I didn’t really run anymore, but after meeting Ben on the beach I made an exception. I ran flat out to Loretta’s grandmother’s house on the far side of Clunes. Loretta was sniffling near the front window and came barrelling out when she saw me.
‘Handsome Ben likes me!’ I yelled at her.
‘Ohmigod!’ she yelled back.
We bounced up and down and then she started crying again. ‘I’m so happy for you!’ she sobbed. ‘I love you so much I’m not even jealous that you got Handsome Ben!’ She tilted her head. ‘Okay, I’m not that jealous that you got Handsome Ben.’
‘Rets?’
‘You owe me a hundred bucks. Told you he liked you.’
‘Rets!’
‘Yeah?’
‘You know why Gordon won’t let us look at his sketchbooks?’
‘Why?’
‘Because mostly they’re drawings of you, Rets! Gordon draws you. Over and over again.’
***
Loretta came back to my place so we could talk about exactly what Ben had said and how he’d said it and whether Gordon really liked her.
Biddy came into the living room where Loretta was trying to get a jammed DVD out of the player. Her eyes filled with tears and without a word I reached out to her. She didn’t hesitate. She held me tightly.
‘I’m really sorry,’ I said.
Martin popped up behind her, a cup of tea in his hand.
‘What are you doing here?’ I asked.
‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Just dropped in to see how you’ve been travelling. That’s all.’
‘I’ve never really thanked you,’ I said. ‘I’ve been thinking a lot about everything and . . . you helped us. So much. Thank you.’
Martin sort of shrugged and nodded and scooted back into the kitchen.
Biddy grabbed my hand. ‘I was making the fabric into a tail,’ she said. ‘Loretta mentioned it to me the other day, when we were looking at knitting patterns. Loretta said that your mum was going to make one for you. And I found the fabric in the spare room and thought I’d finish it off, you know?’ She pressed the material into my hands. It was cut into the shape of a tail with plastic jewels and sequins sewn on. It was beautiful.
‘This must’ve taken you forever.’
‘Mau Fischer helped me,’ she said. ‘I had to go to her shop to buy sequins and she helped me sew them all on. Martin did too, when he had down time at the station. I wouldn’t actually go in the water in it, though.’
I closed my eyes. ‘Thank you.’
And Loretta burst into tears, yet again. ‘It’s just so beautiful.’
Later, Loretta and I went to bed, where we continued to talk over each other about Gordon and Ben. Loretta continued to sob on and off between hiccuping about how great it was. I spread the mermaid’s tail over the top of my quilt and kept a hand touching it, even though it was freezing.
It was so cold that Loretta made me get up twice to pass her more socks. She always got cold feet.
‘I knew it,’ she said, over and over, sniffling and grinning at the same time. ‘I knew he liked you!’
‘You think everyone likes me.’
‘Do not! Amber doesn’t like you.’
‘Thanks for reminding me.’
‘Gwen?’
‘Hmm?’
‘I’m still cold.’
‘Get up and do some jumping jacks, then.’
‘Seriously. It’s so cold.’
‘Just think warm thoughts. I need to sleep.’
Loretta clung onto my back like a possum. I shrugged her off. ‘Get away! You know I can’t sleep if you limpet me!’
‘Alright, alright. I’m just cold!’
It was impossible to relax with Loretta tossing and turning and fidgeting next to me.
‘Ugh!’ I said, throwing off the blanket after a few minutes. ‘Fine! I’ll get you a hot water bottle!’
‘I love you.’
I pulled on my jumper over my pyjamas and my mermaid’s tail over my shoulders, like a shawl. I slouched down into the kitchen. Biddy was obsessed with hot water bottles – the cupboard under the sink was full of them. It was raining outside, a gentle drizzle.
I turned on the kettle and leaned up against the kitchen counter, watching the rain fall. I squinted. It didn’t look like rain, though. It looked like . . .
I raced back to my bedroom and jumped on Loretta. ‘Snow! There’s snow! Get up! There’s snow!’
Loretta was out the door before I’d finished speaking. I ran into Evie’s room and shook her awake. ‘Evie! There’s snow!’
Evie woke up straight away and we raced outside and onto the beach. I’d never been so cold or so amazed. Standing on the beach with the rough, black sea and snow falling, landing on us, the sand and the water.
‘Your mum was right!’ Loretta was crying. ‘Your mum was right!’
I messaged Ben and let him know and then I ran back inside and woke up Tyrone and Dad and Biddy. I ran to Gordon’s and banged on his window until he got out of bed. And we went outside onto the freezing, wild beach and watched the snow falling. We laughed a lot, and ran around.
‘Whoa! How’s this, Pearlie?’ Dad said.
I frowned at him. ‘You called me Pearlie. You never call me Pearlie.’
He smiled wryly. ‘I wanted Gwen, Lucy wanted Pearl. We flipped a coin on it and she lost, but your mother was a stubborn woman.’
‘I always wondered about that, you know, why she called me Pearlie when she’d named me Gwen.’
‘I’ve wondered that too,’ Loretta said, sitting down on the sand next to Evie and spreading out her arms and legs, making the shape of snowy sand angels.
‘Well, now you know. She didn’t name you, Gwen; I did.’
I took a moment to soak this in. It was so childish, almost cruel to call me something other than my name. I’d been puzzled through the early years of school, wondering who I was. Always feeling so torn. Torn ragged and into little pieces.
