The Search (3 page)

‘Have I met him?’

‘He hasn’t arrived yet. This is only the start, Flick. The camping ground isn’t even full. Wait till next week and they’ll all start pouring in like flies, camping along the foreshore and up the river if they can get away with it. Coolini Beach really
pumps
. Kay’ll employ three or four more people, and she’ll open from six am till midnight.’

‘Yeah? I thought seven till ten was bad enough.’

Flick was watching the surf with narrowed eyes. The tide was on the turn and she could see that an undertow was forming where the incoming and outgoing waves met with force near the edge of the deeper water. She could have sworn she’d seen a hand go up, slim and tanned, out beyond the flags and over to the right. Then it had disappeared. Was someone playing a joke? There were always idiots who wanted to mess about and stress out the lifeguards.

Then she saw the hand go up again. This was for real!

‘Someone’s in trouble,’ she yelled, leaping to her feet and pointing.

Sam, the other lifeguard who’d been trying to move some weak swimmers nearer shore, heard her shout and he swung round. Immediately he went into action, picking up the rescue float and in a moment the other lifesavers were swarming out of the shelter, organised and ready to help.

Sam was a strong swimmer and so was Selina, the other lifeguard who went with him. Nathan was still prancing around in the waves like the king of the surf and hadn’t yet noticed that he should be helping. One of the lifeguards grabbed the megaphone and bellowed at him to come back.

People stopped swimming and stood watching at the edge of the water. Someone said there was a shark, and mothers quickly began herding their kids out.

Flick shaded her eyes with her hand. She’d forgotten to grab her sunnies, but despite the glare she could see Sam reach the person and start towing them to shore.

‘And wouldn’t you know it?’ said Flick, as eventually the slim blonde girl was half-dragged up the beach on wobbly thin legs. ‘Our little American rule breaker!’

The American girl wasn’t too thrilled to be told off by Sam, and nor was she pleased to be spitting out sea water in front of the crowd of bystanders.

‘Has that lady drowned, Mum?’ asked a little boy in a loud voice.

‘She nearly did,’ answered his mother. ‘She should have been swimming between the flags.’

Of course Nathan had to arrive at the end of all the drama, surging into the shore and leaping out, leaving the raft to bob about on the edge of the breakers while he dashed up the beach.

‘Here comes Nathan the Great himself,’ said Flick sourly. She got to her feet, walked down the beach and dragged the rubber rescue craft safely onto higher ground. Nobody had noticed that it had started to
float away: they were all too busy crowding round the American girl who was now looking pathetic and clinging to Nathan. Her companion was hovering helplessly, so Nathan scooped her up in his arms and carried her up the beach to the surf lifesaving club so she could rest and recuperate.

Liz, who’d scurried over to see the action, was waiting for Flick near the path.

‘It’s almost worth drowning to be carried by Nathan,’ she sighed, as they walked toward the road. ‘Did you see how that girl wrapped her arms round his neck and gazed at him? He’s drop-dead gorgeous, you’ve got to admit it, Flick.’

‘I wish
he’d
drop dead,’ said Flick. ‘He’s such a poser. Where was he when he was needed? Out in the waves showing off. What if they’d needed the rescue boat? He’s just so up himself it’s not funny.’

‘But he’s so gorgeous!’

‘You just said some guy called Josh is gorgeous,’ Flick reminded her as they crossed the road.

‘Nathan’s gorgeous, but Josh is a
babe
,’ Liz explained. ‘He’s sixteen and he’s got this really cool blond hair and he’s a fantastic surfer. He surfs really close to the rocks where no one else is game to go, and he’s just so nice. Once the zipper got stuck on his
wetsuit and he asked me to unzip him. It was sort of romantic.’

Flick sighed. Had she been this crazy over boys when she was fifteen? It seemed a long time ago, pre-Todd. There were vague memories of giggling with her girlfriends over guys at school.

That’s right, now she remembered, she’d been head over heels in love with Fraser when she was fourteen. She’d even managed to get photos of him when their class was going on a school excursion by getting a friend to yell out his name, then snapping him as he’d turned round. She’d plastered the photos all over her bedroom wall and inside her locker door. There’d been hours of hanging round near his locker, dropping books on his feet, flirting, calling him up then giggling and slamming down the phone. He’d never asked her out. He was just a sort of dream lover who had lived a wonderful romantic existence inside her head until she’d seen him kissing another girl in a doorway, and the bubble had burst, just like that.

By now they were back at the store and it was busy again. Kay was trying to serve at the counter and cook all at once, and was looking frazzled.

‘Remember that American girl, the blonde one with the big teeth who was in here before?’ said Liz in a loud voice to Kay, as she put on her apron. ‘Well,
she nearly drowned, but Sam and Nathan rescued her.’

‘Sam and
Selina
rescued her,’ Flick said curtly as she washed and dried her hands before coming to serve behind the counter. ‘Nathan was nowhere near the woman.’

‘Yeah, but he carried her up to the clubhouse,’ Liz defended, as she dug down deep into the freezer for two Maxibons and three King Cones.

‘Is that true?’ Kay asked. ‘That American girl nearly drowned? There’s not even the suggestion of a rip out there today, although, of course, the sea can look deceptively calm.’

‘She was swimming out of her depth, and not between the flags.’

‘Serves her right then,’ said Kay shortly. She hadn’t been too impressed by the American girl’s rather bombastic nature when she’d come into the store, and she had no patience with people who didn’t obey the signs and swim safely.

During the non-holiday period when the lifesavers weren’t on duty it was understandable that people could use bad judgement and swim in dangerous currents that they didn’t know existed, but when the beach was being patrolled there was absolutely no excuse.

