In the kitchen he stood again at the back door and cast his eye across the room. He’d reached for the key, turned it in the lock, when he noticed Mandy’s watch on the counter top, circling the salt and pepper. He picked it up, recalling how she’d worn it in the water the day he’d followed her down to the beach. That had been the sweetest time, the best it would be between them, if only he’d known it.

He put the watch in his pocket and locked her back door behind him.

47

Sydney 1997

The sky is dark and low over Agnes Bay and the beach is deserted. Rain is blowing in from the ocean. Isla walks into the water, glad of the cold violence of it, the insistence of the swell. She swims into the waves as they rise up and they drag her under, turn her body over, throw her out and pull her under again. She is not afraid. She gasps for breath, wrestles with the water; dares it to hurt her. Twice it flushes her onto the shore and twice she wades back in. She stops thinking after a long time. She doesn’t know how long it takes, but finally she knows nothing but the ache in her limbs, the struggle.

She is surprised by the strength of the rip when it takes her. The fear is cold and sharp. The shock. She is farther from the beach than she thought and closer to the rocky headland that separates the bay from the open sea. Her legs are helpless against the deep, relentless tug and it will kill her if she struggles. It will take what’s left of her strength and she will drown. She learned this as a kid: don’t swim against it. Don’t panic. Try to float, if you can. And like every other kid in the class she’d known that if it happened to her she would panic; she would fight it and she would die. She looks up at the sky and thinks, this is not what I want, after all. Not like this.

Her head goes under. She waits for the pain as her body hits the rocks. She waits for her skull to crack. She surfaces, gulps air into her lungs, goes under again and thinks she is dead now, she must be. She is so cold. The colours of death are ugly: green and pink, yellow and brown. They move before her eyes, viscous, rolling shapes, heavy and lolling. Fat, leathery petals like tongues.

Isla does not feel it when the rip lets her go. Wave after wave covers her, rotates her, throws her body down and backwards. She gives up. Her mind is tired. In the deep water, out beyond the break, she sees a darkened room. Her mother is on the bed, her father standing, the two of them struggling. She sees her mother draw her legs back, position her feet against his chest. She feels the power of the kick. It is a pocket of trapped energy, a dormant force, thirty years in the waiting.