backside’. Nina was certainly carrying a bit of weight but her plump, round, unlined and pretty face was a testament to the saying. Meredith had no bum and the result was evident in the bathroom mirror—most mornings she saw that her face looked like the site of a landslip in Ecuador. She should tell Nina how attractive she was . . . and pass on the name of a decent beautician and hairdresser.
And she should tell Nina how much she enjoyed her company. She was a busybody, that was true, but she was also so . . . comfortingly motherly. Not that Nina would welcome that description. She had some ‘self-esteem issues’, that too was obvious. Too much daytime TV. Every time you turned on one of those mind-numbing programs, it seemed there was a woman on trial for some maternal misdemeanour or other. The accused would sit with tears rolling down her cheeks in front of a studio audience while husbands, friends and children all charging her with a range of female failings. Too overbearing, too undemonstrative, too tidy, too slovenly, too generous, too miserly. Mothers were to blame for everything these days, it seemed. Motherguilt—someone had even coined a name for the low-lying cloud of dread every woman had hanging over her head. It was a damn sight easier twenty years ago, when it was all men’s fault.
Meredith stopped, turned her face to the sun and tugged her white singlet over the top of her navy jogging tights. She shuffled her feet so that her new sports shoes were perfectly aligned—toes and heels together. She stood tall, breathed in to lengthen through the spine, then out to engage the muscles of her pelvic floor and flatten her abdominals. ‘Zip up and hollow,’ she said aloud with some satisfaction. Perhaps Nina might also benefit from Pilates. She would give her that phone number too. The morning sunlight refracted through the water and infused Meredith’s body with cleansing, invigorating energy. A walk along the beach was the perfect way to start the day. She hadn’t done it in ages.
Last night’s mosquito invasion aside, Meredith was surprised to find she was enjoying her campervan experience. She had woken this morning and surveyed the few square metres of her new domain—the modest row of wood-veneer cupboards over her head, the plastic domed reading lights and the expanse of synthetic curtaining—and felt a curious lightening of her load. If she had been in her own bed in Armadale, she would have been mistress of some five hundred square metres of pure wool carpeting, a hectare of raw silk curtains, hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of Italian furniture and German appliances, French cut-glass light fixtures, hand-painted wallpaper, a hundred-year-old hedge . . . and an empty den. She had to admit that, as much as she adored her home, there was something oddly comforting about being away from it—eating fish and chips out of paper, and living in a cheap plywood-and-aluminium box. Perhaps it was as simple as having nothing to dust.
‘It’s just one more thing to dust’ was one of the favoured sayings of her mother, Edith. It was what she said when she was given a piece of Wedgwood or Belleek fine china for her birthday. It would be admired for the day, then sent straight to the ‘good front room’ and placed in the famous crystal cabinet. Meredith never saw any one of the precious items inside it used for any occasion in almost half a century. The family sat down in the kitchen every night and ate from plain white plates and ugly pyrex casserole dishes while a table setting fit for royalty remained behind glass. Even if the Queen of England herself had come to tea, Edith would not have surrendered the key to the crystal cabinet.
Striding along, right at the point where sand met sea, and relishing the painful strain in her thigh muscles, Meredith’s pace did not slacken. She could see Annie up ahead and was determined to run straight past her. It would do Annie good to understand that her selfish act had cost both her and Nina a decent night’s sleep. She didn’t want to even think about what had transpired in the early hours at the campsite at the end of the caravan park.
Meredith was startled by a splash in front of her and saw that Annie had torn off her clothes and was diving, naked, through the aquamarine shallows and out through