18
2015, Camp One
Green River Campground
Liss
‘Does he think that’s sexy?’
Liss could hear Juno whispering to Emily on the edge of the space they’d hastily cleared for dancing under a flimsy gazebo.
Liss did.
The way Lachy, with hardly even a beer inside him, would stalk a dancefloor.
She’d seen him do it at weddings and thirtieths, just as all the other men would stand off to the side, nursing their bottles and leaving the dancing to the ‘girls’ until they were definitely drunk enough to break out a move from their adolescence, perhaps tearing off their ties in the process.
Not Lachy.
He loved to dance, and he didn’t give a shit who was watching.
In fact, the bigger the audience, the better.
If others – Juno, clearly – might find it embarrassing, the way that Lachy was popping his shoulders and jutting his chin, shaking his hips, clicking his fingers, Liss did think it was sexy.
And hilarious.
A swaggering confidence coupled with a willingness to embarrass himself to entertain.
‘He’s always been a good dancer,’ she said to Juno, leaning in to let her friends know she’d heard them. ‘You should get up there.’
She watched Juno and Em exchange a look, swallow a little smile. ‘Perhaps worth putting that in the consideration column about the genes,’ Juno said, and Liss felt her own smile immediately falter.
They’d all arrived yesterday for the first Green River camping expedition. Liss had been so excited she could barely stop herself jumping up and down and clapping every time another car pulled over to the crop of campsites she hadn’t visited for years.
She knew that her friends had been a little amused by the level of enthusiasm she’d invested in the site tours.
‘It’s tidal, you know,’ she’d said, about a hundred times, when she took each arriving set of friends to see the beach, at its afternoon sludgy, muddy lowest. ‘It’s picture-perfect when it’s high, I promise.’
By the time she showed Ginger and Aiden around, Juno was teasing her when she got back to camp.
‘It’s tidal, didn’t you know?’
And Liss pushed down the irritated voice that wanted to shout, But it is, and mud can be fun! like the eight-year-old who used to have soggy-sand flinging fights with her brothers and dad out there, one of the only times she could remember her father being loose and silly. She was looking around as if she could see it all, she and her brothers as tiny little people, her tall, handsome dad carefree and dirt-splattered, scooping them up and splashing them down.
‘I just want everyone to love it like I do,’ she’d said to Dani, as she gave the last tour of the afternoon. Seb was back from New York, baby Brigitte strapped to his chest. The happy family charade that Liss had witnessed many times since Seb started ‘working away’ in full effect.
‘I’m sure we will,’ Dani had said, putting an arm around Liss’s waist as they surveyed the mudflats under heavy grey clouds. ‘We just have to adjust to the smell.’
‘The smell?’ Liss had shrieked, and Dani had laughed and assured her she was teasing. Ever since, Liss had been walking around the campsite pulling in deep nasal breaths, worried she’d missed something.
Since then, everything had settled. High tide had coincided with a blaring sun in a cobalt sky, the water turning an inviting pale blue-green and everyone old enough to walk had tentatively waded into the river for the first of hundreds of group swims, as the smallest of the babies snoozed in muslin-draped prams up near the tree line. They had bush-bashed a little way into the forest to see Liss’s favourite trees, let the saucy yolks of fresh bacon and egg rolls drip on their hands as they ate them straight from the barbecue, drunk red wine next to an illicit fire pit, and bonded over embarrassing song choices of their youth.
Oh, and Lachy had offered Juno and Emily his sperm.
Watching her husband now as he twisted himself around Ginger and Sadie, waving his imagined maracas to ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ – his father’s favourite and his first request, always – Liss could see how hard he was trying with her friends.
Dani was a known quantity to Lachy. She’d been in and out of their home for almost five years now. There had been a little tension as Lachy worked through his jealousy over his wife’s new confidant, but there was also affection and respect between them, which Liss loved.
But Liss knew the other women were little more than judgemental strangers to him, and there was nothing more motivating for Lachy Short than winning the approval of women.
He didn’t seem to care a bit if he offended Seb, or dismissively spoke over Aiden, or had interrogated Sadie’s Jacob when he’d been around. But Lachy Short wanted the women to think something about him, although Liss wasn’t always sure what that was.
With Sadie, he was flirty, leaning into her energy. With Ginger, he acted curious, flattering her by asking questions about her rodeo relatives and life in the bush. And apparently, he’d decided Juno was one of the boys.
It had been cringy, last night, to watch his energy shift when he clinked his beer with hers, linen shirt open, baby Ollie rested on his hip.
