Silver Bay (29 page)

‘Doesn’t mean she loves me,’ I said, taking the last swig of my drink. ‘In fact, I have it on fairly good authority that she hates my guts.’

My sister raised her eyebrows in a way that transported me to a time when we were children. It was a gesture that spoke of the uselessness of boys, of her eminent superiority. It told me that, yet again, I had got it wrong, and that this was probably only to be expected. As I had then, I wanted to wrestle her to the ground and sit on her, to stop her doing it and prove who was boss.

But, irritatingly, this time I had to accept she was right. She sat back on the bar stool and folded her arms. ‘Mikey, what the hell are you sitting here for?’

‘Because I’m a stupid bloke who can’t make a decision to save his life?’

My sister shook her head.

‘Oh, no,’ she said, and grinned. ‘You made a decision. You’re just too stupid to realise it.’

For the first time in my adult life, I didn’t shop around for flights. I didn’t compare leg room against cost, weigh up the benefits of frequent-flyer miles against the quality of the airline’s meals. I booked the first available seat on a flight to Sydney. Then, before I could think too hard about it, I packed a suitcase of essentials and my sister drove me to the airport.

‘This is a good thing,’ she said, straightening my jacket, almost fondly, as we stood outside at the drop-off point. ‘Really. A good thing.’

‘She won’t talk to me,’ I said.

‘Then for once in your life, Mikey boy, you’re going to have to work at it.’

During that flight I became steadily more nervous. When it stopped to refuel in Hong Kong, I was jittery in a way that couldn’t be explained purely by the time change. I kept trying to think of what I would say when I saw her, but every conversation opener was inadequate. In fact, my presence would be inadequate. With Monica several thousand miles behind me, my vague dreams of an impassioned reunion dissipated like jet-fuel trails in a clear sky.

I had not done what I had promised Kathleen I would do, which was to stop the development. If anything, it was now moving forward with greater speed than ever. Despite my feelings for Liza, I was still the duplicitous pig she had identified: if Tina had not sent that incriminating text, would I have split with Vanessa? I could fool myself that it would have happened anyway, but I seemed so out of touch with my own feelings that I couldn’t claim it as an absolute truth.

The murmured words I had rehearsed for Liza were drowned by different voices. I heard Hannah’s, with the clarity of a silver bell: ‘Mike, why did you lie to us?’, then her mother telling me accusingly that everything I had said, everything I had been, was a lie. I thought about Vanessa’s bleak expression when she had seen the message on my mobile phone, and knew that I wanted never to inflict that kind of pain on anyone again.

Sitting on that flight, headed east, I discovered before the end of the first in-flight movie that I had no idea what I was doing. It was unlikely that Kathleen and Liza would want my help, even if I had known what I should do to oppose the development. Few people left in the town would welcome me. I was not even sure where I would stay.

I drank a lot on the flight, despite what my sister had said to me, partly because it was the only way I could relax, and partly because sipping wine was something to do with my hands. I dipped in and out of fitful sleep, and felt the knots in my stomach accumulate in proportion to the miles that the plane travelled towards its destination.

Some thirty hours later, I got out of the rental car that I had driven to Silver Bay from Sydney, stood up in the bright sunlight, and fought an almost overwhelming urge to climb back into the car and drive back to the airport.

The only time I saw my mother cry was when she threw a cherished porcelain shepherdess at my father’s head. It broke, of course – no fragile ornament could have survived such a trajectory. But after it smashed, she slumped to the floor, cradling the pieces and weeping as if she had come across the scene of some terrible accident. I remember standing in the doorway and feeling shocked by my mother’s uncharacteristic show of desperation, yet repelled by it. My father, his temple bloodied, had been standing by the sofa, and said nothing. As if he accepted that it had been his fault.

