Hindsight (8 page)

‘It must still hurt like the devil, surely?’

He laughed. ‘I’ll endure hell itself if it keeps you safe, Mira. I’m an idiot. If I’d been watching out for trouble that day instead of allowing myself to be so damned distracted by you, I never would have been shot in the first place, you never would have been kidnapped by that damn colonel, and we probably wouldn’t be here, having this damn argument. But let’s not relive moments that we’ll have to endure in our nightmares anyway. Tomorrow starts today and yesterday is history, even if we have to fight so flaming hard to make them stay that way.’

Mira smiled, remembering the matron’s warning. ‘Is that any language for my guardian angel?’

‘There I go again.’ He brushed her cheek tenderly a second time, as if that was as much affection as he dared to show her in public nowadays. ‘I think you’ll need to be my chaperone.’

‘You have your mother for that — at least until she moves out to live with her boyfriend.’

‘Don’t hold your breath. Remember, she’s a nurse, so she’s somewhat more protective than ever lately. I dare say I won’t be able to blast her out of the house until my wound’s healed completely and the scar’s fading. I just wish …’ He patted her hand and sighed. ‘If we’re really good, maybe we can be done with the review committee in six weeks or so instead of months.’

‘Yes, let’s be strong then.’ Inside though, she felt weaker than ever.

‘Ahoy, Benny!’ called a French-accented woman. Her voice came to them from only a short distance away, yet slightly above them. And she sounded young, about Mira’s age, but with a playful deception in her voice that should have been as obvious to Ben as a bottled blonde or plastic cleavage. ‘Don’t tell me you broke your arm to get out of my abseiling lesson?’

‘Hi, Gabion,’ Ben shouted with less enthusiasm. ‘Just a mishap at work. Sorry, I’m a little busy right now. Can I call you later?’

‘
Oui
, naturally. You’ve got my new number at Dead Man’s Beach?’

‘Van fourteen?’

‘
Oui
, but I sleep out on my sloop now. The van is only for my bathroom, spare storage and car, so call first so I’ve got time to come ashore — and don’t be such a stranger as you have been lately.’

Lately?
Jealousy flared unexpectedly, but Mira reassured herself that Ben probably had plenty of friends, and possibly also a few girlfriends even if he hadn’t mentioned anyone aside from his surf-loving mother. Thinking about it, though, made her realise just how little she really knew about him outside of his old job as her social worker. Yet how close could the French woman be to Ben as a friend, if she wasn’t aware that he didn’t abseil any more, or that he’d been in hospital for the last ten days?

The boat lurched unexpectedly on a wave, and in reflex Mira opened her eyes. Through the purple haze of yester-weeks, she saw a two-storey ferry ploughing through choppy waves barely an arm’s length away from her, while she was gliding invisibly parallel as if her drunken duck had taken flight and was keeping pace off their starboard bow. A wave caught the ghostly ferry too, sending it listing away from her, and as she leaned to compensate, the invisible deck shifted beneath her feet in the opposite direction.

Ben caught her as she fell, and steadied her against the railing.

‘Whoa, that was unsettling! Were you better off in the car?’ he asked.

‘No. I just …’ She lowered her voice to a whisper. ‘Can your friend hear us?’

‘No, she’s upstairs with her car. So relax, okay? She can’t lip-read, especially from this angle.’

Mira turned further anyway and saw two of the ghostly passengers on the neighbouring ferry — a bearded man in a long coat with his much younger, bob-haired girlfriend pressed between him and their railing. They were both looking towards Mira with their backs to the other passengers, and since the man was so much larger than his pale-skinned companion, it was unlikely that anyone else on that ferry could see what he was doing to her with his hands inside her blouse, making her squirm.

Please, not here,
Mira read from her lips, but ignoring her pleas, he turned her mouth to meet his and in one movement exposed both of her breasts to the bay as he continued to pinch and squeeze her. The woman melted against him but also squirmed more, as if trying to face him without breaking their kiss, but his strong hands were everywhere. He kept her pinned against the rail and as he began to rock a little faster than the pitch of the waves, Mira realised what else he must have been doing to her out of sight between his long coat and the rail.

