• • •
Six-year-old Audrey ran down the corrugated boat ramp, her legs in free-fall, and spilled onto the sand littered with flotsam.
‘Let’s go to the rock pools, Dad.’
‘I’ll carry you, Auds.’ He swept her up in his arms and wrapped her legs behind his back. ‘Just like we used to. I used to carry you in a harness on my tummy.’
‘Yay,’ said Audrey. ‘Let’s find the starfish.’
She buried her face in the warm nest of his chest. The wool from his jumper tickled her cheek. His boots ground over broken oyster shells; he tested each rock, pushing lightly against it with his foot before jumping onto it. They reached the curve of the bay where the rocks smoothed into boulders. He swung Audrey down and planted her squarely in front of him, gently nudging her towards the rock pool, then rigged up his rod and cast it in a wide arc out to sea. Audrey pushed her arms behind her and crawled down the face of the boulder, like a crab, until she reached a shallow gutter loaded with periwinkles. Her hand skimmed through the water making whirlpools. Juvenile luderick darted into shadowy gaps. She poked her finger into the maroon tentacles of a sea anemone, and screamed.
‘Daddy, Daddy, quick! It’s dead!’
He rested his fishing rod in a crevice. ‘Audrey, come away from there.’
‘It’s got no bottom!’
‘Audrey.’
‘It’s still swimming, Daddy; it’s got no bottom and it’s still swimming.’
He peered into the water behind her, holding her shoulders. ‘Oh Auds, it’s just a fish; it’s the frame of a fish.’
‘It’s all bones and a head and a tail but no bottom and it’s swimming.’ The fish was moving with the flow of the tide, its tail flicking and glinting in the sun, its eyes still clear. ‘Let’s touch it,’ Audrey squealed. ‘Let’s get its eye out.’
‘No, honey,’ he said. ‘Leave it alone. It’s dead, just leave it alone.’
• • •
Audrey carried the bowl of porridge to the master bedroom. The bedroom was a major feature of the Majestic-with-luxe-inclusions. It had an integrated bathroom, the inanest design Audrey had ever come across. The open plan removed any shred of privacy, and steam from the dual-head shower wafted into the bedroom making everything dank. Steven was propped up in bed, leaning against an oversized pillow that erupted in blue bursts through the gaps in the wrought-iron bed head. He had the real-estate guide slung between his legs. On the second page was a photo of him in a navy suit with a cerise tie knotted precisely around his collar in the manner of a private-school boy. His body was leaning forward as though he was about to leap right out of the page. The photo had been retouched. In it, his usually ruddy skin was a lovely caramel colour. Byron-bronzed, thought Audrey. His hairline, normally travelling from his forehead in two high peaks, was styled into a smooth brown wave that hung over one eye. The profile under his picture said, Steven Trott, licensed consultant, and under this, a quote. I truly value people’s needs. Let me help you build you’re new lifestyle. His eyes were immediately drawn to the error.
‘Morons,’ he said.
She balanced the bowl in one hand and pulled the blinds open to let in some fresh air. He held a hand up to his eyes.
‘Audrey, I’m not ready for light.’
‘What’s wrong?’ she said.
‘You’re lifestyle with an apostrophe. You are lifestyle. Two hundred for that ad.’ He slapped the back of his hand over the page. ‘Oh, for God’s sake. Graham’s got the Wise listing.’
‘The duplex? I was sure they’d sign with you.’
‘I’ve been working on that family for months. I gave their bloody kid my mountain bike.’
Audrey had a flash from the past. The two of them cycling down a palm-lined road on Lord Howe Island. They’d rested their bikes against a tree and spent the day swimming in pristine water. Audrey had snorkelled while Steven took underwater photos with a disposable camera. He’d kept a chicken leg from their lunch and thrown it onto her head at the same moment she’d duck-dived. The fish had gone into a feeding frenzy, wrasse and silver drummer gulping at her tanned legs. Steven’s laughter was audible through the water. Then he’d yelped when a kingfish bit his finger. She’d laughed too, through her snorkel, almost choking. They’d laughed a lot back then.
The real-estate market was tougher on the coast than Steven had expected. A lot of the potential buyers ended up being tyre-kickers or rainy-dayers. The local agents were a tight-knit group who’d been around for years. Things were improving, but every day was a new challenge. Sometimes he came home with aching teeth and a sore head from smiling and nodding all day.
