Chapter Text
“Are we there yet?”
Charlie’s dad turns around from the front passenger seat. “No, Olly. Half an hour to go.”
Olly gives a surprisingly gusty sigh for a four-year-old, but thankfully does not labour his point further.
It’s only a ninety-minute drive from Adelaide to Knights Harbour, but it feels much longer. Charlie is thoroughly squashed between Olly’s hard-edged booster seat and the left car door. To Olly’s right is a very surly Tori, who’s disgruntled at having been torn away from her bedroom and beloved laptop for something so trivial as the Spring family’s most treasured Christmas tradition.
It is also a blazing thirty-seven degrees Celsius outside the car, and Charlie can almost see the heat permeating the windows. The road ahead of them shimmers with mirages. The prospect of an afternoon swim is the only thing keeping him from snapping at Tori when she asks him to shift his right leg so it’s a little bit less stuck to her left one, or throwing the heavy cooler bag full of prawns and ice packs he’s holding on his lap down into the footwell at Olly’s feet.
They’ve left hours later than initially planned, as always. When it came to packing the car, the beach towels were suddenly nowhere to be found — they’ve stopped storing them in the caravan after the time a nine-year-old Charlie had opened the cupboard door to a redback spider’s nest. Once the beach towels turned up it was then discovered that the pop-up beach tent and Tori’s boogie board had gone similarly missing. And by the time everything had been located it was lunchtime, so holiday preparations were paused while Jane made ham-and-cheese toasties.
Once seemingly endless duffel bags and Eskys and an assortment of buckets and spades — not to mention the Very Secret Sack of Christmas presents — had been shunted into the boot in a Tetris-like arrangement, and the ancient Viscount caravan was safely hooked to the towball of their sensible Ford Territory (well, safely-ish; the connection to the vehicle’s left indicator is unreliable at best), it was two p.m. and well and truly time to leave. Olly had other plans — he needed the toilet — which extended their packing time to a record five hours and thirteen minutes. Charlie waited patiently in the car, the requisite prawn bag on his lap, dreaming of the day his family actually set off at ten-thirty like they always, always plan to.
Charlie’s thoughts are yanked back into the present when Jane turns off the expressway and Olly points enthusiastically to a vineyard to the left of the road.
“Strawberries!” he exclaims, with a level of confidence encountered only in erroneous preschoolers and politicians.
“No, Olly, that’s a vineyard,” says Jane, eyes remaining straight ahead.
“But Strawberry Shortcake lives there!”
Tori shifts her gaze from where it was fixed on the depressing and ever-growing housing development to the right. “I don’t see a giant strawberry house, Olly.”
For months, Olly has been obsessed with the Strawberry Shortcake’s Berry Bitty Adventures universe after an old stack of DVDs from Tori and Charlie’s childhood surfaced in a drawer full of photo albums. This year, he requested a Strawberry Shortcake-themed McDonald’s birthday party, which he insisted on attending wearing a pink bucket hat scribbled all over with red texta.
Julio appears to sense an incoming tantrum. “It’s okay. Maybe she does live there.”
The car falls quiet again, and Olly drops off to sleep. The only sounds for much of the rest of the journey are the whirr of the air-conditioning, the thunder of tyres on the road, and a brief discussion of the necessity to stop at a servo on the way because the parents are in dire need of a coffee and, according to Jane, “This car is a bloody petrol-guzzler.”
Charlie and Tori start a game involving kicking the prawn bag back and forth across the floor as surreptitiously as possible without waking Olly. They get a decent volley going before Julio twigs and gives Charlie a you’d-better-stop-that-before-your-mother-sees look in the side-view mirror.
At long last they make it, turning off into the caravan park at the ‘Historic Knights Harbour’ sign, slowing to walking pace as they dodge kids on bikes, kids on scooters, kids on RipStiks, and yet more kids on scooters.
There’s a sliver of sea visible behind a stand of Norfolk Island pines.
“Right, big kids,” says Julio, “out of the car so your mother can focus to get the van into position.”
Olly continues snoring softly from his booster seat.
Charlie and Tori clamber out and wait obediently under a bottlebrush tree, relishing the shade despite the vaguely threatening buzzing of bees from the branches overhead. There’s a lot of reversing and re-reversing, a narrowly avoided jackknifing incident, and a not-insignificant amount of swearing from both Jane and Julio as they try to manoeuvre the caravan into the perfect spot: close enough to the electricity pole that they won’t run out of cable to get power in the van, but leaving enough room on the campsite for the annex and tent.
By some miracle they get the complicated old annex up by early evening. Charlie helps Julio make the final adjustments to the guy ropes while Tori bashes in heavy rusted tent pegs with an old mallet with as much strength and skill as can be expected from any thirteen-year-old.
“We’ll tackle the tent tomorrow,” announces Jane, who’s wearing an enormous straw hat and Cancer Council sunglasses against the imminent sunset.
