29
Sunday, 2 pm
Green River Campground
Liss
There was graffiti on the inside of the cave walls. Scrawled and chiselled onto the overhanging lip of its entrance.
Sals a slut
Arc Boyz 2017
Locals only fkn tourists
There had probably once been rock art on the insides of these shelters instead of scrawled inanities, Liss thought. Symbols that meant something, signposted a food source, transferred tradition. The sitting ledge smoothed from millennia of exchanging stories; the smoke-blackened ceiling. This cave had seen a lot.
Now though, the cave was seeing two adult mothers sitting side by side, trying not to hit each other.
Liss wasn’t sure why she was focusing on graffiti when her beloved best friend was sitting beside her, sobbing as if she was broken.
The anger was simmering when Dani had told Liss about her conversation with Aiden and Ginger. Those words made it impossible for Liss not to tell Dani about what she’d seen yesterday. Lyra running from this cave. Lachy leaving behind her.
In the sheer, wild rage that followed, Liss had to grab Dani’s hands and hold them down at her waist to stop her from – what? Clawing at Liss’s face? Pulling her hair? Punching her? It was only the sheer difference in their size that had allowed Liss to hold her friend off, continually saying her name, until the fury broke into something else. Sadness, fear, betrayal, devastation. And then Dani had told Liss the secret she’d been keeping, that Lachy had bought and sold Green River.
And now they sat, Dani sobbing, Liss oddly numb.
‘You didn’t tell me,’ Dani spluttered.
‘And you didn’t tell me,’ Liss replied.
‘It’s really not the same.’
It had taken Dani almost two hours to find her, apparently, after she ran from her river conversation with Aiden and Ginger straight to the campsite in search of Liss, to tell her about the things her husband had said to Aiden on that long, hot slog of a morning run.
Allegedly, she wanted to add, in her head.
What her husband had allegedly said to Aiden.
But Liss knew it was true.
She knew it not only because she knew Aiden, and she knew, despite his patent dislike for Lachy, that he owed her husband something.
She also knew because it was exactly the kind of thing that Lachy would say, and she might have chosen not to believe, or to have laughed it off, until yesterday when she’d seen Lyra and Lachy leaving the cave.
And until what Dani had just told her about the campsites.
It had taken Dani two hours to find her because Liss had driven off with the teenage girls for a few late supplies for the last-night party.
Boring things, like milk.
Less boring things, like chocolates and champagne.
She never went on the supply runs to Arcadia.
For Liss, once she was at Green River, she stayed at Green River.
Finding herself in a strip-lit shopping centre within a thirty-minute drive rather punctured the fantasy of her personal wilderness, so she left it to the others to decide if they couldn’t live without another type of breakfast bread or an extra bottle.
But today, she had needed to get in that car.
Wanted to put some distance between herself and everyone else, and the heat, and the eyes on her.
Dani had been wild, apparently, but somehow resisted going straight to Lachy with her fury.
Liss had no idea how.
Liss had felt Dani’s rage the minute she and the girls climbed out of the car, Lyra and Tia clutching the skincare-spoils of an impromptu chemist visit with Liss’s credit card.
She had put down the milk and alcohol and felt the simmer between Dani, Ginger and Aiden, sitting around in camp chairs waiting, like animals crouched to ambush.
Lachy was at the beach with the younger kids, mustering a game of cricket.
Juno was making some spon-con over in the kitchen, filming herself turning two-minute noodles into ramen over a camp-stove flame.
‘Boil an egg for as long as you want, and you’re done!’
Liss had seen Dani’s face and known.
‘The caves?’ she asked her friend, who gave a tiny, furious nod and followed her, offering only a restraining palm to Ginger.
Stay there.
Now, here it was.
‘You are married to a monster.’ Dani’s voice was thick and choked. ‘You are married to a fucking monster and you’ve been making excuses for him all this time.’
Liss just sat, staring at Sals a slut. She bet that Sal had seen that. She bet those words were for Sal’s benefit. A punishment, not a warning.
‘You know, you could have left him. You could afford to leave him. Does being alone look so awful? Do I make being alone look so fucking sad?’
Liss kept sitting.
‘I need to talk to Lyra. I need to talk to her now.’ Dani didn’t move. ‘Why would she lie to me? Why wouldn’t she tell me if there’s something happening? Why wouldn’t she let me protect her?’ Dani’s voice was devolving back into a sob.
Liss lowered her eyes from the words to the view.
This cave, the one that she had seen Lyra and Lachy leave yesterday, the one she had sat in afterwards, trying to feel something, anything, about what had happened here, had a large opening out onto a scrubby patch of forest between the park and the campground.
