Kiki kills the engine and the headlights. The motor ticks.

Bess sits up, cups her hands to the window and looks into the dark. ‘Mum,’ she says rubbing her eyes ‘are we anywhere?’

‘We’re here. In the morning this place will blow your mind.’

‘Kaboom,’ says Bess, as she collects a Stinky Inky from the foot-well.

Kiki hunches her shoulders up and down and shifts her head left and right. Five hours. No stops. She is tired from the drone of the road, from keeping her eyes open, from the night shadows, from the heaviness.

Dark shapeless dunes drift towards the ocean. Kiki shivers.

‘Bed time, sweetheart,’ she says and opens her door.

The breeze is warm and salty. The ocean booms on the other side of the dunes somewhere.

In the back of the van, Kiki lowers the table into a bed while Bess rummages for the sheets.

Bess falls straight to sleep; her breathing is sweet, damp and even. Kiki’s girl.

Kiki stares at the ceiling, listening to the blackness. The waves don’t soothe her. She wants to roll over but there’s no room. Instead, she scrunches her toes. Clench, relax, clench, relax.  The sheet is scratchy and her hips are wedged between the cushions that make up the mattress. She tries to relax her face but her jaw is wired and her cheeks ache. They’ve hurt for days. Since he called.

Since he said he wasn’t coming back.

He’d driven north, called from a booth to say he preferred working on a lugger to working for the council.

‘You knew I never was the tying down type, Kiks,’ he’d said. ‘I reckon I did well to last eleven years.’ The last of his change had clunked into the phone. ‘I’ll be in touch when I have some digs. We can work something out then. Bessie can come up for a bit. School holidays, maybe. And we—’. The engaged signal had finished his sentence.

Now she pictures him, barefoot, looking out to sea, sizing up the wind and the fishing.

It rages in her.

Bess sighs and drifts deeper. She strokes Bess’ hair. So fine. Her father’s hair.

Eventually, Kiki gives in to exhaustion.

She wakes with a numb arm. Bess is in the front seat reading Matilda with her t-shirt stretched over her knees.

‘Morning, love,’ says Kiki, unfolding and feeling rough.

‘Fi-na-lly!’ Bess dives back under the sheets.

The morning is dull through the small window. They lie for a moment listening to the ocean. A plover’s cry fades into the muted boom of the breaking waves. Tell her now.

But then Bess is kicking off the sheets and announcing she’s bursting for the sea.

‘Before breakfast?’ asks Kiki.

‘Definitely.’

Kiki packs white bread, plastic cheese and two apple fruit boxes into a sling bag.

At one end of the car park is a panel van topped with boards and surrounded by empty beer bottles: an offering to the surfing gods. That was her once. And him.

At the other end of the car park is a besser brick toilet block.

Bess barefoots it over the gravel, picking her way to the soft sand. Then she’s away. As she tops the sand hill she looks around. ‘It’s wild, Mum,’ she shouts over her shoulder and takes off again towards the horizon. Kiki stops at the top of the dune and watches.

Bess stops dead at the ocean’s edge. The surf crashes in rough and grey. She lets the spent waves wash over her feet. It’s how she is with the world. Then she turns and runs. She pounds along the edge of the water, hedging, skirting, zigging, zagging. She ducks under fishing a line. The frothing water chases her feet. Kiki loves to watch Bess run. Boundless.

Kiki’s hair whips at her face. An offshore wind. Her body holds a memory of the surf here. She remembers the drop in, the flow of water beneath her feet, the perfection of the liquid and how the rush and calm came together and she was nothing and everything for a few seconds.

She looks away. That was before.

She exchanges a half greeting with a fishermen at the water’s edge. He stands behind his rod with his arms crossed. The fishing line quivers in the wind.

‘Not much biting today,’ the man offers as she ducks under the line.

‘Always tomorrow.’ She peers into his catch bucket. Three small mulloway. She would have thrown them back. She wants to kick over the bucket. Tell him he shouldn’t waste a life staring out at an ocean, watching waves turning stone into sand.

She walks on, trying to haul her mood back in with each step. For Bess. Always for Bess.

Bess is waiting at the rocks.

‘I’m starving,’ she declares.

‘I’m not surprised. You run like the wind.’

They scramble over the granite, find a spot and devour everything. Then they rock hop for a bit and squeeze strange little anemones in a rock pool until they squirt water into the air. Bess giggles. Kiki would have driven another thousand miles to hear that laugh.
As they turn to walk back, Bess slips her hand into Kiki’s pocket.

