1991

He walked to work along Waubs Bay because the beach gave him a few extra minutes before the day claimed him, and because at seventeen he still believed time was something that could not run out.

The morning was already filling with heat.

Jetty Road shimmered beneath the rising sun, the grainy asphalt releasing yesterday back into the air. The road carried its own smell, warm bitumen, dust, old summers trapped in tar. But beneath it lay the larger smell that belonged to Bicheno itself. Salt. Always salt. Salt caught in the timber fences silvered by decades of weather. Salt lodged in the weatherboards of holiday shacks. Salt drying on washing lines and drifting through open windows. The sea was never simply beside the town. It lived within it. Moved through it. Claimed it grain by grain.

A sprinkler ticked somewhere beyond a sweet pea hedge. A screen door banged. A radio murmured from an open kitchen window before being swallowed by distance. The smell of toast drifted briefly through the air and vanished.

Summer mornings in Bicheno never seemed to begin all at once. They unfolded.

Slowly.

Like the sea.

The road unravelled beneath him. Black asphalt became brown gravel, brown gravel became sand, and suddenly he was standing at the edge of the sea's domain, where the town ended and something older began.

Immediately the world changed.

The air felt cooler against his skin. Richer. Alive.

The smell deepened into something older than the town behind him. Damp sand. Kelp left high by the night tide. Seaweed drying on granite. The iodine tang of rock pools warming beneath the sun. The faint sweetness of decaying wrack hidden amongst the dunes. It was a smell that seemed to emerge not from the shore but from the bones of the coastline itself.

The beach stretched ahead beneath a sky already whitening toward noon.

Above the tide line the sand was loose and pale as sifted flour, collapsing beneath his runners. Lower down it became darker, firmer, holding the memory of the departing sea. Tiny shell fragments caught the sunlight. Threads of seaweed lay scattered like handwriting left by the tide during the night.

His footsteps made a soft grinding sound.

Not quite a crunch.

More a surrender.

The beach giving way beneath him.

The sea lay beside him in impossible colours.

Close to shore it was clear as blown glass, the sandy bottom visible metres below the surface. Sunlight drifted across it in moving patterns that seemed less reflections than living things. Further out the water deepened into turquoise so vivid it felt invented. Beyond that came cobalt and indigo and the deep blue-black waters around Diamond Island, where dark forests of kelp swayed unseen beneath the surface.

The water seemed lit from within.

A small wave slid onto the shore.

It curled around a cluster of kelp and retreated with a soft hiss, drawing a thousand grains of sand back toward itself.

Everything moved.

Everything breathed.

Even the granite appeared alive beneath the shifting light.

Ahead, Peggy's Point rose from the bay in its familiar jumble of ancient stone. The point had stood there long before the town. Long before roads. It seemed permanent. Though lately he had begun to suspect nothing truly was.

The glare coming off the water was fierce.

It burst through gaps in the she-oaks. Flashed between the banksias. Filled the backs of his eyes whenever he blinked.

The sea seemed determined to enter him.

To become part of his thinking.

And somehow, despite the brilliance of the morning, despite the smell of salt and stone and warming earth, his thoughts kept circling back to the girl.

The girl from Launceston.

The memory arrived with the same clarity as the bay itself.

Redbill Beach.

The heat trapped in the rocks.

The white sand bright enough to hurt his eyes.

The sound of laughter drifting across the shallows.

She had been standing ankle-deep in the water when he first noticed her.

Not because she demanded attention.

Because she didn't.

There had been something about her stillness.

Something about the way she looked toward the horizon while her friends talked around her.

As though part of her already existed somewhere else.

Her dark hair had been tangled by the wind.

Sunlight had picked copper from it.

Freckles dusted her shoulders.

Her eyes had shifted colour constantly, green, blue, grey, borrowing their shades from whatever part of the sea she happened to be facing.

They had spoken for less than an hour.

School.

Music.

How boring winter could be.

What it was like growing up in a town where everyone knew everyone.

Nothing important.

Everything important.

When she laughed she had touched his arm.

Just briefly.

The touch had lasted less than a second.

Yet twenty-four hours later he could still feel it.

He wondered if she would be there again that afternoon.

He wondered if she remembered his name.

Or whether he had already become one of those holiday memories that disappeared as soon as the drive back to Launceston began.

The Walkman bounced lightly against his hip. Inside, a worn cassette of REM turned beneath the plastic cover, the tape stretched slightly from too many listenings. Michael Stipe’s voice drifted through the foam headphones and mingled with the sounds of the bay, the hiss of retreating waves, the whisper of she-oaks, the distant cry of gulls circling above the water.

He wasn’t entirely sure what the song was about. Only that it seemed to understand something he couldn’t yet explain.

The strange ache of wanting things.

Wanting to leave.

Wanting to stay.

Wanting the girl from Launceston to be standing at Redbill again that afternoon.

Wanting a future that looked bigger than Bicheno without knowing what bigger actually meant.

The song seemed to belong to that feeling.

To all the things that sat just beyond understanding.

At home the world seemed to have become filled with endings. Every night there were images of missiles crossing black skies over Baghdad. Burning oil wells. Reporters speaking from deserts on the other side of the world. Baghdad seemed as distant as the moon. Yet somehow the worry arrived anyway.

Men in suits talking about recession. About unemployment. About businesses closing.

His father listened differently now. More carefully. As though the future might be hidden somewhere inside the words.

His mother watched him watching.

Silence had acquired a new weight inside their house.

The old world adults trusted appeared to be loosening around the edges. Everything seemed to be changing shape. Nobody appeared entirely certain what would replace it.

Yet the sea remained indifferent.

The tide arrived.

The tide left.

The granite endured.

The bay continued gathering sunlight exactly as it had the year before and the century before that.

He reached the granite path climbing toward the Silver Sands.

The concrete steps emerged from the sand like the spine of some ancient creature sleeping beneath the coast.

Warmth radiated through the soles of his shoes.

She-oaks leaned overhead, their needles whispering together with a sound that was almost identical to distant surf. Banksias crowded the edges of the path, twisted and wind-shaped, their flowers heavy with nectar. Bees drifted lazily between them.

As he climbed, the smell shifted.

Less sea.

More earth.

Dry grass.

Warm granite.

The resin scent of sunburnt coastal scrub.

Through breaks in the foliage the bay appeared and vanished.

Each glimpse struck him anew.

A flash of turquoise.

A sweep of white sand.

Sunlight shattered into a thousand moving fragments across the water.

At the top he paused.

Below him Waubs Bay curved around the coastline like a hand holding light.

Children ran through the shallows.

Bright towels bloomed across the beach.

A radio played somewhere beyond hearing.

The sea breathed steadily against the shore.

Beyond it stood Diamond Island.

Beyond that, the horizon.

And beyond the horizon every place he had never seen.

The girl from Launceston.

The Silver Sands waiting above the hill.

The world rearranging itself beyond Bicheno.

All of it seemed connected by something he could feel but could not yet name.

The sensation that life was gathering itself.

The sensation that childhood was already receding behind him, quietly and without ceremony, like a tide withdrawing from the sand.

Ahead, the white walls of the Silver Sands shone above the bay.

Behind him, Waubs Bay glittered through the she-oaks.

And standing between them, seventeen years old and sunlit and uncertain, he felt the peculiar ache of youth, the conviction that something extraordinary was waiting just beyond Peggy’s, and the fear that he might fail to recognise it when it arrived.