Cherry Beach

by Laura McPhee-Browne

  ‘We’ll hold hands,’ she said, as if that made a difference.

  ‘But that way I’ll just pull you towards the sharp parts with me!’

  ‘There aren’t any sharp parts, Ness. It’s really deep over there. You’ll be fine.’

  Sometimes I wondered if she understood me at all.

  Her eyes were glassy as we slid into the water. I copied her doggy paddle, because there seemed no better way to get to the other side without starting a freestyle stroke, which would have been far too earnest. She stopped halfway, the top of her hair and her head above the water, and waited for me to catch up, saying again that I would be glad to have done it once I’d jumped and was back in the water again.

  We got to the other side, fished ourselves out and clambered up the riverbank. I imagined those who sat back where we had started—those boys with their cruel minds and loose tongues—watching us, comparing our bodies. My unsure parts and my hideous bathers; Hetty’s grace. I remember a blush came to my neck imagining what they were saying.

  After I slipped trying to get up and into the bush that would bring us around to the rock, Hetty took my hand and gently pulled me. We pushed our way up and through the trees that surrounded the small rock landing, and I felt the heat of the day against my wet skin. It felt pleasant, though I could sense my body had started to understand what I was about to do—my heart was beating quickly and my mouth was dry. My flesh didn’t want me to land on something sharp; it wanted me safe down below, lying on a towel. Despite the vodka, I wasn’t numb at all. I could feel the wetness of the drooping fabric at my crotch dripping down between my legs.

  Hetty was ahead of me, standing and looking over at the water. She turned and smiled at me with big cheeks.

  ‘Come on, Ness—come to the edge. It’s beautiful-scary looking out.’

  I walked to join her and saw how high we were. My tummy started hitting itself. Hetty leaned against me and I could feel how calm her body was, how still. I tried to take it in where our skin met.

  ‘I’m so glad I’m doing this with you,’ she said, as if we were about to change our lives, to venture forth and achieve something. ‘I’ve always wanted to jump off here.’

  ‘I’m really scared,’ I told her, and then there was a loud splash and we could see the boys across the river from us, now in the water, playing and fighting.

  We looked at each other and I smiled to distract myself. Hetty took a deep breath. I could almost hear it rumble in her lungs. ‘I’m scared too, Ness. I’m always scared. Of everything.’

  I wanted to ask her what she meant, why she was scared when she was full of all that anyone had ever wanted. I didn’t reply, even though I wanted to say: but how could you be but you shouldn’t be but if you’re scared then how will I ever not be.

  I needed to jump before I really changed my mind. We clasped damp hands and took a step back to run forward. I don’t remember anything more until I was submerged.

  Later on it was still warm and Sam lay with us on our blanket. He and Hetty’s bodies side by side made me want to avert my eyes, as if they needed privacy. I could smell mull in the wind and sat up to pour some more vodka down my throat, a punishment.

  The jump had been horrible, and I wasn’t glad when I’d done it and was back in the water. When my body had hit the surface—my chest and breasts first—it had hurt more than I’d anticipated. I tried to remember the drop down but I couldn’t. The only part of it that made me glad was the look Hetty gave me when we were both bobbing, wiping the water out of our eyes. She was laughing, and her face was wet and shining. I liked that we had done it together.

  I was looking at Sam, his cashew-coloured arms crossed underneath his head to make a pillow, his back warm and his stomach and chest below, when he lifted himself up and looked back at me. I was embarrassed to be caught admiring him, and knew he would know that was what I had been doing. He would be used to being admired, like Hetty.

  I smiled to try to make sure my cheeks didn’t redden, and he smiled back, then lifted himself up and around to sitting. Hetty lay next to him not moving, a drugged princess. She’d always slept like the dead, or a cried-out baby.

