ON SATURDAY AFTER prep. the powers-that-be at Oakholme College release us boarders from captivity and we’re free to hit the mean streets of Sydney in our civvies. All we have to do is sign out and be back by six.
Lou-Anne, Indu, Bindi and I pile into Bindi’s brother’s Alfa Romeo and hit the road.
Bindi’s at the wheel. She has her learner’s permit and her brother, James, is helping her notch up some hours. It’s not a relaxing experience for anyone concerned. Bindi’s not one of those calm drivers, and it doesn’t help that James shouts at her while pumping an imaginary brake with his Bruno Magli boot and occasionally grabbing the steering wheel. Lou-Anne, Indu and I sit stiffly in the back seat trying to avoid injury and nausea as the nipple-pink Alfa lurches and swerves, sometimes across more than one lane, around the eastern suburbs of Sydney.
‘Why do you keep accelerating to sixty and then braking back down to fifty?’ barks James, his forehead popping sweat. ‘Why not take your foot off the pedal when you hit fifty?’
‘I never go past fifty!’ Bindi shrieks in reply. ‘It just looks like I do because you’re seeing the speedo from an angle.’
James whips around to face us. ‘Did she go past sixty, girls?’
We all shrug. James rolls his eyes. ‘I’d like to get to Bondi Beach in one piece.’ He turns to face the front again. ‘Bindi! You just ran a stop sign!’
‘I did not!’
‘There was a stop sign back there. There’s been a stop sign there for the last ten years.’
‘Well, they must have moved it,’ hisses Bindi.
James pumps the imaginary brake again and sulks. ‘Yeah, they must have moved it,’ he mutters sarcastically.
James and Bindi are the eldest and the youngest of four Coroneos children. James’s a lawyer, and the middle siblings, Anastasia and Nick, are law students. Somehow Bindi’s dad, who works on a strawberry farm in southwestern Sydney, has managed to pay for their education. Bindi’s mum died of pancreatic cancer a few years ago and her father shacked up with a ‘skippy’ woman Bindi refers to as The Skank. That’s why Bindi’s at boarding school. She can’t stand to be under the same roof as The Skank. During school holidays she gets passed between her brothers and sisters. Apparently it’s very normal in Greek families for children to completely reject a step-parent like that. My uncle Mick, Andrew’s father, is Greek, so I understand a bit about their culture.
I don’t think I’ve ever met siblings as close-knit as the Coroneoses. Bindi talks to all of them every day (frustrating for those behind her in the boarding house phone queue) and even though about half their conversations are fights, they absolutely have each other’s backs. I suppose one disadvantage of being so close to your family is that sometimes it stops you from needing close friends. With Bindi, I always feel that there’s a barrier between us that has less to do with skin colour and more to do with a lack of interest on her part. She prefers, and is more loyal towards, her family, and that’s that. But she’s still great fun to be around, and no fool either.
We make it to Bondi a little worse for wear. Because there’s never any free parking at the beach, we leave the car in the driveway of a colleague of James’s. Bindi takes out said colleague’s letterbox on the way in, though it’s as much James’s fault because he grabs the wheel while she’s turning.
‘That’s the most appalling driving I’ve ever seen!’ roars James while examining the scratch on the bonnet mournfully.
Bindi, Lou-Anne, Indu and I grab our satchels and hightail it down to the beach.
‘You’d better be back here by five,’ James yells after us, ‘or I’m leaving without you!’
James would never do that.
‘And you’d better not be meeting any boys here, or I’ll call all your parents!’
He’d never do that either.
‘God, how does he know?’ I whisper to Bindi.
‘He has two sisters and two daughters,’ she explains. ‘He knows everything. He won’t call your parents, Shauna. Don’t worry.’
The fact is, this whole girls’ day out at the beach is just a big cover for my date with Nathan O’Brien. When I plucked up the courage to call him back earlier in the week, he told me he was coming to Sydney to visit his cousin, who lives in Surry Hills, and suggested that we ‘hook up’.
It was very weird speaking to him after all that time. He sounded different on the phone, older but less confident. Maybe it was nerves. I was really jumpy, too. My words spilled out fast and loud. I blathered about the HSC, about Paris next year. I didn’t know what else to talk about. All the topics I could think of seemed either too big or too small, considering what we’d already done.
‘And what about you?’ I asked finally, almost panting, having spent myself on my own soliloquy.
‘Next year?’ he said in his quiet, soft-edged drawl. ‘Next year I’m coming to the city.’