It had been worse when Emily had come back from getting Bob to settle down in the tent and Lachy had said, ‘Oh, so you’re the mummy.’
And then things had got stranger again when Liss and Ollie settled next to Lachy as he told Juno, both of them now deep in a bottle of red, that he had heard they were trying to have another baby.
‘You know, one of my mates is the best reproductive endocrinologist in Sydney,’ he said, before stopping himself and rolling his eyes. ‘Actually, his dad is. He’s the second best. Went to school with him.’
Juno and Emily, Liss knew, were about to move out of Sydney’s east and into the inner west, where there were fewer men like Lachy who would happily tell you who they went to school with, and more families that looked like theirs. She also knew, because Juno had told her, that the clinic they’d used when they’d conceived Bob had waiting list issues, high staff turnover and patchy patient care.
Juno had looked to Liss, her eyes wide. ‘Good to know,’ she said.
‘He helped us, of course,’ Lachy went on. ‘You know, with all the miscarriages.’
There was an actual pain in Liss’s chest at the casual way he said that, a little stab just underneath where baby Ollie was sleeping and snuffling. Here and safe, but not without scarring.
‘Lachy,’ she said, with what she hoped was a warning tone, the kind he hated.
‘It’s okay, Liss. You’ve got to share your privilege. Isn’t that the kind of thing you say all the time?’ He’d had more wine than she thought. ‘Not everyone showered and wrestled and did fucking Latin with the best lawyer, financial adviser, skin-cancer dude or genetic endocrinologist. Not everyone has the right numbers in their contacts. Life’s easier when you do. I do. Share the love, right?’
Liss’s face had got hot. She knew what Juno would be thinking. She knew what she and Emily would be discussing, as soon as they were in their tent. People like Lachy Short were the reason they were moving out of the east. And Emily, lovely Emily, would say that they didn’t want to live in a bubble, and that it was good to have friends with different world views and Juno would say something like Lachy Short’s world view was from the time of the dinosaurs.
But actually what Juno said was, ‘We couldn’t afford it.’
‘But we could.’
‘Lachy!’
‘Stop saying that.’
‘It’s okay, Liss, I respect his honesty.’
‘Juno’s American. Americans are more straightforward about this stuff.’
‘But you don’t go around offering to pay people’s medical bills, Lachy. It’s insulting.’
‘Is it?’ asked Juno.
Liss had shared careful conversations with Juno and Emily about their wonderful, well-meaning female doctor, at their wonderful, well-meaning bulk-billing fertility clinic. It specialised in same-sex couples, women who’d struggled with cancer, couples who couldn’t continue to afford endless soul-crushing, bank account-draining IVF cycles. She had talked about it to Lachy, when they had been to see his schoolmate Bryson, because she didn’t know what got you a baby – luck or money.
She had never imagined this was the campfire conversation it would lead to.
Lachy was beaming. ‘See, Liss, not everyone’s as uptight about money as you.’ He laughed, relaxing into Juno’s apparent approval. ‘I’ve always wanted to be a sperm donor, you know. Help people have what they want.’ He took another gulp of wine. ‘I think everyone should get what they want.’
‘I can’t tell if you’re serious,’ Juno had said. ‘You’re a funny fucker.’
‘He’s not serious.’ Liss had put a hand under Ollie’s bum and pulled herself to standing. ‘I’m taking the baby to bed.’
As she’d walked away from the gazebo, she could hear Lachy babbling on. ‘I’m not God, Juno, I can’t make it happen, but I can help make it more likely to happen than Doctor Turkey Baster and her hopes and prayers gang.’
Twenty-four hours later and the topic was coming back as they watched Lachy and Sadie and Ginger bump and grind. Everyone was a little more relaxed about kids’ bedtimes on the second night, and the older children were jiggling around in their pyjamas, buzzing with the excitement of more sugar than was usual and their parents’ good moods.
‘Why did you ever stop coming here?’ Emily asked Liss, clearly steering the conversation away from sperm. ‘It’s paradise.’
‘Paradise is a bit strong,’ Juno said into her glass. ‘Paradise has a spa.’
‘After my mum died it wasn’t the same.’ Liss could conjure exactly how empty that first visit after her mother’s death had felt. ‘Dad wouldn’t give it up, I guess even he was sentimental about it. We came a few times with stepmother one and stepmother two, but neither of them were campers.’
‘Their loss.’
‘I tried to get Lachy to love it when we first got together and he made an effort when he was trying to impress me, but he’s not the camping type either.’
