Shallow Breath

3

Desi




As soon as she had seen the ocean, Desi had been unable to resist its pull. Each step closer has brought her back to herself, helping her to pretend, for a little while, that she has never been gone. But now, as the weakening sun loses its grip on the day and slips soundlessly over the edge of the world, Desi hurries across the cooling sand, each stride returning her to troubling reality.

She can see Pete inside the shack, lighting candles, his face sombre in the flickering light. Thank goodness he is here. He thinks of everything.

‘I filled your cylinder, but let’s not bother with the barbecue,’ he announces when he sees her at the door. ‘It’s too windy and dark now. It’ll be a disaster. I’ve bought some extras. Just give me five minutes and we’ll eat.’

She wants to ask about the others: Maya, Rebecca, Caitlin – even her father. But she says nothing. Instead, she sits down and watches him put things on the table – bread, cheese, dips, salad, wine. The unplanned romance of their surroundings doesn’t escape her.

Eventually, Pete slides into the seat opposite and she feels his gaze on her. Gently he reaches out and strokes her arm. She waits to see what he will say, but he doesn’t talk, just takes his hand away and begins to cut into his bread.

She loves him for that: That, and so much else. And yet she still doesn’t know if this will work out the way he wants it to.

‘What have you got planned for tomorrow?’ he asks, beginning to eat.

‘I need to go and see Maya first.’

‘Do you want me to come with you?’

‘Don’t you have to go to work?’

He pauses, then shrugs. ‘I could be sick.’

‘Don’t do that for me.’

He stops eating for a moment and stares at his plate as though collecting his thoughts. She is dismayed. She hadn’t intended it to sting, but it obviously has.

‘Pete, what I mean is, you’ve done enough.’

They eat in silence. Desi tries to think of something else, something to make him smile. ‘When can I see Indah, and the baby?’ she asks.

He glances up, and his expression isn’t what she expected. He seems worried. Perhaps he thinks she’s joking, but she’s not. She can’t wait to see Indah and her latest arrival. It is the only thing on her to do list that doesn’t terrify or bore her.

‘I’ll have to see.’

‘You don’t need to make any special arrangements.’

What is that look he is giving her now? Is it suspicious? He had been so pleased when he’d told her that Indah was pregnant again. Surely it’s natural that she is curious. But now she realises that he has barely mentioned Indah recently.



‘Is there something wrong? Didn’t you say she had a girl? Are they okay?’

‘They’re fine,’ he says, all his concentration on his meal. ‘I’ll sort something out.’ He nods at her plate. ‘Eat something, Des.’

She picks up a piece of bread and swipes it across a swirl of hummus. It looks delicious, but in her mouth the taste is stale and acidic. Pete is contemplating her as she sits back. ‘I’ve got no appetite, I’m sorry.’

He doesn’t say anything as he finishes and collects her plate. She follows him to the kitchen, watching him as he runs the tap. She hasn’t had the chance to study him like this for a long time, and she is shocked at how perilously thin he is. And perhaps it is the light, but his skin appears to be yellow. On prison visits, he had already been seated at the table by the time she saw him, and protocol dictated that she had to get up and leave before he did. She had spent that precious time absorbing his face – she had noticed when he cut his hair, the creeping grey at his temples, the deep circles and lines around his eyes, the tiredness in them. But now she is frightened.

‘Pete, is there anything wrong?’

He is dropping cutlery into the sink. He doesn’t look at her. ‘What makes you say that?’

‘You’ve lost weight.’

He makes an amused sound, but it’s nowhere near laughter.

‘I’m serious.’

He doesn’t glance back, just pushes his hands into sudsy water. ‘I’m fine, Des, but thanks for caring.’

Suddenly she wants to go and put her arms around him, press her body into his. The urge, so strong and unexpected, catches her completely off guard. The silence seems to become heavy, saturated with unspoken thoughts, and she moves quickly to cut in before something breaks. ‘Will you come swimming with me in the morning?’

He shakes his head. ‘Sorry, I’ve got to leave early. But I’ll come again later, find out how you’ve got on with Maya. Okay?’

‘Yes, that’s fine,’ she says, but it isn’t at all. She wants to be independent, but spines of dread pierce her at the thought of him leaving. While he is here, she feels much safer. Without him she’s frightened of everything, most of all herself.




After Pete has settled down on the sofa and begun to snore, Desi retreats to her bedroom and waits. She is bone-tired, but it is stifling in the small room, and sleep will not come.

