by Poppy Gee
Jane poured a large serving of gin over ice cubes and added a drizzle of water from the tank-stand tap. She took a sip and smacked her lips.
“Good. I needed that.”
Hall arranged sausages and onion rings on the barbecue plate. It was handmade, a blackened metal square resting on three walls of charred bricks. He had spent twenty minutes arranging wood underneath it, trying to get the temperature right. Jane didn’t offer advice and he was glad. The sausages were the cheap supermarket variety, he noted from the packet. He should have organized some fish. Never mind. Food tasted better when it was cooked outside. The meaty smell reminded him of camping trips by the farm dam during school holidays. One of his brothers would simmer lamb chops on an open fire while the rest of the brothers swam and built wobbly rafts from dead wood.
Jane hadn’t mentioned it, but he knew she was worried. Agitation motivated each movement she made—the steady gulps of gin, the flick of her finger as she tapped ash from her cigarette. Nothing about her was still. When she wasn’t drinking, she propped her glass in a potted plant and added wood to the fire or flipped the onion rings around the hot plate. Even her hair kept moving, the wiry coils undulating out from the bun.
He felt sorry for her. There was talk her estranged husband had been seen near the old jetty in a faded bronze Ford utility with unpainted panels on one side. He was hard to miss, a beefy redheaded bearded man. Apparently he had driven up the tip road. Several people had noted the dust cloud rising behind his car as it traveled down the straight road running beside the beach.
“Can anyone believe that man turning up now?” Pamela had said. “You wouldn’t read about it.”
John Avery said Gary Taylor had been working in the mines on the west coast. Erica Avery thought he was doing time at Risdon, a maximum security prison near Hobart, although she was not certain of his crime. No one said anything pleasant about the man. Years ago when Gary Taylor lived at the guesthouse he owned a runabout dinghy. More than once he had been spotted lurking near other people’s buoys; those were the days when empty pot after empty pot was pulled and nobody caught anything.
Hall had mentioned to no one his suspicion that Gary Taylor was living a lot closer to the Bay of Fires than anyone realized. He still had not been able to confirm whether Taylor was the twice-convicted crayfish poacher the police were interviewing in relation to the murder investigation. There were several unemployed men in the area with this type of record. Certainly Pamela was right in saying it was a bit strange, Gary turning up now after all these years. But there was a difference between news and gossip. Jane’s bitterness suggested to Hall that Gary Taylor had left her for another woman. If this was the case, he didn’t know why everyone persisted in discussing him. It was cruel; losing your partner to someone else was a pain Hall understood all too well.
The heat from the wood fire hurt his legs and forced him to stand back. He drank beer and watched fat stream out of the sausages. Jane folded a slice of white bread around a sausage, squirted tomato sauce on top, and handed it to him.
“Sorry,” Jane said.
“It’s fine. I like sausage sandwiches.”
She frowned. “No. Sorry I’m not much fun tonight.”
“What’s on your mind?” Hall felt disingenuous. Casual dinner conversation was not the entire reason he had agreed to eat with her.
“Nothing.”
Jane finished her drink. She held her liquor well. He had noticed her sipping gin during the afternoon while she washed salt from the windows. It was understandable she would want a drink. That morning her final booking had canceled. She had asked Hall to proofread a flyer offering her services for ironing and cleaning.
They talked about the middens while they ate. Jane didn’t blame the farmer for covering them up; Hall was not interested in arguing. She snorted when Hall mentioned Sarah’s concern that certain people in the area took more than their fair share of sea spoils.
“I don’t have a lot of time for Pamela and Don Gunn but I can tell you this: their catch is not a drop in the ocean. They don’t eat that much. And it’s not like they’re taking it to sell in their Chinese restaurant or something. Sarah Avery was complaining about that, was she? Everyone’s got their axe to grind,” Jane said.
Eventually the conversation returned to the murder.
“You know,” said Jane, scraping the spatula along the barbecue plate, “some of the bus drivers coming down from Launceston have been telling people where the beach is. They’re making a big deal out of it, like it’s a tourist attraction.”
