Something Fishy (13 page)

With five or six drinks under my belt, I was close to the limit. So I pushed Barbara Prentice and all she represented to the back of my mind and concentrated on the twists and turns of the road, my headlights sweeping empty air like the wandering beam of a lighthouse. Perhaps it was more than six.

Back in Lorne, I found a boat trailer blocking the driveway, a neighbour loading fishing equipment. He signalled his willingness to shift, but I wasn't fussed and parked a little further along the street.

Although the lights were lit, there was no sign of movement in the house. As I sauntered up the driveway, I was met by sounds from the backyard. The low strumming of a guitar and a girl's voice, singing off-key. Mopey, strangulated vocals of the Tracey Chapman variety, subset of the Joni Mitchell whine. Along with the music came the background burble of youthful conversation. And, as I drew closer, the unmistakable smell of something burning.

Ah shit, I thought.

Shit, pot, hemp, grass, weed, ganja, mull.

Marijuana.

In certain situations, discretion is the better part of parenting. I went back to the car, waited until the driveway was clear, then returned anew, advertising my arrival with engine noises, headlights and a banged door.

As I climbed the front steps, a camel-train of teenagers came loping down the side of the house, half-obscured in the shadows. Three boys and a girl.

The point man was Matt Prentice, sister Jodie in his wake. The other two boys were unfamiliar, generic tagalongs.

A year older than Red, Matt was taller and more confident. Nothing of his mother or sister in his features, not that I could immediately discern. He communicated an attitude, though. A cockiness that didn't necessarily have much to do with self-assurance. Something chippish in the shoulder region.

‘I'm Jodie's brother,' he said with minimal courtesy. ‘Picking her up.'

The two other boys nodded, confirming his claim. Jodie gave me a little hello-goodbye wave. And then they were gone, flowing down the hill.

I clattered through the front door and made a general presence of myself in the house. There was no smell of smoking but there were empty beer cans in the kitchen bin. Not a lot, not mine, not an issue. A half-dozen mid-teens were hunkered down in the backyard near the tent, propped on the rental's assortment of chairs, their outlines familiar to some degree or another. A boy I knew as Max, one of the many Maxes of his age, was noodling on the guitar, displaying an unsuspected talent.

Red wandered upstairs. ‘Home already?' he said. ‘No good?'

‘It was okay,' I said. ‘Jodie's mother was there.'

He tilted his head. ‘And?'

‘And various other people,' I said. ‘So what's been happening here?'

‘Nothing much,' he shrugged. If he was stoned he was hiding it well. ‘Starting to drift away.'

‘I passed Jodie on my way in. Big brother strikes again?'

‘Matt's cool,' he allowed. ‘Hung for a while, him and a couple of mates, Year Elevens. Came around to pick up Jodie, get her home before curfew.'

‘Good idea,' I said, yawning and having a late-night scratch. ‘Same goes for you and Tarquin. I'm going to hit the sack. Keep it down, will you, and don't leave the premises, okay?'

He shrugged, not fussed. ‘Sure,' he said. ‘Cool.'

I tossed and turned, just catching the low murmur of boytalk from the backyard and the faint sighing of the waves, somewhere out there at the furthest reaches of my hearing.

And as I awaited oblivion, I thought of Lyndal. And of a night like this, two summers back, when we lay entwined, the sea in our ears, moonlight seeping through a chink in the curtains, and conceived a child.

Then I tried to remember how many days had passed since Lyndal had last come unbidden into my mind. And what, if anything, the answer to that question might mean. It meant, I decided, that time is an active verb. And pondering in turn the meaning of that observation, I drifted into sleep, sure of only one thing. That I was sleeping alone and I wished I wasn't.

The morning dawned hot. By ten, it had muscled thirty aside. I nailed the boys at breakfast, got them with their snouts in the Nutrigrain. ‘Order in the House,' I declared, gavelling the kitchen benchtop with the back of a spoon and firming the knot in my sarong. ‘The Honourable Murray Whelan has the floor.'

