The First Swim

We swam in the brackish water of a lake at the end of our seventh day.  I was by the passenger window, my skin burning with the heat of the road. The water came in flashes of light between the scrub. We got out further than we wanted, and dived straight into the bush before tramping back about five hundred metres to make our camp. The day was ending and the smell of dry grass rose as our feet, hot in tight boots, squashed it down. We crossed the road away from the water. Clouds of insects flew as he laid out the fly and I snapped the poles together, working silently, thinking about our swim. We threw our packs into the tent and again we darted across the road, and burst out of the scrub into the bright opening of the sun on the lake. My skin was stiff with dirt and filthy from the road and I didn’t care about the still water. The water changed from pale yellow to pink, and he smiled at me with the water up to his wrists and I knew I wanted to remember. Later in our tent we heard someone’s radio out there in the darkness and he got up, and unzipped the fly, and stomped about with a torch. I stayed crouching in the tent, listening, as Paul Kelly came on the invisible radio.  And I was living then, and my decision to  leave, mixed with the man I had to chosen to leave with, all fell in notes around me in the Australian dark and I loved him.