Bay of Fires

by Poppy Gee

  “Grading is sorting them by size. Fish are cannibalistic. If you have three fish of different sizes, all of a sudden you have one big fish,” she had explained. “I know the fellas aren’t doing their job if I see a monster fish swimming around in one of my tanks.”

  He had laughed although he suspected she wasn’t joking completely. It was only when she was speaking about fish or fishing that she maintained eye contact with him.

  Hall checked his watch. Four hours until dinner. He made a mental note to remember to ask John for the book before he mentioned it; otherwise John might think Hall was there only in the hope of bedding his daughter.

  Hall knocked on the door of the green Fibro cottage. While he waited he patted a silky black cat purring around his leg. Something scurried under a broken sofa on the porch next to him. He glanced over his shoulder. He couldn’t help it. This place reminded him of a job he had done early in his career in the Dover Street public housing. The guy he was looking for had shoved him so hard on his arse that his back still ached weeks later.

  “Snake weather, this is.”

  Hall spun around. Roger stood in the long grass, a shovel in his hand. His buttoned-up shirt was frayed at the collar, but it was tucked neatly into his jeans. He seemed friendly.

  “Black snakes. You seen one?” Roger continued.

  “No. I’ve been told to be careful.”

  “Especially on the high rocks at the back of the beach. That’s where they sleep. They’re all poisonous down here. Venomous. Leave them alone and you’ll be okay.”

  Hall introduced himself and explained he wanted to interview Roger for a general story on people in the area. It was almost true.

  “What for?”

  “The Voice. I’m a reporter.”

  “I won’t bother, thank you,” Roger said.

  Roger opened the door to his cottage. Hall caught a glimpse of a tidy kitchen sink and a wall calendar showing a native bottlebrush.

  “The snakes are more scared of you than you should be of them,” Roger said before closing the door in Hall’s face.

  In the Averys’ kitchen the women swooped. Pamela perched Hall on a wobbly stool, Flip poured his beer into a glass, and Erica gave him a papery biscuit smeared with duck pâté. He didn’t know whether to bite it or shove it in his mouth at once; the risk with biting it was that it might crumble everywhere. Better to eat it whole, he decided.

  His mouth was full when Pamela said, “Everyone’s wondering whether or not you’re married.”

  It meant either they knew something had happened between him and Sarah and consequently thought he was the kind of man who cheated on his wife or, on the contrary, they were trying to set him up with her. Either scenario was embarrassing. He chewed the biscuit slowly, watching them wait for his response. In Erica he could see what Flip had looked like as a younger woman. They had the same neat brown hair and delicate features, the same self-assured smiles. Air hostess smiles, he thought, remembering that Sarah had said her sister was a flight attendant for Qantas. Women with that kind of smile made him nervous.

  “Never been married.”

  “You’re a bachelor,” Pamela said.

  Behind her on the wall was a poster showing a multitude of brightly colored fish. It advertised a fishing reel: at the bottom were the words It will catch them every time. Hall chewed another biscuit and waited for the follow-up question. It would be one of two: either whether he owned his house or how much he earned. The question about whether he wanted children usually came later. It was part of the reason why, when he broke up with Laura, he had decided to date only women under the age of thirty. Of course there were other benefits to dating younger women, if you could call what happened between midnight and dawn dating.

  “Sarah said you’re originally from Buckland. Are your family still on the farm?” Erica opted for the asset question.

  “Just my father. Mum died a few years ago.”

  He smiled kindly while they searched for a change of subject.

  Watching Sarah during dinner, he doubted she had put them up to it. She didn’t seem like the kind of woman who would care; she hadn’t even changed her clothes for the meal. Her hair was pulled back in a clumped salty ponytail, and her black T-shirt promoting the 1997 World Aquaculture Conference was at odds with the creamy color palette the other women were wearing. Her face was more delicate than he remembered, a prettiness diminished by her gruffness. Apart from recommending Flip’s hollandaise sauce, Sarah hadn’t spoken to him all night. Maybe it had been presumptuous of him to come.

