Cape View

She’s a blazing peach in the shimmery heat of the day. Still a long way off, propped up between ‘Old Blue’ and the sailor’s shack. Not a bit different. And your throat aches because you had always been a little in love with that sunkissed sandstone and white-trimmed cottage. She’s not even much of a cottage, you realise now – just one of the few, stout beach houses dabbled along the cut of bleached gravel that fringes the sand. But she was always a lovely thing, fragrant with the lavender and marigold that frothed down her side yard, and combed by the east winds that blew off the sea.

She is a lovely thing still. Four years wearier than the last time you saw her – damn, four years? But years have a knack at that – a swift dissipation that you might have thought immoral had not the hot earth burnt your feet, or that first breath reeked of salt, had not less than an hour ago you stepped barefoot onto those shabby planks with only a cotton bag and a short summer shift, your hair knotted up with a thin strip of handkerchief, a long-faded tan, and you were poorer but feeling almightily richer than you ever had in that glassy city. Glass smashes, you realised. Glass, the stuff of mirrors, all surface and guile. The exterior of buildings that promise wealth and power, and fashion only empty hands, and hearts that burn for a simple beach town with a simple stone cottage and a glistening view of the sea.

Four years, you found, can collapse in one swift, salty breath. Four years also bead in your eyelashes, and swim in your gaze, and settle gently, painfully, in your throat. You swallow, but it stays; lift your chin, and the languid breeze whispers through the loose strands at your jaw, ripples silver-green across the light heads of wheat grass, and falls gently back into the heat. Beach towns don’t change – and you think it a sore and wonderful thing, that your soles are scorching and your skin sticky, that the waves lap the shore with a tireless love, that sea kisses sky and mimics her blue. And there’s breathtaking stillness. Have you forgotten what stillness is? Not just a quietness, but a sense of eternity – a simmering day and a howling summer storm, a glittering rock pool and a foaming white ocean. And now it parts your lips and smudges your gaze. Your mind moves with your breath, recalls the heartbeat that brought you back across seas and cities and time zones to mingle with the pulse of the ocean. You had forgotten that you are an ocean, that all things are oceans.

But damn, how you feel it now, one hand clamped to your mouth and your cheeks all salty and streaked. It cuts down to your soul and through every particle of your body. But it’s a fleeting thing, a feeling so blistering that it can’t remain. And your mind clears.Your lungs fill sweetly, deeply. Your gaze glides to the blue spilling up against sand, and you long for the water on your limbs, for the sweet cool that combs your hair and every inch of your body. In the dusk, that’s how you swam – golden skin, scanty lace, fragranced by the day. Few ever saw – the sailor was very rarely at home, ‘Old Blue’ abandoned for most of the year, and the only other cottage, the sunkissed, white-trimmed stone – well, they didn’t mind. Jamie certainly didn’t mind, and he told you so, with winks and cheeky whistles, and you kind of liked it, kind of let towel slip shoulder when passing the cottage, kind of wanted his gaze down your legs. That was when his father was away at the mines. Then his father came home, and two whistles would broadcast your walk past the cottage, and you would wink and then laugh over your shoulder and wonder how long they watched you follow the winding road home. You wondered why Jamie was single. Why you didn’t just kiss him. Why he hadn’t come down to swim with you in the falling dusk. Why, when he did, in a pair of boxers and under a mauve sky, you laughed at each other and swam till the ocean was black, climbed up onto the rocks, all slipping and warm and it only seemed natural that he tilt your face up to his and kiss you.

He took advantage of you very quickly – not physically, but of your thoughts and prayers, of the quiet dawns when the sky was pearl and you talked to God with his scent on your neck and his name on your lips. That summer was intoxicating, and you weren’t drunk for a minute of it. His father was away for most of it, and so you fell in love between late swims and cold showers, underwear on but boundaries off, between sandy kisses and sultry days that bled into even hotter nights. Christmas, and your whole family fell a little in love with him, the quick laugh and unconscious smile, and he dragged you beneath the mistletoe in front of everyone to kiss you hard and tell them, tell you, that you were beautiful. You adored him all silly like that, how he laughed it but meant it, how you slapped his butt and your mum cracked her hysterics and while festivities rolled lazily on, he snuck you outside to tell you under a quiet universe that he was wholly and wildly in love with you. That right there was stillness. The still of brown eyes making love to green. The still of the air before a summer storm. The still of nine words that would stay with you forever. The still of ten words that said you were wholly and wildly in love with him too.

