15
Saturday, 10 am
Green River Campground
Dani
Craig was winning friends one at a time with his tiny portable espresso machine. He’d already turned out a near-perfect macchiato for Juno, who’d enthusiastically filmed the process, and Ginger, who was dancing away from HQ with a wiggle in her hips, coffee held aloft. ‘Nailed, it, Craig. You can come back.’
Craig was beaming, as if winning the approval of this group of women was his life goal. ‘Maybe this will score us a better site next year,’ he whispered as he handed Dani her plastic mug of superior blend and their hands touched on the handle.
The coffee would not dissolve the tension in Dani’s stomach as she scoured the site for Lyra. Tia Short had put her head through the tent flap this morning and spirited her daughter away before Dani could restart the grilling from last night.
‘Nothing,’ was the only word she could get out of her daughter when she asked Lyra what happened at the disco while she and Liss were off collecting ice creams from the camp kitchen’s stuttering freezer.
‘Nothing,’ was what Lyra insisted when Dani asked her what she wanted her to say to Sadie.
And ‘nothing’ was what Lyra answered when Dani, at her most direct, asked what Lachy Short did to her on that dancefloor.
She’d tried to sleep on all these nothings, as Lyra and Brigitte fiddled around getting ready for bed as if it were any other evening. Craig had wisely disappeared for a while and, when he returned, she asked him to sleep in the kids’ tent, so she could bring her girls onto the big inflatable mattress with her. Dani had kept her daughters where she could see them, and listened to Craig’s gentle snores through the canvas.
‘We’ll be back together tonight, right?’ Craig said, watching her sipping her coffee.
‘Were you at the same party I was at last night?’ she asked him, her voice sharper than she’d planned. ‘I have other things to worry about.’
‘It was a lot of nothing.’ Craig put his hand back over hers on the coffee cup. ‘I’m no big fan of Lachy Short, but it’s not a secret that Sadie is crazy. And sometimes, Dan, people bump into each other on a dancefloor.’
He went back to fiddling with his coffee pump. Dani watched his hands while she considered his words. ‘Maybe.’
Lachy and Liss, and Sadie herself, were nowhere to be seen, so far. But Trick had been hovering around the smaller kids monstering the bacon and egg rolls, his face unreadable.
‘How’s your mum?’ Dani asked, in as neutral a voice as she could manage. The boy shrugged and pushed a piece of bacon into his mouth.
She tried a different question. ‘Have you seen –’
‘Beach,’ he replied quickly, nodding to the path, mouth still full, his urgency to get away from her clear. ‘The girls are at the beach.’
They were. The tide was on its way in, and Lyra and Tia were sitting where the wet mud turned to dry sand, heads together. At first Dani thought they were talking, staring out at the pelicans perched on the old pier stumps. But as she approached, and Lyra’s face turned towards her, she realised they were looking at their phones.
Once the sight of Dani would trigger her daughter’s automatic smile. That beloved little face splitting into a grin when Dani appeared to collect her, or arrived home from work, or was spotted in an assembly crowd or at the sidelines of soccer. Now, that face she knew better than her own was finding it hard to hide the inevitable mother–daughter shift brewing between them. Sometimes there was relief, sometimes irritation, occasionally disgust. It’s Mum, her daughter’s face said, how do I get her to move along?
‘Hi, darling.’
Tia Short’s face also turned Dani’s way, attempting an old-style smile. ‘Hi, Dani.’ She looked raw around the eyes, like she hadn’t slept. Her face was slightly puffy and pale, dappled with the headless pimples of hormonal youth. Tia looked like she’d been another mother up worrying all night.
‘What are you doing?’
‘Nothing.’ Lyra lifted her phone hand a little. ‘Data’s terrible.’
‘View’s good though, right?’ Dani nodded out to the pelicans and the girls’ eyes went back to their impotent phones at this most predictable of comments.
