He Would Never, page 7
It was the kind of party her sister-in-law insisted on calling a barbecue. Her brother’s harbourside new-build was full of caterers, and waiters bringing around mouthfuls of things on Chinese soup spoons, and a man in a bow tie mixing cocktails in the corner. Not a barbecue, in Liss’s opinion.
‘Piper loves money.’
Dani raised her eyebrows. ‘Doesn’t everyone?’
‘I don’t,’ Liss said, and caught Dani swallowing a splutter.
‘You’re thinking it must be easy to pretend you don’t care about money when you’ve got it, but it’s more complicated than that. There are rich people who love money, who dedicate their life to keeping it close and getting more of it, and making sure everyone knows they have plenty of it.’
‘Your father?’
Liss nodded. ‘And there are almost-rich people who are always chasing an invisible number, some mythical amount that will make them safe. Like Lachy. His family was . . . he’s driven by wanting to be a different kind of rich. I know that was part of his attraction to me.’
‘Brutal.’
‘No.’ Liss scooped Tia towards her and began unfixing her bra. ‘It’s just true.’
Dani still looked amused. ‘Well, I’m not rich, but I’m chasing that invisible number, too.’
‘Most people are.’
‘And you?’
‘I don’t care about it at all.’
Tia feeding was the most satisfying feeling Liss had ever experienced. Now that it was working, it was better than any drug. Maybe it was acting as a truth serum, because she could see that the longer she talked about this, the more irritated Dani looked. And she didn’t want to irritate Dani.
‘Come on. All this? The view, the house, the right pram? You’d give it all up?’
Liss decided she’d gone far enough. ‘I don’t care about money, but that doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate what it’s done for me. Or that I am an idiot.’
Dani laughed. ‘So, Lachy? And the fancy barbecue?’
Piper’s party had been fairy lights in trees and a string quartet playing Metallica. Liss’s overwhelming memory of walking into that evening was of feeling displaced. After the time she’d spent travelling in India, everything back home seemed wasteful, frivolous, gross. Her dad, her brother, Piper and the ugly new house, all of it repulsed her. She didn’t fit here. She didn’t fit in stinking, throbbing, exhilarating India either. There she’d felt slight, faded, sketched, like an impression of a person rather than the full, bold-colour version. Thing was, she felt like that here, too.
She was by the cocktail cart, avoiding her father. She was about to take the first glug of her third lychee martini when a man stepped up to her.
‘Who are you hiding from?’
Liss knew she didn’t look like the other girls at the party that night. She was wearing a long, loose dress from a market in Goa, the colour of overripe peaches. Leather sandals wound around her big toe and snaked up her ankle. She was slight from the inevitable Indian flu and her hair was untrimmed and frizzy. The other women, in their little cocktail dresses and tasteful diamond-stud earrings, blended in. Liss stuck out. Was that why Lachy had noticed her?
He must have realised that she was only there out of obligation.
‘I’m hiding from my dad,’ she’d said, with a freeing lurch of honesty.
The man was kind of beautiful. Tall and wide-shouldered with a direct gaze. But she had seen enough, in the few years she’d been out in the world, of handsome men who knew their power.
‘Would you like me to tell your father to fuck off?’
‘I wouldn’t. He’s paying for the drinks.’
Was that the moment? Maybe. But what Liss could still conjure, as she sat at her kitchen island, was how she’d felt when he leaned in towards her, his mouth so close to her ear his lips brushed her hair as he said, ‘I’ll still do it. Is it him?’ He turned his head, pointed. His hands, she noticed, were big and wide, but clean and soft.
Liss’s father wasn’t hard to pick from the crowd. Everything about him said ‘holding court’. This wasn’t technically his party, or his house, but his entire demeanour said that none of this would be happening without him. The way he threw his head back and laughed one notch louder than anyone else. The way he put a hand out, casually dangling an emptying glass, knowing that it would be plucked away and swapped for a frothy replacement within seconds. Even in his mid-sixties, Michael Gresky had a glow about him.
