by Sue Watson
I spent the next couple of days planning my time and reading all about Australia from a sunlounger on Bondi Beach. Tough job, but someone had to do it! I devoured the delicious descriptions of ‘the gastronomic allure of Melbourne’, along with photos of stunning roadside vistas of the ocean. I was excited about discovering these new places, but it was tinged with heartbreak and a good old dollop of wet, ugly crying thrown in when I was alone in my hotel room. But I was ready for my next adventure and I would start by doing a dive. Yes, me, Faye Dobson, a forty-six-year-old gran from the Midlands, was going to go diving off some coral reef somewhere in Sydney. I wasn’t sure of the details yet, and hadn’t a clue where to start, but that was part of the fun, wasn’t it?
The ‘Diving Day Course’ was booked up until later in the week, so I reserved my place and decided to stick around the hotel a few more days and be a tourist locally until I could take to the water.
As I donned my factor 30 suncream, a large hat and set off for Sydney Harbour, I felt it was as good a starting point as any. I sent selfies in the sun to Emma, Sue and Mandy, telling them how wonderful it was. Emma responded by sending a kiss and a sunshine emoji, Sue responded by calling me straight away and informed me I had to act quickly because Leo was in Capricorn with several suns rising (or something like that). I told her about Dan and the baby and she said not to worry because my starry alignment was good for a love match. ‘So even if things with Dan don’t work out, there’s a big love on the horizon,’ she announced. ‘You’re young, free and single, the world’s your lobster, love.’
‘I don’t know about the “young” bit,’ I giggled. I wasn’t sure about the lobster bit either, but fortunately I spoke ‘Sue’ and knew what she meant. ‘Thing is, Sue, doesn’t matter how single I am, I can’t just forget Dan and fall in love with someone else.’
‘You must be open, my love,’ she said. ‘You can’t have channel vision when it comes to love – you have to let it in, and trust me there’s a Leo with a big, fluffy mane waiting for you.’
I didn’t fancy the idea of a man with a big fluffy mane, but thanked her anyway, put down the phone and received a text from Mandy in response to my selfie. She asked where ‘Bruce’ was, wanted to know how many times we’d ‘done it’ and posed the question, ‘Have you handled any other bush oysters yet? After all you are “down under”, if you know what I mean?’ She added an emoji, which was frankly disturbing, so I turned off my phone for a while. My friends were lovely, but I needed some quiet in my head and talk of bush oysters and men waiting for me down under with fluffy manes wasn’t doing it. I didn’t want to think about love, or star signs, or sex… or Dan, which was where my mind gravitated to every few seconds. As much as I tried not to think about him and just get on with my day, the sight of a fair-haired man in jeans, or even a good sandwich made me think of him and I turned to mush. His accent was everywhere, his phrasing intruding on my lunch, my nap on a bus, my tour of the Opera House (the guide must have come from next door to where he lived because he sounded so like Dan it was pure agony to hear those raised inflections that made every sentence sound like a question).
As the days passed, I could hear Dan’s voice in my head talking of the waves and though he wasn’t with me, I would listen to his advice and go where he’d wanted to take me. I recalled him telling me about The Surf Pavillion, an old bathhouse on Bondi that had been there since the 1920s. ‘It’s beautiful, a bit of a historical landmark, you know?’ I could hear him saying. I decided that would be my next stop; I packed my beach bag and set off for those famous waves.
So there I was, lying on a towel on the beach, my ‘Diving for Beginners Guide’ across my stomach, to prepare myself for the following day’s dive. I was wearing my new, navy blue one-piece, not the string bikini Mandy had bought me as a ‘going-away gift’. I wasn’t sure what the laws were here, but in the UK, I would be in danger of being arrested for outraging public decency if I wore Mandy’s offering. The sun was beating down, I sipped from a glass of chilled lemonade, and was beginning to think that life could be good again. I wasn’t sure what form that life was going to take, but I was going to stop worrying about it – I couldn’t change anything and when I next saw Dan we’d just have to see where we were. Then above the sound of the waves and the children playing, I heard his voice. But of course it wasn’t his voice, was it? It was just another Australian guy with fair hair on the beach… with a baby?
