But why him? Why that drunken, philandering, beer-swilling loser?
We were half-way up the coast road, the hotel in sight, before she spoke. Two boats were moored at Whale Jetty: Moby One and Ishmael. I knew them both now by sight, which gave me an odd sense of satisfaction. The sun, high in the sky, glinted off the blue water behind them and the dense pines that covered the hills were an unnatural lush green. Every time I had looked at this setting, I had imagined it in the printed images of a brochure.
‘I guess you know what happened last night,’ she said, without looking at me.
‘None of my business,’ I said.
‘No,’ she agreed, ‘it’s not.’
I indicated left and headed slowly up the track to the hotel, wishing suddenly that we were not so close to home. The car’s clock said, unbelievably, that it was lunchtime. I felt as though I’d already lived a whole day.
When she spoke again, her voice was measured. ‘I’ve known Greg a long time. He . . . well, I know him well enough to know that it doesn’t matter for him. That it doesn’t have to mean anything.’
I pulled into the car park. We sat in silence as the engine cooled, ticking its way into immobility, as we pondered the weighty realisation that she had deemed it necessary to say anything to me at all.
‘Your aunt told me about your child. I’m sorry.’
Her head snapped round. Her eyes, I saw, were red-rimmed. It might have been lack of sleep, or the result of endless tears. ‘She shouldn’t have.’
I didn’t know what to say.
So I leant forward, took Liza McCullen’s exhausted, beautiful face in my hands and kissed her. God only knows why. The really surprising thing was that she kissed me back.
Ten
Hannah
Lara took me out on her boat. It was called Baby Dreamer and it had a pram bow, and a thwart, the name for the bench that went across the middle, and it was rigged as a Bermudan sloop with a mainsail and a jib, which looked like two triangles, one smaller than the other, and she had a little flag – a burgee – that told her which way the wind was blowing.
She taught me how to tack and gybe, the most important things in sailing, and to do these you have to use the rudder, the sails and the weight of the crew all at once. Lara and I had to shift our weight from one side of the boat to the other, which made us giggle, and Lara sometimes pretended she was falling in, but I never panicked because I knew she was joking.
I didn’t tell Mum. But Lara’s mum knew – she watched from their house – and I wore her spare lifejacket. My mum never says much to the other mums, so I guessed I was pretty safe.
Everyone in Lara’s family sails. She has been sailing since she was a baby, and in her front room there’s a picture of her, still wearing a nappy, with her fat little hands on a tiller and someone else’s holding her round the tummy. She can remember sleeping on their yacht when she was really little and her mum said she was such a bad sleeper now because she got too used to being rocked to sleep by the water.
Lara has done a course at Salamander Bay and knows how to do all the points of sailing. These are all the different angles on which your boat can meet the wind, including a head-to-wind, which can send you drifting backwards, and a beam reach, which is the one that helps you go fastest. She said that when my mum agrees to let me use Hannah’s Glory we can go and do the course at Salamander Bay, where they make you practise things like sailing with one sail, or sailing without a centreboard. They run it in the school holidays and it’s quite cool if you bring your own boat, instead of having to take turns in the school one. I had asked Mum once about Greg’s dinghy, since my party, and she just said a flat no, in the way that meant she wasn’t going to discuss it. But Auntie K said to leave it with her, and if we were clever about it, Mum would come round. She said it was like fishing: you had to learn to be quiet and patient to reel in what you wanted.
It was quite warm, even on the water, and we just wore our fleeces. Lara’s mum made us wear our lifejackets the whole time, just in case, and they kept us quite warm, so we didn’t need jackets. The sea was calm and we were allowed to go between the two nearest buoys and left up the coast as long as we didn’t go out as far as the shipping lane. Lara always does what her mum says. She said her dad knew someone who had strayed into the shipping lane and nearly got sucked under a steel container ship because they weren’t looking where they were going.
The dolphins came out to see us near the point. We had stopped for a moment to get out our chocolate and I recognised Brolly and Brolly’s baby from the pictures on Moby One, and I showed Lara her dorsal fin, which was the exact shape of underneath an umbrella. Her baby was so cute that Lara nearly cried. We were pretty sure they knew it was us – they didn’t always go up to the whalechasers, but this was the third time I had been out with Lara and the dolphins always came to us. They always look like they’re smiling. We spent about an hour just sitting out there by the point, talking to them and watching them play. Brolly’s baby had grown about six inches since I last saw her and Brolly came up close enough to the boat for us to stroke her nose, even though she must have known we didn’t have any fish. I couldn’t resist touching her, even though Yoshi said we must never encourage the dolphins to come too close in case they thought all humans would be nice to them. She told me that last year, for no reason, someone had stabbed a dolphin to death down the coast. They just went out on a jet-ski and stabbed it with a knife. I cried, because I kept thinking of that poor dolphin swimming up to the bike with its lovely smiley face, thinking it had made a new friend. In the end I cried so hard that Yoshi had to go and get Mum to stop me.
Dolphins were Letty’s favourite animals. She had four on pieces of different-coloured crystal on her dressing-table that she got for her fifth birthday. I used to rearrange them and she got cross because I’d been in her stuff. We used to fight quite a lot, because she was only fourteen months younger than me and Mum said we were like peas in a pod. Sometimes I still think about when we used to fight and I feel really bad because if I’d known what was going to happen to her I would have tried to be nice to her every day. I say ‘try’ because it’s quite hard to be nice to someone every day. Even my mum gets on my nerves sometimes but I’m always nice to her because I know she’s still sad, and because I’m all she has left. I still have the crystal dolphins. One looks a bit like Brolly, so I called her Brolly and I’ve made the smallest one of the others her baby even though it isn’t really the right size. But I keep them in a box now because they’re precious. And because having them out just brings everything back.