4
Friday, 3 pm
Green River Campground
Sadie
Site Eight was closest to the toilet block and on a hot afternoon – and in January, there was no other kind of afternoon – if the wind was blowing in from the south, it was possible you’d wake from a post-lunch nap with a nose full of ammonia and piss.
Sadie was unpacking on Eight now, wondering at her son’s ability to make himself almost immediately invisible, cursing at the bindis already stuck in her knees and feeling certain that her progress was being closely observed.
Twenty minutes before, she’d been parked at the side of the one dusty road into Green River, two wheels in the grassy ditch. The car was crammed to the roof racks with sleeping bags and clothes hastily stuffed into any available space. Her head on the steering wheel, she was breathing in the triangular way her therapist had taught her. Three in. Hold for three. Three out . . .
‘Mum.’ It was Trick. ‘We’re right here. It’s a bit late for a freak-out.’
Shush. Three in . . .
‘Never too late,’ said Lucky. ‘This is Mum we’re talking about.’
It sounded to Sadie like Lucky was using her father’s voice.
‘It’s okay, kids,’ she said, staring at her bare knees through the gap in the steering wheel, noticing lines that weren’t there before. ‘I’ve got this.’
‘Looks like it.’
‘Just centring myself.’
The afternoon was still heavy-hot, and the insects were beginning to whirr. The entrance to the campground – with its single rusty boom and its vine-wreathed wooden arch – was right there, if she lifted her head.
‘Come on, Mum.’ Trick’s voice softened. ‘It’s fine. Let’s go.’
One more breath, and Sadie pulled up and out of her ditch and bumped down to the gates, feeling the kids rise up a little in their seats, heads swivelling, looking for their friends. Sadie, meanwhile, kept her eyes down, in no hurry to see any of hers.
The old lady who ran the office was still there. Sadie tried not to look up as she walked in to check her name off the handwritten list, nodding as she was lectured about the sanctity of the code to the toilet block.
‘I know you,’ the woman said, handing her the familiar piece of paper, the one with the map and the code and the warnings. No noise after 10 pm. Take out what you bring in.
Sadie shuddered. But as well as equipping her with breathing lessons, her therapist also liked to tell her that people aren’t thinking about you anywhere near as much as you think they are. This woman saw hundreds of people coming through here each season, so it was unlikely that the expression Sadie didn’t want to look up into really was one of disgust.
‘Yes,’ she said, lifting her head to look into the woman’s cloudy eyes. ‘I come every year, with the Shorts.’
‘Welcome back,’ the woman said, her voice sour and flat. ‘Be good.’
She was looking out through the glass door to the car as she said it, so it was perfectly possible she was addressing the kids through the Kia’s open windows. But it didn’t feel like that to Sadie.
‘Oh, I will!’ she said brightly, tapping the counter with a little punctuation that was firmer than she’d meant, setting the leaflets for river boat tours and national park walking trails shuddering.
And then there it was, Site Seven, and Liss Short waving wildly from outside her tent, a huge smile painted on her naked face.
One more deep breath, and Sadie threw the car door open.
‘Liss! You bitch, can’t believe you’ve managed to get me back here again, after all the bad juju we’ve dumped on this place,’ she’d yelled, hugging Liss and waving at Dani, who raised a hand but didn’t move from where she was unfurling sleeping mats on Site Six.
‘It’s so good to see you too, Sadie,’ Liss had said into Sadie’s neck, the teeth of her smile hitting skin.
And there was Lachy Short. At the open boot of the black Land Rover. The way he moved, as he unfurled himself and turned her way, was unchanged. The way he smiled that half-smile. The way he looked at her, which was the same way he looked at everything, like he owned it.
‘Lachy.’ Sadie had nodded in his direction.
‘Always a pleasure, Sadie,’ Lachy had responded, with an infuriating little bow. ‘Can I get you a drink?’
His words hit Sadie like a piece of wet paper shot from a biro tube in class. She flinched, inhaled, and turned to survey her site. ‘My place hasn’t had an upgrade, I see.’
