‘You’re pissed.’ She holds out her hand. He takes it and nearly pulls her over as he stands.
‘Ah, the sea,’ he says grandly, clown-faced, his hand extended in knight-mode. ‘It beckons. Come.’
‘My God.’
‘Come hither, sexy pants.’
They splash into the sparkling tepid water. She drops his hand and dives into the base of a small wave. The reason for his excited charge down the beach is unclear, yet as she arrows through the clean water and bursts up into sound and light again, she is grateful. A couple more strokes and she floats in the glittering blue. He surfaces nearby, facing the wrong way. He turns, locates her and grins woozily. She smiles back at him. At least he’s lost the clown-face. ‘What’s floating your boat all of a sudden?’
‘Le Stratton said if he told us the story about the alien he met and taught to write English when he was twenty, it means he really likes us. I’ll get some Comms work. Overtime. So easy it’s not even work.’
‘Well, good. I like him anyway, alien and all. You should be respectful. He’s far better than those old lawyers on testosterone you’re normally brown-nosing.’
‘Let’s park that, shall we? I’ve enjoyed myself too. The lack of rigour makes a nice change. But it’s like eating dessert. You wouldn’t want to do it all the time.’
‘It’s better than the main course Legal serves up: bullshit pie.’
‘Mr Peters claims everyone at the hospital believed Sam was extra-terrestrial, but the truth is that only one solitary doctor did, and she killed herself in Australia decades ago. If that’s not bullshit, I don’t know what is.’
‘Trix is fabulous. I’ve had so much fun talking to her. It’s been more than that, though. I feel we really connected. She really loves what she does, you know. She’s not motivated by status or profit.’
‘I know. I know.’
‘Do you?’
‘Yeah, look, I think it could work out with you and Trix. She won’t have to pay you much. Anything. You could do an internship?’
‘I’m too old.’
‘Hardly.’
‘Well, if she suggests it. We really clicked, I must say.’
‘You know I’m on about the same money as him?’
‘Really?’
‘Yeah. You know how they’re always complaining about the insatiability of the news cycle? Comms people are. It’s obviously just laziness. They complain about information overload, the cheapening of the written word and blah-de-blah, but, you know, the consumer always has the choice to turn off. They’re weird. Some senior managers secretly pine for the days before internet and screens. They really do.’
‘That is a bit weird if you’re into communication.’
‘Le Stratton says Comms managers must have been like Buddhist monks back in the day, with their silences and enforced contemplation. But if you look at their low salaries and high rates of dissatisfaction, their profound silence didn’t get them much. They would have—’
Whistles are blowing. Lifeguards in brief red costumes are walking down to the water and gesturing with sweeping motions.
She laughs. ‘A shark?’
‘It’s adults-only time, baby. They’re turning up the waves, so the kids and the frail have to remove themselves. Come on, let’s body surf. The seventh wave is the big one, but you can ride any of them.’
As the first adult wave gathers mass against the horizon, shrieks echo in the dome. It comes in fast, curling as it bears down on them.
‘Here! Kick off now and go like mad!’
She launches herself and is picked up with surprising power. There’s a brief sensation of flight as she is driven shoreward, until her head is buried in a roaring, bubbling cauldron which grabs and yanks her this way and that. Released and rolled in the sandy shallows, she gasps. Drunk. Alcohol and meds combined, she reminds herself, have a way of creeping up on you.
Jeremiah laughs as he takes her hand and helps her up. ‘You caught it! Come on.’
‘Next wave. I need a breath. I was kind of wiped out.’
He turns and runs, limbs slightly akimbo, back into the water. Yes, he has stamina.
She remains sitting in the shallows and takes a breath. Looking down the beach, she sees that not only kids have got out of the water, but the elderly too. The waves are dangerous. The elderly have a way of pottering, it seems to her, even the muscular men in red Speedos in the way they make a short journey with little steps, put down a towel, look around and hoist their hands onto their hips as if they were weighted. They potter. The women potter too, despite their flat bellies and biceps and arms toned by weights, muscle regeneration techniques and liposuction. They look better motionless. For the first time she realises the elderly are aware of how deliberately they move. They lack fluidity and sway. They prefer to propel themselves short distances from shore to water, in vertical trajectories rather than across lengthy horizontal sight lines. A nearly nude old woman 50 metres away catches her eye, splashing through the shallows towards her, shamelessly tracking sideways along the beach. It’s the old woman from the changing room—she actually put on the ultralight. Dismayed, Karen leaps up and wades back out into the water.