Audrey slid the blind back using the nylon baubled cord at the side of the window. She noticed it was dotted with tiny fly specks. She smudged them off with her fingertip and put the bowl on the bedside table.
‘Make me a coffee?’ Steven said to the back of her head.
• • •
Audrey started back towards the kitchen. She heard the creak of bedsprings and turned into the room she’d decorated for the baby she and Steven had tried to conceive not long after they’d moved in. The room had aqua walls with stencilled schools of whitebait swimming to the ceiling. Against the vertical blinds, strands of fishing line swayed with sparkling silver and gold starfish. Sheer blue silk draped in curling wave barrels from a steel rod mounted above the window. ‘A bit premature, don’t you think,’ Steven had said when she’d started to transform the room and buy furniture.
The timing was wrong. With his business slow to take off, they’d agreed to take stock of things. Audrey made the most of the situation, turning the room into a space for an after-hours childminding service. Steven dismantled the bassinette and moved in a bed suitable for toddlers and children as well as a sofa bed to accommodate the friends he anticipated would lob at their front door now they lived near the sea.
Moving the bassinette had been an ordeal. ‘I’m fine, Audrey, don’t worry about helping me,’ Steven had said, shoving the wooden frame of the bassinette through the sliding door. It had scraped the powder coating, leaving a jagged line in the paint. Audrey had followed with her arms folded as he’d dragged it across the lawn to the garage and then clambered over the retaining wall next to the garage and pushed up the door. He’d climbed onto the workbench and hoisted the white timber structure above his head, shoving it into a gap above the exposed beams where it wouldn’t get in the way. It teetered over the side of the beam and crashed onto the floor, splitting almost perfectly down the centre.
• • •
That morning, the single bed’s chenille quilt had a mound beneath it. Cocooned inside was a child named Phoebe. The bed sighed as she rolled over. Audrey had babysat her overnight; in fact, minding Phoebe had turned into an ongoing arrangement. Her parents were in one of the houses that had gone up in the second stage of Oasis Estate. The Trotts had originally been located on the far boundary, but now they were hemmed in. Phoebe’s parents had a two-storey house that towered over the Trotts’ rear fence leaving a dark shadow on their lawn.
Phoebe’s mother, Kylie, had left her job as a property manager and now sold Thermomixes through a party-plan arrangement. As it transpired, children were an unnecessary distraction during the cooking demonstrations. Audrey knew this from experience. She’d attended the Five Courses in One Hour party, where Kylie had stood behind her marble bench top and popped pre-cut fruit into a machine that magically produced creamy sorbets in seconds. She’d made an entire cake, calmly responding to the patented recipe chip that gave step-by-step instructions.
It was when Kylie was cooking the steamed chicken with creamy Dijon sauce, though, that Phoebe had halted proceedings by tearing out of the entertainment room yelling, ‘Eli showed us his rude parts!’ Eli was the spirited child of one of the assembled guests. Kylie had responded admirably, using Eli’s energy levels to plug the calming effects of naturally produced meals, but it took her time to regain her rhythm, even with the machine
’s pre-set timing function. On the post-demonstration survey form, Audrey stated her preference for the subtle pleasures of cooking to taste. She declined Kylie’s payment-plan offer, but hastily agreed to babysit Phoebe to avoid future disruptions. From there it turned into overnight stays. Steven had encouraged the arrangement, saying they seemed like nice, decent people.
Audrey sat on the edge of the bed. Phoebe’s perfectly plump leg flopped over its side and Audrey tucked it back in. She stared at her reflection in the mirrored built-in. The starfish glinted against the light flowing through the blinds behind her. She was wearing a white towelling dressing gown that gaped, exposing a rash of pale freckles across her chest. Flecks of grey streaked her hair. What a dishevelled mermaid, she thought. She imagined what her hair would look like if it were golden-blonde. Maybe she would dye it. She fluttered her hands by her waist as though she were trying to float to the surface.
