by Georgia Rodgers.
I sit next to her on the warm, sun-bleached sands. The outstretched limbs of friendly eucalypts shade us from the thirsty heat, and the scent of their drying leaves reminds me that it is summer once again. Spread across the dancing water, yachts flutter their milk-white wings, flying over the soft, glittering waves. The kids near us are throwing soggy hot chips for the birds and laughing so manically that I can no longer tell if a shriek belongs to gull or child. The whole place tastes like life, and memories, and sun.
Beside me, Layla stares out at the water. She’s hunched over, arms wrapped around her legs like a schoolgirl on the carpet, but her greying hair betrays her age, sloping over the side of her head and resting on her knee. Her face is empty; eyes half-shut and vacant; forehead smooth and blank.
It used to feel like we were one person, like our skin would melt into each other when we were near. Now, she sits just outside my reach—in a space of her own, clouded from the haze of things forgotten.
I slide my hand across the sand, reaching for her. Her skin is thin and velvety under my fingers. We’re not young anymore. Our hands that were once firm and sure have been wrinkled and browned by the touch of sun and years, but she’s still my Layla, and she feels familiar and warm.
‘We met here,’ I say, running my thumb in circles over the back of her hand. ‘When you were a lifeguard down at the point, just over there.’
Layla looks out to the rocky corner before turning back to me, her gaze settling just above my eyes, eyebrows dipping together in thought. She had once told our story to anyone who would listen, all giggly and proud, but those days are over now.
‘Tell it to me,’ she says.
‘It was a stormy day; you know the type where the air is thick and static? Well, I was out where the back breakers were, and my board got pulled under a strong wave and nosedived with me on it,’ I say, tasting the salt on my tongue and the stinging rawness of my lungs still. I’d moved from the city down to the coast a month earlier and was still filled with that ugly boyish stupidity. Thinking that I was invincible—too strong and intelligent to get beaten down by the stuff that infects everyone else.
‘I was getting tossed around in those waves, I wasn’t as good of a swimmer as you were, but then you came for me. You were so strong and confident, and you knew the water like it was your home,’ I say, squeezing her hand, asking her by touch to remember. She shifts her gaze away, avoiding my eyes.
‘Yes, of course,’ she says, but she lets her hand go limp in mine and starts blinking fiercely.
Then she looks at me, really looks. ‘I wish I could feel those moments again, see them play out in my head. Remember us, and me.’
I feel my heart tighten, and icy blood pulses through the bends of my insides. ‘It’s okay, love,’ I reassure, ‘You’ll remember them again, I know it.’ She smiles thinly, blinks twice and looks away again.
Above us, the sun has shifted spots, breaking away from the eucalypt leaves that held its ray’s captive. I lay down, feeling the heat touch my bare chest and imagining it spreading through my body, warming up my blood, fixing me. I imagine it flowing through my hand to Layla’s, filling her veins with that same warmth, a warmth that nourishes and fixes.
‘How about a dip?’ I ask Layla, who is busy etching swirls with her other hand around and around in the sand beside her. ‘Come on, the water’s calling us.’
We walk across shells towards the water’s edge. It licks at our feet, pulling us in with the promise of comfort and ease.
We wade out, hand in hand until the water sits at our waists. It is clear and completely still today, and I can see down to the sandy floor, where the Pipis and Ulva crowd around the small rocks to the side of us. The water makes me feel young again, like the weight of my body is given away to the sea. My bones feel steady and strong, and I hold Layla’s hand tight, hoping she feels the same.
‘Tell me more about us,’ Layla says, tapping the water’s surface so that it ripples out from under her fingers.
‘Do you remember coming down here with Sammy?’ I ask. She looks at me, her lips a thin downturned crescent, and shakes her head.
‘We’d take him down here in any weather, he didn’t care,’ I look out at the ocean. ‘He’d always bring that little red foamy, the one we gave him for his sixth birthday, with the flames on the side. He thought he was the coolest cat around town.’
Layla smiles, a real wide gap-toothed smile that makes me fall in love with her all over again. She looks into my eyes, urging me to go on.
