O, Fortuna

Chapter 12

The birds in the trees were a-twittering and squawking long before the sun rose in the now-cloudless sky but Liam had beaten them all to the punch by constantly waking up throughout the night and finally, around 4:30, decided to get out of bed for the day. He had plenty to do over the coming week, that much was certain and while early mornings had been part and parcel of life on Faridah as he grew up and then life in the RAAF had required many a dawn start before a long day, not getting a decent night's sleep ahead of it all did not bode well for his mood.

He detested having to think too much about his life and having spent so much of the early hours doing so would not sit easily alongside his fatigue. It was not Grace's fault that she was in his life but her arrival had jolted so many thoughts loose in Liam's head, the sort he normally liked to file under trivial or unnecessarily complicating, it was difficult not to resent her a little bit. He had also not expected he would like her, at all, never mind quickly and that definitely came under the heading of unnecessarily complicating. He had grown so used to being indifferent to the opposite sex, it was confusing when they showed any interest him...Grace seemed very interested and Liam had wracked his brain at least half the night trying to figure out why.

He bicycled down to Monteny, hoping to clear his head, via one of the property's fire tracks, a Saturday ritual that he had maintained during his youth. Back then, Friday evenings had meant getting his weekly allowance and the following morning, the ride to go pick up his standing order of magazines from newsagency which had been, all those years ago, a backpack full of automotive and aviation magazines to lug up to the property. These days, the burning desire for printed matter had been supplanted by access to the internet and a casual flick-through and occasional purchase in the larger newsagent selections in Nambour or Brisbane. But that Saturday ritual had been reborn when he had been discharged from the RAAF and though it might have only been for the newspapers, he could catch up with a few of the other locals who, like him, were required to make the most of daylight hours and could not stop for idle chitchat.

The early hour was also a good way to avoid the attention of the more audacious of the women who lived in the area. Liam didn't think himself as a particularly attractive specimen of his sex but, somehow, his being single, in possession of two arms, two legs and a penis had made him fair game to tittle-tattle and an object of greatly unwanted attentions of the single (and attached) women (and, in the last few years, men also) of Monteny. He had noticed the first time he had come home on leave, as if the months away in training had dramatically transformed him, the girls and women who had known and ignored him all his life suddenly found great need to cross the street to speak to him or accost him for his opinion on some ridiculous bloody matter of fashion or celebrity development.

He had been very sensible, at the time, not to cause too much offense when he kindly declined the more overt advances that had come his way and it all might have been much easier to ignore had his sister, June and Rosa not jumped on the bandwagon or, more to the point, started offering him up like he was a contestant on some demented reality television show, bachelor wants a wife to follow him to his permanent postings across the country, cook his meals, have his children. If none of them had figured out for themselves that such a life would utter shit for all parties but him, away so often, even when he was at home, Liam had made it quite clear to all his kinswomen that if they did not desist in their efforts of trying to fix him up with every eligible female in the area, he wouldn't come home at all.

Deanna had challenged that, bringing Will's younger sister Jen to Faridah to a New Year's Eve bash, a gorgeous 20-year old with blue eyes, blonde hair and alluring lines comparable to that of an E-Type Jaguar. Liam had suspected very early on in his acquaintance with Jen that he would far rather be dealing with dodgy British electrical systems and crippling his personal finances with the need for spare parts and insurance for such auto-exotica than dealing with the precocious spoilt little shit that was Will's little sister, an allegory and opinion that did not sit well with Deanna when Liam told her why he wouldn't be going there. So much so, his sister did not talk to him for six months, having just gotten engaged to Will and with such tension back home, Liam decided to actually go on holiday when leave subsequently came to him and then 18 months later, he was deployed to Afghanistan.