1
Friday, pm
Green River Campground
Liss
Liss pulled up her underpants and kicked a little dirt over the steaming spot between the roots of the great old fig.
‘Hello to you, too,’ she said to the tree, letting her skirt fall to her bare feet.
She performed this same, small ritual every time she arrived at Green River Beach. Stepping away from the campsite’s yawning car boots and scrubby tent squares and onto the forest floor in just a few steps. She’d been doing exactly that, in this exact spot, since she was six years old; so long that she liked to imagine she was a little bit the fig and it was a little bit her.
She drew breath and looked up into the canopy, the vine-draped palms, the reaching branches of the gums, the drooping blousy blossoms, and she exhaled. Happy place. It was a cliché, an Instagram meme, but it was also accurate. Liss felt happier in this place than any other, and she had never wanted to share her first look at Green River with anyone else.
‘Liss!’
Soon enough, Lachy’s voice, through the trees. He’d be asking her where the tent pegs were, or telling her that the kids needed drinks, or calling for help finding the mallet.
‘Hold on!’
She pushed through the vines, instinctively stomping out a warning to snakes, reaching the edge of the green-brown fringe and stepping over the old kayak her kids kept stashed in the tree line, out onto the golden brown of the beach. The tide was out, pulling the water far from her.
Liss pushed her hair back from her sticky face. Despite the proximity of the campsite, there wasn’t a single person on the beach. Tourists didn’t like the mudflats of low tide. There were just the two old fishing tinnies, upturned at the far end of the cove as they always were, two pelicans turning their weighty heads towards her from the stumps of the rotten pier, as they always did, and the exposed pegs of the moorings of the one lifeboat, anchored way out beyond the tideline, waiting for an emergency, as it always was.
She shoved her toes into the mud and looked out to the other side of the river’s bank, where a few homes, accessible only by boat, studded the far river line. No McMansions yet.
‘Liss!’
The campsite wasn’t far enough away. Which was the point, really. Where else could you pitch your tents on the fringe of a rainforest and step straight onto beach, into water? Here.
Lachy, apparently, needed her back at Site Seven. By now he would have unlatched the roof racks, the rolled-up bags of tents, the folded chairs, the air mattresses, the stretcher beds. Everything she’d remembered to pack.
Liss took another deep breath, before throwing her head back and letting out a little whistle. Hello, beach. Hello, river. Hello, hello, hello.
‘You always disappear,’ Lachy was saying as she walked back along the sandy path to the Land Rover, back to the pile of jobs. ‘Just as the work starts.’
Liss smiled. It wasn’t even remotely true. The work of constructing the long weekend’s temporary tent town would be going on for hours yet.
‘Oh well, I’m back now,’ she said lightly, surveying everything she’d carefully stacked and packed into the car boot now tossed all over the sandy ground. ‘Get Tia to help you with the tent. I’ll sort the furnishings.’
‘Furnishings,’ Lachy snorted. ‘Like it’s the beach house.’
‘You’ll survive, babe, you always do.’
‘And as if Tia’s helping. As if any of them are. They’ve already gone . . .’ He gestured, with a clenched fist, towards the beach, the forest.
This mood was typical of the arrival day of camp weekend. What was being asked of Lachy was an hour or two of physical labour. Lifting things, staking things, pulling ropes and fixing pegs. Invariably it would be too hot, or too cold, or wet, or windy.
And when it was done, he and the other men of the group would put down their mallets, pick up their beers and leave the next three days in the hands of the women.
‘I’ll go and find the kids,’ Liss said to him, out loud. But in her head she was already talking to Dani.
Poor Lachy, having to do some actual work for a change.
But Dani wasn’t here, yet. And anyway, she’d heard it all before.
Liss walked away, following the shouts of children. They were running the campsite’s looping central track, naming familiar things.
‘The swing!’ Still there. Hung from the biggest fig on the forest’s edge by Juno, four years ago.
‘The wasps’ nest!’ A dimpled, deflated waxy balloon, still clinging to the weatherboard edge of the toilet block, where last summer it had caused a speedy evacuation.
‘The den!’ A hollowed-out cave on the far side of the campsite, on the edge of the national park, where rocky outcrops formed a barrier between the campers and the wilderness. Giant toothy crags, pocked with caves and squeezy passageways into the wilds on the other side.
