9 #2
‘Hang on, Cat,’ he says as I take off my seatbelt. ‘Before you get out, about last night...’
‘Ugh, here we go.’ I roll my eyes. ‘I know, I know, I shouldn’t have walked home alone, blah, blah, blah.’
‘Don’t be a smartarse. You have an incredible brain; we all know that. But you don’t have a lot of street smarts, and walking home alone last night proved it.’
‘Quick question, Dad. Would Matty have to sit through this or is the safety chat just for me because I’m a delicate, vulnerable girl who can’t take care of herself?’
He holds my eyes as he continues, concern heavy in his face. ‘Why’d you leave the party? Did something happen that I should know about?’
‘I told you, I was over it. Like I won’t be seeing the King of the Neanderthals enough?’
‘Bella, you need to lose the attitude about Paul. Everyone’s dealing with their own crap. Remember that and don’t add to it. Yeah?’ Dad only calls me Bella when he is in full protective father mode and the nickname cleaves through my stubborn annoyance.
‘Yeah, all right, Dad. I get it. It was stupid, and I’m sorry, okay?
Are we doing this?’ I really don’t want to think about Paul GD Lightwood and what’s looking like my undeniably bad call sneaking off last night.
He’s occupied far too much of my brain space this morning as it is, the way my hand felt in his.
Enough! I get out of the car and zip my puffy jacket right up to my chin.
I pull the hood over my face so only my nose is poking out.
Matty always says the jacket makes me look like a burnt marshmallow, but I love it.
Even today, it’s so cold that I can see Dad’s breath as he takes his fishing rod from the car, yet I’m already covered in a fine sheen of sweat. It’s like walking around in a doona.
I take Dad’s tackle box and walk ahead of him down the path.
Once away from the carpark, the trees absorb the light, turning the morning into a strange twilight.
A pile of poo, hopefully canine, is crawling with flies, the buzzing an assault, yet somehow thankfully assuaging the smell.
The path twists and turns through the bush, then gently ascends.
Eventually, sand wins over soil, the trees recede, and the path crosses a dune that leaves my calves burning as I reach the crest. The ocean is a calming sight, spread before me like a galaxy of blues and I am greeted by its salty kisses.
I yank the hood off my face and unzip my coat to my belly button, the cold air delicious on my skin. I wait for Dad at the top of the dune. When he emerges from the trees, he uses his rod to point right.
I run down the dune to Dad’s fishing hole. It’s a rocky outcrop just behind the shore break, an area of water the size of one of the tennis courts at school. The water barely ripples despite being surrounded by an ocean of supreme grumpiness.
Since we were kids, we’ve had it drilled into us that we are never to swim where the waves don’t break. The smooth sea seems enticing when the waves are violent, and the shore break alone looks too big to navigate without being pummelled.
Every summer at one of the local surf beaches someone always gets swept out by the rip.
There’s rescue after rescue when it’s hot.
If people are lucky, they get caught when the surf is pumping, because they drift into the surfing lineup who begrudgingly drag them onto their boards and paddle them back to shore, abusing them relentlessly, calling them every name under the sun and accusing them of ruining the chance of catching the best wave of their life.
By the time they get the poor, bedraggled, terrified person back to standing height, the surf lifesavers are barely up to their knees in the water.
No wonder the lifeys hate surfers, and vice versa.
The surfers see themselves as martyrs giving up their fun time to do the lifeys’ jobs for them while they parade up and down the beach with their wedgies.
The lifeys see them as the interlopers who step in and get all the hugs and gratitude and glory for saving lives, while they get stuck rinsing sand out of kids’ eyes and treating sunburn.
I place Dad’s tackle box on a flat rock shelf high above the point of any rogue waves. There’s a line of foam high on the beach and the tide is making its way out. Away from the dune’s protection, the wind tears into me. I zip myself back into my coat, wave to Dad and start walking along the beach.
The sand is soft beneath my feet but too wet for the wind to flick into my face.
I find a gorgeous piece of driftwood, thick, narrow and gnarled.
Attach some straw to the end and it would be a perfect witch’s broomstick.
I use it as a walking stick, my footprints left with a deep, round indent beside them.
When we were kids, Dad’s favourite beach trick was for all of us to walk with stretched, exaggerated steps in the sand so the next people at the beach who came across our footprints would think they were following the trail of a family of giants.
A wall of white crashes and bounces off the rocks in a steady pounding.
At the foot of the dunes is a carpet of seaweed, torn, twisted sheaths of rubber.
If the tide doesn’t reclaim it overnight, by this time tomorrow when the heat returns it’ll be hard and cracked, its shine reduced to matte.
Entwined and tangled in the seaweed is rubbish.
Ugh. I grab a giant discarded crisp bag and step in the gaps between the seaweed to start collecting.
I pluck tin cans, plastic bottle lids, fishing line, straws and beer bottle tops.
There are the disgusting remnants of cigarette butts, so many cigarette butts.
I barely walk half the beach, and the chip bag is full.
Still, the air smells clean, the scent of salt and wind clings to my skin and hair.
I place my stick under a giant pile of seaweed, its stem as large as my torso.
I flick hard and it flips over, revealing thousands of scrambling sand fleas.
I leap over them, using my stick to clear a path of sorts towards the cliff face.
I hate stepping on sand fleas, but not as much as on seaweed.
I’m always waiting for something to reach up and grab me by the ankle.
It’s sheltered at the point. I sit in the soft white sand, my back against the cliff face, cradled by rock.
It’s so quiet below the wind, the waves muted.
All I can see is a trinity of sand, sea and sky.
The horizon is clear. The light between sky and sea is opaque, as if someone has taken a white chalk and drawn a line to separate the two.
It’s easy to imagine being the only person on the planet today, until far in the distance, the triangle of a boat moves across my vision.
Closer in, shapes are moving just under the surface of the water, a strange shimmering.
Seaweed, I think, until I see what’s unmistakably the tip of a fin flick above the surface.
The shape shifts, separates, rejoins and then two dolphins rise above the water, their white bellies blending into the waves’ foam.
They drop, and rise again, joined by another, and then another.
One leaps high from the water, launching itself across the face of a wave, its landing sending a torrent of water splashing.
I’m on my feet, wishing for them to return but their forms are replaced again by the waves.
They’ve gone, and I’m both exhilarated and bereft.
I grab the plastic bag of other peoples’ crap and my stick and run back to Dad.
‘Did you see the dolphins?’ I yell from the beach.
His face is beaming, and he points to the bay beside him.
The pod is chasing each other up the beach.
We watch them until they are indistinguishable from the white caps.
It’s cold, my puffer no match for the wind blowing off the ocean.
Dad’s had enough and so have I. We’re putting away Dad’s gear when another two cars of fishers arrive to fish the low tide.
‘Good haul?’ They note our elevated moods.
‘Yep,’ says Dad as he turns to leave. He hadn’t caught a thing.