Page 5 of Summer, in Between
‘I have to go.’
The bell jangles again as he holds the door open for me.
‘I’ll be seeing you, Cat.’
‘Ooh, Paulie and the SUB,’ I overhear as a car does a burn out, music blaring, tires screeching and smoking.I zip around the corner out of sight as the Neanderthal’s whoop and I half run to the beach, the foil tucked under one arm.Condensation from the glass bottle pools in my hand.
4
THERE’S a lookout highabove the beach, barricaded on three sides by a timber fence to stop people from accidentally plummeting over the cliff edge.A teenage boy walks the top rail like a tightrope, nothing but air beside him.He’s barefoot, tall and skinny.I see the ripples of his rib cage.He’s concentrating hard, and I grab his hand, yanking him down to the safety of the grass at my feet.
‘Cat!You scared the crap out of me!’Matty yells.
‘Yeah, well you scared the crap out of me,’ I say.‘I’ve told you before: don’t freakin’ do that!It’s dangerous!Now, grab your stuff, let’s go.’
‘I think you pulled my shoulder out of its socket,’ he says.
‘Yeah, right.’I sneak a look.He’s holding it funny, letting it hang awkwardly away from his body.
When our younger brother Tommy was a toddler, we were walking on the beach with Mum and Dad, and he was holding Dad’s hand when he stumbled, Tommy, not Dad, and we all heard this loud pop.Tommy screamed, his elbow dislocated.Mum still gets emotional when we bring it up.I think she imagined him maimed for life.Instead, the doctor at the local hospital nonchalantly popped the joint back into place, gave Tommy a lollypop and told us it was the third most common injury in kids under two.The most dramatic part of the whole thing wasn’t the fifteen-minute drive to hospital that they did in five.It was the tantrum Matty threw about not getting a lollypop too.Now, twelve years later, he’s swinging his beach towel over his head like a lasso as he walks beside me, talking at a million words per minute.I’m pretty sure his shoulder is fine.
‘Jeez, Cat, the beach is packed, isn’t it?Gonna be a long summer, hey?Jeez, it’s hot, isn’t it?Did you swim?It’s flat, isn’t it?Did you see any waves?No waves, hey?Should we go for a snorkel later, what do you think?’
He doesn’t pause for breath – he rarely does.If I weren’t 17, if he weren’t 14, if I didn’t think it would gross him out completely, I’d scoop him up and snuggle him like I did when he was little.I settle with an arm around his shoulder and squish him.He’s all hard angles and between the elbow to my ribs and the pure evil adolescent smell radiating from his pits I sincerely regret it.
‘And here’s me thinking you’re a good kid.’I rub my ribs and scrunch my nose.‘Even though you’re basically just walking, stinky sweat.’
Matty tosses his towel at me and swings himself over the metal access gate that separates the carpark from the path to the beach.
‘Let’s go the back way,’ I say.I’m not in the mood for another Neanderthal run in, so we cut through the streets towards home.There’s only a couple of hundred people who live in Batter’s Cove, but over summer that number explodes as all the holiday houses fill with people determined to squeeze every bit of summer out of their vacation.Towels hang over balconies, garages are open exposing the bowels of beach houses filled with bikes, ping pong tables, boogie boards and boxes.The drone of lawn mowers is pervasive as people make up for months of neglect while their holidays houses were empty over winter.
As we move further from the beach and higher up the hill towards home, the tarred roads turn to gravel.Matty’s barefoot and I can tell by the way he minces along that his feet are still fleshy, soft and tender from months upon months in school shoes.By the end of summer, he’ll be able to walk on glass.Mum will tell him off about not wearing shoes and if Nonna’s there she’ll really give it to him for walking around likepoverati, poor people, as only my politically incorrect grandmother could put it.We approach our house.From the street, it’s three levels of glass balconies and windows reflecting the sky and the trees, and there’s Mum on the side balcony with her back to the street, Nonna sitting beside her, white hair shining.
‘What do you think about the whole reno thing?’I ask Matty, but he’s scooping up a rock from the road and tossing it up into the canopy of the gums.There’s a raucous flurry as a cloud of red lorikeets take to the sky in objection.
Nonna and Mum turn to see us walking up the driveway, Matty’s feet filthy with red gravel dust and the dirty grey soil from the nature strips.We’re going to cop it.