Little Liss had pushed herself through one of those scrubby gaps alone only once, scratching her knees and puncturing her hands as she scrabbled, determined to ace a game of hide-and-seek. But when she’d found herself on the other side, and with the cousin she’d been chasing nowhere to be seen, it only took a few steps on spiky ground to realise she was too small to be alone there, dwarfed by trees, spooked by rattling scrub in the shadow of those rocks.
Her mother had found her; of course she had. It must have only been a few long minutes really, before she appeared, also dirt-streaked and sprinkled with bush, wide-eyed but laughing. ‘I thought I’d lost you, little one.’ She’d smiled, and taken Liss’s hand to lead her back to the campground via a less treacherous route. ‘Your cousin’s hiding near the kitchen, you know we don’t come this side of the rocks.’
Liss’s children had the same rules – don’t play in the national park. But the rocky barrier itself was full of welcoming shelters, which, Liss’s mother had explained to her that day, would once have been kitchens and bedrooms and living rooms for the people who had always lived here, for millennia.
Now the caves were the territory of holidaying city kids, with candle stubs, joint butts and mouldering cushions jammed into the smoke-blackened ledges. It was a rite of passage for camp kids to build their dens here, and to venture beyond them, into the woods. Liss eventually had, and now her children ignored the rules, too.
Liss followed the trail of voices to a sighting of her three children, about to head off into the trees to where, doubtless, more secrets were stashed.
‘Tia!’ Liss called out. ‘Don’t go too far, the others will be here soon!’
Her eldest, comfortable here in a way she wasn’t always, threw her a withering look. ‘They know where to find us,’ Tia said, and disappeared into the green murk, her little brother and sister at her heels.
Liss kept on walking, following the loop of the campground’s path, counting sites, taking stock. It was what she always did, after her tree-wee.
Everyone lucky enough to have the rights to sites at Green River was deeply invested in nothing ever changing. They arrived each year praying that the rented sites hadn’t been halved to squeeze more dollars from twice as many visitors. They’d welcomed hot showers in the bathroom block but were quietly pleased that news of the update hadn’t made it to the park’s neglected website. They’d rejoiced when powered sites were introduced, but signed petitions to keep caravans out, swearing that the winding road down the peninsula was way too narrow. They professed to want to protect this pocket of wild beauty but were entirely opposed to it becoming a part of the national park.
If you had the connections or the dumb luck to have bought one of the twenty sites at Green River Campground back when you could, you held on to them tightly. And Liss had her father to thank for that. One thing on a very short list of things he’d Done Right was to secure the right to these camping sites for his family, all summer long.
Now Liss felt a swelling pride in sharing it with her closest friends, if only for these few days every year. As she padded out the boundaries of her special place, she fizzed with the excitement of seeing them all again. Of hosting them all again.
Five families whose bond had been forged in the white-hot fire of early parenthood. The first of those babies were teens now. Some of the men had come and gone, but the gathering of these women, in this place, year after year, was Liss’s own achievement. Welcome, family, she wanted to say to them, let’s bunker down and nurture each other.
She could hear Dani’s cynical snort from here.
Sadie? Dani would say. Who wants to nurture Sadie?
Liss did. Even Sadie. Despite everything.
She passed the office where Ron and Shell had been doling out strict rules and cold ice for decades, fiercely guarding both the campsite entrance and the peace.
‘I hope that mob of kids isn’t getting to troublemaking age,’ Shell had said when they’d arrived, leaning on the counter, one eye on the horseracing on her tiny portable TV, the kind you never saw anymore.
Liss had agreed, since it had been the subject of much group-chat angst this past week. Was it the year the kids were going to sneak out of their tents to pash each other on the beach at midnight? Raid the parental eskies for booze?
‘They start off so adorable,’ Shell had said, handing over the new code to the boom gate and the toilet block, but not the wi-fi, since there wasn’t any. ‘Doing doughnuts on their pink tricycles. And a few years later you’ve got a gang of rampaging yobbos.’
‘Hope we’ve got another couple of years yet,’ Liss had answered with a bright smile. ‘It’s the dads you’ve got to worry about.’
‘Always.’