‘This city? Sydney, you mean?’
‘Yeah. I’m going to study agriculture at Sydney Uni. I’m going to flat with some mates from school.’
‘I thought you hated Sydney?’
‘I do, but you’ve got to get an education somewhere.’
‘And you’re going to go back to your parents’ farm after that?’
‘Well, maybe . . . see, Shauna, I want to work in agriculture, but I don’t want to work on a farm all my life. I see the way my parents work, and it’s not what I want.’
Even though I was so jittery that the receiver was slipping in the sweat from my palm, it was nice to hear a slow country voice. Try as I might, though, I couldn’t moderate my own voice. Afterwards, I thought I’d sounded clipped and snotty. Obviously Nathan didn’t mind too much because he made a date to meet me at the beach. Little does he know that all three of my dorm buddies are coming with me for moral support. I don’t know that I would have had the stones to show up by myself. I mean, Nathan’s a Wrangler-wearing country boy, maybe not of Keli Street-Hughes’s calibre, but he’s reasonably well-off. His type and my type don’t mix. Not often, anyway.
Whenever I think about the last time I saw him, in his swag, my cheeks get hot. I can’t picture him exactly, but I do remember his light blue eyes and the way his eyelashes and eyebrows matched the sand blondeness of his untidy hair. I remember how big his shoulders seemed when his shirt came off, compared with his waist.
It’s a beautiful afternoon, maybe one of the last hot afternoons before the weather turns, and the crescent-shaped shoreline is sparkling. Every tourist and their dog are out today, but the girls and I find a patch of hot white sand to lay our beach towels on. As usual, we all spend a moment taking stock of the thin, blonde, bikini-clad women around us before stripping down to our bathers. Of the four of us, Bindi is the only one who can get away with a bikini, mostly because what’s up top comprehensively distracts the eye from any imperfections below. She’s blessed and she knows it.
‘How do they do it?’ Lou-Anne demands of no one in particular as a pair of two blonde beach babes saunter past without an ounce of fat to jiggle. ‘I could starve myself for weeks and still not look like that.’
‘Don’t worry,’ says Indu. ‘Black don’t crack. In another twenty years we’ll still look like we do now and they’ll be walking melanomas.’
We all laugh, but we’re a bit envious, too. Feminine beauty in the eastern suburbs of Sydney has startlingly narrow parameters, and all of us, except maybe Bindi, fall well outside them. It seems like every girl who has managed to squeeze herself into conformity is on this very beach right now. After a few minutes of checking out the overwhelming competition, Indu decides it’s snack time and goes off in search of the waffle stand we saw on the beach a couple of weeks ago. Lou-Anne and I decide to brave the cool, busy waves. Bindi stays on the beach to police our satchels.
Both Lou-Anne and I are strong swimmers. We go out deep and float in the swell, with just our heads bobbing between the waterline and the sunshine.
‘I don’t even like the beach that much,’ says Lou-Anne.
‘Neither do I. Too much sand.’
‘I just like the sea.’
‘Me too.’
Lou-Anne brings her knees to the surface and then stretches out, floating on her back, her full, brown limbs slick with seawater, glinting in the sun like sealskin. She’s the kind of person you have to look at from different angles and in different moods to appreciate. When she’s uptight or defensive she could be mistaken for a Kings Cross bouncer, but when she’s relaxed and unselfconscious she looks like an island princess.
We float on our backs for a while and then swim all the way out to the shark net, where there aren’t many people. It’s not rough, but there’s still a swell, and by the time we swim the length of the net and then back into the breakers, we’re both breathing hard.
‘Oh my God,’ puffs Lou-Anne.
‘I know. I’m really unfit, too.’
‘No, I mean, oh my God, there’s your boyfriend, next to Indu!’
I look up to the shoreline, and oh my God, there he is. Standing next to Indu in his khaki shorts, a button-down shirt and boat shoes, looking white-legged and aggy and shy. Farmer’s day at the beach. It’s kind of cute.
I texted Nathan on Bindi’s phone in the car on the way, suggesting we meet at the Bondi Pavilion, but if there was a reply I didn’t see it. Now here he is, in the flesh, and so am I.
It’s not easy to emerge from Australian breakers with grace, and I am living proof of this. I rise from the shallows like some sea monster, my coral one-piece askew, my long, black hair twisted and bunched with sand and seaweed.
‘Hi, Nathan!’
‘Shauna.’
