by Bronwyn Sell
‘Glad to hear it. Sit back and enjoy the view.’
Oh, I am.
Trip Review: Curlew Bay
Rating:
Review: Omigod the insect bites. Been home for a week and I’m still scratching them and they’re getting worse. There was spray in the room but it was some eco-friendly rubbish so I didn’t bother. They should bomb the whole island with proper pesticides. Get rid of them for good.
14
Harry
Harry popped up the little sun tent beside the lagoon on the leeward side of Stingray Island and angled it to catch a breeze without lifting off. He pulled his laptop from the drybag, silently cursing it.
‘You’re going to work?’ Sophia said. ‘Here?’
‘This is my office. It’s that funding application.’ He checked his watch. ‘I’ll miss the deadline but hopefully they’ll take pity on me, given the circumstances.’ He should have finished it that morning, but he’d kept staring at the blue sky out the window of the resort office.
‘Can I help? I’m on the board of a couple of trusts. I’ve read a lot of applications.’
He sat on the floor of the tent and fired up the laptop. ‘Any of them fund marine or island conservation?’
‘Sadly no. Unless you’re also an aspiring opera singer or a teenager from a deprived background requiring a university scholarship?’ She lowered herself down next to him, and he caught a fresh scent. He let his lungs fill. He’d have expected a woman like her to smell expensive, some French perfume from a glowing white counter at duty-free. Hers was more the fresh smell of the clean laundry that came off the barge.
‘You’re on holiday,’ he said.
‘Like you said—I don’t know how to holiday.’ She held out her hands for the laptop. ‘I like being useful. And what else have I got to do?’
‘This is not the sort of place where you need to do anything. Generally, when people go to deserted beaches, they swim and read and get a tan.’
‘Is that what you do?’
‘Well, no, not these days.’ When was the last time he’d done anything like that?
‘Hypocrite.’
‘I’m not the one paying to be here.’
‘Look, if I’m in full sun for more than twenty minutes, I self-destruct. Hand it over. I honestly like doing this stuff.’
He complied. ‘You’re nuts.’
‘Takes all kinds.’
He lay back, resting his head on his linked hands, his knees bent up and his toes digging into the sand just outside the tent. She was silent a minute or two then her fingers started tap-dancing on the keyboard. She’d pushed her sunglasses into her hair and her face was fierce, blue eyes shining like they had their own light source. Was she rewriting the entire thing? Was it that bad?
‘Done,’ she said sometime later. Precisely how much time he didn’t know because he’d dozed off. He crunched up to sitting, hurriedly wiping drool from beside his mouth. She passed him the laptop. The document was unrecognisable—headings and subheadings and bullet points and graphical stuff, like it’d been professionally designed. Even better, it read like someone who wasn’t him had written it.
‘This is incredible,’ he said.
‘Of course it is,’ she said dismissively.
‘Man, I love your confidence.’
She shrugged. ‘I know what I’m good at and what I’m not good at, that’s all. And I try not to beat myself up about the latter, not always successfully. Being persuasive is my thing.’
‘I thought lie-detecting was your thing.’
‘I have more than one thing. I really could be of use to you, you know.’
‘Sophia …’
‘Humour me. I just donated half an hour of my time to you, and you don’t want to know what my charge-out rate is. The least you can do is hear me out.’
He folded his arms. ‘Go on.’
‘What if I live up here for a year? I could donate my time, you wouldn’t have to pay me. If I haven’t made myself useful by the end of the year, I’ll go back to Sydney. I could bash off a funding application every day. I just want to be helpful, that’s all.’
‘You just want to be helpful.’ And sure, the idea of working beside her every day appealed on several levels, but it’d never work, on any of those levels.
She turned to face him, hugging her knees. ‘Doesn’t everyone? I envy you. You get to see tangible results of your work and they’re heroic results. Saving the world.’
And there it is.
‘What?’ she said.
‘What?’
‘You groaned when I said, “Saving the world.”’
