Bay of Fires (18 page)

“Enough.” Sarah closed the newspaper.

The station wagon slowed to a stop several meters in front of Sarah and Erica as they walked up the hill from the shop. In the passenger seat was Darlene Gibson—Bunghole’s wife. She had been with Bunghole outside the shop when he had almost hit Sarah in the head with his milk carton as he tossed it into the bin. Today Darlene wasn’t smiling.

“Keith has got nothing to do with this.” Darlene folded sunburned arms on the open window.

“Who?” Erica asked.

The woman rolled her eyes. “Bunghole.”

Sarah and Erica laughed.

“Who’s accused Keith of anything?” Sarah immediately thought of the roadkill that had been thrown at Roger’s cottage. Had the police somehow heard about that? She knew Roger would not have reported the incident.

“We’ve seen the way you lot look at us. You’re stuck up. And you’re not pinning this shit on us.”

The kids crammed in the backseat—at least four—complained, and the woman in the driver’s seat yelled at them to sit down.

“We’ve got our own theories,” Darlene continued.

“You’re doing the talking,” Sarah said. Her curiosity about what the campers thought was going on was greater than her desire to tell it like it was.

“I’m not going there. It’s what a lot of people are saying.”

“Go on.”

“Nup.”

“Bald Don,” shouted the woman in the driver’s seat. She put her foot down and the car accelerated, gravel spitting out the sides.

“What the…?” Erica said. “I thought they blamed Roger.”

“I don’t think they really do believe Don did it,” Sarah said. “They just hate him because he bullies them about where they fish.”

Could Don have done it? Years ago, a popular Launceston schoolteacher had driven back to town from school camp at Waddamana, murdered his wife, and returned to the school camp that same night. It had taken the police six months to charge him, in which time he had played a perfect grieving widower.

Don was not a murderer. Sarah dismissed the thought. She had known Don all her life and was certain he would never do a thing like this.

“We all need to calm down,” Sarah said as they started walking again.

Using an old knife, Sarah pierced the black back salmon’s belly, sliding the blade from the stomach to the head. Cartilage crunched as she sliced under the gills.

“Do you feel bad for doing that?” Hall said.

“Nope.” With a firm tug of the gills, the guts slid out. She tossed them into the ocean.

“Do you feel sorry for the fish?”

“Not if I’m planning to eat it. They don’t suffer.” She realized he was teasing her. “Much.”

“How come you don’t keep the fish in a bucket of water?”

“Stresses them out. It gives them physiological problems. The more stressed out they get, the flesh gapes, and they toughen up. Better to break their neck.”

“You twisted its neck.”

“Yeah. Some people use a dongometer, something to whack it with. English trout fishermen spend hundreds on ivory-handled dongometers.”

“Really?” Hall said.

He was looking at her intensely, and she had a brief, strange feeling that he was about to kiss her. He didn’t.

She slid a fresh squid tentacle onto her hook and cast out. Wind was picking up, twenty knots and nicely onshore. Good fishing weather. Hall sat on the rock beside her. Usually she liked fishing alone; Hall, however, was easy company. He appreciated solitude.

She could hear happy conversation coming from the shack. All summer Sarah’s parents had invited friends over for drinks before dinner. She had taken to returning to the shack when the cool evening air was quiet and the only sign of guests was the empty glasses by the sink and a half-eaten cheese platter or chip crumbs in a plastic fish-shaped bowl on the table. Tonight their voices didn’t heighten her loneliness; instead, their distant gabbling was as innocuous as the ocean’s breath.

Alerted by the silence, Sarah held her fishing rod between her and everyone else in the shack. Something was wrong. On the couch, her mother, Pamela, and Don sat in a row, like people waiting for a bus. Steve and Dad were smiling so hard she wondered if they were drunk. She noted that each of the champagne glasses on the table had one of her mother’s silver charms attached to the stem. Paralyzed, like a cornered animal, Sarah waited for the dreaded words to come. In the expectant hush of contained excitement, everyone beamed idiotically.

“I’m getting married!” Sarah felt Erica’s words under her skin. Her cheeks became numb; the muscles incapable of smiling.

