13
Saturday, 7 am
Green River Campground
Liss
Liss woke up irritated.
She’d spent much of the night staring at her husband’s sleeping face, so close she could wake him with a puff of breath, his outline illuminated by the full moon’s long reach.
She knew him so well she could end his sentences, predict every food order and read his mood by his footfall on the driveway. But he could still surprise her. And not always in a good way. This was not how she had wanted this weekend to start.
Saturday was usually a swimming day. A paddling day. A day for watching kids at the rockpool or attempting to lie on the beach and read. A day for walks with your old friends, ones where you might share particularly meaningful secrets or stories you’d been saving for a day like this one.
Now it was going to be a crisis management day. A day of tension and tears, of whispered conversations and apologies, speculation and overflowing emotions.
Lachy slept on. As a woman who struggled with sleep, Liss had spent years lying next to this man, tracking the ripples of his eyelids, wondering how he slept so easily, what went on in his dreams. What things did Lachy not do in life that needed playing out in his subconscious?
And then she’d stopped wondering, because if she was honest, her husband’s internal life interested her less, and she became more focused on how she and the kids could dodge whatever mess Lachy’s lived-out dreams might make.
He opened his eyes. ‘Hey, you. Okay?’
The kids were just a few metres away, in the tent’s other ‘room’. Soon they would be awake, stirred by the building heat, asking for the phones and iPads and consoles that staved off the confronting nightmare of having to think or dream.
‘Not really. Couldn’t turn my brain off.’
Lachy closed his eyes again, sighed a heavy sigh. ‘Sadie is mad. The end. Brain off.’
Liss sighed. ‘I wish –’
‘Do you think she’s gone yet?’
‘I was thinking.’ Liss reached out her hand and pushed a lick of damp hair back from Lachy’s forehead. ‘I don’t want her to leave.’
Lachy opened his eyes. ‘The woman who wants people to think I’m a paedophile? You want that one to stay?’
‘We’ve never lost anyone before.’ Liss knew she sounded petulant. ‘And, you know, we’ve come close.’
‘Liss.’ The kids hadn’t moved yet. He slipped his arms around her waist under the big heavy eiderdown they’d brought out here, rolled tightly and tied with ancient fraying rope, for years. ‘You have to accept that things change. Last year was enough, wasn’t it? We didn’t lose her then, but it’s time now.’
‘But what if she just made a mistake? Thought she saw something she didn’t see? A trick of the light, or whatever.’
‘Whatever?’
‘Does it have to be such a big deal?’
‘Being accused of groping a teenager? A little girl I’ve known her entire life? I’d say yes.’
Liss knew it too. There were all kind of allegations you could throw around and come back from, but not that one. Not in any normal circumstance. But given this was Sadie they were talking about, and Lachy, and Lyra, was this what could be called normal circumstance? She wrestled with how to put this to him.
‘I don’t think that’s what she did.’
‘Liss, it’s literally what she did.’ He rolled over onto his back, his body tensing with frustration, his voice getting louder. ‘I can’t stand for that. Nor should you.’
Liss could hear – or perhaps sense – Tia stirring on the other side of the tent. She propped herself on her elbow to peer over in the weak early light. Tia was lying on her fold-out bed, eyes wide open, staring at the tent ceiling, just as Liss had done.
‘Hi, darling,’ she called out, her voice, she hoped, light, bright. Tia looked like she winced at the sound of it, and quickly rolled over to face the other way.
‘Hi, Mum,’ she finally said quietly. She was as long as Liss now, and looked faintly ridiculous in the stretcher cot she’d been sleeping in for a decade. A young woman’s body in a little child’s bed.
‘You okay?’ She sounded like Lachy.
No response.
‘You have to back me on this, Liss,’ Lachy said, not looking towards his daughter. ‘We can’t stand for it.’
He could be very convincing, even now. It hadn’t taken Liss long to realise, back when Lachy Short was wooing her like his life depended on it, that there had been nothing accidental about their meeting that night.