Dani sat down anyway, making sure that the bum of her denim shorts would be on the dry sand, and her feet not too far into the mud. She cradled her coffee and took a breath. ‘Girls, I just have to ask –’
‘Mum!’ Lyra glared at her. Her daughter nodded at Tia, whose eyes stayed down. ‘Can we drop it?’
‘Lyra, I’m your mother. It’s my job to keep you safe.’ It was her most well-worn of teenage parenting lines; still, it was the right one for now. ‘And before we all get on with this weekend, I just have to ask you again –’
‘Again,’ muttered Lyra.
‘Yes, again. And while Tia is here, too.’
Tia, she could see, was scrunching her bare feet into the mud, like she was tensing her whole body, in her fluffy pyjama bottoms and strappy little vest, almost exactly the same thing that Lyra was wearing.
‘I have to ask – no, I have to say – that if anything happens, anywhere, with any of the boys, or any of the . . .’
Tia Short’s eyes were squeezed shut now, and Dani wasn’t sure what word was coming next. ‘Anyone, whatever age,’ she went on. ‘If anything happens that makes you uncomfortable, or crosses a line . . .’
Why was this so hard, this kind of conversation with teens? Dani wasn’t a prude. Dani was straightforward. Dani could have conversations with high-status, wealthy men that they did not want to have. But talking to teenage girls, even when one of them was your own, was terrifying. It was as if they were surrounded by a force field. She blundered on, ‘You can speak up. You can tell me. You can tell another adult you trust. You know that, right?’
The girls said nothing. Tia opened her eyes and Dani could see they were glassy.
‘You have to tell me.’
‘Are you finished?’ Lyra asked, finally.
Dani felt a surge of fury at the cheek of her oldest daughter. At the idea of what her mother would have done – or her father, more likely – if she’d used that tone of voice when she was a teenager, growing up in a three-generation house. ‘Lyra,’ she started, in a voice that both her daughters knew was one step away from all-out yelling. ‘You want to watch yourself with that voice. I am trying to be reasonable here. I am trying . . .’ her voice was disappointingly shaky now, ‘to protect you.’
‘From who?’ asked Tia, looking up.
‘It’s a good question.’ Liss. She’d appeared, presumably from the south path, a cup of Craig’s coffee in hand. Her face echoed her daughter’s. Pale, sleepless, but with a hint of a smile around her mouth. ‘Can I join?’
‘Of course.’ Dani patted the sand next to her but Liss lowered herself on the other side, next to Tia, and put her hand on her daughter’s shoulder. ‘You okay, girls?’
The horror of a dual mother–daughter chat flashed across both the teenagers’ faces at the same time. If the circumstances had been slightly different, Dani would have laughed. She and Liss would have laughed. They didn’t, though.
‘Mum, we don’t need another lecture,’ Tia said. ‘Everything’s fine. It’s just . . . Dad, you know.’
‘No lectures here. Sounded to me like Dani was about to lose her absolute shit.’ Liss sipped her coffee, winced a little. ‘So you’ve definitely had the whole “it’s our job to keep you safe” chat?’
Dani leaned forward and looked at Liss, widening her eyes in a ‘what the fuck?’ face. ‘Thanks, friend.’
The girls’ energy had shifted. They were twitching in their desperation to get up and leave their mothers, this beach, this conversation – the planet, perhaps. ‘Mum, everything’s fine. Can we go?’ Lyra’s voice was no longer full of attitude but cajoling, like a little girl.
Tia stood up, a little patch of damp sand on the bum of her pyjamas. ‘Dad is so embarrassing,’ she said to Liss. ‘Can you just tell him not to dance anymore?’ An innocent request with a tortured tone.
‘Yes, Tia, I can.’
The teenagers started down the beach back towards the path. Two almost-women, only their bare feet and doughnut-printed fluffy pants giving them away.
‘Get some breakfast into you!’ Dani called after them. ‘Ginger’s made bacon and eggs.’
‘Gross,’ she heard Lyra mutter, before they were out of earshot, walking in step.
