Charlie rolled his eyes.‘Cos he’s dead!’
‘Charlie!’Sophie said.Recently she’d noticed he was lacking in the empathy department.Was it normal or something to worry about?She wasn’t sure.
‘Well he is!’
‘Where’d you hear that, mate?’Ryan asked.
‘Leo Berry told me.We were playing Minecraft.I said see you at school, and he wrote back that his pop died so he’s not going to school today.’
‘How awful.’Sophie shook her head as she repositioned the checked fabric.Rob Foley must have only been about sixty.‘So young.’
Jasmine looked up, frowning.‘Young?’Sixty must seem ancient to a ten-year-old.
‘Too young to die, I mean.’Sophie sighed and put poor Doctor Foley out of her mind.‘We need to get going.Get your lunch boxes and go do your teeth.’
They filed out.
‘You need to find your library books, Harvey,’ she called after him.‘One was calledCops and Robbers, and the other one was about motorbikes.Jaz, can you help him look, please?’She clicked her tongue at the sight of Charlie’s lunch box, still sitting on the bench.‘Charlie!Your lunch box!’
He returned with a sheepish smile.As she passed it to him, a sharp pain spasmed in her wrist.He thanked her, oblivious, and disappeared.She grimaced, holding her wrist gently with the other hand.It had been three days since the incident with the bar stool but it still hurt when she turned her hand a particular way.She glanced over at Ryan who was watching her.
When the pain subsided, she exhaled and picked up the iron again.Sensing Ryan’s close presence, she looked up to see him standing in front of her.He reached for her hand and drew her wrist to his lips, gently kissing the sore spot.
‘D’you think Nel Foley will come back for the funeral?’he murmured, his face so close she could smell the earthy protein powder on his warm breath.
‘Maybe.I guess so,’ she said.He held her gaze.‘What do you think?’she added.He liked her to be unsure.She passed him the shirt and glanced at the clock again.He’d be late if he kept talking.
He rubbed his chin.‘I reckon she will.’He started to go, but then turned back, brushing a blonde lock from her face and tucking it behind her ear.‘It’s all ancient history,’ he whispered.‘We’ve got nothing to be worried about.’
Chapter 3
It was still dark when Nel tossed her suitcase in the boot, strapped her surfboard to the roof racks and left the sprawling suburbs of Sydney, following the Princes Highway south through one quaint town after another, stopping only for a tasteless flat white from the Maccas at Nowra.She played true crime podcasts to pass the time, but whole episodes started and finished without her hearing a thing.
A strange cocktail of emotions churned inside her.Disbelief that her father was gone.Dread about returning to Carrinya.But there was something else too … curiosity perhaps?Anticipation?She was impatient to get there and get it over with.
Four hours after leaving Sydney, she emerged from a towering corridor of eucalypts to open farmland where cattle grazed behind barbed-wire fences.She was getting close now.Up ahead, the sky hung low and dark like a bruise.
Soon the farms gave way to weatherboard cottages side by side, the outskirts of the beachside town she’d left when she finished school and hadn’t visited since.
CARRINYA, JEWEL OF THE OPAL COAST!a sign announced, POPULATION 3718.To her left, the caravan park stretched along the lagoon.In the summer months, the place wouldbe heaving with campers, grey nomads, and SUVs laden with bikes and surfboards.Today it was deserted.
As she turned the corner where the road met the windswept beach, her eyes were drawn to the vivid white lighthouse on the headland in the distance.An image of Maddie in the moonlight flashed in her mind, her cheeks shiny and wet.Nel shuddered and looked away, but then her eyes landed on the cemetery out the driver’s window and she remembered cutting through there with Maddie to get to the beach, treading carefully between the headstones so they didn’t step on the bodies.That was bad luck, according to Maddie.
Now she was buried there.Nel shuddered again.This is what she was worried about.Everything here led back to Maddie.
She followed the road past the surf club, which looked freshly painted, and up the hill to the roundabout on Manning Street where an enormous bronze anchor honoured the town’s lost fishermen.A large pelican stood on it now like a bored bouncer, ignoring her completely as she rolled slowly past.Hopefully the rest of the town would do the same, although Nel doubted it.People around here weren’t known for minding their own business.
She scanned the shops as a young mum hurried across the pedestrian crossing pushing a pram, her long hair whipped across her face by the wind.It was all similar but different.If she was blindfolded and dropped here, she would instantly know exactly where she was, and yet most of the shops had changed in fourteen years.Beachside Seafood looked like a gourmet version of the greasy fish’n’chip shop where they’d ordered their takeaway every Friday night.A tourist shop selling shabby-chic homewares had replaced the bookshop, but it seemed to be closed for the winter.Warner Property took up two shopfronts now.Her chest tightened at the sight of the name.
Nel consciously tried to release the tension in her chest as she turned left after the pub and wove through the back streets intuitively, as though she’d driven them yesterday.Her head swept from side to side, drinking in the vaguely familiar sights as long-forgotten memories resurfaced.Wasn’t that the house with the mulberry tree where she’d stolen leaves for her silkworms?Maddie would eat the berries, staining her lips dark purple.And was this the corner where Nel fell off her yellow Malvern Star and split her chin open?She put her hand up to touch the scar where her dad had done seven stitches.It was almost invisible now, just a ridge of skin.
An image of Geoff Marshall on the fence of a pretty weatherboard cottage caught her eye, beneath bold royal-blue text reading VOTE 1 GEOFF MARSHALL.The tightness in Nel’s chest intensified.She’d forgotten about the election.He would be everywhere.
Her stomach rumbled and she realised she’d only eaten an overripe banana since leaving Sydney at 6 am.At sparrow’s fart, her dad said in her head.She often heard his voice like that—with a dad joke or a bad pun—even though she’d seen him so infrequently since she left town fourteen years ago, running from the whispers that followed her wherever she went.
Chapter 4
The first fat raindrops hit the windscreen as Nel turned into Queen Street and by the time she pulled up outside number 15 it was coming down in sheets.She groaned at the sight of Geoff Marshall’s face staring at her from the front fence of the house she grew up in.