Charlie and Tori start to protest — this means both of them will have to sleep in the cramped annex tonight — but Jane gives them a trademark withering look.
“Tomorrow should be a bit cooler,” says Julio cheerfully. “Should I go and get some fish and chips for tea?”
Disappointingly, Charlie does not get his afternoon swim. Instead, he’s stuck in the stuffy van, doing a second pass over the brown laminate surfaces with Spray ‘N Wipe, having been instructed to get at the dust he missed in the initial clean, while Jane fidgets with the knobs on the air-conditioning unit on the caravan’s ceiling.
“Charlie!” cries Olly from his spot on the vinyl banquette. “It’s Christmas Eve Eve! Did you know?”
Charlie shakes his head seriously. “This is new information to me, kiddo.” Then he reaches over the table to tickle him, and the caravan is filled briefly with Olly’s adorable squeals.
The air-conditioner spits out alternating blasts of hot air and little dribbles of cool, before making a horrible shuddering noise and shutting off entirely.
Jane grimaces. “Air con’s broken. Sorry, kids.”
Just like every other Christmas, Nick is waiting for this one to be over. To him, the real Christmas is Boxing Day: the day he and his mum — more recently, sans David — make the ten-hour drive from Dargowrie, Victoria to Knights Harbour, South Australia.
Christmas Day is fine. Sitting in the lounge room opening presents after checking on the grapevine irrigation system for while they’re away is fine, and he actually is grateful for the new Blundstone boots from his mum. Hosting the entire extended Nelson family at the vineyard, complete with several small cousins, is fine. The turducken is fine, as is the potato salad, and the pavlova. It’s even fine that his dad is staying in Sydney for Christmas this year, and that David’s there with him instead of in Dargowrie. It’s all just fine.
Nick knows he seems far away all day. Where he really wants to be is the beach.
In the evening, once everyone’s gone home, he curls up on the couch and watches the Queen’s Speech with Nellie and his mum, just like always.
“All packed for tomorrow, love?” Sarah asks him, between bites of leftover trifle.
Nick nods. In his room is a battered suitcase filled with all the worldly possessions he’ll need for a month at the beach: a small collection of ratty t-shirts, his least frayed jeans, several pairs of printed boardies, and a random handful of jocks. A new pair of thongs, because his feet grew again, and a hoodie for cold nights. Deodorant, body wash, shampoo, toothpaste. Shaving foam and a razor that he doesn’t actually need to use yet, but he suspects his mum feels a sense of guilt that his dad’s not around to teach him about that stuff, so it lives in his bathroom drawer and he brings it just in case.
The night before Boxing Day always has him feeling like a little kid again, unable to lie still with excitement. He’ll probably end up sleeping in the car tomorrow, anyway. He stares at the ceiling, drifting in and out of sleep to thoughts of sunlit sleep-ins and barbecue lunches and bodysurfing with Charlie.
God, he’s missed Charlie.
They’re inseparable for a month of every year, while they’re staying on neighbouring sites in the Knights Holiday Park. Charlie’s family lives in Adelaide, so they don’t have a reason to see each other during the year, and they never stay in contact. That’s just not how caravan park friendships work. It might ruin the magic.
Nick feels a painful little twinge somewhere in his stomach when it occurs to him that if the Springs suddenly stopped staying at Knights, they’d probably never see each other again.
The Southern Cross turns over, and by 5 a.m. he’s in the shed hitching fertiliser tines to the tractor. It’s tough work, early mornings and an exhaustion that seeps into his bones at times, but he’s been helping out since he moved back to the family vineyard from Adelaide when he was five. He’s used to it.
Hamish arrives at six, surprisingly cheerful for someone working this early on Boxing Day, but Nick suspects this is likely due to the prospect of public holiday wages, which nobody begrudges him. The Nelsons are lucky to have found labourers willing to keep an eye on the vines while they’re away.
“Nicky! Can you help me load the tent, please?” calls Sarah from across the yard. She’s struggling under the weight of their old monster of a canvas tent, a relic of the days when they were a four-person family requiring room to stretch out. Every year, Nick and his mum talk about getting a new one, or a camper trailer, and every year they clumsily roll the tent and squash it into the back of Sarah’s Landcruiser anyway.
“Coming!” Nick gives Hamish a wave goodbye and jogs across the yard to help Sarah carry the tent the rest of the way to the car. “I’ve had breakfast, so I’m ready to hit the road if you are.”
“Great,” Sarah grunts as they heave the tent up into the boot. Finally it’s in, and Nick tucks in a wayward rope so it doesn’t get caught up when the tailgate closes, then opens the back door for Nellie to jump in.