‘I did?’ He thought he’d groaned on the inside.
‘What’s wrong with saving the world? Or is this you being humble?’
‘Nothing at all wrong with saving the world. Is that your number-one motivation here?’
She looked out at the beach, lowering her sunglasses onto her nose. ‘Maybe. I’m working it out as I go along. But who doesn’t want to save the world? In my job, I only make the world a better place for rich people. But here I could—’
‘How much do you earn in this thankless job of yours?’
‘You’re asking how much I earn?’
‘I don’t expect you’ll tell me unless you want to.’
The skin at one side of her mouth bunched. The reactions in her face were so subtle you had to look closely to read them, especially with her eyes hidden by sunglasses. She was probably used to maintaining a poker face.
‘Safe to assume it’s well into six figures?’ he said.
‘This isn’t about money.’
‘It’s always about money when you don’t have enough of it. Not wanting to diminish your talents in building predator traps and weeding out invasive plants, but you’d be better off doing what you do best and sending our trust a tax-deductible tiny fraction of your income. We have donor packs at reception just for this. You fill in your bank or credit card details and sign it and away we go. And my Aunty Tam—she’s the sales and marketing manager, though she’s away at the moment—forces me to write a cheerful little email every month to tell you where your money has been spent. You get job satisfaction without uprooting your life, locals get work, the fish and birds and coral go around with happy smiles. World saved.’
‘You have donor packs “just for this”. What does that mean? Do you get a lot of guests throwing themselves at you like this?’ There was a slight wrinkle where her nostril met her cheek. ‘I mean … those weren’t the right words. I don’t know where that … Obviously, I’m not throwing myself at you.’ She shook herself, as if the idea were repulsive. He was reasonably certain he’d be the opposite of repulsed if she threw herself at him. He shifted away, not that there was much room to shift away.
It’s not you. It’s the idea of you.
‘I get what you’re saying,’ he said. ‘And, sure, it’s not uncommon for people to come here and start seeing holes in their lives that may not be there, or that would be better fixed by a tweak to their regular existence rather than a total upheaval. It’s normal to reassess your life when you’re on holiday. Wait until you’re settled back at home before you make big changes. In a year’s time, when your life is back on track, you’ll thank me. Limbo is not a happy place to be, even when it looks like this.’
If he had a hundred dollars for each time he’d given that speech to well-meaning guests, he’d have had a new boat years ago. Some did leave fifty or a hundred bucks on the counter as they left. One woman sent a cheque for the trust along with a plane ticket to London in his name, as if the money were a payment for services she expected to be rendered when he visited. He’d banked the cheque and arranged with the airline to refund her.
Sophia was staring at the ocean again. Bugger. She was deflating right in front of him like a landed starfish. But not at all like a landed starfish.
‘Sophia?’
‘I am such a cliché. I hate being a cliché.’
‘You’re
not. You’re a well-meaning human being, like most of the other people on this planet. Being in the majority doesn’t make you a cliché.’
‘I am a cliché. Ditched at the altar and desperate.’
‘That’s on him, not you.’
She tried a smile, but it wasn’t convincing. ‘I’ll be thirty-eight next year,’ she told the ocean.
‘Are you saying that in reference to having kids?’ Did he even want to go there?
She brushed a spray of sand off one calf. By the gliding noise, he could tell that those long legs were smooth as a frangipani petal. ‘We were going to start trying on honeymoon. I had it all planned. As much as you can plan these things. For all I know, it’s already too late. It took five years of dating to get to the point of deciding to get married, and then an eight-month engagement. I don’t have that kind of time left. I might not even have half that time. I mean, I know I could go it alone but …’ She rested her chin in the dip between her knees.
Hell. He could goanna her, but he suspected she needed to get all that out.
‘This is not where I was supposed to be right now. I mean, it’s exactly where I was supposed to be, but I wasn’t supposed to be sitting here with you.’ She straightened. ‘Wow, that came out badly. I mean, I shouldn’t be sitting here whining to a stranger about my wretched life. I should be ploughing right on into the future. Because that’s the sort of thing Sophia Wicks does. This is not. Shit. Sorry.’
