Christmas at Remarkable Bay

By Victoria Purman

A standalone heartwarming novella celebrating the joy of Christmas from bestselling Australian author Victoria Purman.

Prickly Mara has hit a crossroads and is hoping a Christmas alone in idyllic Remarkable Bay will help. Police officer George is also alone for Christmas. Drawn together unwillingly, they try to stay out of each other's way. But Remarkable Bay is a small place...

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Australia
• Release date: Oct 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9781489297150

Victoria Purman

Victoria Purman is an Australian top ten and USA Today bestselling fiction author. Her most recent book, A Woman's Work, was an Australian bestseller, as were her novels The Nurses' War,The Women's Pages, The Land Girls and The Last of the Bonegilla Girls. Her earlier novel The Three Miss Allens was a USA Today bestseller. She is a regular guest at writers festivals, a mentor and workshop presenter and was a judge in the fiction category for the 2018 Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature and the 2022 ASA/HQ Commercial Fiction Prize for an unpublished manuscript.To find out more, visit Victoria's website, victoriapurman.com.You can also follow her on Facebook or Instagram (@victoriapurmanauthor) and Twitter (@VictoriaPurman)

Book preview

Chapter One

This was absolutely, definitely the perfect place.

A country town but with waves. Oh, yes. This would do nicely, thank you very much, world.

Mara Blumberg turned the key and her car’s engine purred to a stop. She opened the door, stepped out and breathed it in: salt, sea, fresh air. In front of her, there was ocean as far as the eye could see, an azure blue carpet rolled out right to the horizon, a million white caps dancing in the distance. The sandy beach of Remarkable Bay was below, down a set of sturdy wooden stairs set into the low cliffs, and it curved into the sand like a half moon. The wind was warm and as Mara breathed it in, it seemed to seep into every muscle, dissolving the tension she’d been carrying for months.

She wanted small and sleepy and serene and Remarkable Bay looked absolutely perfect. After what she had been through the past few months, she needed something quiet. She didn’t want the big, noisy, argumentative family Christmas that she’d endured for her thirty-five years. When she’d told her mother she was going away on her own, she had looked at her daughter as if she’d taken leave of her senses.

‘But it’s Christmas,’ her mother had implored. ‘How can you go away at Christmas?’

‘Don’t worry, Mum. You have two other children—and their children—to spoil rotten. You won’t miss me in the slightest.’

She just couldn’t do a loud family get-together this year. And she didn’t need Bali or the Gold Coast or Sydney or Fiji. She needed simple and peaceful and quiet so she could stop and think and have the clear space in her head to make some big decisions about her life. Her post-divorce life.

She turned from the spectacular sea view to check out the house she’d rented. For the next two weeks, until after New Year, it was all hers. It wasn’t anything fancy but she didn’t care. She’d found it on the website of the local real estate agent—‘Remarkable Rentals in Remarkable Bay’—and had snapped it up immediately. It wasn’t a beachside McMansion or anything like that. It was a simple brick home, circa 1970s, and it had two bedrooms, a living area with a big table that seated eight people, and a big deck out the front to take in the best of the view. She’d been secretly relieved when she discovered the place had a dishwasher—who wants to spend their much-needed holidays washing dishes, right?—but there weren’t any other mod cons she needed. She had a quick thought: a coffee maker didn’t technically qualify as a mod con, did it? That was an essential, like a toaster or hot running water or a hair straightener.

Mara unloaded her bags from the car and in half an hour she’d unpacked everything, hung up what needed hanging in a white laminate built-in robe in the main bedroom, packed the food she’d brought with her into the fridge, changed into her swimsuit and her thongs, slapped on some sunscreen and a hat, grabbed a towel and a book, and she was out the door.

It was December 23. The school year was well and truly over and her holiday was starting today. Right that minute, in fact, with a book and the beach and the ocean.

She hoped the sea breeze would clear her mind and help her relax enough so she could at least get some sleep while she was down there. She needed it. She hadn’t had a decent night’s sleep since the divorce papers had arrived twelve months before. She needed the kind of sleep that parents craved after they’d had babies. She had that black-bags-under-your-eyes kind of tiredness that afflicted mums and dads in the shell shock of those first weeks and months of parenthood. Not that she was a parent herself, but she’d seen it in her sisters’ faces after they’d had children. When she stared at herself in the mirror these days, she saw it there in her own eyes. Maybe one day she’d know that exquisite exhaustion of parenthood.

Now, it was about something else. Someone else. Abbie.

But all that could wait.

She stepped outside, locked the door and looked out to the horizon. She breathed in the fresh air and set off for the beach.

* * *

‘Merry Christmas to me. Merry Christmas to me. Merry Christmas, dear George. Merry Christmas to me.’

George Gray’s deep voice echoed around the plainly furnished bedroom. It wasn’t quite the same when you sang it to yourself to the tune of ‘Happy Birthday’, but it was all he had. He didn’t know the words to ‘O Tannenbaum’ or ‘Good King Wenceslas’—was it something about feasting on Stephen?—so ‘Happy Birthday’ would have to do.

