Bay of Fires (23 page)

“No worries,” she said.

“Jane mentioned you were upset about it.”

“I don’t upset that easily, Hall. I’m worried about Roger though.”

She leaned back against the rock. In the moonlight her hair had the reddish hue of an Antarctic beech in summer. He wasn’t sure, but the way the fabric of her shirt was sitting it appeared that she wasn’t wearing a bra. He wondered if she was expecting him to take the lead. Without alcohol dulling bravado he felt as though he was on stage and about to be judged, like the bulls in the livestock show at Agfest, blinking at the audience, not comprehending what was expected of them. The rock was digging into one of his legs and it hurt.

“What’s wrong?” she said.

“Nothing.”

“Tell me. You’re acting weird.”

He felt like a boy on a first date.

“Are you married or something?” she said.

“No!”

“You think I’m ugly and wondering why you got with me the other night?”

“No!”

How could he explain to this confident woman that he had not made love sober for seven years? The problem was not that he was worried he couldn’t perform; it was that he would disappoint her. That afterward she might lie beside him, cuddling in his arms, but secretly be thinking that she had had better. Ragged with frustration at himself, he turned back to her. It was too late. She was picking up her fishing rod.

In the kitchen, waiting for his tea to steep, Hall munched Vegemite toast and watched Jane follow her black dogs down the beach track. The bigger one was older and limped, trying to keep up with the younger one, which raced toward the surf. Jane put a hand to her mouth, probably whistling through two fingers, commanding the pup to wait. He did not. It was the younger one that Don had smacked at the Abalone Bake. Hall had checked the wound on the dog’s back, a neat two-inch cut. It had healed faster than he’d thought it would, aided, he supposed, by daily saltwater swims.

This morning Hall planned to knock on Roger’s door again but it was still too early; the sun had barely come up. He looked for something to read or do while he had breakfast. There was a pack of cards beside the stacked board games and he took them down, dealing himself a game of patience. It was hard to concentrate, his thoughts returning to Sarah. He was a moron. Last night he should have just grabbed her and kissed her, properly, how he wanted to. How many chances did a man need?

A door closed somewhere in the depths of the guesthouse. Hall put the cards down. He was about to go down the internal staircase when instinct urged him to look out the kitchen window. In the garden below, a man wearing running shorts and a T-shirt was bent over, rooting around in the wood stack beneath the tank stand. The man stood up, glanced around as if to ensure no one was watching him, and walked up the hill toward the road.

Hall exhaled slowly. It was John Avery.

He finished his tea, watching Jane run the dogs through the white wash. He wouldn’t tell her, not yet. There was no sense in scaring her unnecessarily. And for all he knew John Avery was merely returning some firewood or something. It was nothing that could not be sorted by a few deliberate questions addressed directly to Dr. Avery.

As Hall washed his breakfast dishes, he spotted Roger Coker lumbering across the rocks. Abandoning the soapy water in the sink, Hall grabbed his notebook and jogged down the beach track.

People had said that Roger smelled like cat urine, that his hands were abnormally large and one of them was missing two fingers, that when he looked at you he didn’t blink and it made you feel like he could read your thoughts. Hall had not believed any of it, had attributed it to the witch hunt he was witnessing. The first time he knocked on Roger’s door he had not detected the smell on his body, combined as it must have been with the cat-reeking veranda. Now, crouched next to Roger on the rocks, he had to shuffle back as the sour odor sickened him.

Hall didn’t describe the profile piece he wanted to write on Roger. Instead he talked about the history of the area and how Roger must know a lot about it, having lived here all his life. Roger stared unblinking at Hall, his hands tying a knot in his fishing line. When the knot was tied, he propped the rod on the rock.

“Yep, lived here all my life. Probably die here, too. My old man said his last prayers a few miles up that way.” Roger nodded back toward the gray beach and whitecapped surf. With two fingers shaped like a gun, he tapped his head. “Tock. Gulls and sea eagles had eaten most of him by the time we found him.”

“Is that right?”

“Mum said that was what he always wanted.”

Hall made a perfunctory sound.

“To get eaten by birds—that wasn’t what he wanted.” Roger’s chuckle turned into a hoarse cough. “No, he didn’t want to live for a long time.”