They stop at a Melbourne McDonald’s for second breakfast, and Sarah pulls back onto the Western Freeway almost immediately, eating her bacon-and-egg McMuffin while driving. The next few hours pass like the countryside, faded golden brown from months of heat; sheep and gum trees and Fire Danger Rating signs flick past like shooting stars. Sarah’s soundtrack of choice for this year is ABBA, then Olivia Newton-John, and finally, inexplicably, Glee. Nick counts the journey in rest stops.
After they’ve crossed the border, Sarah drives the final two hours in weary silence. Nick often wonders why she still makes this drive every single year when there are hundreds of seaside caravan parks much closer to home, but he doesn’t like to ask. He’d rather not push it. And he doesn’t mind that they still do this. Not at all.
He can’t wait until he’s sixteen so he can help with the drive. He’s been driving the Landcruiser since he was tall enough to reach the pedals anyway, but a baby-faced fourteen-year-old at the wheel of a 4x4 is bound to attract police attention on the M1.
Slowly the landscape changes from brown to pale yellow-green, and in the distance to the south is a great shimmering stretch of sea, bounded by distant swirling clouds. The sky above them glows clearest blue.
“Made it,” Sarah says, cheerful once more, as she turns off into the park.
Nick rolls down his window and is immediately hit with hot wind, salty, briny seaweed, squawking seagulls, and the rush and thump of the waves. The first breaths of sea air are never not intoxicating.
Sarah punches in the code at the boom gate — 2204 — and turns past the playground to site 148.
He can’t help his sigh of relief when he spots the Springs’ caravan, complete with brown and orange striped annex.
“Oi! Nick!”
The familiar voice comes from behind the car. Nick sticks his head out of the window and there’s Charlie in his springsuit, curls damp and glinting in the late afternoon sun, a stripey towel draped around his neck.
“Charlie!”
And before Sarah can even stop the car properly, he’s leaping out — thank whatever guardian angels are out there that the speed limit in the park is seven kilometres an hour — and wrapping him in a hug.
“Oh, Jesus, Nick, you’ll get yourself all wet!”
Nick hugs him tighter. “Don’t care. It’s hot anyway.”
Charlie just giggles as he eventually disentangles himself, reaching up with one end of the towel to pat at his own hair, nose scrunched adorably. “Missed you.”
“Missed you too,” says Nick. “How are ya?”
Charlie grins. “Good. You?”
Nick nods. His smile is so wide it feels like it’s literally stretching from ear to ear. “I’m good.”
“Hi, Nick.” Tori pops up unexpectedly from behind Charlie, and Nick nearly shits himself. Charlie must’ve had a growth spurt, because suddenly he towers over Tori, who does not yet appear to have reached five feet tall.
“Fucken oath, you scared me. How’re you going, Tori?”
“Nick, you dingbat!” yells Sarah from the now-parked car. “Come and help your ma with the tent!”
Nellie’s face is visible through the open back window, and Sarah jumps out and walks around to open the door for her. She makes a beeline for Charlie.
“Hi, Nellie,” he says softly, burying his hands in her fur, face close to hers. “How are you, hmm?”
She gives him a slobbery lick on the face.
“I reckon she missed you as well,” says Nick.
“Really?” Charlie’s face lights up.
Nick nods. “Yeah.”
Charlie stands back up, and they stand there just taking each other in for a moment.
“Okay, I’d better go get the tent sorted.” He gives Tori a wave as she slopes off around the back of the Springs’ caravan and Charlie a brief pat on the shoulder.
“Can I help?” Charlie’s eyes are wide. “Just let me have a hose-off first, and I can help with ropes and stuff, maybe?”
“Yeah, ‘course! If you want to!”
Charlie nods and runs to rinse the sand from his legs with a length of garden hose, using the water to help with unsticking his rapidly drying wetsuit. He disappears into the caravan and returns a couple of minutes later in a t-shirt and black denim shorts, bare feet crunching against the dry grass.
“D’you remember to set your watch back this year?” Charlie asks, voice teasing, as he helps to spread the tent out on the ground.
Nick slaps a palm to his forehead. “No, I always forget. Whoever had that half-hour time zone idea must’ve been on the fucking piss, I swear.”
“Language, Nicky,” says Sarah, but there’s no hint of rebuke in her voice. “Would you chuck me the crow? I’ve buggered a peg over here.”
“Language, Mum.” Nick hands her the crowbar.
God, he’s missed the sound of Charlie’s laugh.
During the year, Charlie makes a concerted effort not to think about Nick. He finds it makes him feel almost painfully wistful, like he’s homesick for the abstract notion of a beach holiday. And once the feeling takes hold it’s hard to shake.
But now he’s here, and so is Nick, and for a blissful four weeks it’s them against the world, like it has been for as long as he can remember.
On December twenty-seventh they plan to go jetty-jumping at Knights Bay. It’s still hot, but not so blistering, and cirrus clouds form a wispy muslin veil over the sky. In the morning, they linger in the Nelsons’ tent: Charlie sweating in his wetsuit, because according to Jane “the water is still Antarctic”, and Nick in his rashie and boardshorts.
