‘You okay?’ Beau asks, turning the sausages. ‘You’re not vegetarian?’
I don’t even know where to begin or how to explain the swirl of emotions here, but whether or not I consume meat is the very least of our challenges.
‘Is this all for me?’ I glance at the eggs and mushrooms, then up at his caravan, expecting the Hound to bound out of it any second, fresh-faced and resplendent with beachy bed hair, shrouded in afterglow.
‘Depends how hungry you are,’ he replies, nodding at the caravan and adding, ‘Harlow didn’t stay.’
‘Ah.’ I try to decode that statement and how, if at all, it applies to me personally, while engineering an air of casual disinterest, as if the idea of the two of them rolling around on his premium foam mattress, discussing my galoshes, had never occurred to me, just as a council truck rumbles into the park and stops near the shower block. Two workers in high-vis vests amble out of it and promptly go on smoko.
‘Listen, why don’t you grab a shower in my caravan while I cook?’ Beau suggests, frowning at their lack of urgency. ‘There’s fresh coffee ready to go in the machine. Just hit the start button.’
My eyes drift from the mud that is still caked on my ankles to the scrapes of white paint on his ute. In broad daylight, the damage makes my stomach churn, and I walk over and inspect the back of Miss Bennet, who fared even worse.
‘Don’t worry about that,’ he says, waving the tongs at the dents. ‘I reckon I can fix it. You won’t even notice.’
‘I must say this is all … very good of you,’ I admit. Either it’s good of him, or he’s grooming me for one of the many spurious outcomes on my sister’s comprehensive list of ways that I could die during this ‘midlife camping crisis’. Although, if that was his plan, why would he have texted a photo of hisdriver’s licence late last night, which I expeditiously forwarded to Sara, as instructed,In case I need to show the police, Audrey.
‘It’s really not that bad,’ he says, nodding at the ute. ‘As long as nobody gets hurt.’
Fraser used to say that. And then he got hurt, while my own pain snowballed into eight months of whiteout shock. A tumbling, alcohol-fuelled, antigravity avalanche through which I could barely see nor stand until it cleared into the white-hot precision pain of sobriety. No more smoke or mirrors. Unadulterated agony, from which it has taken nearly two and a half years to painstakingly claw myself here.
That’s what this trip is all about. Feeling somethinggood. Breaking the inertia and making progress in this plot twist of a life I’ve been handed.
‘Do you mind if I charge my phone?’ I ask, wishing I’d charged the solar power pack before I left home. Maybe I’ll take up the offer of a few minutes locked inside Beau’s mansion of a caravan to get my head together. ‘I left my sister hanging last night, and she thinks you’re a murderer.’
His rich laugh sails across the camping ground as I retreat to collect my things. And myself. Sara would see breakfast with this man as the equivalent of my teenage cliff-diving. She’s spent forty years exactly today dragging me to solid ground, pulling me from rocks and rips—forever alert to undercurrents I always ignore. When I first mentioned hisocean scientist, likes penguinssign-off, she took one look at my face and warned me about the ‘dangerous sparkle’ in my eyes. My greatest worry now is that she’ll never have to concern herself with that sparkle again.
Beau is heaping shredded potato onto the barbecue when I reemerge. I don’t tell him I skipped dinner in all the kerfufflelast night, but I steal a strip of cooked bacon on my way past, making my vigorous appetite evident.
Once I’m under the hot water, availing myself of his ocean-scented shower gel and inhaling the steam, I’m overcome by a wild sense of wonder.
Howdid I get here?
Here, in this strange man’s caravan, on the morning of my fortieth birthday, when I should be with Fraser, who would be showeringwithme until the water ran cold.
Birthdays mess with my head. They convince me the butterfly effect is real—that every tiny step we’ve ever taken, every decision we’ve made, every conversation we’ve ever had has brought us to this specific moment in time.
That line of thought inevitably leads me straight back to the day I lost him. AndhowI lost him. Wondering—if either of us had flapped our proverbial wings just a fraction of a second earlier or later, if we’d uttered one more word, or even taken a slightly longer breath—whether everything might have been different …
37
FRASER
‘Is there WiFi?’ Parker whines as I turn into the secluded Pretty Beach camping ground on Friday morning. ‘It’s saying I don’t have service. Have you got service, Dad?DAD.I’ll lose my streaks!’
I’ll lose my mind.
Her panic makes me want to ban screens altogether, but I can never seem to follow through. I’ve allowed far more time online than Audrey would have, a fact that has me wrestling with the intrusive thought,She’d have done this better than me. There were never enough hours to implement all the offline activities on Audrey’s list. After she died and the ideas dropped off, I’m sad to say I let the internet step admirably into the breach—something I’m paying for now.
The camping ground is quiet. Plumbing issues, according to the sign at the entrance, although the council truck is here. I park and drag out the canvas tent bag, dumping it on wet grass. Parker takes the mallet and bag of pegs and sets her phone on the ground, where it strives for TikTok like one of NASA’s deep space tracking dishes in the hills beyond Canberra, searching for intelligent life. Occasionally she bangs a peg with the mallet, between obsessively refreshing the screen.
‘Just don’t hammer the phone,’ I say, the pun flying directly over her head.
The guy opposite our site gets it and chuckles. He’s cooking breakfast beside one of those enormous state-of-the-art caravans. Parker fires up the portable speaker and starts blastingThe Life of a Showgirlinto the unwilling ears of everyone on the South Coast. ‘Headphones!’ I yell over the music, switching the speaker off as I wave at our neighbour. ‘Sorry!’
‘Personal best!’ she yells a few minutes later, high-fiving me. Despite distractions, we’ve set up the tent in record time, and I want to file this moment and remember it in three years when she’s sixteen and being dragged from weekend parties for an offline camping trip with Dad will ‘ruin her life’.
I play these mind games, envisioning the future, positioning it on the timeline I described the night I proposed.
