The Bay (5 page)

‘The markets! You mean buy back stuff that belongs to me? I should get the police. They're selling stolen property.' Holly's voice was rising and Andrew decided to take a walk around the grounds. He didn't want to know about bloody china and old chairs.

‘I wouldn't do that, it's a small community. You're a newcomer and if you want to start a business you'll need the locals on side,' said Trudy.

Holly was getting the picture. ‘Okay, where are the markets?'

‘Let's see, the first Sunday of the month, that'd be Brigalow markets. They rotate around the district every Sunday. Briggy is a big one. In the footy field as you go into the village. Yep, sure to find some of the gear on their stall.' Trudy felt she was being more than helpful.

‘We're talking large household items and lots of them,' said Holly through gritted teeth. ‘Markets tend to be fruit and vegies, knick-knacks. I mean, what sort of a market is this?'

‘You have a lot to learn about the area. Do yourself a favour and check it out. Stolle and Lynn are reasonable people. Listen, I have to go now.'

Trudy had initially been so helpful, especially when Andrew had stepped in and handled all the paperwork for the purchase. He probably hadn't insisted on keeping the contents. Holly wished she'd followed the contractual dealings more carefully. But she wasn't going to make a scene over it.

Andrew was reluctant to leave the waves at Tiny Bay. It was a glorious sparkling morning, the water was refreshing, dolphins were cruising past the breakers and the waves were great for bodysurfing. He was just starting to feel alive. It had been a dreadful night, sleeping on a futon on the floor of the main bedroom, being eaten alive by mosquitoes, kept awake by the croaking of cane toads and the sound of possums or rats in the roof. What a disaster the place was. Give him the sculptured clean lines of modern architecture and minimalist decor any day. Holly loved clutter, bits of this and bits of that, flowers in jugs on every surface vying with photographs and old books. She said she was sentimental. Andrew thought she was a pack rat. Well, she could fill this old joint with all the junk she wanted, he wasn't going to live in it. Nor was anyone for some time to come; it needed a complete overhaul. Or better still, pull it down and put something contemporary on the site. It was a great location, but heritage laws and council regulations were a major irritant.

He rolled onto his back, bobbing in the water, and gazed up at the rambling house almost hidden among the palms and wattle trees on the headland above the beach. Holly would be doing it piecemeal, she didn't have the funds to rip the guts out of the place and rebuild, and she had this idea in her head of reclaiming its past glory. He wasn't going to be involved in its future. It was bad enough that he had to get out of the surf and drive her to some damned market out in the hills to look for the house contents. And it was not even eight in the morning.

‘We have to be there early. This kind of stuff gets snapped up quickly by the professionals,' Holly said as she tried to follow their route on the basic map she'd picked up at the garage.

‘You don't even know if it's going to be there. Sounds a long shot to me. God, these roads are shocking.'

‘That's why I have a four-wheel drive,' said Holly in some delight. She'd always laughed at her friends who drove around Sydney in immaculate tank-like four-wheel drives to collect the kids from school and fight for slots in the supermarket carpark. Now she had a legitimate reason to own a practical and reliable vehicle and had bought herself a Forester. Andrew thought it a great car and was impressed that she'd made the decision on her own. As they hit another pothole he was glad they hadn't driven the BMW.

‘How much further? We're in the middle of nowhere, for God's sake, and we've been driving for forty-five minutes,' he muttered.

‘I'm not sure, this is only a tourist guide not a proper map.' She turned the brochure upside down.

Andrew sighed. He should have known better than to ask. Holly was hopeless at directions. ‘How the heck are you going to find your way around when I'm not here?'

‘Get lost a few times, I suppose. I feel happier on these back roads than on the freeways and traffic in the city,' she said cheerfully.

Again she surprised him. She hated driving, her biggest dream had been to have a chauffeur. Or unlimited taxi dockets. ‘Then why aren't you driving and leaving me to surf?'

‘Because this sounds fun. And I might need help bargaining over our stuff.'

‘My famed negotiating skills to the rescue, eh?' Holly was right, he wouldn't take any nonsense from a couple of down and outs scrounging for other people's possessions to flog in a market. Druggies probably.