Sarah thrusts a tube of sunscreen and a five-dollar note at Nick. “UV rating’s thirteen today, Nicky, so don’t be an idiot out there, please. You can get yourselves ice blocks if you like.”
Nick huffs and pretends to roll his eyes, but he’s smiling. “Yeah, yeah. Thanks, Mum.”
“Have fun, you two!”
She settles under the tent’s verandah with a book and a cup of tea while the boys walk down the road, a single beach bag between them, feet bare and burning on the rough tarmac.
“Reckon you’ve got enough sunscreen on, Nicky?” teases Charlie, eyebrows raised.
Nick bumps Charlie’s shoulder with his own. “Piss off.”
“Or is your poor ranga skin gonna burn to a crisp?”
This earns him another shoulder-bump. Charlie retaliates, and soon they’re walking down the road knocking shoulders and arms with more and more force, laughing and swatting at each other.
A particularly hard impact of Charlie’s shoulder against Nick’s arm sends Nick reeling and staggering onto the grass of an empty campsite, clutching at his bicep dramatically.
For a terrible moment Charlie thinks he’s actually hurt him. “Nick! You okay? I’m sorry, that was too hard —”
And as soon as he’s within reach, Nick’s hands are at his sides, tickling him mercilessly. “Gotcha!”
Charlie can’t respond for a moment because his stomach has turned itself inside out, and something tells him it’s not just from the tickling. His body’s reflexes keep him giggling madly for a while, until he cries out a “Stop!” that sounds more distressed than he actually feels because he’s breathless from laughing.
Nick’s victorious grin drops and his eyes are puppy-dog concerned. “Sorry, are you okay? I shouldn’t have scared you like that.”
“Nah, you’re alright. I’m okay.” Charlie shakes his head gently to dislodge his thoughts. “Race you to the beach!”
And he’s off down the path towards the staircase before Nick can respond, curls bouncing in the wind.
“Slow down!” calls Nick from behind him, with the beach bag full of towels and water bottles bumping against his knees. “You’re too fast!”
Charlie just laughs, the sound taken by the wind and the swashing of the waves.
They both make it onto the pale, magma-hot sand, ditching their things and hopping down towards the line where the tide has left the sand’s surface cool and dark.
The first lick of the waves at Charlie’s feet is still a shock, even though he’s spent every day on the beach since he arrived. Seafoam laps at his ankles and catches on his shins. The north wind strengthens the undertow, making the entire sea feel more like a thick soup than saltwater.
He laughs at Nick’s little shocked “Oh!” of surprise at the cold. Nick is standing stock-still, ankle-deep in the waves. “Fuck! It’s so cold!”
“Come on!” calls Charlie from a few metres further out. “The sooner you come in, the sooner you’ll warm up.”
“Easy for you to say, wetsuit boy.” Nick grins, arms folded, knowing he’s struck a nerve when Charlie scowls and pokes out his tongue.
“Not my fault Mum makes me wear it!”
Nick just keeps grinning at him, so obviously Charlie’s only option is to wade headlong towards him and give him an almighty splash.
He splutters, then runs into the water further, thrashing with his feet to get Charlie back. “I hate you!”
“No, you don’t.” Charlie sends another wall of water his way.
Nick gives an affronted gasp, then sloshes the rest of the way towards Charlie until they’re both waist deep. Charlie’s barely able to react when Nick rugby-tackles him, one arm curled around the front of his waist, pulling him down into the waves.
They’re half-wrestling, half just thrashing around in the water. Nick’s much broader and heavier than Charlie, though hardly taller, but Charlie has a certain wiry strength. They’re a pretty even match. Nick gains a semblance of victory, though, hoisting Charlie up to sit on his shoulders.
“I win!”
“You’re older! You’ve got an unfair advantage!” protests Charlie, coughing up a lungful of seawater.
Nick shifts his shoulders, which wobbles Charlie on his perch. “Keep telling yourself that, city boy.”
They’ve touched plenty before, but today something about the contact makes Charlie feel sparkly inside, like the rippling sea in the sun. He can also feel the prickle of the beginnings of a sunburn on the back of his neck, but that’s a problem for later.
“To the castle, noble steed!” hollers Charlie once he’s done coughing and gotten his breath back, flailing an arm in the direction of the jetty.
“You dork,” laughs Nick, lumbering out against the push and sway of the water until it’s too deep for him to stand and he lets Charlie down. They swim the rest of the way until they reach the steps, beaten and windswept into driftwood, and clamber up onto the sun-warmed platform.
Nick collapses on his back, panting, on the wooden slats. “Can’t bloody well keep up with you.”
Charlie stands over him, arms folded smugly. “You’ll just have to get faster.”
“Right.” Nick stands abruptly and takes Charlie by the hand, dragging him to the edge of the jetty. “You’re jumping first.”
“Is that your consolation prize? Because you’ve lost every race today?”
