41

When Mal arrived back with a plastic bag clanking with coloured glass tucked under his arm, I did my best to act like all me and Lou had spoken about was the lapping of the waves of the sea I’d never been in. The darkness landed like a pillow on our faces, and though we’d known it was coming we were surprised just how quickly it arrived.

‘You were gone for a while,’ Lou said.

‘I stopped off at the car,’ Mal said.

We sat and we drank, the conversation flitting happily through topics, a giddy moth between lamps. There was smiling and laughing until it came to three in the morning, when still it was not cold. The wind too was calm. We began to wane as sleep started to take us, and with a towel over her face to protect her eyes from the emulsion of the moonlight, Lou fell to slumber on the sand.

‘That’s it then,’ Mal said. I sensed he’d continue, I sensed he had something to say and that he would as soon as he had poured the last droplets of wine from the bottle into his cup. For the first time today he was not smiling. ‘Back to work.’

‘It’s not all that bad,’ I said.

‘But it’s not all that good either, is it?’ he said. ‘It’s not the stuff you read about in children’s books. You’re not the astronaut or the explorer. All this . . . bills, kids, marriage. It’s not good enough. What will there be to remember of a mediocre existence?’

I didn’t know I’d fallen asleep until the sun rose and poked its hot fingers through my eyelids, massaging my eyeballs until I was awake. Lou and Mal both sat there, stretching, emerging. Her hair was thick with sand. And still there was no one around. It was early. We filled our bags with towels and bottles and walked slowly, quietly, back to the car. I imagined we were returning to a military homecoming on a big ship in the sea. A million cheering people were lining the walls of the docks with flags and banners and kisses when we moored. I was still in this daydream as I climbed into the car and barely noticed the small crane that had been deployed to retrieve the watch thug’s vehicle, which rested in the shallow water at the bottom of the lifeboat ramp, all the ticking in the back of it having ceased.