It was Shell and Ron’s vigilance that stopped the whole camp being swallowed by nature. The tentacles of the rainforest would have snaked through the place years ago if it weren’t for Ron’s constant chopping and Shell’s whirring cleaning buggy, with its buckets of bleach for scrubbing back the mould and lichen from the toilet block. If it weren’t for the rat traps circling the camp kitchen and the mesh wrapped around the trees that edged the tent sites. Ron and Shell kept this wild place tame enough for city types to come here and play at being wild.
Liss padded on, past the camp kitchen with its tree-trunk foundations and its heavy wooden doors. She could see a woman in there, boiling noodles on the hotplate while her two small children sat staring at iPads. It could have been her, just a few years before.
There were ghosts of old versions of herself everywhere at Green River. Little Liss, being chased by her laughing mother. Teenage Liss, motherless, smoking spliffs in the trees with her cousins. Newlywed Liss, desperate for Lachy to love this place as she did, fucking him at sunset in the rockpool tucked away around the headland. It hadn’t worked, she knew; he resented every trip here just a little more than the last. New mum Liss, trying to get babies to sleep in carry-cots under mosquito nets, willing herself to stay awake long enough to see the stars. And then, for years, it seemed, the version of herself that looped this path at a trot, chasing children on trikes and bikes and scooters, willing them not to fall, not to stray into the bush with its spiky, bitey dangers.
Now, maybe, this version of Liss could exhale, just a bit.
Although, Lachy.
She was almost back at Site Seven, Liss’s lucky number and the best spot on the campground. There was no argument about which family would get Seven every year. Liss had fought off her brothers for her familial right to this place on this particular weekend and so it was only fair that she and Lachy would settle in prime position, and the others accept the spots nearby.
Seven was closest to the beach, furthest from the ammonia smells of the bathroom block, and next to the boardwalk that took you through the forest to the sand. It was also the biggest, and opposite a communal site where – with a silent understanding from Ron and Shell, whose adherence to rules softened just a little for VIPs – they could set up a communal HQ, the beating heart of the camp.
The men would pull on ropes to hoist a tarpaulin roof and lay long plastic sheets on the ground for a sweepable floor, held down at the edges by eskies and barbecues. The women would unfold a long trestle table, where meals would be served and drinks would chill in buckets and always, always on the first and last nights, speakers would pump out music that, from the hallowed position of HQ, wouldn’t bother the handful of other families who’d made it to Green River. Instead the beat would roll out over the mudflats, a pulse of nightlife in the wilderness. Dancing barefoot under swinging lanterns was the opening and closing tradition of every summer long weekend.
‘You’re back.’ Lachy was huffing as Liss arrived at Site Seven. ‘Thank fuck, can you hold this?’
Liss tucked her long skirt into her knickers and squatted again, to hold the pole her husband needed steadying.
‘Where are the kids? Where are the others?’ He was hoisting the flysheet over the big old canvas tent Liss insisted they bring, year in, year out. So much more soulful than those modern lightweight numbers, although harder for Lachy to erect.
‘They’ll be here,’ she said. ‘They’re just giving us our moment.’
‘I see you’ve slipped into Zen mama mode,’ Lachy muttered, but he was smiling as he reached and pulled. ‘I could do with someone a bit less Zen, though, to help out.’
Liss smiled off into the forest. Breathe.
There was the scrape of tyres and the shadow of a car pulling up at exactly the right moment. ‘Liss!’
Lyra Martin catapulted herself from the door of an enormous shiny red Jeep.
Liss dropped the tent pole to the sound of a soft swear from Lachy and fell backwards as Lyra’s arms and legs wrapped around her torso, hard. It was the same greeting, this high-speed koala-attack, that Lyra had given her since birth, always reaching, always enveloping, always burrowing in.
‘Hello, darling,’ she said into Lyra’s hair. ‘So good to see you.’
‘Lyra, you nutter.’
That cool voice definitely belonged to Brigitte, Lyra’s little sister, who would never consider wrestling an adult to the ground in enthusiasm.
Liss laughed, spiky bindis at her back, the joy of her god-daughter’s love squeezing the breath out of her. Perhaps Lyra hadn’t yet got the memo that the only acceptable teen disposition was permanent irritation, as if you were perpetually interrupted doing something of far greater importance by someone inexcusably stupid.
‘Lyra, leave Liss alone. She’s pretending to help her husband get the tent up.’
And there was Dani. The only person Liss was happier to see.
