CHAPTER 16

Zoe leaned over her mother’s sink and tilted her head back.

She mussed her hair, ran her finger along her chin and, finding exactly what she was looking for, raised the tweezers. Three swift movements later she bent down to survey the bounty against the off-white porcelain of the sink.

She shook her head ruefully. A year ago she had two chin hairs. Now she had four. Dark, curly follicles which resolutely returned to her chin almost the night after being plucked out, emulating the kind of endless punishment doled out to one of the errant gods in her ancient Greek mythology.

Was this the beginning of the long and slow decline? Would she wake up tomorrow and see her mother’s startled face staring back at her from the gold-plated mirror frame? Ha! She wished. She would more likely see her father’s face staring back at her.

It had almost lulled her into a false sense of security, thinking that the worst thing that could happen to her would be turning into her mother. She idly wondered if there was a psychology field in this called Gilmorephobia or the Lorelai Syndrome.

She sighed and turned from the sink, bending at the waist so her knotty hair would gather over her head to be coaxed more easily into a ponytail. She was sceptical about the value of the beach outing, but Claudia had effusively declared a sibling morning ocean swim would be good for the group, and for the week she was trying to give Claudia whatever she wanted. For the week at least. Zoe had held the refrain ‘you get one day’ on the tip of her tongue like a clenched fist held tightly within a pocket. She had tried to tell Claudia she was taking unnecessary risks organising any group activity in the week leading up to the wedding, that it was taunting fate to have the siblings spending long chunks of allocated time together, but she had the feeling that the success of the pub outing the other night had made her sister cocky, instilled in her a belief she could pull off a situation where everyone would briefly put down their figurative weapons, like Christmas Day on the Western Front.

She had not asked why Nora was not coming. She assumed it was because she was not invited – one of the many tokens of peace extended towards Poppy for the week.

She jumped at the dull thud against the door before the knot in the pit of her stomach unravelled at Phinn’s rising baritone.

‘Women and the bathroom. I am so sick of women and the bathroom.’

Zoe yanked the door open and laughed as her brother almost fell onto the chessboard tiles while following through on a third knock.

‘There’s your precious bathroom,’ she said, dropping her shoulder into her off-kilter brother’s ribcage. Phinn clutched his side, begrudgingly marvelled at his sibling’s footy-style hit-and-spin, and held in his painful groan until Zoe was out of earshot.

He quickly put the body-check behind him and strode to the mirror. He surveyed himself admiringly, in the unselfconscious manner that most women could only dream of in some far-off future where their chin is smaller and their blemishes gone and their eyelashes a bit curlier and their nose not so ‘strong’ and, and, and …

He had not even finished lathering his jaw in shaving cream when the door opened – this time without knock or warn­ing – and his mother was standing beside him in what he instantly knew was nothing but her dressing-gown. Rachel always had been, and remained, the most mortifying on the scale of what people’s mothers were like at home – a naked mum. Other people had cake mums, business mums, shy mums, conservative mums, hippy mums, health-nut mums, and a relatively new breed that was also swelling its ranks: Facebook mums.

The Carters had grown up with Naked Mum. The kind who does not close the door when using the toilet and thinks nothing of her children’s deep shame when dashing from the shower to the bedroom to get changed after failing to register the empty towel rack beforehand. The ease she had with her body was brought into sharpest contrast when the girls hit the minefield of adolescence and wouldn’t even get out of the shower by themselves without first wrapping themselves in a Sheridan-tagged cocoon so as not to do anything as deeply embarrassing as glance at their awkward, rebellious bodies in a mirror.

Regardless, Rachel was Naked Mum when they were children, when they were teenagers, and she definitely saw no reason for that to change now they were adults. They were lucky she threw them the occasional concession of a flimsy nightgown when Dylan was visiting. Small mercies, thought Phinn.

She nudged her son sideways so she took up half of the mirror and reached for her toothbrush and toothpaste.

‘Ma!’

‘What?’

‘Privacy!’

Rachel rolled her eyes and raised the toothbrush to her mouth. ‘I wiped your arse for five years; you can shave the pathetic seven hairs on your face with me in the same room.’

