When I was ten, I went away on a weekend camping trip with the people who lived next door. They were an unmarried couple with two boys from her previous marriage, and each boy was allowed to bring one friend with them. The third kid was someone we knew from school. I think we went to a place called 80 Mile Beach, which is a few hours drive north of Port Hedland, although I could be wrong on both points.

They had a big four-wheel-drive with a dinghy on a trailer, and I can remember it going off the road and into the sand dunes past where people were camping. Everything was bright with all the white sand and sunlight. The dad was cursing at someone for driving in front of him, or perhaps laughing at someone who was bogged, I forget. We drove away from the campers up the beach and parked when there was no one else in sight. It was a stupidly long beach. I remember there was an island in the distance.

We did some fishing that afternoon and I caught a big silver fish that someone took a photo of, and the dad almost caught a shovel-nose shark-type-thing, but it got away. As the afternoon went on, it became cloudy and windy. At one point, I looked up and there was a great big unbroken band of cloud going from one edge of the sky to the other like an enormous grey bridge over us. I had the most intense feeling of deja vu I have ever had, standing there with my feet in the shallow water. When I look back on it now, I wonder if something about it reminded me of the first time I had seen the West Gate Bridge in Melbourne, which was the tallest, most enormous thing I could imagine, at least up to the deja vu moment when the whole sky, and regions beyond, were joined up by that cloud bridge. It buckled and disintegrated after a few minutes, and then my mind is blank. I suppose we had tea, though I don’t think we ate the fish I caught.

During the night it rained. The youngest of the two boys kept waking up, worried that we were being washed away into the water, or that the battering of raindrops on the tent was actually an army of tiny soldier crabs marching up and down the beach in the night.

Then in the morning we woke up at 4 am because we were excited and played chasey in the sand. The boys’ parents rolled down the window of the four wheel drive and yelled at us, but we wouldn’t go back to sleep. Then the dad guy said that he’d had enough and we were all going home early. After that, we wandered down the beach and found some dunes that were full of weird shell-type things that were white and egg shaped with pattens on. They were full of damp sand and crumbled when you squeezed them. We threw them as hard as we could and watched them explode into bits on the sand, and then started throwing them at each other and taking cover behind the dunes. Eventually I think the kid from school got some sand in his eye and we stopped and walked back to the camp site.

The boys’ parents made good on their promise to go home straight away, and I was still in my pyjamas when we packed up and left. At lunch time we were back at their place in Port Hedland, and I climbed the back fence with a frozen fish in a plastic bag to get home. I still don’t know if they stopped the camping trip just because we got up too early and then refused to go back to bed. Maybe the guy had some work to do or the mother didn’t like sleeping in the car. If they did lie about it, I think that’s pretty stupid.