Erica held out her hand, showing five diamonds on a slender silver band. Sarah leaned her fishing rod against the wall and dumped her bag on the floor. She unbuttoned her jacket. Was it hot in here? She hung her jacket over the back of a chair and turned to look at her sister’s hand.

“Cubic zirconia?”

“No! It’s real.” Erica crossed her fingers. She was always crossing her fingers, an annoying gesture. She did it to wish Sarah luck at fishing, or when she dished up a new recipe.

“I know. They don’t make cubic zirconia that small.”

A chair leg grated against the floor and someone coughed. Erica’s hand dropped and she glanced from her mother, to her father, to Sarah, standing there in her old Hash House Harriers T-shirt, stained with fish muck.

“Erica’s ring is eighteen karat, Sarah,” Steve said. “I didn’t mess around.”

“Don’t look at me like that,” Sarah said, taking Erica’s hand. “I’m joking.”

Erica’s manicured fingers felt warm in her own small cold hand. Sarah was genuinely happy for her sister, but the happiness was a long way inside her and too fragile to vocalize. She examined the ring.

“It’s a beautiful ring,” she said. It was enough to relieve the silence.

“It’s exquisite.” Pamela beamed. “And worth every cent, Steven. What do they say? A month’s salary that lasts a lifetime.”

“And the rest,” Steve said.

Sarah sat at the table and drank some champagne while Erica described how it happened. Steve had proposed on the beach that afternoon, after playing a song on his guitar which he had written about love and finding a soul mate, having children, and growing old together. Erica was teary as she told the story. It was so pathetic Sarah didn’t know what to say, so she busied herself fitting a charm to the stem of her glass.

Erica and Steve had been together for six years. Everyone knew they were going to get married one day, so it wasn’t as though this engagement was a surprise. They’d never even had a breakup, as far as Sarah knew. By the time she and Jake had been seeing each other for six months, they had already split up three times. For the last four months of their relationship, they had broken up almost every weekend. Sarah drained her glass and held it out for some more. Don poured champagne almost to the top.

“Those new sinkers will be in the store in a few days,” he said.

Sarah nodded. His offering of a conversational lifeline was welcome, but she couldn’t even think about fishing right now. She glanced at the ring again. Five perfect diamonds, scraped from the bowels of the earth in some distant ruined place. Really, who could bear to wear one?

Erica was sitting on Steve’s knee, her laughter sharp. Steve was drunk and slouching lower and lower in his chair. Fortunately Sarah was sober enough not to comment. Sarah’s face ached from smiling. Her mother stood to announce a toast. Flip tittered, and champagne splashed from her glass as she raised it.

“To Erica and Steve. To see your child happy is the greatest thing.”

Pamela made a funny noise. Makeup bled around her eyes. She was teary. It took Sarah a moment to realize that Pamela was not crying in happiness for Erica but was thinking about her only child, Max, who was in prison. Sarah thought about Max being locked up occasionally. She had been to visit him once, last year, when she attended a conference in Hobart near the prison farm. He wasn’t happy to be imprisoned, but he wasn’t doing too badly, either. He told her he was relieved to be getting some help for his problems. Pamela had always struggled to accept that Max needed help.

“Sit down, Felicity,” John said.

Pamela pressed her hand to her lips, as if to restrain her emotion. While it was easy to avoid discussing gambling and anything about prison in general, it was the unpredictable, happy moments that upset Pamela more.

Flip hugged Pamela. There was a fuss as Erica searched for the tissues. Sarah found them on top of the fridge. She handed Pamela the box, glad to have something to do. Assuaging Pamela was a relief from pretending to be happy for Erica.

Erica was the first to forget about Max. She held the ring up, laughing and repeating “I can’t believe it!” and “You are so naughty!”

Sarah watched the ring move about the shack, pressed to the neck of the champagne bottle, disappearing and reappearing in Erica’s hair, a dragonfly alive in fuzzy lantern light. In Sarah’s pocket were three bottle caps from the beer she had drunk earlier in the evening as she fished. She turned them over, pressing her fingers against their rough edges, mentally adding the three glasses of champagne she had just drunk in the shack. Who cares, she told herself, draining her glass. She was drunk now, so there was no point slowing down.

