The Other Side of Beautiful

by Kim Lock

  It didn’t last. As if registering the moment of peace, her mind knee-jerked with a swift reminder of Ann Barker lurking out there somewhere and that voicemail lurking on her phone. She stabbed her fork into her pasta salad. She should just listen to the message. A heads-up from a legal assistant, a formality or paperwork—it wouldn’t be anything she needed to panic over. Surely.

  But as long as she didn’t listen to it, as long as whatever information that message contained went unacknowledged, Mercy could continue to remain here now: where there was no obligation, where there was only a Scottish man laughing about Vegemite and the sunset gilding the Ranges and the warm, cottony evening air. To hear what Legal had to say would not only be admitting to the future, but confronting the past all over again.

  Mercy set her plate on the grass. Wasabi took the rest of her sandwich.

  ‘So listen,’ Andy said at length. ‘There’s a waterhole not far from here, and I was thinking of going swimming tomorrow. Would you be up for it?’

  Mercy looked down at the smears of mayonnaise on her plate. Overhead in the trees, cockatoos squabbled over evening roosts.

  ‘Unless you’re taking off in a hurry.’ Andy inclined his head, indicating the row of caravans. ‘Like this lot.’

  Mercy’s mind raced. She tried to recall the last time she had been invited swimming by a friend. She tried to recall the last time she had done anything with a friend. Once, there had been colleagues—drinks after work at the pub, synchronised days off where they might have met for lunch. At one point she had joined a book club started by one of the nurses, but after six books in a row that she didn’t get to read she had stopped going. Between work, and Eugene, and her mother, Mercy simply hadn’t done a lot of swimming with friends. And then, two years ago, those last few people she could have called friends had slipped away. Or been pushed: when she started giving excuses, stopped returning calls and, eventually, changed her number.

  Could she? The thought made her stomach squeeze. Strapped into the passenger seat, someone else in control. What if she drove herself, offering to meet him there? But that would be a waste of petrol (and here she thought of the sea life again, suffering with carbon emissions and global warming), and she considered suggesting they take her Hijet, until she recalled how the inside of it must smell: road dust, sweat, petrol and a hint of cremated remains.

  She couldn’t. Besides, what would she do with Wasabi?

  ‘I don’t know—’

  ‘It’s not at a national park, so this wee fellow can come for a dip, too.’ Andy reached forward to pat the dog. ‘We can’t leave an assistance dog behind.’

  Could she?

  Mercy thought of a day of not driving, a day of open sky and sunshine and cool water; the crunch of dry gum leaves beneath her feet, the trickle of a creek. She thought of talking and laughing. She thought of Andrew Macauley’s dark eyes and warm smile and deep voice.

  ‘Okay,’ she said, finally meeting his eyes.

  ‘Yes?’ he said.

  ‘Yes.’

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  The thud of the van door closing echoed across the red cliffs.

  ‘Are you sure it’s not part of the national park?’ Mercy asked again, nervous, as she lifted Wasabi from the van.

  ‘I’m ninety-nine per cent certain,’ Andy said, waving the map. ‘That track we just drove down is definitely not in the green section. The guy at the tourist information centre yesterday swore to me the land is privately owned—said it was a sheep station once upon a time—but the owner is old, no longer has sheep, and lives about a hundred kilometres further in that direction.’ He pointed vaguely west.

  Mercy remained holding the dog, reluctant to step away from the van.

  In the end, they’d taken the Hijet. When she had awoken that morning, Mercy knew she could not sit in a strange vehicle and drive to an unknown destination with a man she hardly knew. She simply could not. Even if that man was charming, inexplicably trustable and had lovely brown eyes. Fortifying herself with a few deep breaths, she had shown up at Andy’s camper that morning as he’d been munching buttered toast and said, ‘Okay if we take my van?’ Then she’d clamped her hands together to stop them from shaking. ‘For sure,’ Andy had replied without hesitation. ‘I’d love a lift in that beast.’

  And so after more than an hour of juddering and teeth-clattering down a two-wheel track, bushes screeching like fingernails along the sides of the van, they had arrived at the waterhole. Dusty, sweaty and out of breath, but here they were. After finally coming to a halt, Mercy had clung to the safety of the steering wheel for a full four minutes before finding the courage to open the door and slide out.