Phinn gave a slight shake of his head and, after letting the creeping blush across his cheeks settle, returned the razor to his face.

Zoe checked her phone and allowed herself what she would now consider an uncharacteristic moment of exasperation. It took so many years to lose it, to soothe it, to pretend her incendiary temper was not lurking just below the surface, an impatient shark patrolling a small tank. Years of hard work quickly unravelling as she waited for her brother and her sisters to get in the goddamn fucking car. She leaned over, and in a movement that brought back an entire youth spent sitting behind cracked faux-leather dashboards waiting for her siblings, leaned heavily on the horn.

Somehow, over the blare, she could still hear her mother’s voice cut through the front door to her ‘… and tell that impatient sister of yours not to touch the goddamn horn, there’s no goddamn clock at the beach.’

Zoe paused and leaned on the horn again, ignoring the sudden twitch of the white lace curtains of the neighbours’ house. She had never learned their names.

She glanced back at the green front door with a small degree of satisfaction as Phinn sprinted out and leaped over the hedge, quickly making up the metres between the yard’s edge and the car. He wore bright green shorts patterned with peacock feathers, a blue shirt that looked two sizes too small and, Zoe realised with a mix of horror and bemusement, a red cap that said ‘Make Winston Great Again’.

‘You know people think they are so clever wearing the Trump parody hats, but all that anyone thinks when they look at you is, “Look, a dickhead Trump supporter”,’ Zoe said, adjusting her blue singlet to cover more of her chest from the sun.

‘Who said I was being ironic?’ Her panting brother grinned as he gave himself another once-over in the rear-view mirror. Then it was his turn to study the door. ‘Where are your dumb effing sisters?’

‘Mate, I’m the one sitting in the car on time,’ Zoe responded.

‘They were swapping shorts last time I saw them.’

Phinn kept staring at the door, willing his sisters to materialise, while Zoe fiddled with the wires in the car, trying to tune it to her phone so she could play her own music free of inevitable sibling interjection. While her focus was on choosing between the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and the Liars, Phinn looked back and asked as casually as he could, ‘Are you, uh, seeing anyone?’

Zoe slid her sunglasses from her head to her face and surveyed her brother. ‘Why would you ask that?’

‘I’m trying to be a good brother! Interested. In your life.’ He nonchalantly pointed towards her. ‘All of that.’

Zoe tapped her phone and Nick Zinner’s needling guitar line signalled the familiar opening bars of ‘Maps’. She cocked her head lightly and squinted as her sisters came barrelling down the front steps, Claudia shoving Poppy a little too hard out of the way.

‘Nothing I would tell you about,’ Zoe murmured, as the girls reached the car’s blazing hot door handles.

Claudia looked hopefully at the front seat where Zoe was perched and shook her head, as if to clear herself of the notion before clambering into the seat behind Phinn.

Poppy instead dawdled to a light jog, before taking exag­geratedly slow-motion steps around the boot to the other side of the vehicle and then finally wrenching open the door and settling down behind her older sister. It had the desired effect. Zoe turned in her seat and looked at Poppy sharply. ‘Are we running on Rachel time, or what?’

Phinn sighed and revved the car, reversing slowly onto the road. ‘Lovely day at the beach in T -minus forty-seven minutes,’ he mumbled.

Poppy, still weighing Zoe’s comment, instead looked out of the window.

Rachel loomed so large in their lives that everything was compared to her – a bad mood, an offhand remark, the way they wore their hair; when they were infuriating each other, when they were emotional, even what they chose to eat and how they drank water (three quarters filled, ice-cold). It was ‘just like Rachel’, they would tell each other in a tone of rote reprimand. They invoked her name on a daily basis, whether it was internally comparing each other to the omnipotent matriarch, or imagining her disapproval in the morning in their respective homes as they guiltily poured their third coffee.

Unable to stomach butter on your toast? Just like Rachel.

Find yourself so moved by the shuffle function on your iTunes that you start crying in the street for a song from thirteen years ago? Just like Rachel.

Late getting to the car to go to the beach? Rachel.

While the invocations of their largely un-silent but definitely long-suffering Madonna figure bore mocking tones, there was no denying she still made up the scaffolding they hung their days and their selves off.

