Their dad says he’ll jog round to pick up the car, so Liss sits down on the biggest of the chilly bins to wait. The sun seems to knock the strength out of her legs, like a mean kid knee-tapping her from behind. There is no shade anywhere, just a blank expanse of sea on one side, the wake of the ferry already vanished, and a stretch of gravel and unsealed road on the other, the muscular flanks of the hills crouching blue in the distance.
They look like wartime evacuees, huddled around their little pile of suitcases and bags and boxes, as if they’ve just been dumped on a country railway platform instead of a barnacle-scabbed wharf. They are all thirsty but they drank the last of their water on the boat, so Liss’s mum finds them apples to take their minds off it.
The three little ones tear up and down the jetty until their nervous mothers shoo them along to the shore. They run in crazed circles until Mattie sprawls in the dust, howling, and has to be picked up and have her skinned knees inspected and the grit wiped out of her mouth.
Jono stands near Liss, sucking at his apple, scuffing at the knotty wood with the toe of his sandal. He is silent, but if she strains her peripheral vision, Liss thinks she sees him glancing at her. After three years apart they are shy; Liss is not yet sure whether she recognises her old playmate in this broad-shouldered teenager.
“Daddy, Daddy!” shouts Tim, and here is her father, swinging the old orange Datsun around in the gravel car park, backing it up for loading.
“Still going strong!” he says, getting out and slapping the roof. “Good old Mandy!” He smiles at Liss, who gave the car its name, short for Mandarin, when she was little. She is glad he doesn’t remind anyone.
They fill the boot with luggage, Jono and Tim squeezing into the gaps. Tim wants to be wherever his big cousin is, besotted already. The rest of them pile into the seats, the two dads in the front, Bede and Mattie on their mums’ laps in the back. It is embarrassing to be wedged so close to Leanne, who is not really her aunt, her warm bottom spreading forcefully against Liss’s.
The car smells of her dad’s sweat, hot dust, rust and, faintly, decomposing carpet. Inside the skeleton of her door Liss can see a desiccated ballpoint, a stained sticking plaster and an iceblock wrapper, faded to blue. She heaves the window handle another quarter-circle and lets the gritty grass- and salt-scented breeze scour her face until the others complain about the dust. Bede’s sandal pumps up and down, kicking Liss’s leg, but Leanne doesn’t seem to notice. Liss slides a hand between her leg and the kicking foot.
Bede looks like Leanne, blond and doughy, much bigger than in the only photo Liss had seen of him. He beams at her and she looks at him sideways, conspiratorial. He stops kicking and she tucks her hand back under her thigh, fingering the shirred patterns branded on her skin by the hot vinyl.
The house is familiar, surprising, the gate listing a little more, the sun-crisped bushes out the front a little shaggier. Liss is first out of the car. She drags the big basket of swim gear out of the boot, releasing Jono and Tim, and takes the key from her father. She opens the door into the house’s dense, shut-up atmosphere, desolate with tidiness. Every year, without fail, it is smaller than she remembers.
Uncle Kevin comes in behind her, a suitcase in each hand, and then her mother, Sally, stiff-legged under the weight of the chilly bin. Sally swears when she sees the last people forgot to leave the fridge door open, and grimaces at the fishy-smelling puddle leaking from underneath. “Matt!” she yells, stamping back out. “The fridge is doing that thing again!”
Liss can hear her dad scuffing around outside the kitchen window and a moment later the pump groans into life, sounding its usual urgent note of complaint. Liss holds a glass under the tap to catch the first coughs of water, and begins to line up filled glasses for the kids.
“Jesus, I see what you mean by basic,” says Leanne, dumping a box of groceries on the table. “I thought you said it had a sea view.” She looks sourly out the big window at the lace-flagged clumps of flax and behind, the lumpy grey dunes with their gingery tufts of grass.
“I said it was right on the beach,” says Kevin. “You can’t get any closer. Anyway, you can see the sea from upstairs. We’ll flip a coin for that room.”
“You’re kidding me,” says Leanne. “Up that ladder? I’m not breaking my bloody neck.”