Hall stoked the fire but watched Jane’s face as he said, “I’m more interested in that fellow driving the bronze utility.”
“You know who it is.” Jane sucked her lips in.
“Why do they call him Speed?”
“Don’t be mistaken. He’s not stupid. Gary’s got it all happening up here.” She tapped the side of her head. “Everyone from Ringarooma speaks slowly.”
Without prompting, Jane outlined the brief, bitter history of her marriage. Gary Taylor could be blamed for pretty much all of Jane’s problems, from her childlessness to the backbreaking hours she worked to keep the roof over her head.
“Nineteen is too young to marry,” she said. “Look at me now. I’m stuck here.”
“How did you meet?” Hall asked.
“God, a long time ago.” Jane poured herself another drink. “Raspberry picking. Sounds bloody romantic, doesn’t it? It was a summer job for a gang of us kids. You picked all day, drank all night. We all camped out in the farmer’s shed and I tell you, once the lights went out, some of those blokes were like a bunch of goanna lizards, crawling over each other trying to get a bit, not caring who it was with.”
Hall cringed. It sounded dreadful.
Jane laughed. “Gary took me under his wing. He was older, twenty-two. He said, ‘You’re too special for those louts to get their hands on.’ We liked each other. Had the same sense of humor.”
Her cheeks flushed, which Hall assumed was from embarrassment at having spoken so candidly.
“‘Special.’ I’m not the first girl to fall for that line.”
“I’m sorry that your marriage ended.”
“I don’t even think about it anymore,” Jane said. “Don’t worry about me. I still have a personal life.”
“Do you think it is strange that Gary has turned up after so long?” Hall knew more about Gary Taylor than his question implied, but he was undecided on how much to tell her.
“Do I think it’s strange Gary turning up now? Nothing that man does will amaze me. Look, he read something in the paper… something I said. He’s full of it.”
“So you’ve spoken to him?”
“Yeah.”
“What else did he say?”
“Drop it. You’re barking up the wrong tree. Gary’s not your man.”
“I have never said he was.” Hall sighed. “All this angst. If only beautiful young girls didn’t go walking on the beach alone.”
“Well, they shouldn’t. Girls who don’t want trouble shouldn’t go running around screaming for attention.”
There was a hard edge to Jane’s voice. Hall waited for her to say more, but she only shook her head. She flicked her cigarette lighter on and off and smiled for the first time that evening. “I nearly forgot. I was talking to someone who is angry with you.”
“Yeah?”
“Apparently you weren’t supposed to put that thing about Roger Coker in the paper. Vigilantes throwing Tassie devil road kill at people’s places.” Jane laughed and lit a half-smoked cigarette she had put out when they started eating. She blew smoke toward the ocean. “You reporters, you’re all the same. I better be careful what I say.”
Hall swallowed the froth in the bottom of his stubby. “What else did Sarah say?”
“She was yapping on. Reckoned you tricked her into saying something. She’s worried Roger Coker’s going to be hassled even more now. It was all over the TV last night. I said wh
o gives a rat’s? You can’t worry about other people.”
Jane propped her pointed boot on a stump of wood. He hadn’t picked her as someone who enjoyed telling a person something they wouldn’t like to hear. A mosquito pricked the back of his neck and he slapped at it in disgust.
“If people don’t say it’s off the record, how the hell am I supposed to know?” he muttered.
A fat round moon was high over the ocean horizon. Darkness, unfortunately, was hours away. Hall opened another beer and sat down next to Jane. There was no point taking his frustration out on her. Her wanting to talk about someone else’s problems for a change, he couldn’t hold that against her.
It was nearly midnight and Hall was getting ready for bed when he heard a male voice coming from somewhere in the guesthouse. It was muffled and for a moment he could not be certain he had heard anything at all. He opened the door to his room carefully, so it wouldn’t squeak, and listened. From deep within the guesthouse he heard the shuffling of furniture on floorboards, followed by Jane’s laughter. Perhaps she was listening to her transistor radio. He shrugged off the thought that something was not quite right and leaned out his window.
