Summer Lies

They told me I was a liar.

They said I made him all up like all the past summers of so called invisible friends. But I remember Shane as clearly as my own sunburnt shoulders. I remember the first thing he’d said to me that day on the beach.

“Did you drop this?” he’d asked, holding my bookmark up. “I found it over there in the sand.”

“Thank you,” I'd said, taking it, but my eyes were focused on the sand on his chin.

“No worries. Is that also yours?” He was pointing at the Metallica Ride the Lightning beach towel. “Did you ever see them live, Metallica?”

“Oh, no. My Aunt Fleur makes them. She sells them on Etsy.”

“Ah, cool.” He smiled. “Maybe I’ll buy one off her.”

“Sure.”

We sat in a dip between the sand dunes after that, talking and learning about each other in such a way as to make the rest of the world feel very far away.

I remember it was 2018. And I was eighteen.

And it was the beginning of the hottest summer we’d had in Melbourne in decades. That day we were all at Portsea Beach.

It was my Dad, my Mum, my brothers Richard and Tate, and my Aunt Fleur. I remember the hot sand pressing against my back as Shane handed me a towel from my bag. He was smiling at me as the sand blew all over my face. The sand was everywhere. All over me because he’d been burying my legs in it, laughing every time I wiggled my toes.

We’d just met, but something sparked between us from the moment he spoke to me. If I were to tell someone what the feeling was like, I’d say it was like seeing someone familiar from school. You just know them.

His hands were rubbing my shoulders while I got out my sunscreen from my bag. Looking back, there were things I should’ve noticed. Maybe I should’ve noticed that Aunt Fleur was crouched near one of the dunes with her camera above her nose, the lens pointed right at us, but I didn’t. Not in that moment. In that moment, it was just the two of us.

“You here with family?” he asked.

“Yeah, they’re over there,” I said, pointing over the dunes towards the centre of the beach.

“And your Aunt. You said she makes stuff.”

He was suddenly so inquisitive. Asking questions about Aunt Fleur.

And then it happened. The shouting from down the beach. Someone had fallen off their surfboard, got tied up in the waves, caught in a suffocating riptide. People were running. Lifeguards shouted to onlookers not to go out into the water. Everywhere around the beach that day there was pure chaos.

Shane let go of my shoulders.

I remember the squawking of the seagulls flying high above us. And how my brothers were rushed away from their beach chairs fiercely by my parents.

And when I turned around, Shane was gone.

What I don’t remember is what my Aunt Fleur was doing then. She was somewhere between the crowd, lost in a sea of surfers and sand-covered towels flapping away like flags in the wind.

I must have called out his name so many times.

“Shane!” I shouted. “Shane!”

No answer. All I could hear at that point was the breeze and the cries from the lifeguards, as they swam out into the sea, past the broken, floating surfboard, waves crashing against their bodies and the yellow cones bobbing near their heads.

When the lifeguards paddled back to the shoreline with the surfer, one of them asked for space, while the other began CPR. I don’t think I ever felt that scared in my life. I’d never seen an unconscious person before.

Women in bikinis formed circles on the sand, shielding their children’s eyes.

I stopped watching the scene and stared at the empty towel beside me. Where Shane had been. I remember the smell of the Banana Boat sun lotion, with the cap off, and a pale stream of gel oozing into the sand like melting gold.

Now that the lost surfer in the waves had been rescued and had survived everyone returned to their little nooks on the sand. But I wanted to look for Shane.

I asked everywhere. Dad first.

“You seen him, Dad?”

“Who?”

“Shane. The guy I was sitting over there with.” I pointed to the dunes down the beach.

Dad tilted his head to the side. He raised his two bushy eyebrows and said, “No love, sorry.”

“Mum!” I shouted at the shoreline. “Did you see him?”

“Who’s that, love?” She sounded confused.

“Shane. The guy I was just with.”

“There’s no one here but us.”

My palms dripped with sweat. I left the towels and asked the lifeguards, describing him in perfect detail. His black hair, olive skin, and dark brown eyes.

“Sorry, not seen him,” the lifeguard with red hair said.

