by Susan Duncan
Back at their table, Jimmy refuses to sit: ‘The skink, Sam, it’s gotta be thirsty. We gotta get Ettie to put out a saucer of water. Or maybe milk. I’ll ring me mum and see what she says about the milk. I think they like milk.’
‘We’ll work it out, mate. Trust me. And that skink’s been OK for weeks now so another day without a saucer of water or milk isn’t going to hurt . . .’
‘Ya sure? Ya sure he won’t cark it?’
‘Positive,’ Sam says firmly.
‘Ya didn’t cross ya fingers behind ya back, didja?’
Sam shakes his head: ‘No, mate, promise you.’
Five minutes later, Ettie is flat out on the sofa. She lies as still as possible, waiting for the sudden onrush of anxiety to dissipate. Kate dumps her paperwork and brings her a cold, damp flannel, which she places over her eyes.
‘I would’ve laughed off all that kerfuffle six months ago,’ Ettie murmurs. ‘Now, any little tilting of the normal daily axis feels like the earth is splitting open under my feet.’ She removes the cloth, stares into Kate’s eyes. ‘You don’t think I’m losing the plot, do you?’
Kate shakes her head, smiling. ‘No way.’
‘God, I’ve got a mongrel headache coming on,’ she moans. ‘Flashing slivers of light in my left eye. Need painkillers fast please or I’ll end up with a full-on migraine.’
‘Coming up,’ Kate says, heading for Ettie’s medicine cupboard. She fills a glass with water and carries it to her friend. ‘I’ll call Marcus and ask him to come and get you.’
Ettie shoots up, almost panicky, groans, drops down: ‘No. Please. Don’t say a word to him. I’ll be fine in half an hour, truly. Off you go. Jenny must be frantic by now.’
‘At some stage you’re going to have to admit you’ve hit menopause with a vengeance . . .’
Ettie raises her voice angrily: ‘I will not, I refuse point blank to have anything to do with that . . . that business. I have finally found a man I adore and who loves me. I am having the best sex of my life. I am happy, for god’s sake. I am also tired, stressed, and probably having a niggling and inconvenient bout of temporary hormone havoc caused by all of the above. Not to mention coping with a disappearing partner . . . Sorry, we’ve been through all that already.’
‘Fine. Whatever you say . . .’
‘Now go. Go!’ Ettie says, sounding exasperated, covering her eyes once more with the damp cloth and letting out a little whimper of pain. ‘Bloody migraines. Never had them in my life until a couple of months ago.’
‘I rest my case.’ Kate flees before Ettie has time to react.
At the bottom of the stairs, she runs smack bang into Sam ‘Hiya, Sam,’ she says, as if she’s never been away. ‘How’s it going, Jimmy?’ She reaches for two plates ready on the counter. Holds out the curry, her eyebrows raised in a question.
‘That’s Sam’s,’ Jimmy says. ‘Mine’s the other one.’
‘Nice to see you home safe and sound,’ Sam says, taking his plate. Besotted, yeah. But hurt, too. She could’ve called. ‘Let’s find a table on the deck, Jimmy. Tuck in, before our lunch gets cold. Catch you later, Kate. And like I said, great to have you back.’
Kate hesitates. ‘Sure.’ She turns on her heel.
Jimmy leans towards Sam, his voice a whisper: ‘You two havin’ a barney, Sam? Or what? Ya can tell me, ya know. I’m ya friend for life. Honest. And me lips are sealed. I don’t hold with gossip and neither does me mum.’
Sam smiles. ‘So a secret is safe from everyone except your mum, eh?’
‘Well, me mum says it doesn’t matter what I tell her, she’s on my side. So all bet’s are off with me mum, right?’
Sam considers explaining the morality, legality and philosophical implications of secrets then gives up the idea. Not many secrets last for more than a nanosecond in Cook’s Basin anyway. Spices – cumin, coriander, chilli, and probably a dozen more he can’t identify – spiral up from his curry to his nose. The rice is white and fluffy, with a thin slice of lemon buried loosely among the grains. Best of all, the appearance of Kate has distracted Jimmy from the question of the ute. He forks a prawn into his mouth. A symphony of flavours skirts the edges of his tongue. He catches Jimmy pushing his salad aside while he hoes into the lasagne. ‘How many times have I got to tell you, Jimmy? Eat your greens.’