She sees Liss looking and pretends to smile. Liss unhooks the sleepout key from the nail by the sink and follows the brick path around the side of the water tank. Inside, the duvets are rolled neatly on the bare mattresses, giving off their dusty sun-baked smell. She opens the thin curtains and forces open the windows, flicking the dead flies out onto the brown grass. Maybe she’ll flip a coin with Jono for the top bunk.
She sinks onto the bottom mattress and lets herself flop face-first into the warm pile of bedding. Then a sound makes her sit up, self-conscious. Jono is standing in the doorway, not quite meeting her eyes.
“Your mum said I could sleep out here,” says Jono, sliding his backpack off his shoulder. He looks up at the built-in bunks, set at right angles to each other, and above, the high wooden rafters with their long bridal drifts of cobweb.
“It’s cool,” he says. “Is it new?” His voice squeaks a little on the last word.
“Few years ago. My dad built it.” In the house they can hear Leanne’s voice raised in irritation, and one of the kids wailing.
“Bit quieter out here, eh.” Jono’s face breaks into its old square-mouthed grin, and suddenly he is her freckled, slightly wicked cousin again.
“You can have the top bunk,” she says, grinning back. “Just watch out for spiders. They’re massive here.”
They slip away while the parents are distracted, through the gap in the barbed-wire fence. The dads are wrestling with the hidden workings of the ancient gas fridge, while the mums step over and around them, trying to sort out something for tea.
“What the fuck are we supposed to do if the fridge is poked?” Liss hears Leanne say, as she and Jono ease past. “I’ve got a chilly bin full of meat here.”
Liss knows she should help her mum with the kids, but she is impatient to get to the beach, to seal the fact of her arrival. The hidden sea tugs at her, and the lure of Jono, alone, stretches her guilt thin and transparent.
They make the long trudge over the dunes, the scrub clawing at their legs, the hot, slipping sand dragging at their feet. The sky is a scorching blue bowl, high and translucent, close and solid.
“Not sure your – Leanne’s too happy,” says Liss, catching up to Jono on the flat.
“Not much makes her happy,” says Jono, neutrally. He mimes holding a cricket bat and pretends to block a ball, making a chock sound with his tongue. “Bede, mostly.”
“Was it weird? Getting a new brother.”
“Nah. He’s all right. He’s pretty cool actually.” Jono shuffles a step and slashes as if to the boundary. Liss wants to ask about Leanne, too, but she stops herself; she has all holiday to elicit confidences.
Every summer the architecture of the beach is changed. This year a broad, shallow lagoon is carved into the vast expanse of packed sand, filled with dark rust-coloured water. Warm enough to lie in, if it wasn’t for the orange tide mark it leaves around their ankles.
Ahead the ocean roars and bounds, a tumble of blue and white and churned grey sand. To their right is the pale, pitiless sweep of the beach and the distant knobbled green of the headland. At its tip the small triangle of Sugar Loaf rises smoothly on one side and crumbles into the sea on the other, like the cracks that open in the top of her father’s gingerbread.
They are not allowed to go near the water, not even Jono, without an adult. Liss thinks of her friends from intermediate, paddling kayaks and floating on their backs in little tree-fringed bays, the sea docile in its dainty scallops of coast. As different from this fierce wilderness as another country.
She runs and plunges into a cartwheel, pulled into motion by the immense runway of sand. Arms wide, she spins, satisfyingly small, reclaiming Tairoa as her own.
The mums load the kids into the car and drive round to Shoal Bay, where it is safe for swimming. The dads stay and wait for the fridge man, who has been summoned via the old party line phone. He’s trying to make it out from town some time today, no guarantees. Matt and Kevin sit on the deck and flip the tops off tepid bottles of beer. (“An hour and a half by road?” says Leanne. “What if one of the kids breaks a leg?”)
In the back seat Mattie and Bede bounce, yelping, on Liss and Jono’s knees. Tim keeps up a shrill monologue on cricket, players and stats and strokes. Liss and Jono smile at each other behind the kids’ heads and Liss allows herself a brief fantasy: she and Jono the mum and dad, these their three noisy children.
On the beach she turns her back to take off her sundress, even though her togs are underneath. Jono strips off his T-shirt and runs into the water, casting himself belly-first into the waves. Tim lollops close behind, but Liss walks slowly, holding her shoulders back, looking down at the slender crescents of her chest and belly. At the water’s edge she stands with just her feet in, crossing her arms over her puckering nipples.