It took only a few weeks for some obvious pieces to fall into place. His commitment to morphing into someone she would find tolerable and exciting. Her brother’s throwaway comment that Lachy Short never accepted an invitation unless there was a party bag in it for him. Details of her family and her life slipping out of Lachy’s mouth. The Bondi love nest. The speed of it all.
Liss had spent years avoiding dating the kind of boys who went to school with her brothers. They held no appeal or mystery for her, with their bottomless confidence. There were no surprises. They would live in one of a handful of familiar suburbs. Holiday at Positano and Aspen and Hyams. Spend a few summers spinning around identical dancefloors at each other’s weddings, then it would be school fees and sailing and tennis and golf for eternity. This was not what Liss had in mind. And if she had been raised for that life, her mother’s death had knocked her firmly off course.
On that day, as her father’s cool hands held her shoulders firmly in place, she had stood by her mother’s bed, staring at the tufts of fluff on the thick beige carpet under her feet and said what her father told her to say. Goodbye. It seemed ridiculous to be saying that to her mum, who was already not there, just a tiny thing lying in the vast bed, eyes flickering under her translucent lids, her skin thin and taut across collarbones and wrists, her fingers trembling.
Liss’s mother had wanted to die at home. Eleven-year-old Liss wished her mother didn’t want that. She wished her mum had left their house the woman she remembered from before, not this ghostly version of herself. Liss had tiptoed past the door to that room for weeks, trying to dodge the nurses and aunties and her father, who might intercept her and make her go inside. Her brothers, she noted, were gone. Sent somewhere else with balls to kick and throw. They, apparently, were not required to play along with this macabre charade.
Liss knew her mother wasn’t in that room. And she also knew that any plans you made for your life were entirely redundant. After that day, Liss had abandoned how things were supposed to go.
It was the very same day she’d started bleeding into her underwear. In one day you could lose your mother and start your period and there would be no-one to talk to about either of those things. This was definitely not how things were supposed to go.
So, no, she wasn’t into her brother’s suitable friends.
But what had surprised her within weeks of being in Lachy’s bed, and he hers, was that, actually, Lachy wasn’t suitable at all.
Her father thought he was an imposter. A wolf in the old school tie. It wasn’t money that was the issue, but pedigree. Lachy’s dad had made his money starting a betting shop franchise in the suburbs. His family were interlopers, with their fortune made from poor men’s misery, Liss’s dad said. There were no stellar qualifications, no soaring talents. Lachy Short, to Michael Gresky, was cocky. Brash. Unworthy. A symbol of what was wrong with Sydney these days.
The other surprise was that Lachy was far from boring. Their chemistry was intoxicating, and so was his willingness to break rules. He took her to places she hadn’t been, literally, sexually. And he treated her with the exact combination of adoration and disdain that she’d been looking for but had always found in the wrong quantities.
They were obsessed with each other from the beginning. So the proposal wasn’t such a surprise, when it came, six months after the night he whispered in her father’s ear.
The ring was. It was her mother’s – a beautiful, delicate cluster of diamonds daisy-set in a yellow-gold band. If Liss had guessed what ring Lachy Short would choose for his bride, she would have imagined platinum, because silver was in fashion, but silver was cheap. And she would have imagined a rock that could be seen across a busy room. An announcement that you had made it, like that awful apartment he lived in when they met. Her mother’s ring was subtle and sentimental. Liss had cried.
But it wasn’t her mother’s ring. Lachy let her think it was for one whole night. And then the next morning, when they were lying in bed at the Shangri-La, a whole wall of window bouncing the morning sun from the harbour view to the stones Liss was holding up to twinkle in the light, he told her.
He had asked her father for the ring at the same time he asked him for permission to propose – a full-circle moment from the night of Tom’s party, half a year on. And Michael Gresky had said absolutely not. Even though Liss was his only daughter. Even though it was clear she was wild about this man. Even though this union would see her settling down close to home, which is what her father had always claimed was his heart’s desire.
‘Did he think it was too soon?’ she asked Lachy.
‘No, he said he wouldn’t give that ring to me under any circumstances. Ever.’
