by Poppy Gee
Beside her, Hall shaded his eyes and searched for yachts on the horizon. She was used to him now and his lengthy pauses. No longer did his silences induce her to chatter pointlessly. He didn’t know everything about her, but he knew enough. He didn’t call her by her surname or swear around her, and she appreciated that.
“So I came across something interesting,” Hall was saying. “Don Gunn has connections to the One Nation party.”
Hall described a political rally where he had seen Don deliver a speech, years ago. Apparently Don had been unperturbed when confronted with his own homophobia.
“Don Gunn is sixty. Who isn’t quietly homophobic from that generation in Tassie?” Sarah shrugged. “In Queensland no one admits to being racist, either, but if there is an Aboriginal person sleeping at a bus stop, no one will even nudge him with their boot to see if he is dead or alive.”
Hall nodded. “Don was quite nasty about Roger Coker.”
“One minute Pamela reckons Roger’s got an overweight girlfriend staying at his place, next minute he’s gay.” Sarah rolled her eyes. “As far as I know, Roger’s not gay. Don’t mind Don. He’s a harmless old bugger, really. By the way, Dad and Don didn’t realize the council was thinking of designating a nudist beach near here. I’m worried they’re planning to visit for a swim.”
“That should give my angry residents over there cause for complaint. Will they pose for a photo?”
“They might not be allowed to go. Pamela doesn’t believe in nudist beaches.”
“I think I heard her say something about that.”
“Yeah. She got quite cross, actually. They were only joking about it. She told Don to shut up.”
“That man needs to learn to do what he’s told.”
While they were laughing, a large wave showered them with what looked like liquid drops of sunlight.
“Nice one,” Sarah said, holding her palms upward to catch the droplets. “This is a million miles from my old life. I don’t want to go back up north.”
Immediately, Sarah wished she had not spoken. Hall wanted to talk about it. She rocked against her knees and didn’t answer him properly. She wouldn’t go back, but not for the reason he thought. His concern was so reassuring she could almost believe she was the wronged woman.
When she was with him she didn’t feel that gnawing emptiness, that wide landscape of thought where nothing she had done or said was worthwhile. Loneliness was an unpredictable creature. Fishing on an empty beach, clearing out a gutter from the top of a wobbly ladder, checking over water quality reports at three in the morning; none of that made Sarah lonely. It was the last beer before closing, no plans for a Sunday, or some crap song from 1985 that reminded her with painful hopelessness of a time when she had been a hopeful teenager. Hall knew loneliness. They hadn’t talked about it, but she could see it in his eyes. She suspected that, unlike her, he expected to feel that way forever.
Sarah let him talk for a while, then casually stood up and got ready to jump. Midair, she grabbed one knee, landing in the middle of the rock pool with a huge splash. Hall followed, arms flailing as though he was trying to slow himself down. When he surfaced, he climbed out. Drying his face and neck, he looked up the hill with a concerned expression.
“There!” Hall dropped the towel and ran up the granite boulders. “I’ve seen you!” he shouted.
Sarah hauled herself out so quickly she tore her knee on the mussels growing on the edge. She knew who Hall was chasing. She had seen Sam’s long afternoon shadow undulating from out of the cave when they arrived. He disappeared into the casuarinas before Hall was halfway up the rock face.
“Give it up!” she yelled to Hall. “You’ve lost him.”
“Why would he run?” Hall said as he came back.
“Sam is always spying on people.”
“Is that right? Don Gunn caught him peeping at Anja. Pamela told me.”
“He used to spy on me and Erica when he was a kid. Try to eavesdrop on our conversations. Erica used to flash her boobs at him, and he was so disgusted it made him run away; then he got older and that made him stay, so she stopped.”
“I feel sorry for him. He keeps thinking of excuses to come and talk to me. He’s lonely.”
