Audrey Liza – Chapter 9
The Long Road Home
Sitting next to her in the van, he became keenly aware of her smell.
It was the smell of a woman who hadn’t had much time for washing recently, and had been doing hard, physical work out of doors. She smelled of sweat and camp fire and soot and dust and … yes, of apples. The musky, sweet aroma of fermenting apples!
It was a distinctly animal smell. As it suffused the air in the small cabin, he found his nostrils flaring and his pulse quickening. He wanted to wallow, bathe in that smell – and he was charmed by the certainty that it would hang around his van, his bed, his person, long after the woman herself was back in her orchard.
Well, well, boring, square, timid Jamie Anderson, he thought, as they talked about inconsequential things.
Looks like you’ve got a kink, after all. This smelly, unwashed woman does things to you. And you want to do things to her, with her, lie back and let her … Such filthy, delicious things …
‘So, what do you think?’
She was looking at him intently. Sharply.
‘You weren’t listening, were you?’
‘Sorry,’ he admitted. Then, taking a shaky breath. ‘Actually, I was thinking about you. Us. Ah, um, you and me.’
‘I see,’ she continued severely. ‘Well, Jamie Anderson, if you had been listening, rather than thinking about … us, you would have heard me suggest that we find somewhere to pull over for a break.’
‘Oh, sorry. Sure.’
‘A recreational break,’ she continued. ‘Because I can see your mind isn’t on the road, and frankly,’ she laid her hand on his thigh and squeezed, ‘neither is mine. The sexual tension in this van is driving us both to distraction. We need to release it. Urgently.’
Even as a young man, Jamie Anderson had never thought of himself as the object of anyone’s desire. Not even Mags, though he may have been once, in the beginning. She’d certainly seen him as a life partner, the father of her children, but that wasn’t quite the same thing, was it?
Now he’d been told in emphatic terms that he was. That he was driving someone to distraction with his allure and she had an urgent need to do something about it.
He was just an elderly bloke, balding and overweight. And she was actually pretty, and though she was no longer young, she was ageing with grace.
Yet she fancied him.
It was possibly one of the high points of his life, up there with the birth of his children.
Then they pulled into the picnic spot, let the blinds down, and he stopped analysing and comparing, and feeling bashful.
It was so … easy.
Afterwards, he felt as if the two of them had shared a huge joke, a hilarious yet important secret which nobody else in the world knew. Laughter welled up in his throat, yet it came out as a sob.
He flowed over with tenderness and wonder.
The afterglow lasted for most of the three-hour journey.
Most, not all.
He couldn’t bloody find it. He stared at the phone screen in frustration. How could he not find the place where he was born, had spent the first five years of his life?
He’d thought he knew exactly where it was. The headland that protected the tiny cove where the boats rode at their moorings. Surely it was this point, here, this nub on the coast, just north of Georges Bay?
He could see it all when he closed his eyes. Hear and smell it. Feel it in every pore.
He still went there late at night, when he was restless but needed to sleep. He let the surf carry him, bear him safely in and out. A little boy again in the arms of the Great Big Sea.
But when they arrived at the point on the map all his dreams had turned around – there was nothing.
No road threaded through the she-oaks and low dunes. No settlement stretched around the curve of the bay. No ragged, homely shacks perched above the high-water mark. No boats tugged at their mooring chains.
There were just angular, architect-designed beachhouses, jutting from the upper slopes. Eyries of concrete, glass and steel.
Below them there was white sand like icing sugar, which could still be made to squeak underfoot. There were rounded grey rocks that fitted just right – still – under the soles of your feet, and livid orange lichen splashed across them like flames. There was restless turquoise water that tickled your toes and swirled around your ankles. There were lines of surf so white you could only look at them through half-closed eyes.
But there was no home.
Eventually her sharp eyes spotted the holes in the rock where the jetty had stood, and the long gouges where the rails of the slipway had run. The winch and the rails themselves had vanished. Sold for scrap, probably.
They met a chatty, middle-aged woman who thought that her mother might have reminisced about the fishing colony, when she was still alive.
‘But that was a long time ago! Back in the … ooh … the seventies, must have been. That the shacks started to be washed away, taken by the sea. Nothing here now – as you can see.’
She waved vaguely towards the dunes.
‘Might be some bits and bobs left up there in the scrub. Or maybe ask in the History Room, in St Helens? Someone might know.’
He could tell that Leigh knew, could see how distressed he was. How it was making her feel awkward. How it might get between them, prise them apart.
He didn’t want that, couldn’t let that happen.
It was getting late. The sun was slipping behind the high hills and soon they’d start to lose the light.
‘Come on,’ he said, putting his arm around her waist. ‘Let’s drive a bit further up the coast. See if we can’t find a good camp for the night, eh?’
The arm hung there, feeling out of place and impudent. Though hadn’t he been inside her, under her, on top of her just a few hours ago? Couldn’t he still taste her on his lips? After a moment’s hesitation, she snuggled into his embrace, put her arm around his hip and pulled him tightly against her side.
‘Yes, let’s do that.’
Then she was gone, hair flying, bare feet kicking up sand.
‘Race you to the van!’
The Easter holidays had been over for a week now, and the beach campsites were empty.
They found a spot where the surf rolled in, regular and miles long, and there was no dark stagnant creek or lagoon full of ravenous mosquitoes to feast on their blood. They gathered driftwood in the dusk, but put off lighting their fire.
The breeze off the land was silky and warm and the night was the purest, blackest thing. After it had become fully dark, she took him by the hand and led him naked into the phosphorescent breakers.
That night it wasn’t the sea that held him safe, rocked him to sleep in its arms. It wasn’t a bed of seaweed that he slept upon, but a tangle of salt-scented hair, spread across his pillow. It wasn’t the sunwarmed rocks that lent him their heat.
He slept the deep sleep of one who has at last come home, after a lifetime as a stranger, travelling foreign lands.
Coming up:
This Friday in The Last Orchard: Leigh’s perspective on the road trip to the Bay of Fires. (Paid subscription.)
Next Tuesday in Audrey Liza: Jamie arrives back at the yard to find that arrangements have been made on his behalf.
She is the apple of his nose ..