‘There's the turn-off. See the sign, “Market Today”. Oh, Andrew, look, they must be going there too.' Holly craned forward as they caught up with a string of vehicles meandering down the twisting road. They followed gaily painted Kombi vans, trucks piled high with all manner of things tied under billowing rugs, and immediately in front of them was a lorry overflowing with pot plants and tubs of trees. From the cabin flew a large green flag but Holly couldn't make out the writing on it.

The convoy wound along the gravel road and below them they could see the broad expanse of the football field. Cars ringed the white fence while in the centre the grass was smothered with circles of small camps. Stalls and tents and open-air displays all sat cheek by jowl. At one end was a row of mini caravans with umbrellas and tables and chairs set up outside each one and big illustrated boards advertising food and drinks for sale.

‘It looks like a massive gypsy camp,' Andrew exclaimed. ‘There must be several hundred sellers there.'

‘Judging by the cars and stream of people going in we're not too early, either.'

‘How are we going to find your people in all that?'

‘We'll just have to look at everything. We'll do it in a sequence.'

As they got closer Andrew began to study the people walking along the roadside to the main entrance. They all looked like they were going to a fancy dress party. Men wore multi-coloured leggings, tie-dyed shirts, painted T-shirts, Indian-style pants and long flowing shirts. Both men and women wore feathers or decorations, many had dreadlocks and beads or shaved heads like runaway monks. Children skipped along in strange outfits, but it seemed that more than the kids it was the adults who were wearing such magical accessories as crowns and fairy wings.

‘This is a bloody circus. I'm not getting into this. They all look filthy.'

‘They all look happy, like they're having a good time,' Holly said. ‘It's a party.'

‘A hippy dippy madhouse,' muttered Andrew as he slowed the car to walking pace while people meandered among the cars queuing to get in. ‘Are those people charging money for parking? What the hell, this is outrageous.'

A girl in a sparkly Indian outfit and a man in bright pink pants tucked into gumboots, a pink shirt with lots of bead necklaces and a battered Akubra hat over shoulder-length hair, waved a plastic bucket. Andrew pressed the button and his window glided down. Before he could speak Holly leaned across him. ‘How much?'

‘Two dollars. Dollar for parking, dollar for the charity of the day.'

‘And what might that be?' asked Andrew with an edge to his voice. He was thinking Protecta-Plantation, or bail for some dealer, maybe save the tree huggers.

‘Helicopter Rescue Service. We need a chopper for this part of the coast. Good men can't fly without machines, right?'

‘Don't they have helicopters to patrol the coast?' Holly asked, somewhat alarmed.

‘The men in blue have something of a flying wreck. We need to be able to pull people out of the sea, that kind of thing. You look like a surfer, you know what it's like, eh?' He gave Andrew a wonderful smile and Holly realised the pink man had a hint of shrewdness behind the grin.

‘Yeah, yeah.' Andrew fumbled and pulled five dollars from his wallet and dropped it in the bucket.

‘Good one, man. Round to the right. Have a cool day.'

Holly glanced at Andrew in his board shorts, T-shirt and tanned face. ‘There, isn't it nice to be recognised as a surfie and not a city slicker?'

They parked on the grass at the edge of an adjoining paddock, locked the car and followed others across to the centre of the field. There was a definite order to the snail coils of stalls. Holly stood beneath some bamboo poles strung with long, coloured triangular silk flags and huge painted three-dimensional stars. ‘Left or right? Food that way, crafty things that way. What do you think?'

‘Clockwise. Just get on with it. We don't want food, walking this way could take ages, everyone is wandering like Brown's cows and it's going to get damn hot.'

‘Told you to bring a hat.' Holly jammed down her own hat. It was a chic lady's panama from Sydney and she felt it looked very out of place.

They began walking past the rows of stalls that lined the path. Andrew kept striding ahead paying little attention as Holly hung back, fascinated by all there was for sale. He was feeling uncomfortable. These people unnerved him, and someone was always bumping into him. Why didn't they walk on the same side? Everyone was smiling, stopping to hug and chat. Even men hugged each other. He supposed they only came out of the hills every so often. Kids were scampering everywhere and it was mostly fathers who were carrying babies in backpacks and cloth slings as women congregated in clusters like chattering birds. Andrew was hot and while he could see the appeal of the market, they had come for a reason. He hoped the old furniture and junk – if they found it – was worth all this.