‘He was crazy, you know? He’d stay out there for hours, catching waves in with the whitewash to the shore. You used to stand in the shallows, waiting for the moment you’d have to go in and save him, but he’d always pull through, grinning like a wild child the whole way to you.’
He was a middle-aged man now, Sammy, with his own wife and kids. He hadn’t taken it well, the diagnosis, and had insisted that the doctors had been wrong. He thought it was a death sentence, that his mum would be gone along with her memories, and he’d be left with the cicada-skin shell of a woman who’d once known and loved him deeply.
‘He loved the water,’ she says, sobering me from my thoughts. ‘Just like me.’
We waddle back in with the tide and the weight of my body reclaims me. It’s late evening and the Pied Currawongs have taken up residency in the trees, fluttering from branch to branch with their glossy feathers flashing in the late afternoon sun. The kids have gone home now, taking their boogie-boards and sunburn, leaving just us on the beach.
‘We called this place Church,’ I tell Layla. ‘We used to say that the spindly branches were pews for the birds, and the crashing waves were our choir. We talked about everything we loved; you’d say it was only right to give praise in a place this holy.’ I move closer to her, letting my leg rest against hers.
Layla laughs and for a moment I allow myself to feel proud.
‘It sounds like we’ve had a good life so far,’ she says. I let the uncertainty of her sentence hang between us, my pride falling away under its weight.
Around us, the sky has turned from orange to pink to purple, and the water shows a smashed mirror reflection of the moon.
We make our way home, walking slowly along the dusty, saltbush lined roads. An old blue Holden Ute passes us on the way, blaring out ‘Am I Ever Gonna See Your Face Again’ by The Angels, and Layla sings it on a loop for the rest of the walk home. It’s funny how some things seem burnt into her mind, and some things are gone faster than a wave against the shore. I hope I’m in there somewhere, tucked away under the covers, safe and sound.
I make us dinner, a version of Spaghetti Bolognese that she used to make to perfection, and we sit at the scratched wooden table together.
‘Would you tell me,’ she begins, putting down her fork to concentrate fully on the question. ‘What’s your favourite memory of us? And don’t give me something you don’t mean. I might be forgetting stuff, but I think I still know when someone’s lying.’
I smile as my mind flashes with memories. Our wedding ceremony, when Layla had made her own dress from op shop fabric, and it had torn when she’d stepped on it at the altar. Sammy’s birth, when she held him to her chest, and I had felt like something new had been born in me too. My birthday one year, when she’d organised for Sammy to be watched by her mum, and we escaped to the mountains for a week.
I look over to her. Her eyes are crinkled and calm. She looks so content sitting here with me, waiting to remember her life.
‘It was late spring,’ I say. ‘I remember because the flannel flowers had bloomed in the front yard. It was in the evening, and we were down at the beach, just you and me. The night air was so mild that you were just in a blue dress, I still remember it—the flowers around the collar. You were walking along the water, looking for shells as you always did.’
Layla smiles, looking to the bowl in the middle of the table that holds a handful of speckled mud whelk shells.
‘I was lying back on the sand, watching you tiptoe across the water’s edge, humming a song, and I knew that you were the woman I wanted forever. I couldn’t think of anything I wanted more.’
She blushes, cheeks turning rosy and full.
‘You came up to me and asked if I wanted to swim, and of course I said yes—I would’ve said yes to anything you asked. We stripped down naked and made our way out past the shallows to the deep darkness out the back. You held my hand, and we floated on our backs until it felt like we were connected to the sea, just another animal floating with the waves. Then I asked if you would marry me.’
I remember the moment like it was yesterday. How when I was waiting for her answer, my heart twirled in my chest, and the stars swirled around my head, waiting to stop spinning at the sound of her voice.
‘You looked over to me and said yes. I couldn’t believe it. The water had led you to me, and the water had let you stay.’
Layla moves closer to me, placing her hand over mine on the table. The house is quiet except for the hum of the refrigerator and Layla’s quiet breath beside me.
‘It all leads back to the water,’ she says, looking into my eyes.
‘It all leads back to you, Layla,’ I place my other hand over hers, and for a moment, it almost feels as if I’m melting into her.
