22
2017, Camp Three
Green River Campground
Liss
At the far end of Green River Beach at low tide, oyster shells rose from an ancient, exposed reef like razor blades.
Liss knew, as a child, never to swim there. You wouldn’t feel the shell slice into you until there was blood in the water and a million dirty microbes flooding your system. Unsuspecting visitors with bare feet and romantic aspirations could be seen hobbling back into the campground with a red-stained towel wrapped around a sopping foot.
The summer that Aiden cut himself was also the summer that Sadie brought a different man, a handsome trainer called Lewis. It was the year that Juno and Emily were vegan. The year the ‘big’ kids could be trusted to paddle in the shallows on their own. And the year Liss could barely walk because of the sciatica she’d been suffering since giving birth to baby Grace.
Dani was alternating cold and hot packs against her friend’s lower back, providing a helping hand to lift and lower little Gracie into her cot and pram. Lachy, not a natural carer, would take Tia and Lyra, Ollie and Brigitte for river-camp adventures, so that Liss could rest and stretch and nurse.
For her, it was a quiet, uncomfortable year. Lachy had urged her to cancel, but she wouldn’t. ‘Once you get a tradition started,’ she’d told him, ‘you have to keep going, no matter what. That’s how you build a shared history.’ And he had shrugged at her, kissed her head, told her she was dramatic, and packed the car.
Saturday morning was the kind of beautiful they had learned to hope for. Hot but not so hot that the tents turned into little saunas. Glorious buttery sunshine with a breeze whipping up just enough air to freshen but not chill. Swimmable high tide coincided perfectly with the moment everyone tipped from their tents in their cozzies, and the rockpool remained blessedly seaweed-free.
Liss stayed back at camp, taking her doctor-prescribed short walks, jiggling the baby at her shoulder, and lying on her beach blanket while Grace kicked and cooed beside her. She felt like an invalid queen, as her damp friends came past to pay a visit in between swims and cricket games and child-chasing. They would wait on her a little and drop morsels of gossip on her blanket.
Juno stretched out beside Liss and played with Grace’s toes. They’d stopped trying for another kid, she said. Nothing would take inside Emily. Juno refused to go again, insisting she was old, her shop was shut. Emily was angry about it. ‘Maybe we should have taken up Lachy’s offer,’ Juno said, sticking out a playful tongue at Gracie. ‘Before everything got so complicated.’ Liss hadn’t said anything to that, but reached out and stroked her friend’s hair.
Sadie brought Liss a valerian tea and confided that Lewis wasn’t as good in bed as he looked. Liss didn’t say what she was thinking, which was that Lewis didn’t look good in bed, he looked good at carrying you a long way on his back, but possibly lacking in the fine motor skills it took to bring an experienced woman to orgasm. Sadie patted Grace absentmindedly on the head while she fed and told Liss not to worry, they would all entertain Lachy. ‘Not as thoroughly as you do, obviously!’ Then she danced away to find Trick, who’d gone off sulking somewhere after James had kicked a ball at him.
Dani ushered Lyra and Tia over to show Liss the necklace they’d made from the pink pig-face flowers they’d found growing on the rainforest edge. ‘So pretty, just for you, Mummy,’ Tia said. ‘Not for Gracie.’ And Dani had whispered to Liss how she’d had to rescue the girls from Lachy’s swim-stroke clinic in the rockpool. ‘He told your girl she’s got spaghetti arms and duck feet,’ she said, which explained Tia’s pink eyes.
And then Aiden came shuffling up the beach path, leaning on Ginger, his leg wrapped in a towel that was rapidly turning scarlet, his foot sliced on a blade of the oyster bed. Nurse Ginger was going to clean it out and wrap it, she said, and wait to see if it was worthy of a visit to Arcadia’s emergency department.
Once his wife had administered enough Panadol, Aiden seemed relieved to have an excuse to sit out of man-play and hands-on dadding. He joined Liss on the camp chairs, his leg raised, and told her stories of their life in the country.
‘Don’t mind me, sickies,’ Ginger said. ‘I’ll just make lunch around you.’ And she did, pulling out the fixings for chicken wraps – slicing up tomatoes and carrots, chipping in to Aiden’s stories as Liss patted Grace off to sleep in her pram.
Their new hometown was close but not too close to where Ginger had grown up. A pretty place with a top and bottom pub where the old high street was lined with wrought-iron verandas. One of those Australian country towns once full of farmers and their labour force, now full of single-origin roasters, wine-growers and artisan bakers. Bitingly cold in winter, blistering in summer.
But however chichi the town had become, the property they’d bought three years ago now was a hungry, dusty money pit. Ginger was working part-time at the town’s general health clinic, and Aiden had got a good teaching job at the rural outpost of one of Sydney’s most elite schools. It was the place young city boys were sent for a term at a time to be taught about the ‘real Australia’, and Aiden, who was not your guy for survival skill classes and multi-day hikes, was one of the ‘ordinary’ teachers keeping the usual curriculum going between sleep-outs, horse-breaking and orienteering.