‘Yes,’ Liss said, her lychee martini stopped at her lips, her eyes now looking up at this man. ‘That’s him.’
Lachy turned abruptly and walked away. Down the three stone steps to the pool deck, along the edge of the glowing turquoise oval lit from below. Right up to where Liss’s father was talking to three of Piper’s most attractive friends, all women less than half his age.
Liss watched Lachy stop, wait for the couple of seconds it took for her father to register his arrival. This tall man smiled a glorious smile and then leaned to her father’s ear and spoke. Liss actually gasped as she watched her father’s face change. His expression shifting from polite curiosity to disbelief to anger. His lips moved, most likely in exclamation, but the younger man was already on his way back to Liss. Her father’s eyes settled on his back. And then moved to Liss.
The stranger was smiling, walking ever so slightly faster than he had on his way there.
When he reached her, Liss knew, she was going to put her sickly drink down, and he was going to grab her arm, careful but firm, and she was going to be swept along with him.
‘We’d better go,’ he said, still smiling. ‘I just told your dad to fuck off, as discussed.’
‘As discussed!’ Liss allowed herself to be steered towards the house, towards the front entrance and the leafy, ink-dark street, almost giggling with fizzy excitement as she pictured the look on her father’s face.
They stopped on the street. It was late summer, the insects were a cheering chorus, the air was sweet and warm.
‘I’m Lachlan,’ he said. ‘Lachy.’
‘I’m Liss,’ she said. ‘Alyssia.’
‘What do you want to do now?’ Lachy asked. This big man, in a suit. She had never before gone anywhere with a man in a suit. She could feel the last traces of India, of the version of herself caught in the threads of this peachy market dress, floating off and up into the evening like fireflies.
‘I’d like to go for a walk,’ she said, ‘by the water.’
The harbour beside them lapped at still, quiet beaches that ran along the front gardens of huge homes, lit up like shopping malls against the navy sky.
The big man surprised her by putting out one of his hefty paws, as if to shake on it. ‘Can I hold your hand?’
‘It’s cheesy, but I knew my next adventure was him,’ Liss told Dani, raising Tia to her shoulder and patting her tiny back.
‘No shit,’ said Dani, her finger hooked in Lyra’s mouth, her body rocking back and forward. ‘That’s a great story.’ She bent to strap Lyra into the capsule. ‘Okay, I’ll meet the guy. Who wouldn’t?’
8
Friday, 7 pm
Green River Campground
Dani
Juno was filming Ginger making margaritas.
‘Shake it, sister,’ she was saying, as Ginger duck-faced for the phone, her hair damp and frizzy around her face, dark patches on her denim overalls where her river-wet undies were soaking through.
‘No kids had better turn up on these TikToks,’ Dani said as she passed, carrying a tray of sausages in the direction of the barbecue.
‘Calm down, Grandma.’ Ironic, considering Juno was a few years older than the rest of them.
‘I mean it. Seb would kill me.’
A tut from Juno. ‘As if Seb’s on social.’
‘You never know.’ Dani kept moving, calling over her shoulder. ‘We’re all trying to stay relevant, lady. Anyway, hard rule: none of the kids on your channels.’
‘Channels? You’re so cute.’
First night dinner was barbecue. The roles had been so well-honed over the years that Dani could tell you exactly what everyone would bring. By unspoken courtesy of Liss and Lachy, rib-eye for all. Everyone else offered a plate of polite gesture – supermarket burgers from Sadie, something tofu from Ginger. Dani brought lean chicken skewers. And between them there were enough plain beef sausages to feed the children three times over.
The trestle table was scattered with colourful plastic bowls of gluten-free chips and optimistic carrot sticks. Foil lids were waiting to be peeled back from shallow tubs of hummus, and Sadie and Liss were talking intently as they cut and buttered a bag of bread rolls. Kids ate first, and kids ate sausage sandwiches.
But where were the kids? Dani wasn’t sure she’d seen them since the beach. She had washed off the river in the shower and changed into her evening camp uniform of long linen everything to fend off insects. She would love to be spraying the girls with something repellent right now.