Nick nods definitively. “Yes.”
“Well, that’s interesting, because I’m not the one who’s afraid of heights here.”
This earns him a shove that nearly unbalances him, leaving them both laughing as Charlie flings his arms out to maintain his footing.
“I am not —” poke — “afraid —” poke — “of heights.”
“Really?” Charlie’s arms are folded again, one eyebrow raised, teasing. “Look over the edge, then.”
Nick swallows, chancing a sidelong glance down at the ultramarine surface, then immediately looks back at Charlie, eyes a little wider. “Fine. I’m still scared of heights.”
“It’s okay. You don’t have to do it.”
“I want to,” insists Nick. “I managed it last year.”
Charlie thinks for a moment. “I could count you down.”
Nick shakes his head, giving an involuntary shiver. “Anticipation isn't good.”
“Okay. I can go first, if you want?”
“No.” The last traces of Nick’s bravado have disappeared. “Don’t want to do it on my own,” he mumbles down at the wooden deck.
“We could…” Charlie hesitates. He’s not sure why. “We could do it together?”
“Yeah, okay.” Nick takes his hand, swinging their arms back and forth. “Ready?”
It takes a second for Charlie to respond because he wasn’t expecting to do this while holding hands with Nick. His heart beats once, twice. “Ready.”
A few brief seconds of stomach-dropping, hair-lifting velocity — they’re still holding hands — before Charlie feels his feet hit the water and he’s plummeting into emerald green.
Before he surfaces he glimpses softly filtered rays of light, catching flurries of sand and tiny bubbles. A metre to his left is Nick, eyes squeezed tight shut, coppery hair fluttering around the crown of his head like he’s a merman wearing a blue Rip Curl rashie. Their hands were probably detached on impact.
They break the surface at the same time, grinning and gasping for breath.
“You did it!” Charlie grins, and Nick gives him a watery thumbs-up.
“I reckon I’m still scared of heights, though.”
Charlie takes his hand again and does a clumsy, one-handed version of breaststroke, pulling him back toward the staircase. “You wanna test that theory?”
The day before New Year’s Eve, a cool change sweeps in and the wind swings around from north to southerly. Outside it’s eighteen degrees and drizzling on and off, so Nick is holed up in the Springs’ caravan with Charlie, Tori and Olly.
Surprisingly, tiny Olly remembers him well, and insists on sitting on his lap in the cramped banquette with Bluey playing on the tiny television.
When the Strawberry Shortcake colouring book comes out and Olly starts scribbling enthusiastically in pastel tones, Nick gives Charlie a mystified look. The only response he receives is a shrug and a shake of the head. They both laugh.
Tori looks up from her game of Solitaire. “What’s funny?”
Charlie motions towards Olly with his head, and Tori smirks. “Yeah, Dad says you were like that about Thomas the Tank Engine. And dinosaurs, as a concept.”
Olly sets his purple texta down dramatically. “Are you talking about me?”
“Yes,” Nick tells him in earnest, patting his little shoulder. “You’re worth talking about, kiddo.”
Olly frowns for a second, bemused, then returns to his colouring.
Nick’s attention turns to the TV. It’s an episode about camping in which Bluey makes a friend who only speaks French.
“Why did Jean Luc have to go?” asks Bluey.
“Their holiday was over, honey,” her mum replies.
“Will I ever see him again?”
“Well, you never know. The world’s a magical place.”
Nick is hit with a rare memory of one of the first summers he properly remembers spending at Knights. He was six, he’s pretty sure, and he spent most of January playing House with Charlie under the front verandah of the Nelsons’ tent while David was off torturing unsuspecting crabs. The Springs left early one morning, towards the end of the month.
Nick left the tent once he was dressed, making a beeline for the caravan next door, only to stop short when all he saw was empty, flattened grass. He thinks he remembers going to Sarah in tears.
Sarah told him they might see each other again one day, and sure enough, Charlie was already there when they arrived the next year, and it was like they’d never been apart.
He glances over at Charlie, who’s watching the TV almost intently, chewing the inside of his lip. His eyes flick to Nick and he smiles a tiny smile.
Does Charlie remember that summer?
Despite the cool wind whistling through the cracked window behind him, there’s a warmth spreading from somewhere deep in Nick’s chest down to his toes.
The New Year ticks over and it finally warms up again. It’s fine and sunny, too — not a trace of the soggy humidity of the last few days — so instead of showering, Nick dresses in boardies and a rash guard and stands at the flyscreen door of the Springs’ caravan.
“You guys wanna come for a swim now the weather’s less dogshit?”
Jane stands at the door and gives him a pointed look, gesturing with her head towards Olly, who’s sitting at the table eating Coco Pops.
“Wha — oh. Sorry, Mrs Spring.”
“I’ll come!” Charlie comes up behind her and opens the door, hopping down the rusted step, already in swim shorts.