For the first time since Christmas Day, Sarah’s indifference to Sam shifted slightly. She had barely spoken to him since the incident. Maybe she would agree to take him fishing next time he asked.
A yacht on the horizon, a white flag on the great slab of blue, distracted her. Hall saw it too and ran down to the edge of the rock.
“There’s a returning yacht!” Hall waved even though the boat was ten kilometers out to sea. “Ahoy!”
All week they had watched the racing yachts sliding down the coast toward Hobart. By the time the yachts reached the Bay of Fires, the most treacherous part of the journey across Bass Strait was behind them. They were only a day’s sailing away from the dockside festivities. A couple of days ago the yacht that would come last had passed. Sarah had felt sorry for it, but Hall had told her not to.
“Don’t feel sorry for it! The last boat in gets the biggest cheer. Everyone loves a loser.”
Watching the swirling water, Sarah had a revelation. She needed to demonstrate it to Hall. Without warning, she ran down the rocks and dived across the kelp into open ocean. Cold wide water swallowed her. It was dark down there. When she emerged she floated on her back in the gutter by the rocks. Gradually, with each wave’s returning wash, she floated seaward.
“Good-bye, Hall.”
“Come back. I don’t like it!” Hall shouted. “Your knee is bleeding, remember?”
“Do you see?”
She knew he didn’t. Sarah closed her eyes and concentrated on the current. She was floating in a gutter in which the current ran from the rock pool straight out to sea. The current did not run straight around to the beach, as some people, such as Pamela, had assumed. With strong confident strokes, Sarah swam back toward the rock.
“Can you pull me up?”
She propelled herself over the kelp toward Hall’s hand. He grunted with the exertion of dragging her up.
“What are you saying?” he asked.
“As I demonstrated, a dead person, tossed in, would float straight out to sea. Never to be seen again. Shark food out there. But Anja landed on the beach, which means she must have been alive when she fell in.”
“Or alive when she was pushed in.”
“Sure. So, either she tried to climb out of the ocean and onto the rocks where you are standing. This would be hard to do alone. Or she would have swum around the rocks, toward the beach.”
Hall nodded. “Continue.”
“The weather was rotten when Anja disappeared. Big surf. I would struggle to swim from here to the beach without being smashed on the rocks, or strangled in the kelp. If she’s swimming to the beach, she’s swimming against the current, because the current wants to drag her out to sea.”
“I don’t think Anja Traugott was an Iron Woman.”
“No. The only way she could have ended up on the beach was if she was tossed dead, or alive, off a boat out at sea, or if she tried to swim around the rocks, drowned in the process, and drifted down to the beach. It’s unlikely she would have ended up on that beach if she got caught in this current.”
“We don’t know the precise spot where she entered the water.”
“No. But I’ve dived around here. All along here sucks straight out to sea. There is no natural drift to the beach until you get into that sheltered section past the bottlebrush up there.”
“What about the boat theory?”
“Don and Bunghole. That’s your department. Ask them. Why would they do it, though?”
“We’ll know more when the autopsy results come through.” Hall studied the dark churning water. “I would not want to fall in there. So let me clarify what you have just said. Anja is alive when she lands in the water here. She tries to swim to the beach; she manages to swim clear of the gutter, which w
ould drag her out to sea, but drowns and washes up on the beach days later?”
“You better give me an editorial credit.”
“A long shot.”
He obviously didn’t think it was such a long shot. He was quiet as they walked back along the beach, and when they said good-bye at the bottom of the Averys’ track, he asked her to explain the current movements once again.
It was pointless to compare people. Sarah had always hated being compared to anyone. But Hall introduced things to her that, in her experiences with other men, she had not had the chance to know she appreciated. A challenging conversation was one. Although they both voted for the Greens, the environmental party, their ideas often caused them to disagree. They had spoken at length about the practice of including hormones and antibiotics in the feed on ocean farms. Sarah believed in moderation—there was a science to it, after all—but Hall was adamant it would have long-term effects on wild fish and sea life populations. She never could discuss anything in depth with Jake. If she mentioned the prime minister or a foreign president he would just say, oh, that dickhead, and there would be nothing left to talk about.