Jono and Tim throw a tennis ball back and forth: a flick of Jono’s wrist, the ball soaring in a high, perfect arc. Tim flings it wildly and Jono dives sideways, catching it in his fingertips as he sinks. He comes up laughing, shaking his wet hair out of his eyes, drawing his arm back for the next throw. His body is brown and as smooth as if it has been poured. His shoulders are square like a man’s but the flesh is soft-looking, almost girlish, at his chest and waist.
Liss takes a step forward and pitches herself into the water, taking the shock like a penance. When she surfaces Jono tosses her the ball, but it splashes feebly between her hands. Her throwing is lame, worse than Tim’s, though Jono doesn’t roll his eyes or hassle her. They play Piggy in the Middle and then, on the beach, tag with the little kids.
Liss and Jono crook their fingers and roar like tigers to make Bede and Mattie squeal. Liss is it again. With a rush of determination she chases Jono up the dunes. He ducks and weaves and her fingers reach for him, touching air. They pant and laugh, facing off. Then they both lunge the same way and she grazes his T-shirt with a shout. He collapses in the dune grass and she flops beside him, gasping.
They stare at the sky, the quiet thickening around them. Jono lifts his hand to part the grass and she turns her face towards him. He holds her gaze for a very long time. She can see the flecks in his irises, the spaces between his lashes, the place around his eyes where the freckles stop.
“You’re it,” she says. Her mouth is dry. He reaches his other hand over and touches her cheek.
“Tag you back.”
Liss’s heart hammers. She is suspended, poised above a drop, weightless as if at the top of a swing.
She starts, guilty, as Mattie’s voice comes calling for her across the dunes. Liss scrambles to her feet and runs down to the beach, looking back, afraid Jono will not follow. But he is right behind her, close enough to touch, all the way back to the others.
The insides of the chilly pads slosh, useless. Six litres of milk is poured thickly down the sink, its lemony edge no longer disguisable by Milo or coffee. The margarine is silky in its tub, shimmering on the cusp of liquid, and the cheese has a vomity stink. Sally cuts off the outside, but the inside is sweaty and translucent. She removes it from their mutinous plates with a sigh, and returns it grilled on toast.
The fridge man finally comes, too late to save the meat. Sally roasts two chickens and a kilo of drumsticks; they will be eating chicken for lunch and tea for days. Leanne prepares to cook four trays of sausages, snatching her fingers back and swearing at the whump of the gas grill.
The reserves of UHT are running low, and the ferry won’t be back till Saturday, so the dads are dispatched on the long round trip to the Four Square in Ngongowai.
“Want me to drive?” says Kevin.
“Nup,” says Matt, blunt. “Any of you kidlets want to come?” Only Mattie does, until Sally bribes Tim with whispered promises of ice cream at the shop.
A listless quiet settles over the house, the spaces heavy with heat. Leanne takes Bede for a walk, despite the brutal sun. The mild acid of her earlier exchange with Sally has left an aftertaste in everyone’s throats. (Bede roaming the bach unchecked: half a tube of sunscreen smeared into the upstairs rug, wet coffee grounds on the couch.
“I’d rather you didn’t tell my kid off, thanks.”
“Sorry, Leanne, but this isn’t just our place. You’ve got to keep an eye on him.”
“Oh, have I got to? Cheers for that.”)
Against the dense silence Liss and Jono play cards on the worn carpet, their feet pressed hard together. The edges of Jono’s toes are rough, male. Liss and Jono snap cards down, calling suit changes and Last card, their voices casual. The game is to ignore the furious wrestling of their toes, tamping down the laughter, as if their feet belong to two other people entirely.
“Isn’t the peace lovely,” says Sally, coming in from the clothesline. Liss retracts her feet from Jono’s. “Anyone want a chicken sandwich? The bread’s not too bad.”
Later, Matt and Kevin return with milk and strawberries and chocolate yoghurt, the chilly bin packed with liquefying ice. The kids scoop dripping handfuls and chase each other around the bristly lawn, shrieking. Tim tackles Jono, who goes down good-naturedly on the grass, and the three little ones pile on.
