Gone Fishing Read online

  The village looms. She swings into the pretty driveway with the pretty herbaceous borders before she can change her mind. She unlocks the door and steps inside. Emily’s heavy perfume, trapped in her pink frills – chairs, clothes, curtains, lampshades – hits her like an assault.

  Here to empty the unit so village management can erase any lingering traces of Emily with new carpet, a fresh paint job and a new stove top before offering it as new to the next cab off the mortal rank, she stumbles for a second. She’d planned to ask Vinnies, the provider of luxuries small and large in Sam’s impoverished childhood, to blitz the place but kept putting off the call. Now, with the lawyer unable to shed any light on her mystery brother, she’s glad. Somewhere in the detritus of seventy years there must be a clue.

  Kate takes a deep breath and enters the bedroom to open the wardrobe. Suddenly finding it hard to breathe, she leans against a wall, slowly sliding to the floor. Eyes closed, she scrolls through the past like a black-and-white movie show, searching for hints, clues, answers. Or even a flimsy link she might be able to follow up.

  She remembers conversations between her parents that suddenly went silent when she, still a little girl, entered the room. She remembers her father’s quiet acceptance of Emily’s frequent absences. Once, when she plucked up the courage to ask where Emily had gone, he simply said, ‘Out.’ She knew the question was off limits forever after. Sometimes Emily’d be gone only a day and night. Sometimes a week. Once, she heard her father ask, ‘The money ran out, did it?’ Her mother’s response a murmur too low to catch.

  Out of the blue, Kate remembers being dragged along on a flight to the city to tour one of the few Australian navy battleships in operation. It seemed so weird at the time. Emily, a battleship nerd? Even weirder in hindsight, unless one of the sailors – no, never a sailor, Emily was a snob – one of the officers, then, was the father of her child. Or maybe her son had joined the navy? But why drag her daughter along? For appearances? As an equaliser? To prevent a nasty scene?

  Kate’s head is beginning to throb. It’s not called rotgut for nothing, Kate, so don’t bother buying me the cheap stuff, I’ll only throw it out. Birthday and Christmas gift law, according to Emily. Kate goes into the kitchen where a used coffee mug sits on a bench that needs wiping. She scours it, fills it with tap water, drinks thirstily.

  Revived and back at the wardrobe, she gingerly fingers clothing arranged fastidiously in strict colour order: red, green, blue, turquoise, yellow and pink, pink, pink. Underneath, a rack of shoes reflects the same colour code. She counts twenty cardboard hatboxes stacked on the top shelf. All of them almost certainly crammed with over-decorated hats representing the most outlandish fashion fads for the past fifty years. Kate had never considered her mother capable of such forensic order.

  ‘The Secret Life of Emily Jackson,’ she murmurs.

  How her mother adored hats. It didn’t matter what style she placed on her head, it always looked fabulous. I’ve got the right bones, Kate, very few women do.

  She opens a hatbox and, against her will, finds herself impossibly seduced by a gauzy emerald-green fascinator with a jaunty little feather (no doubt from an endangered species – survival of the fittest, Emily would poo-poo) propped on top in a swirl of silk. It must have cost a bomb, she thinks. And suddenly she can’t bear the thought that her mother’s great passion for outrageously glorious hats will end up on Vinnie’s crowded and shabby shelves. She puts them aside to take home in what she hopes isn’t a bout of grotesque sentimentality. The Island Players, she tells herself, might be able to use them for their next theatrical production.

  After a while, Kate stumbles on a plastic supermarket bag stuffed with old photos of the blurry, bleached-colour kind, and her heart leaps. Unable to bring herself to sit in one of Emily’s frilly floral armchairs, she sinks to the floor again and sifts through the shots. Her journalist’s eye is tuned to pick up odd emotional nuances among groups of wedgie-wearing, frizzy-haired 1960s diehards in washed-out psychedelic shirts and skirts who smile mechanically into the lens. Were they all saying cheese back then? Or had that free-love generation invoked sex to loosen lips? She has no idea. Nothing leaps out at her. There’s not a baby in sight. She finds two pictures of her father and puts them aside with the hatboxes.