  When he arrived, Sarah had been standing out the back with John and the other men, drinking beer around the barbecue. Now she was shooting off opinions on every topic. Apparently Erica’s partner, Steve, had installed the shack’s new chimney incorrectly.

  “Rattles. Kept me awake all night. I couldn’t sleep,” Sarah said. “There’s a few things around here I need to fix.”

  “You like fixing things?” It was the first time Hall had spoken to her directly that night, and he immediately regretted the lameness of his comment.

  “Love it. Forget tidy modern homes. Give me a diamond in the rough any day.”

  Someone else interrupted before Hall could reply. He concentrated on the delicious food. Before long the conversation turned to the two missing women.

  “Chloe Crawford was such a pretty thing and polite, too,” Pamela said. “She came in to the shop a few times. Actually, I think she was having a little flirtation with Sam Shelley.”

  “I remember you saying that,” Flip said. “Didn’t Simone put a stop to it?”

  “That’s right.” Pamela laughed. “The two of them were eating ice cream on the bench outside and Simone turned up and took Sam away. The poor kid. He can’t even have an ice cream with a girl.”

  From what Sarah had told him at the Abalone Bake, Hall knew Simone was a wealthy widow who made her money running a home furnishings import business. She shopped in Indonesia and Thailand and shipped items back to Australia and the States. Her late husband, who was Australian, had owned the dirt on which her beach house stood. Immediately after his death she had demolished the old Fibro beach shack on the site and built the glass and green copper structure. Her son was being educated in Hobart—at a boarding school. Given her circumstances, Hall could understand why she was a bit overprotective of young Sam.

  Toward the end of the meal Sarah started an argument with Don over whether yachtsmen deserved to pay for their own rescue operations if they ran into trouble on the ocean.

  “Some yachtsmen are decent sailors, I agree with you, but many are just lunatics who expect the taxpayer to pick up the tab,” she said. “No, no, I’m not talking about Simone Shelley’s husband, so don’t bring me into that one,” she added to Pamela.

  “I didn’t say anything,” Pamela said.

  “Pammy doesn’t need any help moaning about Simone Shelley.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?” Pamela said.

  “Nothing.”

  “Shut up, Donald. You’re drunk.”

  “No I’m not.”

  “You’ve drunk two bottles of red. No one else is touching it.”

  “I’m not counting your drinks.”

  “You don’t need to. I’ve had two champagnes.”

  In the silence Flip piled calamari and crayfish onto Hall’s plate from platters on which parsley sprigs had been arranged around fleshy white meat and prawns with gleaming dead eyes.

  “Give me a break,” Don said.

  “We’ve had a nice night,” Flip said. “Come on.”

  “No, I’m sick of him. He’s always like this.” Pamela’s voice cracked.

  “Like what? I’ve done nothing wrong.”

  “Of course you haven’t.”

  “My darling wife, I’m going.”

  “Where? Prowling around on the beach, looking for half-naked women to perve on? You won’t find any out there tonight, sorry to disappoint you. They’re all dead.”
r />   “Now listen here, Pamela. I’m going home to bed.” Don’s voice was controlled, but his lips were stiff as they ejected each word. “To be honest, I’m getting a bit tired of hearing your opinions. Everyone is.”

  “Go, Don, let it rip.” Sarah laughed, and Hall realized she was drunk.

  “Hush, Don,” Flip said. “Everyone’s a bit worn out from this…thing.”

  The door closed behind Don. John started to follow him, but Flip pushed him back into his chair. He glared at her.

  It was clear these people were not used to confrontation. They seemed shocked, like witnesses milling around the edge of the highway after a car crash, not sure whether to comfort one another or leave the scene. Flip patted Pamela’s hand, and Steve had bowed his head in his hands as if he were praying.

  Hall excused himself to visit the bathroom. John gave him directions: go to the end of the veranda and it’s the blue door.

  “Don’t get locked in there.” Sarah grinned.