  ‘Should we go get some fish and chips?’ Sam asked me. He moved his eyes from mine down to Hetty’s still body and back again, raising his eyebrows. ‘She’ll be out for a while, I reckon.’ I was shy to go for a walk with him. What would either of us say, or do with our hands, I wondered, as I nodded and we pulled ourselves up off our towels to standing. It was easier for me to be around people who were not so self-aware, so watchful and precise as Sam. I wanted him to like me, though I couldn’t imagine him disliking anyone. He was too self-contained for that sort of energy. I reminded myself he was shy too, but that he was making an effort. I stood as tall as I could in my body and nodded again.

  Hetty didn’t stir while we prepared ourselves: scrounging for our wallets in our bags, Sam pulling on a shirt, me a singlet.

  ‘Will she be okay if we’re gone when she wakes up?’ I asked him, knowing that she would be.

  ‘Yeah.’ He smiled lightly, and we turned towards the steep bush hill before the main road.

  ‘Which way?’ Sam asked, as we neared the gravel path and the grassy one beside it, both leading up to the street and the chip shop. The grassy one was steeper but more interesting, with a thin track through the weeds made flat and smooth by summer feet. I liked fighting my way up this desire path—the one chosen by the people. I pointed my head at it and shrugged. Sam nodded back.

  It was much hotter now we were out from under the shade of the gums that stood near the river, their branches and leaves blocking the sky. The sun beat down and I felt sweat begin to gather between my creases.

  Sam began the trail first, carrying his thongs in one hand. His calf muscles pulled and hardened as he moved himself upwards. I kept my thongs on and followed him but the flattened grass of the path was slippery, and I couldn’t get beyond a certain point. Sam turned, earlier than someone else might have because he was thoughtful, and when he saw that I was stuck he slid down to help me. He grinned and gestured to my hand, and when I nodded, took it in his. His skin felt like I had imagined it would: sanded and warm.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said, and let him move me. I didn’t care that I should be climbing this hill myself: it was just nice to be near him. I wondered if he wanted to be touching me, and if I wanted it too. I couldn’t feel anything happening in my lower half—not a flicker. But he was even more beautiful up close.

  Towards the top we stalled, after Sam placed his foot where there was no solid ground and I wobbled, and we half-fell together against the bleached rim. Laughing, our hands pulling at each other and holding one another up, I watched Sam’s face crack open into something more full than I had seen before.

  He leaned forward and placed his lips on mine just as I tried to move them. He kissed my mouth and I let his tongue slip my lips apart and in, wet and slightly sticky. My body trembled from knowing he wanted me, trying to work out what I wanted, moving my mouth with his, breathing in the cloy of his saliva and peppery sweat. I felt hot in an unpleasant way, and tried to help him find a rhythm but couldn’t.

  I pulled my mouth away and wiped it, my eyes on the dirt beneath us and our four feet. Sam moved away from me, and when I looked up I saw his arms were hanging at his sides.

  ‘Shit. I’m sorry,’ he said.

  ‘No, don’t be.’

  ‘I didn’t know if you—’ He stopped without interruption, and twisted his hands into a honey-coloured mess. He was someone to feel sorry for, all of a sudden: someone needy and naked. I wanted to be anywhere else.

  ‘It’s okay. Don’t worry.’ I couldn’t say anything more than that and so we stood there, and then he moved to pull himself to the top of the hill and I followed, heaving myself politely, until we arrived at the car park opposite the pub. It was unbearably hot now that we were at street level. I imagined being in the water as we crossed the road. I imagined my arms moving b
ack and forth to keep me afloat, alone and able.

  Sam suggested he wait and bring the food back, after we had ordered and he had insisted on paying for Chiko Rolls, potato cakes and minimum chips. I breathed out only after I had moved through the plastic curtain straps and was back on the street.

  A part of me wished we had kept kissing, that he had lost control and pulled me down into some shrub, that we had fucked in the dirt. I knew, though, that I was only wishing this because I wanted things to go back to how they had been before, and without the conclusion of sex we were just in between, not able to move forward or back. I didn’t want him. I knew the more eager he was, the more I would shrink. The thought of him stroking my body glued up my throat.

