They sat down on the veranda step in front of their small room, and took unenthusiastic bites of their dinner.
‘Are you sad?’ Alex asked between mouthfuls, his shaggy sun-bleached hair quivering as he turned to look at her.
She smiled, knowing what he meant. Their time away had gone so fast, in a couple of weeks they would be back home – in bustling, dark, frosty England, neon-lit with Christmas cheer – the complete antithesis to the hushed, sparse place they were part of right now.
‘Not really,’ she murmured. ‘I mean, we’re coming back, aren’t we – well, at least away again.’ They had spent most of the past five months discussing where else they would like to travel, having fallen in love with being on the road, and would have been tempted to stay if they hadn’t promised families and friends that they’d be back for Christmas and the frenetic Millennium celebrations.
‘Of course,’ he said, running a hand down her bare thigh, leaving a few crumbs on her skin that he then lightly swept off. ‘Although I don’t think I’ll be around when you tell your dad, if you don’t mind.’
Amy smiled, but he was right. Her dad had become a complete nightmare when they’d announced they were going away, first trying to dissuade them, and then, when he couldn’t, attempting to organise them to within an inch of their life. He’d spent a fortnight buying them all sorts of gadgets and gismos that they’d hardly ever used, and made them both get complete medical records from the doctor, just in case they happened to need a blood transfusion or three. Then, at the airport, he had given Alex a lecture about his responsibilities in front of Amy and her mother, while Alex looked petrified. Her father had ended the talk by shaking Alex’s hand and saying, ‘Take good care of her for me,’ to which Alex had replied, ‘Yes, sir,’ as though they were in some midday melodrama. Amy and her mother had laughed, but neither man had seemed to find it amusing.
Now, she shook her head despite her smile. ‘Poor Dad, he finds it hard letting me be grown up. He’s got no one to be a kid with any more.’
They sat in silence for a moment. In the time it had taken them to eat their meagre meal, the sun had vanished, the bold colours thrown out in its descent now fading to pastels as the sky darkened.
Amy was remembering everything they had packed into the past few months. Riding tuk-tuks in Thailand and visiting temples teeming with people in Bangkok; then the rickety, laborious train ride to the north, to find themselves on the backs of elephants or sitting skimming the water on bamboo rafts as they floated through small rapids. Their skin had become bronzed, making their teeth glow whiter. They had lost weight on a diet of rice, fish and chicken, and their hair and nails had seemed to grow faster than they did at home.
Then Sydney. Alex had found a few weeks’ casual work in a pub, while Amy waitressed in a café nearby, on the strip at Manly where tourists ventured through night after night, traces of sand and salt lingering around their hairlines.
And then had come this whistle-stop road trip – first to Melbourne and then along the Great Ocean Road towards Adelaide, before this final journey over the deserted, treeless plains of the Nullarbor, the hire car churning steadily through the endless kilometres.
‘Come on.’ Alex jumped up and held out his hand, and they headed into their room. He went over to the esky and dug around in it, pulling out a couple of stubbies of beer. ‘Here you go.’ The ice they had poured in there that morning had done its job of cooling them, although the rest of the grocery stores were now floating in melted water.
Amy set about pulling things out and drying them as Alex spread a map on the bed. He studied it for a while and then said, ‘I reckon we can make Perth in two or three days. What do you think?’
‘Let’s take our time,’ she replied. ‘It’s bound to cost more when we get into the city. And we’ll still have a week there.’
‘It’s such a shame we didn’t plan this better.’ Alex shook his head in frustration. ‘There’s so much cool stuff on this side when you start looking – we’d need at least a month to explore the coastline, for a start.’
‘We’ve made the most of the time we’ve had,’ Amy reminded him. ‘We can come back, you know.’
‘I know.’ He looked up at her and grinned. ‘I’m just having so much fun.’
‘Me too.’ She smiled back at him, and headed across to the bedside table where her washbag was propped, rummaging in it. As she did so she felt Alex’s presence behind her, then his lips on her neck, and a blissful shiver ran through her. She turned to face him and he pressed against her, sending them both back onto the bed.
Once the motel closed for the evening, the outback darkness became absolute except for the pinpoint lights of stars billions of miles away. Amy couldn’t sleep. Around her it was so black that it was better to keep her eyes closed, for if she tried to open them the lack of anything to focus on caused her brain to invent strange wispy whirls of colour within the darkness that pulsated into being and away again.
‘Alex?’ she whispered, wanting to hear his reassuring voice.
‘Hmm?’ he replied, but he sounded sleepy, too close to his dreams to want to begin a conversation.
Amy sighed and turned over onto her side. As her body shifted so did something in her, and their happiness suddenly became a trepidatious thing – precariously balanced on these small moments in time. She wondered what it would be like when they got home, and wished she could see the bigger picture. But for now she pushed her body towards Alex’s, grateful for his arm coming mechanically across her, unnerved by the sudden, compelling urge she had to hide from the dark.
32
As Chloe negotiated the bustle of Oxford Street she wondered again about how her life was unfolding. It was as though she were being carried by a rip-tide and had no choice about where she was heading. Even the throngs of people now pressing against her seemed to be trying to submerge her within their smooth current.
She didn’t enjoy the crowds, but this was by far the most obvious place to find a dress to wear at the law ball. She really wanted something hot, bright and sexy that would enslave Mark to her for the evening, but since it was a work function she was thinking black and minimalist might be more the way to go.
She wasn’t enjoying her vocational training as much as she had thought she would, which meant she spent every other day wondering if she was really cut out for a legal career. If it wasn’t for Mark’s encouragement she would have felt even more adrift, but his enthusiasm was palpable, and although he could be a little patronising he was helping a lot; particularly by shielding her from some of his father’s stinging sarcasm, which someone seemed to bear the brunt of every day.
She had been almost surprised to find that she and Mark were an item, but more and more she was growing to like the feeling of it. They had gone out with a group from work one Friday night, and the numbers at the bar had gradually dwindled until Mark and Chloe had tipsily called a cab to his place. Although she had felt mortified – not to mention ill – when she had woken up on his sofa the next morning, Mark had breezed in with filtered coffee and an easy smile. Since then they had gone out a few times – although without it resulting in such wicked hangovers, for which Chloe was extremely grateful.
She walked out of the biting cold and into a brightly lit shop with an array of party dresses in the window. Browsing the racks, a slip of black satin caught her eye. That might serve as a compromise, she thought. She found her size, made her way to the changing rooms and slid the dress on. It slunk over her skin, nestling against the curve of her hips, although as she turned sideways she realised she might need to breathe in for most of the event to really minimise her stomach. But she thought she could get away with it. She beamed at herself in the mirror. The woman smiling back had a face flushed pink with cold, and looked excited.