Beach Walker: Chapter 9

Hot and Bothered

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‘I’m not sure it’s a good idea,’ my eldest son’s voice intoned gravely down the line, ‘taking up ocean swimming in winter at — you know …’

After his father’s death, Josh seems to be labouring under the misapprehension that he’s the head of the family, the dispenser of sage advice and stern warnings to a feckless mother.

‘At what, love?’

‘At your time of life, Mum.’

‘And what time of life would that be exactly, Joshua Eric Davies?’

‘You know, Mum …’

‘Twilight? Five to midnight? In my dotage? My declining years?’

‘Mum …’

‘Josh, sweetie, your mother is sixty-one years old. She may be a decrepit old baggage — you clearly think so — but a splash of cold salt water isn’t going to make her curl up her toes. Not just yet.’

‘M-u-u-m …’

That’s better, Josh my darling boy. Less of the twenty-nine-year-old patriarch. More of the whiny teenager.

‘Besides,’ I continued with a good deal more confidence than I felt, ‘Leonard is a marine biologist — an expert diver, snorkeller and sea swimmer. I’m completely safe in his hands.’

I’d painted a rosy picture of Leonard: the scientist, the owner of a substantial acreage on the Bellarine Peninsula, the racehorse lover who planned an equine retirement home as his legacy. Definitely not a dentally challenged lifer who dismantled motorbike engines in his bedroom. No, not at all.

‘You know what these scientist types are like, Mum. Absent-minded. Are you sure he won’t swim off after some rare jellyfish and forget all about you?’

‘Josh, love, now you’re being silly.’

I distracted my son, deftly I thought, with enquiries after the progress of his first-to-be-born, who will be my very first grandchild. (And about time too.) I sent my love to de-facto daughter-in-law Melissa, and rang off with the excuse that I had to prepare for my swim.

‘Just be careful, Mum.’

For our first saltwater escapade, Leonard had studied the tide, wind and surf forecasts and selected the Springs beach, between Queenscliff and…