The Briny Café (6 page)

Kate's grin lights up her pale face. “Maybe I am.”

Ettie tries not to think about her own scrambled existence. Was there a turn-off to fulfilment somewhere along the way that she missed? A fork in the road that failed to mention left was for battlers, right for swanners? She wonders if Kate is still young enough to believe that something wondrous will suddenly pop out of the ether to light up a new path. Ettie has been burned too often to trust in miracles herself. A failed marriage. An erratic career as an artist and illustrator. A few attempts at jobs such as corporate catering (the company went bust) and therapeutic massage (an ad in the paper prompted so many late-night calls for the wrong kind of massage she gave up).

There was also a brief, horrendously misjudged plunge into running a florist shop where she built the business but could never resist adding one or two extra blooms to a bunch, thus cancelling out the profit margin. Until then, she'd never realised generosity could send you broke. She also understood that it wasn't enough to be good at your job. If you wanted to run a successful business, you needed to understand the bottom line. And she just didn't get it, no matter how hard she tried. She quit at the end of her first year, wiser but with virtually nothing to show for twelve months of hard slog. Trusting in miracles, she believes, is borderline suicidal.

Kate crosses the kitchen to open the freezer. A puff of misty air spreads across the room. She removes the last of the chocolate cake and holds it aloft with her eyebrows raised in a query towards Ettie.

“Yeah. Why not? A little sweetness takes away the fullness.”

“Chocolate does that?” Kate gives her a funny look.

“Works for me.”

 

Sitting on his deck with his all-time favourite dinner of sausages, garlic mashed potatoes and peas, Sam automatically checks to see that his barge is still safe on her mooring. She's a miracle, he thinks, an indefatigable workhorse with shapely lines and a glorious rear end. He sips a frigidly cold beer and it hits him then that his fortieth birthday is a day away. He toys with the idea of throwing a last-minute bash but can't work up the enthusiasm. A sign, maybe, that his priorities are shifting? He is hit by a wave of nostalgia and half-closes his eyes. In his mind his mother wanders down the jetty to meet him off the school ferry. Ready with a story: a snake in the woodpile … a duck with ten ducklings paddling in her slipstream … a blank-eyed stingray cruising the shallows. She would always have a tea towel over her shoulder. A short-sleeved floral shirt. Plain cotton shorts. Her feet were bare and brown. Legs and arms, too.

“Good day?” she'd invariably ask. And he'd shrug by way of an answer.

“Daisy's boxer had her pups on the ferry this morning. Right at my feet. Just leaned sideways and out they popped, one by one. Like squeezing pips out of a cherry.”

“Yeah right, Mum. Pull the other one.”

“Honest as, love. Six pups. Did you know that Dottie
waxes
her legs? Never heard of it before. Must hurt like heck.”

One summer day, she ran down the jetty to meet him, face
flushed with what he knew must be
big
news. He tried to guess. A shark in the bay? A giant fish on the line? Maybe a decent dinghy washed up at high tide that he might be able to keep if they couldn't find the owner?

“The bay ran dry today,” she told him. Breathless. In the same incredulous tones you'd use if an alien had just dropped out of the sky.

“Yeah. Yeah.” Sam was disappointed. Didn't his mother know he was too old to fall for dumb tricks?

“No, love, no joke. I was looking out the window while I did the breakfast dishes and the whole bay emptied. Like someone had pulled the plug. Got a bull's-eye view. Soldier crabs on the march, not sure which way to turn and crashing into each other. Water tanks. Rotting hulls. A cannon. A whole universe of sea creatures clinging to our rubbish and turning it into homes. Rent free!” She laughed, delighted with the thought. In the Scully family, the monthly rent payments regularly flattened the fizz in the household savings account. “A bold, new landscape. And a wee bit ghostly.”

“Then what happened?” he asked, eyes narrowed.