  Late afternoon. Hot. Sunlight corkscrews off the water but not for much longer. Soon shadows will lengthen, casting a gentling haze over sea, sky and landscape. Back onshore in the Square, Sam and the rest of the Cook’s Basin community is gathering in groups of growling dissent. News of a luxury resort planned for Garrawi Park has rocketed around the Island. Even isolated bay residents, usually the last to hear the gossip, have been alerted to a travesty that everyone agrees will scar an already ecologically vulnerable coast beyond redemption. No bridge. No resort. Agreement is universal.

  Sam licks his lips, tasting the last of the beer on them, sticky and yeasty, leaving a gluey film on his tongue. He vows never to leave an emergency stash of the amber ale on board again. His head feels woozy. Thick and slow. He wanders over to the tap, turns it on full bore and shoves his head under the water, hoping the cold will shake off the booze. What kind of a warrior gets pissed before the battle even begins? The cold feels like a sharp blade cutting through his scalp. It’s all he can do not to yelp.

  ‘You OK, Sam? You forget to wash your hair after work?’

  ‘I’m good, Jimmy,’ he fibs. ‘Just clearing my head for business, mate. How’d you go this afternoon? Did you do a good job for Frankie?’

  ‘Yeah, Sam. I was the best.’ Before Sam can inform him that self-praise is no recommendation, the kid goes on. Bouncing up and down in his mucky sandshoes, his iridescent clothes subdued by grime, spiky red hair gluey with the gel he applies in an almost religious ritual every morning, he points across the sun-struck water. ‘See her, Sam. She’s a beauty now. Better than a facelift, me mum says.’

  Sam squints into the distance. The Seagull is riding higher than usual after a three-day overhaul that knocked about a tonne of hitchhiking crustaceans off her underbelly.

  Sam turns back to the kid. ‘She looks good for another century, mate. Does Frankie need you again tomorrow or are you back on board the Mary Kay full-time as first mate?’

  Jimmy’s beams. ‘I’m with ya, Sam. Me and Longfellow. Reportin’ for duty. What time, Sam? What’s on?’

  Sam looks at the pup tucked in the crook of the kid’s arm. ‘Give your mum a hand in the morning and then report on the afternoon high tide. And give that mutt a bath when you have your own tonight. There’s enough marine life stuck on him to make a meal.’

  Jimmy studies the pup. ‘You reckon?’

  Sam sighs. Turns towards the crowd. ‘Three o’clock sharp,’ he says, giving the kid’s hair a rough-up before he walks into the thick of a ropeable community with violence and bloodshed up front in its mind. Metaphorically speaking, of course. He wipes his sticky hand on his shorts, checks his watch. No sign of Kate. No word from her either. Even putting a good spin on it, the signs aren’t too auspicious. He’d at least expected an I’m OK call after she finished her tricky legal appointment in town. Serious couples communicate. Real couples support each other. Committed couples share even the most boring minutiae of their lives and find it fascinating. Or pretend to. He’s getting the distinct sense of being an accessory good for occasional use but inessential in the greater scheme. She’s going it alone on the big stuff. He shakes drips of water from his hair. Get busy, mate, he tells himself, or you’ll fry what’s left of your thumping head. If only he hadn’t off-loaded Jimmy for the afternoon. He’d never dream of getting pissed in front of the kid. Lead by example. Not as easy as it sounds. His kingdom for a couple of painkillers.

  Fast Freddy, kitted out for his night-time taxi shift in fluoro orange, appears out of the throng as if by magic. ‘You look awful, Sam. Migraine?’

  ‘Nice of you to put it so politely,
mate. Tied one on. Fell asleep. Now I feel like someone’s ramming a boot into my skull.’

  Fast Freddy reaches into his pocket and comes out with a couple of small white pills. ‘Good old-fashioned aspirin. You’ll be right as rain in a tick.’

  Sam grabs the pills like a lifeline, swallows them dry.

  ‘Er, they’re meant to be dissolved in water,’ says Fast Freddy, who’s a stickler for following instructions. ‘You might experience a bit of fizz making a rocket-fast return trip from your gullet.’

