In this story I take some of the minor characters from Ellen's Tale, (Penny, Robyn, Helen, and Alana) and go back to the year 2000 to tell the story of Penny and Robyn. It's set in Melbourne and the leafy suburbs of Mount Dandenong and Kilsyth. I have also brought back the characters from Crossing Over and Melanie's Story, simply because their story was set in the same part of the city and in the same time frame.
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Kilsyth is a suburb on the eastern suburbs of Melbourne, named after Kilsyth in Scotland it is bordered by Montrose, Croydon and Bayswater North. For years it was a semi rural suburb and some of that laid back sleepy charm still exists in its tree-lined streets and main roads but with constant waves of immigration and gentrification of the suburbs Kilsyth has evolved. The people are a mix of middle class professionals, working class families and students, etc. Most choose to shop in the bigger complexes at Eastland or Knox City but some locals use the smaller Kilsyth Shopping centre and many of them drove past the minuscule strip mall in the rather grandiosely named Collins Place. The shopping centre at Collins Place consists of a dozen shops run by sole traders like the hair salon or the ubiquitous milk bar that sells everything from milk to cigarettes but it has no bottle shop and thus most people drive past it to the larger shopping centre just down the road.
Nevertheless, it was in Collins Place that some of the atmosphere of Old Kilsyth still remained. Many shops could change hands and the kind of merchandise on offer frequently and yet there was a spirit of camaraderie that still remained. One of the newest occupants of a former real estate office was Penny Jones, who had relocated from her father's law firm in the city in the summer of 1995. to the outer suburbs to start her own family law firm in Collins Place. When someone from the local paper questioned Ms Jones why a twenty four year old lawyer with scarcely more than eighteen months practising law had suddenly upped sticks and set up her own practice her reply soon became her mantra.
"Because nobody said I couldn't."
Penny attracted attention instantly, especially amongst the men who took note of her long fair hair that was usually worn loose and her slim figure. She had a long angular-shaped face and blue eyes that seemed to regard the rest of the world with bemused curiosity. Her dress sense could be described as corporate chic, silk blouses and finely cut suits, but even when she dressed casually, she could still look good and no one had ever seen her in tracksuit pants. Nevertheless, despite her looks, Penny didn't appear to have a partner and if she did then she kept him out of sight and out of mind, she seemed more focused on starting her new practice and thus people assumed she was a career professional.
Despite her brave front though, few thought she would last long until fate and the ego of a local councillor clashed. Like most bad ideas, it had started as a 'good' idea. Collins Place runs between two major arterial roads, Mt Dandenong Road and Durham Road. The two roads meet not far from Collins Place with a small patch of grassland and shrubs separating the side street from two dual lane roads. When a recently elected councillor stated his intention to pave over the grass and put in a parking lot there was a hue and cry from the local traders who still wanted to retain the on-street parking. They liked their bit of grassland but it was a case of David against Goliath until their newest resident took on the case pro bono and helped organise a petition.
Even then, the Council had been confident. She was young and ambitious but she was also just a new kid on the block. What the hell could an ex private school girl from Camberwell do when going against a fifty eight year old attorney? Frank Cotton was so confident he'd even booked a local photographer to take his victory picture when he came out of the court. An unnamed source even claimed he'd taken out a private wager with someone within the council for an undisclosed sum of money that he'd win the case hands down.
Instead it turned out to the most embarrassing moment of his long and illustrious career when the vivacious blonde shredded his arguments in court so precisely that the judge interrupted Cotton's carefully crafted rebuttal to ask if he would like to withdraw from the case before he was served a healthy dose of humble pie. He stubbornly refused, thinking his experience would win through and an hour later he walked out of court but sent his minions ahead to shoo away the photographer, who then changed sides and took her picture instead.
The local Leader newspaper carried the story of Penny's triumph with a picture and the rather corny,
Beauty Trumps Brains. Parkland Saved
and they even included her reworked quote,
because nobody said she couldn't... save our parkland.
