20
16, Camp Two
Green River Campground
Liss
Liss slid her arms around Lachy’s waist and held her head against the exact spot where his cotton T-shirt was sticking to the sweat between his shoulder blades.
‘Thank you,’ she said, breathing him in. ‘I know this isn’t your place.’
‘It’s yours. And you’re mine.’
Ollie was toddling around them, holding hands with Tia and Lyra, who had travelled up with them. The three kids singing and squabbling and squawking away in the back seat had left Liss syrupy warm, happy. She was pregnant again.
‘How many positive tests is that?’ Dani had asked her when Liss had told her, sitting at Bronte’s Bogey Hole watching the kids splash around. ‘No-one tells you that the number of times you’ve found out you’re pregnant and the number of babies you’ll have are rarely the same.’
‘Oh, so many. I could play Jenga with them.’ But what Liss didn’t say was that she wasn’t frightened this time. She had a sturdy instinct that this was their third baby, their last. The final character slotting into the family picture she’d always had in her head. Three little heads at the table, turning her way.
Dani had squeezed her hand. ‘I’ll never have to go through all that again,’ she said. ‘I guess that’s a bonus, if there is such a thing, to being left.’
Liss didn’t point out that Dani hadn’t really been going through all that in the first place. Lyra was a happy accident, ahead of schedule. When Dani decided it was time to try to make Seb stick around with the second baby he’d always wanted, Brigitte apparently came easily. But Dani had other problems that Liss did not. Like being a single parent with a demanding job. That sounded like hell.
Lyra Martin almost lived at Liss’s house these days; Dani was so busy and Seb was so gone. That’s what friends were for, of course, and she’d rather have Lyra and Brigitte at her place than think they were with one of the babysitters Dani found from that online service, or with the chaotic au pair she’d had for five minutes. Liss would have hated missing all that time with her kids. She tried not to be judgemental, but sometimes she had to stop herself from asking why Dani hadn’t just sucked it up, followed Seb to America and had a nice life. The one time she’d suggested this, Dani had told her she sounded like a person who’d never been to New York City with a toddler, and that was true. Liss had only been there on a shopping spree with Lachy when they were first married. But she’d seen a lot of movies. Nannies were cheap there, weren’t they?
Lachy turned in her arms and bent to kiss her. ‘I like to see you happy,’ he said. ‘It means I’m doing my job.’
They were in a good place. One of those moments to hold on to. Liss felt Lachy’s lips, smelled her trees on the salty, brackish air, heard the rustle of wind through the acres of bush between her people and the real world, and vowed to remember exactly this.
This was the year of three-wheelers. The year the kids would spend the entire weekend pushing themselves around and around the campsite’s circular track on their little pink and green trikes and scooters, an adult or two trailing at the rear, beer or coffee in hand. The year the babies would be sitting up in the rockpool at the lowest of low tides, splashing their fat little hands up and down, up and down, until they got salty water in their eyes, and would scream until a mother, usually, would scoop them up.
It was the year pregnant Liss and Ginger were on the soft drinks and the year Sadie brought a boyfriend who lasted twenty-four hours before she sent him home. ‘Soft,’ she’d said, when he wouldn’t get a huntsman out of the tent and she had to send six-year-old Trick in to do the job. Sadie didn’t do spiders.
It was the year Dani came late because of a crucial work conference and Juno and Emily were barely speaking over their ongoing baby dispute. And it was the year that Liss’s dad turned up unannounced.
Even Dani had never met Michael Gresky, but she had known exactly who he was when he climbed out of an old Land Rover that managed to look both incredibly elegant and incredibly trashed. Actually, she told Liss, he less climbed out than slid out. A long, lean streak slipping out of the big car – white cotton khakis and a white polo, the palest of skin, the whitest of hair.
‘The whitest man you’ve ever seen,’ was Juno’s assessment to Emily that evening. But Emily wasn’t speaking to her, so she wouldn’t smile.
It was Saturday afternoon, and the children were running back up the beach path from a mid-tide swim. The only adults to witness the troop carrier grumble to a stop next to Site Seven were Dani and Ginger, who were chopping fruit and slicing bread in anticipation of the kids’ ravenous arrival.
Liss was at the back of the children’s parade up the petal-strewn path, her hair wet, her long skirt tucked into her pants, freckles bursting across her nose from the sun, holding on to her moment, just as she’d promised herself, when she heard Dani calling with a strange, almost polite, twisted strain in her voice.
‘Liss! Are you far away?’