‘I knew what you meant.’ And he could relate. This wasn’t where his life was supposed to be either. Well, it was where his life was supposed to be, but he was meant to be a dad by now. And, sure, guys had less of a strict deadline on that stuff, but it wasn’t like he was meeting potential partners every day.
‘I’m seriously sorry this has happened to you.’ He ducked out of the shelter and started unbuttoning his shirt. ‘You know what you need? A distraction.’
‘What?’ she said, as if he’d suggested a shark dive.
‘A swim?’
‘Oh. I didn’t bring my swimmers.’
‘Really?’
‘Didn’t occur to me.’
‘Rule number one, always wear your swimmers under your clothes. Better still, as clothes.’ He wore nothing but boardies on any given day.
‘I guess I could go in bra and knick— No.’
‘No?’
‘No.’
He held out his palms, indicating the deserted beach. ‘No one here to judge. And if anyone comes, you’ll have plenty of warning.’
‘My underwear is really not suitable for swimming.’
‘What do you mean?’ What type of material didn’t survive saltwater? Silk?
‘It’s honeymoon lingerie, so …’
‘Oh. Oh.’
‘It was meant to be sort of a joke for my hus— Yeah, that guy. I packed no practical underwear at all. It’d be marginally less embarrassing to swim naked.’
Naked swimming was, of course, the best kind, but he wasn’t about to say that. ‘Tell you what. I have to check on some invasive weeds on the other side of the island, make sure they haven’t come back since I was last here.’ He looked at his watch. ‘I’ll give you absolute privacy and come back in exactly thirty minutes.’
She smoothed her long fingers over her left wrist. ‘I don’t have my watch, but I’ll just have a quick dip, so yeah, that’ll be fine, thanks. I am pretty hot. Do you have the sunscreen? I reapplied on the boat but I should probably, uh, fill in the gaps.’
‘In the drybag.’ The thought of those graceful hands smoothing sunscreen over her naked body … Definitely time to get as far away as he could on a two-hectare island.
Checking for weeds on the windward side took about ten minutes—there were none, for the win—so he went for a snorkel among the rocks, buffeted by the swell. The seagrass was looking healthy, thanks to the new moorings that were cutting down on anchor and chain damage. Looked like the only things damaging it were the things that nature intended to damage it—turtles and dugongs. He dragged his swim out to forty minutes, just to be safe. There was no sign of Sophia when he climbed back around the rocks. She was probably in the shelter.
‘Coming, ready or not,’ he called, when he was within earshot. The swell had strengthened around the point, making the surf boom. ‘But actually only if you’re ready.’
No response.
‘Sophia?’
And then he saw her. Whoa, did he see her, floating face-up in the water, lazily stroking with her arms and legs. Naked. He ran back the way he came, scooted behind a boulder and pressed his spine against the cool rock. Maybe he should accept her offer to volunteer—there was a high probability that Nan would approve.
He rubbed his forehead with his palms. No.
Yeah, she was incredible, in so many ways. But she wanted to move on—needed to move on. And if he dated anyone, she’d live no further away than Mackay. Sophia would last a month or two on the island, tops. Then they’d both end up back at square one, except worse off because first you had to claw yourself back up to square one.
A new noise rose above the charging surf. A helicopter, close by. He looked up. Shit. Cody, headed for the sandspit, which meant he had a chopper-load of tourists.
In seconds, he’d be right over Sophia.
15
Harry took off, shouting Sophia’s name. She was still floating, eyes shut. Her ears must be underwater. He splashed into the shallows and called again, trying not to look directly at her. She didn’t move. The chopper was descending. He backtracked to the tent and pulled her towel from her bag. Something white flew out of it. A bra and … were those even undies? Bloody hell.