Seconds later Tori appears, too, still in her pyjamas. “Okay if I come?”
“Yeah, ‘course,” says Nick. “Hurry up and get your togs on, though.”
Tori nods once and ducks into the annex.
“Togs?” asks Charlie with a glint in his eye as he smears sunscreen onto his arms.
“Yeah, Charlie. Togs.”
Charlie shakes his head emphatically. “They are bathers.”
“How many times have we had this argument?”
“Clearly not enough times,” Charlie squirts an outsized dollop of sunscreen onto his hand and begins rubbing it into his face, “because otherwise we wouldn’t be having it again since you would already have admitted that I’m correct.”
Nick folds his arms. “Well, you’re not. They’re togs.”
“When in Rome.”
A small, vaguely whiny voice floats down from inside the caravan. “Mum, can I go with them?”
“Sorry, Olly, you’re not quite old enough yet. I’ll take you down later, okay?” says Jane.
“Will Nick do sandcastles with me?”
“You bet!” calls Nick from under the gazebo.
“Okay.”
“Hey, Olly,” Nick stands in the doorway of the van, “what do you reckon? Are they called bathers or togs?”
Olly thinks seriously for a moment, dropping his spoon into his cereal bowl to place a finger on his chin. “Togs.”
“Ha! I win!” Nick points a victorious finger at Charlie. “They’re togs.”
Charlie narrows his eyes. “This isn’t over, Nelson.”
Nick just grins and drapes his towel around his neck. “We taking boogie boards today?”
“Of course.” Tori re-emerges from the annex and walks around to the front of the caravan, where the boogie boards are stored under the rusted towbar.
The three of them walk down the nearly-unbearably-hot road again, bickering gently about togs.
“Don’t most Victorians call them bathers anyway?” asks Charlie.
“Nice try, Spring, but where I’m from they are very definitely called togs. Which means they’re called togs everywhere.”
“Hmm.” Charlie squints over at him. “I still think you’re wrong.” He turns to Tori, eyebrows raised expectantly.
“Oi, don’t bring me into this!” She hits Charlie gently with a faded green boogie board.
Charlie huffs. “Fine.”
“That means I win!” Nick does a little happy dance.
“Yeah, yeah.” Charlie’s smiling. “I was thinking of swimming out to the island today. It’s not too windy.”
Tori wrinkles her nose. “Isn’t that, like, a kilometre?”
“Seven hundred metres, and I am literally a distance swimmer. Nick? You wanna come with?”
Nick shakes his head. “Don’t know if I’d make it there and back.”
“Okay, old man.”
The bay is sheltered on one side by a breakwater, so that one end of the curved beach has small, lapping waves and the other is constantly hit with great curling surges. They settle somewhere in the middle, where the conditions are just right for boogie boarding.
“Can anyone see the rip today?” asks Charlie, shading his eyes with his hands.
“Yep.” Tori points to a thin silvery line on the water where a strong current traces from the shore out to the tip of the breakwater. “You should be right to get out to the island without getting caught.”
“Yeah, I see it. Okay, catch you later!” Charlie duck-dives into the waves and sets off.
Nick and Tori catch waves for a while, then lounge idly on their boards further out, where the waves aren’t breaking and their feet don’t touch the sand.
They’re comfortably silent. Tori feels like a sister to him, somehow, and now he thinks about it, Olly’s like a little brother.
Charlie is… well. Not a brother, exactly. Something.
He stares out at the tree-studded island and thinks about his friends back home. They’re alright to hang out with, and they’re into rugby, and most of them are from farming families too. But Nick doesn’t just click with them like he does with Charlie. Banter with his mates is strained, with undercurrents he can’t fully understand but knows he doesn’t like. With Charlie conversation comes as naturally as breathing.
Maybe that’s it. Charlie, a boy he sees for one month of every year, and otherwise doesn’t hear from, is his best friend.
It should be sad, but it’s not.
A seagull bobs up and down on the waves, just metres in front of him.
“Do you miss him? During the year?”
He looks over at Tori with a start. She’s treading water, one arm slung over her board, and she’s looking at him with that scary piercing gaze.
Christ. Is she a bloody mind-reader?
“Because he misses you, I think.”
“Oh.”
She says nothing else, and catches a wave back to the shore, leaving Nick feeling a bit out of his depth in more ways than one.
It’s afternoon now, and Charlie is busy being buried up to the waist in sand by a very enthusiastic Olly, egged on by Nick. Tori has nicked off with Jane’s comically large sunnies and is seated under a red-and-blue beach umbrella, sipping on a blue slushy while Jane is at the cafe on the foreshore, buying chips for a late lunch.
“What do you think, Olly? Should we turn him into a merman?”
Olly very nearly squeals. “Yes! Merman!”
Charlie groans in protest, but he’s only pretending. He’s already buried, after all; there’s not a lot he can do short of destroying their work so far, and he couldn’t bear to do that to either of them.