He had a small engineering firm, which my parents had run on hippieish lines, allowing everyone a say and doing their best to share profits. Surprisingly, for ten years it had worked quite well. It grew, my parents became more ambitious, and decided to open a second plant about an hour away. We would move too – and as all their money was ploughed back into the business they had been delighted to find a large country house available for a knock-down rent, due to its general state of disrepair. The hot-water system was eccentric and half of the rooms were too damp to live in, but this was in the days when unmodernised houses like this were not unusual, and central heating not a necessity. My sister and I loved it. We spent five years roaming the woods, setting up camps in the unused wings of the house, not really minding as the damp spread and the number of habitable rooms shrank commensurately. My parents were too preoccupied with the business to do much more than the bare minimum of repairs.

Eventually the owners announced that they would not renew the following year’s contract. No great disaster, my father observed. It was probably time we bought our own place.

Then they were alerted to the small print on the lease. My father had signed up to a ‘renew and repair’ clause. He had agreed to restore the house to a condition it had not known for several decades. ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ my father protested. ‘The house was barely habitable when we moved in.’ But the solicitor just pointed to the print. My father should have read the contract, he said. He should have taken pictures and agreed the property’s initial condition. He could not argue with what was there in black and white. The solicitor read out an estimated sum for renovations, and my parents knew that they were ruined. The shepherdess figurine was the first casualty.

My sister and I were moved to an unfriendly school, forced to share a bedroom in a grim maisonette, and for years there were no holidays other than in borrowed caravans at cheap seaside towns. For years I held up that porcelain ornament as a symbol of what happened when you fell foul of sharp practice, when you were not on top of the deal, when you believed that people had a natural tendency to play fair. Now I saw things differently. My father had rebuilt his business into an ultimately more successful company, run on more efficient lines. My sister and I were probably more resilient, and more ambitious, because of our early brush with loss.

My parents were still together. The shepherdess, painfully glued together, was still on the mantelpiece. ‘It showed us what was important,’ my mother would say, touching the cracks fondly.

It sounds stupid, but it was only now that I realised she was not talking about reading the small print.

I knocked three times on the back door before I caught sight of the note. ‘Lance/Yoshi: Help yourselves, we are at the hospital. Back soon. Please write down what you take in the book. L.’

I held it for a minute, feeling winded to have her little note in my hands, then looked down to the jetty. There were no boats except
Ishmael
, and as it was only a quarter past ten in the morning, it was possible that Liza and Kathleen would be gone for some hours. I sat down on one of the empty benches for a few minutes, then walked to MacIver’s Seafood Bar and Grill and ordered a coffee. My body didn’t want coffee – it told me it was late at night still, contrary to what my eyes could see. I drank only half of it, letting the remainder stain a dark brown ring round the inside of the pale blue cup as it cooled.

‘You the English guy?’

The owner, a large man in a grubby apron, was staring at me.

‘Yes,’ I said. There was no point in asking which English guy he meant.

‘The guy from the development company, right? The one that was in the paper?’

‘I’ve just come in for a quiet coffee. If you want to pick a fight about the development, I’ll leave, if you don’t mind.’

I put my wallet into my pocket and reached for my case.

‘You won’t get a fight from me, mate,’ he said, picking up a plate and drying it with a tea-towel even filthier than his apron. ‘I’m looking forward to it. Glad of the extra business.’

I said nothing.

‘Not everyone’s against it, you know, no matter what the papers are saying. There’s plenty like me who think the town needs a bit of investment.’

I must have looked disbelieving because he continued, walking over and sitting down heavily at the other side of my table. ‘I’ve got a lot of respect for the whale guys – Greg’s an old mate of mine – but, strewth, I reckon they make a big deal about these old whales. Those big fish have been swimming past this bay for a million years and a few little jet-bikes ain’t going to make any difference to that. Oh, sure, they might quiet off for a while, but they’ll be back.’

‘Quiet off?’

He jerked a thumb towards the jetty. ‘Oh, they’re all moaning, saying they’ve already gone. Like the fish know what’s coming. I ask you!’

‘Who’s gone?’ I was having trouble keeping up with the conversation.