  She gazed now around the tree-lined hollow. Rocky bluffs rose up, a split of daylight blasting through the centre where a shallow creek trickled between the cliffs and ended in a deep pool. A sandy beach curled around one side of the waterhole. Insects buzzed and clicked; a bird gave a long, whip-like call that echoed around the rocks before fading into the heat.

  ‘Okay,’ Mercy conceded. ‘It’s nice.’

  As Andy took out the esky, Mercy set Wasabi down and made her way to the water. Dry leaves crunched underfoot; sweat beaded her lip and she wiped it with the back of her hand. Wasabi trotted off into the bushes, nose to the ground, and Mercy hoped he hadn’t scented some endangered native marsupial and was about to dig it out of its hole and devour it.

  At the water’s edge she stepped out of her boots. The sand was hot and gritty beneath her feet. Algae slicked the shallows. Dipping her toes in the tea-coloured water, she let out an involuntary shriek. The sound ricocheted across the cliff faces.

  ‘All right over there?’ Andy called.

  ‘It’s freezing!’

  He came down the sand and crouched, putting his hand in the water. ‘Ah, what’re you on about? It’s lovely.’

  ‘After you, then,’ she said, opening her arm towards the pool.

  ‘All right.’ Lifting his T-shirt over his head, he stepped out of his boots and peeled off his socks. He dropped his clothing on the sand, grinned at her, then plunged into the water. Icy cold droplets showered Mercy’s legs and arms and she gasped and stepped back. There was a second, smaller splash as Wasabi rocketed after Andy.

  Mercy watched Andy’s arms lifting and slicing through the water, Wasabi trailing behind like a seal. Ripples spread out in their wake, bobbing twigs and pieces of leaf litter. Below the surface Andy’s torso and shoulders looked green-brown.

  A memory began to stir, dredged up from the bottom of the pond of her mind. Mercy fought it, trying to press it down but it floated up, lifting higher and higher until, like it or not, there it was, grabbing at her insides.

  Two police officers came to her door, and told her they had found her mother in the bath. Two days she had been there, they said. It looked as though her mother may have tried to climb out, but never made it over the rim, falling back into the water. Mercy often thought that if her mother’s heart had kept beating just a few moments more, the neighbour who met her mother for coffee every Thursday morning might not have found her in the bath, but on the bathroom floor, and Mercy wasn’t sure if that would have been any better, to be honest. Loretta Blain’s body was still in rigor mortis when they found her; there was no water in the lungs. She had died of a massive heart attack. This information they had delivered to Mercy gently but assertively, leaving no room for misunderstanding, and Mercy knew this tone so very well because how many times had she delivered that same irreversible, life-altering news?

  There is no heartbeat and your baby has died.

  Watching TV, Mercy always scoffed at the way doctors or police officers delivered the news of death to loved ones. Lots of We did all we could, or I’m afraid I have bad news, or sometimes nothing more than a sad shake of the head while holding tragic, beseeching eye contact. No, that’s not how it was done, not in real life. Breaking the news of death takes exquisitely firm clarity and the use of correct, unmistakeable words.<
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  Dead. Died. Dead.

  Andy was saying something, his voice skipping across the water and echoing around the rocks. He was laughing at Wasabi.

  When Mercy had broken the news to the woman’s husband, he had looked around the room as though he suddenly didn’t know where his wife had gone. As though he was waiting for her to appear. When Mercy said, Your wife has died, it was as though he heard: Your wife has just popped out to the shops, she’ll be back in a jiffy. Even though his wife had been lying right there on the bed in the ICU, still attached to all the tubes and hoses that hadn’t saved her.

  ‘You coming in?’

  Mercy blinked. Sunlight flared off the water. The scent of sunscreen rose from her warm skin. Be here now.

  And now she was crying, tears sliding down her hot cheeks, the silent kind of crying that happens all on its own, without any shuddering or sobbing or honking, just tears leaking like pus from an abscess that has gotten so swollen the fluid and mess can no longer be contained.

  ‘Hey—are you okay?’