The siblings rode for the first twenty minutes in silence, Claudia preoccupied with marriage, Phinn enjoying the serenity, Zoe trying to think of safe topics of conversation and Poppy thinking about what she looked like staring stonily out the window. Moody? Beyond reach? Melancholy? (She just looked like someone staring stonily out of the window.)

They could smell the salt in the air when the conversational ceasefire was enthusiastically broken by Poppy. ‘Hey Zoe,’ she thumped the back of the seat in front of her, ‘Mary said something funny this morning when we were leaving.’

‘Was it that she needed some wart of toad and hair of virgin for the next time she had her cauldron out? Was she thinking of buying a Dyson V6 because her arse is getting too big for her broomstick?’

The four of them allowed themselves a snigger before Poppy continued, ‘No, it was something about a postcard.’

Zoe raised her eyebrows as the corners of her mouth pulled up. ‘What did she say about postcards?’

Poppy looked searchingly at Claudia for backup. ‘She was talking to Mum and she said something about Zoe being good at writing nasty postcards.’

Zoe’s smile was wide and genuine. ‘Did she now?’

Poppy leaned in. ‘Yeah, she did, what was she talking about?’

‘Do you remember a few years ago when Mum was having a hard time at work? They kept cutting her hours?’

Her sisters nodded. Everyone remembered. Rachel had tried to start a union at the credit union where she worked as a cleaner, and her boss, a 52-year-old man in a white short-sleeved shirt and pocket pen protector in another town, responded by cutting her hours to the sixteen-hour weekly minimum. A useful lesson in socialism for some of them and the vital importance of personal finance for others. They all remembered a lot of soup and toast for dinner.

Well, Zoe told them, during that time, Rachel actually needed her sister a bit. Mary was living a couple of hours away, rent-free with some poor sucker in one of those hill village-towns full of exhausted middle-aged tree-changers, and Rachel kept calling her. But after the first conversation Mary just ignored the calls. A Rachel in need was a burden indeed, in her sister’s mind.

‘I was in the area, I forget why, it might have been for work, or I could have just been road-tripping. I don’t know why I was in that town; I don’t think I’ve been back since. Anyway, I knew where she was living; I think I had saved the address from when Mum had posted her some things she’d needed a few months before. I was walking past the poky little village news agency and saw postcards for the area. I don’t know why but I lost it, I was just so furious, so I bought a postcard and wrote one to Mary. It said something like, “You are a terrible human being, a bottomless emotional abyss with no empathy for the suffering of those closest to you and you need to apologise to my mother.”’

The car was silent, apart from Karen O’s constant yelp about good things happening in bad towns.

Poppy cackled. ‘You what?’

‘I wrote her a postcard telling her she was a terrible human being. I still don’t know why. She has never said anything to me about it. Does Mum know about it?’

It was Claudia’s turn to start snorting. ‘Oh, she knows about it. She didn’t tell me what happened but I remember her telling me you had done something she thought you shouldn’t have. Then … Then she told me a story.’

Claudia paused, long enough to make sure she had everyone’s attention, but short enough that their notoriously unreliable attention spans did not wander to a road sign bearing a decades-old double entendre or, even worse, their phones.

‘Do you remember that beautiful postcard Mum used to have on the fridge? That she bought in Beirut in the seventies?’

The siblings all remembered the gold-fringed relic from their childhoods. Something they had all gazed at either privately or in concert at least daily, enchanted by the gilded edges, the crystal blue Mediterranean taken from above, a beach club dotted with glamorous young Arabs and sweaty Eastern Euros lazing around in bikinis and dick stickers, glittering chains around their necks and Jackie Onassis-inspired sunglasses on the faces of the women, gold-rimmed Wayfarers on the men. Everyone looked so young and beautiful and impossibly far away.

They had not seen the postcard in years, but none of them could actually recall when it had gone missing. Like so much of their youths – primary school best friends, final-year exams, teenage despair – it had loomed monolithic in their lives until suddenly, inexplicably, it didn’t.

Now Claudia had the answer to a question they had never thought to ask.

