When Jens found Lucy Teller squatting in the dandelions, he had been planning to tell her he was her father. He had spent forty-five minutes searching before one of his kitchen staff said She’s in the gardens.

Lucy Teller had been hiding in the shade of the fig, avoiding her manager, when she had suddenly needed, badly, to wee. Her black tights were pulled down to her ankles and gathered at brown leather brogues. The stiffly snug pencil skirt was hitched and held up.

“Are you taking a piss, Lucy?”

She was trying to. The dandelions behind the gargantuan ficus tree were brushing against her bare skin, giving her gooseflesh and making it difficult to relax.

”Lucy Teller?” the voice of her manager came again in a hysterical hush.

“The blue-rinse crowd have made a queue out the door in there.”

Through the thick of green he could see her squatting among the weeds. If Lucy was seen pissing in the gardens … Why was she like this? She was, in many ways, the worst of all his staff.

She was listening to the ocean but it was too inconsistent to coax anything and besides she was too aware of her manager, now standing awkwardly on the garden path. Lucy pulled her knickers and tights up the length of her legs, standing and tugging straight the skirt that caught at her hips and bottom. The female uniform came in only two sizes, small or large.

“You cannot, I repeat, cannot, urinate in the garden,” Jens said as she emerged.

“I didn’t,” she said. “I couldn’t go,” and she started back towards the club, away from Jens.

“I — Aren’t you meant to be out on charter?”

Jens knew the vessel was not due out for another hour but could find little else to chide the girl with. Jens was thirty-three years older than Lucy and he wore these years uncomfortably.

“They eat first,” she said over her shoulder.

Lucy had spent most of the afternoon avoiding her manager. She had set out triangles of watercress and cream-cheese sandwiches, keeping watch for if he might appear. She had placed the watermelon, also cut into triangles, the reheated spanakopita, and Waldorf salads on the large table inside the private dining room before hurrying to hide in the hubbub of the kitchen. The club always over-catered for these occasions. The sandwiches had started to crust in the late-day sun by the time the party of six women, each brushing up against their eighties, had arrived. The large windows facing the water and distant harbour were due to be tinted but this was an expense that someone kept putting off. There was always next summer. The women would eat and then Lucy and the skipper, a man named Mark, would meet them on the jetty before taking them out. Once she was out on the water where Jens couldn’t follow, she’d be safe from his persistent, curious gaze and that weird look he had in his eyes today. Then her mother would pick her up at the end of the shift and she would be beyond his grasp.

“I have to take a toilet break,” Lucy said, still wrangling her skirt as she moved off. “I can’t be busting out there, can I?”

Lucy always had an answer and Jens rarely a retort. Much about Lucy Teller frightened him. The flight of hair, her hooded eyes, what the colour green did for her, her ease around grief, for a start.

Jens was fair and tall but his slouch meant Lucy was just as high in the world. She marched off down towards the yacht club, the path crunching under her heels. Jens noticed a red leaf in her ponytail. Was autumn coming so soon?

“Tuck your shirt in,” he called in her wake, cursing another lost chance for the conversation he had been considering for half a lifetime.

Stuffing the bleached cotton shirt into her skirt, hurrying away from Jens, Lucy looked into the dining room. The shirt, like the rest of the uniform, sat at odds with her shape; the shoulder seams did not sit neatly on the appealing push of her bones.

She couldn’t hide in the bathroom. There was still a line three geriatrics deep for the ladies toilets. The woman dressed in grand layers of navy-blue silks, Lucy guessed, must be the widow. No. The rich sister-in-law who’d made the arrangements. The woman touched her age-stretched earlobe: a hanging Tahitian pearl was gone.

Damn, the woman said, and released her long grey hair from its tortoiseshell clasp, patting it down to cover what was missing. The staff bathroom offered a single urinal and a skinny basin that hadn’t been updated since the years when the club catered only to men.

Lucy hurried into the little office, locking the door and sitting on the chair behind a littered desk. She crossed her legs tightly and swivelled, trying to make herself motion sick. Nothing. An amber leaf fell from her hair as she spun, settling on the thin carpet. She picked it up and placed it on the desk. Good. She looked at the whiteboard; on it was scribbled the day’s itinerary. She quickly memorised the names. She would use the guests’ names and meet their gaze, knowing when to hold their hands or arms and when to give them space, to disappear. She was good at this work and wondered what she would do with her summer if her manager fired her. If she had friends her own age she would have known this was an odd job for a girl of seventeen. Her mother had encouraged her to accept the position for this second summer and Lucy enjoyed her holiday work.