  Mercy looked up. Andy was swimming towards her. His hair was slicked back, water gleaming on his shoulders, a concerned expression on his face.

  Mercy hauled herself up straight. Her whole body felt too hot, like she was burning up from the inside. Pain flared like a blowtorch in her chest.

  She didn’t think about it. She yanked her I ♥ SYDNEY T-shirt over her head. She wriggled out of her shorts, kicked them across the sand, and in her bra and undies she ran forward, cold water churning up her legs, until the silty floor of the waterhole fell away from under her feet and she flung herself in.

  Cold slapped her skin. Bubbles roared against her ears. The water tasted of earth and metal. She may have laughed, or screamed, and when she surfaced, she was breathless and shrieking.

  ‘Oh god!’ she cried, unsure if she was exclaiming over the cold, or the pain, or the fact that she had just leapt into the water in her only bra.

  Andy was treading water a few metres away from her, Wasabi paddling in circles around him, wet nose pointed into the air.

  ‘Better?’ Andy said after a few minutes.

  Mercy’s legs pedalled. Below the surface the water was even colder. She imagined the water seeping up from deep fissures in the earth. Hair plastered to her cheeks and scalp, the sun heated the top of her head. Above and below. Heat and cold. Light and dark. Life had both extremes—all human experience existed on the one spectrum. Sometimes you felt one side, sometimes the other. It was a physical fact, as real and immutable as the necessity for air.

  Life and death.

  Mercy was here now, in this moment. That was all she had, or could ever know, really.

  Mercy exhaled. She said, ‘Better.’

  Mercy had seen a lot of men in their virile prime. Large men, small men, men built like broom handles and men who could lift a bus with a single bicep. She had seen gym-pumped men with shaved heads, sensitive-looking graphic designer types with coifs, shopping centre security guards smelling of cigarettes and big city bankers reeking of cologne and sexual infidelity. But Mercy had never seen a man pull off a man-bun. Until now.

  After a swim, Mercy and Andy had climbed out of the waterhole and staggered, shivering, across the sand. Before collapsing onto towels in the shade, Andy had lifted his arms, loosely raked his fingers through his hair, and snagged it up into a top knot with an elastic tie he’d taken from his wrist. And he’d left his shirt lying on the sand.

  So there he was, lounging back, eyes closed and face tilted to the sun and gloriously man-bunned, and Mercy, tugging her T-shirt back over her damp body, was trying to look anywhere but directly at him. Because where did all that definition in his shoulders and chest come from? Was it there before? When he lifted his arm again to scratch between his shoulder blades, was that … was she salivating?

  Mercy dropped her gaze to her toes. It was amazing how something she’d assumed was long dead could actually snap awake and announce itself with an unmistakeable pang. Yes, it had been a long time. A very long time. To many it would be painfully long, but to Mercy it had simply never come into her mind because for two years (and not to mention the long marriage to a man who had quietly harboured a hankering for the pleasures of his own sex) her mind had been too busy freaking out about how she was going to pick up that parcel the courier had taken to the post office instead of dropping on her doorstep, or what might happen if a Solar Roof salesman came to her door and refused to be rebuffed with any haste. Life had been reduced to moments of fear strung together like beads on a wire of anticipation.

  Until finally that string had frayed, unravelled, snapped—beads falling to the floor and scattering everywhere. Flames licking the night sky.

  Andy leaned over to drag the esky closer, the muscles along his spine doing all kinds of wonderful things.

  ‘D’you want a piece?’

  Mercy unstuck her lips. Her stomach growled. Yes, she wanted a piece. They’d bought the pre-packaged sandwiches that morning from a deli—ham, cheese, tomato and white pepper on multigrain bread. Biting into the soft bread, she ate hungrily. Pepper pleasantly opened her sinuses, eucalyptus-fresh air filled her lungs and Andy appeared in no hurry to reapply his shirt.

  She didn’t even mind the flies.

  They chatted about pleasant things, personal things: Andy had two younger sisters and had always felt the protector, even though one of his sisters was a pro wrestler and the other was a diesel mechanic. ‘And they’re both six foot two,’ he added, holding his hand flat a few inches above his crown. ‘Like, they don’t need me.’

