The Briny Café (3 page)

Sam Scully spreads his feet on the worn green paintwork in the wheelhouse, balancing his body with the instinct of a kid raised in a boatshed so low over the water his mum would roll up the floor rugs before every king tide.

Close to Cargo Wharf, he ditches a roll-your-own butt in a round boiled-lolly tin before he's tempted to light it. Two weeks since his last puff, he thinks, wondering briefly if there's any benefit in counting the days when the deal is open-ended. Oysters, mussels and other ugly sea creatures bulge off exposed piles in razor-sharp clumps of grit and shell. The muddy smell of low tide is rank. Ambrosia to him.

He spins the helm, sidles up to the wharf and tosses a for'ard portside line around a cleat. At the stern, he repeats a process he could carry out in his sleep.

With the barge secure, Sam hoists himself onto the wharf, feeling blindly for a foothold to give himself a final boost. Onshore, the truckie, ankles crossed, arms folded, watches from the rear of his semitrailer. There's no offer of a helping hand. Not that Sam needs one. It just rankles.

“Told you earlier, mate. It's low tide right now,” Sam says, walking up to the truckie and brushing red dirt off his scabby
hands. “Worst time on the water for taking a delivery.”

“No choice, buddy. Got a full day booked and you were first cab off the rank.”

The bloke has a
bugger you
air about him. Sam's eyes go hard. He chews his bottom lip. “Yeah. Well. Told you we could load at four a.m. or four p.m. You made a trip for nothing, mate. Crane won't hoist from eight feet below the wharf.”

“Serious?”

“Serious as …”

The truckie swears. Sam feels a twinge of pity, but not enough to turn helpful. He walks away, tapping his boots to dislodge the dirt, unmoved by the screech of grinding gears against too many revs. Dust kicks up. A dirty brown cloud floats over the water. Consideration, mate, and a little humility, and it could have all unravelled so differently.

He sets off on the
Mary Kay
at an agreeably sedate pace, listening to the steady growl of a well-greased diesel engine, as soothing as a symphony to his bargeman's ears.

The barge suddenly lurches. “Jeez!” he explodes. A stink boat flies past kicking up a three-foot wake. Sam leans out of the cabin door. “Stupid bloody idiot,” he shouts, knowing the lunatic driver is too far away now to hear. He shakes his head in disgust. First hint of summer and a fresh crowd of cowboys rolls in treating Cook's Basin like the last frontier, many of them pig-ignorant about boats and water. He's amazed more don't kill themselves, or worse some poor innocent boatie enjoying the waterways in the peaceful manner he's supposed to.

He follows the white froth of the disappearing wake, trying to place the boat. A runabout with dollar signs hanging off
it stands out in a civilian navy of mutilated tinnies you'd be hard-pressed to sell for scrap metal. A new swanner then, he figures. He'll have a quiet word in his ear. The idiot needs to be set straight on a few basic local niceties. Even morons deserve one warning.

He tracks the runabout to a pen at the foot of a tall, glassy house with a boatshed featuring opaque sliding Japanese doors, wind chimes and decorative oriental ceramic pots filled with water lilies. Like a Japanese whorehouse, he thinks. He swings alongside, ties up, leaves the engine running and makes his way along the jetty.

“Yo!” he calls. He hears the whoosh of a sliding glass door, the clunk when it opens all the way. A red-faced bloke in a blinding white linen shirt sticks his head over the deck, close enough so Sam doesn't have to shout. Hallelujah.

“Lost something, mate?”

“You own that flashy little boat tied in the pen down here, next to that pretty timber rowboat?”

“Yeah?”

“Lovely things, timber boats. You got a name, mate? I'm Sam, by the way.”

“Leo.”

“Right. Now that we know each other, I won't say what I
was
gonna say. Which was that if you ever freaking roar through the moorings again, knocking toddlers off decks and tipping tinnies on their sides so people's hard-earned groceries roll overboard, I'll break your head.”

“You threatening me, arsehole?”

Sam looks down at his scuffed leather boots. “Nah. Like I said, that's what I
would've
said if you'd been a weasel. But
my father, you see, always reckoned good manners got you further in life than a fat wallet. So. Very nicely. And politely. There's a reason for an eight-knot speed limit when you're in a high traffic area. It's called
safety
. Do it again, mate, and I'm liable to forget I'm a good-natured sort of bloke. And the name's Sam. Not
Arsehole
.”

