He noticed the men he passed looking at them from their city-bound SUVs, enjoying their looks of envy when they saw the woman alongside him, the ends of her hair flicking in the breeze.
He couldn’t blame them. She looked so different now from when he’d first met her. She’d gained weight in all the right places, her cheeks filled out now to balance that wide mouth and her long limbs toned from swimming and honey-gold from the sun. And he wondered how he could ever have taken her for anorexic.
He’d misjudged her in so many ways. She wasn’t what he’d expected at all. She was—more.
At least she could be more. He remembered her reluctance to shop for the nursery. He remembered how upset she’d been in the store, as if it had all been such a chore and she couldn’t wait to get away.
And none of it made sense because he also remembered how she’d felt in his arms, warm and yielding and womanly, her taste like a drug in his system…
He didn’t like things not making sense. He didn’t like it at all. Wondering what he was even doing here, he pulled the car into a just vacated space in the car park.
‘This is it,’ he announced, raising the top. ‘Welcome to Coogee Beach.’ Manicured lawns lined with Norfolk Island Pines on one side and the Pacific Ocean on the other spread out before them. ‘Do you fancy a walk?’
She nodded, enjoying this rare chance for an outing despite the mess of conflicting thoughts in her head.
They wandered through the park, between the beach that was heaving with swimmers and the picnickers enjoying sizzling barbecues that sent delicious aromas into the air. They stopped for gelati before heading slowly up the path to the cliff walk. They paused at a lookout, gazing out at the surf and the ocean and the cruise ships and container vessels that ventured along the shipping lanes far out to sea.
‘My mother used to bring me here,’ he said, looking out towards the horizon, ‘when I was just a child.’ She looked up at him, at his tight expression, and she could see how much this cost him. ‘My nonna and poppa—my grandparents—would come too. We would have picnics at the beach. Swim in the sea pools at first, and then in the surf when I was older. After a picnic we’d wander along the cliff walks and think how good it would be to live so close to the sea.’
And now he did. Their lives had been so different, she thought, gazing out over the magnificent stretch of coastline for the very first time. Cliffs and beach and tumbled rocks and salt-toughened bushes bursting with colour.
They gazed silently out to sea, watching the waves crash mightily on the rocks below, the white water spray going metres into the air, before the wave’s energy dissipated, turning it to meek, foaming wash.
‘When my grandparents died, it killed me,’ he said, and she looked around to see his face so tight with pain it hurt her too. ‘We didn’t have much but we were a family. We had each other. Until a train collided with the bus they were in. They should have survived. I knew in my heart that my love for them should be enough to save them. If they’d been able to afford a car…’
She listened in silence, awed by the power and the pain of his words, fighting the urge to reach out and comfort him with his anguished face and his tightly bunched hands.
‘For a while there was just my mother and me. We had each other. For a while—until once again I learned that love was nowhere near enough. That it was money you needed if you wanted things to happen. Money you needed in this world if you wanted to save and protect the ones you loved.’ He turned to her then and it was all she could do not to reel away; his eyes were as black and bleak and empty of life as a bushfire-ravaged forest.
‘Your mother died of cancer,’ he said. ‘Mine too. A brain tumour that sucked her of her life. And because we didn’t have the money to pay for private treatment, we had to wait in line for months for her to have scans. Months to see a specialist. And by that time it was too late. There was nothing they could do. And I learned—by God I learned—that it is only money that can get you what you want, when you need it.’
His voice trailed off, carried away by the wind and the waves, and she thought he was spent until his voice came back, gravel-rich and thick with anguish as his gaze stayed firmly fixed on the shifting sea.