‘I thought you liked . . .’ Liss’s forehead creased in worry.
‘We go through this every year, Liss. It’s not that I like being near the toilets, it’s just, since I’ve been coming on my own . . .’
‘So the whole time then,’ Lachy said.
‘Fake news, Lachy. Remember Jacob? Remember Lewis?’
‘Do I?’
‘Shut up, Lachy,’ Liss snapped. ‘You know you do.’
‘Anyway, since I’ve been coming alone I feel more comfortable with the shortest distance to walk in the night . . .’
‘It’s not like the rest of us are walking to the toilet block in twos, Sades.’
‘Lachy, again, shut up.’ Liss, Sadie knew, was perfectly content for her to be willing to take the worst site. Someone had to, after all.
‘Just taking the piss,’ Lachy said. ‘Sadie can handle it, she’s a grown-up.’
Sadie shrugged, her stomach fizzing, her throat dry. ‘Missed your chivalry, Lachlan Short.’
‘Ignore him,’ Liss said, in the way you might about an outsized puppy knocking things over with its wagging tail. ‘I’ll send him over to help with your tent in a minute, we’re nearly done.’
‘Please don’t,’ Sadie had said. ‘I’m a grown-up.’
Now here she was, trying to work out which side of the tent had the door in it, billowing bright polyester everywhere.
‘Trick!’ Sadie called again, in the direction of the trees. No answer. The reunited teens and tweens had fused into a single organism as soon as they were together, and slid off somewhere, doing who knew what.
‘Can I hoist your fly for you, madam?’
It wasn’t Lachy who walked onto Sadie’s site, although there were plenty of similarities. The same confident lope, the same patronising smirk. The same well-pressed khaki shorts and polo shirt embossed with the little horseman waving his stick about.
Sadie looked up from the polyester puzzle. ‘You’re Dani’s boyfriend.’
‘Craig. We met last year.’ He looked a little disappointed, like he was not a man used to being forgotten.
Sadie hadn’t forgotten.
‘I’m trying to block out last year,’ she said, looking at the mountain of puffy yellow material at her feet rippling in the slightly stinky afternoon wind.
‘Oh no, it was fun,’ he said, and there was a smile around the edge of his mouth that made the back of Sadie’s neck go cold. These fucking men.
‘Let me help you.’ He bent down, picked up the edge of the tent and began to walk backwards in neat, fast steps to pull it out square.
‘I don’t need your help. My son is –’
‘Off being a teenager with the other teenagers. He hasn’t realised you’re a person yet.’ Craig pushed the first metal corner peg firmly into the ground and moved on to the next.
‘Oh, he knows I’m a person,’ Sadie said, mimicking his movements. ‘No getting around that, unfortunately.’
She caught Craig’s quick glance up at her, his head going straight back to the tent. ‘The door’s here,’ he said, lifting a flap.
They moved quickly now, Sadie remembering that it always took two people to put a family tent up, and just how bullshit unfair that was.
‘How long have you and Dani been together now?’
‘Almost two years.’
‘I’m amazed she brought you.’
‘That feels like an insult.’
‘I’m also amazed that you wanted to come back.’ Sadie clipped her side of the tent to her new pole and, together, they hoisted the roof of the tent. ‘This is a pretty tight crew. And Dani’s . . . tough.’
‘I like what Dani likes. And she loves you people, so, you know, she’s not so tough.’
Sure, Sadie thought. That sounds convincing.
Dani, she knew, was tough like granite.
The tent was up, now there were only pegs waiting to be knocked into the hard ground. Craig looked around, dusting his hands on his shorts. ‘Got a hammer?’
‘No. For fuck’s sake.’ Sadie looked over to where Lachy was fiddling with the barbecue, with Liss up a ladder draping her signature solar fairy lights over everything in sight. ‘Can you go and ask that idiot for one?’
‘You two haven’t made peace?’
Sadie didn’t remember much about Craig, but she did know better than to trust him with any kind of intel. He was, after all, an outsider.
‘No idea what you’re talking about, we just give each other shit. We’ve all known each other a long time.’
