The night before we set sail, I stay at Maggie and Mac's and help them prepare the food for our voyage. We pre-cook meals to eat over the first week. 'After that,' Mac says, 'we get crafty with non-perishables.'
By midnight, the kitchen bench is stacked with Tupperware containers: vegetarian casseroles, an eggplant curry, spicy pumpkin soup.
Mac puts the last container in the fridge, then asks me if I've told my parents that I'm leaving.
'I sent them an email this morning telling them I turned down the internship.'
'What do you reckon they'll say?'
'Who knows?' I say. 'My dad already pretends I don't exist.' Maggie, standing beside me in the kitchen, hugs me, holding my body against hers. 'Nope,' she says. 'I can feel you. You definitely exist.'
***
When I wake on the couch, sunlight is yellow yolk, flooding the room. Maggie emerges from her bedroom with Coco. The light catches Maggie's hair. It glints rose gold.
In her nightdress, she drifts through the yellow like she's underwater. She stops in front of the bookshelf. Coco sits at her feet, waiting. 'Oli,' says Maggie, 'we need to choose which books to take with us.'
'Sure thing,' I say, getting up off the couch. Mac appears from his room, rubbing sleep from his eyes, as I scan the bookshelf. There are books on history and philosophy, adventure novels, and as many art catalogues as you'd find in a gallery bookshop. 'It's an impressive collection,' I say.
'Thank you. There wasn't a single book in this house before I got here.' Maggie laughs. 'I swear he'd never read a book in his life.'
'I'm a simple man.'
'Now he reads to me.'
'She opened my eyes,' Mac says, warm as the morning sun. 'Can you please find The Lost Lunar Baedeker by Mina Loy, and Selected Poems by H.D.?' Maggie asks. 'Poetry books are on the top shelf.'
I point them out and Mac pulls them down.
'Also, A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit.'
I find it on the shelf. The book is so worn the blue mountains on the cover are as thin and watery as sky. I open it. There are coffee stains on the title page.
Maggie says, 'My favourite book of all time. I think you'll feel the same. There's an excellent essay about Yves Klein. I'd love for you to read it to me.'
I put the book with the poetry collections, then Maggie invites me to choose a few for myself. I find Tim Winton's Island Home and Virginia Woolf's The Waves. I tell Maggie my choices, admitting I haven't read either. 'They have beautiful covers,' I say.
'Describe them to me,' she says, and so I do.
'Island Home has a photo of a beach. Bird's -eye view. Sand becoming ocean. And there's a tiny person walking with a tiny dog. It could be you and Coco!' I say. 'The Waves has a photo of the sea—taken from the beach, I think, looking out. It's all silver and blue. You can't see the sun itself, but here and there you can see its light reflected on the waves.'
'Beautiful,' says Maggie. 'Mac, what are you bringing?'
'One of my favourites,' he says, pulling a novel from the shelf.
'I bet it's Lost and Found,' she whispers to me.
'Lost and Found, by Brooke Davis,' he says. 'It's about a young girl who goes on an adventure with a couple of old farts. They're mad!'
Maggie laughs. 'Sounds just like us!'
***
We pass through the heads, tack the Sea Rose, angle north. The sea is corrugated iron. Maggie is at the helm, steering us up the coast. Sailing is about listening.
Mac comes on deck with two bottles of nail polish. He calls me over. 'Port,' he says, holding up the red bottle. 'And starboard.' He waves the green bottle. 'It'll help you remember.'
'Why don't you just say left and right, and then I won't need to remember,' I say.
'Because you're a sailor now, so you gotta start talking like one.' Maggie chimes in, 'Life at sea has its own language.'
'She's right,' Mac says. 'Walk into any yacht club in the world, and it won't matter who you are or what you look like—if you speak the language, you'll never feel out of place.'
'Fine,' I say, taking a seat in the cockpit.
Mac passes me the bottles. 'Red is your left foot. Green is your right foot.'
I start painting my toenails, a task I find tricky enough on dry land. Out here, with the boat chopping through swells, rocking back and forth, I paint as much of my toes as I do my toenails. 'Couldn't you have got me to do this before we left?'
Mac laughs. 'Where's the fun in that?'
For our first lunch at sea, we boil rice to eat with our eggplant curry. Sitting together in the cockpit, we eat from bowls in our laps. Mac takes over at the helm so Maggie can use both hands to eat. 'I'm bloody good for a blind sailor,' she says, 'but no one's that good.'
I've almost finished my curry when something comes undone at the bow of the boat. The headsail comes loose and begins flapping wildly like a bird in frenzy. Mac jumps up and hurries to the front of the boat. He calls out to me, 'Oli, give us a hand, would ya?'
I help him wind in the headsail. We pull in a rope that's now dragging along in the water. He inspects the end of the line. 'Ah, shit,' he says, 'think we lost a carabiner.'
'Sorry,' I say, knowing it was my knot that came undone. 'Don't worry, I should have double-checked it.' Maggie calls out, 'If you don't know knots, tie lots.'
'No,' Mac says. 'If you don't know knots, you sit in the cockpit and practice until you do.' He ties off the headsail, takes me into the cockpit and gives me a coil of rope. First he demonstrates how to do a half-hitch. 'One hundred of those, please.' And then he shows me a figure-of-eight knot. 'One hundred of those, too.'
'What is this? Boot camp?'
'This is serious stuff, kid. When things go wrong at sea, they get very bad very quickly. You gotta learn to tie the ropes the right way.'
And so I do. For the next two hours, I sit on my arse, tying and untying knots until my hands are chafed.
'Show me your half-hitch,' Mac says.
I show him.
'Good. And your figure of eight?'
I show him that too.
He grins. 'Good work, kid.'
