‘You okay?’
‘Yeah, fine. Just . . . just had an odd night. A baby whale died outside the hotel and it . . . threw me a little.’
‘Wow. A baby whale? Did someone kill it?’
‘Not exactly. It beached itself.’
‘Okay. I’ve heard of that. Weird.’ I heard her drag on the cigarette. ‘Did you get pictures? Might make an interesting feature.’
‘Take off the hack head, Monica.’
‘Don’t be so precious. So what, were you all trying to get it back in the water?’
‘Not me personally.’
‘Didn’t want to get those designer trousers dirty, huh?’
Suddenly I felt irritated by her singular inability ever to be nice and straightforward with me instead of smart and sarcastic. ‘We’re not fourteen any more, in case you hadn’t noticed,’ I wanted to yell. But I just said, ‘Oh, forget it. I’d better go.’
‘Hey – hey – okay, Mike. Sorry.’
‘Look, we’ll speak another time.’ I should have rung Vanessa. But I knew why I hadn’t.
‘Mike, don’t be angry. I’m sorry, all right? What . . . what was it you wanted to say?’
But that was it: I didn’t know. I sat there for almost five minutes before I realised I really didn’t know.
I spied her walking down the coast road half an hour after I had returned from dropping off Hannah, the dog yapping for joy at her return. She was evidently exhausted and very pale, and the legs of her jeans were wet and sandy. When she saw me sitting at the beach end of the jetty, her expression didn’t change but she stopped a few feet away from me on the sand, one hand raised against the morning sun. She teetered a little, and I wondered if she was slightly drunk. I looked at her differently now, knowing what I knew. It was as if Liza McCullen had acquired another dimension.
‘You want to drive to the market with me?’
Silhouetted as she was, I could barely see her face. ‘You’re driving?’
‘I guess you could drive me, if you’ve mastered the gear change on that Holden. Kathleen’s too tired to go grocery shopping today, and she needs sleep.’
I figured it was as close to an invitation as I was going to get. I went inside to get my car keys.
To the British eye, Australian supermarkets are a cornucopia, strange yet familiar, with an abundance of brightly coloured fruit and vegetables punctuated by alien delights such as Violet Crumbles and Green’s Pancake Shake. I didn’t have much to do with the food shopping at home; either Vanessa organised it or, on her instructions, I hit ‘repeat order list’ on our Internet shopping site and it was delivered, neatly packed in colour-coded bags marked ‘Freezer’, ‘Fridge’ and ‘Larder’ – as if anyone in London had a larder. But as we walked round the cavernous interior of the Australian supermarket I enjoyed studying these new foods, found myself repeatedly calculating the cost in sterling – as if I had an idea how much the British equivalent cost.
Liza marched up and down the aisles, lobbing items into the oversized trolley with the confidence of someone who performed this task regularly. You would not have guessed from the dexterity and swiftness of her movements that she had been up all night.
‘Anything you want in particular?’ she called over her shoulder. ‘Assuming you’re staying a bit longer.’ There was no hint in her voice as to whether that made the slightest difference to her.
‘I’m easy,’ I said, putting a packet of crackers back on to the shelf, and thought of the myriad ways in which that statement was true.
When she came to pay, I noticed that she had to rifle in her pockets for enough cash – crumpled notes, cents in various denominations – to make up the full amount. I made as if to interrupt, but her warning glance kept my hand in my pocket, where it rested on my wallet. I pretended I had been fumbling for a handkerchief and blew my nose so ostentatiously that the woman behind me backed away in horror.
As I watched, I found myself piecing things together, considering what now made sense. Her inability to let her surviving child out on the water. Her melancholy. Perhaps the child had drowned. Perhaps it had been a baby. Perhaps she had lost a husband at the same time. I realised how few questions I had asked her. How few, come to think of it, I had ever asked anyone. For all I knew Dennis Beaker might have a second family. Tina Kennedy might have left a convent two years previously. I had always taken people at face value. Now, suddenly, I wondered what I might have missed.
Liza McCullen had had a child who died. She was three years younger than me, and suddenly, next to her, I felt as if I had the life experience and self-knowledge of an amoeba.
We had been on the road for almost twenty minutes before we spoke again.
We passed the council offices, and I thought about the development, and my conversation with Dennis. I thought about something Kathleen had told me a few days earlier: that the only reason the area around Silver Bay had developed from bush at all was because Allied soldiers had built a base there. She could remember a time when there had been only her hotel, a few houses and a general store. She said this with some satisfaction, as if she had preferred it. I knew I should have said something by then. Part of it, I guess, was cowardice. I knew how she – any of them – was likely to respond. I liked them. And the thought of them not liking me . . . got to me.
And by then, after Liza, the distress flares and the baby whale, I was no longer convinced of the plan’s rightness as we had envisaged it. There must be a way, I thought, to tie in the two sets of needs – those of our proposed hotel and those of the whalechasers. Until I had worked it out, though, I didn’t want to discuss it with anyone. Not Liza or Kathleen. Or Dennis, no matter how angry he became over my supposed obfuscation. I sat in the driver’s seat, trying to concentrate on the road, acutely aware of Liza beside me. The way she twisted her hair with her right hand when her thoughts took her somewhere far from where she sat.
I kept thinking of things to say, but I didn’t want to give her the chance to retreat into polite conversation. I felt we had passed that stage. I felt, oddly, as if I was owed an explanation. And I kept thinking of the way Greg would grin at me that evening, drop thinly veiled references to their night together, as if he had been proven right in warning me off. I have met men like him in every walk of life: charismatic, loud, childlike in their determination to be the centre of attention. It’s incomprehensible to me how they invariably attract the nicest women, and usually end up treating them badly. I imagined him sitting next to Liza on the bench, laying a proprietorial arm round her shoulders, believing, as Kathleen said, that he had a chance. But perhaps he had more of one than she thought. Who knew what lay behind the choices of the human heart? Liza had liked him enough to go to bed with him, after all. More than once.