Heat flooded Mira’s cheeks and she turned away from them.

‘You look like you need to sit down.’ Ben touched her hand, making her flinch, and as Mira sensed him leaning closer, she sidestepped a little further down the rail away from him.

‘No, I just saw a couple …’ Turning, she noticed the ghostly couple still at it. ‘Never mind,’ she said, averting her eyes again. ‘I’d rather not talk about it.’

‘Suit yourself,’ Ben said, but he sounded a little hurt. ‘First sign of trouble though, I need to hear about it.’

‘You bet.’ Glancing ahead, she noticed another ghostly ferry docked at a pier on the sheltered side of the long mountainous island that was also their destination, while another ferry followed behind them and three others headed back to the mainland at similar intervals. Four huge cargo ships also gagged the throat of the nearby river port, while a race of jet skis traced a lace of wakes across the huge bay and a flotilla of catamarans breezed independently from north to south in zippered patterns between the hazards of mangrove islets and muddy shallows.

‘It’s so busy out here,’ she said, trying to look anywhere except at the ghostly couple; and yet her traitorous eyes kept straying back to them. ‘I didn’t realise how busy. Last time, I kept my eyes closed the whole way.’

‘Last time?’ He let out a heavy sigh. ‘Oh, yeah. Seems like a lifetime ago now.’

Silence hung between them for a long awkward moment.

‘I can’t see Colonel Kitching’s ghost aboard, if that’s what you’re worried about.’ Ten days ago the Colonel had followed them across to the island somehow. He’d been in charge of the scientific team who’d discovered that her ‘ghosts’ had once been real; just slow light like shadows stretching away across time, and become determined to find a way to profit personally. ‘The other ferry was a big boat, however, so he could have been out of sight, or travelled over another way.’

Ben chuckled nervously. ‘I swear sometimes you can read minds, but what did we decide about the past?’

She frowned, wishing she really could read minds, or at least his body language. Was he upset now, and if so how much? Was he even watching her at all, or ahead to the island? He couldn’t possibly be watching the ghostly couple, but then Mira couldn’t see them any more either. A frumpy old woman and fisherman stood in their place.

Fares are getting expensive,
Mira read from the woman’s lips.

Better than a bridge,
argued the fisherman.
No faster way to wreck an island than upping the traffic. Look at Bribie, Bulwer, Macleay, Lamb, Likiba and the rest. If they’re not being reshaped for fancy canal estates, they’re being used for expanding ports or burying toxic waste. No, my dove. There’s an isle for every day of the year in this bay, so give big business their own way and there’d be a cobweb of bridges all over the place!

‘What are you watching?’ Ben asked.

‘Nothing much.’ She stared down at the turbulent waters of Moreton Bay, ever moving, yet ever the same, and lifted her nose to the breeze. ‘If it weren’t for all the people, it would be timeless out here.’

Raising her shades briefly, all the violet ships disappeared. Ferries, jet skis, catamarans; all gone with the river port — replaced in the same instant by a blue haze and a solitary sailing ship with three masts full of billowing sails. Dropping her shades again put the modern port back in business.

Ben chuckled, this time a little less glumly. ‘You should see the bay at Christmas. We need so many ferries, it would be faster and cheaper to anchor them end-to-end and let everyone drive across.’

‘That must thrill the locals.’ Mira glanced at the fisherman again, who was still arguing with his ‘dove’ about ferry prices, politics and the local anti-bridge protesters, when it occurred to Mira that when they boarded the ferry in Ben’s car, she hadn’t heard any beep from an electronic device, like on the toll roads, nor any zip or Velcro-rip that might have been from a wallet to pay for a ferry ticket.

‘Did you pay to drive on?’ she asked. ‘I didn’t hear anything.’