‘Oh, sure.’ Honestly, the smirk on the man. He was as convinced by that as she’d been by his ‘I like what Dani likes’.
‘I’ll go,’ she said, and walked away towards Site Seven.
There wasn’t a child to be seen, but Sadie took a moment to stop, face the trees and, just as her therapist had urged her, check in on her breath. It was still there. The sun was beginning to track back down towards the tree line but the air was soupy warm. The kids would be flinging mud at each other by the river, or rediscovering old hidey-holes in the forest.
Dani was bustling between the two tents on her site with armfuls of doonas and pillows pulled from the tightly packed bags in the back of that ridiculous red truck. Sadie called out to her and Dani looked up, offered a quick smile and nod, and went straight back to her blankets.
Right.
By the time she reached Site Seven, there was no longer any sign of Lachy. Liss, her floaty skirt tucked up in her pants, her strong, dimply thighs on full display, looked down from her ladder.
‘Craig’s helping you?’
‘I don’t like him.’ Sadie sank down to her haunches. ‘Got a hammer?’
‘Lachy’s got it. Not sure where he’s gone. You okay?’
‘I’m just recalibrating.’
‘It’s going to be difficult for you, this weekend, isn’t it?’ Liss climbed down, leaving a long line of lights in the shapes of giant chilli peppers to swing free.
Sadie reached a hand up to Liss, who pulled her to standing. ‘I just need everyone to let me be a different person.’
‘We will,’ Liss said, squeezing Sadie’s hand.
‘They won’t.’ Sadie nodded over to her site, where she could now see Lachy. He and Craig were pulling her guy ropes out tight and banging them down with the missing hammer and what looked like excessive force.
‘They’ll move on.’
‘It’s funny,’ Sadie looked right into Liss’s face, ‘you have the most reason to be mad with me, but you’re the only one who isn’t.’
Sadie had thought about not coming this year. She’d thought about it a lot. If friends were, as Instagram quotes insisted, for a reason, a season or a lifetime, how did you know if and when your season was over?
‘No moral high ground here,’ said Liss. ‘Anyway, we go way back.’
‘We really do.’ Sadie squeezed Liss’s hand again, then shook her head quickly, as if to dislodge a thought. ‘That guy, though.’ She nodded over towards Craig.
‘Give him a break,’ said Liss, even though Sadie was sure her feelings were identical. ‘He’s with Dani. And the person who’s going to suffer the most that he’s here isn’t you, or her. But –’
‘Aiden,’ they said in unison. And it was as if the word magically conjured the car that came bumping up the track towards them. It was the same station wagon that Aiden and Ginger had arrived in every single year, covered in what looked like the same dust and dirt.
Sadie watched as Dani threw the pillows she was carrying through the flap of the tent and came trotting over, beaming and clapping. Clearly, this was a friendship whose season was still in full bloom.
The rear door of the station wagon shuddered open with what looked like pressure from a foot belonging to a gangly teenage boy.
‘My God, James, you’ve grown a foot!’ Dani went in for a hug, but her head only hit his chest now, and he stood so still and frozen she could have been embracing one of the palms that lined the beach.
Two more overgrown children followed, their faces set in the expression of a child who’s been told to be polite with these overly familiar adults. We think we know them, Sadie thought, but we have no idea.
And then the front passenger door opened, and it was Ginger, in denim overalls, a baseball cap and bare feet, and a smile that split her wide, freckled face. She had a bottle of champagne in her hand and she lifted it triumphantly towards the women.
‘Supplies!’
The kids all cringed. ‘Where is everyone?’ asked Abigail, peak twelve in her tracksuit, hood up, hands in pockets. Just like Lucky.
Liss was hugging Ginger to within an inch of her life as Dani continued to cluck over the children. ‘Out there somewhere,’ Sadie told Abigail, ‘far from us.’
James and Abigail began to move off, staring down at their phones as if they were homing beacons that would guide them to the location of their old friends. Which, in fact, they were. Maya, the littlest and not yet of digital age, followed at a skip.
‘Make good choices!’ Ginger called after their backs.