‘And so this . . .’
‘Is an exact copy.’ Lachy’s voice was different. Lower, flatter. ‘I know a guy who knows a guy. Specialises in duping antiques. Sourced the gold and stones from the same era. Amazing how old things cost more than new things, isn’t it?’
‘But you said . . .’ Liss thought back to the moment she opened the box, at the table at the sky-high restaurant last night, dizzy from two glasses of champagne. She had known, the moment they arrived at the hotel, what script Lachy was following, with the private table, the flowers. And she had decided to go with it. She was certain that when she opened the box she’d gasped, because her mother’s ring was such a surprise.
‘I didn’t say it,’ Lachy said, taking hold of her hand and looking at his creation. ‘You said it, and I didn’t correct you, because I didn’t want to upset you about your dad being an arsehole. It could wait.’ He kissed her hand, let it drop.
‘You know that’s a strange choice, right?’ she’d said. ‘To remake my dead mother’s ring?’
When he rolled on his side to look at her, he was smiling. ‘I wanted you to think about her when you look at it,’ he said. ‘You deserve that.’
It was a lovely thing to say. She had told him, of course, about the space her mother had left that she could never fill. About how Liss wished she felt her mum with her, like other people said they did but she didn’t.
‘And every time you see your father,’ he went on. ‘I want him to see that ring and know what a complete cock he is for underestimating me.’ He kissed her. ‘And you.’
It was a bit embarrassing now, as a supposedly grown-up mother of a daughter, to admit how incredibly sexy Liss had found Lachy’s twisted little stunt.
You get me, she’d thought, then, as they rolled around in the blistering light pouring through the penthouse suite window. But the slight from her father had left a mark. Lachy had got up not long after, and as if a switch was flicked, had looked around the room and declared the hotel overpriced and tacky. That the meal from last night had maybe made him ill. That he really couldn’t afford to take the day off, like he thought, because his new boss was an insecure phoney who would try to badmouth him if he wasn’t there.
And everything beautiful and special was swept away, leaving Liss feeling uncomfortably hot in the fishbowl room, lying on a wet patch and looking at her deep-fake ring while Lachy ranted and swore about the size and number and thread count of the towels in the bathroom.
And so it was with him. The sun was shining its brightest beam right at him or the world was pissing in his pocket.
Us against the world was one of his favourite scripts, and today, he had decided that Sadie was the enemy who must be eliminated. Did she have to go along with it?
Easier for you. It was a cruel thing to say to Sadie last night, and she knew it. But Liss was irritated by her friend’s self-pity. Sadie used to be fearless. A remarkable survivor of a traumatic story. From the very first day, babyless at mothers’ group, Sadie was refreshingly other. But the last few years, she’d brought mess to almost every interaction. And Liss’s tolerance for mess had shrunk.
She whispered to Lachy, hoping Tia was falling back to sleep. ‘Why would Sadie make that up though?’
‘You know why.’
‘Because of last year?’
‘She’s obsessed, Liss. You know it.’
‘Mum.’ It was Tia. She hadn’t fallen back to sleep. ‘Can I get up?’
It was cute that she was still asking that. There was a rule between Liss and her friends that no child was out of the tent before 7.30 am. Otherwise all the kids would be up, shouting and running and calling for breakfast, and before you knew it, the mothers would all have to be up, too, breaking up fights, picking up plastic bowls, closing cereal boxes and putting the lids back on orange juice bottles. And Liss craved the novelty of a slow morning.
‘Can’t you wait a bit?’ Liss asked, realising in that moment that Tia didn’t have her phone in her hand. Weird.
‘I just want to go and see if Lyra’s okay.’
‘Why wouldn’t Lyra be okay?’ Lachy’s voice was too quick, its edge too harsh.
Tia twisted at her long braids and made eye contact with Liss. ‘Can I, Mum? We’ll just go down to the beach.’
‘I said, why wouldn’t Lyra be okay, Tia?’ Lachy’s voice inched up a decibel.