The light fades. It’s darker. A red and orange band glows low over the water: sunset. The water she wades through is opaque and like a warm blanket. The wet comfort suit is heavy and cumbersome, but the water takes its weight as she submerges and swims out to Jeremiah.
He grins as her feet are lifted off the bottom by the next wave. ‘God, that steak was good!’
‘Ha!’
He grins. ‘You bitch! Come here.’ He pulls her close.
She smiles broadly as they kiss, and she wraps her legs around him.
‘Five or six,’ he murmurs as the incoming wave lifts and then drops them back onto the sandy bottom.
The several dark figures scattered in the water around them turn towards the next wave. It’s big, but no bigger than the last. After this will come the monster. Voices rise in excitement. A shriek rings off the dome. The sunset reddens.
As the sixth swell rolls in and lifts her feet clear off the bottom again, Jeremiah unzips her top and pulls the shoulders down. Her breasts are free, lifted by the greasy, tactile water.
‘That’s better,’ he says.
It feels better. Like night swimming should. Everything feels better. She’s connected with Trix and everything’s working out brilliantly. The Beach is beautiful and even Jeremiah’s drunkenness is enjoyable, the way he’s acting like an idiot. It’s a side of him she hasn’t seen since they moved to the Mount. In fact, she hasn’t enjoyed his company so much for ages, even though most of her enjoyment has come from hanging shit on him.
She floats back, just out of his reach.
His voice is thick as he follows her. ‘Come here.’
‘Hot for Grandma?’
He actually visibly blanches. ‘Karen!’
She laughs and after a moment he sees the funny side. His lust regathers. No, she hasn’t had so much fun with him for ages. This time she doesn’t float out of reach.
The seventh wave is looming, a rearing black mass of a different magnitude. They stand and watch it form. Water rushes out past her legs to feed it. The wave mounts higher and higher, dragging her towards it. She slaps the water. ‘Here it comes!’ Squeals, whistles and shouts echo all around.
‘On three!’ he shouts, and hooks his fingers at the waist of her comfort suit, inviting her to dive out of it and swim naked. It won’t be that easy, she thinks. Then again, it might. ‘Dare you,’ he calls. ‘One… two…’
She quickly scans the placement of elderly men and lifeguards on the gloomy shore, weighing the risk. It’s no longer so gloomy. In fact, it’s lightening in rapid irregular increments. Jeremiah releases her as the wave arrives and full daylight illumination is abruptly restored. As she goes under she fears she will be cast up topless in the shallows, but she is yanked shoreward only a short distance. The wave begins to break after it pa
sses and thunders away without her, Jeremiah half-buried in it. She zips up and listens to an announcement ringing out over the PA system as she swims to shore: ‘Due to unforeseen circumstances the Beach must close immediately. Will guests in Platinum please make their way to the changing area and collect their belongings for evacuation…’
Bill and Trix are at the water’s edge, in deep conversation with Jeremiah. They turn and watch her wade in. The comfort suit feels very saggy and heavy around the bum, positively pear-like, and Karen realises the waterproof bottom is retaining the water let in when the top was unzipped. Look out, Ursula Andress, she thinks, as the group watch her splash heavily towards them through the shallows. She stops, puts her hands on her hips and tells Trix, ‘I’m the next Bond girl.’
Everyone is very serious.
‘It’ll be a bond,’ Mr Peters tells Karen. He frowns. ‘I mean, a bomb. Planted, or more likely claimed to be planted, by the protesters outside.’
‘Did you say a bomb?’ asks a passerby, a wet elderly woman in a retro red one-piece with matching swimming cap to protect her Permahair. The sea has been abandoned. The waves have been turned off. The restaurant is emptying.
Karen wonders how she can let out the water trapped in the waterproof section of the suit, short of taking it off. It weighs at least ten kilograms.
‘Hopefully a bomb scare,’ Bill declares, lurching emphatically.