He’d woken in a strange and uncomfortable bed to an unfamiliar sound: the low hum of waves crashing in the distance. Back in the city where he lived, the only low hum he heard was cars and trucks passing on the main road, which was only a few houses away. This was better, he thought as he threw his arms back over his head and listened. The sea air sure beat petrol fumes. He’d left the windows wide open overnight and the warm breeze wafting in over his bare chest was a nice way to wake up. Once upon a time, he’d woken up with the warmth of a woman’s body next to his, but he hadn’t had that pleasure for a while.

This wasn’t exactly the way George thought he’d be spending Christmas Day: in a house at the beach on his own with no one but a grumpy mutt for company. He was used to working right through the holiday season, handling DV cases and road accidents and assaults and drug overdoses. Yeah, Christmas was never quite so merry when you were a police officer. Twenty years on the force had taught him that Christmas and family reunions tended to bring out the worst in people. Being forced to play happy families was sometimes too much for those who couldn’t bear to be in the same room as their relatives on any other day of the year. Emotions were heightened, and when alcohol was involved and when people had already been driven apart by distrust and abuse and misunderstandings, a roast turkey and a trifle weren’t enough to make up for all those past hurts.

Merry freaking Christmas.

George considered himself lucky to have a functioning family he still liked quite a lot. And since he was on holidays, that’s where he’d imagined he’d be this morning—at his sister’s place for the traditional feast of turkey, prawns, roast veg, trifle; the whole box and dice. Shawna had taken over the family tradition when their mother died a few years before, and since there was only the two siblings, it was a small gathering. Shawna and her husband Paul and their kids saw Paul’s family on Christmas Eve, so Christmas Day had become the Gray family’s day. George’s role was to turn up with a couple of bottles of great South Australian wine, a huge box of Shawna’s favourite chocolates and his arms loaded with presents for the kids. He would play video games with his two nephews, Hugh and Darcy, while Shawna and Paul got everything organised. They would eat, drink a toast to their absent parents—during which Shawna always cried buckets—and then George would drag the boys into the living room to watch the first Star Wars movie—the 1977 version and still the best—and sit with one of them under each arm until they fell asleep, exhausted. It was their thing. Star Wars, every year.

There would be no Star Wars with Hugh and Darcy tonight.

This year, everything had been thrown up in the air.

He’d had a week’s notice that Karen’s dog-sitter had to pack up and leave—one of her parents had had a heart attack—so he’d volunteered to come down to Remarkable Bay to look after the mutt. Karen, his patrol partner, owner of the house and the mutt, was due to finish her stint in rehab just after Christmas, but she was heading from Adelaide Airport directly to her parents’ place to spend some quality time with her family before she headed home. She needed to be with her parents and her little brother, who’d been as worried about her as he’d been. Karen had put in the long stretch and was almost done. Two and a half months before, he’d put her on a plane with a sad and tender hug, telling her he’d take care of everything.

And if looking after her mutt for a week or so was what he had to do, then he would do it.

His patrol partner’s slow slide into oblivion had been hard to watch and even harder to bear, but he knew from experience that all he could do was support her and wait. Nothing good ever came from pushing someone to do something they weren’t ready for. Karen had managed to stay dry on the days she was at work—which was a minor miracle—but off duty, she’d sought solace in vodka. When he’d gone around to check on her, the day she admitted she needed help, he’d found her passed out on the kitchen floor. When the ambos had come to take her to hospital, he’d searched every nook and cranny in the place and had found empty bottles stashed everywhere: in the back of various kitchen cupboards; in the linen press shoved behind folded sheets and towels, for fuck’s sake. That had been the final straw. After that incident, she’d been forced to take sick leave from the force and had finally relented and admitted herself into rehab, some well-regarded place in Melbourne.

He hadn’t heard from her the whole time she’d been away, the woman he thought of as a little sister.

The partner he owed his life to.

George turned in bed and looked out the window to the cloudless Christmas Day sky above Remarkable Bay. His time with Shawna and Paul and the kids was a reminder that there were normal families out there, untouched by crisis and chaos. It was true what people said about cops, he thought. The boys and girls in blue were the experts in the worst kinds of human behaviour. In all its fucked-up variations, he’d seen it all.

That’s why he was missing Shawna and Paul and the kids on this day of all days.

He looked down at the mutt sleeping by the side of the double bed. He was in the spare bedroom, smaller than Karen’s and with only a double bed and a bedside table in it, but there was still a view. And even though the dog seemed to hate him, she insisted on being in the same room as him.

‘Hey, Fluffy.’ George propped himself up on one elbow and yawned.

The dog opened one eye. She really was a mutt: some kind of terrier-chihuahua mix with little legs and wispy fur all over her body. Knowing Karen as he did, it was no surprise she’d adopted a stray