  They chatted about normal things, everyday things: Mercy preferred Armageddon when it first came out—‘I was fifteen,’ she declared—but now she had to concede that Deep Impact was, well, deeper.

  They chatted about family things, let-go-of things: Andy’s ex-wife’s wedding was yesterday, Saturday, and Mercy’s father, even though he had cut ties almost entirely when he left, still sent Mercy a card every year for her birthday.

  ‘I got the most recent one the day before my house burned down.’

  ‘Are you angry at him?’ Andy asked. ‘Were you ever angry?’

  ‘Maybe,’ Mercy said. ‘Yes. Of course. But I think, in a way, I sort of got it. I understood.’ She fed Wasabi the last crust of her sandwich and brushed crumbs from her fingers.

  ‘How old were you when he left?’

  ‘Eight, I think. Nine.’

  ‘That’s fairly young to understand something like that.’

  Mercy shrugged. ‘Everything seems to make more sense in hindsight though, doesn’t it? It ends up that we view our childhood memories through an adult lens. That changes things. Even if it didn’t make sense to me at the time, it makes sense to me now. At home, when I was a kid, things were … intolerable.’ She left the rest unsaid.

  ‘So you’re not angry—at either of them?’

  She looked at him. ‘Are you worried your kids will be angry at you?’

  He picked up a twig and began to snap it into small pieces. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Maybe. Yes. Of course.’

  ‘You know,’ she said, ‘I don’t think it’s possible not to have hang-ups about your parents. I think even the happiest, most loved children in the world grow up wishing something could have been different.’ She offered him a smile. ‘Just be there for them when they need you to be, and let them be whoever they are. Do that and you’ll be a better parent than the shittiest ones, I guarantee it.’

  ‘What a bar to aim for, eh? One up from the shittiest.’

  ‘Everyone’s got standards.’

  A warm breeze eddied across the water, shifted over the sand and lifted hair from the nape of Mercy’s neck. Her skin was dry but her bra was still damp, pressing dark circles into her T-shirt.

  Andy turned to her, and she held his gaze.

  ‘So what now?’ she said.

  A beat of silence passed. Eucalypts tipped their limbs and rustled their leaves. Then, carried on th
e breeze, they both heard it at the same time: an engine. A car was coming down the track. A minute later a dusty troop carrier arrived in the clearing, voices whooping from open windows, and Mercy and Andy were alone no longer.

  It was about halfway along the rutted, rocky track back to the highway when the loud clang sounded under the van.

  ‘Shit,’ Mercy said, wincing. ‘What was—’

  She was drowned out by a tremendous, deafening roar. It sounded like a herd of Harleys had just opened the rear door and begun driving through the Hijet.

  If Mercy could have heard Andy, she would have heard him mutter, ‘Damn.’ But she couldn’t, so she didn’t; instead she applied the brakes and the van jerked to a stop. The thundering continued. As the engine idled, Mercy realised the racket was the sound of the Hijet itself. It had gone from making its usual happy little burble to an ear-splitting crashing sound.

  Andy was speaking, but Mercy couldn’t hear him. He mimed turning a key.

  She shut off the engine. Silence fell.

  ‘What the hell was that?’ she said.

  ‘Sounds like the muffler.’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘I’ll take a look.’ Andy opened the door.

  ‘Do you know about … mufflers?’

  ‘Enough to know if they’ve fallen off.’

  As Mercy went to open the door, Wasabi jumped onto her lap. Ears flattened, he was quivering and showing the whites of his eyes.

  ‘That was loud and scary, huh?’ she said, stroking his fur. ‘Sorry, boy. It’s okay.’ Running her palms over his body, she waited until the dog settled before climbing out. He whined and put his paws up on the window.

  ‘Stay,’ she told him. She was still nervous about the national park’s boundaries.

  Squinting against the blaring afternoon sun, she hurried around the side of the van in time to see Andy’s head and shoulders disappear under it.

  ‘Okay,’ he said from under the vehicle. ‘The muffler’s fallen off, all right.’ He reappeared with a grunt. Red dirt smeared his shoulder and one side of his head. ‘And great Christ, is this sand hot.’