“Well, I waited. Sort of paralysed with shock. I thought later that if I'd had my wits about me I would've run for the hills because it was crazy! Bays don't empty, not around here. Not unless some catastrophe is about to happen. I stuck my head out the window and watched, wondering if I was in a dream and didn't know it. Suddenly, the water came back in a mad, frothing rush. Fish were tossed high. Driftwood flew through the air. Water came up to my knees in the boatshed. The whole event took about ten minutes, and within fifteen it was as though it had never happened.”

Sam grinned, sure now that it was a hoax. “You're havin' me on, Mum, aren't ya?”

She didn't reply. Instead she reached for his hand and walked him along the jetty to the beach. Then she pointed to a few dead tiddlers stranded way above the seawall.

“How do you think they got there?”

Sam was flummoxed. He trusted his mum, but she'd always told him to question what he hadn't seen with his own eyes. To seek the truth before making a judgement. And this was downright spooky. Fish didn't fall out of the sky. No way.

“Did Dad see it?” he asked, thinking witnesses were the only way to go.

“No. He was in the city. He doesn't do a ferry shift on Wednesdays, remember?”

“Anyone else see it?” No witnesses, no deal.

His mum smiled then, and pointed to a peeling old shack across the bay.

“The Heggartys were home. Want to row over in the boat and ask them?”

Sam dithered. The Heggartys were ancient and a bit potty. Once they got yacking, he'd be trapped for the rest of the afternoon. Still, old Mrs Heggarty cooked a decent shortbread biscuit and kept a good supply in a jar on the kitchen counter next to the tea. He had nothing to lose. He set off.

Two hours later he returned. “Tsunami,” he said, looking at his feet, cranky he hadn't twigged earlier. “Mild. Caused by an earthquake a long way away. It's the second time the Heggartys have seen it happen here.”

His mother looked vindicated but she wasn't the type to
gloat. “Mrs Heggarty have any biscuits?” she asked.

He shook his head. “She was about to make a batch when I turned up.”

His mother ruffled his hair. “Come inside.” She pulled a tray of scones out of the half kerosene tin perched on a gas ring that they called an oven, slathered on butter and honey. “You're a good boy. It never hurts to question even your old mother's words. Always remember that.”

They had nothing in those early days, Sam thought. No phone, no electricity. No radio. The three of them ate, slept and played in a single room. A chip heater for hot water. The rise and fall of the sea cleaning away their sewage. He never once heard his mother complain, even when those huge king tides flooded her floors and wet her knitting if she'd forgotten to put the basket on a shelf. He remembered the awe of an early misty morning when he went off fishing with his dad and came home with a kingfish so big all the neighbours dropped by with their measuring tapes. He feels the old familiar ache of loss creep into his gut.

Sam sighs. Toys with the idea of another beer. He's watched the boat traffic all evening. Too many tinnies have come to a standstill at the Weasel's wharf and it's giving him a very bad feeling.

 

Kate lines up the chocolate cake on a plate.

“Cream's in the fridge, is it?” Ettie says, opening up to have a search. “Oh. This is the sort that needs to be whipped. Next time, buy double cream. Works better with cakes. Well, except for sponges. And it's less effort.”

“Oh. Okay. I've always thought of cream as … just cream. Tea?” Kate asks.

“Coffee if you've got it.”

“No coffee. Sorry.”

“Tea's fine.”

“Marco Polo, Earl Grey, Sencha or Russian Caravan? I don't have anything else that isn't medicinal, I'm afraid.”

“Marco Polo,” Ettie says, trying not to sound astonished.

She watches Kate, curious to see how a woman who is indifferent to food prepares a delicate brew of exotic tea. She crosses her fingers but expects the worst.

Kate warms and drains a fragile bone china teapot with a lissom spout and painted with tiny pink flowers. She adds two heaped teaspoons of tea and snatches the kettle off the heat a second after it bubbles. She waits half a minute before pouring water over the leaves. The mysterious scent of fruit, some floral hints and definitely vanilla, fills the kitchen. Flavours that would burn if the water was spitting hot. The lid goes on with a light clink. Ettie nods with approval.

