by Susan Duncan
Inside the café, a couple of kayakers with damp backsides and dry T-shirts are ordering large flat white coffees. They both look buggered. Sam nods hello. Wonders if they’re in training for the Cook’s Basin to Port Ready marathon but can’t be bothered finding out. Ettie passes them two cardboard containers. Kate takes their money. They leave wet footprints like spoor all over the floor.
‘So how’s the campaign going?’ Kate asks, using tongs to place a muffin in a white paper bag. ‘Any fur flying yet?’ She passes it across the counter.
‘A little. Here and there.’
Ettie hands him his coffee. ‘How little and where?’ she asks, but six more kayakers roll through the door.
Sam takes Kate aside: ‘How about I put together a luscious picnic, tonight? We could head off somewhere quiet . . .’
‘OK,’ she says. ‘But give the sauso rolls a rest, eh?’
Sam reels. Ettie gives him a wink and points at her chest. She’ll sort it. He grins. Ettie, as he has always said, is the answer to every man’s dreams.
*
By eight am, he’s tied up at Cargo Wharf and he and Jimmy are loading the Mary Kay with enough heavy chain to service four moorings. The day passes in a blur of dirty work. Chipping cunjies off ropes, lifting marine-life encrusted cement blocks from the seabed. The sun beats down. The kid slaps a hat on his gelled head for the first time Sam can recall. The mutt takes shelter in the wheelhouse, where he flops on his side, panting, his dribbling pink tongue hanging loosely. The kid tips a bucket of salt water on him. The dog raises his head but doesn’t stir. Together, Sam and Jimmy hose the muck, swab the deck. The hard physical yakka has the magical effect of making Sam feel cleaner of body and spirit despite the sweat, grit and grease. The kid never complains or shirks.
At the end of the day, they strip naked and jump overboard. The water feels like a cool cloth on their hot bodies. ‘Kings never lived this good,’ Sam shouts, his spirits high. Jimmy rolls his eyes. Duck dives. For a millisecond his skinny white backside points skywards. The Misses Skettle with their World War II binoculars will be laughing out loud.
At home with an hour to spare before he’s due to meet Kate, he grabs a bar of pungent Solvol soap and scours every centimetre of his feet, legs, arms and hands until he reckons he’s arguably the most polished bloke in the Southern Hemisphere. When you’re on a roll, you’re on a roll. Five minutes later, it starts to rain. The best-laid plans . . .
*
The remains of their dinner, a Briny take-away special of lamb rogan josh with condiments supplied out of Kate’s fridge (raita, mango chutney, peanuts and tomato and onion sprinkled with paprika and doused in white vinegar that she says is the first feast Ettie ever taught her to prepare), litter the table top. He dabs his mouth with – surprisingly – a paper napkin. Checks his knife and fork are placed at attention on his plate. As far as he can tell, he’s been textbook perfect all evening.
‘Great dinner,’ he says.
Kate smiles, gets up and disappears into her bedroom. Thinking he’s meant to follow, he pushes back his chair. Before he can stand, though, she’s back. In her hands she holds the grey tin box from her bedside table like it might explode.
‘What’s that?’ he asks, getting a sense that the evening isn’t going to unfold in quite the way that he’d hoped.
‘Found it at Emily’s unit when I cleaned the place after the reading of her will. No key though. Wondered if you would open it for me?’
Sam thinks: So that’s where she disappeared to. She hands him the box, finds a screwdriver in a drawer. He pops the lock in about a second.
‘Thanks,’ she says, coolly.
‘Aren’t you going to look inside?’ He’s puzzled. Her responses are off-kilter. He wonders where this is leading.
Kate hesitates. Picks up their plates, stacks them in the sink and then goes to the fridge to get him a fresh beer. She pours a trickle of wine into her own glass. Stares into it. ‘If it contains what I think it does, I may be gone from Cook’s Basin for a while,’ she says.
Sam goes still. ‘What are you talking about?’ he asks softly.
‘My brother. The key to him has to be in this box.’
‘Let me get this straight,’ he says. ‘You haven’t got the faintest idea what’s inside the box. That right?’
