Back to Cronulla

On the first properly cold day of winter this year I went back to Cronulla. It took me a while to remember how long it had been since I last had been here, but I realised, eventually, that it was when my sister-in-law had had a birthday lunch at a restaurant next to North Cronulla beach, when she'd been almost unbearably pregnant with my eldest, now five-year-old, niece. She'd had a difficult pregnancy, with morning sickness that lasted the full nine months, and I remember the two of us getting very excited, towards the end, during a conversation in which we listed foods that were good to throw up" bananas, ice-cream, noodles" and those that were awful: curries, sourdough, squid; her body suddenly acting in the way that mine had been, by that stage, for seven or eight years, although for far more common, easily-understood, and temporary reasons. You're a pair of sickos, my brother had said.