He strode into the water, shouting, averting his gaze. He was a saint and he hated himself for it. He was almost on top of her—but not on top of her, jeez—when she finally opened her eyes, saw him and gave a screech. She rolled onto her front and found the sand with her feet, remaining doubled over. She was arse-deep—and what an arse.
He held the towel high above the water, screening her from himself and the landing chopper. The wind from the blades whipped the cloth, giving him glimpses of pale skin.
‘The chopper,’ he shouted, his head resolutely turned to the beach. ‘I was calling you and you didn’t … I didn’t think you’d want to, uh, I thought you’d rather, um …’
A moment of silence. Then a peal of laughter. ‘Hell’s bells. Did they—? Would they have—?’
‘I’m sure they wouldn’t have seen,’ he lied. ‘So much scenery to look at. Uh, do you want to get out of the water now?’
‘Take a few steps up the beach with me,’ she said, barely spitting the words out for cacking herself, ‘so the towel doesn’t get wet.’
He did, forcing himself to ignore his peripheral vision. Finally, she backed into the towel and wrapped herself up.
‘At least this means you’ve got a ride back,’ he said.
‘Just me?’ She glanced at him, over her shoulder. ‘What about you?’
‘I’ll wait for Lena. I’ll go and check Cody has room while you get changed,’ he said, backing away. ‘And sorry, your undies are sort of scattered. They jumped out at me when I grabbed your towel.’
‘They jumped out at you?’
‘They did.’
She lost it again. Why was he more shaken than she was? ‘That … honestly would be quite … scary.’
Cody shut down the chopper, dispatched his tourists, and wandered up to meet Harry halfway along the sandspit, his blond mop the same colour as the sand. One day, someone in the family would catch him in the act of bleaching it, though he swore it was from the sun. By the grin splitting his face, there was no mistaking that he’d got the full monty on Sophia.
‘Bro,’ Cody said, drawing out the word.
‘Not what you think. She forgot her swimmers.’
‘Bro.’
‘Shut up.’
‘Watching you sprint to rescue her …’ Cody shook his head, grinning as if he couldn’t believe
his luck. ‘I might have to charge the tourists extra for the floor show.’
‘Just don’t give her any grief.’
‘As if I would. She’s a guest. But I hope you’re treating her with respect.’
‘What do you think bringing her a towel was? Tin Lizzy died again, and we had to kayak here from the reef.’
‘You sure Nan didn’t sabotage the fuel line? When Lena told her that you were stranded with the jilted bride, she suggested an airdrop of overnight supplies.’
‘We’re going to get a reputation. Come to Curlew Bay, where we’ll kidnap you and force you to marry one of us. And her name’s Sophia.’
‘Her name’s Sophia. But you’re definitely not going there?’
‘Definitely not.’
‘Good. Dunno if I can handle you getting all heartbroken and mopey again. Going deep and personal makes me uncomfortable.’
‘When have you ever gone deep and personal?’ Cody’s only relationship advice was to eject the second you hit a speedbump.
‘Since never, and I’m good with that. I like our shallow brother thing just fine. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to rescue a poor stranded woman whose stunning body is going to waste being stuck out here with a nun.’
‘Remember the rules, Cody.’
‘The rules are fucked up. I’m not supposed to screw employees or guests, which is all of the people on the island who aren’t related to me. And Nan wonders why we’re all single. And I notice that it’s only me that this rule seems to apply to. Maybe I’d better drop into the military base next time Lena goes for a perv.’
‘Count yourself lucky that you get off the island regularly. I can’t remember the last time I set foot on another inhabited land mass.’ Sometimes Harry got to the mainland and found himself marvelling at cars like they were from another planet. Perhaps it was time to do another of the sabbaticals Nan insisted they all take every few years. She maintained it was for mental health and upskilling, and because she couldn’t keep everyone’s names straight when there were too many of them in the same place (which was true, and the reason she called all her descendants ‘my love’), but everyone knew it was primarily in the hope they’d find spouses. Human husbandry.