Can You Keep a Secret? (2 page)

At roughly the same time that Robert Brancato was talking Colby into making a trip to Australia, Caitlin Hourigan was applying for a job at the Merchant Hotel in Townsville.

‘I’ve got waitressing experience, and I’ve done the odd shift on the glass-bottom boats,’ she told the manager. ‘But that’s kind of dropped off until summer.’

The manager looked her over – Caitlin was then just nineteen, and a beautiful, thoroughly Australian girl, with long bleached hair, golden limbs and freckles across her nose – and said, ‘Have you ever done skimpy?’

Caitlin hadn’t, and didn’t particularly want to get started, but she was a high-school dropout who’d fled the family home on Magnetic Island as soon as legally able, so it wasn’t like she had a huge number of options. Skimpy at the Merchant involved tending the bar for freshly shaven, off-duty soldiers from the Lavarack Barracks; and for leery
truck drivers from the zinc and copper mines, usually while dressed in a maid’s apron with transparent knickers and a matching bra.

Caitlin had been in the job for about eight weeks when Trevor Nesbit, of Trevor’s Reef Tours, came in and ordered a beer. Caitlin sort of knew Trevor: he lived in a two-bedroom flat above a timber shopfront at the end of the Townsville Pier, near where she’d gone looking for work on the glass-bottom boats. Plus, he was a regular, and he always tipped.

‘What can I get you, Trevor?’ There hadn’t been many customers, so Caitlin had a cleaning rag in her hand.

‘I’ll take a Four-X,’ said Trevor.

Caitlin dropped the rag, flipped the tap on the beer and began filling the glass.

‘You’ve gotten good at that,’ said Trevor, watching the beer rise under a fine head of foam. ‘And that’s actually why I’m here. I’ve got a proposition for you. A few days kind of waitressing, kind of serving beer. Because guess what’s happened to us? We’ve taken this big booking from a bunch of Septics.’

Caitlin put a coaster and the beer in front of Trevor.

‘What’s a Septic?’

‘You know … septic tank … Yank,’ explained Trevor, but Caitlin still didn’t get what he meant.

‘You know! We got a message on the E-Mail. Four blokes from New York. They want to do an island hop.’

‘Since when are you on the E-Mail?’ asked Caitlin.

‘Been on it a few months now,’ said Trevor, ‘trying to build up the business. And now it’s come home to roost. So I’m looking for staff, and Carol’s wondering if you’d be interested.’ Carol was Trevor’s second wife, and his partner at Trevor’s Reef Tours.

‘What’s the job? I’m not doing skimpy on a boat. I’ll get burnt.’

‘This isn’t skimpy,’ Trevor said. ‘These blokes, the Septics, they’re a classy bunch. Colin helped us find them. It’s a no-expense-spared kind of thing.’

Colin was Carol’s boy from her first marriage. He was already twenty years old and a computer programmer when Trevor arrived on the scene, and he had this idea that his mum and her new husband could be doing better, if only they’d jump on the information superhighway. To that end, he’d turned up at Trevor’s carrying a dusty desktop that one of his clients didn’t need anymore.

‘Make way, make way!’ he’d announced. ‘Here comes the future!’

‘Oh, don’t tell me that’s for me,’ Carol said. ‘I don’t know the first thing about computers.’

Colin staggered over to the shop counter. He was carrying the monitor and the hard drive, with the keyboard tight under one arm and the cords dangling around his knees.

‘Just come and check it out,’ he said, using his hand to wipe a thick layer of dust and static off the bubble screen. ‘This is going to turbo-charge your business. You’re going to get new bookings, plus you can do invoices, everything, on this. It’s going to really get you going.’

Trevor eyed the machine suspiciously. ‘Your mum already does all the invoices,’ he said. ‘We’ve got an invoice book.’

‘Forget that,’ said Colin. ‘This is going to streamline your whole operation. Plus I’m going to build you a website.’

Trevor wasn’t sure what that meant, exactly, but he left Colin to it, and by the following morning Colin declared the website up and running, saying, ‘Come and have a look.’

Carol had wiped the screen with Windex and old newspaper. It was showing brightly coloured cartoon fish, swimming.

‘I’m not sure I get the point,’ Trevor said.

‘No, no, that’s just a screen saver,’ said Colin, tapping a key. ‘Here’s your website.’

Up came a different screen, still with fish, plus a picture of a smiling Trevor and Carol, and the words ‘Trevor’s Reef Tours’.

‘People all over the world can see this,’ Colin said. ‘They can search for you, and the beauty of it is, you won’t need all those brochures in the local motels. You’re on the World Wide Web now, Trevor!’