It turns out that Nathan, having arrived early, decided to buy a waffle and met Indu in the queue at the waffle stand. They got talking – one of Indu’s many talents is striking up conversations with strangers – and they worked out they were both here to hang out with the same girl. Me.
He tells me all this, oozing politeness and kindness, as we walk together to the pavilion steps where we sit side-by-side at a respectable distance.
It’s weird. The last time I saw Nathan I wasn’t wearing any pants. Now I’m the picture of beachside modesty, with a towel pulled up to my armpits. Nathan looks into the surf and bites into his waffle.
‘I forgot what the beach smelled like,’ I tell him, sniffing the salt on my own shoulders. ‘I haven’t been here for ages.’
‘Why did you want to meet here?’ he asks.
I shrug. ‘I haven’t been here for ages.’
He laughs and offers me some of his waffle. I lean over and take a bite. My wet shoulder leaves a print on his t-shirt.
‘It’s good.’
‘So why did you bring your friends?’ he asks. ‘Safety in numbers?’
‘Well, I don’t have a car. My friend drove us.’
‘I could have picked you up from school.’
I shrug, smiling stupidly.
We both look out over the water. I don’t know what to say to him, and he probably doesn’t know what to say to me either. If only we’d gotten to know each other before sleeping together, things would be flowing a lot more smoothly, I’m sure of it. Where do you go from sex on the first night? Anything you say after that will probably just sound like phony small talk. I’m beginning to think that, in spite of all the hype, sex is the easy part. I think about the sex and its aftermath – the morning-after pill and twenty-four hours of gut-wrenching nausea. It wasn’t very romantic.
‘So Paris next year, Shauna? And studying journalism?’
‘Maybe. Hopefully.’ I wipe the chocolate sauce from the corners of my mouth self-consciously. ‘And agriculture for you?’
‘Doesn’t sound very glamorous in comparison, does it?’
‘I love animals,’ I blurt.
‘You should really come to the Easter Show and meet my cows.’
This conversation could be among the World’s Most Boring. I realise that I’m at least half responsible for its shortcomings.
‘Do you want to go for a swim?’ I suggest limply.
‘I think I’ll let the waffle settle.’ He turns his head and looks at me. I glance at him, catch his eye briefly, and then look back out to sea. ‘Listen . . .’ he begins apprehensively.
‘Sorry about my friends, but I—’
‘Your friends are fine. I just wanted to apologise for that night.’
‘Oh, don’t worry about—’
‘No, listen. I had a great time with you, but you should know that it was my—’
‘Look, you don’t need to—’
‘First time, Shauna. It was my first time. So I hope I didn’t disappoint you.’
‘You didn’t,’ I lie. Amazing! I was so afraid that I had disappointed him.
‘So maybe I’ll get another chance sometime,’ he says, blushing. ‘I wanted to talk to you but you did the dawn dash on me.’
He smiles at me, his eyes light and creased at the edges with fun. I grin and cringe.
‘I had to go and find my cousin Andrew. I was under strict instructions to stay by his side the whole night.’
‘I guess you broke that rule.’
‘On the whole I break a lot of rules,’ I say sassily. I realise that there’s still chemistry between us, that I want to flirt with him.
‘Is that right?’ he says with a grin, leaning against my arm. I lean into him. ‘You go to a pretty fancy school for someone who breaks a lot of rules.’
‘Like you didn’t go to a private school, Nathan.’
‘Whoa, I never said that. But what makes you think so?’
‘You’re polite. You look kind of . . . I don’t know . . .’ I want to say sure of yourself, but he speaks for himself.
‘I went to an Anglican boys’ school in Tamworth. Not some posh harbourside hotel like Oakholme College. I’m middle class.’
‘And you think I’m not?’
‘I think you’re pretty posh. Going to Paris next year and all.’
‘Guess what my dad does for a living?’ I challenge him. ‘I’ll give you a hundred bucks if you guess right.’ I don’t have a hundred bucks, but that’s okay. He’ll never guess.
‘I dunno,’ he says. ‘Doctor? Lawyer? Banker?’
‘Truckie.’
‘So he owns a trucking company.’
‘No, he drives a truck that someone else owns.’
‘So how does he—’
‘Pay for Oakholme College? He doesn’t. I’m on a scholarship.’
‘So who’s paying for you to go to Paris?’
‘That’s a good question. Haven’t figured it out yet. Maybe I’ll get a job at the Barraba servo for a month. They’re always looking for staff.’
