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When the passenger door creaks, I jump. And open my eyes to see a plump expanse of décolletage above the zipper of a pink tracksuit.
“Go away,” I yell. “Waggle your tits at someone else.”
Juliet ignores me and climbs in. Close up she must be half my age, with a pretty face as plump as her body, and brown uncombed hair pulled back in a ponytail. It’s the kind of beauty that could fade.
“You’ve been taking pictures,” she says.
I shrug. How does she know?
“I came to talk to Andrew. He won’t let me in.”
“Course not. Trust me, the place is a tip.”
“I thought so. Why do you stay?”
“None of your business. A bit like those pics you took.”
“What about them?”
“Look, it’s, like, over between you and Andrew, yeah?”
“So?”
“So what do you care? About what I, like, flip at the neighbours?”
Good question, but I don’t owe her an answer.
“Do me a favour,” she says.
“What?”
“You know.” She holds out her hand for my phone.
“Sounds more like an order than a favour.”
“Whatever.”
It’s clear she won’t be leaving till I do. I open the photo gallery and pass her the phone. She could delete them but she doesn’t.
Neville’s and Doug’s assault on the hedge amuses her.
“Look at ’em. Their wives must be, like, over it.” Now she’s studying the close-ups, boobs and buttocks bobbing. “They’re good. Are you a photographer?”
“Not really. I didn’t plan to take them. You just...popped up.”
She giggles again. And suddenly I like her.
“How did you meet him?” I ask.
She shrugs. “Temping in his office, till I crack it in catalogue modelling. Plus size, you know? I’ve had experience. Anyway, we started working back late. Then doing it on his desk. Now I’m, like, permanent. Till I get bored.”
“You could do better. He’s selfish. And cruel.”
“And old.” She’s still scrolling. “What are you gonna do with ’em?”
“I don’t know.” Although something spiteful appeals. “But you’ve got something in mind, haven’t you?”
She grins. “Post ’em online. Get right up Andrew’s nose.”
For a moment I see Andrew with his hand across his face as Neville’s and Doug’s wives attack him with brooms, and camera crews vie for a glimpse. Then there’s his reputation. A junior employee semi-naked in his garden, posing for the paparazzi, then regaling them with details of what they do on his desk after hours. If the partners get wind of it, he’ll go straight onto the demotion list. Or worse. Not to mention his political aspirations. Perfect.
But just as quickly, I let it go. This pantomime is happening in a parallel universe, a universe I no longer inhabit.
“They’re yours,” I say to Juliet. “Email them to yourself. Then delete them.”
“Cool.”
After it’s done, there’s nothing more to say. She hands me back my phone before getting out, then she leans through the open door and gives me one last look at her equipment.
“You’re much more, like, chilled than I expected. Andrew goes, ‘My ex, she’s one desiccated bitch’. Like coconut, you know? All the juice squeezed out.”
It’s an adjective he’s used about me before. The bastard.
“But he hasn’t got a clue, has he? He’s the one that’s sucked you dry. And you’re still letting him do it.”
She walks down the hill, the tracksuit clinging to her backside. Women would call her plump, but men wouldn’t. She’s the opposite of desiccated. She’s, like, succulent.
On the way to Placido’s for another coffee I can’t stop thinking about it. How Andrew controlled my life; how I let him suck my juice out, smear my essence on the walls. But Juliet’s a free spirit. Not because she drops her robe for the neighbours, but because of what it represents. No-one’s going to suck Juliet dry, not even an expert like Andrew. She’s getting the juice out of life. All of it.
***
It’s great to have a plan. Gretel’s always got something wise to say, even when she’s up to her eyeballs in sleep deprivation.
Back at my hotel I shower off Andrew’s toxic energy. Then, on a whim, I make my way to the beachfront. The surf is subdued, along with my phobia. Since my disappearance, my fear of the sea has morphed into something else. An emptiness I don’t understand.
Along the promenade, there’s a market in full Sunday swing. I browse the handmade soaps and bamboo wind chimes and Nepalese beanies, catching gusts of that autumn chill as it ripples through the pines. Even though I’ve done nothing more than decide to find a lawyer, I feel strangely out of reach of Andrew’s vengeful clutches. Someone is selling helium balloons, and I buy one just to let it go. It jerks higher and higher into the pale sky, taking my impotence with it.
When I check my messages, Juliet has sent a link. She hasn’t wasted time posting the photos, captioned Dance of the Disappearing Bathrobe. She’s left out the most explicit ones, but the viewer gets the picture. Andrew will be incandescent. Especially if he finds out who took them. I laugh and turn off my phone.
