The Briny Café (12 page)

Kate jumps up and opens the door before she realises who it is. She goes beetroot-red and stands stiffly aside to let him in.

“Still here, are you?” he says.

“Yeah. Sorting the final details before making an appointment with the bank manager. I'm in.” The words are out of her mouth before she knows it. She turns to Ettie: “What time do we start tomorrow?”

Ettie pulls her head out of the fridge, not sure she's heard correctly. “Eh? What did you say?”

“I'm in.”

With a whoop, Ettie jumps up. She dumps her dishcloth, rips off her polka-dot headscarf and throws it in the air. Breathless, she triumphantly withdraws a bottle of champagne from the fridge. “Ta da!”

“Pretty sure of yourself, weren't you?” Kate smiles, but her voice is shaky and her heart beats faster.

Ettie turns serious. “You're not a fool, Kate.”

“No doubts that we can do it?” Kate asks.

“None. Not about the business. Not about you as a partner. This is the opportunity of a lifetime for both of us. If we let it go, we'll spend our old age asking ourselves
what if.
Trust me, a cupboard full of
what ifs
is no comfort in the dead of night.”

She pops the cork and pours the pale fizz into three chipped water glasses. They stand in a circle, sombre, marking the moment with a clink. Sam sculls. Ettie too. Kate takes a small sip. The two women grin and Sam forces a smile.

Outside, the water shines like a jewel in the rich afternoon light. Red. Yellow. Orange. Blue. Green. Two hoots blast in quick succession. Loiterers make a dash for the back deck of the
Seagull.
Dust motes play in a pool of sunshine pouring through the door. For a delirious moment, Ettie wonders if an angel is about to land in their midst.

The Briny Café seems to lift her worn and shabby shoulders, raise her head and shrug off decades of slough, while the two women whose hearts are reeling with hope, joy and plain old fear, try not to get teary.

 

When the champagne is finished and a jet-lagged Kate looks ready to wilt, Sam plonks his glass on the counter. He gives Ettie a scratchy kiss and turns to the weary traveller: “C'mon, I'll take you home in style on the beautiful
Mary Kay.
Kings used to travel by barge, y'know. It's God's own transport.
And I've gotta go that way anyway.” He looks back at Ettie. “Will you make it to the fireshed for the residents' meeting tomorrow night?”

“God, is it the last Thursday of the month already? Yeah. I'll be there. Who's cooking?”

“That new chef in Kingfish Bay. Used to be someone big in town, so I hear. He's making slow-baked whole ocean trout with some kind of green sauce. Anchovies and a heap of herbs. The anchovies might be a bit of a worry.”

“Classic salsa verde. Very trendy.”

“Yeah. I was going to suggest him as a possible —” He stops.

“Possible what?”

“Ah, consultant. Just till you both find your feet. No need, probably. You girls'll cream it. Right, let's go.” He reaches for Kate's bags, grabs her elbow and pushes her out the door in a rush.

“So what made you change your mind?” he asks bluntly when they're underway.

Kate gets up from the banquette where she was about to doze off. “Do you care?”

“I care about Ettie, so I want to know you're in for the long haul, not just fluffing around until something better comes along.”

“Whoa! Don't hold back. Christ, I can't win with you, can I? One minute you're berating me for not taking Ettie up on her offer, and now that I've said yes you're still having a go.”

He turns to face her. “I'm just saying that if you let Ettie down, the locals will all come after you with hatchets. When you walk through the Spit we'll turn our backs. When you
get stuck in a storm, not even the Misses Skettle, who have hearts of gold, will raise the alarm. Put one foot wrong, and I kid you not you'll be right back at the starting line that the confidence Ettie's placed in you has just pushed you over. Around here, you earn your place in the community. It isn't handed to you willy-nilly.”

“Finished?”

“Just so you know. Wouldn't want you to be under any misapprehensions.”

“It's clear as daylight. My turn now? You're like something out of the dark ages,” she says, coldly. “A tragic figure clinging to an era that's been dead for nearly half a century. You want to get out a bit more and see what the real world's all about. Some of us from
the other side
actually have our own set of morals and ethics and try to live decent lives. We're not all numbskulls, either.”

“If it's that good over there, mate, what are you doing here?”

“Cut the
mate
crap, okay? It's starting to wear thin.”

They motor along the broken shoreline in a silent, angry fug. Before the barge has slowed to a standstill, Kate jumps off at her pontoon.