Penny had winced at the article because it had been brains that triumphed over smug egos and the old boy network, but her place in the community had been established. She lived on top of Mount Dandenong in a rustic old house overlooking the city of Melbourne but even her neighbours had never seen anyone staying the night except for family. It seemed that whilst her professional life was known, her personal life was a mystery yet to be unravelled. She went out on dates with men and women but no one could point to any of her dates and state that this particular person was in a relationship with Kilsyth's newest local hero. However by the year 2000, life had settled into something of a routine. She still made the papers now and then.
Two years ago, the local Leader paper had run an advertorial entitled
Women Who Talk About...
The advertorial went on to state that Women Who Talk was a new organisation set up to encourage women to talk about sex, sexual orientation, bedroom etiquette, relationship issues and other related matters. Once again Penny's picture was featured along with her quote underneath.
Nobody Said I Couldn't.
Underneath the quote was her age, 27. It was the only newspaper article about herself that Penny had permitted to be mounted in a frame in the reception area.
WWT had grown slowly but surely into a network of local women organised into autonomous chapters of between fifteen to twenty women. Penny's motive behind starting the group seemed almost counter intuitive. She wanted to empower women to save their marriages before it was too late because the only winners in a divorce court were the lawyers. It merely added another layer of mystery to the enigma that was Penny Jones.
She had five other staff members who shared the open plan office space with her. Lisa, Margaret, Charlott, Anne and Helen. The first three were lawyers whilst Anne and Helen shared the legal secretary duties between them. Paradoxically, she'd never actively sought only female staff for her firm, it was just that she attracted women to herself by virtue of her confident and altruistic nature. Penny was definitely the kind of boss who rewarded her employees and remained faithful to them. However that never evolved into romantic liaisons with any of her staff.
Penny Jones considered herself a competent lawyer with a certain degree of prescience that enabled her to predict the way people would react under different circumstances and most of the time she was proved correct. She had a sharp legal mind and an even sharper tongue when going up against other lawyers in court and yet despite numerous offers from male members of the bar she'd turned down every man who ever asked her out. It had begun to earn her the title the Ice Queen and by the end of the second Millennium there were even some women who had begun to question her sexual orientation but her personal life remained off limits. What no one doubted was her ability to detect the shift in the wind that enabled her to win more than her fair share of cases.
Her ability to predict the way people might react or move was also a regular game played by her staff on a regular occasion. The game was called Where the hell? Whenever a stranger pulled into one of the spaces outside the shops you had to guess which shop they were going to visit or if they were just consulting their street directory. Those who guessed incorrectly put a dollar into the wine carafe on Penny's desk and at the end of the month someone went out to buy a bottle of wine or two for their after work drinks the last Friday of every month.
Thus it was that when a white Toyota Corolla pulled up outside the hair salon, Helen turned to look at the young blonde woman getting out of the car. It wasn't surprising she'd noticed her first. The thirty five year old was well known for her high sex drive which consisted of one night stands and brief flings, the latter was now her preferred sexual preference. Helen also had a preference for men's fashions, trouser suits and shirts and indeed from the back she could be mistaken for a man due to her short brown hair and wedge-shaped figure.
"Hair appointment," Helen swivelled in her seat.
Penny looked up from the papers in front of her and noticed the woman for the first time. She was wearing a brown, three-quarter length A-line skirt and a matching tailored jacket. Her blonde hair fell past her shoulderblades in cascading waves and both of them noticed her hourglass figure but didn't pass comment on it. She was in front of the driver's side window flicking at her hair and examining herself. She then glanced to her right at Moira's Hair and Nails salon, but a moment later the woman put her handbag on the roof and opening the back door, bent over to grab something from the back seat.
"What the hell's in the back seat?" Penny mused.
"A child?"
"I was looking at her arse not the inside of the car," Helen conceded.
Lisa stepped into the office at that point and the petite blonde raised an eyebrow as she saw both of them staring out the window and so she moved to the window and glanced out at the woman.