She wasn’t. But when she saw who was standing there, looking at her big canvas tent, a cigarette in his hand, she wished she were.
‘Grandpa!’ Tia ran to him, wrapping her damp little arms around his pristine legs.
‘Dad.’ When she was Tia-sized, Liss had learned not to do what her daughter was doing. That disrupting her father and her father’s space was never rewarded with anything other than irritation. She watched him glancing down at her daughter with a slightly confused look and patting her head cautiously.
‘Tia, come away.’
The swarm of soggy, hungry children parted around Liss’s father to reach the melon and oranges, sandwiches and biscuits. Their energy and chaos were in such stark contrast to his stillness it seemed impossible that her father had ever been a child himself.
Michael Gresky smiled. ‘Alyssia. I thought I’d come and see what you’ve done with the place. What all the fuss is about.’
Liss gathered herself, shook her skirt out so that it fell around her bare legs, smoothed her hair with her hands and walked over to him, leaning to kiss her father on his offered cheek.
‘What a surprise to see you here, Dad.’
She held her wet swimming towel in front of her stomach. She had no desire to taint the news about the baby by sharing it with him, yet.
‘Daddy, these are my friends, Dani and Ginger.’
He raised his eyebrows. He didn’t have to say anything to telegraph that it was unusual for him to be in the presence of people whose names were not Alice or Peter or David or Elizabeth.
Juno arrived from the beach behind her and Liss took pleasure in introducing her, too. She could see him, as clearly as if it were a speech bubble over his head, thinking an American.
‘Well, what a party.’
This was not how the afternoon was meant to go. Irritation surged as Liss considered whether it was possible that there could be a positive reason for an unannounced visit from her father. None came to mind. Whatever he was doing here, it wasn’t going to be good.
‘Did I miss a message?’ she asked, trying to sound calm. ‘Or a call? Should I have been expecting you?’
‘Oh no.’ A wave of his hand. ‘I just felt like a drive up the coast. It’s been a long time.’
She’d been standing there, in the middle of the path, for a few moments too long. ‘Lachy! Where’s Lachy?’ Liss hoped her voice didn’t sound too panicked, which was the way she was beginning to feel with her father’s focus only on her. Where the hell was Lachy? He was always an excellent deflection with her father, they hated each other so.
Cool and calm Dani stepped in, wiping her hands free of sticky-sweet honeydew juice and dropping the cloth in the middle of the horde of children.
‘It’s good to meet you, Mr Gresky,’ she said, presumably in the voice she used with important people at work. ‘I’ve heard so much about you I was hoping our paths would cross one day. I’m Daniella.’
‘Oh, the Italian.’
‘Greek,’ Dani said, not missing a step, her smile only brighter. ‘But, you know, been out here assimilating since 1984.’
Liss’s dad smiled, dropped his cigarette on the ground, an offence almost worthy of flogging in the bushfire-prone Australian countryside, and stepped on it with a crisp white tennis shoe.
‘Do you enjoy this place, Daniella?’
‘Well, camping’s not my first choice of holiday.’ Dani was being charming. People always tried to be charming when they first met Liss’s dad. ‘But I’ve come back for more. This place is so beautiful it’s hard to resist, even under canvas.’
A nod. A look across at Liss. ‘Yes, well,’ was all he said.
Liss’s father had a trick of always staying separate from his surroundings. Children were milling and the sun was blasting and birds and insects were shouting a warning about something and yet he stood somehow unruffled, not a bead of sweat on his brow, moving and talking at his own pace.
Dani looked to Liss. ‘Should I make your father a cup of tea?’ It was a strange question, which Liss took to mean, do something.
‘Yes, Dad, what can I get you?’
‘A gin and tonic would be good.’
‘Ah,’ Juno called out. ‘Your son-in-law makes a mean one of those.’
‘Of course he does.’
Even if all the women here hadn’t heard Liss talk about her father, anecdotes which never painted him in a warm light, the tone of his voice as he said this was as bitter as the twisted lemon Lachy swore by.
‘But I can step in.’ Juno shooed some shoeless children away and began to rummage for a clean glass. Michael Gresky observed her with open disdain.
‘Only if it’s no trouble.’
‘Dad. Let’s walk.’ Liss decided getting him away from her friends was the best idea. ‘I’ll show you around. You can tell me why you’re here. Dani, do you think you could find Lachy for me, please? I know he wouldn’t want to miss Dad, and I’m sure he can’t stay long.’
