Chapter 37
FRASER
‘Is there WiFi?’ Parker whines as I turn into the secluded Pretty Beach camping ground on Friday morning. ‘It’s saying I don’t have service. Have you got service, Dad? DAD. I’ll lose my streaks!’
I’ll lose my mind.
Her panic makes me want to ban screens altogether, but I can never seem to follow through.
I’ve allowed far more time online than Audrey would have, a fact that has me wrestling with the intrusive thought, She’d have done this better than me.
There were never enough hours to implement all the offline activities on Audrey’s list. After she died and the ideas dropped off, I’m sad to say I let the internet step admirably into the breach—something I’m paying for now.
The camping ground is quiet. Plumbing issues, according to the sign at the entrance, although the council truck is here.
I park and drag out the canvas tent bag, dumping it on wet grass.
Parker takes the mallet and bag of pegs and sets her phone on the ground, where it strives for TikTok like one of NASA’s deep space tracking dishes in the hills beyond Canberra, searching for intelligent life.
Occasionally she bangs a peg with the mallet, between obsessively refreshing the screen.
‘Just don’t hammer the phone,’ I say, the pun flying directly over her head.
The guy opposite our site gets it and chuckles.
He’s cooking breakfast beside one of those enormous state-of-the-art caravans.
Parker fires up the portable speaker and starts blasting The Life of a Showgirl into the unwilling ears of everyone on the South Coast. ‘Headphones!’ I yell over the music, switching the speaker off as I wave at our neighbour. ‘Sorry!’
‘Personal best!’ she yells a few minutes later, high-fiving me.
Despite distractions, we’ve set up the tent in record time, and I want to file this moment and remember it in three years when she’s sixteen and being dragged from weekend parties for an offline camping trip with Dad will ‘ruin her life’.
I play these mind games, envisioning the future, positioning it on the timeline I described the night I proposed.
We’re on a date in this Italian restaurant, and we’ve been married fifty years.
I shouldn’t have been so optimistic. We wouldn’t have fifty years.
We wouldn’t even make the wedding. But even now, in a coastal camping ground she never would have agreed to visit, I feel the whisper of Audrey’s energy.
We were so close, I’m convinced there are moments, like this, when time implodes, stardust glitters, and her particles dance back to life in the fireworks of our existence.
‘Dad, are we done? Can I explore?’ Parker asks, snapping me from a cascade of memories and back to the wet grass, broken amenities and lack of service.
‘Just stay inside the camping ground, okay? Don’t go on the beach.’
The same comforting thought that keeps Audrey alive in my mind taunts me with an imagined future where bad things happen again.
What if it’s just an illusion of free will, as Audrey suggested?
What if the scripts of our lives are set and we’re actors running prepared lines that feel improvised but aren’t, because everything that’s going to happen already has?
It’s thoughts like this that make the endless battle to balance risk and safety with a teenager feel even more fraught, and I’m dreading the push and pull, the older she gets and the more I need to let her go.
I watch my once-inquisitive child wander across the grounds, oblivious to a kangaroo and her joey, who observe her from the mist in the nearby bushland.
She holds the phone aloft in a fruitless search for a rogue bar of service, and I lament the future direction of human evolution.
Staying offline this weekend is fine by me.
Somehow, probably just to appease Audrey’s friends, I got the guts to publish a vastly edited version of the pile of insufferable cringe that the literature think tank concocted last night in my living room.
It was a dating profile brought to the single women of the internet by ‘best intentions’ and ‘Brown Brothers vintage 2022’.
And now I can’t bear to look at the app.
‘You’ve got a happy camper there,’ our neighbour says as he turns sausages on the hot plate. Tattooed, with dark stubble on his square jaw, he looks like a walking advertisement for the Shoalhaven coastline.
‘You didn’t hear the angst over the internet on the way in.’
He laughs and I walk over and shake hands. ‘I’m Fraser.’
‘Beau.’
‘Impressive tourer,’ I say, nodding at his caravan.
He glances at it, then slides a spatula under some hash browns. ‘Home for a few weeks while I’m based here for a project.’
Something stirs in my chest. I used to have stints working away from home, too.
It feels like another life, researching ocean currents in Antarctica, flung far from the routine of the university, deep in focus, doing work that made me feel alive.
I would never say this to Parker—and if I had to choose, she would win—but as a single dad now bound to desk research and teaching, there are moments, usually when we’ve bickered about bedtime or homework or boundaries, that I pine a little for the freedom I exchanged for parenting.
‘What sort of project bases you here?’ I ask Beau as he moves around his elaborate outdoor kitchen with the relaxed confidence of a TV chef.
‘Screenwriting.’
He delivers this news nonchalantly, as if he’d answered Executive Level Two in the Australian Public Service, which, two hours from the capital, is the more likely response.
Then he reaches for two plates and some cutlery and says, ‘I do a bit of directing. We’ve got a film shoot coming up on the coast.’
Somehow, I think the Bookies would find this far more appealing than the data guy with the nonexistent lab coat.
The absurd thought pops into my head that perhaps Beau and I are rivals on the apps.
Next, I’ve cast imaginary women swiping left on the analyst with the phone-addicted teen. Right for the tattooed writer-director.
Will you get a grip, Fraser Miller! I imagine Audrey urging from some overlapping fold in time. Don’t undersell yourself! You were everything. Always. Right from that very first email exchange …