Hall had heard the rumor about Roger Coker’s father from more than one person. Apparently he had taken his own life on the bluff when Roger was a boy of ten or eleven. Hearing it from Roger was humbling.

“Sarah said your father was a carpenter?” Hall said.

“Yes. But he never got his papers. That was his problem. He was hopeless, my mum said. He couldn’t finish things. He built a boat once. Just a small dinghy. It leaked. It’s in the bottom of the lagoon somewhere.”

Hall laughed with Roger. This could make a really lovely, insightful story. A story that changed people’s perceptions. Somehow, Roger had decided to trust him. Hall tapped his notebook.

“Maybe you could talk to me about fishing in the area?”

Roger stood up. He was taller than Hall. As if to fend off Hall, he held both hands up. The palms were flat and wide, his fingers flared.

“You shouldn’t talk to strangers,” Roger said. “Off I go.”

As Roger lumbered away across the rocks, Hall could not stop himself thinking about the size of his hands. Roger might not be a muscular man, but even with several fingers missing, those hands looked capable of snuffing the life out of a person.

Once they were clear of the wharf, Don wound the throttle up. Hall had no idea how fast they were going in boating terms but it felt like a hundred kilometers an hour: the speedboat was skimming the water. Wind rushing on his face, hand steadied on the bow, Hall momentarily reconsidered putting his hand up the next time the chief subeditor job was offered. It paid at least ninety thousand a year, which was a thirty percent increase on what he was currently earning. With that kind of money, he could afford to purchase a small but sexy speedboat.

They followed the coastline south, passing the guesthouse on the headland and the row of shacks nestled above the beach. Where the rocks ended and the sand began, a figure was running by the water’s edge. As the boat approached, Hall recognized Sam Shelley, his long legs striding through the white wash. Even more interesting was the figure behind him. It was Simone, her sarong tucked into her bathing suit. Sam kept turning, glancing over his shoulder at her. Either they were racing, or she was chasing him. It reminded Hall of those vibrant, outdoorsy types of images used in cigarette advertisements in the eighties, before the tobacco companies were banned from having people in their ads.

In line with the lagoon, Don cut the engine. He pointed out the landmarks relating to the Anja Traugott and Chloe Crawford cases. It was interesting to see the land from the perspective of the ocean.

Don’s observations were things Hall had heard before. Hall let his mind drift, nodding agreeably as the older man spoke. Don’s way of speaking was unhurried; he was confident he would be listened to. Hall’s father had been a man like that, a man quietly satisfied with his self-sufficient farm, his cattle dogs, his keen sons, his hardworking, uncomplaining wife. Such measured parlance was not a characteristic that you would expect of a man with such a verbose wife as Pamela. You would think Don would need to blurt out his thoughts in order to make them heard.

The boat drifted toward the beach, positioning them in line with the Coker block.

“He doesn’t do himself any favors, that one.” Don nodded toward the green cottage.

“Roger Coker?”

“Queer.” Don’s tone implied this was a bad thing.

“That’s okay, isn’t it?”

“Son, I’m not going to give you a biology lesson.” Don chuckled.

Right then Hall remembered where he had seen Don Gunn. It was in June 1994 at an Ulverstone rally titled “Say No to Sodomy.” That was nearly ten years ago, but Hall’s recollection of dates and political events was as precise as his capacity to remember names and faces. In any case, that date was an easy one to recall: it was the year the state’s anti-gay laws were repealed by the United Nations Human Rights Committee. Oh dear. Hall wouldn’t have picked Don.

“Now I know where I’ve seen you before.” Hall snapped his fingers. “You spoke at a rally at Ulverstone alongside Pauline Hanson years ago, didn’t you?”

Usually the mention of Australia’s most prominent redneck politician provoked eye-rolling and sniggers, but Don nodded amicably, unembarrassed.

“I was toying with the idea of running in the state election at the time. It didn’t pan out. In hindsight I probably would have won a seat.”

“There were three rallies across the state. I covered them all.”

“Ulverstone was our best event. We kept the idiots out.”