Kate places two delicate cups and saucers, like props out of an Agatha Christie movie, on a tray with the pot. Ettie follows her back to the sitting room and watches her pour the copper-coloured tea with tight-lipped concentration. She passes Ettie a cup. Not a moment too long in the pot, Ettie thinks. Every flavour is distinct even if she can't quite pin them all down. The two women sit silently, each lost in thought until Ettie replaces her cup on the tray.

“Shall I make a fresh pot?” Kate asks.

“No. I'm feeling full and sleepy. It's time to go.”

Ettie stands with a sigh of contentment and makes her way
to the front door. Kate holds her wet-weather jacket while she slips her arms through the sleeves.

“I'm thinking of buying a boat,” Kate says. “Nothing flash. To go back and forth to the Spit. Who do you think I should talk to?”

“Sam Scully on the
Mary Kay
. You've met him, right? He delivered your building material. Get him to ask around. If I see him, I'll mention it. And don't worry about the house while you're away. Everyone will keep an eye on it. That's how Cook's Basin works. God, look at the moon. Magic, isn't it? Don't come down to the pontoon, it's too cold. I'll see myself off.”

Carefully Ettie makes her way down the steps to the foreshore, grateful for the moonlight. Thirty years of offshore living, she thinks, and she still forgets to take her torch with her.

Frankie has left her boat tied to Kate's pontoon. She can see it's sitting higher out of the water and the greasy broth of oil, petrol and seawater that normally swashes in the bottom has disappeared. She finds a note wrapped around the tiller, held on with a rubber band. She fossicks under the dented bow for the torch and in the thin yellow light of a near-dead battery, she reads:

In the Square, Ettie fingers the latest rejection from a publisher, folded into a tiny solid block in her pocket. Not even a note, this time. Just an unsigned
With Compliments
slip. Was the irony deliberate, she wonders? She feels a whang-bang dose of the blues on the rise.

The stray mutt crawls towards her apologetically and flops at her feet. She rubs his ears. “Good doggie,” she says. Inside the café, Sam is slouched over the counter, ordering their coffees from Big Julie.

How long before The Briny collapses? One day, she'll step inside for a flat white and put a foot through a rotten floorboard. Then she'll crash onto all those oyster-encrusted piles underneath, get slashed to thin little ribbons like calamari and end up crumbed, deep-fried and served in a paper bag for some passing tourist. Environmentally sound recycling. Images whizz through her head. She wonders if she can whip it into a cute little kids' story. Maybe not. It smacks ever so faintly of cannibalism. She sighs. Back to the drawing board.

Sam comes up to her and hands her a beer. She raises her eyebrows and points at her watch.

“Coffee machine died again. It was a beer or tea and, as we are all painfully aware, Bertie's tea is hard to pick from drain water.”

Ettie sighs and takes the beer. “Tide's on the turn,” she says.

“Yep. Comes in and goes out. As dependable as tomorrow's sunrise.”

“You remember Kate? From Oyster Bay? She's after a commuter boat. I told her to call you for a few tips.”

“Jeez, Ettie, what did you go and do that for? She's deadset scarier than my old schoolteacher who used to come after us with a rubber strap for no reason. You should have told her to ask at the boatshed. Frankie's the main man. Bloody hell.”

Ettie looks at him in surprise. Why is he so worked up over nothing? she wonders. He likes Kate,
really
likes her. So much that he thinks staying clear of her will solve the problem. Well, well. After twenty years of sweet-talking the never-ending stream of starry-eyed young women who regularly drifted into Cook's Basin in search of romance and excitement, he might have met his match. She doubts Kate would fall for his usual moonlit picnic on a deserted beach and a casual fling. Well, well.

Sam glugs his beer and Ettie waits patiently, a smile lurking at the corners of her mouth.

“Listen,” he says. “There's a sweet little tinny for sale on the Island. Solid as a rock and reasonably priced.”

“You're a star, Sam.”

Ettie finishes her beer and kisses his cheek like a sister. Still feeling down-hearted, she drags her feet along the stained seawall towards Commuter Dock where she's tied
her tinny, dreading lugging her shopping up the steps to her Island home.