It was right on the edge of the path down to the kitchen and the toilet block, and yet it was almost completely concealed.
A space where you could see people coming, but they couldn’t see you.
A place you could observe but not be observed.
The perfect hide.
When she was little, her brothers would dare her to go in here alone and try to jump out and scare them as they walked up the path.
She would agree, delighted to be included in her brothers’ plans, and then the boys would go off to the beach or go climb a tree and leave her sitting here, lying in wait, for hours.
She felt like that now – a tiny, insignificant person, being tricked.
Someone who didn’t matter in the big boys’ games.
‘Dani, I’m just so sorry.’
Dani waved a hand, swallowed a sob.
‘I’m so sorry, but we can sort this out.’
‘I will not . . .’ Dani was gasping through her tears, ‘be doing that with you.’
Liss flinched.
She deserved it.
After today, she was going to lose everything.
Her husband.
The picture of a perfect family she’d been carrying around and polishing for so long. This beloved place. Her best friend. There wasn’t really any alternative. Or there was, but she no longer had the stomach for it.
Still, her tears wouldn’t come. She felt clear-eyed, right-headed.
‘I have to find out if anything has actually happened.’ Dani choked on the words. ‘I have to talk to Lyra. Where are the girls?’
‘Skincare haul,’ Liss replied, and smiled, despite herself. She had spent the afternoon watching them skipping about through supermarket shelves and coffee shops and the aisles of a chemist lined with jars and tubes and potions. They had seemed so innocent. Young. Silly.
‘For fuck’s sake.’ Dani was gulping, wiping her face on the back of her hand, trying to pull herself together. ‘This is bullshit.’
‘Dani,’ Liss said, still looking out at the view, ‘I’m so sorry.’
‘So you’ve said.’
Liss knew her friend’s head was whirring, that she was calculating her next move.
She knew Dani wouldn’t go and talk to Lyra until she was composed and calm.
Dani felt the responsibility of being her girls’ constantly present parent like an extra ten kilos on her back.
She couldn’t put it down, because what would happen then? But Liss knew she was wrong.
Lyra and Brigitte had been in her kitchen, her house, her bath, her pool, her holiday home, her sacred campground for their entire lives.
They had slept and played and cried and fought in her home.
Liss had picked them up and dropped them off from daycare, from school, from sport and parties and trips to the mall.
She had wiped tears and bums and patched knees for them.
Lyra Martin, Liss felt deep inside herself, was her child too. She had done half the mothering for Dani.
And now she had to face that she may have put Lyra in danger. She wanted to kill Lachy for that.
Tia, too, of course, in a different way. She saw how her girl cowered around her father. At least, she saw it now that the scales were falling from her eyes.
‘I know those words aren’t big enough,’ Liss said, finally. ‘But I need you to know something. My loyalties are not divided. My loyalties are with you and Lyra. And my kids.’
Dani sniffed, covered her face with her hands. ‘I have to get myself together.’
‘We do,’ Liss said. ‘We do.’
Lachy had managed to convince her, for decades, that she was the one thing he would always need. That he would never be successful enough, rich enough, important enough to betray her. That any other interests were safe, frivolous dalliances. She had genuinely believed, all this time, that she had the upper hand. She had believed that until . . . when? Friday night? Yesterday? Today?
Her father, making a deathbed deal with a man he hated. Her brothers, keeping it from her. Her husband, trusted, for once, with a piece of her mother’s legacy. All these men, playing her.
How much were these campsites going for? That was her price, she supposed. A stupid, petty loss compared to the dread she felt for Lyra, but a stinging devastation of any remaining trust. A compounding realisation that this man was capable of anything.
‘How can I not have seen this?’ Liss asked, out loud. ‘How can I not have understood all this?’
Dani was not going to do what Dani always did, Liss knew. She wasn’t going to say, It isn’t your fault. Don’t worry, it will be fine. Don’t be so hard on yourself. Dani was trying to piece her own reality back together, right alongside her.
Nothing was going to be the same after today.
‘Dani,’ said Liss, ‘I think I know what to do next.’
‘Liss, this is not one of our just-move-on moments. We can’t rally around this. We can’t gloss over it or leave it until tomorrow so we can have one more disco. We are so far beyond that.’
‘I know, Dan, I know.’
‘So what are you thinking?’
‘Well.’ Liss stood up, eye-to-eye with Sals a slut above the cave’s exit. ‘First, we need Juno. And we need Sadie. God knows I owe her an apology.’