It’s time for fish and chips wrapped in paper. I eat them off my lap on a beachfront seat and try to stare down the seagulls, with as much success as I had with Andrew. It reminds me there are no seagulls on Hawaii. But there are mutton-birds. Meteorites with wings. My kindred spirits, clumsy but focused. Always finding their way home.
While I’m trying not to obsess about the whole home thing, a man in a wheelchair rolls up and stops beside my seat. He’s got a large black dog with him and I realise he’s also blind. He opens a parcel of paper and starts on his own fish and chips.
“Your dog’s obedient,” I say. “He’s not even ogling the chips.” Then I’m embarrassed for mentioning something he can’t see.
“She,” he says. “Daisy. She’s obedient. She also doesn’t like chips.”
We laugh.
“What’s the sea like today?” he asks.
“Flat.”
“You’re a woman of few words.”
“Sorry, I’ve got a bit of a sea phobia.”
“Well, you’re safe on this promenade unless there’s a tsunami. And I can’t see the view, so knock yourself out on a description.”
His forthrightness reminds me of a girl I knew at uni. She was in a wheelchair with advanced MS and I was one of her helpers. She got away with being as cheeky as this guy.
“OK,” I say, “here goes. The beach is wide...so the sky is big above us. It’s stretching in layers of thin grey clouds all the way from heaven to the horizon.”
Can he remember colours? But he’s already closing his eyes and moving his head as if he’s visualising the scene.
“And there’s almost no swell so the horizon is...sharp.”
Another beach, another horizon, moonlight spilling across the sea. I try to hold the image so I can follow it to where it took me, but again it slips away.
“The water is a dull grey,” I say, “with few white caps. And the waves aren’t rushing to the shore, they’re...meandering diagonally and colliding with each other in a companionable way, then trickling the last distance and dwindling into nothing in the shallows.”
Splashing in the shallows... Dancing on the shore... But it’s what I’ve seen before.
“And the cliffs?” he asks.
Something about cliffs. But I already know that I took off my shoes and descended Bantry’s Bluff. Then...?
“The cliff,” I say, “is high and crumbly. Jagged layers of rough sandstone in cream and orange, creating a patchwork of light and shadow.”
“A great place for fossils. When I was a boy I found a fossil of a lizard.”
I want to give him more. I close my eyes and try to feel the cliff.
“Its claim on the space...reflects something primal and true, something secret that lives deep inside.” Where did that come from? “It makes me want to weep with gratitude.” Shit.
When I open my eyes, the man is smiling.
I’ve finished my fish and chips, but I stay while he eats his. He tells me his name is Keith and I tell him mine.
“Selkie,” he says. “After the Celtic myth about seals.”
“My mother’s mad idea. I always have to spell it.”
“Selkies are seals but they’re also people. They have divided selves.”
To avoid this observation I ask if he lives around here.
“I’ve got a ground-floor unit. Nice and flat. Daisy and I can do all our shopping and roll home. What about you? I sense you’re just passing through.”
Bloody hell. What is it with this guy?
“I’m on my way to Paris.” I find myself telling him about leaving Andrew and coming back.
“Hawaii. Sydney. Paris,” he says. “Which place is home?”
Instead of spilling any more to this stranger, I offer to buy us ice creams, fetching them from a milk bar opposite the seafront. Then it’s time to part company and I watch Keith and Daisy roll away.
I wander along the Corso, the short road that connects the seashore with the harbour wharf across what was once a spit of sand. The whole world is doing the same – the Sunday pilgrimage from the ferry to the beach, even on a grey day like this. This precinct is my old teenage stamping ground: Saturday nights with the girls, strutting our stuff in tiny skirts and big shoes. Until Andrew exploited my awkward adolescence for himself. These days the Corso is lined with cafés spilling alfresco tables onto the pavement, and glittering shops offering everything from designer jewellery to tacky souvenirs. The old slogan still emblazons mugs and T-shirts: Manly. Seven miles from Sydney, a thousand miles from care.
I’m imagining dwelling in the heady space beyond care when a brass shingle between two shops catches my eye. Judy Cartwright. Solicitor. There’s a door to the offices above. I was going to hit the city tomorrow, but maybe there’s a lawyer right here.
***
It’s Monday morning. Judy Cartwright’s rooms are old and small, but the paint job is new and the north-facing windows let in lots of light. The receptionist consults her screen and tells me Judy can see me at ten thirty. Back on the street, I’ve got over an hour to kill. Should I interview another lawyer to give myself a choice? There’s another shingle and another stairway. Roach and Leggett. Sounds suitably scurrilous.
As I start to climb the stairs, a suited man is coming down. We nod as we pass but when I reach the landing I hear a voice behind me.
“Aren’t you Elkie Tabrett?”
“Selkie Moon.” What’s going on?
He laughs. “Ah, yes. Elkie with an S. Your hair’s different from the photo.”