‘Ya gunna tell me about the ute, Sam? Man to man, like ya said.’
Sam sighs. Puts his fork on the side of his plate. ‘Do you have a dream, Jimmy, a real dream that you had long before you wanted a ute or a tinny?’
‘O’ course,’ Jimmy says, his normally childlike expression morphing into his serious version of adulthood.
‘Can you tell me?’
‘Ya won’t laugh, will ya?’
Sam shakes his head.
‘I wanna get married and have me own kids, Sam. At least two. Me mum says one kid can end up cranky ’cause they get too spoiled. Spoiled kids are brats, ya know what I mean? She said you and I were the . . . er, expection to the rule, but mostly it was a dead-set certainty. Mind you, me mum was one of thirteen. She reckoned that wasn’t much chop, either.’
A germ of an idea begins to take hold in Sam’s head.
‘You need to save hard if you want to have a family. You up for that?’
‘Once I get me ute, Sam, I’m up for anything, aren’t I?’
Sam rolls his eyes, cursing his idiot impulse to mention the car. He pulls out his mobile phone and dials the chef. He needs help on this one. He walks away from the table to have a quick conversation that clues in Marcus, who has his own take on the subject, to the upside and downside of fame and makes arrangements for Jimmy and his mother to meet him on the chef’s deck at sunset.
Pleased he’s sorting through at least one problem, he sits back down and tucks into his curry with renewed gusto and an even deeper appreciation of Ettie’s unerringly exquisite talents in the kitchen. He’s not the kind of man who often contemplates the follies of happenstance but jeez, there was something wrong with the order of the universe when it saw fit to link Ettie and the chef. Two great cooks in one household was borderline criminal. Not that they weren’t a great couple and didn’t appreciate each other’s culinary skills to the maximum, but good cooks needed to be shared around the greater unskilled population who otherwise relied on meat – mostly lamb chops till the price sky-rocketed – and potatoes for sustenance. Not that he isn’t a devout aficionado of the humble lamb-y chop, which in his opinion runs a close second to sausage rolls, it’s just that variety, as anyone with half a brain is well aware, is the spice of life.
Realising he’s sending his thoughts off in haywire directions to switch his mind off Kate not even bothering to let him know she was home, he decides to focus on the upcoming black-tie fundraiser. Five minutes later, his head awash with dead ends (Does black tie mean tables, chairs, and matching cutlery for chrissake?), he gives up and orders Jimmy aboard the Mary Kay. He lumbers into the café to pay the bill. It’s a pointless exercise. The joint is jumping with tourists in search of food and drink and no one’s got a second to scratch themselves. He slaps enough notes on the counter to cover the damage and heads for the barge with his woolly head down. He’s ready to tackle the business of Jimmy’s magic windfall that if mishandled – despite everyone’s best intentions – could turn into a nightmare and ruin the life of a kid who was born with enough personal, er, glitches to challenge even the toughest hombres. Hombres? Where the hell had he found that word when bloke was a more than decent description for a . . . well, bloke?
Amidst the rush, in a tone she hopes is tinged with the right degree of nonchalance and self-deprecating humour to pass off as casual interest only, Kate says: ‘Sam seems to be so busy I don’t think he even noticed I was gone.’
Jenny, furiously working the grill and plating up six orders at a time, swings around, her face red with effort.
‘Oh, he noticed. He’s just finally realised that, at best, you’re a seriously dodgy bet. At worst, you’ll bleed him dry of every one of his generous instincts and then leave him wrung out forever.’
Kate grabs the plates, a flush of her own rising from the base of her neck. ‘Wouldn’t want you to hold back, Jenny.’
‘Not in my nature. Not when a good-hearted man whose natural impulse is to save souls lays his own wellbeing on the line for someone – and Kate, I’m not beating around the bush here, either – who may not be worth the effort. And for your information, I’m not talking about romance, love or even a full-on fling. Go figure the rest for yourself.’ Jenny turns back to the grill, tossing a tea towel over a shoulder, and diving on the hamburger buns. ‘Bugger,’ she says crossly. ‘Burned.’ She tosses them in the bin and starts again.
Kate bolts, like she’s been slapped hard in the face.