“Liss, Liss!” they call, pinning Jono down, and she advances, her leaking hands already going numb. She claps a slippery fistful against his neck while he bellows and squirms, working her hand in against the clench of his shoulder. She slides her empty fingers inside the collar of his T-shirt and holds them for a secret second against his warm skin.
It is late afternoon when Kevin takes them over the dunes to the water. Leanne and the little ones are napping and Sally and Matt have disappeared upstairs. Their voices murmur through the ceiling, sealed in adult intimacy.
Today the sand shelves steeply into the water, the waves slamming low and vicious far below the tide line. Tim hangs off Kevin, levering his uncle’s arm up and down. The boy disappears under the hissing foam and comes up whooping, clutching at his uncle with all four limbs. Jono ducks a wave and surfaces a few metres away, treading water.
“Jono!” Liss calls. “Come back!” He is facing the direction of the next breaker, her voice crushed by the roar. She turns at another yell from Tim and her feet skid down the drowned collapsing sandbank.
She doesn’t see the wave until she is under it, felled by its force. For an age she is rolled, tumbled, held, the light wheeling above her and below. Sand scours her face, one arm dragged beneath her. She is hollow, a taut shell straining around a precious bubble of breath.
“It was fine,” Kevin says later, on the beach. “I had you.” He dabs at her with a towel, Tim dancing and chattering behind. Jono stands a little apart, looking away.
Walking back she is shaky, tearful. Her face stings and her arm is weak and sore. In the dim bathroom she peels off her togs under the frail twisting stream of the shower, stretching the leg holes over the grazes on her thighs. Sand is caked on her skin, a dark triangle where her knickers go.
She turns under the water, the sand under her feet sugary in the steel shower tray. There is grit against her scalp, scabbed inside her ears, in the corners of her eyes. She rinses the caked triangle off last, levering the edge of it with her fingernail so it cracks, crumbling and dissolving in the warm water.
Late that night Liss sneaks back to the house for a pee. She no longer squats in the grass beside the sleepout, unless she is sure Jono is asleep. Her father’s voice is raised inside. She teeters on her toes outside the deck door, her breath so shallow it is barely breathing at all.
“There’s always some fucker who thinks She’ll be right and ends up losing his fucking kids. This is Tairoa, Kevin! Half the time it’s too dangerous to get in at all.”
“Take it easy. It was fine, they’re fine.”
“That poor cow at Whangaparaoa lost all three of hers. A freak wave, at Whangaparaoa! Gamble with your kids, not mine.”
“Look, Liss just got a fright. Every kid does, once or twice.”
“Still driving after a few, are you?”
“Jesus, Matt! That was ten years ago!”
“You still drive like a fucking nutcase. Man, I just hope Gail’s new bloke is a decent role model for Jono.”
There is a long silence.
“That’s out of line, Matt. Lay off how I bring up my kid.”
“Yeah, well don’t go near mine again. Understood?”
She’ll be right. Her dad used to say that all the time.
In the dark, Liss wriggles out of her nightshirt. In daylight it is a humiliating pale pink, with Goodnight Kiwi on the front. She lies on her bunk in just her knickers, her bare skin tingling. What if he turns on the light? She puts her hands over the fleshy buds of her chest.
“Have you taken your nightie off?” Jono says, somewhere above her.
“No,” she says, her pulse thudding in her ears. “Maybe. You’ll never know.”
“I’m looking at you,” he says, his voice looming nearer. “I have night vision and I can see you.”
“No you can’t,” says Liss. She tenses, the nightshirt in her hand, ready to whip it over herself. She strains her ears for sounds on the ladder.
“Maybe I’ve got a torch.”
She remembers last night, his tongue meaty against hers. His teeth grazing her lips, his saliva slick around the outside of her mouth. Dragging her face away, whispering in an agony of self-consciousness, terrified he will stop, “Too wet. Sorry. Dry – please. Sorry.”
His awkward groan, the resumption of his urgent mouthing. Herself adrift in an invisible tangle of sandy bedding, her hands up by her shoulders, wanting to touch him, afraid in case he touched her back.
Then adult voices in the distance, and their violent, reflexive separation, the creak of the ladder as Jono shinned back up to his bunk. Lying for a long time in the dark, listening to Jono’s rough breathing, the mad beat of her pulse slowly subsiding.
