looked an easy couple, with a history. They both laughed at something, and the barman put down the glass and leant both hands on the bar top. The girl glanced around the room, seeing if anyone was watching. She was surprisingly young. She leant forward so her shorts rode up the backs of her thighs and said something into the barman’s ear that made him put his tongue into the side of his mouth and look at her like he was thinking something over. The smile was big on his chops. She was young to be having sex. The thought surprised Frank as he was pretty sure he couldn’t have cared less.
What had he been – fourteen, fifteen? They’d had their first girls together, him and Bo, in the back room of the pie shop, two older girls who thought they were a funny pair. ‘Couple of homo boys, I reckon,’ his one, Eliza, had said, a smile round her orange lips.
‘One way to find out,’ her friend, Beth, had joined in, lifting her hair on to the top of her head, showing off yellowish stains under the arms and bumping Bo with her hip. Eliza had been a reedy sort, but she had a curve to her back and bottom that he’d replayed for weeks to come in his head; the way it’d tightened and relaxed as they’d rutted on the floor with the flour and the dead cockies at eye level. The lino that squeaked under his arse. Bo’d lit a cigarette afterwards, like in the films, and Frank had felt ashamed of him in front of the girls. The pair of them all rags and flesh and both on the nose, but they laughed and Beth drank milk from the fridge and it spilled down her arm. It wasn’t long after that he and Bo had headed out to the shack for the first time, thumbing up to Crescent and walking in the peeling sun, cans of gasoline and chicken biscuits in a plastic bag. Frank’d had the keys away with no trouble and the route they took was remembered from the funeral, in the car with the urn, his father silent and sober. It was the only time Bo ever mentioned his old man, and all he said as they sat in the back of a Ute that was driving them past the town, with the wind back-combing their hair and sunset starting to happen behind them, all he’d said was, ‘Dad would’a liked this,’ and Frank had wondered what sort of a man would make a person such as Bo. They’d made Mulaburry by nightfall, getting lost and inhaling the gas on the way, spending time on beaches where it looked as if nobody ever went, drinking warm beer that Bo had bought and seeing the night sky as it was for the first time. The sex and the girls didn’t seem important then, they’d messed about like ten-year-olds, telling scare stories about sharks and men with axes.
As they were falling asleep Bo said, ‘There’s no crocodiles around here, is there?’ and he’d answered, ‘Dunno, might be,’ even though he knew they were too far south for salties.
They slept in the sand, and woke up freezing and sore like they’d been dropped on bitumen, but the sea was something else, and neither of them talked as they watched it turn from white and peach to blue as the sky righted itself.
They stripped naked and crashed around in the waves, dared each other out beyond the breakers, cried shark a hundred times and pretended they were being yanked at from below. They had a lunch of chicken crimpies and hot beer, and Frank felt his eyes swell up with the heat and the sand and the fun of it. They let the gasoline alone because they couldn’t have stood it, the tops of Bo’s jubberly boobs went red and Frank felt it cut about his face. To escape the wide-open burn of the sky they barrelled into the bush, their hair dried to a salt crisp. About the time Frank started to feel sick from thirst they found a shallow creek, shaded by the tall ghost gums and the two of them lay down in it like dogs, their mouth open, the cold water crawling all over, the sand in their underpants rinsing out and their bellies swelling up with the drink.
‘Shit! Look,’ said Bo, ‘yabbies.’
They made it to the shack and found fishing rods leant