Roadwork sites and their high-vis sunburnt caretakers whizzed past as she grinned and relayed the tale of her first heartbreak.

She had been nineteen. They all remembered him: a bit lovely, a bit dumb, a bit fundamental. His interests spanned cars, MDMA, never ever letting his feelings show, the gym, and occasionally Claudia. His sister had died in her early teens, which Claudia shamelessly found morbidly attractive. She married this fact with an emotional hinterland for the boy almost entirely confected by herself. In hindsight a lot of imagination hung on his square jaw, tight delts and sad eyes. But he had been her first boyfriend and she had quite an attachment to him. Zoe, Phinn and Poppy all remembered, though even now Claudia would not portray the relationship in such unflinching terms.

He seemed sweet, albeit temporary, until one day he did something both completely unexpected and terribly predictable, and slept with a woman who was not Claudia. She found out within three days on the trusted Winston bush telegraph, and retired to her bedroom for a week to cry, more out of sheer humiliation and bruised ego than actual heartbreak. One night, drunk on self-pity and one and a half bottles of wine, she confessed to Rachel the reasons for the relationship’s demise.

Rachel, who even at the best of times could be magnani­mously described as ‘smother superior’, was blind with fury. In Claudia’s retelling she looked wildly through the kitchen drawers, scrabbling through scissors, bobby pins and old vinyl-embossed refidexes. Finally, she turned to the fridge in exasperation and ripped down the azure and white postcard before fiercely hunkering down at the kitchen table to write. Claudia did not see exactly what was written but she had been able to deduce from text messages from the victim days later that it called him a piece of shit, said he was lucky Rachel did not tell the boy’s mother – ‘a beautiful member of her parish who was unworthy of such heartless offspring’ – and said she hoped his beloved bonsai plants died in a huge effing fire involving his car.

Zoe interrupted in disbelief: ‘So she actually sent it?’

Claudia giggled even more. ‘Of course she sent it! Can you believe it? That beautiful, intricate homage to 1970s Beirut – in its Paris of the Middle East phase – which she had saved for thirty years. And then just to finally send it, turning it into a psycho postcard.’

‘I can absolutely believe it,’ Phinn said dryly, shifting the gears down as they snaked through the impossibly wide back streets of the beach town to the ocean.

‘I wonder what it was like for him. This stunning relic arrives in the post – such a dreamy scene, exotic even – and then he turns it over to read it and it’s just pure savagery. A Trojan horse of an absolute bollocking.’

Zoe smiled at the idea of Claudia’s vain Adonis going down to another Grecian analogy. ‘I think the most savage part of it is that anyone in the house could have read it before he got to it; it was a postcard.’

The siblings burst into new peals of laughter, awed by the most diabolical aspect of their mother’s revenge. Phinn tried not to dwell on the fact that Poppy’s laugh was the first to cut out seconds later.

‘So psycho postcards is a family trait,’ he mused as he pulled into a takeaway-wrapper-strewn car park facing an unpatrolled section of mildly undulating surf. The three rusty four-wheel drives with shining roof racks suggested the placid water wasn’t providing much incentive for the locals, while a look towards the east revealed just four board riders perched on the water, pointedly looking away from the forty-something paddleboard rider flailing away nearby. Claudia and Zoe opened their doors in time with each other and breathed the air deeply. Poppy was slower, infuriatingly so. Somewhere well after Winston, and almost immediately following the communal joy of psychotic postcards, a heavy mood passed over her – almost as if the quickly changing atmospheric pressure of the sky over the suddenly open water had drawn a coastal cumulonimbus directly down to her.

Straight away her sisters knew they were not going to get more than two syllables from her at a time. As always, Phinn was happy to cheerfully ignore it, but the pall had fallen. The tension was obvious to all four, the chatter died down and the jokes became more forced.

On the beach, Poppy sat on a towel with her silver one- piece swimsuit pointedly beside her. She was not going to put it on.

Phinn sprinted towards the waves and dived under in a graceful arc. Suddenly he was behind the sets and swimming lazy lengths parallel to the beach.