Dani and Liss sat for a moment, watching the river lapping up to them. Dani finished her coffee, pushed the base of the mug into the soft sand and tipped her head back, sighing.
‘Jesus Christ.’
‘So, who are we protecting them from?’ Liss asked, eyes still out to the water.
‘Everyone.’ Dani sighed. ‘Absolutely everyone.’
‘What did she say happened?’
‘Nothing. Nothing is the word of the moment.’
Liss, hands wrapped around her mug, looked like she was choosing her next words cautiously, which was uncharacteristic. Usually words between them were a constant streaming exchange. They had a short-hand, they had in-jokes, they had no filter. Only when it came to Lachy could things get spiky, careful.
‘So.’ Liss had chosen. ‘You think Sadie?’
‘Do you?’
‘Well, I don’t think anything else, Dan. Lachy’s a lot of complicated things, as you know, but Lyra? Come on.’
It was what Dani believed, too. Or, at least, it’s what she wanted to believe. Believe her daughter, believe her friend. But there was a little block to it in the shape of the growing distance between herself and Lyra. It was inconvenient, but it felt wrong. She shuffled a little closer to Liss in the sand, dropping her voice.
‘How do you know what’s normal teenage behaviour and when to worry?’ she said. ‘That’s what’s keeping me up at nights now. How would I know if something bad had happened to her? Would she tell me? I don’t know if that’s something I can count on anymore. She used to tell me everything, but now . . .’
‘That’s not what this is.’ Liss pulled her toes out of the way of the advancing river and turned to look at Dani. ‘And, Dan, you’d know. You’re so close to your girls. You’d know.’
Dani wasn’t sure if this was true, looking down the beach at her daughter’s retreating back. She and Tia were turning to walk up the path, they were talking to each other now, phones down by their sides. Dani was jealous. To be on the end of a free-flowing conversation with Lyra. To know what was being shared between them, their private worlds and thoughts. Would she really know? Would her daughter look different to her the day after she lost her virginity, say, or the day after something world-shifting had happened? Like . . . a trusted older man groping her? Would it leave a mark that a mother could read?
‘Yeah,’ was all she said as the girls disappeared up the path. ‘So, Sadie?’
‘I don’t know if she thought she saw something, or if she made it up entirely because . . .’
‘Of last year,’ Dani finished the sentence. ‘If that’s true, Liss. If she invented the whole thing, you have to do something.’
‘That’s what Lachy says.’
‘Of course it is.’ It didn’t quite feel right, even in all its obvious likelihood. Sadie carrying shame, projecting it around.
‘Okay, well, I’ll talk to her about it.’ Liss placed her hands on her thighs in a decisive, ‘here goes’ gesture. ‘It’ll be okay. Lyra wants this over. Lachy wants it over. I want our weekend back.’
Dani nodded. It was tempting to just move past this, to erase the first-night disco from the story of the weekend. But there was one more idea she needed to try on first.
‘Do you think it’s possible that Lachy just didn’t realise it was Lyra he was dancing with?’
Liss looked at Dani for a long moment. ‘Well, he knew it wasn’t me, so . . . what are you saying?’
‘Nothing.’
‘You think he thought it was . . . you?’ Liss asked, looking closely at Dani, a smile forming.
‘That’s not what I meant.’ But maybe it was, a little bit. ‘Sometimes people bump into each other on a dancefloor, as Craig says. That’s all.’
‘I think it’s Sadie seeing things,’ said Liss, calmly. ‘Let’s stick to that.’
‘Yeah.’
The river surged and both women jumped up, their feet in the water, the coffee cups knocked to their sides. They laughed and fished the mugs out as the water retreated.
‘Let’s go,’ Liss said. ‘I think I’ve got some instant coffee somewhere that’s better than this.’
Dani laughed, picturing Craig’s earnest face pumping away at his espresso machine, easing into the idea that they were pushing this chapter out with the tide. ‘Jesus, let’s hope so.’