“Cool seawater on the way with the tide,” she calls to the oysters, not caring if she sounds mad because everyone, even an oyster, needs a little encouragement from time to time.

As she reaches the dock, black globs are mustering behind the hills, blocking the sun. Spring is gathering for a final tantrum before bowing to summer. The light on the water is clean and smooth and battleship-grey. She searches for her boat in the mess of clanging tinnies tied three-deep off the pontoon. Only two boats to climb over and they're those lovely stable plastic ones. She sighs with relief.

On the way home, she veers off to check on Artie to remind herself that in the great scheme of things, she really hasn't got much to complain about.

 

Sam kicks himself for offering to help out the Oyster Bay woman. He hasn't got anything against her as such. She's polite, pays her bills on time and gives all the right specs when she books a job. Not like one or two penny-pinching bastards he could name, who consistently understate a load hoping to cut costs and then wonder why they find themselves on the bottom of his schedule. So he's got no argument with her. She just gives him the shivers. It's like she sees right through to his backbone and finds it hollow. Face it, mate, she makes you feel like an ignorant redneck and it sets your teeth on edge.

He considers wheedling out of the deal with any number of excuses that he knows won't stack up under close scrutiny. But then makes his way to the
Mary Kay
at the end
of the ferry wharf. Once a commitment is given, it has to be honoured. He jumps on board. With a bit of luck, Kate won't be home.

She opens the front door on the first knock.

“Hi,” she says, puzzled. “I'm not expecting a delivery.” She leans against the doorjamb, her arms folded. Not an invitation inside for a cuppa or a chinwag. Not a hint of warmth.

Sam stands awkwardly. “Ettie says you're looking for a boat.”

“Oh yeah.” Kate's face clears.

“There's a bloke on the Island selling up and moving onshore. It's a strong boat with a reliable outboard. You could do worse but if you're feeling itchy after looking at it, you don't have to take my word, you can get a second opinion from Frankie. So there you go. For what it's worth. Ettie asked me to tell you.” He turns and begins walking towards the waterfront.

“Hey, Sam,” Kate says, hurrying after him. “I need a name and directions. Or a phone number. Something. I'll contact him now.”

Sam pulls up, sighs. He looks at the water, the barge, the sky and the bush and comes up with ten good reasons not to offer to give her a ride to the Island to see the boat. The first and foremost of which is that if the engine ever blows up, she'll throw the blame straight at him.

“Hop on,” he says, ungraciously, “I'll take you over.”

The barge cuts a smooth passage through water as sleek as foil. Back in his comfort zone, Sam relaxes and steers one-handed. He figures they've got an hour before the storm hits. Plenty of time to check out the boat and deliver Kate back to
Oyster Bay safe and sound. Mission accomplished.

Like all first-timers on the barge, he can see she is unnerved by the lack of lifelines but makes a bet it will only take her five minutes to feel confident enough to let go of the doorframe. If she's got any brains at all, she'll stay within arm's reach of solid support. Only the genuine idiots go off on a wander around the deck.

“You know anything about boats?” he calls over the noise of the engine.

“Well, I can drive a car,” she shouts snippily. Like
so what's the big deal?

“Lady, the only thing a car and a boat have in common is fuel.”

She is inside the cabin now, standing next to him so she doesn't have to scream. “Oh come on. I've seen four-year-old kids driving tinnies. It can't be that hard.”

There it is, he thinks, feeling the hair rise on the back of his neck. That ice-cold snap in her voice. He considers spelling out the facts of boats. No brakes. No headlights. No stability. Then there's the power of wind, currents … ah jeez, why go on? She doesn't strike him as the type who listens anyway.

“Up to you, mate,” is all he says.

She leaves him then, and wanders forward to stand at the tip of the bow where there's nothing to grab if the barge takes a hit from a wake. She hasn't got a bloody clue.

 

The commuter boat for sale is a rock-solid, former fishing boat with a strong fibreglass roof instead of a flimsy canopy, a key start, and an engine still under guarantee. Thoroughly
reliable. Not pretty. Kate whispers to Sam that it is exactly what she's looking for.