  As Hall stepped outside, he could hear Sarah laughing. Hall smiled. She could not have been that intoxicated at the Abalone Bake if she remembered his story of being locked inside the city park toilet block. At a dinner party once, he had told the tale and it had made Laura cross with him, as though there were something embarrassing about being accidentally imprisoned in a lavatory. Sarah was not so highly strung.

  When Hall returned from the bathroom, Sarah was stacking the plates. Hall helped. Superficial chatter around the table concealed the discomfort caused by Don’s exit. In the kitchen Hall placed the plate stack he was carrying on the bench. He was tired. He felt slightly sick from the rich food. He had never seen so much seafood on one table. Years ago, he recalled, a guest at his family’s farm had brought a crayfish and his parents had not known how to eat it.

  “What’s it like being so popular?” Sarah said.

  “I am?”

  “A journalist. I don’t think anything so exciting has happened here since, well, since a body washed up on the beach.” Sarah tipped eight sets of cutlery into the empty sink. “I’m crass. I shouldn’t joke about it.”

  “Being a journalist doesn’t impress everyone.”

  “Neither does being a fish farmer, trust me.”

  “I’ve got a story to follow up near the St. Columba Falls in the next day or so,” he began.

  He had not planned to ask her to come with him. He wanted to. It was a country pub in the nearby Pyengana dairy farm region, somewhere on the road to the St. Columba Falls. The map showed gravel roads crossing cattle bridges and a green dotted line climbing through a national park. Tasmanian roads were notoriously underused. If he got lost on one of the forestry roads, if he got a flat tire, it could be days before someone else drove past.

  In the shack’s silence the gas lanterns buzzed. White moths beat the glass like butterfly whips. Sarah opened another beer, her cheeks billowing as she swirled the liquid in her mouth.

  “I’ll buy you lunch,” he said.

  “Got nothing else to do.”

  Erica giggled, and Hall realized everyone was listening to them.

  “Hush, Erica,” Steve said.

  Sarah glanced across the room to the dinner table. She spun the beer cap on the bench. Hall worried that she was changing her mind.

  “Thanks for asking.” Sarah slung a green satchel over her shoulder and picked up her fishing rod. At the same time John poured a glass of port and handed it to Hall.

  John started talking about his book, and Hall remembered why he was there. He tried to concentrate, but all he could hear were Sarah’s feet thudding down the ramp into the night.

  “Johnny, aren’t you concerned about her being down there alone?” Pamela bustled into the kitchen and pulled on pink rubber washing-up gloves.

  “When did anyone in this shack ever listen to me?” John read the time on his watch. “I’ll go for a walk in a little while, make sure everything is safe.”

  Hall considered following Sarah to the beach. Fishing by moonlight with Sarah was infinitely more appealing than drinking port on a stomach full of seafood. But it was John who had invited him for dinner, and it would be rude to leave now. He would finish the drink and excuse himself.

  Before he left, Hall had another look at the fishing poster. He searched for the snotty trevally. Earlier Sarah had confessed her secret for catching snotty trevally. She used raw chicken breast. Underwater, raw chicken resembled jellyfish which the fish usually ate.

  “Don’t quote me. It’s never been scientifically proven. But it’s the only explanation anyone can think of, because a snotty trevally who only eats chicken is going to be one very hungry fish.”

  Hall had laughed; it was the kind of fact he liked.

  The snotty trevally was silver with a blue and green back and small rubbery lips. She had a black dot on her cheek, like a beauty spot.

  Pamela’s huge four-wheel drive headlights were inconsequential under the late night sky. Their bucketed light was dwarfed by the immense blackness. Sitting beside Pamela as she drove him back to the guesthouse after dinner, Hall tried to remain impartial as she explained exactly how obese the Averys’ Labradoodle was. Apparently Henry ate scraps from the table during every meal.

  “Henry is so fat he’ll get arthritis. It’s in their genes. I’ve told Flip.”

  “Well, you’re not helping. I saw you feeding him crayfish tonight.”