“You want these bags or aren't they any good to you any more?” Sam calls after her.

She stomps back and snatches them out of his hands.

The mutt leans against his leg and dribbles on his boot. The good thing about dogs, he thinks, heading for home, is they never turn on you and bite your backside like people.

On Thursday morning, when the air is so still the kayakers are out on the water in colourful packs, Ettie hears a boat whack into the fragile café pontoon with a heart-stopping crunch. She rushes out, hair and apron flying, terrified someone's been hurt. At the top of the crooked timber ramp with too many missing planks to satisfy even the vaguest safety standards, she looks down at a tinny locked in a frantic struggle to dock. She lets out a belly laugh and wanders down to help, positioning herself on the end of the pontoon that hasn't yet sunk.

“Start again from out wide and take it really slowly,” she calls out to her new partner.

Kate wrenches the steering wheel, throttles too far forward and the tinny roars straight at the shore. She jerks the lever backwards and the boat stalls to a sudden stop. She falls sideways, banging her head.

“Slowly,” Ettie calls again, still laughing. “Gentle on the throttle.”

Kate restarts the engine and does a snail-pace 360-degree circle that gives her a long, straight approach. But she misjudges the width of the boat and is still too far out to reach the cleat to tie on.

“Throw me a rope,” Ettie calls, “I'll drag you in.”

“God, how hard is all that?” Kate moans when she's finally ashore.

“Wait until it blows like stink. Then you'll find out how good you are.”

“We need to put up an off-limits sign on the pontoon,” Kate says, thinking of lawsuits.

“No point. Boaties are notorious rule-flouters. Sam's working on a plan, though.”

They walk through the decrepit tables and chairs. Ettie, pink-faced and smiley, solid in her large white apron, rubber-soled shoes. Kate, slight and serious, neat in blue jeans, a navy T-shirt. A small, dark wraith.

“How about a coffee? On the house.” Ettie slips an arm around Kate's waist and guides her inside the café. Her dawn baking is already on display. “Hope you had a good think last night. It's still not too late to back out.”

“What about you? No second thoughts about taking on an ex-journo with a history of itchy feet and burnt toast?”

“No doubts here.”

“Then I'm in. Full partner. If you're sure.”

Ettie is serious. “Never been surer of anything.”

There is a knock. Light. As if someone doesn't want to intrude on a private moment. The two women turn towards the doorway. Fast Freddy peers through the plastic ribbons, his blue eyes like glass balls in his face.

“You finished havin' a sob in there? Or whatever? Can a poor tired old fella get a heart-starter at the end of a long night?”

“Yeah, Freddy,” Ettie says, laughing. “I'd give you a bacon and egg roll too, love, except we're not officially open yet, and Bertie's leftovers are definitely suss.”

“Just the coffee, Ettie. That'd be good as gold. Prefer to leave pigs in the paddock where they're happiest anyway.”

“Busy out on the water last night?” Ettie jams ground coffee beans into a dripper, fills a steel jug with milk and hooks a thermometer on the side. She turns a black knob fast and hard. The milk froths with a gentle roar.

“No more than usual. Got stiffed for the fare to the Island. Second time it's happened. Same dead-eyed kids with skin like strawberry jam.” Freddy puts down the pile of newspapers he's carrying and twists to read the headlines upside down.

“Know who the kids belong to?” Ettie places his coffee on the counter with a smile. She's drawn a boat in the froth.

“Nope. Couldn't help wondering what they were doing arriving at that boatshed next to Triangle when it was long after visiting hours, though.”

“Leave 'em behind next time, huh?”

“Not in me nature to leave a bloke stranded, Ettie. You know that. I'll take 'em, but they'll pay upfront.”

“You're a good man, Freddy. I'd be spitting.”

“Well, the way I see it, life's a pond. If you let a passing bow wave knock you over every time it comes along, you'll drown. Better to tread water, till the ripples fade away, or swim under them. You'll live longer. Betcha.”

“You're starting to sound like a Buddhist, Freddy.”

“Those Buddhists got a lot goin' for 'em,” he says, looking at his feet, his neck stained red. He slams his coins on the counter, grabs his coffee and flees.

“Didn't get a chance to tell him it was on the house,” Ettie murmurs. “Right. Ready for work? We start at the top and work down. Every pro cleaner knows it's the only way.”

 

Twenty years of scum is caked into every corner of The Briny Café. A colony of black house spiders resides in the cracks in the ceiling, their webs spun as thickly as fabric. Shelves are covered in half an inch of filth. Nearly everything is outlined with a ribbon of mould.