  When I got back to the river Hetty was still lying there, her arms and legs and hair spilled out around her. I sat down and looked out across the water, Sam’s lips still on mine. I hoped he wasn’t too embarrassed or disappointed, though I couldn’t imagine he would be. It would have been a chance he took in the moment, and that was all. I was sure I wasn’t something to get over. I wondered if I would tell Hetty, and what she might say if I did. Beside me, she moved, then made a sighing noise and opened her eyes. She lifted herself up and yawned, stretching out her legs and leaning forward to meet them.

  My vodka was next to me, forgotten, and I lifted it and drank. It was very warm now, and parts of my body became slightly less shaky immediately—my arms, my stomach, my toes. I sat still, waiting for Hetty to say something because I couldn’t. The air around us was barely moving, and my thighs were shiny.

  ‘Should we try to find some water ribbons?’ Hetty asked brightly, then yawned again.

  Hetty was obsessed with water ribbons. Ever since we had learned about bush foods in Year Nine History with Ms Diaz, how they grew all over Victoria and how you could eat them if you knew how to choose the right parts, she’d been looking, trying to find something we had read about to see what it tasted like, and imagine what it would have been like in Australia before the British arrived.

  I had gently reminded her so many times that we would never be able to know what it was like, to understand the country we were born in, because it had been changed too much and we hadn’t listened properly when we got here, rushing to settle and make and change when there had been no need. Hetty told me she knew, that she wasn’t really pretending it was easy, but she still wanted to eat something that had grown indigenously from the Australian ground.

  We searched in Tecoma for pink native raspberries, and drove all the way to the Strzelecki Ranges to look for the tubers of the wombat berry, which we did find, and cooked up that night into a stringy, mild casserole. Every time we had come to swim in or walk beside the Yarra in Warrandyte, Hetty had looked for water ribbons along the banks—they liked to grow in the muddy bits where the water had stilled. She had a colour photo showing what they looked like growing against water, and it lived in the front pocket of her backpack, bent and smudged. They were beautiful, half-standing and half-floating, long against the top of the water. You could eat the little green fruits that gathered under the tiny flowers in a spike at the top of them, and the tubers that sat at their bottoms.

  ‘Yeah, go on then,’ I said ‘But we better wait for Sam. He’s bringing back fish and chips.’

  ‘Ooh,’ Hetty said, though I doubted she would indulge in much of it.

  I waited to see whether my mouth would open again, to tell her about Sam. I was sure she would be kind, and wouldn’t make things difficult when he got back, with stares and smiles and giggles, but I didn’t feel I could talk about why I hadn’t wanted it.

  Hetty was standing now, and had pulled her dress on over her bathers. ‘If we go now, we might be back before him,’ she said.

  ‘We very well might be.’

  As we climbed up to the path and stood dusting the grass and the dirt off our backs and bottoms, Hetty took the photograph out of her bag.

  ‘Where did you get that again?’ I asked, pointing at it.

  ‘My dad took it,’ she answered, trying to smooth out the photo with one hand. ‘When he was living in Gippsland.’

  I didn’t ask more. Hetty’s dad was tricky—for her, for her family, for me as someone on the near outside, looking in. He was angry and sad and loving and slow and often full of alcohol, which made him unpredictable. That he clearly loved Hetty more than he loved anyone else was unhealthy, and seemed to be her blind spot. She talked about his time living on his own in Gippsland when she and her siblings were small as if it had been a romantic pilgrimage, rather than what I believed—that he had run away, unable to handle reality. I respected her need to leave him unexamined, but I couldn’t join her.

  ‘He gave it to me because he thought I’d like to see them floating on the water and know what they were called. The leaves aren’t as wide in Gippsland. But otherwise we should look for something like that.’

  I suggested we start moving, as the sun would soon start to slowly sink down and become pink and then nothing below the trees. As we edged along, I watched Hetty in front of me, the tendons in her back bulging and pulling as she pushed past trees and weeds. I could smell the thick sweat of the mud and the sweetness of the plants we were passing, and I let my eyes move towards the bank to watch for something like the shrub in the photograph.

  It was starting to rain, very lightly, when I heard Hetty yell out and then saw her trundle down the bank, right to the edge of the water.

  ‘There!’ she said, and got on her knees to lean forward.

