Floodtide

by Judy Nunn

  'And in doing so, they're discrediting the ABC. I'm sorry, Sal, but you'll have to make a personal on-air apology. The general manager's already insisted on it, and I'm afraid I have to agree. Regardless of the circumstances, we've no other option.'

  She tried to protest, but Patrick, although genuinely sympathetic, remained insistent.

  'We can't just announce there was a mix-up with the footage. Be reasonable, Sal, we'd look like absolute fuck-wits. The only way out is for the journalist to take full responsibility. And that journalist is you.'

  That night Sally felt sick as she faced the camera.

  'In my story last night on the threat to our historical buildings, I'm afraid some of the facts were not as they should have been.' The words stuck in her craw. 'As viewers may have noticed, I referred to one or two buildings incorrectly, and much of the architecture shown in the footage has proved not to be heritage listed. I take full responsibility for these errors, and I sincerely apologise for the flaws in my research.'

  Sally Jordan's credibility had been totally undermined.

  She sweated it out through the weekend, fielding the odd phone call but keeping her mouth shut. Then on Monday, determined to get to the bottom of the matter, she paid a visit to Greg, the film editor whose studio was in the bowels of the building.

  Yes, Greg said, he had made some changes. There'd been a number of stock shots Ryan had wanted added to the original footage. He'd thought nothing of it at the time, he said – assistant producers often liked to put their personal thumbprint on a story. Greg personally found the practice a bit cheeky. Shit, he said, most of the time the APs didn't even go out on location. How could they know the full story?

  'I heard there was a bit of a kerfuffle. Did Ryan bugger it up?' he asked mildly.

  'Yes,' Sally retorted, 'and he may well have successfully buggered up my career.'

  She stormed off to confront Ryan, but he was nowhere to be found. She'd forgotten that she'd already sent him out to do some field research on her latest story. So she reported her findings to Patrick, who immediately informed the general manager.

  The next day, Ryan was called upon to explain his actions in Sally's presence. He'd found the segment short on time, he told the general manager, so he'd added some stock shots. He was very sorry if he'd got it wrong, but he presumed Sally had seen the final edit and given it the go-ahead.

  'You bloody well knew that I hadn't, you little bastard,' she said. Beneath her fury, she was mystified. What the hell was he playing at? Why was he out to discredit her? Was he after her job?

  No action was taken against young Ryan Bromley, which Sally considered strange. In the past, she'd always found the ABC protective of their staff and quick to right an injustice. But the general manager deemed it unnecessary to take action. Ryan had made a mistake, it was agreed, he should have conferred with his senior producer, but he'd learned a lesson, it wouldn't happen again. To keep the peace, however, it was decided he be assigned to another producer.

  A month later, Ryan Bromley resigned. He left the ABC to take up a position as press officer with the Premier's Department.

  Shortly afterwards, Sally found herself out of a job. She wasn't dismissed. Her contract was up and the ABC was not going to automatically renew it as they had done in the past. They were sorry to see her go, the general manager said, she'd been one of the best journalists they'd ever had.

  The delicately inferred reason she was given was the sad demographic reality that viewers these days preferred younger reporters. At least younger female reporters. Sally was powerless to contest the fact. She was, after all, looking forty in the face.

  But she knew the truth. She had no doubt she was paying the price for her exposé, and there was nothing she could do about it. The WA Flower Power story had dwindled to zero, the press hadn't followed up on the issue, it was yesterday's news. If she tried to go public and fight her dismissal, she'd simply be joining the whinge of all aging female reporters who found themselves replaced by fresh-faced twenty-something cabs off the rank.

  Sally Jordan realised that she'd collided with an iceberg, and that WA Flower Power was only the tip of it.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Jools returned to Perth that summer of 1985, her first trip in over six years. She was 'coming home for Christmas' she announced, which Mike found a bit strange. His sister and her writer husband had been settled in Ireland for years and he'd presumed she'd embraced Dublin as home.

  'It'll be just like the old days, Mike,' she bubbled enthusiastically over the phone. Henry wasn't coming with her, which was just as well, she said, things weren't crash hot between them at the moment.

  Well, he supposed that explained why Dublin wasn't home.

  Jools was thirty-nine years old, childless and her second marriage was crumbling. Going the way of the first, she said, but so what? She refused to give in. She was growing old disgracefully and proud of the fact.

  There was a touch of desperation about Jools these days. She drank too much and she smoked a lot, but some-how she still managed to be fun, albeit, Mike discovered, as infuriating as ever.

  'My God, what an atrocity,' she said as she stood with her brother in Victoria Avenue looking at the high-rise apartment block that sat where the family home had once been. 'Why on earth did Dad do it?'

  'He didn't exactly build the thing himself, Jools,' Mike said a little tersely. He found the implied accusation offensive.