‘I’m a shareholder. My father owned half the company, but for one reason or another, a sixth was all he left to me when he died — that and the beach house.’

‘And your mother keeps a house on the mainland even while she’s living with you? But if you’re already so rich, why did you want to work at Serenity?’

‘Ha! There’s no money in ferries, Mira. Maintenance costs can sink a boat as fast as government compliance fees and licences. So free passage is about the only benefit I get — and just as well too, or I’d never be able to afford to commute. Come to think of it, my only real wealth is your friendship.’

‘Wow, that
is
poor.’ She blushed and tilted her hot cheeks to the breeze. ‘Sounds like a raw deal too, actually. If anything, it’s
your
friendship that must be worth something.’

‘No need for that, Mira. I wasn’t fishing for compliments.’

‘I’m serious! If it wasn’t for you, I’d still be sedated and strapped in a wheelchair for everyone’s safety, but what do you get? Unpaid responsibility for a blind dependant. I think you should take a million or two from my estate to help balance the scales.’

‘A million or two?’ He coughed as if he’d choked on the words.

‘All right, more then. Let’s say, fifty-fifty. Your friendship is worth twenty-six mill, to me at least.’

Waves clapped against the hull as if the water agreed.

‘Mira, we can’t throw money around like that. We need to prove how responsible you are for the board review.’

‘Half
is
responsible. You weren’t only shot because of me, you lost your job. Meanwhile, I owe you everything I have, and I’d gladly pay it, but I’m not sure how much I’ll need to buy my own place eventually.’ Ahead, she could see the small town of Dunwich bobbing nearer, with its sports field and modest buildings mostly huddled around the mudflats and pier, while further back on the ridge shone the roofs of much larger homes, which commanded more expensive views of the bay. None of them interested her particularly, so long as she could stay close to him. ‘Maybe I should live in a tent? I have no idea about property prices, but camping sounds like fun — and there’s plenty of parks near you. Keeping twenty-six mill for myself still feels far too greedy of me anyway.’

‘Forget it, Mira. I’m not taking a cent off you. I can get a job doing almost anything — even a barnacle scraper or ticket attendant — but you can’t. You’re about to ditch all the benefits that went with being a ward of the state, so that fifty-two million has to be budgeted well enough to last the rest of your life.’

‘Two million a year?’ She grinned cheekily. ‘I think I can budget enough groceries with that.’

‘Sure, it sounds silly at first, but if you deduct the cost of a decent home with enough space around it to give you sufficient privacy, and factor for all the running costs which only ever spiral up thanks to inflation, then average over the next sixty to eighty years and
blam
, your two million a year has collapsed into pocket change.’

‘You’re forgetting the most basic thing.’

‘Interest? No. You can’t rely on a steady income from investments. That’s like sugar on an apple pie; the more you eat, the less sweet the dish.’

‘I was talking about Fragile-X syndrome, Ben. Statistically speaking, people with faulty DNA like me live much shorter lives.’

‘Freddie Leopard is seventy-seven.’

‘Freddie Leopard is a freak. You can’t say such things about him, because you’re so polite and politically correct. But you still have to face facts, because I sure have. The best I can hope for is another decade. Maybe two. That’s why I’d been so desperate to escape. I wasn’t scared of dying, Ben. I’ve been terrified my life would never begin.’

‘That’s not your problem any more, Mira. I can’t let you short-change yourself now at the expense of your future.’

‘That sounds like sensible financial advice.’ She grinned again cheekily. ‘As my business manager, you just earned your first pay cheque. Let’s say a mill or two per year?’

‘Stop that. I’m not qualified. Besides, some might call it a conflict of interest. We’ll have to pay somebody else for your investment advice.’

‘Oh, like the government bean counter who sold my home in the first place? No thank you. I’d rather make my own mistakes, so at least a dollar lost has paid for a lesson learned.’

‘You can’t do that either, sorry.’ He patted her hand again. ‘Not until
after
the board review.’