She had accessed it, the ability that flowed through her to speak like him, act like him. The whole family had this learned skill lying dormant.
‘Well, Daniella, before you scurry off like a good little maid to do what Alyssia tells you to, let me share a pertinent memory with you.’
Dani didn’t flinch. She was probably more used to dealing with this kind of rude old white man than Liss had given thought to, working where she worked, knowing what she knew.
‘Dad.’
‘Alyssia’s mother and I –’
‘Dad!’ Liss tried to take her father’s arm. He shook her off in a quick motion.
‘We found this place when we knew she was sick. Dying.’
‘That’s not true.’
‘Not every story is yours to tell, Alyssia, please.’
Liss felt like the little girl with his hands on her shoulders. A familiar chastening. A familiar suffocation.
‘And Alice loved it here. Specifically,’ he looked around, ‘she loved the peace. She was English, you know, came here so young, and she loved the Australian bush. She was romantic, spiritual about it. The trees, the water, the space. She saw a peace here she’d want to hold in her head through the times that were coming.’
The whole of HQ, including the chewing children, was silent, listening. Liss was willing him to choke on his words.
‘It’s not true. She wasn’t sick when we used to come here. She was well, she was happy.’
‘If that’s your memory then we did it right.’ He looked around at the plastic trestle table, the unkempt children, the toddlers sitting on the tarpaulin floor sucking melon from grubby fingers. ‘She loved the simplicity. She was quite a simple woman.’
Why is he alive, and she isn’t? ‘Also not true. Come on, Dad, let’s go.’
‘It’s painful to come back, I could never really bear it. Difficult memories.’
Liss thought of the two subsequent holidays to Green River with his two subsequent wives. They were very painful, for her at least.
‘Well.’ Dani cleared her throat, broke the spell. ‘Liss is making new memories, with your grandchildren.’
‘We bought these sites. You could do that, then. I suppose they’re in her blood, and her brothers’ blood, of course.’
The mention of her brothers landed like a thunk in Liss’s muddled brain. The reason for her father’s drive from the northern beaches to the tip of the peninsula, onto Liss’s paradise.
‘Dad, let’s go,’ she urged again. ‘We need to talk.’
‘At last!’ Sarcasm dripped from the voice she knew he’d worked so hard to cultivate. The voice that marked him as old money, when really his wealth didn’t stretch beyond his own parents. A voice that made him sound cultured and educated in the art world he’d hovered around his whole life, but that now marked him out as privileged and old and irrelevant in a world that wanted everything but that.
‘Lachy!’ she shouted now.
Her father laughed out loud and Dani reached out to squeeze Liss’s hand. ‘I’ll find Lachy and send him down. You go to the beach with your father.’
His eyes were running over the various bare-chested children scrapping over buttered bread as if he were trying to pick out his relations.
‘Mr Gresky, I know you’d like to see the beach.’ Dani voice was firm, like she was talking to an unreasonable child who wasn’t her own.
‘I’d like that gin and tonic.’
Juno waved from where she was fishing through a half-melted esky for the gin. ‘I’m working on it.’
‘Thank you ever so much. It will be lovely to return to. Alyssia?’ But Liss had already turned and started to walk back down the beach path. ‘Oh, okay. Off we go then.’
She felt her father’s eyes on her back as she walked. He would be taking in her body, her figure, her size. He’d be cataloguing her many disappointments as a woman, her unfortunate unruliness, which started with her frizzy hair and made its way down to her muddy bare feet and their chipped glittery toenail polish, a remnant of one of Tia and Lyra’s ‘pedi parties’.
Fuck you, she thought with every step. She knew what was coming.
‘Dad,’ she called back to him. ‘Are you planning on selling the campsites?’
‘What was that? Slow down, Alyssia.’
He’d heard her.
‘Did you come to tell me you’re putting the plots up for sale?’
‘Nothing so crass.’
‘So?’ She stopped at the beach and turned for him to catch up. He wasn’t as fast as he’d once been, after all.
‘I’ve had an offer. Several, in fact.’
Liss felt the words hang in the changing air. It had been still, but the breeze was picking up as the light shifted. The beach was momentarily in shade.
‘The demand is enormous, darling, although God knows why.’ He looked left and right, incapable of seeing what Liss was seeing.
The dense, ever-shifting rainforest, the golden beach flats moving with scuttling crabs.
The quietly lapping water, perfect for children’s first swims.
The rockpool and its natural flotation tank, the endless sky.
Instead he slapped his exposed forearm, as if to flatten a mosquito, and squinted past the view to her.