She nods. Her face is pinched. Her eyes cast down and fixed on hands that are balled into fists inside the pockets of her blue jeans. Sam can hear the warm tide slurping against the shore. ‘So if it’s not a rude question, why haven’t you checked it out before?’
‘I was afraid,’ she whispers.
He chews the inside of his cheek, wondering what strange impulse draws him towards crusades that might rip him to shreds and leave him scarred forever. It’s his own bloody history, of course. No one ever gave up on him. His own childhood was idyllic while it lasted. No money, no fancy toys, but there was never a shortage of love. All of it was wiped out in less than a minute, though, when a truck flattened out the new canary-yellow car his parents had saved like maniacs to buy. His mother’s last words to him: ‘Imagine, I can bulk buy flour and rice because I don’t have to carry everything home on the bus. What luxury.’
All he wanted to do was join them wherever you go when your life is snuffed out. The Misses Skettle and Ettie, they saved him. Never let him out of their sight till he came good and realised blame was a pointless exercise. If he thought about it, the whole community had quietly kept tabs. Not in a heavy-handed, eat-your-vegetables way. But gently, as though they realised there was a war going on in his head, a war between grief and a boy’s natural instinct to survive. He’d drag himself home from school and find a casserole on the table, a note inviting him over to a barbecue, a message to call, if he had time, to help a neighbour chop his wood. And in those three small gestures, every base was covered: sustenance, human contact and a cash job to help pay the bills.
‘You want me to look inside for you?’ he asks gently; because he had a dream run, considering, and as far as he can tell, Kate’s battled on her own for most of her life. So she’s not just smart, she’s brave, too.
Kate nods.
‘What if there’s nothing? What if there’s everything?’
‘I need to know, Sam. Right now, it’s like a sore I keep scratching.’
‘He might be a psychopath – or live on the other side of the world. What then?’
‘I’ll find him. Wherever he is and whatever it takes, I’ll find him.’
‘I can’t help thinking that if this brother of yours has waited this long to be found, hanging around for a few months, a year, until the café is secure and the park is safe won’t make any difference.’ Where he comes from – and where he’d hoped she was slowly finding the kind of anchors and values she’d been searching for – you hang in even tighter when the shit hits the fan. ‘Jeez, Kate, you’ve got just as much riding on the success of the café as Ettie . . .’
‘I can’t sleep, Sam. In the café, every time I catch a hint of Emily’s smile, the colour of her eyes, the shape of her nose, in a stranger’s face, I have to turn away before I make a fool of myself by asking were you adopted? Is this the way it’s going to be for the rest of my life? Always wondering, never knowing?’
And it occurs to him, his heart hurting with the knowledge, that her cool reserve is a public front and under it, Kate Jackson might be damaged more than most people and it’s quite possible that no matter how much love and care she allows him to pour into her, she may never repair.
He lifts the lid of the grey box. It takes two seconds for her to conquer fear. She falls on the box hungrily, scrummaging amongst what looks to him like a load of old scrap paper. Bibs and bobs. Flotsam and jetsam. Rubbish without meaning to anyone except the person who placed it there. Eventually, she extracts an envelope from the bottom, holds it high in triumph. ‘This is it. I’m sure it
is.’ She hurries to break the seal. Her fingers are clumsy with haste. Impatient, she rips the paper at one end and peers inside. Looks back at Sam, her eyes wide, frowning, puzzled. ‘Ash,’ she says. ‘There’s nothing here except a pile of ash. It’s all a hoax. A shockingly malicious prank devised by my mad mother. And I fell for it.’ Her face crumples. She screws the envelope into a tight ball and throws it against a wall, keeping her back to Sam so he can’t read her face. He has no idea what to do. Hold her? Leave her alone? Come up with a few soothing but inadequate words? Stay silent?