• • •
Eight-year-old Audrey and her dad walked down the stairs to the ocean baths. She was dressed in a navy swimsuit with tiny ruffles fanning out from her waist. Her legs were patterned with purple blotches and her arms were covered in goose bumps. Her dad had a canvas backpack on, crammed with masks, snorkels and towels. They sat on the edge of the saltwater pool. On the other side, waves crashed over the chain barrier that separated them from the ocean. A lady wearing a racer-back swimsuit and a flowered cap flexed her shoulders, folded her outstretched arms across each other, and dived into the water. Audrey’s dad jumped in. The water slapped against his waist. He took her mask and spat in it, swishing around the glass with his thumb. She giggled.
‘Daddy, that’s disgusting.’
‘Trust me,’ he said. ‘You don’t want it all foggy.’
He took her feet and cupped them into bright blue flippers. He stretched a mask over her face and pulled the loose wisps of her fringe out, then slotted a snorkel into her mouth.
‘Bite on it,’ he said. Her lips puffed out and he laughed at her. ‘I wish your mum could see you like this.’
He clapped his hands and she jumped out from the edge and wrapped herself around him. His skin was warm. She clung to him like a periwinkle, but he prised her off and laid her face-down in the water.
‘Just breathe,’ he said. ‘Try not to think of anything.’
He held one arm under her tummy and one under her thighs. The water lapped around her hairline. She could see his legs under the water. They looked like the legs of a giant. They were white with tiny bubbles of water stuck to them. ‘Kick, Audrey,’ he said. ‘Move your hands in and out like the fins of a fish.’
She felt the water take her weight as her arms and legs paddled in furious circles. His voice was muffled against the sound of her breath. She saw an orange starfish peeking out from the sand and she squealed and spluttered out her snorkel.
‘A starfish, Daddy. I saw a starfish. It was huge.’
‘My little mermaid,’ he said.
• • •
Audrey picked up the teddy that Phoebe had flung to the floor during the night. The child suffered night terrors. She’d had to tell Harold next door that the blood-curdling screams that came from their house were nothing to be concerned about. Whenever Phoebe stayed, the stuffed toys that Audrey tucked in next to her were spread in fluffy carnage on the green shagpile rug come morning. Audrey had bought the rug at a department-store sale at the complex an hour’s bus ride from Oasis Estate.
On her daytrips to the mall, she could be anyone. Sometimes she imagined she was on her lunch break, overdue to return to her job as centre manager. On one occasion she sat in a coffee shop and told the waitress that she was having a quick bite to eat before meeting her mum for a girly shopping spree. On that particular day she’d pretended she was pregnant. She’d travelled up the escalator and wandered past women’s wear and shoes through to the maternity and baby section, where she’d spotted a flokati rug that looked just like a bed of soft weed, its fibres looping in on each other. She’d passed her money to the shop assistant, saying it was for the nursery.
As she’d walked to the bus stop with her shopping bags slung under her arm, she’d pictured the ropes of green fibre from the rug twisting between her baby’s curled pink toes. It was a boy. She could smell his skin, freshly bathed and massaged with oil, and she could see herself tickling his feet with a strand of wool. He would have her upturned nose. Sitting on the bus, with the breeze blowing through her hair, she’d pulled the rug from its bag and held it against her cheek. The woman sitting next to her had smiled. Audrey had smiled back and rubbed her belly. She’d closed her eyes and felt her stomach swelling as the baby grew inside her, suspended in its warm ocean, floating and tumbling, immersed within her.
When she’d opened her eyes again, her stop was just up the road. ‘They told me I’d get tired in the first trimester,’ she’d told the woman next to her, who’d nodded in sympathy. Audrey had slid across the seat and rocked from side to side against the aisle. She’d thanked the driver and stepped onto the kerb. On the pavement, she’d let go of the fantasy, walking into the estate and past the Birds-of-Paradise. Their dead flower bulbs drooped over the garden’s perimeter, discarded in brown shadows, clinging like cicadas. She’d reached the crest of the hill, and spread in front of her, in the midday sun, was the blinding shimmer of Colorbond and brown-brick houses with patchwork shale facades teetering from their borders.
When she’d reached her house, Harold had been playing with his cat, his hand scuttling under a piece of newspaper. He’d asked her if she’d had a good day at the shops and she’d told him that she’d caught up with friends. She’d gone into detail, right down to the meal, the soy sauce in a little plastic fish. ‘I’ve never understood malls,’ Harold had said. ‘Hate the lighting. The missus had a thing for malls. Sends women mad, I reckon. Still, it’s always good to spend time with friends. Most of mine are long gone. I read the obituaries now just to see if I’m dead.’ She’d given Harold a small parting wave and checked the mail box, which was empty.
