Lou laughed. ‘Julia Childs didn’t baste hams.’
‘Whatever.’
Lou looked over at the neutral linens couple. He was taking pictures of her with his phone, the beautiful boys were building a sandcastle that was taking on epic proportions. The woman tilted her golden head back, looked at her husband like he was a delicious pie, and he lowered the phone and playfully began to crawl over the sand to where she was sitting.
‘Do you think the sex will help us reconnect?’ Lou asked.
Gretchen reached out a hand and squeezed Lou’s thigh, which was covered by a sarong she’d draped across her lap. ‘Can’t hurt,’ she said. ‘But really, you have to want it. The connection, I mean. It’s not going to turn up if you’re not there for it. It’s going to take more than fifty per cent.’
Lou nodded, still looking at the perfect couple, who were kissing now, as their sons worked on an improbably intricate sand turret. ‘Wise words, my friend.’
‘And there’s something you haven’t told me yet.’
Lou stiffened, knowing as she did that Gretchen’s hand would be able to feel her tension.
‘What?’
‘Does Josh know about this? Does he know that his marriage, the whole fucking centre of his entire wood-whittling, guitar-twiddling, middle-aged life, is on borrowed time?’
Lou exhaled, loosened.
‘Nope. Not yet.’
The girls came charging back at them, spraying sand.
‘Can we have ice cream?’ Rita yelled at a volume that made Lou flinch. She looked over at the destroyed hump of sand where they’d been digging and burying and dumping.
‘Sure you can, it’s the holidays,’ Lou said, reaching out to brush sand off Rita’s lips.
And Gretchen was looking at Lou again now, over her sunglasses, even as Stella was pulling at her to get up, get up, get up.
‘Well, that’s probably for the best, right?’ she said to Lou.
‘Yes, definitely for the best,’ Lou answered.
And as she started rummaging in her cavernous beach bag for her wallet, Lou’s phone, lying on top of towels and Tupperware snack-packs and squeezed-out sunscreens, started vibrating. It was flashing up a number she’d last called two nights ago.
Suddenly the heat felt unbearable on Lou’s face. She grabbed the phone with a slightly shaky hand and quickly flipped it over.
‘Ice creams!’ she called to the girls. ‘Let’s go.’
Josh
Josh rested his head on the steering wheel of the van and closed his eyes, just for a second.
His head was heavy and the van was cool. He knew that out there in the timber yard a wave of inner-west heat was going to hit him like an iron to the face.
I want to be at home, he thought. All those lucky bastards having January off. I need to be at home with Lou and the girls, with my feet in that giant paddling pool they got for Christmas and a cold drink in my hand.
He knew better than to bitch to Lou about January. Living with a teacher for thirteen years had made him as defensive as she was when anyone commented enviously on the length of school holidays. He knew she’d be at the kitchen table right now with her computer open, hacking out the lesson plans for her new year one class while Stella splashed around out the back and Rita snoozed off a fever on the lounge.
Still, he’d rather be there than here.
But if he was, Lou might try to make him have ‘energetic’ sex again.
He lifted his head and hit it gently on the wheel. ‘Shit,’ he whispered.
‘Hey, Jon Bon, are you coming?’
All the other chippies knew that Josh played guitar. He copped every rock’n’roll nickname there was, from Keef to Jimi to Slash, even though he’d never played a metal lick in his life. Now Jon Bon. Tradies – so very funny.
This was Tyler, one of his most regular partners in the jobs he’d been specialising in the last few years, restoring heritage buildings in Sydney’s oldest and swankiest suburbs. They were both contractors, working for their old mate Mick, who had become something of a building tsar, much to everyone’s surprise.
The days when Josh loved his job were the ones when he was in the shared workshop, focusing on details for one of the smaller, private projects he took on himself. His hands running over the wood, feeling his way. The satisfaction of standing back from a finished job – a frame or a table or an old chair that was going to sit in someone’s home, quietly making life incrementally better just by being one proper, solid, beautiful thing that would last in the world.
Today was not one of those days.
Today was a day when he and Tyler had to sort through hundreds of old doors at this huge, chaotic mess of a place, trying to find six that were an exact match for a city hotel job that Mick had going on. And they’d have to haggle for them with Enzo, who was close to ninety and mean as hell.
Nope, this was a shitty, stinking-hot day and his heart was not in it.
‘Mate, I’m getting sunstroke.’ Tyler opened the door to the cab and Josh lifted his head and climbed out.
‘Sorry. Knackered.’
‘If you’re already knackered in January, it’s going to be a long year,’ Tyler said, as they crossed the yard to Enzo’s site office.
Why am I forty and still doing a job that I always swore was a stopgap?
This was a thought that Josh tried not to let settle for too long. It wasn’t that the money was bad; it wasn’t. The level he was working at now, the jobs Mick managed to pull him in on, he was doing alright by the family – a whole lot better than he had at other times. Times when he’d been trying to make music pay, for example. Lou was happier about that, surely.
But fuck, he felt too old to be clambering around a grumpy old man’s timber yard on a thirty-degree morning.
‘Lou at the beach?’ Tyler asked, as they waited at Enzo’s door. The old guy was on the phone, holding up a hand and shaking his head to stop them entering his air-conditioned shipping container.
‘No, she’s home with the girls. Probably working too,’ said Josh.
Josh knew that Tyler had broken up with his wife more than two years ago now. That he barely saw his kids anymore. Josh knew this because there had been a night, about six months ago, when they’d gone out for a drink to celebrate one of the apprentices at the workshop getting his papers. Josh wasn’t big on drinking with the boys. He told Lou it made him feel old, and like a walking cliché, but also it made him feel like he was truly part of this tribe, when he preferred to consider himself a visitor, an outsider passing through. But that evening, he’d gone to the pub with the others and he’d seen Tyler – who generally seemed sunny and confident – dissolve into a mess of a boy nursing a raw, open wound. Two hours in, he was slumped at the table in the too-bright sports bar, talking tearfully about how his son didn’t want to come over to Tyler’s new place, even though the agreement with his ex, Jodie, was that Tyler could see his kids every second Saturday night. How his little girl looked at him like he was a stranger and squirmed out of the hugs she used to fall into. It was all his own fucking fault, Tyler confessed. He’d been a shit husband who didn’t pay attention, but he’d never meant for this to happen and he couldn’t really blame Jodie, because she was just trying to have a good life, not one with a dropkick, you know what I mean?