2
Friday, pm
Green River Campground
Dani
‘It’s bullshit.’ Craig kicked at the gumnuts that scattered Site Six with the tip of his boat shoe. ‘I’ll wake up with one of these up my arse.’
‘I’ve seen that mattress you bought,’ Dani said, unfurling the first of the tents from its sausage-skin bag. ‘You won’t feel a thing, Princess.’
She watched Craig pull his frown into a straight-line smile with considerable effort. His ego was dented by Liss’s refusal to upgrade their site, but his status as a visitor in Dani’s inner sanctum made sulking a precarious choice.
‘It’s not like these people are actual campers,’ he huffed.
‘Craig, please.’
‘Don’t they own a beach house up the road? They’re just play-acting.’
‘Craig. Shut up.’ Dani bumped him with the tent. ‘If you’re the real camper, help me with this.’
Case against Craig: Sulker.
Dani was collecting tokens of evidence that her relationship was doomed. She wasn’t sure why yet, except that, after two years of dating – an impossibly youthful word for what they’d been doing but really the only applicable one – she could no longer ignore the twinges nudging her towards an escape hatch.
Case against Craig: He was late picking her up in that ridiculous new car.
The giant red truck had rounded the corner when she and the girls had been standing outside her apartment block for more than ten minutes, Dani’s irritation growing with every second.
‘Surprise!’ he’d called, double-parking and lowering the window with a barely audible zip.
‘I thought he drove a Tesla,’ Lyra muttered to her mum.
‘He does. But clearly not camping.’
Lyra had hesitated as Brigitte clambered up to the back door with a squeal. Dani could see her elder daughter’s excitement at the prospect of riding in this huge, shiny spaceship rubbing against the required disapproval at such a gas-guzzling, performative monstrosity. ‘It’s a bit . . . much,’ she said finally, grabbing her holdall.
Dani had wanted to drive them to Green River in the Rav, like she always did. There were few things she hated more than turning over her schedule to other people’s patchy punctuality. But Craig had begged for a change of plan. Now she knew why.
‘You’re late.’
‘But worth it, right? Picked her up last night.’
‘Her?’
‘Of course. Such a beauty.’
Case against Craig: Ugh.
He’d climbed down from the driver’s side, oblivious to the cars banking up behind, honking and attempting to pull around him on Dani’s narrow street. He’d pressed a button on a little black box in his hand and the ute tray began to slide open.
‘Ventilated retractable cover. We could sleep in here, if it came to it.’
‘It won’t.’ Dani could hear the snark in her voice. She didn’t like it. She couldn’t help it.
‘One year there was a storm and we all ran away,’ Brigitte called from the back seat where she was stroking the leather, pulling at handles, counting the drinks holders, breathing in the new-car smell.
‘Drove away,’ Dani corrected. ‘At speed.’
‘And another year it rained so hard we all slept in the camp kitchen.’
Craig visibly shuddered as he tossed the chairs into the tray, weight-curling arms on display in his tight, white polo shirt. ‘If that happens this weekend, we’re finding a hotel.’
‘Good luck.’ Dani laughed. ‘There’s nothing available on the peninsula on a long weekend.’
‘It’s who you know,’ he said. ‘Like everything. We won’t be sleeping in a mouse-house on my watch. Say the word and we’re in a suite at The Arcadian. So, are we ready?’
Dani wanted Lyra to go and check that she’d locked the door for the third time but, looking at the car queue, she swallowed the urge to ask her.
There were three security screens between their flat and the street anyway. Gleaming and modern and a realistic distance from the beach, Dani had put a deposit on her piece of this building before the slab was even poured. A safe, clean, purpose-built home devoid of history was precisely what she wanted, and exactly what she’d finally moved into, a year ago. ‘We’re ready.’ She’d pulled herself up into the passenger seat and Lyra whispered to her again.
‘Mum! Has Craig always been so rich?’
‘Don’t be crass,’ she said, but Craig had heard and was smiling.
‘Did you really buy this car to go camping?’ Brigitte asked as he strapped himself in, and Dani did the same, her feet dangling like a child’s, nowhere close to touching the floor.
‘I’ve been looking for an excuse.’
‘Did you sell the Tesla?’ asked Lyra, eyes wide.
‘No, I just extended the garage,’ he said, with a wink.
Did the wink mean that was a joke? Dani had felt Lyra’s confusion from the back seat. She knew, of course, he wasn’t joking. Craig’s dream of a three-car garage twenty minutes away in North Bondi was coming true, one neighbourly objection at a time.
Case against Craig: Too materialistic. Bad example to the kids. She caught herself. Good example to the kids. Self-made. Independent. Works hard.
Not that he spent much time around Lyra and Bridge, even after two years. Their strict twice-weekly date schedule meant Dani rarely stayed over at his house and if he was at hers, she brought him back late and hurried him out early. It irritated Craig, actually. She knew he’d like them to progress to a more blended-family model. But Dani also knew that was because he’d like the convenience of folding his own son, Anders, into the mix, and she wasn’t that stupid. Dani wasn’t looking to mother anyone new.