My dad had always made me feel loved and done his best to make me feel safe.
‘Thank you,’ I whispered in his ear. Because I realised I wasn’t Pearl. I wasn’t the luminous child, full of potential, whom my mum had wanted me to be. I was Gwen. Plain Gwen. I had always been Gwen and I had my father to thank for it.
I pulled out my phone and called the police station.
‘What’s wrong?’ Dad asked sharply, seeing the number on the screen.
‘Nothing,’ I said, ‘I just don’t want Martin to miss out.’
Later, when Ben arrived, he spun me around and I could feel snowflakes landing on my face. When nobody else was looking, he quickly kissed me and he tasted of snow and the wild beach.
***
The next morning, Dad, Loretta and I sat in the kitchen, around the large scrubbed wooden table that smelled like sea, salt and coffee. The mermaid’s tail was in my lap. Outside, it was still snowing, on and off. Loretta jiggled next to me. She was so overexcited by the snow after seventeen years of waiting that I doubted she’d ever calm down.
I drank water and my dad drank some of Biddy’s chamomile tea. Evie didn’t have a drink because Bubs turned up and they went out and played on the beach and I knew from the shiver up my spine that they were going to Wade’s Point. But I trusted Evie. She’d spent her whole life watching the ocean. She knew its moods better than any of us, even though she was young.
I used to ask Mum what she did for a job. And she would say I look after you and Jamie, silly.
And I would ask her what she did before us.
And the story would always change. Sometimes she would say she was a clothes maker, a jeweller. She was a circus performer a dancer, a horse trainer, a dog rescuer. She was a marine biologist, a fashion designer, a writer, an artist, a singer. And I had been dazzled. I had felt so sorry for Dad, who had only ever been an IT technician.
Today, I sat down next to Dad and we stared out towards the beach. Our breathing matched up to the crash of the surf and I wondered if Dad had noticed.
‘What did Mum do for a job?’ I asked and felt Loretta tense up a little next to me.
Dad looked startled and then he frowned. ‘Oh, baby. Your mum was never well enough to have a job.’
‘What do you mean?’ Loretta asked, squeezing my hand under the table.
‘When we met, she was always jumping from one course to another, but I knew what she’d been through. I always just figured it would pass. I thought she was just taking a while to work out what she wanted to do because of all that. But she never settled to anything. She couldn’t.’
‘Oh.’ I swallowed.
‘Why do you ask?’
‘No reason.’ I kicked at the leg of my stool. I wasn’t sure how I felt. Sad, I guessed. A little bit angry, maybe.
‘It must’ve been hard for you,’ Loretta said to my dad. And I realised I’d never really thought about that.
Dad just shrugged. He almost looked shy. ‘I loved her, Rets,’ he said. ‘I just loved her.’
***
Later, we walked. My dad, Loretta and I. We walked along the beach and I told him the mermaid stories Mum had always told me. Had told Jamie.
And Dad started talking about Jamie. And suddenly I could picture him. His face, his hands, the way he hated cantaloupe. His sweet little-boy smell. The way he wouldn’t shower when it rained outside. How he sometimes threw his violin in a temper and then picked it up and crooned to it like something that was living and very much loved. All this time, I’d tried to remember him on my own. All this time, I’d needed Dad to help me.
We walked all the way to the cove and Dad kept walking, slowly and steadily, along the track that I had thought was my secret; that I had thought belonged to Loretta and me.
I jogged to keep up. ‘You know how to get into the cove?’
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Your mum showed me. Years and years ago, now. Not very long after we met. She only ever took me there once.’
We stood in the cove, staring up at the cliffs and out at the water. The waves hit the cliffs so heavily that the whole cove seemed to shake. The water of the cove was calm, though.
Dad picked up a shell and handed it to me. ‘For Elsa’s work.’
‘Thanks.’ I fiddled with it. ‘Do you think Mum would’ve been different? If she’d grown up away from all this?’ I asked gently.
‘I don’t know that she would’ve, Gwen. She just was who she was.’ Dad sighed and half smiled at Loretta. ‘Let’s get out of here. It’s getting late.’
On the way home, I told him about the CDs that Tyrone had bought me over the years and he looked shocked. ‘Really?’
‘I know,’ Loretta said. ‘Who’d have thought he’d do something sweet like that?’
And when we got home, Ben was there, waiting on the doorstep. He smiled when he saw me and everything inside me turned to jelly.
We all went into the house and I played a few of the violin CDs. The soaring cry of the bow against strings. The impossible complexity of the sounds, the beauty of them. How Jamie would have played, if he’d lived.
And, sitting together, my dad felt like he still belonged to me. That he was still my father, even though he was now Biddy’s husband and Evie’s dad and Tyrone’s stepdad and Jamie’s dad and Lucy’s widower. He was still mine.
I sat there, between my father, who was still mine, and my best friend, who had always been mine, and the boy I liked who, miraculously, seemed to also like me. Maybe, we could be each other’s. And I thought, I could do anything. I could leave the beach. I could go with Loretta to the mainland. I could learn to paint. Be a teacher, a marine biologist, a lawyer. I could do whatever I wanted, even though Mum wasn’t here to tell me what that was.
It grew dark, but still we listened. Not talking, being so quiet. Loretta’s fingers linked with mine. Just the four of us, in the kitchen. And the sound of the violin, cast up against the roar of the tide, coming in from the icy, snowy sea. The sound of the violin and us.