Starlight Peninsula by Charlotte Grimshaw

do. You find yourself immersed, just surrounded by love. Just the other day Thee and I …’
    Eloise half-listened. She was remembering the person hidden behind Kurt Hartmann’s eyes. How many of us are living so deep below the surface, no one knows who we are?
    Out on the northwestern, the gridlocked traffic queued and slowed. By the time they got back, Mariel Hartfield was up on the big screen at reception, sleepily gorgeous in a tight black jacket, and halfway through reading the evening news.
     
    Anita O’Keefe wasn’t telling. Satan Dance wasn’t commenting. Ed Miles, the Minister of Justice, was available and was commenting: ‘I will not review my decision to deny Andrew Newgate compensation for the ten years he spent in prison.’
    And later in the bulletin, Ed Miles appeared again: ‘The Opposition,’ he said, ‘should put up or shut up. As far as I can see, there is no truth to the allegation that Prime Minster Dance acted outside his powers by allowing illegal spying on citizens. I do not, and never have had, leadership ambitions. I am one hundred per cent behind our current leader, Jack Dance.’
    And now came the weather. The Sinister Doormat was predicting weather that would surprise us. It would surprise us by not changing. By going on day after day, giving us worryingly more of the same.

NINE
    Along the peninsula, the air was hot and still. The iron roofs blazed with reflected evening sun, and the boardwalk was busy, a steady procession of dogs and owners making their way across the bridge to the dog park. Eloise was walking on the edge of the estuary. She shaded her eyes and squinted at the gulf, where the water lay silver and flat. Heading home for the first time in two days, she was thinking: Make a plan. It would be good to make a plan. But there was so much, so very much, that needed fixing.
    Drink less. Find a hobby. Join a club. Meet a nice man. She passed one of the neighbours who’d tried to stamp out the fire on her lawn. The look he now gave her was scandalised, reproachful. Look at that glare. Go on, get your staring done. Whatevs .
    She frowned. See, I love living by myself. Living alone: what a thrill.The freedom. You can do what you. No need to answer to. When the impulse takes you, you can …
    The migraine had gone but its effect had lingered — rawness, dizziness, a feeling of teetering at the edge of a cliff. At one point during the night at Carina’s a shaft of darkness had split her vision, as if a door had opened, and she’d seen the shape of a man, blacker than the darkness, at the end of the bed. She lay watching the black figure, her whole body poisoned with adrenaline, until he passed across the room and was gone. She dreamed that behind the fabric of the night there was a deeper blackness, only glimpsed when the night had frayed. When she woke in Carina’s spare room she was wired, exhausted, with a yearning for touch so strong she would even have hugged smelly Silvio, if he’d snuffled his way onto the bed.
    She had woken with a memory, of a story in a book Arthur had given her a long time ago. But who was the author?
    Now, just off the bus, she was carrying a DVD of Kurt Hartmann’s hip hop tracks, a vegetable curry hot pot, a box of Panadol Extra, a memory stick of interview notes, and a bottle of chardonnay. She passed two boys hauling up a bait-catcher on the edge of the creek, the plastic cylinder filled with writhing sprats. She thought: Yoga. Meditation. The whole mindfulness thing. Or Nick’s hobby: search and rescue. Finding lost kids, bewildered oldies. Camaraderie. The satisfaction of it. Their relief and gratitude.
    Book clubs. Karate?
    Now she came up against the singed bushes, the new line of black at the boundary of her property. Nick, at least, had taken the fire calmly. She summoned up his face: strong jaw, clear blue eyes, slightly rough skin. A tall, lean figure, thin even. Ruggedness mixed with a gentle manner: that was an appealing