It’s mid-afternoon and we are all lazing under the shade of the tent awning that staves off the intense West Australian sun, reading or dozing, after a morning fishing on the brilliant white beach.
For the last few hours we have been baiting up lines with inch long silver slices of pilchard, the red innards oozing over our sandy fingers as we squeeze them onto hooks, and cast into the Indian Ocean. The inexorable rising tide keeps us walking back up the beach, moving the knife, bait and chair that is our makeshift table towards the dunes that form the rear barrier to the bleached expanse. We catch little, a small salmon and a shark, but it’s enough to keep us casting for hours. As the sun reaches its zenith and the tide begins it’s return journey, we pack up and head back.
I sense them before I see them – that prickly feeling of being scrutinized. I glance up from my book and see two children, boy and girl, a couple of metres outside the shaded area. They stand together, side-by-side, shoulders almost touching. I am unsure how long they have been standing there, but they project an aura of patience, so it might have been a while. They both stare at the same point in space.
‘Hello’, I say.
‘Hi’. The girl speaks, the older of the two. She is thin, fair-haired and wears a light cotton pink dress with dusty bare feet. She is about eight and the boy around five.
‘I’m Poppy and this is Toby’, she continues, with confidence. Toby raises his left hand slightly, acknowledging both us, and his introduction. His mousy hair has blonde edges, faded by the sun, his skin is tan and he is wearing the uniform of the beach camping kid – rashy sun-shirt and little skinny shorts that are made of some material that is meant to dry quickly. They are the togs of those whose parents are still in complete control of wardrobe.
Sandi then introduces us along with the boys. With this, they walk in and sit.
Once I would have found this behaviour to be surprising. I probably would have been asking about the location of parents or at least looking around for some responsible adults. But this is not the first time this has happened, nor are we immune. Not long ago the boys disappeared only to surface playing UNO and nonchalantly sipping cordial with another family across the site.
We do the usual background travel conversation – where are they from, where have they been, where are they going?
As the conversation continues, the largely silent Toby remains cute and likeable. However, Poppy, while being thoroughly well-mannered and pleasant, unfortunately starts to irk me.
‘What’s this music?’ she asks, with an inflection on the word ‘music’. She doesn’t roll her eyes, but the delivery of this single word does the job. It’s clear that Bob Seeger hasn’t been rocking the little ears of Poppy recently. She doesn’t wait for a response.
‘You could play one of my Spotify playlists – there is coverage here so I could easily just look it up on the phone and play it’.
‘No’, I say, probably a bit quickly. She stares at me for a beat too long and the mood changes. I’ve been taken on by an eight-year old.
‘We’re vegan,’ she now announces. ‘We don’t eat meat or chicken or cheese or anything. We think even using animals as pets is cruel.’
‘Oh,’ I respond feebly, and feel a cool sweat break. After some gentle opening moves, Poppy is circling my Queen, and I’m helpless.
‘I’ve seen a megalodon’ says Toby, with what seems remarkable social awareness, knowing that observing thoroughly extinct mega-fauna should be enough to change the direction of a conversation.
‘Really… was it alive?’ I respond, hoping this piece of scientific tomfoolery will animate the little bugger.
I’m encouraged by the fact that although Toby doesn’t eat animals, he had declared earlier that he actually hates birds after being victim of the occasional swoop. He actually seems happiest chasing seagulls and pretending to assassinate them with whatever weapon a morally compromised five-year-old vegan uses.
But Poppy persists.
‘Have you been fishing?’ she asks.
Checkmate.
‘Yep’ I respond, and hope to leave it at that, but the ever helpful Eddie then chimes in and mentions we managed to hook a couple. He also adds some vivid detail of pulling them from the sea, the blood in the water, how they squirmed as they choked on air before we popped them back and they eventually swam off. Although, of course, they took a while to get going he concludes.
Poppy rolls her eyes towards me, and stares.
‘We think that fishing is cruel and we don’t do it,’ she pouts.
‘So… no danger of catching a megaladon at least,’ I offer insipidly.
Poppy chuckles, not in mirth but delicious victory.
Big Country 