Zoe pulled out her sunscreen and took off her shirt, offering her back to Claudia without bothering to look at her youngest sister. The two fell into an old game, tracing symbols on creamy backs in the hopes they might tan along the same lines. Zoe drew four roses on Claudia’s back, while in return she gave Zoe a planet, some stars, and even part of a moon.

‘Are you coming in?’ Zoe said to the space beside Poppy’s shoulder.

‘No,’ Poppy responded, lifting her sunglasses, Ray-Ban rip-offs, so she could squint at her phone properly.

‘The water looks like it’s the perfect temperature,’ Claudia ventured pathetically.

Poppy held her phone a bit closer to her face so her head shaded the screen from the sun’s glare. Zoe shrugged and took off her denim skirt, folding it neatly on top of her sandals to reveal a violently red bikini in a design that tied in a series of knots at her hips and neck. Claudia pulled off her old blue cotton dress and pushed her growing fringe out of her face, giving the effect of a tween boy’s body in a black one-piece. She linked one of her arms through Zoe’s and walked carefully towards the water’s edge, so they could complete the female Carter ritual of entering the water, inch by painful inch, step by tiny step, stopping and grimacing for each freezing wave, no matter how small, to break around their shins, then their thighs, then their stomachs. Finally, when it had reached their armpits, they would duck their heads under, muffling squeals with the foamy tide.

They trod water between sets looking at each other. Claudia glanced anxiously back at the shore.

‘Do you think she’s all right?’ she asked, searching for her sister’s horizontal figure on the sand, which she supposed was baking evenly in the sun.

‘Oh, she just wants to sit moodily on the beach where we can all see her so we know she’s staring moodily at the ocean,’ Zoe said, leaning back so she was half floating in the water.

‘Do you think I should marry Dylan?’

Zoe swung her legs through the water so she was upright, bobbing like a cork in an Esky of melted ice, and looked at her sister. Claudia was staring straight back at her, eyes glazed.

‘I don’t have any opinion on who you should marry, Clauds, unless he is hitting you or is a Tory,’ Zoe said gently. ‘What’s going on?’

‘Thinking about that break-up when I was younger and Mum’s postcard. That was a relationship that looking back was so obviously a disaster, so completely wrong, and I didn’t really see it at the time. What if that’s happening again?’

Zoe looked out at their brother, the clean strokes of his arm as he calmly freestyled past the impassive surfers towards a rocky outcrop, his head turning every two strokes for one breath.

‘I don’t think this relationship is the same as that, but I don’t know how normal it is to think you don’t want to get married a few days before your wedding. What do you think you would miss about him if you did break up?’

‘I loved your crooked sleep beside me and never dreamed afraid.’ Claudia ducked her head under a wave.

‘Huh?’ Zoe stared at Claudia as she surfaced, showing her teeth in a forced smile.

‘It’s a line from a poem about a break-up, called “One Last Poem for Richard”, I think. I often think about it when I think about Dylan. The poem talks about how they should have champagne for surviving their break-up, basically.’

‘It’s only me out here, kid, you don’t have to impress anyone with poetry, you can just tell me how you feel.’

‘I don’t know how I feel.’

Zoe paused to consider Claudia, her relationship, her options. She honestly had no opinion. Claudia attempted to interpret her older sister’s silence.

‘This is a first-world problem, isn’t it?’

Zoe shook her head. ‘That’s not useful. First-world problems are not enough money for all of the luxuries you covet, slow service at a restaurant, UberEATS not reaching your suburb. Relationships still matter; the people we love matter; our feelings matter. It’s true we have more time to think about these things, but do you think the most oppressed people sit around just focused on their oppression? Of course it dictates their lives, but they still have room to fret about the people they love: who’s not loving them back, who’s loving them the wrong way. This is not a time to check your privilege; you can always go and find someone who needs to check it more and less than you.’

Claudia took in Zoe’s words gratefully. ‘So what should I do?’

‘I don’t know, that’s up to—’

Zoe’s response was cut short as she was suddenly dragged under the water, disappearing with a series of bubbles marking where she had just been.

Claudia tried to scream but rasped instead as she looked around wildly for anyone else in the water. She was just two metres from where Zoe had last been, and instinctively she swam towards the spot before stopping and frantically looking back to the shore, then to her right to the surfers and up at an endless sky.