He was manoeuvring the pushchair over the shifting sand. It wasn’t a smooth ride for that poor baby. He was talking to someone as he grappled with the pushchair and my stomach crumpled like wet tissue paper. It was definitely Dan, and he was walking towards me.
20
Sunlounger Stalking
I put on my sunglasses for disguise and also to enable me to really stare without him or his companion noticing. From my vantage point I couldn’t see who he was talking to, and he hadn’t yet seen me, but my heart began hammering against my chest. Oh God, I’d come all the way here from my hotel and was now on his side of Sydney, he might think I was stalking him!
I didn’t know what to do – should I get up quickly, gather my things and rush off? Or should I style it out at the risk of looking like a twisted psycho? If I took my sunglasses off now he would know it was me, and I really wasn’t ready to see Saffron, if she was with him. Perhaps she was back from Perth already?
I stayed very still, not moving, just letting my eyes follow him behind my sunglasses and waiting for the babymother to appear in my eyeline. Throughout everything that had happened, I’d found it hard to think of Saffron. I tried not to dwell on how young and beautiful she’d be. I knew Dan loved me and didn’t doubt that, but like any woman, I wasn’t completely secure about my looks, or my forty-six-year-old body. I didn’t want to think too much about the thirty-something, firm-thighed babymother in my boyfriend’s life. I certainly wasn’t ready for the family tableau that was about to set up on the beach several feet away from me. As I looked on in my floppy sunhat and dark glasses, shuffling slightly in my sunlounger, I knew any minute now that woman was going to wander down the beach, a slinky-hipped dusky-skinned sun goddess who didn’t know the meaning of eye bags, cellulite or mottled flesh. But she was about to witness it in all its glory.
I lay awkwardly, trying to see without being seen, and trust me, I was no spy. I had one foot in the sand to steady myself and one up on the lounger in an attempt to keep it balanced. I’d always had a thing for sunloungers – they represented such glamour in films and magazines: the beautiful, bronzed film star/model, gleaming limbs, pouting lips, sunglasses lowered slightly beneath lapping lashes. Sadly, I’d never achieved this ‘look’ and the only time I’d ever mastered the art of just sitting on one was if someone else held it down as I landed. Over the years they’d thrown me in the air, folded me in half and hurled me onto sand with no warning, usually just as I was dropping off. I’d already been ‘man overboard’ that morning when I’d whiffed the salty golden promise of fish and chips being carried past me by an unsuspecting child. Keen to follow the delicious smell, I’d turned rather abruptly, causing the sunbed to capsize and the child to scream, assuming some woman was about to rugby-tackle her for her lunch. After much apologising and explaining to her bemused but slightly concerned mother that I wasn’t trying to fight her kid for chips, all was good. But one false move and it can be curtains for any kind of beach-body glamour, as I was proving now, straddling the bloody thing like it was a bucking bronco while trying to be discreet.
Dan was now setting up camp with his baby only feet away, far too close for comfort as I waited and waited for Saffron to appear with her no doubt heartbreakingly beautiful body. But her gorgeousness was the least of my problems. As I’d banged on about us both needing time and space, it would look weird me sitting here apparently on the exact spot where he came to sunbathe. I felt so stupid. I would look like such a weirdo stalker if he saw me, so I waited until he was about to take the baby from the pushchair to m
ake my escape. As he picked her up, he kept talking and I realised, to my great relief, he wasn’t speaking to Saffron or any other adult – he was speaking to Clover. And suddenly, in spite of being in the wrong place, I was melting slightly at the sound of his voice, gentle and loving, the Dan I knew. I caught snatches of the conversation – he was telling his baby daughter how he learned to surf on this beach. I smiled at the sweetness of him: this baby couldn’t even sit up yet and here he was, telling her all about how he and her uncle were permanently in the water growing up. I wondered how he was really coping after his brother’s death; he kept it in, but I knew it cut deep.
