Bridie lies under a blanket on the couch in the living room, white-faced with purple smudges under her eyes, her earbuds in, the television on. The leftover makeup under her eyes gives the impression that she’s a teenager who has been out clubbing rather than an eleven-year-old hungover from all the adrenaline and excitement of playing Zazu.
Leo used the unexpected gift of time to catch up on work and now he’s having coffee and croissants with Neve, while the rain falls steadily and the wind howls.
He watches Neve putting jam on her croissant. His wife wears pajama pants—she says they are not pajama pants, but they sure look like pajama pants, and she wears them to bed, so it seems conclusive—and an old blue school hoodie that once belonged to Oli but is too small for him, and, of course, her Cartier watch.
He met Neve at a party and it was her watch that first caught his eye. Rectangular face, eighteen-carat white gold, covered in white diamonds.
“That is a really beautiful watch,” he’d said without thinking. Normally he agonized over the appropriate opening line for so long the moment passed.
“Thank you,” said Neve, before she was Neve and when instead she was a moderately drunk pretty girl sitting precariously on a stool at a high table. She wore crooked glasses with smudged lenses, a red slip dress with a fraying neckline, and Birkenstocks. (Leo’s mother loves Neve, but she does not love her shoes.)
She held up her wrist so that Leo could look more closely at the watch and said, “It was a twenty-first birthday present from my mum.”
One strap of her dress had fallen off her shoulder, which was mesmerizing. Now it drives him mad when a bra strap slithers to her elbow. He keeps adjusting her bras. She seems to have no understanding of how the tightening mechanisms work.
After they introduced themselves and determined how they knew the party host, she put her hand on his arm and said, “What’s worrying you?”
He tried to tell her that he wasn’t worried about anything, it was just something about his face—he suffers from “resting worried face”—but she insisted, so he admitted he was worried he might have accidentally parked illegally and he couldn’t afford a parking ticket right now; he was worried he couldn’t remember the host’s mother’s name and he’d been introduced to her many times before; he was worried Neve was about to fall off her stool, could she please stop rocking back and forth like that? And finally he was worried that she might not be able to see properly through those glasses and could he please fix them for her?
He cleaned her glasses with his handkerchief and straightened the frame and when she put them back on she said it was a beautiful miracle. She discreetly determined the host’s mother’s name for him, enabling him to smoothly say, “Hello, Irene!” just in the nick of time, and they went for a walk to double-check the parking sign. Basically they laid down a template for the entirety of their future relationship. His role is to straighten and adjust, mitigate risk and worry, hers is to mollify and soothe, to unwind his wound-up self.
Their first kiss was under the parking sign, which he had, as he suspected, misread. The ticket was already there, under his windshield wiper, so he didn’t move it and he didn’t care.
As they walked back to the party through the narrow inner-city streets in the moonlight, she mentioned that it was the anniversary of her mother’s death. She’d died when Neve was six. That was very sad, but also confusing, because wasn’t the watch a twenty-first birthday present from her mother? But then Neve explained that on her twenty-first birthday, she had opened her car door when she had arrived home after a family birthday dinner, and there, right on the asphalt, was this pretty gold watch, as if it had been placed neatly there for her to find.
Neve picked it up, tilted her face to the stars, and said, “Thanks, Mum.”
Leo was already half in love with her by then, so he didn’t say, Are you crazy? Do you know how much that watch is worth? You should have handed it in to the police!
He’s not sure if she knows how much it’s worth now. She has zero interest in brand names. She’s a staunch atheist, has no superstitions, no patience for activities like meditation or yoga, but she truly believed, and still believes, that her watch was not someone’s valuable lost property but a gift from her dead mother. She wears it every day, an incongruous gleam of designer luxury for someone who dresses purely for comfort and economy, who avoids wearing shoes wherever possible.
Sometimes he looks up at the stars himself and thanks Neve’s mother for the Cartier watch that brought them together.
Also, now he has had children and lost a parent, he kind of gets it. He and his sisters are always asking their deceased father to help them find parking spots. They send photos of amazing car spots on the family WhatsApp captioned: Thanks, Dad! Just the other day a miraculous spot appeared directly outside the building Leo needed to be in, as wondrous and valuable as a Cartier watch. A parent’s love is surely strong enough to occasionally crash through the barrier dividing heaven and earth.