It seemed there was a wide silence, only punctuated by the slow and regular roll of the waves and the tight uneven spacing of her short, hurried breaths.

Her eyes were suddenly stinging as the sound of a huge break in the water shattered the terrible quiet. When she opened them up again, Zoe was spluttering beside her, joined half a second later by a burly figure laughing hysterically.

‘PHINNNNN,’ Zoe screamed in fury. She grabbed her brother ineffectively by the shoulders. His body kept rocking in the surf with laughter.

‘Got ya,’ he said, before turning and cutting through the water towards the shore.

Claudia looked at her sodden sister, still trying to push her wet mop of hair out of her eyes. ‘Sweet Jesus that scared the hell out of me.’

Zoe just turned wordlessly and calmly swam in the direction of her brother who was already on dry land, walking towards towels.

By the time Zoe and Claudia reached the towels, Poppy was already yelling.

‘Fuck you! What is your problem? Can’t you just leave me the fuck alone?’

Phinn bashfully tried to rub his hair dry. Zoe looked at her sister, now shirtless, the straps of her bra pulled down to avoid tan lines on her shoulders. Poppy had both of her fists clenched and was huffing in Phinn’s general direction. Still, it took a few seconds for Zoe to notice the spattering of salt water on Poppy’s face and hair.

She turned to her brother. ‘Did you shake your wet hair over Poppy while she was sunbaking?’

Phinn didn’t respond but his enraged sibling snapped back, ‘He’s such a fucking arsehole.’

‘Aw come on, Poppy, what’s really the matter? I know he’s annoying but you seem to be having a bad time anyway.’ Claudia attempted to sound reassuring. Poppy blinked as her face flushed an endearing pink.

‘I’m fine! I just don’t think we have to do everything together all of the time. I need some quiet from you guys sometimes; I don’t have to come into the water if I don’t want to.’

‘I know, I know, you just seem really cranky this morning.’ Claudia kept her tone neutral, like a zookeeper to a tiger who has had a fright.

Poppy seemed on the verge of tears. ‘I’m just not like you guys, I can’t be as happy.’

‘Oh Jesus, calm down.’ Zoe picked up her towel and wrapped it around her. ‘It’s just a bit of water.’

Poppy let out a scream and, grabbing her bag, stalked off towards a bush track. Claudia looked at Phinn and Zoe, but none of them tried to stop Poppy straight away as her figure shrunk towards the headland.

‘What is her problem?’ Claudia said, directing her question to nobody in particular.

‘She’s just a messy bitch who loves drama,’ Zoe said. She was already walking towards the car.

What it came down to was this: Poppy was offended by the overwhelming physicality of her siblings. In the real world you were not rough with other adults: you did not grab them, you did not drop your shoulder or elbow into them as you passed by, tickle them or, indeed, pinch them. All of this was supposed to be left in the primary school playground, but it took longer, so much longer, when it came to brothers and sisters. They were still considered young enough to be fair game for a sneakily outstretched ankle while walking around a coffee table, to be shouldered aside while trying to grab a sausage off a barbecue, to be suddenly hoisted, kicking and screaming, in a bruising bear hug from behind.

Don’t touch me. Get out of my space. It was hard to assert boundaries, to hold on to yourself when there was so much familiarity. And everyone else seemed to know what familiarity breeds.

The three watched Poppy’s retreating figure, her melo­dramatic stomping, the tension in her balled shoulders as she half ran away.

‘Pops! Wait,’ Claudia wailed.

She tried to catch up but Poppy raised one hand without turning around to reveal only her middle finger. Claudia reluctantly gave up, knowing better than to try to talk Poppy down from her almighty wrath at these moments. She turned back to the other two who were both casually rubbing themselves raw with their ratty towels.

Zoe leaned forward at the hips to towel her salt-frizzed hair and returned Claudia’s pleading gestures with rolled eyes.

‘Let Christian Bale over there walk it off. The performance must be tiring when so much has to be put into it.’