‘Some of them love it, you can see their eyes and minds just widen with the space and the freedom,’ he said, wincing as he adjusted his leg on the chair. ‘Others, well, you can tell they panic when the pavement runs out.’
Liss knew that Lachy’s nephews went to that school. She knew a story that did not reflect well on her family was moments away. Her stomach fluttering at the thought, she kept trying to change the subject.
‘I think you really do need to get that foot seen to, Aiden,’ she said. ‘Oyster shells almost always cause infection, even with your wife’s professional cleaning skills.’
‘He’ll be fine,’ Ginger called from where she was arranging cheese slices on a big plastic platter. ‘It wasn’t deep. I’ve got some pretty standard antibiotics in the first-aid box. Nurse stuff.’
Damn it.
Aiden suddenly looked at Liss as if something was just occurring to him. ‘Actually, there’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you about Lochs and Lachy’s brother.’
Damn it. The dots had been joined.
‘You know, I can’t believe I never warned you about swimming at that end of the beach,’ Liss said. ‘It’s so dangerous, isn’t it?’
‘Lachy’s nephews go to Lochs, right? Primary?’
Liss nodded. She knew where this was going.
‘But you’re not sending Ollie there?’
‘No,’ she said quickly. ‘Both his and Grace’s names are down at Samara so he can join Tia. I really feel strongly about co-ed.’
‘Yes, I thought that was it. Obviously I only teach Years Nine and Eleven.’ Aiden kept looking at Liss like he was trying to work something out. ‘Which is when the boys come to the bush, but I think Lachy’s brother is involved in the school leadership? Richard Short? He’s on the board.’
Liss swallowed. ‘I think I know what you’re going to say next, Aiden,’ she said.
Ginger looked up from her salad plate, her nurse-issue rubber gloves paused midway through halving an avocado.
‘The scandal?’ Aiden looked left and right, as if expecting Lachy to come barrelling in, which he was likely to do any moment. His finite patience for swim school and the proximity to lunchtime meant his body clock was probably already propelling him back to base.
‘What scandal?’ Ginger separated the avo with a decisive twist.
‘It’s really nothing,’ Liss said. ‘One of those silly social media things. You know, a Facebook group getting a bit out of control.’
‘Oh my God, I love those stories. Schools specialise in that shit, right? I can’t believe you haven’t told me this, babe.’
Liss sighed, closed her eyes, and Aiden, satisfied that Lachy wasn’t lurking around a corner, gave Ginger what she wanted. ‘Last year all the teaching staff got pulled into a meeting to warn us we might read stories about Richard Short on social media, and to ignore them and not comment to parents or kids. I think they were really worried the media might pick it up. I didn’t put two and two together that it was Lachy’s brother until recently . . . Should I not bring this up?’
Clearly, Liss’s face was giving her away.
‘Maybe you shouldn’t,’ Liss said. ‘Not around Lachy.’
‘What was the rumour?’ Ginger asked.
‘You know I don’t gossip . . .’ Aiden looked genuinely concerned. He really didn’t.
‘I know, it’s infuriating. But you’ve started, so you have to finish this one.’
‘I can tell you because it’s over.’ Aiden rearranged himself again, the pain shadowing across his face. ‘The rumour had been that Short was having an affair with one of his sons’ teachers. The school was convinced it wasn’t true, but it wouldn’t go away, and some of the staff in Sydney had a big issue with it because there were insinuations the affair hadn’t really been an affair, but more of a harassment kind of thing, and the poor teacher – it was Linda, you don’t know her, but she’s so lovely – was deathly embarrassed about it all.’
‘Poor Linda.’
‘And then it kind of all went away because it became clear it was a grudge thing. Linda was so adamant, I think, and the school was so spooked they tried to track the anonymous online posts and how they’d got in the groups and could keep popping up about Richard Short . . . it was what they call a malicious actor.’
‘Well, there you go.’ Liss stood up, with some difficulty, desperately needing to bring this conversation to a close.
‘But,’ Aiden was still going, for fuck’s sake. ‘And this is what I wanted to ask you about, Liss, in the vault . . . All of a sudden it stopped. And the rumours all over the staffroom were that it was a family matter. Like, someone close to Richard had started the campaign. His wife, or someone . . .’
‘Why would his wife do that?’
‘She wouldn’t.’ Liss pushed through the burn spiking across her back and down her leg to grab the handle of Grace’s pram and kick off the brake. ‘I think we should stop talking about it, you know. It’s over. We’re just adding to the gossip.’
And just as she had feared, or maybe even manifested, Lachy appeared at that very moment, shirtless, hair wet, lightly burning across the shoulders. ‘What gossip?’ he asked, smiling an extra-toothy smile at Aiden. ‘You alright, mate?’
Liss knew how Aiden felt about Lachy. Ginger didn’t have to say anything for her to understand there was a very long list of things Aiden would rather be doing, and people he would rather be doing them with, than camping with Lachy Short. They were such different people. It was like putting a dog and a cat in close proximity for the weekend and telling them to be mates.