She turns to old Des who's still got a gleam in his eye even though he's on the wrong side of eighty. “Tell me why this is better than any other tinny,” she says, polite but no-nonsense.

“Low tide you can jump on the roof,” he replies, pride in his voice. “Keeps you dry in the rain, too, or when a rogue wave comes crashing over the bow. Big enough to transport a wardrobe, sofa or a dozen cases of wine and it won't rock more than a baby's cradle in a swell straight from the ocean.”

Under the stubble clinging to his deeply lined face, he chews his bottom lip and stares at water through slats in the jetty. He suddenly looks like a man at his best friend's funeral who knows he's seeing the end of an era.

“Where you headed next?” she asks, kindly.

“Off to put me head on a flowery pillow in the retirement village. Happy wife, happy life. Although I keep tellin' her it's livin' here that keeps us young. She won't have a bar of it, though, so we're on our way. No point in whingeing. What is, is.”

“How much then, for the boat?”

The old-timer hoists his baggy pants, held up by a piece of string, and gets a squirrel look. He chucks a quick glance at Sam, who shrugs to show he's not going to get involved. Then he takes a seat on the starboard gunnel, fidgeting until he's comfortable. Points Kate towards the portside. She sits, leaning forward on her knees, her face intent.

Sam watches as they haggle like camel traders until it starts to rain so hard the old bloke sighs with disappointment and
gives in. “Haven't had that much fun since a trip through the souk in Marrakech fifty years ago.”

Kate shakes his hand, grinning. “Haven't enjoyed myself more since buying a rug in the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul. I'll look after her, you know. I'm careful about possessions. Does she have a name?”

The old bloke shakes his head. “A boat's a boat. You don't need frills just a lot of grunt.”

“I'll call her
Ghost
then, if that's okay?”

Sam snorts. Kate and the old-timer beam at each other, water dripping down their faces, both flushed with the thrill of the deal.

Sam retires to the shelter of the
Mary Kay
as Kate signs a cheque and hands it over.

“Isn't gonna bounce, is it?” Des asks after a minute, forgetting the rain and holding the cheque up to daylight as though it might be counterfeit. He curses and shakes it dry.

“If it does, let me know.”

“If it bounces I'll charge ya double next time.”

“Deal!” They shake hands.

“Hey, Sam,” he calls out. “This one's got a bit of spirit in her. Ya better watch out. She'll run rings around ya and she's too good for ya anyway.”

Sam cups his ear to signal he can't hear.

With the rain coming down hard, Kate thanks Des then asks if there are any golden rules for boats.

“Check your petrol tank before every trip and assume every other bugger on the water is a mug.”

“Oh sounds fair. And if I want to reverse, I move the throttle backwards, is that right?”

The old guy looks at her quizzically. “Yeah, well, that's how it mostly works.”

She thanks him again and waves towards Sam to signal the deal is done. He gives her the thumbs-up.

“I owe you a beer, Sam,” she says, sticking her head inside the wheelhouse. “Go home and get out of the wet. I'll find my own way back.”

“You might consider a lesson or two before hitting the water solo with a storm on the rise,” he says, trying not to sound like he's telling her what to do. Because he already senses that won't go down too well.

“I'll be right. Thanks again.”

And just like that, he's dismissed. He feels his jaw go rigid, his teeth clamp down. He knows he should insist on seeing her safely to the pontoon but … He sniffs the air, checks the water for whitecaps to get a sense of how long till the storm hits hard. She's got time. Just. With the wind coming from the east, the worst that can happen is she'll get blown onto the rocks and, if she's really unlucky, end up with a hole in her hull. She won't drown, though. Unless she can't swim. Ah jeez.

“You know how to swim, don't you?” he yells from the doorway of the
Mary Kay
to save himself a soaking.

Kate nods, waves and steps into her boat. He hears the engine kick over with the first twist of the key. With a bit of luck, she'll make it. If not, well, she'll learn the hard way.