Phinn shook his head and set his mouth. Not just an ominous sign; the subdued jaw-grind was an unconscious familial call-back to a long-dead grandfather they had never known – a Carter tic that would need a member of the clan’s previous generation to verify it. Phinn would not be swayed to sympathy today: that was it, his sisters knew it. They slowly gathered their things and headed to the car, the playful air of the morning fully punctured and now deflating at the regular rate.

In the front seat Zoe checked her phone. ‘Well, we have to meet Mum for lunch in forty-five minutes so leave here in twenty. Surely the sulk and dash will be done by then?’

Phinn just sighed deeply, shut his eyes and leaned back in the driver’s seat, tapping the steering wheel. Claudia attempted to furtively type out a text in a painfully obvious way, an SOS screed to Dylan, no doubt. Zoe tried to tilt her head to see what was on Claudia’s screen, but she was thwarted by the glare so instead she opened her car door again.

‘I’m going to try to find her; she can’t be far.’

Zoe pulled her top over her head and slid her Birkenstocks back on. On her, the iconic sandals looked the way their namesake designer probably intended when he had created them in 1963 – like giant paddles signalling to onlookers that the wearer had given up on many things in life, but mainly style for comfort. They had seemed more attractive when she bought them, ironic in their ugliness.

She faced the road and looked right, searching down the visible kilometre-straight before the corner rose into coastal scrubland. Several neat brick bungalows lay towards the end of the bitumen, betraying how their owners had little of the laidback beach village attitude associated with such coastal communities in previous decades. To her left was more beach scrub canopy and, she knew, a beaten track that people used for walks to a couple of saltwater lakes, which teenagers used as cover for their pot smoking. Zoe headed to the small thirty-centimetre outline of sand and waffle-tread shoeprints set against the patchy green border.

Phinn opened his door, and for a moment Zoe thought he was going to join her for the grand retrieval mission. But instead he hung one leg over the door and manoeuvred his bulky frame into a more comfortable position to laze in the two p.m. glare.

Claudia stayed on her phone.

Zoe was now slipping on rocks not made for the thick soles of the German sandals, while tentatively calling Poppy’s name, in between cursing to herself in exasperation. Dried leaves and sticks crackled beneath her feet, and above her the gum leaves continued to wither and yellow in the dry heat. She watched as the light became more dappled and after 700 metres finally let out a scream.

‘Poppy!’

The only response was the high-pitched pipe of a stray plover.

Zoe looked at the sky, becoming more sparse through the dense canopy, and down at the moist dirt track. She bent down to examine the ground more closely, looking for recent signs of movement. Apart from her own sandal treads, which were already fading, there were no footprints she could decipher, nor freshly disturbed rocks. She found her focus fading into that all-too-familiar creeping sense of futility. On the other hand, she guessed that she had been gone for ten minutes, so it would mean she had also used up all the time they had left before having to leave to meet their mother.

She picked up her pace, fretting as she finally approached the car.

She thought about how supremely annoying her youngest sister was, while also reluctantly acknowledging how that surface emotion of irritation was grimly anchored by a pit of dread, quietly shared, that was dragging down all the siblings. Deep down she also worried about why Poppy was behaving like this; just how unhappy she could be; how Poppy felt about the form her life was failing to take, like shaping water with her hands; and finally how gruelling this was for Claudia.

When she got back to the car, Phinn was still there, mouth still set in a thin line, listening to New Order. The overall effect was a vaguely menacing counterpoint to Phinn’s usual breezy demeanour. Zoe peered into the back seat.

‘Where’s Claudia?’

‘She went looking the other way.’ As Phinn finished, Claudia came into view on the other side of the car, her face slightly sheened.

‘You didn’t find her?’ Claudia was slightly puffed.

‘No, have you tried calling her?’

Claudia shook her head and Zoe made an exasperated murmur as she pulled the phone from her pocket and scrolled through her Favourites. Despite keeping contact to the bare minimum, she kept her siblings at the top of the starred list in some gesture of loyalty she still did not quite understand.

The phone rang out as she climbed back in the front seat and Claudia took her position behind. Zoe looked over her shoulder. ‘I guess we should do a quick drive around to see if we can see her.’

Phinn grunted and slammed his door shut, taking his sweet time to put his seatbelt on before they were trundling down the road. Five minutes later they had completed two laps of the dormant township – both with no sign of their sister.