His father came back for New Years, and they hosted a party and a half. The cottage was a dazzling thing, decked with tiny, buttery, battery-lit stars, flooding with laughter and limbs, icy drinks making slow pathways between hands and lips. You danced till the music softened and slowed, till new faces became old friends, and old friends slung arms into yours and giggled about your handsome lover boy. The crackers went off five minutes late but no one cared, and by 2 the cottage was empty, dozing into a shimmery sleep. That’s when you lay on the sand, listening to the waves lapping silkily up the shoreline. On an inky horizon hovered the new year. It didn’t really feel new till dawn, and even then, as she sprawled across translucent sky and sea, you felt that lovely, wearied, well-used feeling and wondered what could possibly change.

Many things changed. For the better and worse. The cottage trimmings were freshly painted, and a vegie patch instigated out her backyard, which you equipped with a handful of crystals, and the latter of which Jamie hated vehemently. A V-dub beetle rumbled into your life, and well into your bank account – she had a spluttery engine, wore her P-plates askew, and you lovingly called her Pip. Jamie, alternatively, despaired; but the memories you made in her were so pretty that he soon enough, ruefully, admitted her charm. It was a good year, a long one, not all rosy – there were nights wet with tears, days barbed by anger and one argument that cleaved you for days. And after a week you found yourself back at the cottage, her cocktail of marigold and lavender heady in the evening breeze. He was sitting out the back, lightly fingering his guitar while the crimson and gold of the fire played flicker-like over his expression. His Christmas sweater was scrunched to the elbows, his hair tousled by salt and sunshine, the slightest crease between his brows. There were words on his lips, but he sang softly, as if to the quiet host of stars sprawled above, and the attentive breaths of the night. It was a very still night, too – reverent somehow, watchful and wistful. His eyelashes were lowered, watching the strings sing softly back to him, watching his fingers glide and halt along the frets. You were falling in love with him all over again when he noticed you, leaning against the back door, your hair in a messy bun and your eyes full, and he smiled, and called you sweetheart and you went to him thirsty and tired and hopelessly in love. And remember how he kissed you then – beneath a clear September milky way, at first a little hesitant, and then his hand in your hair and his lips hot against yours – salted with tears, perhaps they were yours – how his mouth fled gently between your lips and collar bone, breast and your shoulder and the curve of your neck, where his kisses were softest and throbbing with something you couldn’t define. That’s where he buried his head, and his whole body curled into yours; where he was just a boy, and you were just a girl, sitting beneath trillions of celestial diamonds and hovering on eternity.

There’s a car pulling into the sandstone cottage. It’s grey. Not white. Not dusty or dented rear left, like his old Rav4. Your chest constricts, but sweetheart what did you expect? It wasn’t just you with the ache to explore. You watch the light dust settle. The engine stops, you hear its last, gentle shudder carry on the breeze. You stand still and your feet are burning. You feel four years younger and intensely naïve. But you’re walking the gravel, and then you’re running, cotton bag flapping, hair coming loose. And the lavender is creaming brilliantly in her side yard. New pot plants, new windows, an old red bike parked against the side gate where it once waited for yours to come flirting. There’s a plaque over the doorway, “Cape View” and a single marigold carved in the wood – you’re reading it and remembering with faltering breath the first time you suggested the name for the cottage. And your gaze falls to the figure that comes from the garage. Neither of you speak. But he looks at you like you’re very pretty and very needed. His hair is darker, still stiffened by salt, he’s muscled but lean. You don’t tell him yet that your bag is empty, because four years brought you nothing and you came here to fill it. He looks at you under long eyelashes and you know he wants to kiss you. You want to kiss him too. Your lips part because you can almost taste him. And you don’t yet know that he’ll take your waist and put his mouth to yours, tell you his father died last year, that the horizon was not all she promised to be, that he’s sorry and forgives you and wants you, needs you.

Your eyes are full, but you smile all the same, glance at the plaque set above the doorway.

“Nice name,” you say.