The Misses Skettle, who stood aside through the discussion, heads at an angle all the better to catch every word, step forward, smiling serenely. ‘Feel better now you’ve got it off your chest?’ one of them asks.
Jenny swings around, spatula raised, her eyes blazing. When she spies the two old ladies, resplendent as usual in shades of pink, she smiles wryly. Violet Skettle, the older of the twins, reaches across the counter and pats Jenny’s shoulder. ‘You’re under pressure, dear. Kids, saving Garrawi, the café.’
‘It’s just that Kate –’
‘We’re all built differently. Nothing wrong with that as far as I can see. Makes the world more interesting, doesn’t it, Myrtle? Be a terrible thing if we were all the same. And Sam can take care of himself. He learned long ago where rock bottom lies and he’s smart enough to quit long before he gets close to it.’
‘What can I get you?’ Jenny asks with a loud sigh, knowing when she’s defeated.
‘Nothing, dear. We just called in to give Ettie some sweet-potato cream to rub on the inside of her thighs. It might help to get her hormones back on track – at least until she admits she’s going through the change and not simply unravelling as the day progresses.’
They plonk a jar that looks like it’s been recycled many times since it first appeared filled with Pond’s cold cream, probably in the 1950s, and twitter off back into the Square.
Chapter Twenty-two
Sam dashes home to clean off the sweat and dirt of a hard day’s work before his meeting with the habitually immaculate chef on his spotless deck overlooking the large flotilla of holidaying yachties moored in the shelter of a tiny bay fringed with a golden crescent of beach. In the bathroom, he catches a quick glimpse of his face in the mirror. He pauses. He is unable to recall the last time he took a long, hard look at himself. Well, he thinks, that’s not quite true.
The last time he looked closely he was thirty instead of forty years old and pissed as a lizard. The image that bounced back then – bleary-eyed, slack-mouthed, red-faced and slightly off-balance – shocked him into sobriety. Long ago, he’d come to grips with the idea that he’d never give Tom Cruise a run for his money, but until that defining moment, he’d always thought he could handle the booze with gentlemanly valour, without the boring, self-absorbed sloppiness of most drunks. Since then, if a few of his old demons seemed to be gaining the upper hand and he felt like tying one on till they were beaten back into submission, he took to the water on the Mary Kay and got quietly shit-faced in private. Better than revealing the darker side of Sam Scully, known far and wide as a mostly cock-eyed optimist and generally decent bloke, to the impressionable Island kids.
Today, he might be in full control of his faculties but he’s shocked to see someone slightly feral gazing back. Hair turned into dreadlocks by the salt air. Face well weathered, as square as the rest of him. A two-day stubble flecked with grey. Grey? Jeez, when did that happen? He pulls a tape measure out of his back pocket. According to one of Fast Freddy’s latest dips into the shifting sands of modern health research, the average life span for a bloke is now eighty years. He stretches the tape along the rim of the bathtub and locks it at eighty centimetres. Places his callused thumb on the forty-centimetre mark. So, he thinks with a feeling that’s not unlike rising seasickness, if he’s average and barring accidents or some hideous life-threatening disease, he’s half done with making a footprint on this earth. Christ, what happened to the last ten years? Where did they go? What’s he got to show for them? He casts his mind back, sees the seasons scroll in a fast rewind through a mish-mash of fireshed dinners, community meetings where the problems are mostly the same and never change, picnics, a few (quite a few) casual summer romances and days plotted and planned around the rise and fall of the tides.
He turns away from the mirror, feeling slightly shattered. He is not the man he dreamed of becoming. A family man like his ferry-driving father, who slowed his hell-for-leather young son every so often, to point out the small details that truly enriched life. ‘See the tiddlers, son? Watch how they play in the shallows where they’re safe from sharks that gulp them down. See the octopus? Watch how she shields her babies from predators. We should all have eight arms, eh, and turn red to frighten enemies away? See the tawny frogmouth babies? They’re learning to fly. They’ll crash and bang for a while but they’ll never give up. Remember, life can be tough so it’s the way you handle problems that really counts.’
Sam presses a button and the tape measure winds back with a lethal speed before snapping shut. He opens the bathroom cupboard, turning the mirror towards the wall. He reaches for shaving cream and a razor and, from memory, slides the blade along his sun- and salt-blasted cheeks. He’s had enough of the sight of his freckly, messy, boofy phisog for one day.
