6
Friday, 4 pm
Green River Campground
Liss
The flame trees had left puddles of blood-red bellflowers all around the entrance to the beach path.
The women, barefoot and giggling, picked their way through, kicking up splashes of colour.
Juno and Emily had arrived, their new electric SUV gliding to a stop at Site Five like a spaceship landing in a swamp. Now it was time for the first female tradition of the weekend – a swim before the chopping and grilling of dinner began.
Liss knew that their appearance on the beach would send the sand-splattered child-pack running back to the tents where they would nag the men for the sugary drinks they would certainly get.
‘Yoo-hoo!’ she called to the gang of bodies already in bikinis and boardies at the far side of the sand. ‘Yoo-hoo! Want to swim with your mothers?’
‘Child repellent.’ Emily laughed as the children turned their heads towards them and then scattered, some waving, some heads-down darting, into the fringing tree line.
‘Thank God.’ Ginger sighed. ‘Now I can swim without all the commentary.’
‘Commentary?’
‘Why are you wearing that, Mum? Put it away, Mum. Is that how you swim, Mum? You look silly, Mum.’ Ginger’s voice was high-pitched, whiny. ‘Who knew we’d given birth to our monstrous inner critics.’
‘Speak for yourself,’ Sadie said. ‘My children worship me like a goddess.’
‘Yes, I’ve noticed.’ Dani, earning a swift look.
The women dropped their towels and sarongs where the sand was still dry and turned to the water. The tide was washing back in, the river sandy golden-brown-green as it lapped the shore.
Liss pulled off her shirt, dropping it in a sandy heap. ‘Let’s go!’
For Liss the weekend truly began when the river closed over her head. When she shut her eyes under the water, rolled and stretched out on her back, floating under the dipping sun. Her skin tingled now, knowing that feeling was coming.
She had been wearing her swimmers – a 1970s one-piece printed with a toucan she’d found in a long-forgotten box of her mother’s things – all day in anticipation of this moment. She imagined that the shiny, thinning fabric held tiny molecule remnants of swims her mum had taken, maybe here, at the river campground. Liss could clearly remember those early summers; she could paint a vivid picture of her mother, in a toucan swimming costume, tossing a toddler version of herself up in the air from the water, just as she had with Tia, with Gracie and Ollie, revelling in the freedom and safety of the river beach. No breakers. No surfboards. No blow-ins.
Lachy called it her campsite uniform, the floaty vintage she always wore for this trip. He didn’t know, or maybe care to remember, that these were her mother’s literal clothes. That in the place she felt closest to her mum, she held her next to her skin.
Liss ran into the river now, gasping as the cool water hit her calves, her thighs. She knew that Sadie and Ginger would be right at her heels, flinging themselves forward into the rippling tide. She knew that Dani, Emily and Juno would stay standing and swaying at the river’s edge, avoiding getting their hair wet, avoiding the palaver of drying off, avoiding the salty, brackish tang that would stay in your mouth after a river swim, a sensation Liss loved.
Liss shot back up through the water, sending rainbow droplets through the air. ‘Heaven!’
‘As long as the jelly blubbers don’t get you,’ said Dani, who was, as always, up to her thighs but looking around anxiously for a tentacle.
‘They don’t hurt you, Dan, you know that.’
‘I don’t care, they’re a disgusting feature of this beautiful place.’
‘So Australian, that there would be something gross and dangerous,’ Juno agreed, ‘even here.’
Emily snorted. ‘No stingers in the land of the free, darling?’
Liss noted the tone. Some of these women – like Dani – she saw as often as she could, for as many coffees and walks and dinners as it was possible to cram into boringly busy adult lives. Some, like Ginger, she saw rarely. Distance and difference intervened.
So now was the time to read the faces, gestures and comments of her friends.
Dani was as tightly put together as ever, in her tasteful French navy bikini with its white edge, the only mark of age a few extra stripes at the loosening skin on her shoulders and at her thighs, her slicked-back dark hair entirely free of silver or frizz. But Liss knew Dani well enough to see signs of turbulence. Nibbled skin at her fingernails. An indirect gaze. Right now, as the water tried to pull her deeper, Dani was turning away from it, glancing back towards where the children had disappeared into the forest, unable to keep herself here, with her friends.
Sadie was tall and strong and fragile and weak all at once. She was gliding freestyle through the water in her high-cut, bright-lime one-piece. Liss knew she would stop only after making sure everyone had seen her stroke – calmly confident and capable. The stroke of a woman who wanted you to know she was no longer falling apart.
Ginger was porpoising in her faded black knickers and bra. She thought swimsuits were for posers and would rather skinny-dip, as she declared every year, and at some point certainly would. Ginger was unbothered by the stares that would come her way from any of the other campers. Especially any who might notice that one side of her lacy black bra was yawning empty, a space where a traitorous cancer had been, two summers before. Now she burst out of the water tossing back her tangled hair. Liss worked hard at appearing easy-going, a dose of Bohemia in a manicured, middle-class world, but Ginger was the real thing.
Juno was holding Emily’s hand and wobbling on the muddy riverbed. She wore a wide black bikini and sensible waterproof sandals. Emily – slight and angular in a crocheted one-piece that looked as old as Liss’s, as pale as Juno was dark, as hard as Juno was soft – didn’t seem as indulgent as usual with her wife. Juno was hooting, loudly, about what she might step on, how the water was colder than last year, about bull sharks, which no-one had ever seen in these slightly murky waters. And Emily was looking down at her free hand trailing in the water, sending up little arcs of diamond drops. Absent.
