45

Anne is beginning to think Peter will never marry. He’s moved around a bit over the years and now he’s back at the shop. One Thursday afternoon, he settles back at his desk in the second small bedroom upstairs and looks through the bamboo blinds into the sideway between the shop and the chemist next door. The sky has taken on the honey colour of early evening and he pulls up the blind to catch more. Some of the gold drifts in but between the two buildings he can catch only a sliver. The computer screen holds itself before him briefly but soon falls into saving itself. He wonders how you save yourself. There’s a soapstone owl on his desk, a little gift from his first girlfriend, Gloria, who thought he was wise. He often holds it, looking for a wisdom transfer. He puts it down and decides he needs a walk.

Out in the street, Lily Baxter’s barrel of a dog, Ned, charges snorting and snuffling straight at Pete, mouth wide open like some deepwater fish. Lily Baxter takes off after the dog, grabbing at his collar and saying, ‘Sorry ... Ned’s a bit of a sticky beak, but look at that, he likes you already.’ She smiles. ‘It’s fine,’ he says, patting the squat sepia animal. ‘He’s a great dog. What is he?’

The dog props magnetically on his shoe, he’s not going anywhere. ‘He’s a Staffie, not pure bred, his mother was a seal by the look of him.’ She laughs. Pete grins and keeps patting. He’s seen Lily before and knows they went to the same primary school. He recalls it instantly. By grade six, girls were becoming real to him and one lunchtime always stays with him. He was on the bitumen not far from some girls. He spent a good part of the time watching Lily Baxter and her mates play hoppie.

Now here she is right in front of him outside the shop. You’ll get nowhere and you know it, he tells himself, sternly turning. They’re never interested in you. But Lily has been chatting and he’s already stunned himself by inviting her to come fishing with him one day. ‘You wanta try surfing,’ she says amiably. ‘Better than killing fish.’ He laughs with reservation, amazed that anyone could think something so dumb.

‘Says you.’ She looks straight into his eyes. ‘Yeah, I say it. Fish are alive just like you are alive. Fish have feeling too.’ He’s too flummoxed to reply, he’s never heard anything like it. He peels Ned off and sends him back, but something makes him turn around. ‘You went to West Footscray Primary, didn’t you? Year below me. Never forget a pretty face.’ He winces at the corny line. ‘Wouldn’t wanta teach me to surf, would ya?’ She laughs as if that was all pretty funny but answers with a ‘maybe’ that gives him hope.

He’s elated as he walks away in the completely wrong direction and must wait till she’s gone to come back. Cannot believe how well that went, he says to himself. Upstairs, he settles down in his room and decides, that’ll be the end of it, cannot possibly work out. He doesn’t expect a thing. So when she drops in a few days later and catches him minding the shop, he’s charmed and embarrassed. He makes her a cup of instant out the back and in one of those random, good long gaps between customers that shopkeepers both love and hate, they talk about everything from surfing to school days to the souls of fish.

Lily reckons surfing is what the gods would do if they still hung around here on earth, especially if they had access to Geelong Road. ‘Think about it, at one with the sea, with the power of it, the colour of it, with the wind. With every single thing.’ There’s something in her that lifts him. She’s studying nursing and working part-time. ‘Bit of the old moolah never goes astray,’ she says, rubbing her fingertips together in front of his face, her smile wide.

Apart from fishing, she never seeks to convert him. She gathers information on computer courses and leaves it in the van. She helps him apply. He dithers about kissing her, so she kisses him to get it out of the way. They’re standing out the back of the shop on a fresh afternoon when the wind is whipping around and the sky is full of scattered cloud. Peter’s being dilatory again, finding it hard to let her go, so Lily leans over, puts two hands on his face and pulls him to her.

Eventually they go surfing. Driving down to the Geelong Road through the flatlands past the You Yangs, the dark mountains on the side of the bay, heading ever onwards to the coast in the van and down there with her, he is healed by the ocean and by talking, and slowly he learns about having another partner against the immensity.