At the Hobart rally the police, for some reason that was never explained, had opened the doors and two hundred protesters had barged in, ending the meeting. Following this, the Launceston and Ulverstone rallies had charged a five-dollar entry fee, which had minimized the disruptions, although almost three hundred protesters held a candlelight vigil outside the Ulverstone rally. It was a topic that had divided the state.

“Well, it was a controversial issue.” Hall emphasized the past tense.

Don shrugged. “You see, it’s not what people do in privacy. That’s not what everyone was concerned about. It was the age of consent that was the problem. And now it is legal for depraved men such as Roger Coker to sodomize very young boys.”

“You mean pedophiles in general, not Roger Coker specifically, I assume,” Hall said.

“Hall, I do mean Roger Coker. And I don’t think his interest stops at young boys, either. He used to sit in those sand dunes for hours, and I can tell you he wasn’t bird-watching.”

“Geez, Don, that’s a big call.”

“Well, you’re the journalist. These are the things you need to be aware of.”

Don switched the key too fast and the engine snarled. He muttered something about not flooding the engine and sat there, twisting the gold mesh of his watchband around his wrist.

Sarah executed a perfect pin drop in the center of the rock pool. Seal-swift, she sucked a mouthful of air then kicked her way to the bottom. Hall didn’t want to follow. He felt jumpy today, as though he had drunk too much coffee when in fact he had drunk only one cup. There was no need to be nervous. From the moment he had jumped off the back of Don’s boat, which she had held steady in the surf, she had acted as relaxed as if they had been friends for years. She wasn’t one to complicate things; he should follow her lead.

Her dark shape circled the rock pool. The water looked inviting. Shades of green shot with crystal twirled above a subtropic rock reef, an ecosystem protected by granite walls. As Hall watched, the water changed color continuously: bright emerald switched to cool aqua; one moment the water reflected the blue sky before becoming as transparent as drinking water. A gap in the rock pool floor led to the ocean, and bubbles rose with each oceanic pulse.

Hall leaned forward trying to see. Sarah was no longer circling; her body remained head down at the bottom of the pool, her legs dangling upward. Impressive lung power. She could probably cut it as a synchronized swimmer, not that he would say that. She’d bite his head off. She emerged laughing, snorting water from her nose.

Above the rock pool was a cave. It was the kind of cave Hall would have liked to know about as a kid. Pirate games, castaway, the perfect hideout from where the rock pool could be secretly viewed. It was in this cave, Sarah said, that Roger Coker had slept for two nights when he ran away from home as a teenager.

Dripping water, Sarah sprawled beside him on the rock. Her body language was encouraging. When they first met she had covered her body with a towel after every swim; now she didn’t bother. Instead of a bathing suit she was wearing what looked like an aerobics bra and sporty bikini pants. Her stomach muscles rippled every time she moved. They looked out to sea, attempting to distinguish distant whitecaps from the sails of the returning Sydney-to-Hobart yachts. At the bottom of the rocks, burnt-orange-colored kelp thrust up with each wave.

Arriving at the Bay of Fires last week, Hall had seen scrubby vegetation in shades of muted green, spiky dune grasses, a murky lagoon, and sea too cold to swim in. It looked different now. The Bay of Fires had a beauty that was not apparent on first glance. He remembered thinking the same thing when he visited here for the day with Laura. The open ocean, and the way the tree-covered mountains sat humble and untouched beneath the big sky, had gladdened him. That was a year before the breakup, and probably Laura had not even thought of sleeping with Dan. There were signs that she wasn’t happy. It had taken Hall a long time to acknowledge this. For instance, that weekend she had not liked the motel he booked in a fishing town farther down the coast. She complained to reception that the bath was not clean. She hadn’t liked the lunch he packed; he couldn’t remember what it was now, but he recalled her feeding bits of it to the swans. And when they arrived back in Launceston, she had called him the “traveling companion of the year.” He was flattered; then he realized she was being sarcastic. Apparently he had not initiated one piece of conversation during the three-hour drive. Hall had thought they were enjoying a companionable silence.

One thing he now knew for sure was that when a man was crazily in love with a woman, he wasn’t an idiot for not seeing that she didn’t love him in the same way. Laura should have told him how she felt. Not all women would be deceitful—Sarah’s honesty, he imagined, might be brutal.