‘The whales. There’s none showing. They’ve had to shut down the whale-watching early and now they’re just going round the bay to see the dolphins. I don’t reckon it makes a big difference to their profits. They can do two dolphin trips in the time it takes to do one whale trip. I don’t know what they’re complaining about.’

I sat there for a while, digesting this. Then I turned to him. ‘You wouldn’t serve me a drink, would you?’ I had a feeling that the next conversation I had would require of me rather more Dutch courage.

He raised his bulk from the table, both hands resting like fat hams in front of me as he levered himself upright. ‘Mate, I reckon you guys are about to do me a big favour. This one’s on the house.’

It took me almost an hour to make it back up the coast road to the Silver Bay Hotel. I had run it several times in less than ten minutes. Normally it would have taken twenty to walk. But the jet-lag had combined unhappily with the several large Scotches that my new best friend Del of MacIver’s Seafood Bar and Grill had pressed on me, and despite the elegantly discreet curve of the coastline it was difficult to maintain a straight line. A few times I sat down on my case and thought hard about how best to continue my journey. The hotel was there, within spitting distance, but somehow kept moving away from me, like a mirage in the desert. Once I thought of having a paddle in the sea – the water looked inviting, and it was a lot warmer than when I had last been here – but for some dim reason it was important that I looked smart. Besides, I could no longer remember how to remove my shoes.

Twice when I had got up I had remembered some minutes later that I had left my case in the sand, and had had to go for it, with all the handle-missing and toppling over that that now apparently entailed. I had sand everywhere, in my nose, my hair and my shoes, but I kept a tight hold of my wallet, holding it out in front of me so that I could keep an eye on it at all times. My parents had always impressed upon me the need to hang on to your wallet when in a strange country.

When I made it to the hotel I felt an almost euphoric sense of achievement, tempered only by the fact that I could no longer remember why it had been so important to get there. I dropped my case outside the door, then gazed at the note, which swam around in front of me. I snatched at it vaguely a few times, in an attempt to make it stay still.

Then, suddenly immeasurably weary, I decided I needed a lie-down. The wooden benches were too narrow – I wasn’t sure whether I could actually sit on them, let alone lie down on one – and the sand, at this end of the beach, was pebbly. I could just make out the invitingly dim interior of the Whalechasers Museum a short distance away and stumbled towards it. I would grab forty winks in there, and when I woke I would remember what the hell I was meant to be doing here.

I woke to the sound of shouting. At first it had been part of my dream – I was on an aeroplane, and the stewardess was trying to wake everybody up because until we all flapped our wings the thing would not rise off the ground. Gradually, through the fog of jet-lag and whisky, I became aware that even as the stewardess evaporated, the shouting was louder, and her grip on my arm was uncomfortably tight.

‘Let go,’ I murmured, trying to shift away from her. ‘I don’t want any peanuts.’

But then as my eyes opened and grew accustomed to the light, I realised I knew the face. Standing above me, her yellow oilskin flapping like the wings of some great bird, was Liza McCullen. And she was shouting at me: ‘I don’t believe it! Like, this is all we need – Mike bloody Dormer turning up here drunk. You stink, do you know that? You stink of whisky. And what the hell do you think you’re doing just coming in here like you own the place?’

I closed my eyes again slowly, feeling a strange calm descend on me. The weird thing was that, just before I did, I could have sworn I saw Kathleen smiling behind her.

Seventeen

Kathleen

He told me I should ‘step up’. He told me he had discussed it with his sister, who was a journalist and knew about such things, and that I could be the main focus of a feature on ‘The Shark Lady Trying to Save the Whales’, or some such. He said that publicity was the best chance we had of increasing opposition to the development and that it had to spread wider than this town, given that so many people seemed not to care much one way or the other.

I told him I didn’t want to stir all that up again and that I certainly didn’t want to feature in any newspapers. He looked at me like I was insane. ‘It would bring a lot of publicity. Helpful publicity,’ he said.

‘It might interest a few local people but there’s only so much interest a seventy-five-year-old woman who once caught a shark can generate. Better just let all that be.’

‘I thought you were seventy-six.’