‘You’re going to be just the same, Clover,’ he said, ‘a little water baby.’ He held her in his arms, looking from her face up to the great expanse of white foam rising up above the beach. And as much as I wanted to grab my things and run away, my feet wouldn’t let me, my whole body was arguing with my mind. My heart was saying, ‘Stay a while, watch him, we don’t know what’s going to happen – he doesn’t know you’re here, enjoy this moment. Look at that gorgeous baby, she’s just like a dark-haired version of him.’
I was trying to dig the leg of the sunlounger into the sand while observing this poster of fatherhood and, at the same time, imagining what our child might have looked like. But losing focus for a moment, I pushed too far into the sand and, like a dog burying a bone, I found myself going too deep, too soon. I tried to grab onto the sunlounger next to me for balance, but that tipped and before I knew it, I was face down with the bloody thing on top of me. I instinctively screamed with surprise and within seconds several people had run over to see if I was okay. I insisted I was, and willed them to bugger off because they were drawing attention to me, and I could see from under my sunglasses, now skewed as they’d hit the deck, that Dan was glancing over at the kerfuffle.
I then saw a look of recognition on his face, while fighting off some man who was trying to lift me up off the sand.
‘Thank you, but I’m fine,’ I was saying as Dan approached, holding Clover, to see me being mauled by well-meaning strangers.
‘Faye, is that you?’
I was desperately clambering to get up without help and I was painfully aware he was addressing my upturned arse. It wasn’t a look I’d planned.
‘I’m fine, really…’ I was insisting to all the do-gooders, who apparently came out of the woodwork here the minute a girl tripped slightly. ‘I haven’t had a heart attack, I just fell off my sunlounger,’ I said with some force.
‘You certainly seem to be attracting the crowds…’ he laughed.
I nodded, wiping sand from my face, which had stuck to the suncream – I must have looked like a bloody sand sculpture.
‘What are you doing here anyway?’ he asked.
‘I’m looking… I mean, I’m watching the sea. Not you, I wasn’t stalking you or anything… I wasn’t looking at you. I hadn’t even noticed you… Oh, it’s you, there you are,’ I said, nonsensically. ‘I came to see the beach, not you or your baby’s mum, so don’t even think that.’
‘I wasn’t.’ He seemed vaguely amused. ‘I didn’t mean what are you doing here? I just didn’t think you’d want to sunbathe – you said you were going to see the sights, The Opera House and…’
I straightened out my sunlounger and stood near it; I wasn’t letting that bucking bronco beat me again.
‘Yeah, yeah, I did. And I have, but I just wanted a day on the beach and you’d told me all about the pavilion,’ I waved behind me in the general direction, trying to hold in my stomach as I spoke, ‘… and the waves like skyscrapers…’
He stood there, holding the baby, just looking at me, and I looked at him and for a moment it felt like the sea stopped moving and everyone around us was still.
‘I’m touched that you remember,’ he finally said. ‘But you never called me… You should have called me and we could have come here together.’
‘You know why I haven’t called you, I want you to have the chance to work out what you’re doing without me being around.’
‘But I like you being around.’
‘So, this is Clover?’ I said, keen to move on. It didn’t feel appropriate yet for either of us to be saying nice things to each other. I wanted to be sure that he was sure and that everything was settled with Saffron before anyone declared undying love.
‘Yeah, this is my baby girl.’ He turned her towards me and I looked into this perfect little face with huge brown eyes.
‘She’s beautiful,’ I said, feeling a little catch in my heart. I fell easily for babies, but this one was special: she was Dan’s baby. I gently stroked her soft, warm cheek and suddenly felt a deep pang for what might have been and what never could be.
‘Would you like to join us?’ he asked, gesturing over to the ‘baby camp’ he’d set up.
‘Oh no… Thanks, I have to get off, I’m meeting someone,’ I lied, pointing vaguely up the beach. I wasn’t ready to sit there playing happy families, I felt like the other woman. The interloper. I just didn’t belong here.
He seemed disappointed that I wasn’t staying and shrugged without taking his eyes from mine.
