Someone Like You (7 page)

‘This sounds interesting. What’s up?’

‘Dan’s coming here for dinner. To the pub, I mean. Tonight. In,’ Lizzie checked her watch, ‘two hours.’

There was silence. Lizzie wiped the beads of sweat from her top lip. This place really was like an oven.

‘Jools? Are you there?’ If only Lizzie could see her best friend doing a silent happy dance in the middle of her kitchen.

‘What did you do to lure him out of his house?’ Lizzie could hear Jools’ sigh down the line. ‘
His house
. That sounds weird. I still think of it as
my
house.’

‘Enough about you, Jools, this is about me,’ Lizzie snapped.

‘Sorry. You’re right. Prepare for twenty questions: why are you freaking out? How did this all happen? Where? When? And what are you going to wear?’

Lizzie relayed a highly edited version of all the events so far. She told Julia about Dan’s surprise visit the night before, the wine glass incident and Dan’s parting words to keep a table for two. She conveniently failed to include specific details about his eyes, his shoulders, her raging hormonal response to being lifted off the ground like she was a feather or the beard fondle. And she most definitely forgot to tell her about the rejected offer of a drink. All of that was way too humiliating.

‘That all sounds extremely promising, Lizzie,’ Julia said.

‘It’s dinner. That’s it.’ No strings, no expectations, Lizzie told herself. The booking was at eight o’clock. It would probably be all over by 8.45, including dessert. And then she could go home and watch a weepy movie and get drunk. How ridiculous to be thinking this was anything more.

‘Lizzie. You’ve gone quiet. What aren’t you telling me?’

Lizzie could hear the suspicion in her friend’s voice and tried to snap out of her ridiculous, uneasy mood. She’d been totally distracted by Dan’s eyes and body and that thing he did when he looked at her. That thing that scrambled her brain and her resolve. Wasn’t he complicated enough without throwing sex into the mix? Staying away from him and his problems was definitely the best thing she could do. So why wasn’t she doing it?

‘I don’t know why I said yes. I can’t do this, Jools. Every time I see him my resistance chips away just a little bit. You know me and my pathological addiction to helping people.’

‘Stop being such a drama queen, Lizzie. Would it be
that
bad to spend some time with Dan? I could think of worse ways to pass the time. He clearly wants to hang out with you and the only risk I see is that you could get a crick in your neck from looking up at his chiselled jaw and fine eyes for too long.’

Lizzie sighed in frustration. ‘Would it be bad? Yes. Very bad. Seriously bad. We’re talking about the Dan who slammed the door in my face. He’s just being polite.’ Whatever interest he might have had four months ago, and Lizzie was even suspicious of that now, was dead and gone. Despite the way he’d looked at her.

‘Lizzie, it’s just food. The man clearly needs to eat. Just chill.’

‘I don’t need to chill!’ Lizzie shouted and her voice echoed around the car park. ‘Oh hell, I need to chill.’

Lizzie heard the pub door open and there was a heavy thud of boots on the wooden floorboards. The sound triggered a jolt of memory.

That night, last winter. The pub had been busy but not jam-packed. A few tradies had stopped in for a cold beer on their way home and a party of day-trippers from Adelaide were tucking into a very late lunch. In the far corner, the Middle Point bowling club ladies were finishing up dessert, their celebrations for a member’s eightieth birthday almost coming to a close. It had only taken them a dozen bottles of wine to get there.

Dan had swaggered in, his hair and leather jacket misted with rain, and his tall frame had almost filled the doorway. He’d worn a shit-eating grin and there was sex in his eyes. They’d roamed over her eyes, her lips and her breasts and unashamedly stayed there.

He’d asked her why she was known as Lizzie and not Elizabeth.

‘Always hated it,’ she’d told him. ‘When people call me Elizabeth I feel like the Queen.’

‘Bye, Elizabeth,’ he’d said and winked at her, pushing his wayward fringe off his forehead.

Everything had changed just a few hours later on a lonely road.

At 7.30 p.m., Lizzie checked her make-up in the bathroom mirror. Entirely by accident, of course, as she’d just popped in to go to the loo. For the fifth time that afternoon.

At 7.45 p.m., she counted the bottles of chilled water in the fridge behind the bar.

At 7.50 p.m., she checked the time. Again. Was the old clock getting slower?

