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Her name was Tara, she had sweet-girl cheek

A Saturday in March 2001, around 6pm… Wearing a loose, white t-shirt, pale grey tracksuit paints and a tube taped down against her neck, Tara opens the front door to greet an older cousin. Her head is covered in a 2mm-long cap of hair. Her skin is tinged slightly orange from the many months of chemo treatment.

Tara smiles and her blue eyes sparkle as she gropes her cousin’s ample backside in mid-hug. She is beautiful, and still has plenty of grope in her.

She grins and laughs when introduced to her cousin’s tall boyfriend of six months. He comments with much amusement that cousins share a similar cackle laugh and dimpled chin. The cousins can’t help but cackle in response, edging each other’s cackle up higher and higher.

Together they walk down the suburban-wide hallway past a couple bedrooms and the loungeroom and into a large kitchen where the father of her child sits at the kitchen table. Daniel, holding their four-month baby girl, offers the kindest of smiles to both guests and invites them to sit down.

In the loungeroom the cousin holds the pretty baby girl for the first time – she smiles, coos and gives in to the beginnings of cravings for one of her own. Tara chides her older cousin with a wink and a little of her sweet-girl cheek.

Childbirth wasn’t easy for Tara. It was said that she let out an almighty holler and animal roar. Sometime later Daniel said he had a feeling that Tara knew that something was wrong even before she have birth to Georgia Isabella Faith Tara (Tara’s ‘gift’) on 17 November 2000.

Tara didn’t get to go home a few days later like most young mums. The doctors were quick to begin treatment for her leukaemia, which some months later required a bone marrow transplant from her older sister.

Stretched out, lying the full-length of the couch, Tara eyes her questioning cousin with slight suspicion. “So, how did you two meet?” the cousin asks from a crossed-legged position on the loungeroom floor. 

Tara sighs, and shows no intention of telling her story. Daniel smiles, and shows all intention of telling his story. “We knew each other for years before we got together,” he says while looking at Tara who seems to be smiling and frowning at the same time. 

“I gave her a lift home from university one weekend. We were driving along, listening to music, and Tara asked me to pull over to the side of the highway. We opened all of the car doors and turned the music up loud. We danced on the picnic table. A train, a truck and a van all went past, they all sounded horns.”

Tara smiles, and shows all intention of taking over his story. “I went out dancing one night and a friend put me on his shoulders and then dropped me on my head. I broke my neck and Dan would visit me in hospital. He was very persistent!”

The cousin remembers a few early courtship details from emails she received while she was in London. Tara’s near death-neck experience happened in early-1999. She said that Daniel “wooed” her “from afar” until she visited him in Sydney in May. By October the smitten couple had settled into an Adelaide home.

Tiring easily, Tara heads off to the bedroom for a mid-afternoon nap, a few hours later the group of four share a meal and then sit around the loungeroom coffee table to play a feisty game of UNO. The cousin, her boyfriend and Daniel also share a bottle of red wine. 

“You would get these little devil horns on your top lip after drinking red wine,” Daniel teases and flirts with his weary fiancé.

Mid-morning the next day the cousin and her boyfriend check out of their hotel room and head back to the house to bid their farewells.

The feeling of fear, foreboding and emptiness sits in the cousin’s stomach during the drive back to Tara’s house. The cousin numbly walks into the house, possibly greets and hugs Tara, Daniel and little baby Georgia, but finds that she is suddenly back in the car’s passenger seat readying to leave.

Daniel stands by the passenger door with baby Georgia in his arms bidding his own warm farewell, while Tara stays back by the car’s back-left tail light. The cousin looks back and waves to the still-standing Tara, then cries, and cries until well-beyond Adelaide's hills.

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