‘Then make up a bill for a year in advance for fuel and time running around for me like a taxi, then pay yourself — and don’t say no to
that
, Mr Bennet Chiron, or you might just start making me cranky.’

She pulled free, poked her finger at his chest as a playful warning, and turned to reclaim the passenger door of his invisible car.

‘Mira, I can’t just make up a bill,’ he complained. ‘We have to cope using responsible budgeting.’

‘Too late!’

The deck lurched under her feet as the ferry grounded.

‘Your ship just came in, Ben. So unload already.’

‘I
can’t take money from you in any form,’ Ben said, ‘and that’s that.’

He’d been driving north up the west coast of the island for nearly twenty minutes, and all the way she’d been arguing with him — most of the time playfully. He admired her so much for her tenacity, but he couldn’t help feeling she might be secretly determined to spend far more on him than she should. Far more than he deserved, given that he’d failed to keep her safe from Colonel Kitching. Certainly far more than any review committee would smile upon, and far more than he wanted anyhow, considering how deeply he’d fallen in love with her. If ever she could give him her heart, he’d never need anything again, but for the moment, she was too vulnerable. Too prone to infatuation. To push her too soon for a heavier relationship wouldn’t just be unfair on her, it would be doomed to failure. The best he could hope for in the meantime was a little help in clearing his name using her special talent to find the culprits who’d framed him. But he couldn’t worry about that for now either.

Keeping secrets from her felt akin to betrayal, even when it was in her best interests. He wondered if he should have explained the full details of her guardianship situation in the matron’s office before they’d left, but Mira had been so emotionally delicate and Sanchez so busy arguing silently with him about Freddie. And how much did it really matter, if the loophole Sanchez was exploiting to let her out from Serenity couldn’t be stretched further than a fortnight’s holiday at a time anyway? So long as the fortnightly passes were extended every fortnight on time, the effect would be the same as a pass for six months at a time, or a year — depending on how long it took to develop her case for the review committee.

The other secret remained his most serious concern. All handicapped state wards needed an official co-guardian to share the same roof while on leave from Serenity, much more than an authorised escort; however, his criminal record disqualified him — and his mother’s involvement in that role could be too easily misunderstood as a power-play. Mira would never believe that his mother’s only motivation was innocent; to support him in recovering his career, using the common aspects of Mira’s rehabilitation as a case study.

So much safer for everyone, in the short term at least, if Mira stayed happily oblivious to his mother’s involvement on that level, since any explosive decomposition of the situation might adversely affect Mel’s professional reputation too.

Ben glanced sideways at Mira, still admiring her for her fiery determination. She could have no idea how beautiful she looked, or how difficult it was for him to keep his hands off her, but for now he hoped she could sense enough of his guilt and uneasiness to know that teasing him too much too soon could be dangerous for them both.

Leaving her alone in the car briefly at Dunwich had been necessary for that reason. After weakening so much on the ferry, he’d needed a few minutes away from her, but still he couldn’t keep his eyes off her the whole time while he’d purchased some fresh milk and bread from the modest row of shops overlooking the bay. Views had been pretty enough to hold her interest, but served better as a backdrop to her sweet elfin face. Even her short crop of fair hair looked wildly attractive with the light behind her; hacked short many weeks beforehand when the only safe way to get close enough to steal her curls was during periods of heavy sedation. The brief stop also provided her with the chance to notice that North Stradbroke Island offered few luxuries to waste money upon, unless she counted the local beer, burgers and fries, or the cheap tourist knick-knacks available further along at the newsagent.

Since rejoining her with renewed resolve to temper his feelings for her — for her sake, despite the difficulty to him — the coastal road had swept them slightly inland past a row of camping grounds and cheap-looking bungalows until the bay and mainland were lost behind coastal swamplands and increasingly dense forest. A single strip of bitumen led them further north through hills that looked, Mira told him, like any coastal eucalypt scrublands on the mainland, and if not for her lingering seasickness, she confessed it would have been easy for her to imagine herself back there, headed homeward to her own childhood corner of the bay — except for the lack of traffic.