‘Just a precautionary evacuation,’ Jeremiah adds, touching the old woman’s shoulder in a manner meant to reassure her, as if he were a doctor.
She looks past him and moves on without a word, clearly seeking a second opinion.
‘Yes,’ Bill declares. ‘Well. Shall we?’
Mandela, Karen thinks. God, I forgot. We have to call Plearn. As she falls into a weighty step with Trix, behind Bill and Jeremiah in the procession of lightly clad Platinum guests, mainly elderly, making their way along the seaward path, she gets Jeremiah to check his screen. There are three missed calls from the childcare centre. Jeremiah goes white. He must have muted the screen. And there’s a message: Mandela at Victoria Clinic with acute stomach pain. Please call ASAP. A chill comes over her despite the heat.
The dome flashes and cracks like thunder. A hammer blow knocks her down and rolls her over. It’s pitch dark and hard to breathe.
Then she can breathe. Screaming, moans and wails. She’s lying on grass. There is dim light; stuff falls down from a tear in the dome and splashes into water 50 metres away. The wailing intensifies.
‘Oh, God.’
‘God!’
‘My leg!’
The real sky is visible: pale and cold, hauling its freight of black clouds. Jeremiah touches her head.
‘Karen. Are you okay?’
She sits up. Her face and hair are wet. Her fingertips show water, not blood. The procession of Platinum guests has been flattened and scattered. People have been thrown and dumped in strange positions. Dead. Thirty metres away a one-armed man in speedos and a swimming cap picks up his severed arm, with the screen still attached, and stares at it. A man in front of them groans as he tries to sit up. His looks at her with unseeing eyes, his face covered with blood. He sinks back down.
‘Karen?’
‘I’m okay.’
‘A bomb.’
They get up from the grass beside the path. Nothing feels broken. All the water trapped in the suit has gone. Jeremiah hugs her. Nothing can go too wrong with him there. He holds her tightly.
Bill and Trix are sitting up. They say they’re okay as Jeremiah helps Trix up first.
Wind whistles through the messy fissure over the water. As her eyes adjust to the blackout, the dome becomes smaller and lower. Names are called, over and over, with no response, no matter how loudly they’re called.
Bill is oddly emphatic. ‘Okay, okay,’ he says, as Jeremiah hauls him to his feet. ‘Okay, okay. My fault, my fault, all my fault. I didn’t protect the one who could save us. But why me? Why me?’ He breaks down. ‘Why me?’
Trix pulls him to her. Bill rests his head on her shoulder, tall as he is, and weeps.
Someone screams, ‘It’s the end! It’s the end!’
An old woman is helped to her feet only to collapse as if strings were cut.
‘Something’s broken.’
‘Help!’
A child’s keening cry: ‘Mummy! It’s me!’
A chill runs through her.Mandela, she thinks. I have to call him. She strips Jeremiah’s temporary screen transfer from his bicep. It’s dead. All the screens are blank. She can’t believe it. How could I forget him? How could I forget my son? She pictures him calling out for her in the ambulance. Oh God, she thinks, swimming and drinking while he screamed for me. I have to get out of here. Get to him. Hold him. Tell him I love him.
Mr Peters has lost his tenuous hold on reality. ‘I didn’t know, didn’t know how important he was,’ he cries. ‘Oh God, forgive me.’
She’s over him.
Lifeguards shout to keep moving as they tear open the emergency rescue boxes on the sand.
Trix steers Bill forward, around and over bodies and body parts. They step over stretched intestines gleaming on the concrete path. She can reach him, direct him. ‘Darling, darling, sshh. It’s alright.’
Karen tries not to see the torn and twisted corpses thrown together in groups and in solitude by the blast, naked or near-naked, like carcasses in a slaughterhouse. But one holds her eye: the super-elderly woman from the changing room. The ultralight has been stripped from her, revealing her balloon-like breasts, blood clots under her nose, her sightless black eyes stare at the clouds sailing above the punctured dome. The same in death as in life.
You, Karen tells herself, but not my son, please. I’ll get myself together. Change my life.