Phoebe rolled over in her sleep. Audrey turned to watch her nestle her face into the quilt. Her blonde hair spilled across the pillow. She had hair just like her mother. Audrey only really knew Kylie on a party-plan basis, but she did know the overnight arrangement had come about so she and her husband, Michael, could go on scheduled date nights. Steven had started to play golf with him. Michael had said recently, out on the course, that Kylie thought he had an alcohol problem. He’d confided to Steven that he’d only started drinking heavily to cope with his wife’s direct-sales-induced manic optimism. Audrey had laughed the way you do when someone else’s burdens make your own seem more bearable.
She gazed at the spindly blue veins on Phoebe’s eyelids. Her mouth was open. Audrey tucked the teddy back under Phoebe’s neck and inhaled her bitter, milky breath. Steven called out from the bedroom.
‘How’s the coffee coming, Audrey? I’ve got inspections at the new subdivision all day.’
• • •
After Steven had left for work and Kylie had arrived, flustered, to collect her daughter, who was late for pre-school, Audrey walked down the hallway to her office. She supplemented minding the children of Oasis Estate with a home-based accounts service. It made sense, Steven said, for her to work from home. The Trotts could, after all, only afford one vehicle, and the bus service made commuting to work almost impossible. Steven had recently bought a new-model Statesman. The car was a reflection of his ability as an agent. A luxury car was expected.
That day she entered the monthly transactions of a small-business owner who lived down the road in Hideaway Close. The wind rattled the window frame. As she moved her fingers over the keypad, entering numerical sequences, tapping lightly and efficiently, she fell into a daze. She saw herself trudging along the sand. Her brown calves flexed as she picked her way past abandoned footprints and ribbon weed. It was the summer holidays. Parents twisted umbrellas into the sand and dabbed their children with sunscreen. Teen
age girls sprawled on their stomachs in their boy-leg swimmers, their pale heels pointing up to the sky. She saw a topless woman engulfed by a huge inflatable tyre, bobbing languidly in the water. As she typed, the woman’s fingertips trawled through the surface of the ocean, netting tiny silver fish. Audrey felt invigorated. Her skin was golden with tiny pale hairs. She had a mulloway bone on a piece of fishing line dangling between her breasts. She spread out her towel and leaned back, pushing her fingers deep into the sand. A young boy crawled out from the water draped in a cloak of seaweed. He looked at her with yellow eyes and shuffled up the sand until he reached her; then he turned and pushed his body into the space on the towel between her legs. She picked the seaweed off his back. He was covered in dark, soft down and his shoulder-blades protruded like wasted, distorted wings. While she waited for her file to save, Audrey rested her cheek against his back. He was damp, his skin flecked with salt. She licked the tiny indentations of his backbone. He tasted like the roe from a cracked sea urchin.
Audrey printed out a hard copy of the spreadsheet. She moved her fingers from the keypad and cupped her coffee mug. She let the last metallic drop fall against her tongue. Above her head, huddles of flies dotted the casing of the overhead fluorescent light. She heard a blowfly buzz into a gap to reach the light, hurtling back and forth against the hard plastic edge in tiny death vibrations.
On the cork noticeboard in front of her, her dad smiled up from a photo she had pierced with a thumbtack. He was standing in the front yard of her childhood home. It was a white weatherboard cottage wrapped in a hardwood verandah. In the photo, she could see the jasmine-covered bearers that she used to scale as a kid. The garden was littered with scallop and abalone shells. A sagging lounge covered with newspapers and books leaned near the front door, and netted glass floats dangled from the beams. Her dad’s hands were pushed into the flowered red gills of a mulloway that was almost as big as he was. He’d given her the bright bones from the cavity at the top of its spine to take for news. She’d told the class what her dad had told her while they ate the fish for dinner, about the humming noise the bones made that sounded like the fish were singing. Her teacher held her back at recess and told her that news was meant to be something real. That night her dad had asked her how her news went. She’d said there hadn’t been time and then she’d gone to her bedroom and dropped the bones into her jewellery box.
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