Now they were here: him feeling personally affronted by gumnuts and an inferior tent site; her trying to stop herself from kicking at that escape hatch.
She looked around. Where was Lyra? She’d just been here, unfolding poles with Brigitte.
‘Bridge, go find your sister, she’ll be looking for Tia.’ Those girls were like magnets. ‘I asked her not to go anywhere until the tents were up.’
Brigitte flitted away as Dani and Craig started building the skeleton of their home for the next three nights. Working quickly, efficiently, while flies dive-bombed their sweat-studded foreheads.
Dani stepped back, wiped her hands on her shorts and was looking around for the flysheet when Craig suddenly came close, cupped her chin and lifted her face to look into his.
‘Baby,’ he said.
Dani blinked. Did Craig usually call her baby?
‘It’s good to see you. Good to be part of this.’
She nodded, his finger moving up and down with her head.
‘I want you to know,’ Craig’s voice was deep and round, one of the things about him that Dani found both seductive and irritating, ‘there are no other people on the planet who could make me go camping.’
He dipped his head and kissed her mouth.
‘Yes,’ she said, pulling away from his lips, his hand. Not now, she hoped her movements said. Not here. Calm down, buddy. ‘But I didn’t make you.’
‘Make me want to go camping, I mean,’ Craig course-corrected and pushed on. ‘Just to be around all of you; to be part of something important.’
Case against Craig: All of this.
‘But I was thinking,’ he continued, ‘maybe we can start making our own traditions and rituals. You know, just for us, and the kids.’
‘Oh.’ Dani was deciding what to say when Lyra – God bless her – came bouncing back to camp, Brigitte behind her. Beyond them, down the path, Dani could make out Tia with Liss’s two younger kids, pushing and shoving each other. ‘Of course, I – Lyra! You’re back. You and Bridge need to put your tent up this year. It’s time you two started helping more.’
Craig dropped his hand and turned back to their flysheet. ‘Lyra,’ he said, trying on an authoritative tone. ‘Help me get this over the frame and I’ll help you girls with yours.’
‘Did I interrupt a romantic moment?’ Lyra’s voice was tilting, mocking.
‘Hardly. Can you do what Craig’s asking, please?’
Lyra looked back to where Tia Short had stopped on the path. She was jiggling, reminding Dani for the umpteenth time that inside this young woman’s body was an impatient, unsure child.
‘It’ll take two minutes.’
‘I have to do what he says?’ Lyra whispered.
‘Just get the tent up, Ly.’ Dani sighed. ‘Don’t make it about that.’
Her daughter slunk over to the far side of the tent frame and picked up the corner of a plastic sheet. ‘Where does this go, boss?’ she asked, pointedly, and Dani felt a jolt at the attitude in her voice. That was new. Wasn’t it?
Craig hoisted the sheet over the top of the frame then returned to picking at his favourite scab.
‘It just always surprises me, you know, that you’re a camping family.’
‘We’re not.’ Dani started unpacking the box of plastic plates and cups and torches, laying them out on the Formica card table. ‘This is it. One weekend a year and then all this goes back into storage.’
‘But, you know, Liss and Lachy – those old-money people are not usually campground types.’
Dani sighed. ‘Liss is not a flashy person. And it’s not any old campground, is it?’
‘If I’m sleeping in something that’s not an actual bed and shitting next to a stranger, it’s a campground.’ Craig snorted. ‘It just feels a bit fake. Why camp when you don’t have to?’
‘It’s not all about Liss and Lachy.
When we first started coming, as the mothers’ group, it was democratic.
We all come from different backgrounds, different budgets, different situations.
Camping is manageable for everyone, rather than renting a holiday house, or –’
‘But they have a holiday house not far away.’
‘It’s not big enough for everyone.’
‘And the whole mothers’ group thing,’ said Craig, banging in his final peg. ‘I get that at the beginning, but the kids are all so big now, there’s no real need to stay friends with people who aren’t on your –’
‘Social level?’ Lyra called as she walked over from her side of the tent. Such a smart-arse. Dani threw her a smile.
‘Wavelength.’
Case against Craig: He was a snob.
‘Liss is family to me. This weekend is important to her. We’ve been through a lot, and the girls and I have got good at pretending we’re campers, haven’t we?’
‘It’s my favourite holiday of the whole year,’ Brigitte confirmed from her and Lyra’s decidedly wonky tent.
‘Because we get to do whatever we like,’ Lyra added.
‘You do not.’ Dani grabbed Lyra’s hand as she passed and looked her straight in the eye. ‘The mums will be deciding the rules later. How far you can go, when you all have to be back to camp. Bedtime.’
‘We’re not babies.’ Lyra pulled her hand away.
‘Only the mums make those rules, do they?’ Craig asked.
Dani ignored him. ‘Lyra, I love you, but being fourteen is not the same as being an adult. There will still be rules.’
‘Can I go now?’
‘No. Your sister needs help.’ A wave of exhaustion hit Dani at the prospect of three days of boundary-setting and rule-enforcing with a group of teenagers all straining at their leashes of various lengths. It would be easier to let them Lord of the Flies it.