Carol was dubious. Nobody she knew had a computer at home and what was wrong with putting brochures in the local motels?

‘There’s nothing wrong with it, but don’t you get it, Mum? Everyone can see you now, they don’t even need a brochure.’

‘Well, it’s not just the brochures we have. We’re also in the
Gold Coast Bulletin.
’

Colin sighed. ‘Just do me a favour, will you? Every now and then you’ll hear a ping. That means you’ve got mail. See here, Mail? You click on these little envelopes. Not that one, that’s spam. Not that, that’s just a welcome to Yahoo Mail. That’s nothing. But see how they’re closed? You click on them to open them and read the message. See if you get an inquiry. Let’s just see what happens.’

For the first few weeks, nothing happened.

‘I open those E-Mails you told me to open,’ Carol said, ‘and it’s all about losing weight. I mean, who sends these things? It’s not good manners.’

‘I got one the other day, he wanted to make my penis longer,’ said Trevor, winking, ‘and we don’t need that, do we, Carol?’

‘Look,’ said Colin, ‘you ignore that stuff. And don’t, you know, answer anything that looks dodgy. If somebody’s offering to give you a lot of money or something, ignore that too. Don’t give anyone your bank account details.’

‘As if I would,’ said Carol.

A week or so later, Carol got what she would later call ‘the big E-Mail’ from Robert Brancato in New York.

‘Come and look at this, Trevor,’ she said. The computer had been moved off the counter to a small table in a far corner of the little wooden shopfront, where it sat, unloved, and mostly unused.

‘Do I have to? What is it?’ Trevor had been in one of the storerooms, examining a fishing rod.

‘I said come and
look
.’

Trevor leaned the rod against the wall. ‘You know I can’t see anything without my glasses.’ Carol had his glasses on the end of her nose.

‘This here is one of those E-Mails,’ said Carol, pointing at the screen. ‘It’s somebody talking about renting a yacht for a reef tour.’

‘We don’t have a yacht.’

‘It says there are four of them coming, and look, it says they’re offering ten K. What do you think he means, Trevor. Ten K?’

‘Ten kilograms?’

‘It can’t be kilograms! I think that means
thousands.
I think it’s saying that they want to pay ten thousand dollars for a four-day tour.’

‘You’re off your trolley, Carol.’

‘No, Trevor … I do think that’s what it means.’

‘You’re off your trolley,’ Trevor repeated. ‘It’s one of those SPAM things Colin was on about. Don’t give them our credit card.’

‘Why would I give them our credit card, Trevor? It’s them wanting to pay us.’

‘You can’t be right, Carol. Ten thousand dollars for a reef tour? They’d have to have more money than sense. In any case, like I said, we don’t have a yacht.’

‘But you’d be mad to knock it back,’ said Colin, after he’d come to have a look. ‘Haven’t you got a mate with a yacht you can borrow? That bloke from Whitsunday Escapes, the one who keeps
Blue Moon
, isn’t he a friend of yours?’

‘Don Scott? He’s not going to borrow out the
Blue Moon
. That’s a special boat. All the bells and whistles. I went on board once. He’s got a marble bathroom. He’s not lending her out.’

‘Well, you lent Don our lawnmower. And the Jeep, last Christmas,’ said Carol, hands on hips. ‘You lent him your Jeep when he had trouble with his four-wheel drive, remember?’

‘The
Blue Moon
isn’t a lawnmower.’

‘You should ask him,’ said Colin. ‘Tell him you’ve got a new client, you need a bigger boat. Offer him a grand … I’m telling you, you’d be mad to knock it back.’

‘I can’t ask,’ Trevor said, ‘he’s going to think I’m off my trolley. Ten thousand dollars for four days. He’ll think I’m running drugs.’

‘You don’t need to tell him what they’re paying. You tell him you’ve got a bigger group. Four people. Your boat can’t handle it. He knows that. He won’t mind.’

Trevor ran a sun-damaged hand over his sun-damaged head.

‘Jesus,’ he said, ‘alright. I suppose I could ask.’ And so he did, and Don Scott, remembering how good Trevor had been about the Jeep, had said yes, okay, alright, and so Colin wrote back to Robert in New York, saying, ‘We can confirm that our luxury cruiser, the
Blue Moon
, is available in the week before the New Year.’

‘I’m not going to believe it’s happening,’ said Carol, hovering over his shoulder, ‘until I see the money.’

‘Show me the money!’ hollered Trevor, in the way of that character from the movie.

‘You’ll get your money,’ said Colin. ‘Just watch, in the next day or so, you’ll get another email with his confirmation.’

