1983

She lay on the towel as though the beach had been waiting all day for the shape of her body. The towel was striped yellow and white, though the yellow had long since faded to the colour of old newspaper left too long in sunlight, and it smelled faintly of mildew and salt and the coconut sunscreen her mother kept in the glovebox of the Kingswood all summer. Sand had worked deep into its threads years ago and would never really leave. Nothing in Bicheno ever truly left. The wind simply moved things around for a while.

Above her the January sky burned with that enormous hard blue particular to the summer of 1983, when the whole country seemed made of heat and cricket scores and radio songs drifting from open windows. Somewhere further along Waubs Bay somebody had a cassette player balanced on an esky, its batteries beginning to flatten so the music warped softly in the wind. Men At Work. Dragon. Maybe Australian Crawl. The sound stretched strangely across the harbour as though the bay itself were remembering the song rather than hearing it.

Waubs breathed beside her in long sleeping folds. Waves rolled gently into shore and collapsed against the sand with that hollow rushing sound that seemed to come from somewhere beneath the world itself. Then the water dragged back again in whispers.

Children shrieked near the bleached white toilet block. Teenagers with zinc on their noses and sunburnt shoulders threw themselves from the rocks into the cold green water below. Seagulls screamed over hot chips wrapped in paper already turning translucent with grease. Somewhere near the road a car door slammed and a dog barked once before silence settled again beneath the wind.

The girl closed her eyes against the brightness. Light burned red through her eyelids. She could feel grains of sand lifting against her legs and stomach like tiny living things. The salt drying on her skin made her feel older somehow, though she was only thirteen.

And drifting there between sleep and sunlight she noticed everything with the terrible intensity only thirteen-year-olds possess, before the world teaches them not to.

She noticed the older girls near the old jetty pylons lying on their stomachs on bright towels, bikini straps untied across their backs, talking lazily as though they already belonged to some more glamorous version of life she could not yet reach. One of them kept smoking cigarettes stolen from her mother’s handbag and exhaling the smoke sideways into the wind with an expression that seemed impossibly adult. Another wore a white oversized shirt over her bathers like the girls in Puberty Blues, and the sight of it filled the younger girl with a longing she did not understand. Not to be older exactly, but to arrive somehow inside herself.

She noticed the boys too. The way their wet hair darkened at the ends after swimming. The silver flash of sun on skinny shoulders. The confidence with which they climbed the rocks before diving. One of them, a boy from school whose voice had changed over Christmas, laughed loudly and pushed another boy into the water and suddenly she became aware of her own body lying there on the towel. Her legs. Her stomach. The damp edge of her bathers against her hips. A strange self-consciousness passed through her like cloud shadow over water.

The sea kept breathing.

Nearby a little girl cried because the sand was too hot on her feet and her father scooped her up laughing, and watching them the thirteen-year-old felt something shift painfully inside her chest. Not sadness exactly. More the beginning of understanding that everything changed. Little girls became older girls. Parents became older too. Summers disappeared one by one without anyone noticing at first.

She thought about the books hidden beneath her bed at home. Forever by Judy Blume with its bent spine and secret passages she reread over and over. She thought about Molly Ringwald in Sixteen Candles and how American teenagers seemed to live inside some glowing impossible world of bedrooms and parties and boys leaning against lockers. Meanwhile here in Bicheno the afternoons smelled of salt and fish and hot bitumen, and boys rode BMX bikes shirtless through town with towels around their necks.

The breeze shifted and carried the smell of vinegar and frying oil from the Silver Sands above the beach. She opened her eyes briefly and watched sunlight flashing across the water beyond the boats. Diamond Island sat low against the horizon like some ancient animal sleeping forever upon the sea. The granite surrounding Waubs Bay seemed alive in the heat, holding not just the afternoon but every afternoon that had ever happened there: mothers rubbing sunscreen onto children’s shoulders, teenagers kissing awkwardly in the water, fishermen cleaning a Flatty on the rocks while gulls screamed overhead.

And though she could never have explained it then, lying there at thirteen in the endless summer of 1983, she felt time loosening around her. As though the bay itself already knew she would one day leave this place. Knew she would grow older and lonelier and spend whole years longing suddenly, inexplicably, for this exact afternoon, for the rough towel beneath her body, the sound of Australian Crawl drifting thinly through the wind, the sting of salt on sunburnt skin, the unbearable beauty of being young beside the sea before life had properly begun.