Today, watching Hall watching the boat, his hands on his hips and his board shorts clinging to his thin thighs, Sarah had felt affection. His wholesomeness was another one of the things she liked. It was peculiar how the polar opposite of what attracted you to one man could be the precise thing that would attract you to another.
Deception, the thrill of an illicit relationship, had fueled her attraction for Jake. Hiding it from the others at work had been part of the fun. In hindsight, people weren’t as stupid as the two of them had thought. When she had told Hall about it, the events turned into a self-deprecating story in which she was a lecherous boss and Jake an emotional moron.
“Don’t screw the crew is the moral to the story,” Sarah had said.
Hall had laughed and she cut him off. “Look, I don’t want to slag him off. Women who slag off their exes often have more problems than the ex.”
Besides, it was boring to listen to. As her thoughts shifted back to Hall she grinned. For the first time since she left Eumundi, her thoughts about Jake had not been accompanied by a gut ache and cold sweats.
The next morning they jogged up the old tip road, past the first burned bridge, through the scrub and down toward the lagoon. It had been raining for most of the morning, and mudded water dredged the steep hillside. Sand and leaves washed between the paperbarks and clumped in a sticky mess around the base of bleached gum trees. As the ground flattened, they jogged side by side, occasionally bumping against each other. Sarah was still stiff from yesterday’s beach run and it felt good to stretch her legs. Hall ran unevenly beside her; she could tell he didn’t run often.
“He won’t talk to me.” Hall spoke in rough puffs. “He will if you’re there.”
It was the third time he had asked her to take him to Roger’s place. She didn’t want to escort Hall there, not in his capacity as a journalist. It didn’t feel right.
They paused at the bottom of the gulley. Dappled green light from the eucalyptus canopy cast patterns on the sand. Potable water flowed over the last river rocks before filling the lagoon. Hall scooped his cap through the water and poured it over his head. Beads were trapped in his stubble. He hadn’t shaved since yesterday and it suited him, made him appear exotic rather than a middle-aged greenie.
“No stupid questions?”
Hall grinned. “Deal.”
They resumed jogging. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to help him; it was more that she rightfully suspected that Hall was capable of a gung-ho approach to his stories, with people such as Roger being treated as collateral damage. She lengthened her stride and maintained a five-centimeter lead over Hall. It was a psychological racing tactic designed to dishearten and exhaust the second runner.
It didn’t take long until Hall’s breathing became alarmingly rough. Sarah, with satisfaction, suggested they walk it out. They followed the curve of the lagoon beach east. The gray sand was stained with yellow frothy arches that looked like washing-up scum. They talked as they walked, about nothing in particular—the bird sounds they could hear, the fishing trip Sarah wanted to take to a frozen lake in Minnesota one day, and how Hall had learned that Simone Shelley had once been a competitive figure skater in the United States.
Sarah didn’t know that about Simone. In fact, she knew little about the American woman’s past except that Simone had two dead husbands and ran a successful business importing home furnishings.
“Sounds like you’re getting friendly with her,” Sarah said.
“Not too friendly, I hope. Although she did mention that she hadn’t been to the Pub in the Paddock for many years…I told her how nice our lunch was and I think she was hoping for an invitation.”
“Right,” Sarah said.
Why would Hall tell her that? Either he was taking Simone out for lunch or he wasn’t. It had nothing to do with Sarah. If he was hoping to get a reaction from her, he would be waiting for a long time. She continued walking, concentrating on the damp swampy smells around the lagoon.
They emerged from an inlet and the campsite became visible, snatches of color through the paperbark trees. It was an isolated spot to camp. The only access was by four-wheel drive along the swampy shore, and only then if the lagoon was not too full and there were no fallen trees blocking the beach. Not the most serene spot, either; midges and March flies bred in foul pockets of still water between the rocks, and there was no breeze to ease the intimate salty smell of low tide.