  ‘Feel better already,’ Sam insists, punching Freddy’s shoulder in thanks and honing in on Lindy Jones, the shapely real-estate agent who seems to be able to discover the secrets of the universe by clicking on one in a row of bewildering graphics on the bottom of her computer screen. He wonders nervously whether it’s time he embraced the new technology. ‘It’s been around for thirty years,’ Kate had lectured him the other night when he made some disparaging remark about the invasion of electronics and the abandonment of nature for what seemed to him to be a load of time-wasting trivia. ‘The web,’ she replied – almost impatiently, now that he looks back on the conversation – ‘means no one needs to suffer in silence and ignorance ever again. Used correctly, it’s the tool – the weapon if you like – of the masses. All you have to do is hit one key and you can galvanise an army to march for the common good.’ He was unconvinced. Now he wonders if her words were prophetic. If ever there was a time to galvanise an army, it’s right now.

  But army? He checks out the beads, sarongs, shorts, T-shirts, thongs and bare feet; kids splashing about naked in the shallows; the same old Island die-hards glued to their seats in their regular corner, fists curled around stubbies dripping condensation like a dodgy hose. He marches up to Lindy, pushing aside Jason, her good-looking, always-amenable husband, with a business-like shove. Squashing down a ping of envy for this bloke who has it all, Sam kisses Lindy on both cheeks to show he’s up with at least one of the current social fads. ‘We need to do a bit of research, love. Find out where this shower of . . .’ He pauses; Lindy’s two excellent teenage kids are in earshot. ‘. . . shinola emanates from. You got any ideas?’

  ‘For god’s sake, Sam. Keep up,’ she replies impatiently. ‘Why do you think everyone’s here? The developers stuck up a sign at lunchtime to say they’ll answer any questions at six o’clock. Or, in their words, bring the community up-to-date and on board. They’re distributing plans and prospectuses so we’ll all be absolutely clear about what’s happening. Considerate, eh?’

  Sam fights down the queasy sensation of being caught wrong-footed. He looks around at the crowd. To an outsider, it might appear to consist of aging hippies, yobbos and beach bums, but they’re people he’s laughed with, drunk with, eaten with, grieved with, worked alongside and even battled. They’d never let you down. You could get arrested for knocking off your mother-in-law and they’d risk smuggling a frigidly cold beer behind bars before giving you a quiet nod of understanding: Must’ve been having a crap day, eh? Right now, they’ve gathered to protect everything they passionately believe in and damn the consequences. ‘The law on our side or theirs, Lindy?’ he asks.

  ‘Too early to say but it’s not looking good. Just so you know, that shiny-headed stirrer with the filthy temper who lives on the eastern side of Garrawi has bought all the bordering properties over the last couple of years. My guess? He’s in this up to his eyeballs and not the temporary blow-in we thought he was.’

  Sam scans the crowd, searching for light bouncing off a baby-pink skull. ‘How’d he manage to get under your radar?’ he asks.

  ‘Company names. If there was a connection I failed to see it and I look hard when people buy stuff over the internet because there’s no knowing who might pitch up as your next-door neighbour. There were eleven separate organisations. I thought they were one-offs triggered by the current volatility of the stock market. The grey brigade funnelling retirement funds into property. Big mistake.’

  Sam thinks back. ‘Nah. Don’t blame yourself. The signs were there for all of us to see. We just didn’t take them seriously.’

  Two years ago, Eric Lowdon had turned up in his deeply eccentric golf-course clothes to take up residence in the waterfront house left vacant when Joycie Bancroft broke her ankle rushing for the ferry and decided that at the relatively young age of ninety-three, it was probably time to give up offshore living. Eric descended on Cutter Island like a puffed-up parrot, accompanied by six flashy barge loads of glass-and-chrome furniture that outshone the bay on a blaster of a day. Making enemies from the start. ‘One chip in my glass table top,’ he told Glenn the removalist, ‘and I’ll personally hold you responsible for a replacement. Seats thirty. Twenty grands’ worth.’ The thick plate glass, beaded with coloured sparkles that skewered the eyeballs of anyone brave enough to look at the thing, hung over the front and back of the barge by two metres. Eight men moved it into the house. Sam included. All of them tempted to chuck the glittering monstrosity overboard and let the bastard sue. Glenn didn’t have a cracker anyway. But a bloke had his pride. Glenn couldn’t let a runty little arsehole with no taste win a single round.

