surely must be the harbingers of a heart attack. That’s all she needed—to drop dead here on Ninety Mile Beach! Brad would have to drive all the way from Melbourne to pick up her huge, blubbery carcass and drag it home. If she did collapse right here, conservationists might try to roll her back into the ocean. She’d be in the news then: Greenies Mistake East Malvern Housewife’s Body for Dugong.
Up ahead Nina saw Meredith pull up at some imaginary line in the sand and turn to march back down the beach towards her. Look at her, still lithe and fit—one of those portraits you saw in magazines under the heading: Life Begins at Fifty: Four Women Tell. Well, Nina could tell them life at forty-five, with an extra twenty kilos on board, was bloody hard going. Especially in sand. Even more so when you’d had about three hours’ sleep and tried to wake yourself up with a huge bowl of muesli, a sliced banana and two cups of milky coffee. And then, stupidly, agreed to a walk along the beach. It was only 9 am but it was already hot and all was sand. Ninety miles of the stuff. Hateful, sinking sand.
Nina had woken at seven this morning. She immediately found her mobile phone and tried to call home, except her battery was flat. So she had plugged in her recharger and stayed in her scungy hard bed until the morning light hit the floor and revealed the corpses of a fallen militia of mosquitoes. She lunged for the dustpan and brush to sweep the dead down the steps. The rhythmic strokes soon restored Nina’s peace of mind. There was nothing so calming, she thought, as watching the swipe of a damp cloth or the drag of stiff bristles restore order to a surface.
By eight her phone was fully powered. She dialled home. No answer. She then tried to call Brad’s mobile. No response. Then she remembered that it was Sunday morning and, without her marshalling everyone downstairs for strawberry pancakes, bacon and maple syrup, they would probably sleep until midday . . . on Monday.
Nina turned to see the deep imprints of a lumbering, constipated brontosaurus behind her. She plopped her backside onto the beach. She was stuffed. Didn’t have another step in her.
O, that this too too solid flesh would melt
Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!
It was the only quote from Shakespeare that Nina had ever memorised from her high school studies. She would bet that the Bard had never intended for those lines from the Hamlet soliloquy to be used by a fat middle-aged housewife to berate herself for eating too many hot chips.
Lowering her sunglasses and looking out at the sea, Nina caught the shadow of a circling sea eagle against the bright rays of morning. She watched the bird’s sleek form hover and then plunge, talons outstretched, to snatch a fish from just below the surface. The metaphor wasn’t lost on Nina. She’d watched too much Dr Phil. Drawn too many cards from too many inspirational decks of wisdom. Stuck too many O magazine tear-out postcards on the fridge to miss the message. That’s what she had to do—leave her earthbound, sweaty, lumpy body, fly to the horizon, dive and trust her instincts. She had to believe that, just below the seemingly impenetrable surface, there was a glittering prize waiting for her. Or was that just a line she’d nicked from a Danielle Steele novel?
In the meantime, The Journey Of A Thousand Steps had to start with the impossible trudge through the sand and over the bridge back to the van. She thought she might wait until Meredith passed her by. The last thing she needed this morning was a head girl urging her on with a lecture about the ‘intense satisfaction of digging deep and pushing on through one’s personal limits’. If Meredith tried that particular routine this morning, Nina might just have to drown her.
Meredith slowed her pace at the spot where Nina was slumped in the dunes and gave her a hearty salute. Good on her for making it so far! It couldn’t be easy to start an exercise regime with a punishing walk in the sand after an interrupted sleep. Nina was a good-looking woman, and even a few stray kilos couldn’t disguise the fact.
Meredith had long been a subscriber to the old adage that, after a certain age, a woman had to ‘choose between her face and her