The lads regarded me languidly, cereal-laden implements poised in mid-shovel.

‘Regarding the smoking of dope,' I began. ‘I'd like to take this opportunity to point out that the possession and use of cannabis is illegal in this state. A bust could get you kicked out of school. Furthermore, some authorities believe that marijuana can trigger adolescent-onset schizophrenia.'

Tark and Red gave each other the sideways eyeball, brows furrowing.

‘Not if you don't inhale,' said Tarquin.

‘According to the President of the United States,' added Red, helpfully.

‘I'm not going to be hypocritical and pretend that I've never smoked the stuff myself,' I said. ‘I know it's out there and you'll probably have a lash at some stage. Just let's not pretend it isn't happening.'

They twigged, realising why I had chosen that particular morning to raise the issue.

‘Wasn't us,' said Red.

I raised my palms. ‘No names, no pack drill. Just play safe, that's all I'm asking. And you might consider waiting until you're a bit older. That way, you can combine it with alcohol and cars, get more bang for your buck.'

‘Chill, Dad,' said Red. ‘We're cool.'

‘I'm glad we had this little talk,' I said. ‘Pass the sugar.'

‘Now there's something can really kill you,' said Tarquin.

‘Depends how hard you get hit with the bowl,' I said.

After breakfast, we went squinting into the heat and drove down the hill, looking to get wet. Mountjoy Parade was thick with traffic as party animals poured into town for the evening's revels on the foreshore, horns honking, car stereos cranked to maximum doof. On the sward of couch grass between the esplanade and the beach a concert stage was taking shape, roadies swarming over the rigging like a pirate crew.

We headed for Wye River, fifteen kilometres further west, a sandy beach at the mouth of a trickling creek. The water was wet but the tide was out, the surf was nowhere and the heat was so wilting that our swims wore off almost before we left the water. Within an hour, we'd had enough.

Back in Lorne, we found council workers erecting crowd-control barriers along the main drag, heat haze rising from the asphalt. Police buses were disgorging coppers from Melbourne, all aviator sunglasses and peaked caps, and a mobile command centre was parked at the kerb outside the Chinese take-away. An FM radio station was broadcasting from the foreshore, its studio in the shape of a giant boom box.

I spent the rest of the day in a wilting torpor, the boys drifting in and out of frame. In due course, late afternoon, we set out for the Falls festival. The lads were tarted up for the festivities. Tark had gone for the romantic-consumptive look in a pleat-fronted dress shirt with a wing collar and no sleeves. Red's hair was sculpted into the vertical with enough gel to grease a Clydeside slipway. Taking the Erskine Falls turn, we followed the shuttle-bus up a meandering road that climbed past the town tip and fern-shaded picnic grounds towards the divide at the top of the ranges. Somewhere to our right, invisible in the dense bush, was the Erskine River and its eponymous falls.

For the last couple of kilometres, the traffic crawled, bumper to bumper. There was shade between the trees, but not a hint of breeze. The leaves hung motionless, limp, the light filtering through their drab greenery from a baked enamel sky. Then, at the top of a crest, they parted to reveal the festival site, a neat patch of grazing land that sat in the midst of the forest like a crop circle in a wheat field. A squarish circle, cyclone-fenced and sloping to an array of big-tops, canopied stages and food stalls, a bass thump washing up the hill to the main gate. A mini-Woodstock.

Eight thousand were expected. Most were there already, the rest arriving by the minute, the tribes gathering. I parked in the designated drop-off zone and told the boys that I'd pick them up in exactly the same spot at exactly noon the next day. After extracting sworn assurances that they would enjoy themselves without doing anything health-threatening or egregiously illegal, I issued a small cash bounty and left them to find their friends in the milling mass at the main gate.

On the way back down to Lorne, I passed a dark grey Landcruiser coming up the hill, Barbara Prentice at the wheel, a full load of teens. I gave her a beep and a wave but I couldn't tell if she recognised me.