Carol was so anxious she instructed Trevor to sleep on a camp cot in the shop, in case the email went off in the middle of the night and they missed it.

‘Sleep with one eye open,’ she said. ‘When you hear the ping, come and get me. Don’t try to open it. You’ll end up deleting it. Call me and I’ll come down.’

‘You don’t have to do that,’ said Colin. ‘Emails don’t disappear just because you’re in bed.’ But Carol was worried, and Trevor knew her well enough not to argue. He put up the camp cot, and Carol went upstairs to sleep and, just as she’d predicted, the email did go off in the middle of the night, and Trevor dutifully rolled from the cot onto his knees and started to shout up the stairs, ‘Carol! It’s the computer! It’s saying we’ve got one of those E-Mails … Carol?!’

Carol came down in her nightie, hair loose around her shoulders.

‘Let me see,’ she said, pulling back a chair. She jiggled the mouse, saying, ‘Come on, you little mongrel.’

‘Is it them?’

‘Let me read.’ She clicked and frowned and studied the screen, and then her two hands became fists.

‘It looks like Colin’s done it!’ she said. ‘This E-Mail here, it’s from that same Robert in New York. They’ve confirmed.
They’re coming. Can you believe it? They must have money to burn.’

‘Far out!’ Trevor punched the air.

‘He’s saying he wants our details,’ said Carol. ‘He can make the deposit into our business account this afternoon. It must be daytime over there.’

‘Don’t give him the bank account. Remember what Colin said. Tell them we’ll only take a cheque.’

‘I don’t need you telling me how to do the accounts, Trevor,’ said Carol. She got Colin to ask for a cheque, and only when it was banked and cleared did they go out to celebrate on the edge of the timber pier, with a bucket of plasticky prawns, and cups of Moselle squeezed from a cask.

‘You know they’re going to want the works,’ said Colin. ‘No cutting corners, not for ten grand.’

‘Well, we’ve got the
Blue Moon
,’ said Trevor, ‘what else could they want?’ He was shelling prawns into newspaper, and lowering them into his open mouth by the tails.

‘Well, let’s start with those prawns,’ snapped Carol. ‘You didn’t take out the shit, did you? You left the shit in the prawn. You won’t be able to do that on the
Blue Moon
. You’re going to have to do it right.’

‘It’s not poo! It’s sand and muck,’ said Trevor, but Carol said, ‘It’s disgusting how you eat it. And Colin’s right. You’re going to need proper help on this trip. Somebody to do the dishes. Somebody to make the toast in the morning and a cup of tea, and clear out the beer bottles. That’s all going to have to be included.’

‘Yeah, well, I already know a girl,’ Trevor said, and the girl he had in mind was Caitlin.

‘But you can’t waltz into the Merchant and offer their bargirl a job,’ said Carol. ‘You know how hard it is to get people. You can’t just pinch other people’s staff.’

‘I’m not going to pinch her,’ Trevor said. ‘It’s only a few days we need her for.’

‘It’s a busy time, though,’ said Carol, ‘between Christmas and New Year, and this year especially.’

‘Yeah, but she’ll be back for New Year’s Eve,’ said Trevor, ‘and that’s all the boss at the Merchant will care about. I’ll go down there tonight and ask her.’

And so he had.

‘We’ll be on the water for four days,’ he told Caitlin. ‘I’m okay to steer but I’ll need somebody to help out. You can cook some fish, make some salads, can’t you? Clean up the cabins, make the beds and stuff like that. They’re paying a pretty penny and I mean that literally.’

He didn’t mean it literally.

‘It won’t be all day every day,’ Trevor added. ‘We’ll come in at night so they can try a few of the counter meals, even here if you want. It’s easy money for you. And the boat’s beautiful.’

‘Your boat is not beautiful, Trevor,’ Caitlin said. ‘It’s an old fishing trawler you’ve painted blue.’

‘But it’s not my boat we’re taking. I’ve got
Blue Moon
, borrowed from Don Scott. It’s a classy trip we’re doing. So, what do you say? Yes or no?’

‘Oh, I don’t know, Trevor. What’s the wage?’ Caitlin was folding and unfolding the cleaning rag, uncertain about what to do. Trevor was doing his best to keep his gaze above the frilled apron over her breasts.

‘Five hundred dollars,’ he said. ‘Plus you can keep whatever you make in tips. And look, it’s better than working here. No skimpy! And they sound like nice blokes. Good fun. The one who made the booking, Robert, I take it he’s the ringleader. The last E-Mail we got – it’s all been done on the E-Mail – it was all about meeting Aussie sheilas while they’re here.’