‘Fine.’ Lyra went to Brigitte and the piles of tent.
She was a good girl, Lyra.
Dani had never caught her lying, found a vape in her pocket or cider on her breath.
She didn’t have the school on the phone, or a lunking boyfriend hogging their lounge.
Lyra played soccer and netball and swam.
She got solid Bs.
When her friends came around they said please and thank you for the snacks and drinks foraged from the fridge.
Lyra was where she said she would be when Dani checked the family app, and she called her father as promised.
When Dani worked late, Lyra came home and fed Brigitte.
She smiled and giggled politely when her grandma critiqued her clothes.
She followed the house phone rules – the bane of every teen parent’s existence – plugging in overnight in the living room and doing her homework before scrolling TikTok, most days.
Dani had no choice but to set things up like that.
There was no time for an unruly teen; she was a single parent with a big job.
She had chosen a school – Catholic, girls-only – that would reinforce the boundaries she could not always police.
Dani knew that schoolfriends’ parents might whisper about whether hers was a house they’d want their girls at – that one with the working mum and the overseas dad – so she counter-programmed with a tight ship.
But every year this camping weekend was both a release and a threat.
Some of the parents were happy to let the guide ropes slacken.
They opted to take their eyes off the kids, to shrug off teenage ‘experimentation’. They trusted that everything would be fine. But Dani couldn’t. When the kids were little, she was constantly vigilant. ‘Where’s Bridge?’ she’d repeat any time her younger daughter wandered out of view. Now it wasn’t the forest or the unknown campers that worried her, it was the other children. Who knew if they were as good as Lyra? As boundaried and responsible? Who knew if they were already necking (was necking still a thing?), smoking, wagging?
‘Show’s on the road,’ Craig exclaimed, gesturing to the tent. ‘We might be on the crappiest site, but our home is our castle and the castle is up.’
‘Sadie’s on the crappiest site,’ Dani said, without thinking, taking her eyes from her daughters to Craig. ‘It looks good.’
‘I live to serve.’
Case against Craig: He spoke in clichés. In public, at least. When they were alone he was capable of honesty, originality, even vulnerability. But Public Craig was programmed to communicate like a marketing campaign. And she was about to spend a very public weekend with a very public Craig.
Now the tents were up it was time for the beds and the sleeping bags and the blankets, all tightly packed away in those plastic sacks she’d sucked all the air out of with the Dyson.
Craig would find something more physical to do, she knew, over at HQ with Lachy. She looked across and saw Lachy was leaning against the Land Rover while Liss rummaged in the open boot. He was on his phone. Typical, she thought, looking up from her own armfuls of fluffy covers to see that Craig was doing the same.
‘Hey,’ she said. ‘Don’t set a bad example.’ She nodded towards the girls.
Craig pocketed his phone and came over to kiss her forehead and take a blanket from her. ‘Of course. Although I know you – you’ll be checking your work messages as soon as you’ve got two hands back.’
She would.
‘Only when the girls aren’t looking.’
Craig’s eyes were back on Site Seven and Lachy. ‘That guy is not about life’s humble pleasures any more than I am.’
‘For God’s sake.’ Dani sighed, ducking through the tent door, a spike of intense irritation pushing into her chest. ‘I thought we were done with that. If you hated it last year, if you don’t want to sleep in a tent, if you think Lachy and Liss are pretentious – Just. Go. Home.’
‘Whoa!’ Craig followed her into the strange pale blue light of the tent. ‘I’m just talking, babe.’
‘Mum!’ Lyra’s voice, from the other side of the canvas. Shit. Kids who’d spent their formative years in the eye of a disintegrating marriage were sensitive to raised voices and emotional temperatures. She’d seen Lyra run from a loudly exclaimed curse.
‘All good, Lyra.’ Dani turned to glare at Craig and mouthed a quick shush.
He shrugged. ‘I’ll go inflate the mattresses, the new car’s got a plug-in for –’
‘Thanks.’ She turned her back on him before he could finish.
She was being a bitch.
Sometimes the magic of Green River worked on her the way it worked on Liss, unravelling her tightly wound anxieties, smoothing her frown lines, lowering her shoulders.
But at other times the disruption from routine and the forced extraversion made her tighter, harder, spikier.
She knew to choose the former today. But the latter was pricking at her temples.
Her phone, shoved in the back pocket of her navy shorts, buzzed.
Just as Craig had predicted, work.
He reappeared in the tent’s doorframe as she dumped the blankets and reached for her phone.
‘I want you to know that I promise to embrace the hard ground and have a good time,’ he was saying. ‘Couldn’t be happier to be here. As if I’m going to miss what your mad mate Sadie is going to do this year. She’s really something.’
‘Yes,’ Dani said, absently, waking her phone screen. ‘Let’s hope this year she’s not something to worry about.’
Craig smiled, pulled his head back out of the tent and returned to mattress inflation.
I need to talk to you. Urgent.
It took a minute for Dani to realise that the message was from Lachy.
Jesus. She shoved her phone back in her pocket, pictured her friend’s husband over the path, leaning on the car, poking at his screen. Not again.