Was it against the law? Would they send her to counselling? A therapist? Sinking into sleep, waking again and again, each time the knowledge seeping into her anew. Surfacing in the blackness with her hand gripped between her thighs, her thumb hard against the crotch of her pants.
Liss sits up now and wriggles back into her nightshirt, lying down just in time. Jono’s weight collapses the edge of the mattress, tipping her towards him. “Scoot over.”
She makes room, but he follows, pressing the length of his body into the crevice between her and the bed. “Cowabunga!” he says suddenly, and laughs.
“What?” says Liss, unnerved by the whiff of a private joke.
“It’s just a game we play on the bus, me and my mates.”
“What game?”
“You have to get as much of your body touching some chick before she notices. And you have to say ‘Cowabunga!’ so all the guys look, as proof.”
“What chick?” She feels an obscure sense of injustice.
“Any chick,” says Jono. “Any female. It’s easy when the bus is crowded. Better if she’s a spunk, though.”
“Gross,” says Liss. She tries to unpeel her body from his. “You guys are perverts.”
But his hand creeps up to her cheek, pressing her face towards him, and his wet mouth finds hers, insistent and real.
Liss cannot believe there is no trace on her. She finds her mother and leans over the back of the couch, testing her own opacity.
“Jono and I are going for a walk.” Liss is appalled at her own daring. Jono and I. She has gone too far. But their cover is impeccable: “We can take Tim with us if you like.”
Sally has a magazine open on her lap, Ten Tips For A Stunning Summer Body. A woman holds a bowl of fruit close to her face, her glossy mouth gaping around the spoon, eyes rolling up in delight.
“Thanks, sweetie,” says her mum, smiling up at her. “It’s nice you’re getting on so well with Jono. His dad says he’s had a tough time lately.” She reaches up to brush the hair out of Liss’s eyes. “Have fun.”
Liss and Jono walk ahead of the others, carrying the basket of towels and the picnic bag. Far behind them the mums coax and bully the little kids. Tim lags way back, dragging his feet, his shoulders slumped under the weight of his sulk.
Ahead of them is the broad, empty curve of beach, rolling asterisks of spinifex reflected in the low-tide sand. In the shelter of the headland the rocks that hide the Mermaid Pool lie square and pale, piled like something edible, nougat or fudge.
Liss longs to say something knowing, nonchalant; something that will fix whatever there is between them at night in the proving solution of daylight. But Jono’s silence is a forcefield that scrambles speech, and she walks mutely beside him, the opportunity nearly gone.
They round the last tumble of boulders and Liss sees with a thud of resentment that the pool is occupied.
“Mermaids!” says Jono, leaping ahead over the rocks.
There are two teenage girls, older than Jono, and a younger sister about Liss’s age. They crouch above the low-tide pool, extending first one leg and then the other, testing the chilly water. Their limbs are the rich brown-gold of honey and there are real curves beneath their bright bikinis. Jono capers as if before a cattle prod, prancing and shouting, puffing out his cheeks and making comic-book sound effects.
The girls elaborately ignore him. They slide into the water, gasping, lifting their elbows and shoulders in elegant gestures of shock. Liss hunches on the rock, feeling the goosepimply skin of her shins, the roughness of the tiny straining hairs. She says hello, politely, to the parents; they are a family of boaties, anchored round in Shoal Bay.
Jono tucks and leaps explosively into the centre of the pool. The adults avert their faces and tch in complaint.
“Dickhead,” says one girl clearly, and she and her sisters turn away, hitching their lips. The oldest girl climbs out, streaming water, the navel in her smooth belly as perfect as a kiss. Mortification curdles inside Liss, for Jono, pathetically exposed, for her thin pale self in her childish polka-dot togs.
Sally and Leanne arrive with the kids and Liss scrambles up gratefully. She fusses over Mattie and Tim, blowing up water wings, helping her mother administer drinks and biscuits. The visitors soon depart without saying goodbye, leaving a spiralling rainbow slick of sunscreen on the surface of the pool.
On the long walk back Liss holds Mattie’s hand, matching her steps to her sister’s short, uneven ones. Jono, who has been playing frisbee with Tim, jogs to catch up. He walks close, his shoulder almost touching Liss’s, and she imagines his warmth radiating across the wind-whipped air between them.