“So this strange thing happened on yesterday’s flight,” says Leo.
“What’s that?” Neve looks at him. There is a smudge of butter on the lens of her glasses.
He tells her the story while he cleans her glasses, and she is into it—not frightened, she does not really believe in psychics, she thinks most of them are probably scammers—but she’s fascinated to hear what the lady said and how the passengers reacted, and she’s so focused on Leo that unfortunately, without her glasses, she’s unable to see the child standing in the doorway, listening to every word, which is why they both jump out of their skins when Bridie says, in a heartbreaking, terror-trembled tiny voice: “Is Daddy going to die?”
Chapter 32
Some people lead charmed lives and think it is all due to them.
They stand, like ship captains, proud and tall, feet apart, one hand loosely on the helm of their destinies. They are often charming, charismatic people because why wouldn’t they be? They have no need of fortune tellers. They have only ever faced clear seas and easy choices.
When the iceberg looms, when something finally happens that is outside of their control, they are outraged. They whip their eyes to the left, to the right, looking for someone to blame.
Try not to marry that sort of person.
Chapter 33
It’s the fifth day of their seven-day honeymoon and Eve and Dom lie on top of the bedclothes, naked, spread-eagled, holding hands, watching the rotating ceiling fan as its cool breeze wafts across their sticky bodies. If they lift their chins a fraction they can see out through the half-open slatted-timber doors to an ocean view, framed by a splash of frothy purple bougainvillea and the elegantly drooping frond of a palm tree.
Right now they are honeymooners in an Instagram post. They are tanned, they have just had sex, Eve’s hair looks great, the sky is pink and the setting sun has turned the water rose gold. Eve loves rose gold. Her phone case is rose gold! She didn’t know it was an option for the sea.
Sadly, this view is also only temporary. It comes and goes with the tide. It’s a life lesson about their wedding vows: good times and bad, good times and bad, over and over.
In the next hour, a giant parking lot of slimy black rocks and clumps of brown seaweed like piles of rubbish will slowly be revealed. Eventually, their view will resemble a nuclear waste site. Eve has never seen a nuclear waste site, but it seems an apt description.
This was the distressing sight that greeted them when they first arrived on the island: tired, cranky, grumpy, and married.
The night they’d arrived in Sydney, when they’d finally gone to bed in the “deluxe room” at their fancy hotel, all they had done was sleep. The uncomfortable lingerie was a total waste of money. They had zero physical contact. They slept like literal corpses. When they woke up all the sheets were still tucked in! They had to be up unbelievably early for their next flight, which had not seemed a big deal when Eve planned their itinerary but turned out to be a very big deal when their phone alarms went off. They didn’t even have time for the free hotel breakfast.
It’s okay about the sex. Eve looked it up. Loads of people are too tired for sex on their wedding night. It’s practically a trend.
They are staying on Emerald Island, a newly renovated “affordable luxury” island resort in the Whitsundays. The previous resort was top end but went bankrupt and then got decimated in a cyclone. It’s funny to think that rich celebrities who were once guests wouldn’t be seen dead here now. But Eve and Dom get to walk on the very same sand for a fraction of the price—suckers.
Eve found it on a list of “great value packages for budget-conscious honeymooners.” She booked a “standard view beach cabin.”
After they checked in, a resort worker with a freaky resemblance to their friend Riley drove them in a buggy to their cabin and carried in their bags. Panicked, Eve whispered to Dom, “Do we tip him?” Dom shrugged, aghast. Dom’s dad always insists you never tip anyone for anything in Australia because “we pay our workers a proper wage,” but Dom’s dad is not always a reliable source. (He sends texts like: Hope you feel better soon, LOL, Dad.)
After the Riley look-alike brought in their bags, he opened the wooden doors with a flourish and said, “Beautiful view, eh?”
Eve and Dom were stunned. Eve actually gasped in horror. Was he gaslighting them? Eve assumed it was climate change. Therefore, her mother’s fault. Her mother’s generation had done nothing about climate change. Or was it Eve’s fault because she’d chosen the cheapest room? This was a “standard view.” Get what you pay for.
She was the first to speak.
