We’re on a date in this Italian restaurant, and we’ve been married fifty years.
I shouldn’t have been so optimistic. We wouldn’t have fifty years. We wouldn’t even make the wedding. But even now, in a coastal camping ground she never would have agreed to visit, I feel the whisper of Audrey’s energy. We were so close, I’m convinced there are moments, like this, when time implodes, stardust glitters, and her particles dance back to life in the fireworks of our existence.
‘Dad, are we done? Can I explore?’ Parker asks, snapping me from a cascade of memories and back to the wet grass, broken amenities and lack of service.
‘Just stay inside the camping ground, okay? Don’t go on the beach.’
The same comforting thought that keeps Audrey alive in my mind taunts me with an imagined future where bad things happen again. What if it’s just an illusion of free will, as Audrey suggested? What if the scripts of our lives are set and we’re actorsrunning prepared lines that feel improvised but aren’t, because everything that’s going to happen already has? It’s thoughts like this that make the endless battle to balance risk and safety with a teenager feel even more fraught, and I’m dreading the push and pull, the older she gets and the more I need to let her go.
I watch my once-inquisitive child wander across the grounds, oblivious to a kangaroo and her joey, who observe her from the mist in the nearby bushland. She holds the phone aloft in a fruitless search for a rogue bar of service, and I lament the future direction of human evolution. Staying offline this weekend is fine by me. Somehow, probably just to appease Audrey’s friends, I got the guts to publish a vastly edited version of the pile of insufferable cringe that the literature think tank concocted last night in my living room. It was a dating profile brought to the single women of the internet by ‘best intentions’ and ‘Brown Brothers vintage 2022’. And now I can’t bear to look at the app.
‘You’ve got a happy camper there,’ our neighbour says as he turns sausages on the hot plate. Tattooed, with dark stubble on his square jaw, he looks like a walking advertisement for the Shoalhaven coastline.
‘You didn’t hear the angst over the internet on the way in.’
He laughs and I walk over and shake hands. ‘I’m Fraser.’
‘Beau.’
‘Impressive tourer,’ I say, nodding at his caravan.
He glances at it, then slides a spatula under some hash browns. ‘Home for a few weeks while I’m based here for a project.’
Something stirs in my chest. I used to have stints working away from home, too. It feels like another life, researching ocean currents in Antarctica, flung far from the routine of the university, deep in focus, doing work that made me feel alive. I would never say this to Parker—and if I had to choose, shewould win—but as a single dad now bound to desk research and teaching, there are moments, usually when we’ve bickered about bedtime or homework or boundaries, that I pine a little for the freedom I exchanged for parenting.
‘What sort of project bases you here?’ I ask Beau as he moves around his elaborate outdoor kitchen with the relaxed confidence of a TV chef.
‘Screenwriting.’
He delivers this news nonchalantly, as if he’d answeredExecutive Level Two in the Australian Public Service, which, two hours from the capital, is the more likely response.
Then he reaches for two plates and some cutlery and says, ‘I do a bit of directing. We’ve got a film shoot coming up on the coast.’
Somehow, I think the Bookies would find this far more appealing than the data guy with the nonexistent lab coat. The absurd thought pops into my head that perhaps Beau and I are rivals on the apps. Next, I’ve cast imaginary women swiping left on the analyst with the phone-addicted teen. Right for the tattooed writer-director.
Will you get a grip, Fraser Miller!I imagine Audrey urging from some overlapping fold in time.Don’t undersell yourself! You were everything. Always. Right from that very first email exchange …
38
AUDREY
April drops a screenshot into the group chat, the ping waking me on my second morning of van life. It’s some guy’s dating profile.
He says, ‘I don’t want kids but yours are fine.’
It stings a bit. Not the part about his not wanting kids. The fact that April is emphasising it, as though not wanting children is the hill I’ll die on.
I sit up and shove my feet into hot-pink Crocs. The council has removed the tape from across the shower block, and all is quiet on the Viper front, so I grab my toothbrush. My bar is higher than doesn’t want kids, I type while I walk. This new, deliberately transient life, disconnected from any expectation of my future direction, is all about running towards what feels good. Not away from things that don’t.
That guy has been on the same app for three years, Clair replies, and I roll my eyes.I once did an experiment where I had a totally blank profile. No profile pic. Just my age and a fifty-kilometre radius from Canberra. He sent me a message and said how fascinating he found me.
Ha!
But you are fascinating, Rachael assures Clair as I set my toiletries down on the bench in the shower block.
Yeah, in that I am a woman with a pulse and it wouldn’t take a full tank of fuel to meet up with me.
I squeeze some toothpaste, pausing to type,If you must know, I met a guy Thursday night.Obviously, I didn’tmeetBeau in quite the way I’m implying, but that doesn’t mean I can’t borrow a little from the truth to get my friends to ease off. The chat evolves immediately into a video call, and I’m staring at four shocked faces as they watch me brush my teeth.