PART II
4
Trix clears Bill’s walnut shell fragments off the bench. An eye test might be in order, she thinks. He gets most of the shells, usually, but never all of them when he cleans up. A few nuts left behind, too.
A certain vigour enlivens her polishing. How well the marble, granite, tiling and stained cherry-wood cabinets respond. Like all quality objects, they glow as if animate when attended to. She’s tempted to bring the whole kitchen to a high lustre. It’s a top of the line Flennel, Flesch and Sons—it would be criminal to neglect it. The help doesn’t understand.
The stainless steel ovens, with their knobs and minimal instrumentation, have the look of an audiophile’s stereo. Gas for the hobs and electricity for the oven. She can understand why some people consider the Space Odyssey too good for everyday use, preferring the help to do their everyday cooking in a secondary kitchen. Nothing more than kettle-boiling ever occurs in the primary kitchen because it cannot be sullied by functional requirements. But they deprive themselves of an enormous privilege: the sheer delight of interfacing with the design. She gazes about her. Bill denounces that kind of thing as wasteful. But it’s also a form of respect to not touch something, she thinks. Or to touch it only occasionally, on special occasions, to amplify the sense of ceremony. The kitchen was installed six months ago, just before he moved in.
There’s time, she decides, spraying the stainless steel surfaces with polish. And as she buffs the Space Odyssey’s curves with a new chamois, her first view of the Brodericks at the Beach comes unexpectedly to mind, while she was on the way to meet Bill at the Pagoda, when they were unknown to her, two strangers she never expected to see again. Jeremiah was on his knees before Karen, massaging her foot. It had seemed to her an act of true devotion, such was the solemnity about it. The lovely young woman’s incontinence suit suggested head injuries, some kind of tragic accident or virus, while the virile young man’s tender ministrations proved he still worshipped her, regardless; loved that part of her beyond social or cultural conditioning—her soul. It was eternal love, in her eyes, love personified, and she had been moved. Yet when she met them shortly after, there was no trace of such gravity. They were not serious people
at all, it seemed, nor even sensible. Karen’s Modesty suit was a prank and Jeremiah practically drank himself under the table, making a series of ridiculous observations along the way. Yet Trix had seen something else when they were alone, and had kept an open mind about the young couple, which was wise, because it transpired that, deep down, Karen was very serious about fashion. And then, of course, Jeremiah had rallied so magnificently after the bombing and carried all those frightened and terribly injured people in the dark. Risen to the occasion heroically, while Bill fell to pieces.
‘To thine own self be true—Shakespeare’ reads the main fridge’s digital smart screen. The sensor picks her up and the quote changes. ‘A bear can juggle and stand on a ball and he’s talented, but he’s not famous. Do you know what I mean?—Kim Kardashian’. Bill thinks it’s funny, but she wants the fridges and freezer magnet-free to preserve the kitchen’s clean lines. Yet a magnet would be the only way to get a Sam Starsailor quote up there. The quote changes again: ‘Not what we have but what we enjoy constitutes our abundance—Epicurus’.
Noticing that the faint thudding downstairs has stopped, Trix takes a jug of iced water out of the beverage and condiments fridge. When Bill appears in his T-shirt and shorts, towel around his neck and his white hair spiky with sweat, a long, tall glass of iced water waits for him on the bench.
Bill stops and grimaces at the glass as if it’s filled with toxic sludge. ‘I didn’t ask for that. However, given the circumstances, I’ll grudgingly accept it.’ He downs it in one long gulp. ‘Hahhh.’
She can’t help laughing, again. Three weeks on, the joke is still to lose its lustre. The way Jeremiah pretended to object to the bloody slab of rare steak at the Beach, even as saliva bubbled at the corners of his lips, and then demolished it within seven minutes (Bill timed it) with such poorly disguised relish, wearing a regretful and soulful expression as he chewed—Bill can mimic it hilariously. Since then, Bill has caught the alleged vegetarian eating a 75-dollar drone-delivered steak alone in the canteen at 10.30 in the morning. Jeremiah, sitting in the far corner with his back to the room, informed him, long-faced, that it was on doctor’s orders, for the iron, for his kidney. Trix suspects he was joking, and after a couple of debates with Bill about this comfort steak and singular kidney, he’s coming around to her way of thinking.
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