He bumps his arm into hers a few times, pushing her off course, and she shoves him back, accepting his reassertion of their intimacy. He is nice again, the desperate idiot of the pool forgotten.
“Hey, Liss,” he says, dropping his voice as if to share a confidence. She turns her head and smiles at him. She is ready for his contrition, his declaration of loyalty.
“Do you have any friends like those girls you could introduce me to?”
She looks down, at the top of Mattie’s sunhat, at her own feet appearing and disappearing beneath her, shattering the thin crust of high-tide sand.
“Not really,” she says, at last. “I don’t know any girls like them.”
“Maybe at your new school this year. You could invite me up for the holidays.”
“Maybe.”
She stares out at the heaving sea. All the way from Chile, her father says, the waves gathering force across countless miles of empty ocean. Nothing to stop them until they reach Tairoa, pouncing and chewing and sucking at the beach at her feet.
Liss sits on the end of her bunk, her head bent over the book in her lap. Her hair is up in a towel, her sandy feet dangling. Behind her she can hear Jono scooching along the upper bunk and then creaking down the wooden ladder. She keeps her head down as if she is reading. It has been surprisingly enjoyable, ignoring him.
She hears a step and then his mouth is on the back of her neck, a single, glowing imprint. The shock of it sings through her, turning her insides liquid.
His foot scrapes on the doorsill but she sits unmoving, her eyes on her book, until she is sure he has gone. A focused point on her nape, fleetingly warm, cools as if a cloud has crossed the sun.
It is evening, their shadows flung ahead of them across the glowing sand. The sun has appeared beneath the overcast ceiling that has pressed down all day, dipping towards the hills. They have permission to walk as far as the Mermaid Pool, as long as they don’t go in the water.
It is nearly over, the days and hours spooling jerkily past. Liss wonders if Jono will try and kiss her, a final ratification of their nighttime exchanges. But the daylight renders them both ordinary, recognisable, bleaching the moment of possibility.
Ahead, the smooth crust of Sugar Loaf rises from the headland, its trail of crumbs leading darkly out to sea.
“Let’s go up there,” says Jono.
Liss shows him the start of the track, tucked into the groin of the hill. They press up through the tangle of bush to the parched open space above.
She remembers coming up here with her dad, last summer, just the two of them. The sun battering down, the track cracked and dry. Neither of them with a water bottle, the sea tormentingly blue and cool and liquid almost directly below. Her dad the optimist, trying to find them a short cut down. She’ll be right. The unspoken pact ever since, never to tell her mum.
The descent starting out okay, the two of them skidding down through dusty gaps in the scrub, clutching scratchy fistfuls of manuka. Then the bluff dropping away beneath them, hollowed out by the wind and sea. Liss slipping a few metres, graunching her knee, pain and fright throbbing through her.
The moment, clinging to the cliff face, when she began to panic, unable to find a safe foothold up or down. Her father, below and to one side, reaching up his hand to guide her foot. The understanding leaching into her: this is how it feels, just before the tragedy. The world coming off its rails, lurching away from the predicted and the safe. Her father, just a man, in the middle of a mistake.
Liss and Jono stand at the top now, as far as the trail will go. The evening is humid, the cloud lowering in the brackish air. A pair of gulls hang casually in the wind. Below, grey-green water swirls and slaps between lumps of rock.
“I’ll write to you,” says Jono. “Maybe I can come up in the holidays.”
A golden spot glows again on the back of her neck, briefly eclipsing his faithlessness and greed; smooth honey-coloured limbs, crowded buses, a gluttonous, probing tongue.
She closes her eyes to the warm wind, tasting its restless energy. There is a force like gravity urging her forward, its currents flowing towards the cakey edge and over. Her eyes flick open and she balls her fists to disperse the treacherous sudden impulse. This is how it feels, just before. The uncertainty, the trembling open-endedness.
“Come on.” She turns decisively. “Before Mum starts to worry.”
Her feet skitter down the track, sliding in her dusty jandals, stones biting into the thin rubber soles. The gulls surf the air abreast of her, far above the drop. Jono calls, behind her, to wait.