‘So… I’d better go…’ I said, gesturing again up the beach in an attempt to make it look like I had somewhere to go. So we said awkward goodbyes, no hugs, no kisses, and I just picked up my bag, wrapped my sarong around me while still holding in my stomach and smiled, wandering away. I suddenly realised that as well as leaving my upturned sunlounger and scattered towels, I’d also stupidly left my flip-flops but rather than go back for them, I just kept walking. I’d made my exit, I couldn’t go back, so I tried in vain to walk straight and smoothly on the hot sand. I wanted him to see flowing blonde hair and a smooth glide on brown legs, but I may have yelped and jerked a little. And I was horrified when he turned up at my side, Clover in one arm, my flip-flops in the other.
‘You forgot your thongs,’ he said, and I thanked him, popped them on and set off again, smiling and waving and holding my stomach in – all at the same time. He was standing there watching me go and I felt awkward. I was a mess, I didn’t know what to do. Eventually, when I hoped it was safe, I glanced back, but he was now involved with Clover – I’d almost forgotten that you can’t concentrate on anything for long with a baby in your arms. I was thinking about his face as I waltzed up the beach, then realised to my horror I’d left my purse, with money in it!
‘Christ,’ I muttered to myself, as I gave a sideways glance back, just as he looked up at me in the distance. He waved and I waved again – I couldn’t go back there now, I just had to keep walking and hope that by the time I returned to the scene of the crime he’d gone – and my purse hadn’t. He wouldn’t stay out in this heat too long with a tiny baby anyway, so I walked for another ten minutes, then slowly headed back.
As I approached the area where I’d been sitting, I could see he was still there. The touching silhouette of a man holding his baby, the sun high in the sky, against a wave wall of turquoise sea. He hadn’t seen me, but if I turned and left, he might see me walking away and that would look weird – he’d really think I was stalking him then.
When I arrived at my sunlounger, I checked to see my purse was still there, which it was, thank God, and saw Dan was busy with Clover. I reckoned I could stay a while and just look at them discreetly from behind my sunglasses. It was a little creepy of me, I’ll admit, but as a new family had now settled on the beach between us, I didn’t think he’d be able to see me straight away, and he had his hands full with Clover. So I watched as he played with her and I tried really, really hard not to fall in love with him all over again. I wanted him, but did I want what he now brought with him? I watched as he attempted to extricate her blanket from the wheel of the pushchair, and in doing so nearly planted her face down in the sand. This made me agitated and I had to stop myself from shouting ‘Be careful!’ I tried not to look, but had no choice; I so desperately wanted to help, but he would be so weirded out if he thought I’d come b
ack unannounced and was observing like some obsessed psycho. I wasn’t. Honestly.
I watched as he sat staring up into the sun, and continued to talk to his baby, whose sunhat had now fallen off and the mother in me was taking over from the obsessed psycho and becoming even more anxious. I tried to look away, told myself it was none of my business, this was Dan and Saffron’s baby, not mine – but my eyes dragged me back. He was now juggling with a bottle of baby milk in one hand and Clover dangling in the other. This guy who could ride the highest waves, climb treetops, jump into streams, and even make the lightest sponge wasn’t quite as dexterous with a baby. From my discreet vantage point, disguised behind floppy hat and sunglasses, I saw he’d just dripped milk onto the baby’s now sun-exposed head. I was itching to just go over there and take Clover off him, like some TV supernanny, and tell him exactly where he was going wrong. But that would be even weirder than me silently stalking from my wobbly sunlounger, wouldn’t it? Then I spotted that thing all mothers know only too well – an induction into motherhood that happens swiftly and without warning: projectile vomit.
As this babycare car crash unfolded, I could see his helplessness and, sensing danger for the baby, suddenly found myself up and over the hot sand and by his side, beckoning assertively with my arms and shouting, ‘Dan, Dan, give her to me!’
He’d just been surprised by the trajectory of vomit on his chest and shoulders and was now even more surprised to see me lurching over him and demanding he hand me his baby. I felt like some sinister Mary Poppins, turning up out of nowhere, but I couldn’t help myself.
The vomit was now congealing on his T-shirt, the baby was screaming, and there was milk everywhere.
Wordlessly, I gestured again for him to hand me the screeching Clover and he looked from me to her and lifted her up to me. I took her, and at the same time grabbed a muslin square that was in the storage part of the pushchair.