By ten Sunday morning the bus to Bondi was already packed. There were hats and ponytails, canvas totes and rattan baskets, shorts and thin cotton shirts. Bikini ties peeked out the collars of girls’ tops. We sat in the back row, me and CC and Maeve, like the bad girls on the schoolbus. The kid had been slip-slapped with sunscreen. I had on starlet sunglasses and dotty flip-flops. We had ice cream money in our pockets.



The approach to Bondi Beach on the 380 is steep, delicious downhill. First a glimpse of sea beyond the trees and low wall, then, after the curve in the road, the full, resplendent swathes of turquoise, teal and cobalt blue as the bus revs along Campbell Parade.

We started at the markets: here, the elastic-waisted rayon dresses, the made-in-China matryoshka dolls, the Muchacho T-shirts, the handmade soaps cut like blocks of butter, the mismatched mirrors made out of handsome, salvaged wood. The smell in the air was bacon on the grill; we followed the scent till I was holding a sausage roll in my hands.

A sausage roll in the hands can save you from many things, friends. Buying necklaces with cutesy laser-cut plastic pendants, for example, or handing over money for a fetching stripey dress whose above-knee hem, while fresh and frisky on the beach, while dazzling and devil-may-care in the sun and the sea breeze, would probably make me mince down London streets as I tugged ungraciously at the fabric and the seams of my self-awareness. I was out with Nora once, shopping, and I said, “Am I too old to wear a T-shirt that says ‘Drop Beats Not Bombs’?” “Yes,” she said, unhesitatingly, and I dare say I got a Look, too, for having even asked. I am not saying you are a sausage roll, Nora, but I am saying sometimes a sausage roll in the hands busies you before other distractions take hold.



Later, the cousins converged: Stephen and Suzanne, and Yen-Yen, and Sam – Ee-ee the chaperone among us all in her large straw hat – and the Exotic Dessert Platter from the fish-and-chip joint. Hello, pineapple fritters, and hell-o deep-fried Mars bar. I held out for a pistacho gelato, eaten in the shade, before we headed down to the beach, CC and me and Sam and the kid, to bury our feet in the soft sand, and to scream at the water teasing our feet.

This is how a Sunday afternoon passes by while the waves wash languidly onto the shore. Maeve chased her pretend pet crab. Stephen did cartwheels on the grass. The girls sauntered in maxidresses and minidresses, and surfer boys grinned in boardshorts and bare torsos.