Page 30 of People Skills

‘What guys?’

‘You hear a woman say she plays chess and you want to beat her and put her in her place.’ This has happened to me multiple times on bad dates with men—they would ask if I had any hobbies, and if I said I like chess, they would immediately want to play me, sometimes right there at the table (‘What’s your username? Let’s play on our phone right now!’) and if I refused, they would get weird about it.

‘What? No. I don’t want to beat you. I mean, it would be nice to win, but I don’t want to put you in your place.’

‘You’re feeling a loss of control, with me setting all these rules, and you want to reassert your power by beating me in a game I think I’m good at,’ I say, bending down to pat a border collie that is trotting beside us.

‘You are good at psychobabble, I’ll give you that. I want to play you because I’m thinking about all those screen-free hours I have to fill in this godforsaken town.’

‘You don’t like Barwon Bay?’ I ask him. I am offended on behalf of the town. I feel more defensive of Barwon Bay than I do of Melbourne, even though I have spent three and a half months in one and my whole life in the other. Melbourne doesn’t need me—as a resident or as a defender. Melbourne had its chance to keep me, and it blew it.

‘I don’t,’ he says, and then pauses. ‘To be honest, I’m not sure I know anything about it.’

‘Isn’t it your hometown?’ I say. In my imagination, he spent every summer here and all school holidays, his family driving down every Friday night and coming home reluctantly on a Sunday night. But in reality, I know very little of Xavier’s childhood. Hillary talks of it only in terms of struggles of motherhood. She speaks of it as a time long ago, and, while she speaks fondly of her children when they were little, she speaks of herself in that time like she’s talking about a stranger. She once said to me, ‘I was completely drowning, with three little kids, and my focus was on holding on to my career, because I was scared of who I would be without that, but I think now there were better ways to approach it all.’

‘No. It’s Mum’s hometown, not mine,’ Xavier says now. ‘We would come here on Sundays every few months when I was growing up, and go to my grandparents’ house—which is now Mum’s house—for lunch and Mum would fight with Grandma, and Dad would complain about the traffic all the way here and back, and the whole experience was really tense and I would dread it. So I guess I have kind of lingering negative feelings towards the place.’ He pauses, as if surprised he’s revealed this much.

‘But, I mean, this is nice,’ he says, his hand waving vaguely at the view in front of us.

‘Nice!’ I scoff. He’s going to inherit Hillary’s house one day, which is sort of like inheriting this beach and this sunrise, and he has no idea the gift he’s been given. He’ll probably sell it without a thought.

‘Why do you love it so much?’ he asks me.

‘Because. It’s…’ How to explain that I can breathe here, that I feel safe here, that I think I like the version of me that’s here, as tentative as it all feels.

‘I don’t know. I just do,’ I say.

‘Did you grow up in Melbourne?’

‘Yes. Lived there my whole life.’

‘Me too,’ he says.

‘I love Melbourne, I loved living in a city, but it didn’t always love me back,’ I say.

Xavier gives a huff of laughter. ‘And this town does?’ he says.

‘Yes. Sort of. It has healed me,’ I say and immediately regret it.

Xavier gives me a look and I can see the healed-you-of-what question forming on his lips, so I barrel onwards. ‘Living near the ocean is good for you. You can look up the science on that.’

‘I guess that’s why they always send people to the sea to get better in old books,’ he says.

‘Every book needs a good setting. This could be yours,’ I say, sweeping my hands wide. The beach, the wide, tree-lined streets, the charming shops, the preserved history. There are no big-brand stores or fast-food restaurants here. You have to drive twenty minutes to find a major supermarket. There’s a bookshop, and several art galleries, countless cafes, antique shops, a florist. There’s an old-school fish-and-chip shop that gets so busy in summer they don’t answer the phone after five and you have to stand in a line thirty people long.

He wrinkles his nose like he’s looking at a swamp.

‘I don’t like writing about the beach.’

‘Why not?’

‘I like writing about sad people in cities in cold weather.’

‘How very Dickens of you. There are plenty of sad people here, you know.’

‘Are there?’ He looks around. ‘Everyone looks happy and healthy. They have dogs. Happy-people type of dogs. And they’re exercising.’

‘Not true. Bob Wicky walks along this beach every day, and he’s very lonely. His wife died last year. And there’s a teenage girl I sometimes see sitting in the sand dunes and writing in a notebook. Happy people don’t write poetry in sand dunes.’