The Briny Café
Authors: Susan Duncan
EttieBrookbank is the heart and soul of Cook's Basin, a sleepy cluster of dazzling blue bays where the only way home is by boat.
However, as idyllic as her surroundings are, she is all too aware of the years slipping by without note.
While her good friend Sam, an offshorer born and bred, steadfastly guards the tranquillity of Cook's Basin life, Ettie yearns for excitement, a challenge, the chance to live dangerously while her blood still runs hot. But she gave up believing in dreams long ago.
Then fate offers her a lifeline â the chance to breathe new life into a beloved local landmark.
Ettie's salvation, it seems, is a lopsided little café on the water's edge â¦
Brimming with warmth and wit, Susan Duncan's first novel is a delicious tale of friendship and love, and the search for a place to call home.
âA delightful, refreshing read' Cheryl Akle,
The Circle
âSusan Duncan has the elusive gift of being able to write in a warm and instantly engaging manner'
Saturday Age
For Bob
Not long after schoolkids have rampaged through The Briny Café like a flock of hungry seagulls, Ettie Brookbank sits down, with a heavy sigh, at one of the scarred picnic tables in the Square outside. She's just returned from cleaning a house so filthy she'd seriously considered putting a match to it. She'd found used condoms at the bottom of a bed, a bathroom full of bloody tissues, and a kitchen strewn with dirty dishes and cooking pots burned beyond redemption. The house had always been a tip but this was a new low. To top it all off, the owner, a divorced mother of three, had forgotten to leave out her pay, which meant Ettie would have to waste time chasing up the money and put off grocery shopping for a couple of days.
For a while she'd put aside her anger, telling herself she was lightening the load for a woman raising her children alone. Then she'd stopped vacuuming mid-stream.
“Ah sod it,” she'd thought. “I'm out of here.”
The sun is now low in the sky as the steady pulse of Cook's Basin beats around her. In this sleepy offshore community there are no roads or bridges, no cars, trains, no buses or even bicycles. Just a cluster of dazzling blue bays with
mouth-watering names: Oyster, Kingfish, Blue Swimmer.
For once, the beauty of her surroundings fails to soothe her and Ettie feels worn out and anxious. Every time she looks into the future, all she sees are her options fast running out. She flexes her arm muscles. She is strong. Her blood still runs hot. She considers her nest egg sitting tidily in the bank. The stash her mother left her wasn't much but she's never, ever touched it. The numbers, five of them now, are fat with comfort and mean she can make choices. She reckons that's about as close to freedom as most people ever get.
She could buy a ticket to Paris, find a tiny atelier to live in and get a job in a pâtisserie. Learn to bake meltingly light croissants. Stir crème anglaise dotted with vanilla seeds and rich with egg yolks that hint at decadence but feel light on the tongue. On her summer holidays, she could hitchhike from Paris to southwest France to make the 800-kilometre pilgrimage along the Compostelle de St Jacques.
First, all you can think about are the blisters on your feet. Next, you ditch everything from your backpack except a clean pair of knickers and your toothbrush. Finally, the rocks begin to sing to you.
She wants to hear rocks singing, she wants to burn bridges, shout from mountain tops. She wants to lie on a remote, sunstruck island dotted with whitewashed houses in fields smelling sweetly of thyme, oregano and rosemary. She wants a man twenty years her junior to read to her from
The Iliad
in between afternoons of wild or â even better â languid sex. She yearns to drink absinthe and live every moment like it is her last. The years are being swallowed so fast, she thinks, how long before it is too late â¦?
She tells herself there is no reason she can't do any of
this. Except that she is afraid. What would she become, she wonders, without her allegiances to friends, the Cook's Basin community and the landscape she loves so much? A drifter without purpose. Skimming, floating, flailing above the surface. Hardly even there. She is fifty-five years old. Her youth was so long ago she barely remembers it. Her future, if she is lucky enough to escape illness or accident, is old age. Nothing can change that simple fact. She is also painfully aware she doesn't have it in her to live dangerously.
Ettie resides in a rented timber cottage at the top of the gut-busting steep side of Cutter Island, which rears out of the sea at the mouth of the bays like an upended ice-cream cone. Every day, as she tackles the two hundred steps to her home, she tries not to resent the triple-decker waterfront houses with foldaway glass walls and private jetties. The ritzy boatsheds kitted out with soft white sofas, draped fishing nets and an extra fridge to take care of the booze in the summer holidays. The sleek commuter boats with powerful growling engines and taut biminies to keep the rain off. And truthfully, she doesn't begrudge anyone good fortune. It's just that sometimes she's completely frazzled and doesn't know where she's going to find the stamina to lug her shopping from way down at the silvery public wharf to way up to her sky-blue door. She sighs. Ah well. Clogs to clogs in three generations, isn't that the old saying? No one gets a free run from beginning to end. Not in her experience, anyway.