Holly's fury at the loss of the house contents seemed to have dissipated with her enthralment at the markets. She was hovering at another stall. It sold hand-made cosmetics and Holly was opening jars and rubbing lotion on her hands and exclaiming in delight. The stallholder, an attractive young woman with auburn hair and flawless skin, explained to her, ‘These products are all made with natural ingredients – you can even eat them. I have done a lot of research with a pharmacist friend into retail cosmetics and you'd be horrified if you knew what they were made of.'

Holly had looked at similar products when shopping in the city, tried a couple of them once but didn't persist and eventually threw them out on the grounds that they were beyond their use-by date. Up here, though, the products seemed to demand more serious consideration. Why was this? Holly wondered.

‘They really work?' she asked, as if struggling for an opening line.

The woman smiled. ‘Of course. It's the only way to stay in business, particularly up here.'

‘You study botany at uni?' Andrew asked, barely masking his scepticism.

‘Nope. But I've got a couple of friends clued up on all of that. As I mentioned, one's a pharmacist and she's brilliant at analysing what's in some of the big name commercial products. Horrifying stuff really. And then there's a mate who's a botanist. Spends most of his time hunting around the forests here trying to find something new in the way of herbs and other plants. He reckons we are only just beginning to learn the value of plants for health and beauty. He's been given a grant by the uni here.'

‘First steps in a long journey,' commented Andrew as he sniffed a bottle of tea tree oil-based aftershave lotion.

‘Hey, you're talking like a local,' laughed the girl.

Andrew grimaced. ‘The labelling isn't very good,' he said in a bid to regain the high ground.

‘Prefer to put the money into the contents,' she responded a little sharply.

Holly stepped in to the conversation. ‘I'll take these, thanks,' and handed over several jars and a bottle. ‘Are you at all the markets?'

‘Every Sunday, just like a churchgoer. I've moved back from Sydney and one day I'd like to open a shop, but for the time being it's strictly only on Sunday.' She reached into a bag. ‘Here's my card. And a sheet you can fill in, personal details, and then I can make up things specially for your skin.'

‘Thanks a lot. I'll give it some thought,' said Holly glancing at the card. ‘Oh, that's a lovely name – Amber. You said you've just come back, so I assume this is home.'

The girl's expression faded for a moment then she forced back the bright smile. ‘Yes. Born here, but had to go south to the big smoke just to see what it's like; now I'm back for good. I'm working at it, damned hard. As you probably know, this area is at the cutting edge of holistic health and lifestyle changes. Not to mention all the other things that ruffle the conservative traditionalists.' She grinned, giving Andrew a sideways glance. ‘This is the place to start a business that is grounded in a caring belief system.'

‘That's nice to hear. Good luck, Amber, I'll let you know how I find these,' said Holly.

‘Please do,' she said before turning to serve another customer.

‘Idealism of youth,' said Andrew with a slight smirk. ‘She'd go broke in a proper shop in a month.'

As they turned into the next avenue of stalls, Holly stopped and dug her elbow into Andrew's ribs. ‘Look there.'

At the end of the row a man was sitting in a polished wooden squatter's chair under a fringed Indonesian paper umbrella, his legs slung over the arms, an embroidered footstool and coal shuttle beside him. Three card tables were covered with an assortment of crockery, ornaments and silverware. On an old Persian rug on the ground were piled lace doilies, crochet rugs and damask cloths, cushions and patchwork quilts. Several paintings and prints of old boats were stacked against one of the tables. A tall thin woman wearing a top made of what was once a brocade curtain over a silver and red Indian sari skirt was showing a couple a large silver teapot.

Holly rushed forward. ‘Excuse me,' she said and she tugged at the teapot. ‘I believe that came from Richmond House. It belongs to me.' She turned to the suburban looking couple who were dressed in unflattering baggy shorts and golf shirts. ‘It's not for sale, I'm sorry.'