Zoe could see Claudia’s breathing become shallower as her chest tightened. Meanwhile she was trying to suppress the frantic edge to her voice as she raised her phone to her ear every forty seconds to listen to the ringing die out again.

‘What should we do?’

Phinn shrugged. ‘Fuck her. She’s probably got Mum to pick her up and is already at the café. Who cares?’

Claudia and Zoe cared, but they were trying hard not to. This, as always, was the problem.

The trio rode the twenty minutes in silence along the same ochre-bordered bitumen that had delivered them to the coast, but the hysterics they had shared on the eastern run now simply hung in the air as a stark juxtaposition. In unison, both sisters sighed as Phinn rolled to a stop across the road from the café and Zoe finally put her phone in her bag after her last attempted call.

Claudia paused at the bottom of the stairs and shielded her eyes from the sun as she gestured to the other two. ‘How much do you think it would piss Poppy off if we took a selfie here and put it on Phinn’s Snapchat story?’

Zoe snorted, while Phinn, refusing to surface from his mood, shook his head and kept walking up the stairs. ‘Sounds in­credibly productive.’

Inside, their mother was already at a table next to a window, her head held close to Mary’s as the two whispered to each other. Phinn quickly clocked the midway-level of the yellowing pinot gris in both women’s wine glasses, and was forced to pull his slumped shoulders up and make his choice: half full or half empty?

‘Yeah Mum, get on it!’ he boomed at Rachel, as his slightly stunned sisters took their seats opposite her.

They made no attempt to hide the absence of Rachel’s youngest daughter. That didn’t quell their vain hopes it would escape her notice, though.

‘Where’s Poppy?’

Rachel hadn’t even said hello. She addressed Phinn, suddenly deflated. He had never been able to lie and looked imploringly at Zoe.

‘She’s meeting us here; you haven’t seen her?’ Zoe replied.

Rachel’s eyes narrowed. ‘Why is she meeting us here?’

‘She wanted to go look for something.’ Zoe knew the best strategy for a moderately successful lie was vagueness: scant detail meant what had to be remembered and offered up to Rachel’s deductive powers was also minimal. The biggest trick was avoiding any specific destination, object or other person, which their mother could quickly check off through an algorithm of elimination honed from the four children’s marathon upbringing. ‘I thought maybe she would beat us here.’

‘Where did you drop her off?’

‘Well, it’s not so much that we dropped her off …’ Claudia tried to back her sister up. ‘It’s more that she dropped us.’

Mary drained her wine glass and waved her hand at a staff member for a refill. The young waiter looked up from the counter briefly and returned to wiping forks, beside the red-lettered sign urging patrons to ORDER AT THE COUNTER. Mary was too delighted to take much notice.

‘You don’t know where your sister is, do you?’

The three paused for a moment.

‘We know the vicinity …’

‘We know where we last saw her …’

Phinn stared at the glass stem reaching up at the transparent bowl above, distorting his view of Rachel’s index finger, impatiently tapping away. Glass fully empty. Fuck it.

‘She’s a bitch, anyway; we don’t need her for lunch.’

‘PHINN!’ Rachel and her daughters reprimanded him as a choir – the matriarch’s high-pitched outrage cutting above the emotional exhaustion of his sisters’ duller voices. Mary buzzed with satisfaction.

Eyebrows raised, Rachel reached for her bag and got out her phone. She half-stood up but then sat back down.

‘Just before we start lunch, Claudie, where are you staying tonight?’

‘I, um, I think we were going to go to Dad’s after the beach.’

Rachel sighed. ‘Typical. Rushing off to your father’s again.’

Zoe cut in. ‘We’ve been at your house the past few nights, Mum! We are having lunch with you right now.’

Rachel raised her hand as she stood up and put her phone to an ear. ‘I just feel like an afterthought. You’re fitting me in around your father.’

All three siblings lowered their heads. Despite the glaring evidence they had been spending time with their mother, she could still invoke guilt in them. They could clearly hear the dial tone on Rachel’s phone and the familiar voice after just two rings.

‘Poppy, sweetie.’ Their mother walked away.