In the last light of day, she secures her dinghy and hoists her groceries over three equally tippy boats to reach the jetty. The light is on in the ritzy boatshed when she walks past. She sees a small group of kids standing in a circle, their backs to
the outside world. Holiday-makers, she figures. She'd recognise the outline of most of the Island kids like the markings on a dog. There is no sign of the new owner, a sleazy bloke with rubbery lips and granite eyes. He must have handed over the house for a weekend party.
The rain that's been holding off all afternoon suddenly comes down like a grey wall. She squares her shoulders and takes off, the shopping whacking against her legs like a constant reminder that she's too old and it's all too hard. Halfway up, she's soaking wet and every breath feels like a hot blade. She doubles over with a stitch. How long does she think she can keep this up, for God's sake? She flexes her fingers to restore circulation as rain runs down her neck to the hollow of her back. Her clothes stick to her body like a second skin. Her shoes squelch. She has to remind herself once again that many women her age, without steps to keep them fit and healthy, wouldn't make it even halfway. She blames her breathlessness on the extra supplies she's carrying to whip up a “Welcome to the Foreshores” dinner for the skinny little woman who has just bought the rundown old house in Oyster Bay.
“Hey, Ettie, need a hand?” Without waiting for an answer, Jimmy, an Island kid who favours clothes as iridescent as his carrot-coloured hair, grabs her bags.
“How're you doing, Jimmy? You managing with your mum away?”
He cracks an ear-splitting grin and jiggles the shopping from one hand to the other, his wet synthetic singlet sticking to his boyish chest. His feet are never still â like a sprinter warming up before a race. “I'm nearly eighteen, Ettie. I'm grown, aren't I?”
“I'm always here if you need anything. Just until your mum comes home.” But her words are lost. The kid, who lives in a harmless world that bamboozles strangers, is a disappearing streak of red and yellow already nearly at the top of the steps.
Oh for that energy, she thinks, bracing for the last dash.
She reaches her front door with a groan of relief. Her shopping is piled in a corner out of the rain and she shouts out a “Thank you”, not sure if he will hear. She kicks off her wet shoes and dumps the dripping groceries on the kitchen bench, massaging the kinks in her neck. Not bothering to towel dry, she grabs a bottle of wine from the fridge and fills a glass to the brim, swallowing a good inch straight off. It slides down her throat like liquid gold. Better than sex, she'd joked out loud to friends the other day, feeling slightly winded when she'd realised she meant it. Relaxing now, she separates her mail from the groceries and drops it on the table. Probably all bills, anyway.
She steps into a pair of pyjamas and slips her arms into the sleeves of an old plaid dressing-gown that once belonged to her mother. Like an old spinster with no one to please, she thinks, looking around for her glass.
The wine spreads warmly, seductively, from her stomach to her limbs, smoothing, blurring the edges, sharpening her appetite. She decides on a slab of strong, crumbly Cheddar from the colder regions of Tasmania, a few slices of hot Spanish salami cut so finely they're transparent. A handful of salty black Ligurian olives which she arranges in a white bowl. She sets the food on a chopping board like the artist she is â although her name on the cover of three children's books and a few dozen canvases hanging on the walls of Cook's
Basin homes hardly adds up to a stellar career. Without the regular cleaning jobs that paid the rent, she'd be out on the street. A slight exaggeration, perhaps, but uncomfortably close enough to the truth.
She adds half a sourdough baguette and a bone-handled knife. At the last minute, she snips a small bunch of grapes and fills an empty spot on the board. It is a still life waiting to be painted.
Her wineglass topped up again â what the hell, she thinks, it's Friday â she flicks on the television and tunes in to a current affairs show where a whining bad luck story is being flogged into resembling serious news. So she takes her dinner onto the rain-sodden deck to watch the storm move out to sea instead. The air smells like gunpowder.
Alone again
, she thinks, the Willie Nelson tune looping in her head. She sculls the wine, overwhelmed by a dangerous yearning to feel the warm hand of a lover.
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Sam Scully, a big man with hands like plates and shoulders so wide he has to twist slightly to get through doorways, slips his mooring in the dead of a night washed clean by the storm. He is amazed, as he always is, by the suddenness of the calm. In less than fifteen minutes, the lightning that turned the landscape a ghostly shade of blue has pranced off to sizzle and crack over the open sea.