  I joined her at the edge of the river and saw what she was trying to touch—a plant with light-green stand-up leaves, some with conifer-shaped endings, and below the standing leaves a fan of long, slim ribbon leaves floating in the water.

  ‘They really are water ribbons,’ I said, and Hetty looked up at me with such a smile that the whole of me lifted slightly.

  ‘As if someone just dropped some green ribbons into the water,’ she said, and leaned down to touch one of the floating leaves. ‘They feel strong.’

  Hetty took the photo out of her pocket and smoothed it out again to see if we were right.

  ‘Yes! It looks the same. Just with thicker leaves, like Dad said.’

  She handed me the photo and leaned forward again, towards the strong plant, in the home it had made against the soil wall and the water. It did look like we had found one—the picture had thinner leaves but it was standing in the same tall drooping way, and the tufts at the top, like tiny white and yellow trees, were similar. I looked closer and could see the few leaves that were swimming along the top of the brown Yarra water. It smelt like garden, and I watched Hetty take photos on her small, broken phone, likely to show her father.

  ‘I don’t want to destroy it,’ she said, after she had stood and was back with me again, somewhat past the wonder.

  ‘We don’t have to.’

  She looked at me and scrunched her face. ‘But I want to try to eat the tuber potatoes at the ends! And the little fruits. Maybe if we just pull out a part of it? Or will that kill the whole thing? I don’t want to ruin something that was living happily on its own.’

  I shrugged. ‘It doesn’t matter, Het. It’ll be our dinner. I’m sure there are other water ribbons along here that can move in if we take this one.’

  She was still looking at where the plant stood, where it floated.

  ‘I know that’s not actually a thing. That another water ribbon plant will just see this vacant lot and move in. But really, let’s just do it; it’s fine, really—’ I said, waiting for her to turn back around.

  ‘Yes!’ she said, turning with a smile, then moving towards me. ‘You always make things clear again.’

  With Hetty’s arm around my shoulder, I felt good, and imagined the tubers and the fruits would be delicious, in a subtle, unusual way, and that we would enjoy eating them together because it was a moment we had been waiting for. We took our shoes off and I rolled up my pants. Hetty gathered her skirt up around her waist an
d tied it in front like a belt, and we stepped into the water.

  ‘Maybe if I pull it from the bottom? From the roots?’ Hetty asked, and I nodded.

  She moved her whole arm down into the water and stuck her tongue out the side of her mouth with concentration, trying to find the obvious end—the place that helped the plant to grow. It took a few dunks of her arm, and a few grabbings around at the bottom of the river, before she smiled and jerked her whole body to pull it free.

  ‘Got it!’ she yelled to me. ‘It’s really muddy down there. Muddling.’

  I did a small silly dance, and then took the long, dripping plant with its hairy, intricate end and handed Hetty a towel to dry herself.

  ‘It didn’t want to come with me,’ she said. ‘Maybe I should have listened and let it be.’

  ‘No, Hetty. Don’t worry.’

  I swung the water ribbon over my shoulder, the tubers and root veins hanging behind me near the small of my back, and we walked along to where we had started, where Sam was lying down with his eyes closed: perhaps sleeping, perhaps pretending to be. The sun was beginning to set, it was almost summer dusk, and I saw the wrapped grey paper next to him, full of fried food. My stomach muttered.

  Later that night, after Sam had dropped us off and I had managed to catch his face to smile in a way I hoped was tender, Hetty and I sat on the floor of her bedroom and stroked the water-ribbon leaves.

  ‘I don’t want to eat it,’ Hetty said.

  ‘That’s because you’re not hungry,’ I answered.

  ‘Know-it-all,’ she said, and stretched back along the carpet with a sigh. I could hear her breathing. ‘I wish I could show Dad,’ she said, lifting her legs up into the air and her arms to meet them.

  ‘Why can’t you?’

  ‘Because he’s sick. He’s not here. He’s staying with his brother until he’s better.’

  ‘What kind of sick?’ I asked, quietly, so she wouldn’t feel she had to answer me.