The Survivors(11)

‘Kieran?’

He had blinked at the woman in front of him. ‘Yeah?’

‘Hi.’ She touched her collarbone. ‘Mia Sum.’

She’d had a straight blunt fringe and glasses back then that gave her a kind of pretty geek-girl vibe, and she was wearing a short black dress that he’d later learned she considered lucky. What he’d thought was iced water in her hand turned out to be a surprisingly pleasant vodka cocktail of her own invention that years later she still referred to as Mia’s Mayhem.

‘I used to live in Evelyn Bay,’ Mia had added when the recognition was slow to dawn amid the chaos of the bar. ‘I was –’ She hesitated now. ‘I was Gabby’s friend?’

She said the name clearly, which Kieran found interesting. Most people tended to lower their voices at the mention of poor here-then-gone Gabby Birch.

Mia had seemed a little reluctant to elaborate, but she didn’t need to. Kieran had placed her by then, and was instead struggling to reconcile the shy girl he barely remembered with the woman standing in front of him.

He knew he was thinking of the right person, though, because there hadn’t been many – or, indeed, any – other half-Singaporean girls living in Evelyn Bay when Kieran was a teenager. But the Mia Sum he remembered had been four years younger than him and always seemed to be rushing past his house to or from a piano lesson. Kieran wasn’t sure he’d have recalled even that much about her except, as Mia had said, she’d been best friends with Gabby, and after the storm everyone remembered a lot more about Gabrielle Birch than they’d ever seemed to before.

He knew Mia’s parents had upped and moved the family to Sydney as soon as they had been given the green light by police, which had seemed like a pretty good idea to Kieran, both then and now.

Mia was still looking at him in the bar, a tiny frown forming. ‘Kieran, are you all right?’

‘Yes,’ he’d said automatically.

She was jostled by someone trying to reach the bar, but held her ground. ‘Do you want to go somewhere else?’

‘Where?’

‘I don’t know. Just not here.’

He was sick of this place and, unexpectedly, that actually sounded good. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Okay.’

They had stepped out into the warm city air and walked a little way until Mia had pointed to a bench, where they’d sat surrounded by litter and a patch of dead grass and the sounds of Sydney after dark. They’d avoided the one old subject they had in common and instead talked about other things – city life, Kieran’s internship at the physio clinic that could probably lead to a job if he managed to make it to graduation, Mia’s biology degree and the subtly racist lab partner she was stuck with until the end of the year – until Mia had stretched and checked her phone.

‘It’s late,’ she’d said. ‘I should go.’

‘Already?’ Kieran had glanced at his watch and been surprised by the time.

‘Yeah. Besides –’ Mia had looked up at him from underneath her fringe. ‘You’ve probably got an early start tomorrow, haven’t you?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Nothing.’ She smiled. ‘You just look like the kind of guy who hits the gym pretty hard on a Saturday morning.’

‘Not the gym.’ He’d said it before he could help himself. ‘I go swimming.’

She had blinked. ‘Do you really?’ The flirtatious tone dissolved in an instant and a look of sad surprise flashed across her face. She had sat back down on the bench and put a warm hand on his back. ‘Oh, Kieran.’

Kieran sat on the beach now, years later but somehow still back in Evelyn Bay, and reached across the sand and took her hand. She’d grown out the fringe a while ago and swapped to contacts, and he wasn’t sure what had happened to the black dress. She still enjoyed the occasional Mia’s Mayhem, but now it was usually whipped up in their tiny kitchen and served in a tumbler from the cupboard. Life had a quieter rhythm now and he was still a little surprised how much he liked it. Nights in and not minding when the other person meant to smile but yawned instead.

‘Sorry.’ She covered her mouth quickly as the wind blew her hair across her face. ‘You ready to go back? I’m so –’ She yawned again.

‘I know. Me too.’

They stood, dusting off the sand. Ahead, the beach stretched out in shadow. Kieran’s parents’ house was only a ten-minute walk along the shoreline but he felt Mia look into the night and hesitate.

‘Go back along the road?’ he said, and she nodded.

They stopped under a lamppost where the sandy path hit the tarmac of Beach Road and held the fence for balance as they put their shoes back on. There was no official pavement, but no traffic either, and they walked side by side along the makeshift nature strip that lined the front of the beachside cottages. Most of the homes lay in sleeping darkness, with only the occasional glow from a front window. The houses blocked the view of the water, but Kieran could hear it lapping against the shore.

‘Hey, what did you make of Liv and Ash as a couple?’ Mia asked suddenly.

Kieran considered, picturing them earlier at the Surf and Turf. There was something about Ash and Olivia together that he’d found a little hard to get a read on. It could just be history, he knew. A lot of water had flowed under that bridge, for all of them. But they’d also had the faintly combative edge that some couples seemed to enjoy, but that Kieran personally found exhausting, even as a spectator.