“You'll find a ladder in the storeroom upstairs amongst a pile of broken tables and chairs,” Ettie says. “Bertie couldn't bear to throw anything out. There's a cracker view from the top deck, though. It'll make you weep. You can see all the way to Cat Island.”

“This is going to sound really dumb, but I didn't know there was more than an attic up there,” Kate says.

“Bertie never used it. He didn't think it was structurally sound.”

“It's not going to come down on our heads or anything, is it?” Kate asks, alarmed.

“No. Nothing like that. Sam says it's solid. Reckons Bertie couldn't be bothered with the stairs so he kept it closed off. Told everyone it was unsafe. He probably said it so often he believed it himself in the end.”

Upstairs, Kate steps into a large room. She finds vintage soft-drink boxes, empty packing cases, cartons of cleaning supplies
and enough cheap napkins and dangerously flimsy cardboard coffee cups to last for ten years. One of Bertie's “bargains”, she thinks. They are now completely unusable. She picks her way through the mess, jiggles a stiff latch on the French doors and steps onto the spongy boards of a broad deck.

And catches her breath.

The sea is awash with diamonds, small clouds whisk across the sky, tinnies fly, gulls soar. Shags, with heads rising from the water like periscopes, dive deep. A fish jumps, then another and another. Underwater, a chase is on. Light flattens from yellow to white. Within the unflinching boundaries of the landscape, nothing is still. She is mesmerised. A plan begins to take shape in her head.

“You okay?” Ettie calls.

“Yeah, yeah, just getting the ladder.” She finds it and bangs downstairs.

 

For the next few hours they toss away sundried tomatoes, capers, anchovies, olives and every other “fancy food” trend that Bertie had tried and failed to embrace. Discard chipped plates, rusted trays, cooking utensils with missing handles and plastic platters, yellow and brittle with age. Ancient cooking pots, still solid and useful, are put aside for scouring. All morning, garbage bags pile up outside the front door until the café is stripped almost bare.

When the shelves are empty, Kate gets a bucket of hot water and a bottle of sugar soap and starts scrubbing. A greasy, evil-smelling concoction of stale fat and dirt lifts in thick globs. The hulls of dead flies and shrivelled spiders float to
the top and quickly the water turns black. But the acrid stink of Bertie's stale coffee fades slowly away.

“Sam give you a hard time when he took you home last night?” Ettie asks with a sidelong glance.

“More or less said I'd be garrotted publicly if I let you down.”

“He's not known for his subtlety. It just takes a while to get to know that his one-liners are his own brand of humour and not to be taken literally.”

“Humour? Is that what you call it? Anywhere else, we'd call it rudeness. Does he dislike all women or just me?”

“Sam? Sam loves women. He nearly married a gorgeous Frenchwoman about ten years ago. He was absolutely wild about her but she didn't want to live here for the rest of her life. When it came to the crunch, he chose the Cook's Basin over love. I've never been sure whether it's the biggest regret or the biggest relief of his life.”

Kate looks at Ettie with a grin on her face. “Can't see Sam hoofing around Paris in his greasy hat and old workboots, can you?”

Ettie laughs. “No, you're right. It never would have worked and he was smart enough to realise it.”

“I just can't work out why he dislikes me so much.”

Ettie comes over and puts an arm around her shoulders. “Oh he likes you, Kate. You can be sure of that.”

“Well, he's got a funny way of showing it.”

Customers come and go buying coffees and cakes until they hang the
Closed
sign at noon. An antique till that rings up pounds, shillings and pence, pings regularly. Ettie spins a spiel about the new ownership while she warms the milk.
Come back next week, she invites, when the new menu will be up and running and the burgers will be made from fresh lamb mince, seared over high heat and dusted with allspice and cinnamon to give them a kick. She'll top them with yoghurt, mint and cucumber, a little tamarind chutney, and she'll lie them elegantly on crisp butter lettuce fanned on toasted Turkish bread because it has more oomph than traditional buns. There'll be a sign chalked on a blackboard in the Square, she adds, when they're fully up and running. Keep an eye out, okay?

Halfway through the afternoon grind the Three Js – Judy, Jane and Jenny – pitch up with buckets and rubber gloves. “Point and we'll scrub,” says Judy. “We've got a few spare hours.” The chat is nonstop. Ideas get tossed, discussed, discarded or written on Ettie's list.