“Why not a mermaid?” asks Charlie.
“Well…” Olly thinks for a moment. “You’re a boy.”
“Boys can be mermaids.”
“Oh, okay.” Olly flicks a handful of sand dangerously close to Charlie’s face to fill a final small hole at his waist.
“Olly! No throwing sand!”
Nick and Olly set about building a tail. It’s mostly Nick doing the careful sculpting, shifting piles of hard damp sand further up the beach, where Charlie is, and packing it tightly in a curved tentacle shape. Olly follows Nick’s movements, dropping most of the sand he tries to carry and patting ineffectually at the tail, but he comes into his own when it’s time to add scales, poking little holes with his fingers and studding the sand with pale cockle shells.
“I think it’s time for hair now,” says Nick, surveying his work with his hands on his hips. “What do you reckon?”
“Nooo!” groans Charlie. He knows exactly what’s coming.
Olly looks confused. “He’s got hair.”
“He needs special mermaid hair,” says Nick. “Come on, let’s go and find some!”
Charlie watches them playing in the shallows. Nick lets Olly splash him mercilessly, then offers him a piggy-back. They return with armfuls of feathery red seaweed.
Nick dumps it unceremoniously on Charlie’s head.
“Nick!” he protests, and cold briny seawater drips into his mouth. “Oh, biscuits.”
Olly hears this and giggles. “Charlie said biscuits!”
“Pay a lot of attention to Bluey, do you?” asks Nick, grinning.
Charlie huffs. “I don’t exactly have a choice. Besides, it’s actually good. And you liked the Camping episode.”
Nick flushes pink and gives him a warm, genuine smile. “Yeah.”
They build elaborate sandcastles around his tail: a city for him to rule over, complete with little sand-trees made by dribbling sloppy wet sand through Olly’s fists.
Nick cocks his head to one side. “You look quite pretty.”
Jane returns with two white paper cones of neon-yellow chips and a takeaway coffee, quickly reclaiming her sunglasses. They eat the chips, gritty with chicken salt and an unavoidable measure of sand, and then Olly gets restless and stomps all over his mermaid city.
“Does this mean I get to take off the seaweed hat now?” asks Charlie hopefully.
Nick laughs. “If you must.”
The pile of seaweed is discarded and he lifts himself out of his sandy half-tomb. Clumps of sand fall to the ground around him, which sets both him and Nick laughing even more. They wade into the water to rinse off the sand.
“Wanna walk up to the obelisk before dinner?” Nick asks. “I haven’t been up there yet.”
“Yeah, alright.”
They rinse off under the cold outdoor shower, and Charlie ignores the strange little twinge in his stomach when Nick casually strips off his rashie to reveal his chest, freckled and soft, yet solid, somehow. They walk for half an hour on the rocky path along the coast to the obelisk, damp and content, while shadows lengthen and a bank of soft clouds rolls over the sea.
The night before Charlie has to pack up and leave — or maybe it’s very early in the morning; he’s not actually sure — he hears a noise outside his tent.
“Charlie!”
He sits up with a start.
“Charlie, wake up!”
It’s somewhere between a hiss and a whisper.
“Nick? Is that you?” he mumbles blearily.
He crawls to the door and unzips.
“Oh good, you’re awake,” whispers Nick. He’s wearing Avengers pyjama shorts and a faded navy T-shirt.
“What’s up?”
“Meteor shower! Come and watch it at Moss Point with me?”
They sneak off and stumble along the loose gravel path under the waxing moon. There’s giggling, and swearing when Charlie nearly trips on a stray tree root.
Charlie is always amazed at the stars out here. There’s little enough light pollution that he can make out the long band of the Milky Way, glimmering down at him.
On the cape that frames the east of the bay there’s a perfect flat rock with a view of the island and the long stretch of surf beach to the other side. They lie on their backs, heads resting next to each other, and Nick points up at a patch of sky where it looks like a shower of golden sparks are raining down over the sea.
“Look!”
“Whoa,” Charlie breathes.
“Yeah.”
They’re both quiet for a while, just watching. The moon creeps ever westward. The rush of the waves below them is calming.
“Charlie?”
“Yeah?”
Nick breathes out softly. “I kissed a girl this year.”
Charlie’s heart skips a beat.
Why is that such devastating, soul-crushing news?
“At the Year Eight Disco.”
“Oh. How…” Charlie clenches his fists. “How was it?”
A wave breaks and recedes.
“It was okay.”
No matter how hard he thinks about it, Charlie cannot imagine kissing a girl. He does think about kissing boys, though. Sometimes.
He knows what that makes him.
There’s a part of him that wants to confess to Nick that he’s been harbouring a vague, wispy hope that Nick thinks about boys like that, too.
Instead, he says, “I don’t want to go home.”
“No, me either,” Nick replies quietly, but definitely. “I’d rather stay here with you.”