Eventually she collects some blankets and takes them outside, making her way onto the beach, just past the scrubby dunes. The cool air is an instant relief, the ceaseless rustling of the ocean a whispered lullaby, filtering out everything fearful, refilling the empty spaces with quiet, abstract hope.

She can hear Connor’s voice as though he is right next to her. What do you think, Des – is life like the current, an endless back and forth? Or is it the sea, constant?

It must be twenty years since he said that, when they were spending their days on the boat. How can it be possible that she can hear him so clearly, when he has been gone for so long?

She had been a different person then – unaware she had the capacity to cause so much hurt. She feels heavy with remorse and shame when she thinks about her one moment of madness – how she had recklessly torn at the fragile web of her life, forgetting each thread was attached to so many others, until her whole world fell apart.

For a while, there had been a crucial, missing few minutes in Desi’s memory. One moment, she was at home; the next, she was getting out of her car, as people ran towards her. This lapse had been the sticking point in her sentencing. Culpability had been easy: Desi had pleaded guilty, and was full of remorse. But when she couldn’t explain what had happened or why, the prosecution team had used this to ask for a custodial sentence. A psychologist’s report concurred – it said that Desi wasn’t withholding because she couldn’t remember, but because she chose not to.

But that seems less important now than apologising again to Rebecca and her family. The physical scars may be healing, but what about those deeper, more abiding ones?

The noise of the ocean is changing. Each wave carries soft entreaties and broken promises, dropping them at her feet like flotsam, the churned-up fragments of the past. Desi watches helplessly until they settle, layer on layer, recreating the landscape of her life. Most of her story falls away into deep, hidden stratas, leaving only a thin veneer for her to survey. What she sees makes her shudder.

Every decision she has made in her life had seemed right at the time, but surely they must all have been wrong, or she wouldn’t have ended up here, nearing forty, alone, with a criminal record and no job prospects. She sits up for a while, hugging her knees close to her chest. Despite the dark, leering void of her future, tonight she will rejoice in her freedom and not be cowed by fears of the unknown.

She looks north, thinking of Maya asleep a short distance up the coast. She hadn’t wanted her daughter to go to Lovelock Bay. She had asked Pete to move into the shack, but he said it was inappropriate for a man to live alone with a seventeen-year-old girl who was not his relation. ‘You’re like a father to her,’ she’d argued, astonished, but he wouldn’t be swayed. Then Maya had settled the argument by declaring she didn’t want to live in the shack any more. She had gone to Jackson – and Charlie. Perhaps Desi shouldn’t feel so humiliated about relying on her dad’s charity. But she does, and she can’t wait to have Maya home.

She lies down again, cocooned in her nest of blankets, hidden under the wing of night. She studies the pinwheel of the endless sky, marvelling at its breadth as the ocean soothes and shushes. The stars begin to shiver as a deep, somnolent wave overtakes her, and she is lost in her own sleeping depths before she is aware of it.




What happens next is part dream, part memory. It is 1986, and Desi is thirteen years old, arms whirling through the water, her shoulders burning. Each time she turns her head to the right, she sees two men gawking at her from a boat in the distance. The shorter one holds a stopwatch, frowning. The taller one is grinning like an ape.

Desi is going as fast as she can. She doesn’t mind swimming, but there are many things she dreads about the ocean. For a start, there are rip-tides that carry you stealthily away from shore. On more than one occasion, her father has taken pity and pulled her aboard spluttering when she has almost given up fighting the current. But what really makes her stomach drop is the endless blue beneath her, extending well beyond her vision. Who knows what might be down there.

However, it is her father’s idea that, when he takes her out on his crayfishing boat, Desi should swim the last kilometre to shore. He is encouraging her natural talent, or so he had sniped at Desi’s mother when Hester complained. ‘It’s how my dad taught me. If she’s fast enough, she could be an Olympian. Think of that.’ And the thought had seemed to stall her mother’s objections.

She hears her dad and his deckhand Rick begin to shout encouragement. They haven’t done this before. She can feel she is going well, though. This could be her best time.

Then she registers the tone of their voices. Urgent. She flicks a glance towards the boat, to see them leaning over the side, pointing. She sculls with her hands to get upright, and into her line of vision comes a flash of grey fin, almost in touching distance.

Her veins run cold with terror. Any moment there will be a bite, and unimaginable pain. She will be swimming in her own blood; she will be yanked under to drown. The shark has appeared between her and the boat, but she has to swim that way to safety. In her panic, she begins to move that way anyway, but she doesn’t seem able to swim properly any more. Her strokes are too frantic; she is just churning up water, not going anywhere, waiting for the strike.

