body into his. The urge, so strong and unexpected, catches her completely off guard. The silence seems to become heavy, saturated with unspoken thoughts, and she moves quickly to cut in before something breaks. ‘Will you come swimming with me in the morning?’
He shakes his head. ‘Sorry, I’ve got to leave early. But I’ll come again later, find out how you’ve got on with Maya. Okay?’
‘Yes, that’s fine,’ she says, but it isn’t at all. She wants to be independent, but spines of dread pierce her at the thought of him leaving. While he is here, she feels much safer. Without him she’s frightened of everything, most of all herself.
After Pete has settled down on the sofa and begun to snore, Desi retreats to her bedroom and waits. She is bone-tired, but it is stifling in the small room, and sleep will not come.
Eventually she collects some blankets and takes them outside, making her way onto the beach, just past the scrubby dunes. The cool air is an instant relief, the ceaseless rustling of the ocean a whispered lullaby, filtering out everything fearful, refilling the empty spaces with quiet, abstract hope.
She can hear Connor’s voice as though he is right next to her. What do you think, Des – is life like the current, an endless back and forth? Or is it the sea, constant?
It must be twenty years since he said that, when they were spending their days on the boat. How can it be possible that she can hear him so clearly, when he has been gone for so long?
She had been a different person then – unaware she had the capacity to cause so much hurt. She feels heavy with remorse and shame when she thinks about her one moment of madness – how she had recklessly torn at the fragile web of her life, forgetting each thread was attached to so many others, until her whole world fell apart.
For a while, there had been a crucial, missing few minutes in Desi’s memory. One moment, she was at home; the next, she was getting out of her car, as people ran towards her. This lapse had been the sticking point in her sentencing. Culpability had been easy: Desi had pleaded guilty, and was full of remorse. But when she couldn’t explain what had happened or why, the prosecution team had used this to ask for a custodial sentence. A psychologist’s report concurred – it said that Desi wasn’t withholding because she couldn’t remember, but because she chose not to.
But that seems less important now than apologising again to Rebecca and her family. The physical scars may be healing, but what about those deeper, more abiding ones?
The noise of the ocean is changing. Each wave carries soft entreaties and broken promises, dropping them at her feet like flotsam, the churned-up fragments of the past. Desi watches helplessly until they settle, layer on layer, recreating the landscape of her life. Most of her story falls away into deep, hidden stratas, leaving only a thin veneer for her to survey. What she sees makes her shudder.
Every decision she has made in her life had seemed right at the time, but surely they must all have been wrong, or she wouldn’t have ended up here, nearing forty, alone, with a criminal record and no job prospects. She sits up for a while, hugging her knees close to her chest. Despite the dark, leering void of her future, tonight she will rejoice in her freedom and not be cowed by fears of the unknown.
She looks north, thinking of Maya asleep a short distance up the coast. She hadn’t wanted her daughter to go to Lovelock Bay. She had asked Pete to move into the shack, but he said it was inappropriate for a man to live alone with a seventeen-year-old girl who was not his relation. ‘You’re like a father to her,’ she’d argued, astonished, but he wouldn’t be swayed. Then Maya had settled the argument by declaring she didn’t want to live in the shack any more. She had gone to Jackson – and Charlie. Perhaps Desi shouldn’t feel so humiliated about relying on her dad’s charity. But she does, and she can’t wait to have Maya home.
She lies down again, cocooned in her nest of blankets, hidden under the wing of night. She studies the pinwheel of the endless sky, marvelling at its breadth as the ocean soothes and shushes. The stars begin to shiver as a deep, somnolent wave