The three of them looked at him out there in the dusk, shuffling barefoot, arms in the air, a small child clinging to each leg. ‘He’s making an effort now, I guess.’
‘I did have him down as more of a beach house guy,’ Juno said. ‘But this is an interesting side of him.’
‘Oh, he’s definitely a beach house guy.’
Before they married, the fraudulent ring she still wore blinking on her finger, there was a contract. Liss’s father, entirely unhappy about the marriage but always willing to shift position to keep his avenue of influence open, told Liss to buy something big and expensive, like a home, and make sure it was only in her name, etched into the equivalent of a pre-nup, and locked down.
Liss hated to take her father’s advice, but in a gesture of pragmatic loyalty to her dead mother she spent a hefty chunk of her inheritance on the Bronte house the year of the wedding. And she told Lachy that it was their home but it would always belong to her. He had signed the papers on the financial agreement without comment or argument and never spoke of it again. And then he immediately took a mortgage out in his name only on a holiday home on the northern beaches. They went there a couple of times a year, usually with his finance friends and their wives, and the rest of the time it sat empty, quietly gaining value along with damp, a musty monument to Lachy’s ego.
‘He certainly is full of surprises.’ Juno looked at Liss, then Emily, then Liss. ‘I suppose we should discuss his offer at some point?’
‘I’m not the boss of him,’ Liss said, pushing down her rising anger at her husband’s attempts to make himself central to every situation, every relationship. ‘Although I am surprised you two are entertaining it.’
‘We’re not,’ said Emily, firmly. ‘Absolutely not. It’s ridiculous. Sorry, Liss.’
A rush of relief. ‘Oh, don’t apologise.’
‘What’s so ridiculous about it?’ Juno demanded. This was clearly a continuation of an argument they’d already been having today. ‘Our friends offering to help us? It’s kind of beautiful, Em, when you think about it.’
‘Juno.’ As Emily spoke, her eyes were on Bob, who was trying to stand on his head in the middle of the dancers, kicking his little legs in the air. ‘Can’t you see that our friend is uncomfortable with this whole crazy thing?’ She was nodding at Liss now. ‘I swear, sometimes you are about as emotionally intelligent as a rock.’
Liss excused herself, headed over to her dancing husband, shaking her shoulders and hips as she went. She leaned in and whispered in his ear. ‘My friends think your dancing’s terrible.’
‘Oh,’ he said, picking up the edge of flirtation in her voice. ‘And you?’
‘I think it’s hot as fuck,’ she said. ‘But you need to stop offering your sperm around. It’s all mine.’
‘So selfish.’ He kissed Liss, and she felt a familiar rush of adrenaline as she spun out of his reach to usher Tia and Lyra off towards bed.
As she passed Juno and Emily, still hiss-arguing with each other, she saw Dani and Seb, standing under the camp kitchen’s flickering fluoro light, baby Brigitte in a pram between them. Seb was leaning towards Dani, his illuminated face twisted in distress, and her friend looked so hollowed-out exhausted, so little and sad, pushing the pram handle back and forth, back and forth, shaking her head.
Lyra and Tia were dancing towards them, ahead of Liss, and she couldn’t decide if it was better to stop them or let the little girls’ energy puncture the moment.
‘Good riddance to that guy.’ Lachy’s voice in Liss’s ear, his arms around her waist.
‘You think? For good?’
‘I told him he needs to make a call,’ Lachy said. ‘That Dani and Lyra seem happier when he’s not around.’
A little rush of nausea flooded into Liss’s mouth. ‘Lachy, you need to stay out of other people’s lives.’
‘Why wouldn’t you help the people you care about?’ he asked, his mouth close to her ear. ‘Or who your wife cares about? Sometimes people can’t see what they actually need.’
The little girls had reached the puddle of light around Dani and Seb. Dani took her hand off the pram to extend it to Lyra. Seb looked over to where Liss and Lachy were standing, watching, and the look on his face was something like hatred as he turned and walked away, heading for their tent, perhaps, or the beach. But it was clear to Liss he wanted to get away from them. And from Dani, and his daughters.
‘Do you mean Juno and Em, or Dani? How is telling Seb she’s better off without him helping Dani?’
‘That guy,’ Lachy kissed Liss’s neck as she watched Dani crouching down to Tia and Lyra, one hand on Brigitte’s pram, ‘just needed a little push. And she knows he’s not the father those girls need.’
‘Who is?’
Lachy gave Liss’s hips a gentle shove. ‘Go get the girls to bed. I’ve got more dancing to do.’