Time arrests. Until, to her surprise, her father begins shooing her towards the shore. ‘Keep going!’ he shouts.

There is no time for questions. She turns and starts to swim, kicking like her feet are on fire.

And then the water breaks again, only an arm’s length in front of her, and out flies a slick gunmetal torpedo. It arcs over her, then the water explodes into spray as it neatly cleaves the sea on re-entry, leaving only bubbles in its wake.

Not a shark at all.

A dolphin.

She loses all momentum, so relieved that she is instantly laughing while choking back tears. The fin flashes past again, and this time she puts her face down into the water. For a moment the dolphin is right there in front of her, regarding her with a small, alert eye, the curve of its jaw fixed in a smile.

And then it is gone.

She twists around, searching in every direction, trying to see where the dolphin went, but there is no sign of it.

She has forgotten her father and Rick for a moment, until she sees them leaning on the rail. ‘Come on, Desi, get moving,’ her father is shouting, all impatience now.

Both encounters were over so quickly she is glad she has witnesses, or she might not have believed her own eyes. She turns and has a quick look at the beach, before beginning to grind out the strokes. Within the fog of water, the dolphin comes into view again, swimming directly under her body. If she reached out, she could touch it, and its steady pace matches hers. They are synchronised for what can only be a minute, but to Desi it is as though time is suspended. Then the dolphin disappears, and shortly afterwards she is staggering out of the surf, walking around to wait while her father moors the boat.

Rick comes down the pontoon first. ‘We thought you had a shark sniffin’ at you for a second there,’ he laughs.

The dream begins to break, and she doesn’t want it to. In her lightening sleep, she ignores Rick, rewinding the memory until she is back with the dolphin, swimming in tandem again. She can still hear the ocean crackling and fizzing in her ears. She can still feel what it was like to briefly have a space filled inside her that she hadn’t even realised was there.

She remembers the rest of that day so clearly. Her father and Rick had hurried into the pub as usual, leaving her waiting an hour for them, shivering on the edge of the slipway wall, unable to believe what had happened. Later in the evening she had tried to tell her mother about the dolphin, but Hester had been too distracted by Jackson’s toddler tantrums to listen properly. Eventually she had decided she would walk to Rebecca’s.

Rebecca was Rick’s daughter, and her closest friend. The girls had known one another since they were babies, when their mothers had grown close while their fathers were out crayfishing. As toddlers, they had pushed one another’s strollers, built sandcastles and shared ice-creams. As young girls, they had sat on the beach and told each other stories of tiny mermaids hiding in rock pools, or secret lands behind the clouds. Desi had pestered Charlie to let Rebecca come out on the boat too, but he had always refused. Rebecca claimed she was glad she didn’t have to go – she didn’t want to witness the pots of crawling crayfish being spilt into buckets and counted, or spend the day throwing up over the side. But as Desi raced around to her house that night, she knew Rebecca would be spewing about missing the dolphin.

The Carlisle family lived in a small fibro close to the beach. It was set back from the road, with a large garden at the front. As Desi walked up the path, light blared from the windows, and she could hear raised voices. Unsure, she edged across to peep in the window of the front lounge.

In the far corner, Rick was towering over his wife, who was obviously livid. Marie’s rapid Italian strafed the air, as she waved her arms furiously. Then, without warning, Rick grabbed hold of Marie’s ponytail, and pulled her into the kitchen as she kicked and screamed. Desi jumped as she heard a dull thud, and all the noise stopped. Only then had she noticed Rebecca and her brother on the sofa, both in the same dull trance, never taking their eyes off the flickering television screen.

Desi had raced back down the path, totally forgetting the reason she had gone there. Her mind had been bursting with questions. Should she tell someone? In the end, she had decided to talk to Rebecca first. The next day, as they sat on the sand, Desi had put her hand on her friend’s shoulder and explained what she’d seen.

Rebecca had folded her arms across her knees. Then she had turned to Desi and made her promise that she would never tell. It only happened sometimes, she said. But if they told, it would be much, much worse.

Rebecca was her best friend. Of course Desi had agreed without hesitation. Not knowing what it would cost her, in the end. Not yet realising that some things couldn’t be un-seen.

Now, as she thinks of Rebecca, one memory slides into another. Rebecca is twenty years older, a small, limp figure cradled in her arms as she screams at Desi. Desi hadn’t even understood, at the time, that she was to blame. But now she needs to find the words to tell her friend how terribly sorry she is. She wants to explain the whole thing to Rebecca from start to finish; how it all began that day with the dolphin. But even if she did, she knows this is one thing she can never make right.