By seven-thirty, I was back in town, replenishing my stock of grog at the pub drive-through. The show on the foreshore was firing up. Elements of the crowd were already well lubricated, and mounted police were patrolling the fringes on horses with clear plastic visors. I'd been giving some thought to my options for the evening and hanging with the headache crowd wasn't one of them. I took my beer back to the house, stripped to my jocks, put Ry Cooder on the CD player, ripped the scab from a Coopers Pale Ale, sat in the shade on the deck and watched the sinking sun reach over the ranges and caress the molten sea. Fuck it was hot.

One beer down, I was talking to myself out loud. ‘Nothing ventured,' I said, far from convincingly.

Two beers down, I was staring into the rickety wardrobe beside my rented bed, looking for the right kind of statement. The pre-faded Hawaiian, I decided, with the dark hibiscus motif. Khaki shorts and loafers. Laid-back but snazzy.

I finished the third bottle under the shower, out-and-out Dutch courage, then dressed and drove to Gusto. It was nine, the sun was gone and a syrupy twilight was taking its place, the sea flat, the air motionless. Inbound traffic on the Great Ocean Road was backed up to the town limits, cops at a row of witches hats running random breath tests. I was safe, headed the other way, but I popped a mint anyway and summoned my sobriety. Chill, I ordered. Be cool.

If I was serious about this, I'd have done some spadework. I'd have called Sandra, made exploratory noises, got the lowdown. Instead, I was playing an outside break sucking a peppermint, for Christ's sake. All dicked up in my new-bought leisure-wear, hot to trot with a mother of two who probably wasn't even in the market.

By the time I took the turn at the adobe signpost, I was moving beyond second thoughts, entering cut-and-run territory. But there was nowhere to run. The sharply ascending strip of asphalt was squeezed by tea-trees and there was a car behind me, pushing me forward. At the first opening, three hundred metres up the slope, I was extruded into the restaurant carpark.

I fed the Magna into the first available slot and sat there, engine idling, aircon blasting, fingers drumming on the steering wheel, sucking my mint.

The carpark was a quadrangle of crushed gravel toppings, fifty or so spaces, filling fast. The car that had followed me up the road, a big old banger of a Merc, decanted a party of four. Thirtysomething couples, the men in high spirits, the women in high heels. Passing a dark grey Landcruiser with roof-racks and Ripcurl stickers, they bantered and crunched their way down steps flanked with enormous terracotta pots sprouting an exuberant arch of raspberry bougainvillea.

Another carload arrived, then another, then another. This was getting ridiculous. Time to screw my courage to the designated place. But which one?

It wasn't rocket science. I had two choices. I could return to the house and get comfortably numb on self-pity, Coopers Pale Ale and
B. B. King's Greatest Hits
.

Or I could slip into the restaurant, ease my way into the evening's
joie de vivre
, suss my prospects with Barbara Prentice and play it as it came.

Go wild, I told myself, live dangerously. You're on holidays after all.

I turned off the motor, checked my charm in the rearview mirror and stepped out into the sticky night air. The twilight was thickening, thrumming with laughter and music, the sound of salsa. Gusto's facade was an eclectic amalgam of peeling weatherboards, fibro sheeting and rust-hued corrugated iron. The effect was of a beachcomber's shack slapped together by a castaway with an artist's eye. Gilligan meets Georgia O'Keeffe. Or Barbara Prentice.

A strip-door curtain of rope and crimped bottle caps marked the entrance. I parted the strips and found myself in a narrow, badly lit corridor. The sound and light and laughter lay ahead, drawing me forward. All part of the design, I realised. The customer as privileged insider, a mate of the owner. The cook's cousin, granted backdoor access.

A gaggle of diners milled at the edge of the light, pressing their credentials on the head waiter. One wall of the corridor became a plate-glass window, a view into the kitchen. Another design flourish. No miserly dribbles of truffle oil here, no pernickety plating of filleted fava beans. This was Gusto's fiery forge, a seething engine-room of white-clad minions, flaming sauté pans and flashing knives. I watched a cook emerge from a back door, a heavy bucket in each hand, and pour a stream of glistening black mussels into a huge pot on the cooktop.