At 7.55 p.m., she reviewed the covers for the night, looked over the next day’s specials and wondered again if the sushi counted as a gluten-free option if it didn’t come with soy sauce.

At eight, she waited and watched the door.

She did the same at 8.10 p.m. and 8.15 p.m.

Dan stood frozen to the spot, sweat drenching his T-shirt. A wrench of pain arced to life near the scar on his thigh and radiated up and down, sending waves of shock coursing through his body. He took a few halting steps to the kitchen bench and gripped the counter top, knowing what would come next. A ferocious pounding in his chest and a terror so intense that it took over any rational thought and made him want to run and run and run.

Was this what a heart attack felt like?

The panic attacks only lasted a couple of minutes but the sudden onset of dread was bone shaking. It had a violent, uncontrollable and unpredictable power over him and Dan wanted to curse and shout at it, whatever it was, to fuck off and leave him alone but it gripped around his chest and his head like a vice and pounded there too. His heartbeat hammered so hard he thought his heart might burst.

When it was over, when his chest finally stopped quaking, he stumbled to the sofa and collapsed onto it. The wave was over but the ripples shuddered through him, inside and out. What came next was almost as bad.

The trying to make sense of it.

Why had it hit now, seemingly out of nowhere?

For once in four goddamned months he hadn’t been thinking about that night, about the accident. He’d been feeling okay, and maybe even let himself feel a little…hell, feel something that wasn’t a dulled sense of dread.

So why now? A few minutes before, he’d stepped out of the shower, grabbed a towel to dry himself, and had pulled on a shirt and jeans to go down to the pub for that meal with Lizzie. He was in the kitchen, had just poured himself a glass of water and was drinking it over the sink, when it struck. Ordinary, stupid, mundane shit that he did every day.

Dinner with Lizzie.

He buried his face in his hands. He knew he wouldn’t go. Couldn’t. Not tonight. Not this way. Because he knew that after the fear and the confusion, came the exhaustion. And then deeper still, came the guilt, the disappointment, the shame.

Those things that were easier to hide when he was alone, in the dark.

At 8.30 p.m., Lizzie picked up her handbag, locked her office and wandered home in the fading twilight. She needed the ten-minute walk to think. Dan couldn’t have made it more obvious. She got the hint. Maybe he’d had a rush of blood to the head yesterday, or even somewhere else, when he’d suggested they have dinner together. Whatever he was planning was now irrelevant. He’d clearly changed his mind.

Lizzie tried to tell herself she was okay with it. She’d had a full life before Dan McSwaine ambled into town, and she would just have to get back to it. During the past four months, Ry and Julia had been distracted by Dan’s situation, as any friends would be. Lizzie’s problem was that she’d let herself get sucked into their lives as well. Of course, she’d been more than happy to step up at the pub while Ry and Julia were up in the city in the weeks after the accident. It was her first few weeks as manager anyway, and she’d kept the place ticking over like a well-oiled machine. Ry had placed his trust in her and Julia had relied on her friendship. She hadn’t let either of them down.

But now it was time for Lizzie to get back to her own life. She’d done it before, knew the drill. Knew that getting up in the morning, brushing her teeth and slicking on the mascara, creating a brave face for the rest of the world to see, created a routine, a reason to keep getting out of bed. There had been many times in the past when she’d needed to find reasons.

As she got closer to home, Lizzie looked over the dunes to the darkening, wild sea. There was so much to be thankful for, she knew. She’d always loved her job at the pub and was loving it even more now she’d been promoted. She had a life here. She was a de facto daughter to Harri next door, and Julia was back in the Point. Ry was now part of that circle too. It was a good life.

What she didn’t have, what she hadn’t had for a long time – two years, six months and he’d been a dud, but who was counting – was a man. While she loved Middle Point with everything she had, there were certain limitations in its man department. Half the boys she’d gone to school with had married their high school girlfriends. Others had married girls from other towns on the peninsula. The only guy she’d had a crush on, who she’d always considered really cute with perfect hair, had moved to Sydney and burst out of the closet the minute he’d stepped out of a taxi on Oxford Street. Men had been pretty thin on the ground in the years since. There were some single guys around Middle Point, either newly divorced or never married, but Lizzie hadn’t been tempted the first time around.