“We could do with some of your special harissa and tamarind chutney,” Ettie says to Jenny. “Be great on the burgers.”

“Maybe, if stocks were guaranteed, we could set up an area to display and sell local produce,” Kate suggests quietly. “Create our own label?”

Jenny looks at Kate thoughtfully. “Fannie has been bored rigid since she retired. She makes a silky smooth pâté from organic chicken livers, bacon and brandy that's wicked. Want me to ask her if she's interested as well?”

Ettie nods. The chat fires up again. No one hears the stealthy arrival of the
Mary Kay.

 

Sam is dressed for hard labour in heavy khaki cotton shorts with a long-sleeve flannel shirt over his blue singlet. A worn
leather tool bag is slung at his waist. He scans the deck, the water. There's no sign of Jimmy. He holds back a sigh and starts stacking tables and chairs in a corner near a couple of dead trees in large terracotta pots. Cigarette butts, some still wearing lipstick, are jammed in the soil. Filthy habit, smoking, he reminds himself, fighting the urge to roll his own.

He yanks down a piece of sagging trellis and chucks it on the growing pile of rubbish from the café. A couple of days ago, the neglect and decrepitude were so familiar he barely noticed it. Today, it's an eyesore. His face softens at the sight of his canary-yellow barge, glittering like a golden slipper at the end of the deck. One day, he thinks, The Briny will be restored to her former glory. He hopes Bertie lives to see it.

On the water, a tinny crashes and bangs, going too fast over a rising chop. He watches the hoon through narrowed eyes. The bow rises, points at a blue sky, then snaps flat on water as hard as glass. Thwack. Thwack.

“Dead meat within the year,” Sam mutters, his brow knotted, then: “Ah bugger. It's Jimmy. That kid's got one speed and it's flat out.” He shakes his head in despair.

Jimmy surfs to a standstill alongside Kate's boat and the huge surge of a following wake splashes alarmingly over the pot-holed pontoon. Sam waits for it to sink but it struggles and rights. The kid rafts up and roars along the ramp in flapping red board shorts covered with yellow lightning strikes that match his top. Arms wave. Legs fly. He's like a firecracker going off in all directions. His hair remains ramrod stiff.

“I'm here, Sam. Just like I said. How's Tilly? She back yet?” He screeches to a halt a handspan short of Sam's nose.

“What did I tell you about turtles and speed, mate? Have a
good think before you say anything because right now I'm so mad I could push you into the water, fancy clothes and all.”

Jimmy's euphoria dissolves. He knuckles his forehead, trying to think where he's gone wrong. His feet tap-dance with worry.

“Ah mate,” Sam says, ditching a long lecture because he's fully aware the kid just plain forgot, “Tilly's not back yet. She's got to have surgery and then … physio. Yeah. Physiotherapy, would you believe it? It'll be a while before she's fit enough to return.”

Realising a tricky moment has passed, Jimmy brightens. “What's she gotta have physio for, Sam?”

“Because she does!” he says, almost losing patience. “Let's go, mate. We've got work to do.”

“What work, Sam? Where do we start? I'm ready, aren't I? Didn't I say so?” Jimmy bounces off the deck rails like they're elastic bands. “What d'ya want me to do, Sam?”

Suppressing a sigh, Sam drapes an arm around Jimmy's gristly neck and scruffs his sticky hair. Then wipes his fingers on his backside, his nose wrinkled in disgust. “Right, mate. Follow me. Good to have you aboard. You got any work clothes with you, or you going to prance around like —” Sam breaks off.

“Like what, Sam?” Jimmy asks anxiously, eyes cast down, dragging his bare toes along the splintered timber of the deck. His cheeks are so red his freckles disappear altogether. He's been picked on, Sam thinks, for his highly individual, but nevertheless impressively
creative
choice of clothing.

“Like a, a … handsome stallion, mate. You look downright sartorial.” He grins widely to show approval. Jimmy
beams right back. He has no idea what Sam has just said, but picks up it's a compliment.

“These
are
me work clothes, Sam. I'm ready, aren't I? Didn't I say so?”

They get down to business. Sam chalks some dodgy planks while Jimmy, his face serious, sticks so close Sam can smell the sickly scent of raspberry jelly frogs on his breath and catches glimpses of a red-stained tongue. He wonders if that's all the kid's had for breakfast and makes a mental note to ask the Three Js to keep a closer eye on him.