Her mother and Pamela were remembering engagement stories. Pamela was twenty-two when she married, which was young by today’s standards. Mum and Dad were twenty-four and twenty-five when they got married in the quaint St. Helens chapel. Erica was thirty-two.

Of all the men Sarah had known, there were only a few she would have considered marrying. When she was at university, Max Gunn had been interested in her. There was nothing between them, but he had more or less said he was keen on something serious. That was before his gambling got messy. Looking back, she realized he had ticked most of her boxes, but that was before she even knew she had boxes that required ticking.

Who really wanted to be married, though? Look at Mum and Dad. They barely touched each other; if they kissed, it was on the cheek, never on the mouth. It had always been that way. They functioned well together, tolerated each other’s company, but if that was all you wanted, you might as well marry your dog.

Under her father’s chair, Henry slept, oblivious to everything. It was nearly midnight when Pamela and Don finally left. Yawning, happily tipsy, Flip and John kissed their daughters and hugged Steven and went to bed. Sarah remained at the table, finishing the champagne. It was flat and warm. Erica squeezed toothpaste onto Steve’s toothbrush and handed it to him. As Sarah watched, she silently congratulated herself for not commenting. He went to bed to wait for Erica. Poor guy; gets engaged and doesn’t get a celebratory fuck. The shack was too confined, the walls too thin. Maybe Erica would give him a silent blow job. Sarah chuckled.

Sarah put the empty champagne bottle on the bench beside the other two empty Moët bottles Erica was saving to use as candlesticks. Men wanted wives like Erica, the kind who would match her tea towels to her oven mitts and slow-cook casseroles with seasonal vegetables from her own garden. Erica was an air hostess, the ultimate training ground for wifely perfection.

As though she sensed the drift of Sarah’s thoughts, Erica sat on the stool beside her and started rehashing the proposal.

“Yep, you told me that already.”

Sick of listening, Sarah stretched. She wasn’t tired but she needed to be alone. In the dark bedroom her head spun. She was thirty-five, too young to be spending evenings listening to her parents’ friends reminisce, too old to hide on the top bunk feeling jealous and mean. Mindful of her potential hangover, Sarah drank from her water bottle until her stomach felt uncomfortably swollen.

Erica finished tidying up but she didn’t come to bed. She was probably standing in front of the mirror, looking at the ring on her finger. The shack was quiet, just the wind blowing down the hill to meet the ocean’s constant hum. Henry’s sloppy drinking from his bowl sounded like a human whimper.

Sometime in the night Sarah woke up needing to urinate. She couldn’t find her flashlight. Without it she was reluctant to use the toilet at the end of the veranda. There were spiders, mainly daddy longlegs, living in there. Although they were harmless, it was creepy to think you might sit on one accidentally. Instead she went into the backyard and squatted on the grass.

She was almost finished when she heard the low howl of devils fighting. Startled, she tried to hurry. It had been a long time since she’d heard their screams; a vicious, chilling sound like that of a woman being strangled. The convicts had thought it was Satan’s laughter when they heard it two hundred years ago. Devils were misunderstood—usually their noise was their bluff to protect a carcass—but their capacity to rip one another’s head off and their high pain threshold meant that humans were sensible to maintain a respectful distance. They could fight for hours.

Sarah pulled her underwear up and looked in the direction of the noise. It had stopped. Two thoughts ran through her mind. One, devils didn’t become suddenly silent. Two, if it wasn’t devils fighting in the bushes, what on earth was it?

She sprinted back inside the shack and locked the door behind her.

The shack was quiet when Sarah woke up the next morning. There was no sound, no chairs squeaking or newspaper rustling. Everyone was gone. She didn’t care where.

In the empty kitchen she drank a glass of juice and stared blindly at the wall, not seeing her mother’s collection of fish-painted plates hanging there. Her meanness hung around her shoulders like a heavy and ill-fitting coat. She should apologize to Erica but she knew she wouldn’t. They never had. Transgressions passed without comment, forgotten and forgiven.

Erica knew there was something wrong. Even Hall had guessed. On their date he had asked her about Jake. She didn’t mention the fight in the Pineapple Hotel car park, or how she had driven drunk as far west as the car would go before running out of fuel. She had woken up on the side of the road in blasting afternoon heat. Birds were fighting over something in the cane field beside the car.