No one had seen him. Not the snack kiosk girl who’d sold iced coffees just an hour before. Not even the couple who’d been lying just meters from us on their pink beach towels.

“We didn’t even see you sitting over there,” the old man said.

The next thing I remember is my Aunt Fleur standing beside me with her camera still hanging around her neck. Her lens cap was on.

“What’s going on here?” she asked, looking worried.

“Aunt Fleur,” I said, leaning against her shoulder. “You saw the guy I was with before. On the towel, right?”

Her forehead wrinkled. “Yeah, Shane.”

“You remember.”

“Oh, no,” she stopped. “Sorry, love. I just meant I heard you asking your father before. But I never saw anyone.”

My stomach swirled in agony.

“But you were right there with your camera. I swear you were.”

Aunt Fleur’s eyes twitched.

“No, no. Now don’t make up things, sweatheart.”

I should have noticed it then in her face what was happening, but I’m ashamed to say I believed her when she said, “I wasn’t near the dunes at all today. I’ve been down by the rockpool with Tate and your mum. Ask them.”

And that’s when my family started calling me a liar. At the time I couldn’t blame them. I had a reputation in school for trying to get out of something in the heat of the moment. An exam. My piano lessons. The family dinner I didn’t want to sit at. I’d lie to my teachers. Tell my parents I’d met a new friend at the servo or down at the oval. Dad caught me in a big lie once when I told him I’d found a stray dog and spent all afternoon looking for its owner.

It's the reason why no one believed me about Shane.

I remember Dad’s tanned face that day on the beach. He walked over to me, his eyes big and a little angry.

“What is it you’re trying to get out of this time?” he’d asked.

“I’m not making this all up Dad.”

“You want to avoid your tutoring session your Mum booked this afternoon, right?”

I shook my head.

But no matter what I told them, they didn’t believe me.

“Liar, liar,” my little brother Richard shouted from his beach chair.

“You’re such a big liar Claire,” my brother Tate added.

I remember sitting down on the sand, trying to catch my breath, while digging my fingers into the hot sand. “I’m serious this time, guys. He was here with me before the surfer had that accident.”

All I could think about was how did no one see us together?

Aunt Fleur gave this sad smile, rubbing my back. “Sweetheart, I think you just need to calm down and go for a walk or something.”

“Yeah,” Dad said. “Just go for a walk.”

I did as they all wanted.

The waves crashed against my bare feet as I walked along the shoreline, staring out into the crowd and over the dunes. I looked as far as the trees brushing against the sand at the bottom of the bluff, hoping to see Shane. Like maybe he’d jump out from the rocks any moment and tell me he’d just popped off to the corner shops.

I remember letting the sea soak the edge of my dress, watching as the sun started to dip below some clouds. No Shane anywhere though.

Dad and Mum waved at me to come over to them. To head back to the car.

When we finally got home, no one ever talked about that day again. I eventually stopped talking about it too.

#

It’s only now, five years later, in my Aunt Fleur’s house, that I found them. The photos. I’d been here only a week while she visited Gran up north in Darwin. I’d offered to house-sit, water her precious plants, keep the cat alive. And the box was just sitting there, shoved in the back of the laundry cupboard.

The box had a date on it: Coastal Holidays – 2018

At the bottom of the pile, nearly stuck to the cardboard were two photos of him. Of Shane. Clear as day. Smiling at the camera, wearing that black singlet and the sun sparkling over his olive skin.

Shane C. – Portsea Beach 2018 was written on the back of the first one. The second photo said everything. Aunt Fleur knew him. From before.

Shane sitting on the stool in her art studio. His head close to her easel, tilted to the side, as if Aunt Fleur had just asked him to pose that way.

Shane C. – My Studio, Sept 2017. Model for Term 4 classes. Do not sell!

I thought about the beach that day and how easily Aunt Fleur had slipped away into the crowd, in the chaos when the lifeguards swam out to sea to rescue that kid. She’d said she wasn’t near the dunes that day. She’d said she never saw him. She’d said I was making things up. But it was her.

She was the liar.