‘What do we want from this weekend, friends?’ Liss called out, treading water just beyond where her feet could touch the bottom. ‘We should ask the river for it.’
Dani squinted at her with a familiar, affectionate frown, hand above her eyes. ‘Again, Liss?’
‘It’s called a tradition for a reason.’
‘Okay, okay.’ Dani shook her head, closed her eyes for a moment, let her breath go. ‘Cliché, but I want peace. Even the school holidays have been too damn fast this year. I want three days of nowhere to be and nothing to do.’
‘You do not.’ Liss laughed. ‘You hate nothing to do.’
‘Well, luckily we’re camping, so there’s always something to fucking do.’ That was Juno, still unsteady at thigh-height. She was every inch a city person and Liss loved that she still came every year despite it. Bob, she was sure, had a lot to do with that. ‘I’d like,’ Juno sighed, and held up Emily’s hand towards the sun, ‘some quality time with my elusive wife.’
‘And some good content, no doubt,’ said Emily, still looking at the water. Juno, who’d been a book publicist when she’d had Bob but had since passed through careers in PR, talent management and massage therapy, was now busy ‘building a brand’. She’d become ‘big on lesbian TikTok’, she’d told Liss.
‘Aren’t you a bit old for that?’ Liss had asked, thinking of her daughters glued to their glowing screens, to the incessant whiny repeat of catchy music hooks, shouty comedy lines and tearjerking stories about dogs. Juno had laughed. ‘You have no idea,’ she’d said. Liss still hadn’t seen any of Juno’s ‘content’, but Dani told her there was money being made. That new car, for starters.
Now Juno was shaking Emily’s hand in hers. ‘Of course there’ll be a little content,’ Juno said. ‘Camping’s too good not to post. But look at me now, honey, I left my phone in the car.’
‘Congrats.’
‘Emily?’ Liss pushed, smiling.
‘I’m with Dani,’ Emily said. ‘I wish for a year here where things don’t get messy.’
‘Ouch.’ Her wife pulled at her hand.
‘She means me,’ yelled Sadie, from her floating spot. ‘But it’s okay, Em, I’ve cleaned up my act. Going to be boring this year.’
‘I didn’t mean you,’ Emily said, gently. ‘And you could never be boring.’
‘She means me,’ Juno called to Sadie.
‘And what about you, Sadie?’ Liss asked.
‘I want to stay away from the men,’ yelled Sadie. ‘They’re pigs.’
Ginger laughed. Dani and Liss did not.
‘They ruin everything,’ Sadie continued. ‘I’ve sworn off the lot of them.’
‘Welcome,’ said Emily, smiling.
‘Well, I want to have fun,’ said Ginger. ‘No animals, no chauffeuring the kids, no patients. And, sorry, but I will be drinking.’
‘Thank God,’ said Juno.
Liss looked around at her women, beaming now at the comfortable back and forth. It was going to be okay. They were always okay.
‘I want to be with you all,’ she said. ‘And, of course, our beautiful kids.’
Dani laughed. ‘How many of them are there again?’
‘Eleven.’ A man’s voice.
Lachy was standing at the water’s edge, one hand in the pocket of his khaki shorts, the other holding a glistening beer bottle. Something Italian.
‘Where did you come from?’
‘Came to check up on you.’
‘No need, darling, we’ll be back soon.’ Liss waved her hand, raised her eyebrows.
‘Those eleven kids are hungry,’ he said. ‘They’re asking where the food is.’
‘I’m sure you men are capable of figuring out some snacks.’
‘Yeah, we’re decompressing here, Lachy,’ Juno called to him. ‘You’re not helping.’
‘Okay. Okay.’ Lachy looked at an imaginary watch on his bare wrist. ‘It’s five o’clock.’
Liss saw how Dani kept her back to Lachy. How Sadie ducked back under the water and swam several determined strokes further out.
‘We don’t need a timekeeper, darling,’ she tried again, keeping her voice bright. ‘We’ll start sorting out dinner soon.’
‘I meant it’s shark o’clock.’ Lachy’s voice was full of suppressed laughter, as if he were talking to a group of naughty children. ‘Don’t want you to come back in pieces.’
Liss’s irritation hardened into flat-out annoyance. ‘We’re fine, you don’t need to keep an eye on us.’ But she knew he would.
‘He’s got a point,’ said Juno. ‘Dusk, and all that.’
‘It’s not dusk. And there aren’t any sharks.’ Ginger kicked up her legs in exactly the kind of splashy, rhythmic display that would attract them if there were. ‘Lachy’s just trying to scare us. As usual.’
Lachy raised his beer and turned to walk back to the red-stained beach path. ‘We’ll put some snacks out and turn the barbecues on,’ he shouted. ‘We just want our women to come back alive, you hear?’
‘Our women,’ spat Sadie, shooting a mouthful of river water towards the shore. Still, she started her strong stroke back towards the sand, and the others all began to leave the water too, murmuring now about what they’d brought for dinner, and whose salad they might use today and whose cheese they might save for tomorrow.
Lachy had broken the spell.