  'You know what I mean. Why on earth did he sell?' Undeterred by the reprimand, Jools was still accusing.

  How like her, Mike thought. She was oblivious to the circumstances and yet totally opinionated. But he decided not to allow it to irritate him. Jools was just being Jools, and it was good to see her again.

  'He sold because the bloke next door did.' He patiently repeated exactly what he'd said over the phone years ago when she'd expressed her horror at their parents' plan to sell the old Claremont house. 'Dad couldn't bear the thought of living next door to a bloody great high rise, which is pretty understandable.'

  'Yes,' she said, vaguely recalling that he'd told her. She looked at the apartments with added distaste. 'So the developers ended up getting practically the whole block from the jetty to where the old baths used to be. How criminal.' Then, in typically mercurial fashion, she turned to him with a huge smile. 'But I'm glad Mum and Dad are happy where they are.'

  'Come on,' he said, 'time to go. Jo and Allie'll be waiting.'

  Mike had picked his sister up from the airport on his own. It had been Jo's idea. The siblings hadn't seen each other for over six years and she'd thought they might like some time together.

  'No, no, wait, Mike, wait.' Jools looked at him beseechingly. 'Just a walk to the end of the jetty? Please?'

  He gave in with good humour, and together they walked to the end of the old Claremont jetty.

  Jools took off her sandals, feeling the sun-warmed, weathered planks beneath her bare feet, not bothered by the threat of splinters or the splatter of bird mess. She looked out across the bay to Point Walter where she used to sail her little boat, and she peered down at the jetty's pylons where she and Mike had gathered the mussels they'd cooked up in the old laundry tub.

  'Let's go for a swim,' she said. 'I can get my bathers from the car. They're in the very top of my suitcase, it'll only take a tick.' She had a desperate desire to throw bombies off the pylons.

  'I don't have mine with me.'

  'Then go in your underpants – you've done it before.'

  'Not now, Jools, Mum and Dad are expecting us.'

  They'd already be late, he thought, having stopped off at her insistence for this trip down memory lane. And after picking up Jo and Allie in Nedlands it was a further forty-minute drive to Shoalwater Bay. But Mike understood his sister's nostalgic longing. Indeed, he understood it the way no-one else could.

  'We'll come back, I promise,' he said. 'We'll come back before you leave, just you and me, and we'll chuck bombies off the jetty th
e way we used to.'

  'Goody,' she said, 'I'd like that,' and she threaded her arm companionably through his as they walked back to the car.

  Words couldn't express Jools's gratitude for the past they shared, she and Mike. Her memories of their childhood by the river had become more precious than ever over the last year or so. As they walked beneath the big Norfolk Island pine which stood at the bottom of Jetty Road, she looked up through its branches. She'd been living a lot in the past lately, she thought. And why shouldn't she? The present didn't seem to have much going for it.

  'God, we were lucky little bastards, weren't we,' she said. The understatement of the year, she thought. 'And we never knew it – we took it all for granted.'

  'Kids always do.'

  They exchanged a smile.

  Jools was surprised when they pulled up outside Mike's modest single-storey house in Nedlands with its neat little garden and river glimpses from the far corner of the front verandah.

  'Surely a world-famous scientist should have something more posh,' she said. As usual, she wasn't shy in voicing her opinion. 'Where's the luxury? Two storeys at least, panoramic river views, a huge launch on a mooring – I was expecting that sort of thing.'

  Mike laughed, she was incorrigible. 'We don't need all the trimmings, and there're plenty of launches and views at the Institute,' he said. 'You've never seen it, have you?'

  Jools shook her head, shamefaced. She'd been to Perth several times during the early years of the Institute, when they'd been working out of an old corrugated-iron shed at Woodman Point. Or so Mike had told her. 'It used to be a Water Board storage depot in the days when the main city sewage discharge was from a pipe out into Cockburn Sound,' he'd said, which hadn't particularly enthralled Jools. Besides, her trips had been fleeting ones, just for Christmas, so she hadn't considered herself obliged to pay a visit. She felt decidedly guilty now.

  'I sort of never got around to it,' she said apologetically.

  But Mike didn't seem at all bothered. 'There have been a few changes – you'll be impressed.'

  The front door opened and Jo appeared, Allie by her side.

  'Jools, how wonderful to see you.' The two women embraced fondly.

  'My God, but you're ageless,' Jools said, 'it's bloody disgusting. And just look at you, Allie.' She stood back admiringly, 'You're going to be a model, I can tell. Well, you probably are already. How old are you now? Seven-teen?'

  'Eighteen.'

  'Eighteen, and a knockout.' She gave her niece a fierce hug. 'I bet you don't remember me.'

  'Yes, I do.' Allie had met Jools only the once. She'd been nine years old and they'd come down from the Pilbara for a family Christmas at her grandparents' house. Her aunt had made a very vivid impression upon her, as had been Jools's intention at the time. 'You gave me a book, remember?'