‘I’ve been contacted about selling the sites privately more times than I can count over the past few years.
And you know, one day the Greens will get their way and this will all be part of the national park and the sites will be worthless.
It’s a good time to sell.’
A dealer. Not an artist. Someone who trades in beauty, incapable of creating it. Unable, even, to see its value beyond the literal sum of what it could bring to him. Paintings. People. Places. Views.
‘Is it a good time to do it because my family has fallen in love with it, like Mum did?’
‘So sentimental, Alyssia. There are a thousand river beaches in Australia. Pick another.’ His eyes were paler than they’d once been, she noticed as he fixed her with them. ‘You can’t always get what you want.’ A little smirk.
A tiny facial movement, a twitch of the mouth, might spark a fury so fierce it could make you push an old man over.
It might make you want to slap him in his face.
It also might make you say emotional things you know will give him a satisfaction you desperately want to withhold.
‘You’ve always hated me living my own life.’ You might try really hard to keep your voice from wavering.
‘Please, Alyssia, your choice of holiday destination is not something that keeps me up at night. This is a practical decision.’
You might be made to feel tiny and insignificant in a way that seems outsized by the actual words spoken.
‘I just don’t believe that.’
To Liss it was clear that if her father could have prevented her from inheriting her mother’s money he would have done it.
That he undoubtedly had tried to unpick what Alice Gresky had painstakingly put in place.
And not because of the money – although, yes, because of the money – but because of the control it afforded him.
If he could have kept his daughter on a short leash, reliant on him, duty-bound to consider and defer to his opinion, he would have.
But he couldn’t.
Liss’s mother was too wily for that.
It was a word he once used about her in Liss’s presence, meaning it as an insult. As if a woman shouldn’t be strategic and considered, and suspicious of her literal will being disregarded and discarded.
But those were exactly the things a woman should be in the eyes of a man like Michael Gresky.
Liss’s mother was soft on the outside, iron-rod strong on the inside.
The words she’d left Liss with about men, about love and life and marriage and sex, seemed laughably archaic and soft.
But her actions were those of a warrior.
The sun broke through and her father lifted a speckled hand to his eyes. ‘Do we have to stay on this godforsaken beach? Can we not talk like civilised people, in shade, over something with ice cubes in it?’
‘Do you need the money, Michael?’
It was Lachy. He came to stand beside Liss, putting his arm around her shoulder.
Her father looked from Lachy to Liss as if these were words he didn’t understand.
‘Hello to you, too, Lachlan. That’s a rather common question, wouldn’t you say?’
‘Do you?’
‘Is it relevant? Or any of your business?’
‘Because if it’s about the money, I’ll buy them.’
Liss, startled, looked up at him. Of course.
‘That’s hilarious.’ Her father snorted, and, still using his hand as a visor, turned to walk up the path. ‘I’m going to get my drink.’
‘I’m serious. Talk to my lawyer about how much you want for them.’
‘Your lawyer. Honestly.’ Her father stopped, looked back at Liss. ‘This man.’
Liss smiled up at Lachy. ‘This man.’
‘I’m not selling them to you.’
‘Then that seems to rather prove Liss right, doesn’t it? If this is a purely practical decision, wouldn’t selling them to me make everyone happy?’
Liss’s father looked a little like he might explode in a shower of white diamond dust. A few beads of sweat stood out on his unflappable forehead. He sighed.
‘Lachy, you can’t outsmart me.’
‘Certainly I wouldn’t try.’ Lachy smiled. ‘I’m just a man who buys and sells things. Like you.’
Liss laughed, involuntarily.
‘Or perhaps I could buy them, Dad, that would make Mum happy, wherever she is.’
‘You’re missing the point, Alyssia. Wilfully. I couldn’t sell them to you without upsetting your brothers. Apparently you’re all rather overly sentimental about this place.’
‘So back to me, then.’ Lachy, like Dani, had a voice he used for work. For talking to people like her father, presumably. ‘My lawyer will call yours this week. Monday.’
‘We’ll see.’ Liss’s father set off up the path again and she noticed, for the first time, that there was a wobble to his foot. That he seemed lighter, more fragile. She let him walk ahead, let Lachy fold her under his arm as they followed behind.
Lachy smelled of the tennis game he’d been whacking out near the forest with Aiden. He had mud on his shins and sand in his hair. And he was excited, vibrating at a high frequency of steady loathing for the man who’d given her life.
Liss had never loved him more.