The Baghdad Hotel

Pretty soon the couple were seeing each other every second night. “I wasn’t driving at the time so I relied on Narelle to come and get me,” Jason recalls. “Because we lived across town from each other it was a 40-minute trip.”

“He’d ring up late at night and say, ‘Fancy ice-cream?’ so I’d change out of my pyjamas and go get him,” Narelle smiles.

Despite late-night romantic outings like these, Narelle’s dreams of marriage remained exactly that – dreams. “The first birthday I had after we started going out, I was sure Jason was going to give me an engagement ring; the present was the right size and everything, but it was a gold bracelet. I was so disappointed.” “You could see it on her face – it just fell,” Jason recalls. “I actually said, ‘What did you expect? A ring? Well, you’ll be waiting a while; I love you but I just don’t believe in marriage’.”

Some women might have given up but not Narelle. Destiny had revealed its hand to her – if not yet to Jason – and she was not going to fold and risk losing everything. She knew he would eventually realise they would make the perfect husband and wife team so she agreed to move in with him in the meantime. The couple found a flat in Northcote and life glided happily on.

A few years later they were celebrating the anniversary of their meeting by spending New Year’s Eve 1997 at a swanky hotel in the centre of Melbourne when the subject of having children came up. Both expressed a deep desire to be parents, and that’s when Narelle played her trump card. “I said well, he’d better find someone else to have children with because I wasn’t ever going to have them out of wedlock,” she smiles. Realising there was no-one he would rather raise a family with, Jason got down on bended knee and proposed then and there.

“I called my mum Lyndall as soon as it was light,” Narelle recalls. “And she said, ‘I bet you asked him!’ But I didn’t have to – he finally understood he couldn’t live without me.” But it was the reaction of Jason’s mum Anna that said the most about the profound effect Narelle had had on her son. “Mum was delighted of course,” Jason remembers. “But she was really surprised too. She thought I’d never settle down with anybody; I just wasn’t that kind of guy – until I met Narelle.”

2345   |  Single page