Aiden climbed out of the driver’s side, crumpled in an old band T-shirt and oversized denim shorts. His hair stuck up in different directions, his rough chin speckled now with tiny grains of grey.
‘That was a drive.’
‘You are such legends,’ Liss was saying. ‘I know it’s a big ask for you to leave the farm.’
‘It’s not a farm,’ snorted Sadie. ‘He’s a teacher and she’s a nurse.’
‘They grow everything!’ said Dani. ‘It’s like paradise out there.’
‘You visited?’ Sadie didn’t know that. ‘Who else went?’
Liss said nothing and Ginger busied herself with the car door. Aiden walked around and pulled Sadie, who was half a head taller, with a stronger grip, into a hug. ‘It’s paradise with an endless to-do list and too many mice. You’re welcome any time, Sades.’
‘Okay.’
‘Are we popping this, or what?’ Ginger asked, waving the bottle. ‘You know I’m better at setting up camp with a bit of a buzz on.’
Sadie looked at her feet, knowing Liss was looking at her rather than rushing to pull out the plastic champagne flutes that were always the first thing unpacked.
‘Maybe let’s wait until the sun’s over the yardarm.’
‘Oh, it’s definitely over,’ said Ginger. ‘I’ve been up since five. My body clock thinks it’s midnight.’
Sadie knew that if she lifted her gaze from the ground, Liss would be nodding at her, perhaps even mouthing something to the others. Dani, she knew, would be rolling her eyes. Here was the midlife fuck-up, spoiling everything for everyone.
‘Oh, don’t mind me,’ Sadie said. ‘I’ve still got to sort the tent out and I’ve brought some of my pretend beers.’
She watched Ginger and Aiden’s faces click into recognition, as if they were remembering something they’d been told, maybe around a farmhouse kitchen table that Sadie hadn’t been invited to.
‘We can wait!’ Ginger dropped her hand with the champagne bottle down by her side, and a little behind her, as if she was rethinking its existence. ‘Probably getting a bit old for tipsy tent-building anyway.’
Sadie could have sworn she heard Dani tut, ever so quietly, before Liss jumped in. ‘Well, it’s disco night, so there’s plenty of time for bubbles and fake beer once we’re all settled in and Juno gets here.’
They all paused, looking up the path, as if Liss’s magic would work again to produce their friend from thin air, but Juno’s family wagon didn’t appear.
Sadie nodded over to where Lachy and Craig seemed to be wrestling over inflating one of the kids’ blow-up beds on her site. ‘Better get back to it before the alpha men explode in a testosterone mushroom cloud.’
‘Nice to have some husbands for hire, though, hey,’ Ginger said. ‘All care, no responsibility.’
‘Not a husband,’ Dani interjected very quickly.
Aiden, Sadie noticed, was not rushing over to join the men, who raised their heads and hands in recognition before turning back to her flaccid mattresses. Instead he was stretching, rolling his neck and looking around. ‘I’m going to go and say hello to the beach before we start work.’
‘Check if the kids are down there,’ Liss said.
‘And if they’re entirely covered in mud,’ Dani added.
Sadie knew Trick wouldn’t be covered in mud. She knew he would be slightly apart from the others; there but not there. She knew he’d be quietly stewing on what these next few days would be like. What she would be like.
A familiar sensation burned the back of Sadie’s throat, made her tongue tingle.
‘Okay,’ she said, slapping her denim shorts. ‘Call off your husbands, friends, I’m going to go ruin my manicure finishing off the site.’
‘They can help,’ Liss insisted, as Ginger and Dani, arms around each other’s waists, headed off towards Site Four, the wide, open spot in between Sadie and the camp kitchen, a convenient space that wasn’t in the line of the poo-breeze. ‘It’s the least he can do,’ she added, quietly, as Aiden wandered off towards the beach path, leaving the dusty station wagon still packed, doors flung open in the middle of the track.
‘Thank you, Liss.’ Sadie ran her hands through her hair, fishing around for a smile to offer her friend. ‘I’m so happy to be here, I am, but the less I have to do with your husband this weekend, the better.’