“What photo?”
“Your ex thought you might be looking for a lawyer. He’s put your photo around, warning everyone to show you the door. No-one’s going to touch you, babe. He knows a lot of people.”
Andrew’s the in-house accountant for a big city law firm. This guy’s right: through his networks, he’ll have contacts everywhere.
“And you are?” I’m trying not to sound rattled. “Roach or Leggett?”
He smirks. “Neither.”
While he’s enjoying himself at my expense, I pull out my phone and snap his photo. “Just in case I have to make a complaint to the Law Society.”
Now he’s shouting and climbing the stairs, then stops. He was thinking of grabbing my phone but he doesn’t want to risk an assault. And what can I do with the picture? There are no witnesses to our conversation, and I’m already locking myself in the toilet on the landing.
A few minutes later, the coast is clear and I return to the Corso for a coffee. Has Judy Cartwright got the message to leave me out in the cold? She’s only a suburban solicitor, so even if she’s happy to represent me, does she have the balls to face up to Andrew? Unless she’s a hard-faced bottle-blonde who started her career as a prison guard. I wish.
I’m worrying away when Keith and Daisy roll right past my table.
“Hey, Keith.” Daisy is sniffing my hand. “It’s Selkie, we met yesterday, remember? Care to join me for a coffee?”
He laughs. “I’d never forget your name. Or your voice channelling the cliff. Order me a coffee and regale me with stories of the seashore.”
As the coffees arrive, I’m telling him my seashore story, the one where I disappeared.
“Part of you hasn’t come back from that beach,” he says.
“Why do you say that? You’ve only just met me.”
“Because you don’t remember. You’re in an amnesia loop, Selkie, and it makes you vulnerable.” Derek would love this guy. And Davina. “It’s like post-traumatic stress. Those guys coming back from war zones. They keep reliving the horrors because part of them is trapped in the experience.”
Rupert.
“Except I can’t remember what happened.”
“Flipside of the same thing. They’ve got the mental video running and they can’t get out of the movie. You’re still on that beach because you can’t remember. In both cases, you’ve got to get the trapped part back so you can live fully in the present.”
It’s what I wondered myself.
“How do you know this stuff?”
“I work with traumatised people. I’m a psychotherapist.”
“Now you tell me. No wonder I’m spilling my secrets. When you say ‘regale me with stories’ you’re pressing the play button.”
He laughs. “I seem to have that effect on people.”
“Because you’re not at all threatening, Keith.”
“No. The blind guy in the wheelchair. It helps people open up.”
Is he a war-zone casualty himself? That would give him serious cred with his clients. Something stops me from asking.
“OK, so how do I get myself back? And don’t say five years of therapy.”
“Sometimes it’s as simple as a short visualisation.”
Keith’s whole world must be visualisation. On the other side of the table, he’s fiddling with his smart phone. He’s got an earpiece that must be guiding him with sounds.
“Close your eyes,” he says. “Listen to this.”
I don’t know what I’m expecting, but what pours out into the darkness behind my eyelids is a bird carolling. Its slow rich song echoes in the dark, the notes flowing from high and clear to deep and mellow, piercing my heart. I’m transfixed by the perfect pitch as it carries me to a lonely moonlit night, poignant with feelings of longing.
When it’s finished we’re both silent.
Eventually Keith says, “The pied butcherbird. I’ve just come back from Uluru, and when I heard it calling across the outback, I knew I had to buy the app.”
I don’t know what to say, I’m almost in tears. We’re sitting at an outdoor café in Manly and I’m connecting with a bird call on an app.
“Did something come back?” he asks.
“Yes, but I don’t know what it means.” The emptiness again.
He says no more and returns to his coffee.
After a while I ask, “Why did you go to Uluru?”
“A tribal elder invited me. I helped his son escape his mental horror movie and he wanted to thank me.” He waits a moment before adding, “I spent a whole day in a secret cave.”
A visceral jerk sideswipes me with thoughts of Andrew.
“Where only the initiated go?” I manage.
“Yes. They put me through a ceremony, then they carried me to the cave.”
Because I’m a woman, he can only talk in general terms about the men’s business he experienced – the sacred totem carved at the entrance that he touched with his fingers, how they sat in silence and allowed him to just be there, how he felt the air moving through the cave, the sun bouncing off the rocks as it travelled across the sky. After a while he heard distant chanting and imagined a sacred campfire with elders gathered around it. As it got louder, bouncing around the valley and playing on the wind, he asked where the ceremony was. “You hear singing?” the elder asked. Keith nodded but no explanation was given, and eventually the voices drifted away.
When we say goodbye, I return to my own mental message: Turn the tables on the troglodyte.
Keith’s talk of secret caves has brought me right back to my mission.