I fiddled with my phone, "we've agreed to take a step back for a week and see how things develop."
Bridget didn't say anything for a minute or so.
"Well, I just hope you're not getting your hopes up, that's all. I mean I don't know any bible bashers but from what I've heard about them over the years they tend to be a little homophobic. You might have unlocked something she wanted to keep locked up, so tread carefully."
As if she needed to tell me that! Nevertheless, I had a little over a week because I'd flown out on the Sunday afternoon and wouldn't be flying back until Monday night, and because of the way my employee contract worked I'd have the Tuesday off as well. So my initial plan was to let things go until Monday and try to meet up with Rowena on Monday night or even Tuesday but I'd forgotten about my social media feed. I'm a keen Instagrammer, I'm forever posting stuff even when I think it's just trivial shit. Admittedly it has a lot to do with the fact that a lot of my pictures are on the phone so it's easy to upload stuff when I'm just sitting around.
Thus, being in Queenstown just made it all the more urgent. As I mentioned earlier, both Bridget and her husband lead busy lives and so I spent a lot of time walking around looking for things to photograph and that's pretty easy to do there because of the spectacular views. The most talked about feature is the mountain range called the Remarkables, easy to remember and aptly named because they are a remarkable sight and it makes a nice change from suburban Wantirna, but on this visit I added something extra thanks to Rowena's fashion influence. I took pictures of clothes, some of which I bought and others were just shots of clothes I like.
I gained a few new followers and a lot of likes but one of the people who responded with her own Instagram fashion pictures was Rowena. Most of the pictures she took were of her own clothes but there were some I knew were taken at nearby Eastland. I paid more attention to her likes and posts than to others simply because of our one night stand before I flew to New Zealand. She hadn't seen me off at the airport because she had to go home but when I sent her a text telling her I'd landed she did reply with a thumbs up icon.
However we hadn't spoken about what happened because neither of us knew exactly what to say, she'd crossed a line and I'd willingly gone with her. As to whether she could stay on the other side and still maintain her Christian faith was very much up in the air and I guess that's what was on my mind the most. It might sound strange that as an out there lesbian I'd be concerned about her faith but over the last few weeks I'd come to both admire and fear that part of her because she was quite strong about it all. This wasn't some kind of mantra that she quoted over and over to keep the devils at bay, she actually thought about her faith and could disagree with people using bible verses to justify homophobia, anti-feminism or a slavish adherence to Israel. To put it bluntly, she was the kind of Christian who made other Christians seem fake. If you were hungry she'd feed you, if you were thirsty she'd give you something to drink, and if you were cold she'd give you one of her many coats.
Thus, it goes without saying that the last thing I wanted to do was engineer some kind of personal crisis that might have unintended consequences. What I didn't realise is that everything we do is like ripples in a pond, we may not always see the final effects of our actions but in this case I was a witness and an integral part of another love story.
It began innocently enough when Bridget introduced me to the woman who'd invested a sum of money in their bed and breakfast hotel. Alicia is part Maori on her mother's side, she has the darker pigmentation but distinctly Caucasian features. It's only when you see pictures of her maternal grandmother that you can see the Maori ethnicity.
Alicia lives in Wellington and back then she was quite happily single, having ended her fifteen year marriage some five years ago. Emerging from the darkness of an unhappy marriage she reinvented herself when she threw herself into a university course and did a course in app development. This led her to develop an app specifically for the tourist industry that had taken off in a big way, which led her to diversify some of her profits into local businesses and Bridget's bed and breakfast was the perfect opportunity for her and Bridget.
I had little knowledge of that however when I snapped a selfie with Alicia that it would echo across the ditch to Melbourne and in particular, Petra. The first I knew of it was when Petra became one of my newest subscribers and her comment caused me to raise an eyebrow.
Petra: Tell Alicia I said hello.
As it happened, Alicia was sitting on the other side of the table and when I showed her the comment she too raised an eyebrow.
"My God, it's been years."
"You know Petra?"
"You could say that," she murmured, "we did a course in university when I was in Melbourne."
"What was the course?"
"Theology," she propped on her palm, "believe it not, I've got a doctorate in divinity, not that it could save my marriage and to be honest the church and I parted company long before I left my husband."
"He wasn't abusive, was he?"
"Rob was never violent, thank God, but he had real problems with intimacy and relating to women in general. I blame his mother for raising an only child in a one parent family, when he married me he tended to hold me up against the standard of his mother and I could never measure up."