He waits a minute for a response.

“Another quick word of advice, mate,” Sam adds, “Around here it's best to keep any illicit habits inside the privacy of your four walls. Step outside with any even vaguely suspect behaviour and we'll come down on you like a ton of wet cement. And you might want to invest in a nav light for that rowboat if you're going to keep using it at night.”

The door slides shut with a bang. Well, he thinks, he tried. He thumps down the jetty, jumps on board the
Mary Kay
and glides slowly away, hoping the weasel of a man picks up a few clues. Hoping there won't be trouble ahead.

 

With the noonday sun now high in the sky, Ettie packs her carefully prepared food in two waterproof carry bags and sets off down the two hundred steps to the wharf, on her way to visit the new woman in Oyster Bay. She's dressed in a profusion of colours and beads that she hopes doesn't make her look like mutton dressed as lamb, or worse, someone stuck in the 1970s.

The creep from the ritzy boatshed is standing on the deck, staring at her like she's naked. She feels a chill run down her spine and the hairs on her neck prickle. He inclines his head towards her. She ignores him.

“Picnic?” he asks, ambling towards her and pointing at the bags.

“Something like that,” she replies. She bends to untie the bowline.

“Jump in your boat and I'll pass the bags to you,” he says with a voice like thick black coffee. “Isn't that the way you do it around here? Everyone lends a hand?”

Ettie feels cornered. “Yeah,” she says in the end. “Thanks.”

She makes it into her boat and he holds a bag just out of reach, grinning, like it's a game. Ettie wonders if he was the kind of kid who set fire to cats' tails or pulled the wings off flies. She waits, refusing to play the game. The creep laughs and puts her bags even further away from her before walking off. Ettie lets go of her breath, and lingers a few moments to make sure he's gone before grabbing the bags and loading them into her boat.

She tucks her floating skirt under her bottom and pulls the starter cord four times until the engine revs with an unwilling splutter. Undeterred, she swings out of the melee of tinnies to navigate the sparkling blue waters on a brilliant spring day that's too good to be ruined by a deadset creep. She can't resist cranking to the max even though she knows the risk. The joy, she thinks, of the wind in your face. She feels reborn by the heat, the lustre of the landscape, the glory of Cook's Basin. Riding the waves like a rollercoaster. Scanning the water for the quicksilver flash of a single majestic kingfish. The blues of Friday night are all but gone.

Her strings of hippie beads are soon streaming out behind her, catching occasionally on the tiller. Quickly, she bunches them in a knot – she doesn't want to end up throttled like
Isadora Duncan. She checks the two carry bags containing an earthenware bowl of still steaming spaghetti bolognaise, a thermos of coffee, a green salad, a chocolate cake so moist it's almost a mousse and a bottle of a medium-quality red wine. Honest food, she thinks, made with the best ingredients she can afford. Still standing upright. All good.

Ettie hopes the latest arrival in Oyster Bay isn't vegetarian or gluten intolerant, and wonders if she should have called ahead. Perhaps even asked if it was convenient for her to visit. Sometimes she forgets that on the other side of the moat the rules are very different. Hardly anyone lives as casually as offshorers.

Too late now, she thinks, cutting the motor and drifting the last few feet. She steers her tinny alongside the pontoon with a light thunk. Way above, she makes out a woman with spindly limbs, tying empty cardboard boxes into bundles.

“Oy!” Ettie shouts, waving.

The woman looks up, uncertain, and calls out, “You okay?”

“You're the new owner, right?”

There's a nod.

“I'm Ettie Brookbank. The welcoming committee. Of one.”

“Yes?”

“Come to explain a few, er, local customs.” Why doesn't the bloody woman come down so she doesn't have to shout?

“Now?”

“No time like the present,” she says, throwing a line around the cleat and tying on.

Reluctantly, it seems to Ettie, the woman makes her way from the gloomy shadows of the verandah to the foreshore,
her hands balled in the pockets of her blue jeans. She takes careful steps, eyes fixed on the ground, her black hair falling forward and half-covering a face that has spent too much time indoors. Her T-shirt is blinding white, even though the bright noonday light is filtered by massive spotted gums. Ettie counts twenty steps from top to bottom and feels a twinge of envy. She'd trade her two hundred in a flash. Even for a house that's always given her the shivers.