  Not long afterwards, Eric Lowdon began appearing at the fireshed fundraiser dinners. Scraped his plate clean of top nosh cooked by noble, sweaty volunteers before he whinged about the lack of value for money. ‘It’s a fundraiser, mate, not a loss leader,’ Sam told him. ‘And tell me where else would you get a three-course dinner for fifteen bucks?’ Lowdon ignored him and banged on about how it was time to bring Cutter Island into the twenty-first century. A bridge, he preached, cafés, restaurants, sparkling new marinas, a helipad. Glamour: the word presented like a gift on a silver platter. And they’d all laughed smugly in his face. Explained patiently that the whole point about Cook’s Basin was the fact that it was managing to hold back the over-regulated, over-crowded, over-stressed, glamorous current world. They’d thought he’d up and go one day without a peep, like the deluded weekender who’d bolted when he found out what the community thought of his idea to upgrade the fire tracks into major access roads. Jeez. How did you fight an enemy when you couldn’t see it coming?

  ‘Here they are,’ says Lindy, tipping her chin towards three very clean, sleek black sedans purring up to the Square and coming to a standstill on the sandy track. All eyes turn and fix on the six hard men who emerge from the soft leather innards of the vehicles. They’re wearing suits and ties, dark glasses that hide half their faces but not their smirks. The murmuring crowd goes deathly quiet, like the curtain’s just been raised on a Greek tragedy. One hundred pairs of accusing eyes track the movement of the men but not a soul moves to ease their way to the seawall, where they eventually line up to sit like well-fed crows on a country fence. Oozing power and arrogance, protected from any possible rear-guard action by a tide that sloshes lazily behind their backs, they (bizarrely) fold their hands primly in their laps like schoolgirls at a class photo-shoot.

  ‘They think it’s in the bag,’ Sam says through clenched teeth. He grabs Lindy’s hand and pulls her forward with him, turning sideways to squeeze through narrow gaps in the crowd. ‘They think we’ll just roll over with idiot grins on our faces while they tickle our tummies, not notice when they bully us into submission and destroy everything we believe in. Are they dead-set morons?’

  ‘No sign of Eric,’ Lindy says, on tiptoes, searching the heads. ‘But I know he’s the lynchpin. Every instinct in my body tells me I’m right.’

  ‘He doesn’t strike me as a man who likes to get his hands dirty. But I’m with you. He’s got to be up to his eyeballs in this.’

  Two of the dark suits are handing out pamphlets and flyers, smarmy, touching shoulders, arms, like they’re trusted friends spreading comfort and hope at – given their weird black outfits – a funeral. A few people flinch. Some look at a hand laid on their body like it’s a violation. Others grab the written material and retire to the far end of the seaw
all to get the facts in black and white. The suits forge on, immune. Sam has to fight the urge to roar. ‘They have no idea what they’ve just stepped into. No freaking idea at all,’ he mutters to Lindy. ‘I’ll fight this to the death. Trust me on this, Lin. The only way I’ll give up is if I’m dropped over the side of the Mary Kay wearing concrete boots.’

  Before she can reply, he snatches a copy and stomps off towards The Briny. He doesn’t trust himself not to hurl empty bottles at those unblemished black cars, or slam his fist into the even rows of sparkling white teeth. At the last minute, unable to contain his anger, he spins on his heel and marches back into the crowd. He picks the closest suit, and twists the bloke’s designer silk tie as tight as he can without totally cutting off his oxygen. His face so close he’s almost knocked flat by a shocker dose of halitosis, Sam hisses: ‘You can’t do this.’

  With the sixth sense of professional thugs, the other five blokes dump their pamphlets and converge on Sam. Close around him like a cloak. ‘Are you taking us on?’ They make hee-haw sounds. Grin. ‘Are you taking us on?’ they say again. Fingers pointing, prodding the open air, then making circular motions at their temples like Sam’s a full-blown loony.

  The locals step forward, edgy, spoiling for action. ‘Bring it on,’ says Glenn, puny fists raised to his face like a boxer.

  ‘Kids and dogs splashing about, Glenn,’ says Bill Firth, the mild-mannered, art-loving president of the Cook’s Basin Community Residents’ Association, who materialises behind Sam. ‘This is not the time nor the place.’ Fast Freddy, a newly practising Buddhist, spirits Glenn away before the goons turn him into fish food. Bill says soothingly, ‘Let it go, Sam. Save the fight for when it matters. Punch-ups never settle anything.’