In the end, he slides the box towards him and takes out each item one at a time, laying them in a straight line. A few blank postcards. From London, mostly. Big Ben, Buckingham Palace. The Tower. A blue foil chocolate wrapper. A folded silver wing from a costume, perhaps. He holds up a parchment-thick card with a coat of arms stamped on the front. ‘Looks like a menu,’ he says. ‘It’s from Parliament House in Canberra. Dated 26 March 1962. And here. Another menu. From the Oriana, this time. A cruise ship, wasn’t she? Dated a year earlier. Any of this make any sense to you?’ he asks, looking at the jigsaw.
‘Yeah,’ Kate says, sculling her wine. ‘My mother was a first-class bitch.’ She stands up abruptly. ‘Let’s go to bed.’ Spat out like an order.
He tells himself he should leave; he tells himself turning into anyone’s punching bag does a disservice to both parties. He tells himself it would be an act of sensible self-preservation to say something polite and close the front door quietly behind him. He tells himself that if he follows her, he will be drawn deeply into the insanity of Kate and her mother’s relationship because his gut feeling – and all men who make a living on the fickle sea know to trust those niggling sensations that are based on nothing but animal instinct – is that this is not the end but the beginning of an odyssey that could well end in tragedy.
‘Want me to fill your glass?’ he asks.
Chapter Fourteen
Sam wakes in the morning to a house that is still and silent. One side of the bed is empty. The place where she lay already cool. He checks the time. Barely six. So she’s done a runner to avoid any awkward morning-after socialising. He closes his eyes, remembering. He’d whispered soothing words. Held her fine-boned hands tightly in his great paws. Cupped her pale pixie face and tried to make her see the love in his eyes. In the end, all he could do was to let her talk – spew – until the rage abated and her head cleared enough for the two of them to start sifting through the facts.
If they hadn’t been born out of heartbreak, Sam would have relished the halting, tentative revelations. Like someone lifting off dustsheets in a house long locked up, and slowly remembering what had always been there. Which, as it turned out, wasn’t much. She knew almost nothing about her mother’s life as a young woman. She never met her mother’s parents, her grandparents, never heard them discussed. She had no idea where her mother was born, raised or went to school. ‘All I know is that I was an unplanned, unwanted late-life baby and my arrival ruined Emily’s life.’ Over and over, like a bad loop on a CD, Kate came back to that one single fact. ‘Well,’ he said to her, ‘you either let the past dictate the terms or you write your own script.’ His words went unheard.
He swings his legs to the floor. Naked, he walks down the hallway to the kitchen. Fills the kettle. While he waits for the water to boil, he studies the enigmatic flotsam from Emily’s shabby grey box. The answer is here, he thinks, using a finger to push around one or two pieces. He bends to the task, concentrating hard. Maybe there’s a timeline. If he hits on the right order, all will magically be revealed. The kettle clicks off. He sighs with frustration. A heap of mementoes dating back in history. Nonsense to anyone but the owner of them.
He brews a cuppa and carries it into the bathroom, swears when he burns his mouth on the tea. He steps under hot water, turning his back to the spray. Feels a sharp, stinging pain. Yelps. He emerges, wet, to stand in front of the steamy mirror and twists his torso. Red welts crisscross his skin. For a second he feels oddly cheered.
He showers until his skin is lobster red and the pain fades away. Dressed in yesterday’s clothes and smarting inwardly from a picture of Sam Scully, a mild-mannered bargeman, trying to pass as a wild crusader in the fight for both Garrawi and Kate, he pulls the bed into order. ‘There’s no point in being faint-hearted, son; you never know what you’re capable of until you put yourself to the test.’ The gospel according to his father. Shit, he thinks, slapping his forehead. He closes the door behind him, races down to the pontoon, three steps at a time. He’s just remembered an urgent appointment.
Frankie emerges from his boatshed and gives a hoy.
‘Not right now, mate. On a mission.’ He’s due to meet a man called Delaney.
Sam picks Delaney out of the Sunday queue for coffee. A massive man, well past the middle of six feet, with a ruddy complexion that comes from either too much sun or too much booze for too many years, his build runs more towards fat than muscle. His tightly curled fair hair is peppered as grey as his neatly trimmed beard. He wears a baby-pink cotton shirt and drawstring cream linen trousers. A smaller man would have looked foppish. Closer, Sam sees that even if the newspaperman’s body is running to seed, his eyes, almost reptilian as he scrutinises the café, the clients, Ettie, miss nothing. Sam can almost hear his brain ticking. Ettie points a finger in Sam’s direction. He strides over.