For all these reasons, the news of Dan’s arrival had been a glimmer of hope in a depressed man market. The first time they’d met, caught in the crossfire between Ry and Julia’s battle about the merits of Ry’s company’s Windswept Development, they’d predictably taken the sides of their best friends and gone at it, tongues and tempers blazing. The next time they met, it was kind of different. They’d managed to overlook their differences when it seemed as if their best friends weren’t going to make it. They’d engineered a rendezvous at the pub and Ry and Julia had been together ever since.

Whatever potential there was for anything between her and Dan had been snuffed out months ago in a car wreck on a dark road just outside of Middle Point.

Lizzie turned the corner into her street and saw Harri in the distance. Her neighbour’s bright orange shirt was hard to miss and she threw Lizzie a spirited wave, beckoning her to come over. Harri watered her front garden at sunset every night, totally in line with water restrictions and in solidarity with the life-giving River Murray.

‘G’day Lizzie! How are you, doll? Fancy a cuppa?’ Harri leaned down to yank off her garden tap, her loose grey bun drooping to one side as she bent over. ‘You’re a bit late tonight. What’s up at the watering hole?’

Lizzie sighed. ‘Nothing, I just got a little held up.’ She tried to avoid her friend’s eyes.

‘Something tells me you’re bullshitting, Lizzie. But I’m sure you’ll spill the beans in your own good time.’ Harriet Byrne had been a trailblazer in her younger years and for two decades had represented the local area in State Parliament. Now in her seventies, she’d left politics behind but still had a blindingly good nose for intrigue.

That’s why Lizzie changed the subject so fast. ‘How’s your hip holding up today?’

‘Oh, it’s a bugger. You think the warmer weather would help but no, it hurts like a bastard.’ Harri plonked a hand on the hip in question for added emphasis. ‘The doctor keeps telling me I should get a new one.’

Lizzie laughed out loud. ‘Don’t tell me, you’re not taking any advice from that quack, right?’

‘Doctors,’ Harri winked. ‘You know me too well, doll. What do you think about ditching that cuppa and opening a bottle instead?’

Lizzie looped her arm around Harri’s shoulder and gave it a squeeze. ‘You had me at g’day, Harri.’

The early morning sun was already shining so bright that the lapping waves on the sand shimmered like liquid mercury, hot and silver in the distance. With her red bodyboard nestled under the crook of her right arm, Lizzie took slow steps into the waves, cool on her ankles and calves, the cover of her knee-length wetsuit insulating the rest of her from the freshness of the water. Being in the ocean calmed her. The unyielding pull of the waves, the mysterious interaction of the moon and gravity that created the tides, the pounding sound in her ears. It was all heaven to Lizzie. For some people it was classical music. For her, the rhythm of the deep was always enough.

Lizzie breathed in, let the sea air fill her lungs. Above her, the sky was almost cloudless, a brilliant early summer blue with only a few scattered streaks of white marking the eastern sky. A pair of seagulls flew low over the water and Lizzie watched in amusement as one landed to bob on the water right near her. The gull cocked its head in her direction, flapped its wings and took off, soaring away with the southerlies.

Just like the gulls, Lizzie felt a part of this place, had grown up looking at this ocean most every day of her life. The Southern Ocean could be unforgiving, as the historic wrecks of ships along parts of the rocky coast could attest, but she loved the wildness of it, the knowledge that there was nothing between her and the Antarctic but a few thousands miles of ocean.

It was her favourite place, her saving grace, her anchor. She’d needed to get out there in the waves, to calm her growing sense of dislocation. Since Dan’s accident, normal life in Middle Point had veered off course, like a stone from a crooked slingshot, in a direction no one had prepared for or planned. And since then, nothing had come together in exactly the same order. Julia and Ry were still on tenterhooks around Dan and their attempt to get Lizzie to help him hadn’t worked. He was clearly pushing back, trying to put a distance between them. Lizzie felt foolish all of a sudden; she should have gone with her first instinct, which was to do exactly the same. Instead, she’d let herself be distracted by his handsome sadness.

At the sound of girlish shrieks of laughter, Lizzie turned back to the sand and watched two young women contemplate the water. As they ran into the waves, their tanned knees rose up like prancing ponies. They were happy, giggling, calling to each other, clad in tiny, precarious bikinis that wouldn’t survive a strong wave. She wondered where they got their mysterious confidence and more importantly, where hers had gone. Part of it was back in London, she knew. Maybe she would never get it back.