Roger had said the pink shells would be easy to find and he was right. There must have been close to one hundred of them. Sarah knelt beside the pile, swearing softly. She didn’t need a measuring device to see they were undersized. At least half of the shells couldn’t have been more than ten centimeters wide. Some were only seven; just babies. She glared in the direction of Bunghole’s camp. Damn thieving greedy vandals.
“Don’t go over there. There’s no point,” Hall said.
“If I don’t say something, who will?”
“We’ll call the ranger. That’s his job.”
Disgusted, she breathed in through her nose, out through her mouth, trying to control her temper.
Bunghole was stupid, too. It was illegal to shuck or shell abalone until you had brought it ashore and above the high-water line. This was so the shells could be measured. Any half-brained criminal would have shucked the undersized creatures in his boat and tossed the telltale shells over the side.
Roger crouched beside the cooking pit at the back of the house. There was no ocean view from here; bushy vines grew high above his fence. His smile slipped sideways when he saw Hall.
“What’s cooking?” Hall said.
“Hall wants to do a story on you, Roger,” Sarah said. “He thought you might agree if I asked you.”
Roger didn’t answer. Using tongs, he slid a foil-wrapped package off the coals and across the wet grass.
“Snotty trevally,” Roger said.
“Funny name for a fish,” Hall said.
Sarah said, “They’re slimy. It’s supposed to protect them from being stung by the jellyfish they eat. There’s no scientific evidence to back that up.”
Roger peeled back a layer of foil, and steam hissed out into the rain. He fed himself a chunk of white flesh, nodding with satisfaction.
“Now that looks like a big one,” Hall said. “Would have taken some muscle to bring that in.”
Roger folded the foil back around the fish.
“Where did you catch him, mate?” Hall didn’t wait for Roger to answer. “What kind of rod did you use?”
Sarah felt irritable—either from finding all those abalone or from Hall’s comments about Simone—and Hall’s blokey act now annoyed her. There was no need for Hall to pretend that Roger was a mate. Roger wasn’t stupid. He knew what people thought of him. Several hot coals had fallen out of the fire and were simmering on the ring of sand around the p
it. Roger nudged them in with his boot.
Hall was mumbling numbers, working out the size of the plot of land.
“How much land you got here, Roger? Is it an eighty-square-foot block? What would that be worth? Five hundred? Five fifty?”
“Dunno.”
Sarah tried to remember why Hall was there.
“Hall wants to write a story on you. You don’t have to.”
“Three quarters of a million, easy.”
“Pipe down, Flynn.” Sarah was only partly joking.
No one spoke. The ocean fizzed onto the empty beach, and there was the muffled clatter of a car crossing the lagoon bridge.
“A storm’s coming.” Hall nodded as though someone had asked him for a weather update.
“Take some fish,” Roger said before he disappeared around the side of the house.
“I guess that’s a no,” Sarah said.
In the car, the fish sat between them on the bench seat. Its hot sweetness overpowered the Holden’s dusty smell. Hall hummed as he bunched up an old handkerchief and wiped the condensation off the windscreen. Sarah’s window was stuck open, and rain blew in as they drove past the empty turnip paddocks. Shapeless white water heaved in the bay below.
They ate the fillet in the guesthouse kitchen, straight out of the foil, without speaking.
Bursts of rain and sunshine fell in patches over the coastline, creating several small rainbows. As Sarah walked to the shop from the guesthouse, watching the colors appear and disappear, she heard someone call her name. It was Sam, hurrying through the sun shower to reach her.
“Wait!” he called.
“How are things?” Sarah said as he fell into step beside her.
“All right. It’s a bit boring always going surfing by yourself.”
“I don’t mind fishing by myself,” Sarah said.