Lachy considered teachers to be service workers. That they worked for the parents and performed as directed. The idea that a person – a man – would actively choose what Lachy considered a low-status job was something he couldn’t comprehend. And his feelings about Aiden, about his profession, his influence, his status as a man, were not explicitly expressed but apparent in every interaction. Like now, with his over-wide smile and his pointed ‘mate’.
Liss knew Ginger and Aiden were only here because Ginger was lonely in her new town. These trips were the connective tissue between Ginger and her ‘old’ life, to the solid friends she’d made at the most pivotal time. Liss had imagined the arguments that must proceed these weekends. Aiden asking if they had to go, really? And Ginger saying yes, do it for me, please.
Aiden was one of Liss’s favourites in the group. He was good company, a great dad. But there was a part of her that got a kick out of seeing a man squirm in the presence of her husband. She wasn’t proud of it, but it was true.
‘I’m fine, Lachy, just a fight with a reef.’ Aiden raised his water bottle as if in a toast.
‘I’d get something else in that bottle if I were you,’ Lachy replied. ‘It’s going to hurt like hell when the infection kicks in.’
‘He won’t be getting infected,’ Ginger called.
‘Anyway, what gossip? You can’t stop now.’
Liss looked behind him. ‘Where are the kids?’
‘Coming up with Dani and Juno. What gossip?’ Lachy was, she noticed, looking very directly at Aiden, his smile steely now.
‘We were just talking about Lochs,’ Aiden said. ‘You know, and your brother.’ It seemed like he’d decided to settle into the subject, take a jab. ‘You heard about those rumours, right?’
‘Yes, well.’ Liss watched her husband turn and look at her, back at Aiden, back at her. ‘My brother’s a bit of a dickhead, let’s be honest.’
Here we go.
‘But it was all a beat-up, the school found,’ Aiden went on. Ginger had stopped pretending to arrange lunch. ‘Nothing to see and all that.’
‘There’s always something to see.’ Lachy was standing in the centre of the space, still shirtless, still shiny. He’d pulled himself up to his full height. If he was a dog, his hackles would be up. ‘So what were you saying about my idiot brother?’
Ginger began busying herself with urgent wrap-rolling, Aiden rubbed the bandage on his leg. Liss wanted to sprint away with the pram, but felt Lachy’s eyes on her, willing her to stay put.
‘Seems he was the victim of a smear campaign,’ Aiden finally said. ‘Close to home.’
‘Very close to home,’ Lachy murmured.
Shut up.
‘It must have sucked, seeing people spread lies about him.’ Aiden was trying.
‘Who says they’re lies?’
‘Well, everyone, I think, in the end.’
‘Listen, Aiden, my brother and I went to that school. It was my mother’s singular fixation that we would. She thought it would change our lives and it did. Now my wife,’ he looked over at Liss, who thought she might just vomit, ‘is another mother with a very specific vision for her children’s education, and that doesn’t involve such a traditional institution. And look, we’ve had our differences about it. But just because my association with Lochs is over, it doesn’t mean I don’t care about the standards of the place. And if my brother, who’s on the board, for crying out loud, is behaving like a horny little prick around the pretty young teachers, I think people need to know, don’t you?’
‘You’re . . . jealous of your brother?’ Ginger was the one who said it. ‘Because his kids are at your old school, and he’s on the board?’
Liss felt the need to step in. ‘No, of course he’s not. Let’s get on with lunch, shall we? You could go and tell the others it’s almost ready, Lachy.’
‘I’m not jealous,’ Lachy almost spat.
‘And so you . . .’ Ginger, fearless, straightforward Ginger, Liss could see, was going to call the tiger on its stripes. ‘You sat around on Facebook, posting bitchy shit about him?’
‘Of course not,’ Liss said, instinctively defensive. ‘Lachy, tell them. You wouldn’t do that.’
Liss couldn’t push away the feeling, almost as sharp as the pain shooting down her leg right now, that she’d had when Richard’s wife, Beth, had called and told her that Lachy was ruining her husband’s life. ‘Call him off,’ she’d said, as if Lachy were an attack dog with a safe word. ‘Or we’ll be involving the police.’
And Liss, who had been standing there with the phone to her ear, her big round belly full of baby Grace, felt her unconfirmed suspicion firming that her husband would do anything to settle a score.
‘What did he ever do to you?’ she’d asked Lachy that night, her head in his lap, his hand rubbing firm circles on her lower back. ‘What did your brother ever do to you?’
‘He got on the board of that school,’ Lachy had said. And no more.
‘Of course I didn’t,’ he said now, to Ginger, running his hands through his hair. ‘But I’ve got a lot of sway up there, Aidie, you know. I could put in a good word for you about a promotion.’
‘What promotion?’ Ginger asked, looking up from the chicken as Aiden shook his head.
‘Nothing, babe.’
Ginger went back to the chicken.
‘Okay, so I’d better put a shirt on,’ Lachy said. ‘If the gossip session’s over.’
Aiden looked down at his foot, where a bright red stripe was beginning to seep through Ginger’s tight, white bandage. ‘Babe . . .’
‘Better get that seen to, mate,’ Lachy said. And as he walked out of HQ towards Site Seven and a shirt, he ever so slightly bumped the chair Aiden’s leg was resting on.