She counted forty-one ghostly vehicles and a police bike disembarking from a yester-fortnight ferry at the same time that he’d driven off among a similar number, but those vehicles all vanished into the cobweb of side streets in the same time it took him to park and bolt across the road on foot for the fresh bread and milk — so although the main street of Dunwich had initially been lined with cars and four-wheel drives, the only other vehicles she bothered to mention since leaving town had been farm tractors. One had been a ghostly relic labelled
Chamberlain
, which she complained had been speeding along towing a large fishing trawler when it overtook them — impressively much faster than Ben’s Camaro, apparently — and two equally rusted Massey-Fergusons that were towing empty boat trailers.

‘Easier to drag their boat up a beach with a tractor,’ he explained.

Street lighting also seemed bizarre enough for her to make comment about it at one of the intersections where untethered poles drew their power from solar ‘hats’ instead of the main grid supply from the mainland — and although the road cut and wound through a number of rocky hillsides, the kerb itself was dusted nearly the whole way with beach sand, which also drew comments of amazement from her. And each time, she reminded him of just how innocent she really was about everything, not just relationships, and how careful he needed to be to ensure she didn’t become overwhelmed by it all.

‘How much further?’ she asked, after an uncommon moment of silence. ‘The last time we came, the matron’s Beetle made the trip seem much shorter.’

Nobody hunting us this time,
he thought, but he didn’t wish to remind her too much of that. He didn’t care to recall it too much himself. His hands still shook every time he thought about kissing her, but ironically his fear of it happening again helped to keep his mind away from getting that romantically close to her again. ‘Not really,’ he replied, trying to keep his voice unemotional about it too. ‘I’m keeping to the speed limit.’

He shifted down gears, approaching a long left-sweeping bend, which invited them into the north-west corner of the island; signposted as the
East Coast Road
to Amity Point.

‘Hey, that place sounds familiar,’ she said, turning in time with the passing sign. ‘I remember schoolyard talk before I lost my sight — before my father pulled me out of normal school … Isn’t Amity the place with all the man-eating sharks?’

‘Same danger, different Amity.’ He turned sharper towards The Point but soon began to zigzag through suburban side streets, some of which were bitumen and some deep sand, suited only to four-wheel drives.

‘Ah … we lost?’ Mira raised her hand, as if she could sense directional warmth from the sun, which to her would have been invisible and slightly higher than the ghostly sun from ten days ago at the same time of day — reminding him of how accurate her other senses could often be. He could feel the heat through the windshield himself — ahead but enough to their right to allow her to deduce that they were still on the west side of the island.

‘Didn’t we land on the west side too?’ she asked. ‘That sign doesn’t make sense to me. It suggests we’ve been on the
East Coast Road
all the way up here.’

‘Because we have.’ He let her think about that a little while longer, enjoying the cutely bemused look on her face.

Frowning, she didn’t take long to accuse him of being crazy. ‘Are you trying to convince me that the East Coast Road runs up the
west
coast of Straddie?’

Ben laughed. ‘Local humour. You’ll get used to it. Some say it’s because the road runs parallel to the east coast of Australia but aside from sand mining, Straddites thrive off fishing and the tourist trade, so the more often visitors get lost here, the longer they stay — or the more often they come back exploring — so the better for business either way.’

‘Charming.’ Her frown darkened, and she complained about needing to work harder than usual to keep her bearings straight if pranks like that were going to be commonplace. ‘So what’s the real east coast road called?’ she asked, wrinkling her pert little nose. ‘The west?’

He shook his head, then felt silly, remembering she couldn’t see him — not for another ten days at least, and only if they happened to pass this way. ‘Nothing so colourless, Mira. The only highway on that side is the beach itself; nearly dead straight running north to south and no speed limit yet — no roads on that half of the island at all really, just an extensive network of four-wheel drive tracks through the national parks and mining leases.’