‘You seen Lyra?’ She was handing the sausages to three men who, blissfully unaware of their predictability, were standing around the barbecue with bottles in their hands, waiting for the only catering request that would come their way all weekend – Grill this, please.
‘Can’t keep track of your kids, Dani?’ Lachy Short made pointed eye contact before turning back to the gas.
‘You know where your kids are, do you?’ Dani asked, knowing she shouldn’t rise to Lachy’s bait but still feeling a hot flush of guilt in her chest.
‘Of course not. That’s the whole point of camping these days, isn’t it?’
Aiden’s eyes locked onto Dani’s. Help. He had clearly already run out of conversation topics with the camp’s other males.
‘Go and get a margarita, Aiden,’ Dani said. ‘I’m giving you permission to enter the estrogen zone.’
‘What about me?’ Craig put his arm around Dani’s waist and pulled her in, nuzzled her ear. ‘Do I have permission to enter?’
Dani felt a wave of something like panic. Repulsion.
Watching Lachy watching Craig behave like this was worse than Craig behaving like this.
‘Whoa, you two.’ Lachy’s voice was sly, his eyes narrowed. ‘The fire hasn’t gone out yet, then.’
Dani shook Craig off. ‘Give me a break. I’m going to find the kids. Don’t burn those.’ She nodded at the sausages and stepped out onto the track. She felt Liss’s head lift and turn as she walked away.
Case against Craig: She was still with him. Her crime, of course. But it was a mistake to bring him here again.
Craig was the result of a loose port connection. Her firm had been presenting to his, and she was the lead on the marketing plan she hoped would tip the bid for collaboration their way. Dani’s presentation had been flickering on the giant screen in one of those wireless, open-plan offices that compete with each other for kitchen views and foosball tables. Dani hated off-site presentations. So many things were out of your control.
If a client walked into her space on the marketing floor of her fund, she knew that the boardroom would be ready for anything. Water would be the perfect temperature in the smudge-free glass jug in the centre of the table. She knew that the breakfast muffins had to be small enough to be eaten in one bite, but also that no-one would touch them because having your mouth full in a multimillion-dollar meeting wasn’t it, as Lyra would say. She knew that her assistant had already asked the guests’ assistants for their coffee orders, and hot cups of barista-made would be waiting.
And she knew that the fucking laptop adaptor would fit the fucking black box in the centre of the boardroom table.
‘Let me help you,’ Craig had said, leaning over from the other side of the table, after a flustered young marketing assistant from his firm had dashed off for IT help.
‘It usually just connects through Bluetooth.’ Dani was irritated by finding herself in the exact kind of damsel-in-distress situation she worked hard to avoid. ‘I’m sure I can get it.’
But she noticed Craig’s hands, and then saw how his forearms filled the expensive grey flannel of his suit. This was not the sort of thing she usually noticed. For God’s sake, she thought as she took in his predictably strong shoulders, his close-cropped hair, his kind eyes. Get it together.
She hadn’t dated since Seb. She hadn’t joined any of the apps that Sadie constantly sent her. A little while ago, Liss had brought her a super expensive vibrator with a crystal handle as a joke, and Dani was almost offended. It felt like judgement. ‘Do you think I need this?’ she’d asked.
‘Well, babe,’ Liss had answered lightly, clearly trying to decide how honest to be. ‘Yes.’
Even after fourteen years of Liss’s lightly thoughtless honesty, sometimes it still knocked Dani.
Of course Craig had solved the black box problem. It was his boardroom table, after all. His shitty technology, she’d fumed, quietly, when he’d said, ‘There you go, no need to stress,’ and her deck had sprung onto the screen in full colour.
And so. Maybe still rocked by the crystal vibrator, Dani had let Craig pursue her. It was old-fashioned. Flowers. Text messages with photos of his face, not his penis. Sadie told her this was highly unusual, and scrolled through her own phone, showing Dani dick after dick. ‘This is how it is now,’ her single girlfriends would say, with a sort of amused resignation. Craig must have clocked early that wasn’t going to be Dani’s thing.