“Here, take these, love, while I wring out the bottom of my skirt. Bilge pump's busted.” Without standing up in the unstable aluminium boat, Ettie passes the orange bags across a six-inch gap of water. They're heavier than the woman anticipates and she stumbles forwards slightly.

“Don't drop them, okay?” Ettie fusses with armloads of sopping fabric, wringing little handfuls, one at a time, careful not to crush the tiny mirrored discs that wink along the hemline. She looks up, squinting into sunlight. “You got a name, love?”

“Oh. Of course. Kate. Kate Jackson.” She puts down a bag and extends a hand.

Ettie folds it in her own calloused mitt and feels
white-collar
scrawled in the softness of the skin. She smothers a sigh and, not unkindly, mentally gives the scrappy woman about three months before she flees back to the reliable comforts of city living. Not that there's any shame in fleeing. Everyone's different, that's all. She bunches her skirt against her stomach and finds her barefooted way onto the rocking pontoon, admiring the toenails she's painted to match the bright orange of her embroidered Indian shirt. The platform sinks alarmingly under the weight of the two of them. Ettie ignores the water.
Kate hops backwards to keep her leather moccasins dry.

“Pontoon needs work,” Ettie says matter-of-factly.

“Everything does. You call in on everyone who buys a house around here?” Kate asks, straight to the point.

“Only if they're alone and look incompetent,” she grins.

“Ah. That bad, am I?” The first hint of a smile softens the sharp edges of a narrow face, makes its way up to eyes that are neither green nor blue but somewhere in between.

“Seen worse.” Ettie reaches for the heavier bag, leaving the lighter one for Kate to carry, and leads the way along the jetty with swaying hips and tinkling anklets. She glances at the stacks of new timber on the seawall and shakes her head. She's seen offshore renovations rip the heart out of tough and experienced men who failed to factor in the high cost of barging materials and the expensive impact of fluky weather and unyielding tides. She wonders if this edgy woman has the faintest clue what she's taken on.

Halfway up a scraggy path overgrown with needle-sharp burrawangs and bitey prickly Moses, Ettie pauses. Under her bare feet, the sandstone steps are green and slimy. The stewy smell of rotting vegetation catches in her nostrils. She looks up at the gabled house with two chimneys and a red-tiled roof. Genteel once, maybe even cottage-style grand in its day, but right now “wreck” is the first word that springs to mind.

“You've heard the house is supposed to be haunted?” she says, turning to see how Kate reacts.

“Always had a soft spot for ghosts,” the young woman replies evenly, coming up to stand beside her. “Even the unfriendly ones.”

“There's an old codger, slightly mad. Lives in a log cabin
at the foot of the escarpment. Wouldn't be surprised if it was him scaring people off.”

“What kind of mad?”

Not even a twitch, Ettie notes. “Harmless. Hiding his poverty behind crankiness.”

“Ah. Sad then, not mad.”

At the door, Ettie turns back and says seriously: “A lot of people come here to hide. Doesn't work. Not ever.”

“Do I look like I'm hiding?”

“No one ever does, love.”

A ruined wicker chair sags near the front door in slovenly welcome. Inside, it's no better. Mildew creeps up walls leaving a mark like a high tide. Ceilings are stained with water, soot and streaks from the mashed bodies of spiders. Ettie shivers. So cold, she thinks, on a day when it's hot enough to strip to your undies and dive in the water. “Which way's the kitchen?”

Kate points to a door at the end of a badly scuffed hallway: “Through there.”

“Oh a wood-burning stove!” Ettie declares, unable to keep the nostalgia out of her voice. “We had one when I was a kid.”

“The real estate agent suggested I fix the chimney before I try to boil a kettle. She gave me the impression the house might burn down if I didn't.”

“Probably true.”

“Nice of her to tell the truth. Lot of agents reckon that with a new carpet over the bloodstains and a fresh coat of paint, the past is consigned to the dump.”

“Showing properties at high tide is about as shifty as we ever get around here.” Ettie hoists her bag to the counter top. “Nice view,” she adds, happy to find a positive.