Despite his steel-capped workboots, he makes his way almost soundlessly along the timber deck of his barge to the roomy cabin he uses as an office and, occasionally, a dosshouse. He hooks his index finger around the helm and
spins it 360 degrees with a feather touch. He looks back to make sure he is clear of the buoy rope. Satisfied, he moves the throttle forward. Under his feet the engine thrums. The
Mary Kay
, his treasured canary-yellow barge, glides across water as smooth and dark as chocolate. Moonlight filters through the fleeing rainclouds, enough to find his way without the risk of ramming a million-dollar yacht or one of the many anonymous wrecks, engraved with the scars of their neglect, that litter the waterways.
He heads for Cargo Wharf to pick up a load of timber for delivery to the old house that Ettie tells him has been bought by some city mug for a knockdown price. Well, he thinks, the south-facing shore of Oyster Bay isn't called the dark side for nothing and a wood duck's born every minute.
At the peak of Cutter Island, he notices a couple of lights. He figures Ettie's awake and worrying as usual when there's no need. Community looks after its own if they earn it, and Ettie, who keeps an eye on every waif that comes or goes, has the runs on the board. A pot of soup or, if it's a fundraiser, one of her magical watercolours showing moody Cook's Basin moments.
Auction or price tag, whatever you think will bring the most
, she told him when old Pete the Dutchman died and there wasn't enough money in the family kitty to bury him. Sam was fully aware she'd have to cut back on the wine for a week or two to cover the cost of the frame. She was a giver who stood out in a community of givers.
A few minutes later he feels a shift in the damp night air as he sidles into the wharf, smelling more land than sea in it now. He's judged the tide perfectly. It's as high as it's going to get. If he wanted to, he could tap-dance from the barge
to the dock without missing a beat. He's tickled by the idea. Humming tunelessly, his plain face split by a grin, he does a funny little soft-shoe shuffle in his clod-hopper boots to make the point, then gets down to the hard slog of barge work.
Onshore, he binds a pallet of timber in three strong canvas slings. Then back on the boat, he squats on an upturned milk crate to operate a crane that stretches skywards from the deck like a broken beak. Sliding the gearstick a millimetre at a time, he lowers the swaying hook until it is over the centre of the pallets. He jumps onshore again, clips the slings to the hook, tugs twice to make sure it holds, then returns to his milk crate to swing the timber aboard. He repeats the process with four pallets, spreading the weight evenly to keep the barge balanced. When it's all done, he tidies up and goes inside the cabin.
As he reaches for the nav light, he hears a low purr coming from the roadway. He can barely make out the shape of a car cruising in to park at Commuter Dock. He's immediately suspicious. No headlights. Dodgy as. He checks the time and decides to wait awhile. Just when he's convinced it's a drunk planning to sleep off the party before he faces his irate wife, he sees two blokes get out, closing the doors quietly behind them. A match flares and a flicker of light bounces off a shiny head. He hears another sound now. Oars scraping inside metal rowlocks. A rowboat drifts against the seawall next to the car. He catches the sound of murmuring that carries across the still water, but he can't make out the words.
Stupid bastards, he mutters. It's the stealth that gives them away. If they pitched up on a sunny day with an Esky, we'd all crack a smile and wave them off without a clue what was
going on. He plays with the idea of sounding his horn for the simple pleasure of frightening the shit out of them but it makes more sense to see where the rowboat is headed.
He waits for the car to crawl away in darkness and gives the rower time to get well ahead. The tide is dropping. He reckons he has an hour before the water is too shallow for him to ease the barge close enough to the seawall in Oyster Bay to safely unload the city mug's cargo. Plenty of time to follow the rowboat.
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Outside, in the cool night air, raindrops fringe the edges of her round table. Ettie picks up an olive, a little cheese, popping them into her mouth one after the other. Next, she breaks off a piece of chewy white bread, adds some salami and takes a bite. Back to the cheese again. Like a merry-go-round of taste and texture.
Even though she's old enough to know that playing
what ifs
is a loser's game, she wonders, for the millionth time, if things might have panned out differently had her mother lived a decently long life. Forty-odd years ago not many women were aware that a lump the size of a pea had the power to kill. Her mother just thought it would eventually disappear, like most bumps and lumps. By the time it was the size of an acorn it was too late for anything. Her mother retreated to her bedroom. Her father retreated into himself. Ettie retreated to the kitchen and taught herself to cook little dishes of nursery food she thought her mother might find tempting enough to at least try to eat.