grace and acceptance in the wave of the tentacles of an anemone; fate in the claws of a crab.
Annie kept up her brisk pace along the sand and saw the scattered debris of seaweed and the blanched bones of a fish stranded on the high tide mark. That’s how she’d found Matty. He’d been thrown up on the beach like a shell—worn smooth and clean by the sea—and she had bent to pick him up.
But then, Annie had picked up many men over the years and taken them home. And like those shells collected on summer holidays when she was a child, during the drive back to the farm they mysteriously lost their pearly sheen. By the time she set her souvenirs on her bedside table they’d started to stink. The borders of her mother’s garden at the farm were still decorated with sunburnt shells brought home by Annie from summers at the sea.
Thinking about the farm, Annie found herself wondering how her parents might judge Matty. Her mother would describe him as ‘a bit of alright’ and her father would pronounce him ‘a decent stamp of a bloke’. A broad, burly sort of bloke who could haul haybales onto the tray of a truck from dawn till dusk, then charm the farmers’ wives down at the local pub with his old-fashioned good manners. But then that’s what they’d both said about her ex-husband, Cameron—and look how that had turned out.
Annie couldn’t trust her instincts about men anymore. She remembered noticing last night in the firelight that when Matty laughed his features quickly fell back into calm and symmetrical order in his open, placid face, just a moment before she had composed herself. She felt him looking at her in this split-second—while her head was thrown back and her mouth open with the hilarity of it all—and caught him seeing something she wanted to keep secret.
Annie wasn’t used to men trying to figure her out and didn’t know that she liked it much. Mostly men unloaded their problems on her, as if they thought that she, unmarried and childless, could have no real worries of her own. As if her life was an empty, featureless plain. Thinking on all this had made her reach for another drink.
The exact sequence of last night’s events was, mercifully, still a blur, but she did remember the kisses. Teenage summer holiday kisses. The kind of hot and salty smooches that had meant the two of you were going together. You were now a sandy, sunburnt young couple destined to be one, never to be parted . . . right through to Anzac Day. Although the names and faces had long since faded of the boys she’d fumbled with behind the caravan park toilet block or in the sand dunes, the promise of those kisses lingered.
When she’d finally made her way down the steps of the van this morning, it was as if the sandy-haired man in the red flannelette shirt, board shorts and rubber thongs had been an apparition. Matty, Zoran, the tinnie and the trevally had vanished. It was all too predictable. Just one more example of her crap timing.
Annie turned to see that the path of her footprints in the still cool, pale sand had been inundated by the lacy patterns of the tide. Her tracks had disappeared. And she found herself thinking of that silvery trevally and its bright, translucent, intelligent eyeballs, and wondering what it would be like when she was hooked from life and hauled over the side of the ferryman’s boat. Would there be anything, anyone, any ritual to mark the fact that Annie Amanda Bailey had ever walked upon the earth?
She bent to pick up a fragile pink-tinged shell and felt the blood thump in her skull. The world turned upside down and suddenly the sea was where the sky should be. Annie heaved and vomited her insides onto the beach. She wiped her mouth and watched as the surf accepted her sour offering without judgment, sweeping the shore clean once more.
Nina was hot. Boiling hot. She’d tied her sweatshirt around her hips, pushed the dripping frames of her sunglasses up on her head, knotted the laces of her sports shoes and hung them around her sweaty neck and she was still hot. Her calves were screaming with indignation. Her elbows, every part of her was protesting.
Nina turned to the ocean and could see spots in front of her eyes. Grey, worrying smears across her lenses that