Ten minutes later he was still gazing at the night sea, conscious that the guesthouse was now silent, when he saw a solitary figure moving down the empty road. In Launceston he wouldn’t have noticed a person walking at night on an unlit street. Here it was clearer. He recognized her posture first; striding out, her back erect. It was Sarah. Her fishing rod bounced against her shoulder as she walked.
By the time Hall had tied his bootlaces and crossed the guesthouse yard, she was no longer in sight. He waited until he was well away from the guesthouse to call out.
“Anyone feel like coming fishing with me?” His voice sounded strange in the silent night, as if it belonged to someone else. There was no answer and he couldn’t help feeling foolish.
“Hello?” he called less confidently.
At the shortcut to the gulch, she was waiting for him. She must have been standing there for several minutes, listening to his footsteps crackle on the gravel, hearing him breathe and cough and look for her.
“Boo,” she said.
“Hope I didn’t scare you.”
“You wish.” Her teeth gleamed in the moonlight; he liked the way they weren’t perfect, one front tooth leaning against a corner of the other. Her sister had perfectly straight teeth. Sarah had told him that her sister had worn clear braces, which cost twice as much as normal metal ones, but they had been necessary as Erica was a promising ballet dancer as a teen. Apparently metal braces could be detrimental to a dancer’s prospects in competitions.
“You’ve got balls, wandering around out here by yourself at night.” Immediately he wished he had not used that expression. “You’re gutsy.”
“Not gutsy. Just extremely fit.” She had mentioned that one of the reasons she had been unconcerned about approaching him on that first day on the dune was that she knew she could outrun him. Did that mean she thought he looked unfit? He touched his stomach; it wasn’t as hard as it used to be, but it wasn’t all that soft, either. Maybe she noticed the move for she added, “You look pretty fit yourself, so I guess we’re safe tonight.”
They walked past the gulch and onto a slender stretch of sand called Witch’s Cove. At the end of the beach they sat on a rock, facing the sea. Sea lice glowed like tiny fairy lights in the body of each wave.
“That article about Roger. I regret that it ran.”
He explained about his impatient editor and the news cycle pressure. He kept it brief; he didn’t want to give her the impression that his work colleagues did not respect him.
“No worries,” she said.
“Jane mentioned you were upset about it.”
“I don’t upset that easily, Hall. I’m worried about Roger though.”
She leaned back against the rock. In the moonlight her hair had the reddish hue of an Antarctic beech in summer. He wasn’t sure, but the way the fabric of her shirt was sitting it appeared that she wasn’t wearing a bra. He wondered if she was expecting him to take the lead. Without alcohol dulling bravado he felt as though he was on stage and about to be judged, like the bulls in the livestock show at Agfest, blinking at the audience, not comprehending what was expected of them. The rock was digging into one of his legs and it hurt.
“What’s wrong?” she said.
“Nothing.”
“Tell me. You’re acting weird.”
He felt like a boy on a first date.
“Are you married or something?” she said.
“No!”
“You think I’m ugly and wondering why you got with me the other night?”
“No!”
How could he explain to this confident woman that he had not made love sober for seven years? The problem was not that he was worried he couldn’t perform; it was that he would disappoint her. That afterward she might lie beside him, cuddling in his arms, but secretly be thinking that she had had better. Ragged with frustration at himself, he turned back to her. It was too late. She was picking up her fishing rod.
In the kitchen, waiting for his tea to steep, Hall munched Vegemite toast and watched Jane follow her black dogs down the beach track. The bigger one was older and limped, trying to keep up with the younger one, which raced toward the surf. Jane put a hand to her mouth, probably whistling through two fingers, commanding the pup to wait. He did not. It was the younger one that Don had smacked at the Abalone Bake. Hall had checked the wound on the dog’s back, a neat two-inch cut. It had healed faster than he’d thought it would, aided, he supposed, by daily saltwater swims.