Three hours later, scrubbed and feeling slightly less pessimistic about his future, he leaves the Mary Kay tied safely to his jetty and jumps in his tinny to make the trip across open blue water to Kingfish Bay. The engine starts with the first pull of the cord; he opens the throttle slightly and lets the salty tang of a brothy summer sea invade his senses. The sun is a sinking hot orange ball shooting fiery blades that bounce off the water. He closes his eyes against the glare. How, he wonders, do you explain to a boy who knows only how to live in the moment that planning for a secure future is far more important than a ute?
He scrummages through his past until he finds a memory of his father sitting at the kitchen table, his hand on a chipped old money box his mother had picked up at Vinnies. ‘You ever heard about saving for a rainy day, son? Well, here’s how you do it.’ And he put the box in front of Sam and handed him a one-dollar coin. ‘In the box, Sam, because the sun can’t be relied upon to always shine.’ Sam had held the coin in the palm of his hand, burning with a desire to race out and spend it on something. Anything. A few years later, he realised what he’d felt was the raw and heady power of money and he’d understood that if you let it take hold of you, it could twist your head away from what really mattered. That’s what the bastards planning a bridge and a resort on Cutter Island had lost sight of. What did Delaney say the New Planet Fountain of Youth was worth? Billions. And yet it still wasn’t enough. He could almost feel sorry for the boys with black holes where their eyes should be, for the paltry meanness of their narrow little lives.
Thinking of Delaney, he pulls out his mobile. His call goes to message bank. Christ, he mutters, journos have a bad habit of stepping into your life and taking over, then jumping out as soon as something new catches their imagination. You wouldn’t call them stayers, that’s for sure. He drags his eyes back from the beauty of the rolling hills, blue in the evening light, and aims the bow of his tinny at the chef’s house. That’s when he notices the snub-nosed outline of Kate’s boat tied to the pontoon and his stomach goes into free fall. He deliberately stalls the engine to give himself time to think, rocks on the water while the last warm breath of a nor’westerly dries his recently shampooed hair. He watches as Kate and the chef emerge from the house carrying trays and sighs before firi
ng up a suddenly reluctant engine once more and wheezing towards his fate.
Kate tried to resist the chef’s invitation, citing jetlag and exhaustion, but he was adamant. ‘For Jimmy’s sake,’ he said. ‘Be strong for a little while longer. For Jimmy’s sake.’ He’d pounced on her like a saviour when he found her back in harness at The Briny. ‘This is fate, yes? To arrive on this most important day of a meeting about Jimmy’s future.’
He told her that he and Sam were worried Amelia would push the kid to take the money and run without any clear-headed plan about what to do with it. Even less of an idea of how national exposure on a top-rating current affairs show might affect Jimmy’s unique and essentially fragile view of life. Outside the secure boundaries of the Cook’s Basin community, Jimmy would be easy prey for anyone with a sob story or a grand plan. ‘This is true. We all know this. But what we don’t know, is what is a fair price for a television interview?’ the chef asked.
She floundered. Her background was finance, where stories were sought but never bought.
‘The top offer is forty-five thousand dollars,’ the chef whispered in her ear. ‘It would take Jimmy close to a lifetime to save forty-five thousand dollars, now it drops into his lap like a gift from heaven. We must consider this opportunity wisely, no? It could set him up forever.’
In the end, she couldn’t refuse.
‘Thought you’d’ve crashed by now,’ Sam says, as coolly as he can manage.
‘Marcus was very persuasive,’ Kate replies. ‘Glass of wine? Or beer as usual?’
‘A frigidly cold, thanks. Where’s Ettie?’
‘Helping the chef load another tray with nibbles.’
‘She er, OK, after the skink episode?’
‘She’s fine. Just in denial about aging.’
Sam takes a swig of beer, choosing his words carefully: ‘Whatever gets her through . . .’
‘If she’d just face up to the fact that she’s hit menopause full on, she could get some decent drug therapy. It would solve all her problems. But every time I’ve tried to open the subject, she bites my head off. Quite frankly, the Misses Skettles’ jar of mashed sweet potato won’t help.’