‘Just . . .’ Tia, Liss could see, was trying to reach around for words that wouldn’t make things worse. ‘All that fuss with Sadie.’
She’d said the right thing. Liss felt Lachy relax a little beside her. But Ollie and Gracie were moving now, woken by his sharp words.
‘Lyra will be fine,’ Lachy said. ‘She’s not a drama queen.’
‘Go, darling.’ Liss nodded towards her daughter, who didn’t say anything else. She just folded her long body up out of her bed and grabbed her wash bag and a sweatshirt, and slipped out of the tent, head lowered.
‘Us too!’ Ollie cried. ‘We want to get up too.’
‘Your Switch is in the tent pocket by your bed,’ said Liss, simultaneously throwing her phone towards Gracie. ‘Half an hour.’
‘Lachy. Conference.’ She signalled to him to meet her under the quilt. It was one of their small rituals, to pull the covers over their heads and meet in the musky darkness. Once, it was to kiss. Now, it was to whisper.
Liss’s eyes adjusted to the gloom, her husband’s face inches from hers. He was still so handsome. She saw the way women looked at him. So many of the men in their world had hit forty and sagged and gone bald and faded. Lachy’s ego wouldn’t survive that. Being attractive, being wanted, was a big chunk of his sense of self.
What did he see, she wondered, when he looked at her under here? Unlike Sadie, unlike Dani, unlike almost all the women at Ollie’s school gate, Liss wasn’t fighting the ageing process with needles, fillers and threads. Lachy would be seeing the lines around her eyes, a little stripe of silver at her roots, a softness under her chin that had never been there before. Unlike Lachy, physical beauty wasn’t a currency she was invested in holding on to. It had never brought her much peace, and she was comfortable with how she was changing. Lachy could take it or leave it. She knew, as he put both hands on her bottom and pulled her close to him, that he would still take it.
‘Lachy.’ She shook his hands away. ‘What were you doing that set Sadie off?’
‘Dancing.’ The faint sound of Ollie’s Nintendo was audible in their parent cave, and yet, he kissed her neck.
‘With Lyra?’
‘With everyone. It’s disco night. The girls joined in. You know how rare that is these days.’
‘I do.’
‘We were dancing. It was fun. Until Sadie started screaming.’
‘Was Lyra uncomfortable?’
‘With what?’
Liss took a deep breath. ‘With you?’
‘Liss, for fuck’s sake.’ He took his hands back to his side of the bed. ‘Lyra Martin knows me as well as she knows that French fuck of a father of hers. Better, probably.’
‘That’s not what I’m asking.’
It was getting uncomfortably hot in their blanket cave, but his eyes, now, were unblinking. ‘What are you asking me, Liss?’
‘I’m asking you if anything happened last night which would explain Sadie’s reaction.’ Liss swallowed.
He put a finger on her lips. ‘Liss. I am not interested in teenage girls, I am not a criminal. I did not touch Lyra Martin. I would never do that.’
Liss exhaled. He kissed her.
‘You know who I am,’ he said. ‘You’re the only one who does, really.’
I know, thought Liss. I know.
‘But it’s us,’ he said next. ‘And you can’t let Sadie demonise me like this. I know you don’t want to lose a member of your precious gang but if there’s a toxic element you’ve got to cut it out. And that one is determined to fuck me, one way or another.’
‘Please don’t talk about Sadie as if she’s a thing.’
‘Liss, you’re too forgiving. Have you forgotten last year?’
Liss pushed the covers back, exposing them both to the sunlight shining through the canvas, and took in a big gasp of stale tent air. It was always unbearable to be inside the tents once the sun got to a certain height in the sky.
‘What about Dani?’ she asked. ‘She’s the most protective mother I know. Right now, she could be calling the police, or packing up, or plotting to kill you.’ Liss was only half-joking.
The kids’ heads turned from their screens towards their parents.
Lachy laughed, just like he’d laughed last night when a tipsy Liss had first asked him if Sadie had a reason to hate him so much.
‘You don’t need to worry about Dani,’ he said. ‘She’s family.’
Bless you, Liss thought. You have no idea at all.