‘… and you without a four-wheel drive to get around?’

‘I get everywhere I need to, as you’ll soon see.’

She didn’t need to see, she told him, since she claimed to remember the rest of the way perfectly. After another few minutes of zigzagging around the coast, catching only rare glimpses of the bay, and another five downhill through coastal wetlands, she proved it by announcing his upcoming turn a few seconds before he swerved off-road between two palm trees onto a narrow track which then widened slightly onto a gravel road, which in turn led into dense scrub, headed further north.

Mira bounced and jolted beside him, as the vehicle skipped over a set of ruts in the imported gravel.

‘Now I know what to get for your birthday,’ she teased cheekily. ‘It’s in a few weeks, right?’

‘You’re not going to buy me a four-wheel drive,’ he replied flatly. ‘They’re too expensive.’

‘I can afford it. Besides, how often am I going to contribute to the upkeep of gravel on this driveway?’

‘This isn’t a driveway, Mira. It’s an access road for an old mining lease — under the terms of the lease, the government has to keep it maintained.’

‘I don’t get it. A mine with a forest that’s over-grow-own-own?’ she said, as they bumped over more ruts.

‘Do you think a four-wheel drive would bump less?’

‘I think it’s worth the time to test-drive at least — and if it is comfier over ruts, you have to let me pay for it to save my poor little body from getting jolted to pieces each way.’

‘Nice try, but if you must have a four-wheel drive, I’ve got a better idea than buying one. The Straddie Classic is a fishing competition that starts this weekend from the hotel at Point Lookout. First prize is a fancy black Hilux — and my dad once showed me a fishing spot that’s a dead cert for the winners in most categories.’

‘No thanks. My father used to take me out fishing too and his little boat always gave me the creeps; invisible
and
rocking. Brrr … There’s no faster way to get sea sick.’

‘I never said we’d need a boat.’ He knew the cosiest cove around the shore, plus a few places upstream, inland at the south end.

Trees closed in on the lane ahead, leaving barely enough room to take the next corner, but just as they came to the small clearing where his two-storey A-framed brick home came into view, Ben slewed to a halt, keeping it shielded from her by a dense thicket.

‘Uh oh,’ he said, and backed up enough to put the house out of sight completely. ‘We’ve got visitors.’

‘Police?’ Mira could see the ghost of a police bike in the paved driveway between the gravel road and the house — still rolling as it disappeared down a garden path on the far side of the building — and while she knew Ben’s mother had a cop as a boyfriend, she also knew how Ben felt about anyone who wore that uniform, which probably explained why this one was stashing his quick getaway. Diplomatic, no doubt, since he looked quite big and strong enough to take care of himself.

‘Worse,’ Ben replied. ‘It’s a dark four-wheel drive with trouble written all over it.’

Mira shivered and gripped onto her seatbelt. ‘Military plates?’

He answered with silence for a long moment, then unclipped her belt buckle. ‘Probably just the docs,’ he said, using their pet name for the two kindly scientists who had investigated Mira’s condition and made the discovery that changed her life. ‘To be safe, wait here while I check it out, please.’

‘Hide, you mean? In the trees?’

‘Yeah, sorry.’ He leaned across and opened her door. ‘You can see the forest ten days ago, right? I doubt anything’s changed. Just find a nice thicket and wait until I’m sure it’s them.’

‘Welcome home,’ she muttered and climbed out to the tune of waves breaking against a nearby shore. She closed the door as quietly as she could manage and felt pebbles and sand skitter over her shoes as he accelerated away. Behind her, she caught the sound of another engine, but it evaporated just as swiftly amid the trees. A neighbour, she guessed, and hurried behind a wattle thicket, in case.

Ben’s engine backfired and died as his wheels bumped over a sand trap onto the driveway. His door clunked open and closed, but Mira heard no voices greet him. Just the creak of the security screen and sounds of a timber door consuming him. Then silence for a long time.