  “Cray meat doesn’t keep.” Pamela waved a hand in the air indifferently. “We get so tired of it. I’ve got nine in my freezer. Nine! They take up too much space.”

  If he was talking to a bloke, another journo or any of the guys he played pool with on Wednesday nights, he would have questioned the sense of continuing to drop pots when they had already caught so many. You’re fucked in the head, mate, he might comment with a grin, and the other guy would shrug and tell him where to go. He’d get the point, though.

  Instead Hall said, “I heard there was a murder in your crayfish pot.”

  “No. I haven’t put my pot out for days.”

  “That’s funny. I was at the boat ramp yesterday morning and Erica said an octopus broke into your pot.”

  “I’m too busy working to put my pot out.”

  It was easier to tell if someone was lying if you didn’t look at them. Practiced liars knew about holding eye contact and maintaining a calm expression. Their voices were harder to control. Pamela’s voice changed just enough to confirm what Hall already knew. He exhaled, slowly, and let the topic slide. It was cruel to have a go at a woman who had just had a public row with her husband.

  Stories that would never be written had always teased Hall. The facts would remain with him, forming into impotent leads in his mind as he tried to fall asleep at night. Knowing that something needed to change and there was nothing he could do about it was irritating. When Sarah had complained about how many pots everyone was throwing in, Hall knew he was onto another story that was dead before it started.

  The road curved steadily past the wharf and Pamela slowed down. The headlights picked up a figure moving down the beach track to the water. It was Don; his bald head was unmistakable.

  “Was that…?” Hall said.

  “No.”

  “I thought I saw Don.”

  “I thought I saw something too, but it was an animal, a wallaby perhaps.”

  Hall waited in the dark garden of the guesthouse. When her lights vanished, he walked back the way they had come. At the top of the wharf track, in the shadow of an old boathouse, Hall stood. He listened to the boats creaking on their ropes, the slip-slop of the waves. This was silly. He didn’t know where Sarah had decided to fish, and it was unlikely Don Gunn was a murderer. Still, he held his breath for a minute longer and tried to hear something more sinister than the rustling of bush rats feeding on fishing scraps.

  In bed that night Hall’s mind was too alert to let him sleep. He had not drunk too much, but he felt overstimulated as he tried to correlate the conversations with the work
he needed to do. Anxiety, a long-absent yet familiar variety, also nagged at him.

  Thankfully he hadn’t felt that unpleasant undercurrent for a long time. For pretty much two years after Laura left, disquiet had gnawed him, at any time, whenever anything reminded him of her. Certain books or films he knew she would like, the smell of the Nivea body moisturizer she used, women who wore their hair long and untied, and songs by the Waifs. The Waifs were a band he hated, but for a long time, if they played on the office radio, he feared he was going to cry. It would be seven years since she left this February. The first few years had been very dark for Hall. It was a long time to get over a breakup. Some of his friends had given up on him. They were the ones who were still mates with Dan.

  He hadn’t thought about Dan and Laura for ages, not in a loathsome way. He had seen Dan a couple of months ago, outside the Penny Royal Arcade. Dan had waved, Hall had crossed the road. And why shouldn’t he? Dan was a man who’d waited until Hall had an out-of-town assignment and then got himself invited for dinner at Laura and Hall’s home. They had been sitting at the little wrought iron table on the sunny side of the veranda, eating cornflakes, when Hall returned earlier than expected that terrible morning. The casualness of the scene, Laura wrapped in Hall’s dressing gown, Dan wearing an old tracksuit, suggested to Hall it had been going on for longer than he wanted to know.

  There was an old joke about a man whose wife runs off with his best friend. Someone asks him, “How are you coping?” “Pretty bad,” the man replies. “I really miss him.” But it wasn’t like that for Hall. Once he got past the wretched, cruel business of being heartbroken, the humiliation as he pieced together the puzzle to discover that quite a few people knew about the affair before he did, the violence he wanted to inflict on Dan, his final suffocating pain when he realized Laura would never beg Hall to take her back; when all that was out of his system, he had missed them both, in different ways.