Hello from the Gillespies Read Online Free Page A

you.
    Angela stared at the screen for a long moment. Then she started a new letter, typing faster than she’d ever typed before.

CHAPTER TWO
    Hello from the Gillespies!
    Yes, it’s Angela back again. Can you believe a year has passed since I last wrote to you all? I hope you’ve had a great twelve months and are now looking forward to special family Christmas celebrations together.
    It’s been a terrible year for the Gillespies. Everything seems to have gone wrong for us.
    I’ll start with the children.
    Genevieve:
I’m worried she’s been away in America for too long, working in a fake TV world with fake TV people. She’s always loved to gossip and I’ve loved hearing her stories, but it’s gone beyond fun chitchat now. She’s become obsessed with celebrity news and is far too indiscreet about the people she works with. I’ve tried to warn her, but she just laughs it off, like she laughs everything off. She’s also started talking in a strange hybrid Australian-American drawl whenever she rings us (which isn’t often – she sends us most of her news via Facebook or Instamatic or whatever those internet things are called). She’s such a talented hairdresser, I’m not surprised that she’s found work with Hollywood film and TV stars, but I’m worried she’s got too swept up in all the gossip and glitter of it, and has lost sight of who she really is.
    She’s coming home for Christmas, for the first time in three years, but she can only stay for ten days. It was all the time she could get off, she said. Apparently most Americans have very short holidays. But she’s Australian, not American, and I wish she would come back home for good. Not necessarily to live here on the station with us, but back in the same country again. There’s enough TV and film work in Australia for her these days, isn’t there? Even up here, miles from anywhere – we’re always hearing about film and TV crews staying in Hawker, working on this horror film or that end-of-the-world drama. (It is very beautiful around here, but very empty, hardly a house or a telegraph pole for kilometres, a film-maker’s dream.) But I can’t beg Genevieve to come home, can I? I don’t want to be the kind of mother who puts pressure on her children, especially one as spirited and independent as Genevieve. Even if it’s what I really want and what I think she needs.
    Angela stopped there, feeling oddly breathless but also strangely exhilarated. Joan was right. It felt so good to let all her troubles spill out like this. What was the word for it? Liberating? That was it. She felt liberated. She started typing again, her fingers flying across the keyboard.
    Victoria:
I’m worried about her too. I’d hoped my mother’s intuition was wrong, but then Genevieve (accidentally? On purpose?) let a few details slip and I knew for sure. Victoria and the (very well-known) radio announcer she worked with as a producer in Sydney have been having an affair. That married, very well-known radio announcer. That married, very well-known radio announcer who was in the papers for all the wrong reasons last month. Those of you in Australia probably heard or read about it. Victoria always used to tell me his bad behaviour was just an act for the ratings, that he was a complete softie underneath, but I’ve always worried she’s a bit naive, especially coming from a country radio-station background and not really knowing how big-city media types like him operate. And the awful thing is I was right. Look at the trouble he left her in after that incident in the studio. It’s so unfair; none of it was her fault. He was the one who came into work (drunk and more than drunk, from what Victoria told me – yes, cocaine too) after a big night out on the town, ranting and raving like a lunatic, locking her out of the studio when she went to get him coffee and taking to the airwaves throwing libellous insults at everyone you can think of – our politicians, sports people,