Perhaps now.

But Bess is smiling. And as Kiki tries to form the words Bess darts off to peer into the lone fisherman’s blue bucket.

‘What’s biting?’ Bess asks him. She sounds like her father.

Crouching at the water’s edge, Kiki drives her fingers into the hard sand. As she pulls them out, the water slurries into the five holes as though she was never there.

She twists her silver wedding band as Bess bounces back to her side.

No. Not now. Out here there is nowhere to shelter.

*

They drive into Margaret River for lunch. Sausage rolls and milkshakes. Then they spend the afternoon at the Aquatic Centre. Kiki sips a Coke until she feels sick with sugar while Bess zooms down the slide with her new best friends.

They shower there, long and hot. Better than the Dune Beach toilet block.

That evening, with their skin tight from wind and water, they build a driftwood fire. They wrap potatoes twice in foil and bury them in the coals. After an hour they roll the parcels out of the fire with long sticks. Inside, the potatoes are black and hard.

Bess says never mind and it doesn’t matter, but it does.  Kiki toasts the last of the white bread under the campervan grill, lathers it with butter and brings it out for them to eat by the fire.

‘Yummo, Mum,’ declares Bess.

‘Cheers.’ Kiki holds up her toast.

‘Cheers,’ Bess retorts, taking a big bite.

Kiki pushes her bread into the fire while Bess bounds off to build an empire from flotsam: old tins, faded drinking bottles, chewed-up thongs and cuttlefish bones.

‘Mum!’ exclaims Bess, suddenly at her side. ‘Did you know that the Mona Lisa has no eyebrows?’ 

Kiki laughs. ‘Are you sure?’

‘Ben Miller has a book of strange facts.’

Ben Miller would. Geeky kid. Bess’s skin smells of soap, chlorine and salt. She goes back to her empire and digs a moat around it.
‘It’s an island city for kids,’ Bess declares. Kiki thinks she’d like to move in.

They turn in under the last of the summer twilight.

*

Kiki slams the door twice before it shuts and the van sways. ‘I need to tell you something about Dad,’ she says. She sits and pats the space next to her.

Bess starts to pull on her pyjamas. ‘That he’s not coming home?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘That he’s staying up there. Not coming home. Ever.’

Kiki stares at her.

‘Who told you that?’

‘Grandma,’ says Bess. ‘I heard her telling Aunty Liz last weekend when they came over.’

For God’s sake.

Bess buttons up her pyjamas with her head down.

‘Bess. Bess. Come here.’

She hauls Bess in next to her, puts an arm around her. Bess is stiff, unmoving.

‘My darling girl. Why on earth didn’t you say something?’

‘Why didn’t you?’ says Bess, quick as a shot.

They stare at the campervan door.

‘It’s okay, Mum,’ Bess says with a grown-up sigh. ‘Half the kids at school have divorced parents.’

Kiki winces. She hasn’t thought of divorce. She’s still at desertion. At how easily he shed them and slithered away. He’d always had one eye on somewhere else, spending money they didn’t have on kite surfers, fishing gear, old cars to rebuild. Distractions from the life he’d never wanted.

She tells Bess he was born a wanderer. It’s just who he is. No-one’s fault. She tells her how they used to live in the back of a van, and how every few weeks he would need to move, find somewhere new, how they wandered up and down the coast, drifting with the seasons, the surf and the fishing.

‘He wants to see you. He’s just waiting to find a place. And then we can work something out.’

Bess doesn’t move.

Kiki rambles on. She’s talking too much. She trails off. Bess’s face is set but she trembles at little.

‘Are you a born wanderer too, Mum?’

‘No,’ says Kiki. ‘I just followed your Dad around for a while because I wanted to be anywhere he was. I was young and silly.’

‘If Dad loved us, he would want to be where we are,’ says Bess.

‘Oh love,’ says Kiki. ‘It’s not that simple.’

They stare past the stain on the door, past the water they cannot see, towards the North where the fishing is good, and the days are filled with bright, certain things.

About the Author

Theresa Layton is fascinated by people's dark places and the grey world between right and wrong.   

She won the Perilous Adventures Short Story Competition in 2009 and 2010 and the Common Thread Short Story competition in 2011.  Her short stories have appeared in Award Winning Australian Writing in 2010 and 2011.

She is currently working on a collection of short stories.

Theresa wishes she could grow better tomatoes and hold a tune.




 

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