From the office she could smell the oil-slick batter from the club restaurant, where those who came in for a meal after taking the harbour walk ordered flake and onion rings and sad Greek salads. Where the mid-level chefs would wipe blood from plates with paper towels. The bereft were offered more-personal food, a slightly more considered menu. Those who could barely nibble at the corners of bread were given grapes, like the sick. But most arrived ravenous. Lucy kept a packet of mini chocolate eggs in her bag, offering them to the children, when there were children. The parents of the young dead were always the most peculiar. Harder to predict. The club attracted a particular sort of deceased, those with money who’d loved the ocean, yachting, harbour, fishing, Sydney, the cricket, the old blokes, the good times. Those who’d had dreams of the Riviera and ended up here. Widows and widowers who imagined they might be unique in choosing this picturesque cavity in Sydney’s coastline as a final resting place for their beloved. Some came regularly for years afterward, as if this were the agreed spot of reunion between the living and the dead. The ancient fig trees chuckled.

The handle of the office door rattled, followed by a gentle knock. Lucy jumped up and unlocked the door, slipping through the gap between the frame and where Jens now stood.

“Why was this locked? Lucy — ”

“Not now, Jens. Work to be done.”

Lucy, now behind the bar, sucked on a pink lemon, lime and bitters as a means of seeming occupied. She was chewing the straw and pinching it tight between her lips so little liquid could pass through. The waitstaff resented her. The favouritism management displayed did not go unnoticed. Some thought Jens was in love with Lucy Teller. They whispered about this over hand-rolled cigarettes, between shifts and the big bins.

Jens watched the peculiar girl behind the bar from the open door of the office as she chewed on a red plastic straw. He never saw her working, never saw her lift a damn finger, but at the end of each charter the customers were agog with praise for her. As if, out on the water, she’d cast a charm over them.

Who is that wonderful young lady?

We couldn’t have got through it without Lucy!

Lucy made our day so special.

If Jens wasn’t so sensitive to seasickness, he’d like to take a vessel out with her and see for himself just what she was capable of. She doubled her wages in tips, he’d bet, though he didn’t know for sure. He had never liked the ocean. He didn’t like the dead. He didn’t like anything Lucy took to so naturally, so unnaturally. The girl was staring out the window. What made her so special?

Lucy saw the girls from her former ocean-rowing crew drag in their boat on the far side of the bay, their lithe bodies held in water-slick suits of idyllic blue. She remembered the speed. She knew the shape of things here, the mouths of Sydney’s estuaries and the sandstone-edged coast. This knowledge was one reason she’d been offered the job, surely.

She took her eyes off the young women to consider the conditions from the window, as she knew the skipper would. Due to arrive soon, he would meet her on the dock by the assigned vessel. The club owned four gleaming ovoid machines that sliced through the water and were quick to silence when the engine cut, for patter, prayer, or poetry. They hired only the one skipper, Mark. Lucy liked him. Mark was an approachable, capable slab of a man and left her to her job and the bereft to theirs. He would let Lucy connect her phone and play her music in the cabin now and then, turning it down when one of the guests came in to speak to him. Lucy liked how he answered their questions gently, as if it were the first time he’d been asked how fast can she go? by an awkward member of the extended family. She liked how he referred to each of the vessels by name, as if they had identities independent of human use. She liked how all vessels were female. She liked how the skipper took her seriously, unlike so many of the men on land, and that when he had told her it was bad luck to bring women onboard, he’d added that he could weather a little bad luck. He’d winked at her like the captain of a ship in a storybook. Lucy didn’t understand the weather in the detail Mark did, but she had her own way of understanding the day.

Lucy noticed how the low sun made the stretch of water between the club and Sydney Cove seem as though it were dancing. No, the sea looked as though it were writing, in a thousand leaky fountain pens with silver ink. She knew that tonight the clutch of city in the distance could be seen in sharp detail, unlike the nights when the starch and gunpowder of fireworks lingered long after the final barrage, muting the harbour canvas with an almost imperceptible veil. In the same way she understood these things, she sensed that Jens was probably her father. Things were good at home, her mother seemed happy, and Lucy suspected that her employment was tethered to certain silences. If she could just make it through the day remaining fatherless then it all might stay just so. Besides, if she must daydream about who her father might be, she’d prefer Mark take up the mantle.

Lucy had found ways of forgiving her father. She knew death did funny things to the living. Lucy had shared her mother’s womb with her sister for almost three weeks after her twin’s death. A fact she knew was more ghoulish than tragic. They hadn’t been identical. This unchangeable fact about Lucy Teller was a talisman of confidence each time she stepped onto the yachts that moved with the water, her muscles adjusting, her heartbeat steady. I got you, she said, holding the soft hands of elderly men who were yet to find their sea legs.

