They were heading south along the highway at a speed that unnerved Rob, so he stared far out to sea. His suggestion that they might spend their free day driving down to see a glacier had been his last wild bid before, he’d assumed, they'd settle on a few drinks and a drifting lunch. He’d been floored when Toni agreed. How could he have known she'd always wanted to see a glacier? And so they were now twenty, thirty kilometres from Exmouth on the vertiginous road that plunged without warning into forest and emerged to reveal a precipice and the breakers and rocks tumbled below. Into and out of a green night to be blinded by sunlight gushing down through a hole in the cloud ceiling that turned the endless ocean silver, undulating mercury all the way to Argentina.
Rob fancied that he possessed a fisherman's understanding of the sea – that every wave was a fractal of a tsunami, and no one could tell which one held the greatest power to destroy. He watched a boat far out, a trawler probably, and felt a pull on his gut each time it dipped out of sight, and proxy relief when it appeared again. Toni drove faster than he would ever dare, and the way she turned her head to talk to him was disconcerting, but it was her hair blowing across her face from the open window, and the lightness about her today that put him on edge. An extract of a female body, an unexpected glimpse of leg or cleavage – a snapshot to be surreptitiously consumed – that was part of working with women, but this recurring image, the nape of this woman's neck, haunted him. He thought of the last snowflake setting off an avalanche, how the wrong turn of an Archduke's car could trigger a world war.
Before they’d set off, Toni had lifted her hair once more, this time to insert an earring. Engrossed in this intimate task, Rob didn't think she’d noticed him watching, staring at the confluence of her neck and jaw, the dewdrop of her earlobe, as she performed the delicate penetration. Could the revelation of her neck be the spark that would plunge him, like a fusty empire into war, in love with her? He looked away from her lips, and her eyes that flickered behind the fluttering habib of hair.
"Hey, what are you doing?" she said.
"I'm taking your picture."
"Not like this with my hair all over the place. I must look terrible."
"Not at all," he said. "Look." Rob held out the screen of the phone for Toni to see. "I haven't used the camera function before. But it's not bad at all." He aimed again. "Smile."
When the road fell to run level with the ocean, they passed an old man in wading boots and woollen checks, salvaging driftwood from the beach. Tyres held down the roof of a rust red bach. The daily gales had shaped the manuka bushes into hip Afro hairstyles. The spray rising from the breaking waves reminded Rob of a herd of white horses in a kitsch painting. "Do you think the waves only look like white horses because we've been told they do?" he wondered out loud.
The car shuddered sideways in a gust of wind. Toni gripped the wheel against the spasm but stole a glance across surf.
"Yeah, it really does look like horses," she said.
"Ah, it does to us, but what would it look like to someone who's never seen a horse?"
"I don't know." Toni hesitated before telling him that when she was a little girl she thought the frothy after-wave was made of meringue. All he said was 'how bizarre' and didn't notice her smile leach away. Now he would never know she hadn't told anyone before about sea froth and meringue, not even her Papa on their precious beach walks. This silly, fragile fancy of a little girl's imagination. As Rob pondered exactly how attractive he found her, she was thinking, Fuck you, mate. Fuck you, for making me want to tell you something precious, and, then, crushing it when I did.
Was the attraction mutual? Rob wondered while Toni used the excuse of the buffeting wind to concentrate on the road, silent lest she let slip what was on her mind.