We’re both starting to relax now. I tell him about the challenges of getting to Paris on a shoestring. Then Nathan suggests we take a stroll on the boardwalk.
‘Your friends have been staring at us this whole time,’ he remarks with a chuckle. ‘I can’t take it anymore.’
Nathan clasps my hand as we walk.
‘So your friend, the one I met at the waffle stand,’ he says, ‘she’s Indian or Sri Lankan or something?’
‘Her parents are Indian. They live in India but they want her to go to an Australian school.’
‘And your parents?’
I wondered when we’d get to this. Nathan’s from Kootingal, not far from Tamworth, where a lot of the blacks look more or less like me. Tall and lanky, but plump and luscious in the face. Now that he knows I’m not rich, he suspects that I’m Aboriginal, which was probably his initial impression, but now he’s too afraid to ask. Maybe he’s hoping that I’m half Sri Lankan. Boong girls and aggy boys don’t go around together in Tamworth. Too late in our case, though.
I feel sudden terror at answering the question, truthfully or not.
‘My parents met at a bar in Cairns. Mum was working behind the bar. Dad was a drummer in a band that was touring Queensland. Dad’s people are from Barraba so when Mum got pregnant with my brother, they moved there so my grandmother could help with the baby. Dad gave up the drums and started driving trucks so they’d have a steady income. They were both really young.’
‘Is the guy you were with at the music festival your brother?’
‘No, that was my cousin, like I said.’
I still haven’t answered his question, and now I kind of have an aversion to doing so. Why is it always a confession and never a claim to glory?
‘You didn’t have to get in touch if you didn’t want to,’ I tell him indignantly. ‘I never expected you to.’
Nathan seems taken aback, but his tone remains polite. He’s like my father in that way.
‘Is that the kind of guy you think I am?’
‘I don’t know you very well.’
‘That could change.’ He squeezes my hand.
I don’t say anything and he lets go of my hand. We keep walking. I feel hot in the face. Embarrassed when I know I shouldn’t be.
‘Did I say the wrong thing, Shauna?’
‘Well, why don’t you just come out and ask?’
‘Ask what?’
‘Whether I’m a coon. I suppose you already know the answer?’ I’m suddenly fired up. ‘Most racists do.’ I regret the words even as they’re coming out of my mouth.
Nathan stops in his tracks and turns to face me. He’s angry. I can see his chest rising under his t-shirt. His cheeks go pink, but he doesn’t raise his voice.
‘I knew you were Aboriginal before I even asked you to dance on New Year’s Eve. And I would never use that word. I can’t believe you did.’
‘I’m sorry.’ He’s shamed me! I’ve let him shame me! Now I’m breathing hard, too.
‘I asked you to dance because I thought you were tall and pretty, and I like tall, pretty girls. When I kissed you, I could hardly believe someone as brainy and funny as you would kiss me back. And that’s why I took you to bed, even though I didn’t know what I was doing.’
I’m staggered by his words. I’m shocked that he likes me. Or liked – past tense, maybe. He turns around suddenly and starts walking back to where we came from. I follow him, beach towel billowing behind.
‘I’m sorry, Nathan!’ There I go apologising again. ‘I thought you were asking about my parents because you wanted to know whether I was Aboriginal.’
‘I just wanted to know about you in general. I’m not a racist and I don’t like being called one. What are you going to do next? Get your big brother to bash me up?’
I stop suddenly on the boardwalk. ‘My brother’s dead.’
Nathan stops and swivels around. ‘I’m sorry, Shauna.’
‘Well, don’t be.’
He stares at me for a few seconds, takes me in. Then his face softens. He gulps and then smiles.
‘Why don’t we start again?’
‘Okay.’
‘Come and see me at the Easter Show. Come to the cattle pavilion and meet my cows.’
That’s quite an invitation. ‘Can I bring my friends?’
‘I’m sure they’ll follow you even if you don’t plan to bring them.’
He’s probably right.
‘I’ll try,’ I say.
He kisses me on the cheek.
‘I have to go and meet my cousin on the other side of town now,’ he says, looking at his watch.
I’m sure it’s an excuse, but I don’t blame him. Why did I let myself get so upset? He obviously likes me. Like, a lot. Why did I make it so hard for him?
By the time I make it back to my friends near the flags, Bindi’s sunburnt and Lou-Anne’s bathers are full of sand. No one’s in a good mood.
‘We ate your waffle,’ says Indu sulkily.
‘How long was I gone? It felt like five minutes.’
‘It was an hour and a half!’ they shout in unison.