And though my skin is stinging raw, I feel my fingertips tingling with pride.
Mac takes the rope from me and puts it back in the bag it came from beneath his seat in the cockpit.
'Now what?' I say, and they both crack up. 'What's so funny?'
'At sea,' Maggie says, 'hours pass differently.'
'There's a whole lot of nothing,' Mac adds.
'So what do we do?'
Maggie smiles. 'You learn to be inventive with time.'
Maggie moves back to the steering wheel as Mac takes our plates below deck. He returns with the logbook.
We come up with a game in which we score points for various achievements made on board. Mac writes the rules in the back of the notebook. We begin with animals: thirty points if you see a shark; fifteen points for whales. Forty points for the fastest speed of the day. And then there are points for ticking over specific distances while you're at the helm. One hundred miles, ten points. Five hundred miles, fifty points. One thousand miles, one hundred points.
'How will I get any points if I'm never steering?' I ask. 'That means I can only get points for spotting animals.'
'You'll be at the helm soon enough,' Mac promises. Beyond him, the sun is setting, spilling open on distant mountains, coating them in liquid light. 'But for now, we're anchoring.'
Mac takes over at the helm and steers us into the harbour in Newcastle, where we find a mooring. 'When you're ready, we'll be able to sail through the night. You and I will take turns on watch. Four hours on, four hours off.'
'When will I be ready?'
'When I can fall asleep.'
'What do you mean?'
'Oli, when someone is on watch, you're putting your life in their hands. You need to trust them fully if you want to fall asleep.'
***
After we anchor, I see Maggie, standing at the stern, blow a kiss into the air.
'Who was that for?'
'Coco,' she says, smiling sweetly, 'I'm just wishing her goodnight.' I blow a kiss into the air to Coco, who I imagine is right now settling down to sleep at the holiday kennel we dropped her off at this morning. Then I go below deck to put on the rice for dinner. Maggie and Mac stay on deck to tie up the sails and coil ropes.
In the galley, I turn on the cooker, like Mac showed me, and fill a saucepan with water. As it heats, I go over to my bag and pull out my phone. Sailing offshore, we wouldn't have great reception a lot of the time, Mac had explained, so I'd stowed my phone away. Now, when I switch it on, I receive a voicemail notification. I recognise Adam's number instantly.
Mac and Maggie come down the hatch into the body of the boat. 'You okay, Oli?' Mac asks. 'You look like you've seen a ghost.'
'I'm fine,' I manage, then tell them I'm just going upstairs to listen to a message.
On deck, lights from the city are scattered across the bay. The sky is stained at the edges by the glow of an industrial area. I make my way up to the bow of the boat, then sit down on a folded sail, cross-legged.
With trembling hands I dial my voicemail and hold the phone to my ear. 'Liv, it's me,' Adam says, his voice cracking. 'I've been thinking about everything. In fact, it's all I can think about. You're all I can think about.'
His voice cracks again, and he starts to sob. 'Fuck's sake.' He coughs, clears his throat. 'I want you back. This is killing me. I'm sorry, okay? I'll be better. I'll do anything you want.' He pauses, there's a sound in the background that I can't quite make out. 'I love you, okay? I love you.'
I listen to the voicemail twice over, then Mac sticks his head through the hatch and calls out to me. 'You alright, kid?'
'Fine,' I say, wiping my eyes in the shadow of the mast.
'Dinner's ready.'
'Coming!'
I climb down the hatch and take my seat at the table. If Mac has noticed I've been crying, he doesn't say anything. Instead, he suggests we do a little reading after dinner.
I say, 'I'd love to, but I'm exhausted.'
'You sure you're okay, Oli?' says Maggie.
'Yeah,' I say. 'Promise.'
'Because you can talk to us about anything, alright? Nothing is a secret on a boat.'
I help clean up, then excuse myself for bed. I have a cabin all to myself under the cockpit. The ceiling is low, but I can see the moon through a porthole.
As I climb into bed, the Sea Rose rocks back and forth, gently, like a lullaby. I replay Adam's message in my head over and over.
I think of the first time he said it: I love you. How drunk he was. How amazing it had made me feel. He'd said it in front of Henry, and as he got up to go to the bar, I'd looked across at Henry and said, Did you hear that? Just to make sure it was real. Henry had smiled and nodded. It was real. Adam loved me. Cool Adam. The guy who commanded a room like gravity. Loved me.
I'd felt, in one breath, both whole and utterly breakable.
And then I think of when I first met Adam, walking into the lecture theatre at Sydney University, holding my books to my chest as a sea of eyes opened like flowers onto me. I remember the feeling that everyone already seemed to know each other. That feeling of loneliness only a crowd of strangers can give you. How his voice had cut through all the noise. Hey, do you want to sit here?
I remember how inviting his open arm had been. How, after that, everything else seemed to fall into place. How easily he'd brought me into his world. He made this new city feel exhilarating, because he had friends and a family who took me in, with all their parties and holidays. He gave me flowers on our one-month anniversary, and presents on my birthday.
And he had still and quiet moments in which he said beautiful things that only I could hear.
But that's nostalgia. Filtering out the bad bits.
Because on our second night at sea, when we anchor by Broughton Island, there's another voicemail, in which Adam tells me I'm a whore, and that I've made the worst decision of my life. Shouting down the phone, he tells me I'll regret it, because I'm nothing without him. He says that all my friends are his friends and now they'll want nothing to do with me. And he's right.
Except that when I turn my phone off and go back up into the cockpit, tears pouring down my cheeks, Mac takes me in his arms and sits me down between him and Maggie. They wrap themselves around me, like rings of a tree, layer upon layer. So that I no longer feel exposed. I feel whole and, because their love doesn't make me weak, I feel unbreakable.