Bronte Beach was in Sydney. But it most definitely wasn’t part of Byron Bay.
So that meant one of two things. Either Izzy, in this life, wasn’t in Byron Bay. Or Nora wasn’t with Izzy.
She noticed she was tanned a mild caramel all over.
Of course, the trouble was, she didn’t know where her clothes were. But then she remembered the plastic wristband with a key on it.
57. Her locker was 57. So she found the changing rooms and opened the squat, square locker and saw that her taste in clothes, as well as watches, was more colourful in this life. She had a T-shirt with a pineapple print on it. A whole cornucopia of pineapples. And pink-purple denim shorts. And slip-on checked pumps.
What am I?she wondered.A children’s TV presenter?
Sun-block. Hibiscus tinted lip balm. No other make-up as such.
As she pulled on her T-shirt, she noticed a couple of marks on her arm. Scar-lines. She wondered, momentarily, if they had been self-inflicted. There was also a tattoo just below her shoulder. A Phoenix and flames. It was a terrible tattoo. In this life, she clearly had no taste. But since when did taste have anything to do with happiness?
She dressed and pulled out a phone from her shorts pocket. This was an older model than in her married-and-living-in-a-pub life. Luckily, a thumb-reading was enough to unlock it.
She left the changing rooms and walked along a beachside path. It was a warm day. Maybe life was automatically better when the sun shone so confidently in April. Everything seemed more vivid, more colourful andalivethan it had done in England.
She saw a parrot – a rainbow lorikeet – perched on the top of a bench, being photographed by a couple of tourists. A surfy-looking cyclist passed by holding an orange smoothie, smiling and literally saying, ‘G’day.’
This was most definitely not Bedford.
Nora noticed something was happening to her face. She was – could she be? –smiling. And naturally, not just because someone expected her to.
Then she noted a piece of graffiti on a low wall which said THE WORLD IS ON FIRE and another that said ONE EARTH = ONE CHANCE and her smile faded. After all, a different life didn’t mean a different planet.
She had no idea where she lived or what she did or where she was meant to be heading after the swimming pool, but there was something quite freeing about that. To be existing without any expectation, even her own. As she walked, she googled her own name and added ‘Sydney’ to see if it brought up anything.
Before she scanned the results she glanced up and noticed a man walking on the path towards her, smiling. A short, tanned man with kind eyes and long thinning hair in a loose ponytail with a shirt that wasn’t buttoned correctly.
‘Hey, Nora.’
‘Hey,’ she said, trying not to sound confused.
‘What time you start today?’
How could she answer that? ‘Uh. Oh. Crap. I’ve totally forgotten.’
He laughed, a little laugh of recognition, as if her forgetting was quite in character.
‘I saw it on the roster. I think it might be eleven.’
‘Eleven a.m.?’
Kind Eyes laughed. ‘What’ve you been smoking? I want some.’
‘Ha. Nothing,’ she said, stiffly. ‘I’ve not been smoking anything. I just skipped breakfast.’
‘Well, see you this arvo ...’
‘Yes. At the ... place. Where is it again?’
He laughed, frowningly, and kept walking. Maybe she worked on a whale sight-seeing cruise that operated out of Sydney. Maybe Izzy did too.
Nora had no idea where she (or they) lived, and nothing was coming up on Google, but away from the ocean seemed the right direction. Maybe she was very local. Maybe she had walked here. Maybe one of the bikes she saw locked up outside the pool café had been hers. She rummaged in her tiny clasp wallet and felt her pockets for a key, but there was only a house key. No car keys, no bike keys. So it was a bus or by foot. The house key had no information on it at all, so she sat on a bench with the sun beating hard on the back of her neck and checked her texts.
There were names of people she didn’t recognise.