  Jools looked a little blank.

  'By Patrick Dennis?' Allie added meaningfully.

  'That's right, of course I did.' Jools laughed, delighted. 'Auntie Mame, I thought it was apt.'

  'It was,' Allie said. And it still is, she thought. Jools was obviously bent on the madcap aunty image. But Allie reserved judgement; Jools seemed nice.

  'So are you a model? You ought to be.'

  'No, I'm a uni student.'

  'Allie's just topped her first year at UWA,' Mike boasted. He'd told Jools several times that Allie was at uni, but she obviously hadn't been listening, which was par for the course. 'She's going to be a marine biologist.'

  'Well, I got that one wrong, didn't I?' Jools gave a comical shrug. Personally she thought the girl was mad. Why on earth wasn't she cashing in on her looks?

  They piled into the car, Jo insisting Jools take the front seat so that she could see better, and Mike drove them down the old coast road.

  Jools enjoyed the drive south, it brought back childhood memories of picnics and crabbing at Mandurah. Even the stench from the abattoirs and skin-drying sheds as they passed Robbs Jetty evoked happy, anticipatory times.

  Roughly ten kilometres south of Fremantle, Mike pointed out the turn-off to the Institute.

  'We're just down there,' he said, 'on the south side of Woodman Point. The location's ideal. Ours is the most northerly of the industrial leases so we have access to deep clean water for intake into the laboratories and aquaria. I'll collect you from Mum and Dad's tomorrow and give you the personal guided tour, if you like.'

  'Great.'

  They passed the country town of Rockingham, roughly thirty-five kilometres south of Fremantle, and as they turned off the main link road, the territory became new to Jools. During all her childhood trips south, she couldn't remember her parents ever having taken the short detour to Shoalwater Bay. And now they lived there. Extraordinary, she thought. She somehow couldn't picture them anywhere but the old house in Claremont. Then they turned the corner into Arcadia Drive.

  Arcadia Drive, Shoalwater Bay, was as picturesque as it sounded. The road followed the broad sweep of the bay, which was spectacular: the sand a startling white, two tiny islands sitting in the vivid aquamarine of the Indian Ocean barely half a kilometre offshore.

  'Oh, how beautiful,' Jools breathed. 'No wonder they're happy here.'

  Mike nodded. 'They hardly go into town at all these days. And when they do, Mum says turning that corner to home is her sanity.'

  'Do those little islands have names?'

  'They sure do.' It was Allie who replied from the back seat, with a chortle that Jools found attractive. 'And whoever came up with them had a vivid imagination.' She pointed out the open window. 'That one's Seal Island, and most summers there's a small colony sprawled on the beach. And that one's a nesting sanctuary for gulls and terns so it's called Bird Island. And the bigger one, right down the end, just off the point, that's Penguin Island, but they got it a bit wrong. They should have been more specific and called it Fairy Penguin Island, because guess what nests there?' She gave another chortle. 'You should go and have a look at it while you're here, Jools, it's so pretty. You can actually walk out across the sandbar on a really low tide.' Allie had been coming to Shoalwater Bay for summer holidays every year since she was twelve. She loved the place.

  The house was a comfortable low-slung bungalow facing onto Arcadia Drive and the sandhills that led to the beach beyond. As soon as Mike pulled into the driveway, Maggie and Jim appeared. He'd rung to say they'd be an hour late so that his parents wouldn't worry, but they'd been keeping an impatiently eagle eye out nonetheless.

  The reunion was as dramatic as Mike had anticipated, certainly from Jools anyway. She wept unashamedly as she hugged her mother and then her father, and then she hugged them both all over again. Maggie laughed with sheer delight, and Mike noticed that his father had the glint of an uncharacteristic tear in his eye, which he hastily blinked away hoping no-one had noticed. But then his father was becoming fragile lately.

  Jim McAllister put his failing fitness down to old sports injuries. 'The price you pay as you get older, Mike,' he said, trying to shrug it off. He'd been forced to sell Alana years ago. Sailing was not the sport for a man with a chronic lower back problem, he'd admitted, and he'd replaced the yacht with a small cabin cruiser. 'Who'd ever have thought I'd end up with a stink boat,' he'd joked to his son. But recently the launch too had had to go – he'd become annoyingly prone to sea sickness, which he blamed on his stomach ulcer. Jim's principal pleasure these days was gained from his garden, where vegetables and vines and fruit trees thrived, just as they had at the old house.

  Mike had at first wondered whether retirement perhaps didn't suit a man like Jim McAllister – the rapid aging process had seemed to coincide with his parents' move to Shoalwater Bay. But of late he'd decided, sadly, that he was wrong. His father was simply growing old.