‘Scully?’
Sam registers the use of his surname. Journo talk.
‘Delaney?’
Sam holds out his huge mitt, which is grabbed by an even heftier one. The two men lock eyes, assessing each other.
(Later, Ettie tells the community it was like looking at a couple of bulls in a ring. ‘It felt as though they’d filled every inch of the café,’ she explained. ‘One wrong move or word, and I got the impression the offender would be shunted onto the back deck and hoisted over the railings. It took a couple of minutes before they each let go of the handshake, the stiffness went out of their shoulders, and their chins stopped pointing towards the ceiling. At that moment, I got started on a couple of mega brekkies because I could sense their backsides were going to be hanging over the edge of our café chairs for most of the day. Thank god it wasn’t raining, eh? We’d never have been able to find room for them inside.’)
Both men head for a table in the far corner of the deck. ‘They got waitresses here or do we order at the counter?’
‘You’ll have a plate the size of Africa in front of you within about five minutes,’ Sam says.
Delaney grins. Drags a small notepad out of his shirt top pocket. He digs deep in a pocket and finds a pencil. ‘Just so you know. If I eat, I pay. And if you think a free meal is a peanut kind of bribe I can assure you many people have been persuaded by far less. In fact, it is amazing how little it takes to buy a favour.’
Sam rocks on the legs of his chair. ‘Good to hear. Pointless offering you a freebie to our Garrawi fundraiser then. Got seventy-five bucks on you?’
The big man looks startled for a moment. Then he throws back his head and lets loose with a belly laugh loud enough to scare the fingerlings cavorting in the water below. He pulls a ragged leather wallet from his back pocket. Bits and pieces of paper with weird scribblings fall on the table. He fossicks for the cash and slams it under the saltshaker.
‘Of course if you’d like to bring someone, that’d be another seventy-five,’ Sam says, grinning.
‘A wise man knows it’s smart to quit while he’s ahead, Scully. Now, tell me about Garrawi and why you reckon it ought to be saved. And this better be good because even though I loathe the New Planet Fountain of Youth with a passion I can barely express, there’s no point in beating your heads against a brick wall just because a bunch of freedom-loving hippies don’t want to lose a prime picnic spot.’ He breaks off when Ettie swans up to the table bearing over-laden plates.
‘On the house,’ Ettie announ
ces, smiling like a lunatic.
‘A bill will be fine.’
Ettie’s face falls. She goes bright pink. Breaks out in a sweat. Begins to pant.
‘Easy on, Ettie,’ Sam says, worried she’s about to pass out. ‘Man’s got his principles, that’s all. A rare and wonderful thing if you think about it.’
Flustered, Ettie looks around, avoiding Delaney’s eyes: ‘Oh, yes, of course. Coffee? What kind?’
Back inside the café, Ettie rushes to the office chair and falls in a heap, unable to shake the feeling the world is about to end. She wants to laugh and cry at the same time; her body temperature is ratcheting up towards boiling point. She wonders, not for the first time, if she is going mad.
‘Lord, Ettie, you feel like you’re burning up. Are you ill?’ Kate asks, placing a comforting hand on Ettie’s shoulder.
‘Look! Over there! That bloody rat is still in residence. See the poo? God, we’ve set traps, Jimmy’s taking the garbage every night. I don’t know what else I can do.’
‘It’s just one tiny pellet of poo and, by the look of it, I think that rat’s not long for this world anyway. No need to get so worked up, Ettie.’
Ettie puts her face in her hands, eyes closed: ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with me,’ she says softly. ‘Maybe I’m terrified because life is just so bloody good I can’t help wondering when the axe is going to fall. Know what I mean?’
Kate squats in front of her partner, folds Ettie’s hands in hers. She forces her friend to look her in the eyes. ‘Your world’s gone pear-shaped before, right?’