Lyra rolled off, unfolding her long, gangly limbs, tossing back her thick black hair, beaming the smile that seemed to stretch from one ear to the other as if her head were about to hinge open.
Liss had read enough columns and listened to enough podcasts to know to never comment on the appearance of a young girl, but she couldn’t deprogram the part of herself that appreciated Lyra’s beauty.
‘If this was the eighties,’ she’d whispered to Dani last year, ‘your girl would be jailbait in a French film.’
‘Don’t say jailbait,’ Dani had said. ‘We definitely don’t say jailbait.’
Now Liss took Dani’s hand to pull herself up off the grass and hugged her tight.
‘Dan, we made it!’
‘Another year, who would have thought,’ Dani said into Liss’s armpit. ‘Put me down, darling.’
‘I’m just so fucking happy to see you.’
‘And I’m happy to see you, Craig.’ Lachy was talking to the man standing behind Dani, bouncing a little on his toes.
It was Craig’s second year there, and Liss could sense how eager Dani’s boyfriend was to show that he knew the ropes, that he was itching to start unfolding poles and hammering pegs.
‘I bet, mate.’ Craig had also got the memo that the outnumbered men must appear put-upon.
‘Nice car,’ Liss whispered to Dani, arm around her shoulders.
Dani shrugged. ‘It’s his. There’s a bit of me that thinks he bought it for this trip.’
‘To impress who?’
Dani nodded at Lachy, who was walking over to the huge Jeep, whistling behind his teeth, errant tent pole in hand.
‘Nice wheels, Craig. New?’
Lyra Martin made a finger-down-throat gesture.
‘Where’s Tia?’
‘You girls are going nowhere until you’ve set up your tent,’ Dani said, and Liss felt a twinge of guilt at the thought of her kids off roaming, helping no-one but themselves. As usual.
‘We have a lot to talk about, friend.’
‘But first, tents.’
‘Thank God for the cavalry,’ Lachy was saying, his interest in the car exhausted. ‘Lyra, say hello!’
Lyra danced over to Lachy – she’d never been a girl to walk when she could dance, or run when she could skip – and gave him a brief hug, only shoulders touching.
Liss moved to give Craig a polite kiss on the cheek and he said, ‘I thought we might set up on Site Five this year,’ gesturing at the bigger spot, a little further from Liss and Lachy.
Liss felt a twitch of discomfort and looked at Dani. ‘You’re on Site Six, Craig,’ she said. ‘Dani’s always been there, it’s right across from us, and we’ve always –’
‘I just found it a bit cramped last year, wondered if we might spread out a bit.’
Lachy walked back to the tent poles, head down, staying out of it.
‘Well, I don’t think . . .’ Liss reached around for a reason to say no, we won’t be changing sites, but she couldn’t quite find one that didn’t sound petulant. ‘I don’t think it works. Everyone’s assigned their sites already.’
Craig was opening his mouth to say something when Dani touched his forearm, ever so lightly. ‘It’s okay, Craig, we’ll be fine on Six.’
Liss knew Craig saw himself as a straight shooter. The kind of person who asks for what he wants and doesn’t apologise for it.
But he was also the kind of person who could read status. Hierarchies.
‘Okay. Fine,’ Craig said, his shoulders ever so slightly lower as he turned back towards the red car. ‘Let’s get this show on the road.’
It was Dani’s turn to catch Liss’s eye. ‘Countdown ’til sundowners,’ she said as she went to join him. ‘And all the catching up in the world.’
Lyra was obediently hauling down the sleeping bags from the roof racks. ‘Are we ready for disco night?’ She shook her hips as she threw a bundle of fleecy blankets to her sister. ‘Bridgey, are you ready to party?’
The two Martin girls dashed off to Site Six as Craig climbed into the Jeep and it roared into life to move just a few metres along the track.
As she watched the car pull into its spot, it occurred to Liss that Dani hadn’t said hello to Lachy. That her best friend and her husband hadn’t acknowledged each other, hadn’t exchanged their usual bear hug, hadn’t thrown a sarcastic dig in the other’s direction.
‘Hey, Liss?’ Dani called, loudly, from across the path.
‘What, darling?’
‘Have you already pissed on your tree?’
And Liss felt a wave of intense love for her smart, tough friend as she raised two middle fingers in her direction, and the Martin girls fell about laughing.