For Jens, the other child was a totem of another kind. Seventeen years ago, suspecting that this particular type of grief demanded bravery, he had left. He moved to an unloved suburb not too far from where Kathrine and Lucy lived, just a world away. He had thoughts of returning home but he had made at least the shape of a life in this country. When Jens had first arrived from Denmark as a teenager, sameness was a virtue that will alone could not gift him, so he had learnt in his own way to disappear. But his daughter would be eighteen soon, the summer job would end, and he would lose sight of Lucy into the harsh bloom of adulthood. So today he would be brave. Somehow, today.

Tonight would be good weather for the dead, Lucy thought, keeping her gaze out the window, but bad for the living. It was too perfect. Too expected. It was harder work on a clear night. She idly wondered what poem the women had chosen and if she would be required to read. On a clear evening a widow could never find her words. Lucy knew some of the most popular choices by heart now; she could take her eyes up from the page and deliver the final lines, gazing out to sea, to glorious effect. Once a man had completely forgotten himself and erupted into applause.

When the wind was bullying or when it was raining, the absurdity of it all was easier to see. She remembered the handsome man covered in the ashes of his wife as a gale had turned against them. His shock had cracked into a smile as a long-abandoned laughter overcame him. She would have loved this.

Jens was still watching her as she made her way to the bathroom.

She looked at herself in the mirror — it smelt like rose water in here now — and saw nothing.

Lucy walked out the large glass doors and towards the jetty.

“Lucy. Lucy!”

She curled over the clipboard as she walked, reading the details of the deceased. The funeral director’s notes, in handwriting that leant on a violent slant, were stapled to the invoice and receipt. The dead were ceaselessly expensive.

Jens watched the MV Salute carry the six women and the tall Lucy Teller girl out into the harbour until the vessel disappeared. The customers wanted the Opera House or the rocks of a cherished fishing spot. The crew knew to avoid the straits and coves popular with party boats and topless Italians. None opted for the open ocean, an hour’s sail away. He didn’t blame them. He knew he wasn’t a brave man. He’d been told enough. The sun was low now, the day almost done. This was the most common time for bookings, as everyone wanted a certain twilit gravity for the occasion. When his mother had died, they had buried her at nine-thirty in the morning and got on with it. He tried to forget her in the purple one-piece at Havnebadet Islands Brygge, where she had attempted to coax him into the green shallows and teach him how to swim. They’d only managed that one lesson. She had been breathtakingly young. He had done his best.

He had lost sight of Lucy and returned once again to the achievable duty of his work at the club.

Kathrine Teller picked her daughter up at the end of each summer day, well after sundown, but she wouldn’t leave the car. Honestly, she didn’t need to see him. She knew that although there were no hard feelings these days, there were no soft ones either. She would sit in the old blue Ford, waiting to ferry her daughter home. She would beep the horn, parked every night in the same spot, under the time-worn fig marred by a serpentine system of heavy vines. The slender figure backlit from the festoon lights of the old yacht club, making her way towards the car, back to her, was Kathrine’s favourite sight. Never in a particular hurry, her daughter. So tall, so strong, so private. A mark on the world. She was proud that Lucy worked — and needed her to. Kathrine was glad Jens had agreed to take her on again this year. Sometimes Kathrine wondered if she’d had more children, how they ever would have been able to survive. She never told Lucy these worries; they weren’t for the young. The details she omitted from her daughter’s life made up a world. They would eat stale sandwiches on the drive home and Lucy would count her tips while telling her mother about the day in general terms. Lucy would not say what she knew, out there on the sea.

But tonight as she hurried to the car, Lucy wondered, in a quiet way, if Jens might one day come out on a charter, weather permitting. She remembered he got seasick. She thought it much easier to say hard things on water. Lucy played with the sound of Dad on her walk to the car, under her breath and under the warden fig, who kept secrets best.

The kitchen staff muttered dutiful goodbyes to Jens as he switched off the main lights from his cramped office, making sure he wouldn’t be required to pay anyone overtime. He closed the door and sat down. On his desk sat an orange leaf, a single pearl earring, and a gnarled red straw. Jens sat alone in ocean-broken silence, thrumming his fingers on the desk, making the blue-black pearl jitter.

Jens walked down to the jetty, where the night tinkered away and the yachts swayed. He stepped carefully down the slope of the boat launch, the mainstays tapping as unfinished chimes. The life of the city lights appealed to him, their reflection etching across deep black. The pale brown leather of his shoes darkened. Perhaps it was not too late to learn how to swim.

He tried to recall the exact shade of her hair. He could barely tell himself what he most longed for. When it was his turn to die, he hoped he might be young again, forgiven, and that Lucy Teller would be waiting for him, squatting among the dandelions.