Charlie turns his head to look at Nick’s profile, outlined in silver by the moonlight. His lips are parted slightly, eyes gazing up at the stars, chin strong and softly curved.
He’s had an inkling all summer, but now it hits Charlie like a meteor to the heart.
The Great Spring Pack-Up Day, as Sarah has dubbed it, falls on January twenty-second every year. It is possibly Nick’s least favourite day of the year, and he doesn’t care if that’s an exaggeration (realistically, the worst day of the year is probably in the July school holidays when he has to fly to Sydney to see his dad, but he’d prefer not to think about that right now).
They start early; they’re required to vacate the site by ten-thirty in the morning. Nick’s not sure why, because it always sits vacant once they’ve left, like it’s holding out forlornly for the next December.
First all the bags get packed into the back of the car, one of those city-people four-wheel-drives that go through far too much petrol. Then the tent gets folded up. It’s a two-person job, which usually falls to Tori, and to Nick, who may as well be the sixth Spring family member while he’s at the beach.
This year Tori is keeping Olly entertained so that he doesn’t trip over a stray guy rope, so it’s Nick and Charlie taking the tent down.
Their hands keep brushing over the joints where the poles fold up. He’ll think about this when he’s on his way home in two days.
The tent gets squashed into its bag and tucked under the double bed at the back end of the caravan, and then they tackle the annex. Gravity is on their side, so it’s a much easier job than putting it up, he imagines, though he’s never here for that part.
There’s less of the excitement and anticipation of a month of freedom; more of the heavy awareness of school and responsibilities and the real world to return to. He finds packing up a bit depressing.
Sarah always offers her help, and Jane and Julio always politely refuse, which she respects, but insists on bringing them fresh cups of coffee in brown glass mugs. Nick wouldn’t stop helping with the pack-up even if the Spring parents literally ordered him to, and he knows that they know this.
“Okay.” Julio’s standing on the patch of dead, flattened grass where the annex stood. The caravan is hitched to the towball of the car. “Time we headed off. Thanks for your help, Nick.”
Nick gets a sticky hug around the shins from Olly, a surprisingly warm one from Tori, and a strangely tentative but reassuring one from Charlie. He would prefer it if that one never ended.
Regrettably, though, it does.
“See you next year,” says Charlie softly.
“See you next year.”
Nick waves, a little awkwardly, as they pull out onto the narrow road, and watches the car as it passes the boom gate and disappears from view.
He’s not sure what to do with himself now.
Glossary
| Knights Harbour | A fictionalised amalgamation of many South Australian seaside towns. |
| Esky | A cooler or icebox for storing cold food and drink. Esky is a brand but iceboxes are pretty much always called Eskys |
| Texta | A chunky felt-tip marker. |
| Servo | Petrol/gas station. |
| RipStik | Like if a skateboard and a pair of roller skates had a hell-baby. |
| Annex | A tent-like extension for a caravan with a roof and three canvas walls. The side of the caravan forms the fourth wall. Sometimes called an awning. |
| Cancer Council | An Australian non-profit that provides information about cancer prevention and treatment. This extends to selling a range of hats, sunglasses and sunscreens. |
| Boardies | Short for boardshorts. |
| Jocks | Men’s underwear, usually boxer briefs. |
| Thongs | Flip-flops. Jandals. NOT underwear. |
| Southern Cross | A constellation visible from the Southern Hemisphere. “Turning over” refers to the way the cross appears to flip from upside down to almost upright overnight as the Earth turns. |
| Boot | The trunk of a car. |
| Springsuit | A short-sleeved wetsuit. |
| Oath | An exclamation. |
| Half-hour time zone | South Australia’s time zone is half an hour behind the eastern states. Originally SA was an hour behind, but in the late 19th century business owners wanted to adopt AEST. The state government came up with a compromise, which is the half-hour difference that haunts us to this day. |
| On the piss | Drunk. |
| Rashie | Rash guard. |
| UV rating | The UV index is a scale that measures UV radiation, starting at zero. The higher the number, the less time it takes for sun damage to occur. 13 is considered very high. |
| Ranga | Redhead/ginger. |
| Bathers/togs | Both regional terms for any kind of swimwear. ‘Bathers’ is common in pretty much all states except New South Wales and Queensland, and ‘togs’ is mainly a Queensland term, but is also common in areas of other eastern states. |
| Rip | Riptide/rip current. A strong offshore current that occurs when waves break on a sandy beach, pulling water back out to sea. Can appear as a sandy/shiny/darker trail in the water depending on prevailing conditions. Getting caught in a rip carries a risk of drowning. |
| Chips | In Australia, chips can refer to both crisps and fries. |
| Cockles | Small edible bivalves. Also called pipis in most parts of Australia. |
| Chicken salt | Salt flavoured with a blend of spices. Run-of-the-mill chicken salt generally does not contain actual chicken, though the authentic stuff does. |