And he’d had to be patient, because she had the girls and an ex-husband who was out of the country more than he was in it. She was rarely alone and rarely available. Generally, she loved that she wasn’t juggling a complicated custody schedule and missing the smell of her girls’ hair on a Sunday morning. But after she finally agreed to a coffee and a walk with Craig around Centennial Park, she found herself thinking, for the first time, that the odd free night would be okay.
As it turned out, the time limitations were a feature, not a flaw. She found him physically attractive but mentally exhausting. When Seb was finally in town and the girls were having a night with him at a hotel in the city, Craig planned a dinner. He’d booked them a private room. A tasting menu. A bottle of something vintage she knew she wouldn’t drink.
When he started to look disappointed that she wasn’t more impressed, Dani had decided to be honest.
‘This is very generous but I have to get up early. Could we just go to your place?’
Always his place. Always her timetable. Dani had no idea if he was seeing other women during this time, and she didn’t care, as long as there was nothing awkward, no mess involved. They had sex when they could, they ran together two mornings a week, they were occasionally each other’s date to a Thing.
Liss didn’t even meet him for the first year. ‘Please bring the boyfriend,’ she’d say, at the mention of drinks, a birthday, a picnic.
‘Not a boyfriend,’ Dani would say. ‘Sex friend.’ Not words she would say to anyone but Liss, and only if neither the children nor Lachy were in earshot. Bridge and Lyra had only learned of Craig’s existence weeks before last year’s camping trip. Another stupid mistake. They had not been impressed.
Now Dani was walking away from camp, around the kitchen, following the path towards the forest edge.
‘Lyra! Bridge!’
Dani did not love this side of the Green River campground. Especially at dusk.
These were the trees that you drove through when you left the triple-lane highway heading north from Sydney. As you took the turn-off and the road narrowed and twisted and just kept on going, it felt like you were abandoning order to head into something wild. These endless trees and rocks and mossy caves were the world between the calm expanse of the river and the rushing, tarmacked motorway with its headlights, Maccas stops and Wrong Way Go Back signs. The bush yawned away on all sides, vast, dense, ancient. Travelling through the trees in an air-conditioned car made Dani feel a little uneasy, never mind heading off into them on foot.
‘Lyra! Bridge!’
How could eleven children have disappeared?
Dani took a deep breath, heavy with drifting barbecue smoke and the evening sweetness of all this lush green sighing out the heat. She skirted the edge of the rocks, checking the caves.
‘Kids!’
They were probably at camp by now. She would likely hear them if she headed back. Dani turned, and as she did, she sensed a slight movement in the trees between the rocks. She felt it before she saw it, as if someone’s eyes were on her. ‘Kids!’ she called again and took a few steps towards the boundary.
It was getting to the time of day when it’s still light, but the brightness is being turned down every second. When it feels urgent, suddenly, to get everything and everyone you need together before darkness comes. It was the part of camping that freaked Dani out every time. They could hang all the lanterns they wanted, drape all the fairy lights – but they would only ever form a puddle of light, and everything beyond it would be blackness until the sun came up.
Dani swiped on her phone torch and ran it, twice, over the trees. ‘Lyra!’
She shivered and started walking back to camp. The feeling that someone was watching her walk away was just her anxiety spiking. She was annoyed about Craig. Irritated that they hadn’t given the kids a curfew. She was being silly.
Craig and Lachy were still standing over the sausages. Craig looked up and smiled as she passed.
‘The kids were here, right?’ she said, loudly, to everyone. Ginger and Aiden were drinking their margaritas and watching Juno film a slice of lime sprinkled with salt on a pleasing wooden board. Liss was tossing a salad at the table. Sadie and Emily were puzzling over a phone and a portable speaker in the shape of a poo.
Liss looked up. ‘I haven’t seen them since we went swimming, but Lachy said they were here. Lachy?’
‘They were here,’ he said, breaking from his bro-talk. ‘They all got drinks and chip packets and headed off again. They’ll be back.’