This morning Hall planned to knock on Roger’s door again but it was still too early; the sun had barely come up. He looked for something to read or do while he had breakfast. There was a pack of cards beside the stacked board games and he took them down, dealing himself a game of patience. It was hard to concentrate, his thoughts returning to Sarah. He was a moron. Last night he should have just grabbed her and kissed her, properly, how he wanted to. How many chances did a man need?
A door closed somewhere in the depths of the guesthouse. Hall put the cards down. He was about to go down the internal staircase when instinct urged him to look out the kitchen window. In the garden below, a man wearing running shorts and a T-shirt was bent over, rooting around in the wood stack beneath the tank stand. The man stood up, glanced around as if to ensure no one was watching him, and walked up the hill toward the road.
Hall exhaled slowly. It was John Avery.
He finished his tea, watching Jane run the dogs through the white wash. He wouldn’t tell her, not yet. There was no sense in scaring her unnecessarily. And for all he knew John Avery was merely returning some firewood or something. It was nothing that could not be sorted by a few deliberate questions addressed directly to Dr. Avery.
As Hall washed his breakfast dishes, he spotted Roger Coker lumbering across the rocks. Abandoning the soapy water in the sink, Hall grabbed his notebook and jogged down the beach track.
People had said that Roger smelled like cat urine, that his hands were abnormally large and one of them was missing two fingers, that when he looked at you he didn’t blink and it made you feel like he could read your thoughts. Hall had not believed any of it, had attributed it to the witch hunt he was witnessing. The first time he knocked on Roger’s door he had not detected the smell on his body, combined as it must have been with the cat-reeking veranda. Now, crouched next to Roger on the rocks, he had to shuffle back as the sour odor sickened him.
Hall didn’t describe the profile piece he wanted to write on Roger. Instead he talked about the history of the area and how Roger must know a lot about it, having lived here all his life. Roger stared unblinking at Hall, his hands tying a knot in his fishing line. When the knot was tied, he propped the rod on the rock.
“Yep, lived here all my life. Probably die here, too. My old man said his last prayers a few miles up that way.” Roger nodd
ed back toward the gray beach and whitecapped surf. With two fingers shaped like a gun, he tapped his head. “Tock. Gulls and sea eagles had eaten most of him by the time we found him.”
“Is that right?”
“Mum said that was what he always wanted.”
Hall made a perfunctory sound.
“To get eaten by birds—that wasn’t what he wanted.” Roger’s chuckle turned into a hoarse cough. “No, he didn’t want to live for a long time.”
Hall had heard the rumor about Roger Coker’s father from more than one person. Apparently he had taken his own life on the bluff when Roger was a boy of ten or eleven. Hearing it from Roger was humbling.
“Sarah said your father was a carpenter?” Hall said.
“Yes. But he never got his papers. That was his problem. He was hopeless, my mum said. He couldn’t finish things. He built a boat once. Just a small dinghy. It leaked. It’s in the bottom of the lagoon somewhere.”
Hall laughed with Roger. This could make a really lovely, insightful story. A story that changed people’s perceptions. Somehow, Roger had decided to trust him. Hall tapped his notebook.
“Maybe you could talk to me about fishing in the area?”
Roger stood up. He was taller than Hall. As if to fend off Hall, he held both hands up. The palms were flat and wide, his fingers flared.
“You shouldn’t talk to strangers,” Roger said. “Off I go.”
As Roger lumbered away across the rocks, Hall could not stop himself thinking about the size of his hands. Roger might not be a muscular man, but even with several fingers missing, those hands looked capable of snuffing the life out of a person.
Once they were clear of the wharf, Don wound the throttle up. Hall had no idea how fast they were going in boating terms but it felt like a hundred kilometers an hour: the speedboat was skimming the water. Wind rushing on his face, hand steadied on the bow, Hall momentarily reconsidered putting his hand up the next time the chief subeditor job was offered. It paid at least ninety thousand a year, which was a thirty percent increase on what he was currently earning. With that kind of money, he could afford to purchase a small but sexy speedboat.