Lunchtime was more or less over except for a few stragglers wanting the odd meat pie, and now it was the afternoon tea brigade, as Kay called them — people from the beach wanting cool drinks and ice-creams or packets of crisps, or travellers wanting Devonshire teas.

Kay and her partner Cam had spent a lot of money doing up the old store and making the cafe look appealing to customers. It had originally been plastered with signs advertising various products with its windows clogged with posters about rules and regulations for the state parks area, maps of the region and other paraphernalia, and had looked rundown from the outside.

Kay got the local builder to add a wide verandah so that tables and chairs could be put under cover, and there was a grassy area to one side with more tables, benches and big umbrellas. The exterior had been painted cream with a dark green trim, and she’d placed terracotta tubs of brightly coloured geraniums around the verandah to create a friendly atmosphere. Indoors, lacy curtains at the windows and some small tables with gingham tablecloths and chairs cushioned with the same material created a country cafe ambience.

The general store part of the business was at the
other end of the large room, where the shelves were crammed with tinned food, groceries, magazines, and videos for hire. Camping equipment and fishing gear was stacked high or hung from hooks on the walls. There was a large freezer full of meat, hamburgers and fish fingers, and a smaller one for bait. Fridges full of dairy products and cool drinks took up the remaining space. Everything was dominated by a long counter that ran almost the length of the room.

Through a doorway behind the counter was the kitchen where most of the cooking was done, and further on was another room with the pizza oven where Kay’s special pizzas were baked daily from 4 pm onward.

That was Nathan’s job — pizza chef.

‘Here he comes — Nathan the Great,’ said Flick under her breath.

She’d given him this nickname since he’d burnt a whole oven full of pizzas the week before, like Alfred the Great who’d burnt the cakes in medieval mythology, thinking about battles and conquering the enemy instead of concentrating on the immediate task at hand. Nathan had been concentrating on a group of chicky-babes who’d been in the cafe instead of watching his pizzas.

Apart from the fact that he was good at making
batches of dough and being creative with the toppings, Nathan was a dead loss as a chef. He’d told Kay he’d worked in a hotel in Melbourne as an assistant chef but he’d lost his papers, and being desperate for someone to do the job, Kay hadn’t bothered making him get new copies.

‘He says he’s definitely done a course,’ she’d said firmly.

‘Some weekend wonder-class,’ Flick had mumbled, but it wasn’t her job to hire and fire people — she was employed to make sandwiches, coffees and wait on tables as well as serve behind the counter.

As soon as she saw Nathan swaggering through the door, Liz immediately straightened her shoulders, ran her hands through her hair and tried to push out her non-existent chest.

‘Oh, give it up, Liz!’ snapped Flick. ‘You might as well lie down and act like a doormat for all the notice he takes of you. Save the energy for Josh. He sounds really nice.’

‘Hi, girls!’ Nathan winked as he strolled behind the counter and through to the kitchen. ‘Did you hear about the daring surf rescue today? This Yankee chick nearly drowned in a fierce rip and I saved her, with a little help from Sam and Selina of course.’

‘We were there,’ said Flick. ‘We saw it
all
, Nathan.’

‘We saw you carrying her up the beach,’ breathed Liz.

‘We saw you hurtling about on the rescue boat while the girl was busy drowning,’ added Flick sarcastically.

Nathan glared at Flick, one of those dagger-blasts that said, ‘If looks could kill you’d be dead.’

‘I had to test the engine,’ he said. ‘The spark plugs were playing up. It’d be worse if we needed the boat in a hurry and the engine was a no-go, wouldn’t it?’

‘Yeah. Right. Whatever!’

Nathan shrugged and went off to make his famous Nathan-dough, which involved a lot of muscling activity with the flour-fat-and-water mixture, and made him feel good. Flick
never
made him feel good. He thought that she was the Ice Queen at Coolini Beach and the Kayah Cafe with a tongue more abrasive than heavy-grade sandpaper, and she was going to get a big payback for it. He’d been planning and scheming ever since she’d turned him down flat in front of his mates when he’d asked her out on a date. Stuck-up bimbo.

Nathan pummelled the dough in time to the thump, thump, thump of some ska beat pumping out from the CD player in the corner. He liked music while he worked, not the soft sentimental stuff that
the girls liked, but the full-on adrenaline pump action of top ska musos. He felt he was giving his muscles a workout as he kneaded the dough into a satisfying pliancy. He twisted one lump quite viciously, at the same time wishing it was Felicity London’s neck.

‘London Bridge is falling down,’ he sang to the music, ‘falling down, oh, falling down. London bridge is falling down, my fair lady!’

Completely unaware that she was being strangled in Nathan’s mind, Flick was madly serving customers. She wondered if she should suggest wearing rollerblades to Kay, because it seemed to take forever to trudge in and out with trays of food plus zoom back behind the counter to serve the impatient customers who wanted magazines and dog food and packets of instant two-minute noodles and chocolate milkshakes and tent pegs and a bag of whitebait and have you got any ice and twenty bucks of super please and one burger with the lot, hold the onions.

She’d need to talk to Kay about this. It seemed to her that it would be far better to take turns, Liz behind the counter and Flick waiting tables for an hour or so, then they could swap round. Kay had everyone doing everything, and if things got even more hectic Nathan was expected to strip off his chef’s apron and start being a petrol jock at the bowser.

There were more staff starting at the weekend and if they were all trying to do everything it would be one big mess! They’d be tripping over each other and getting orders muddled. Tempers would be frayed and the customers would cop some real grief, which wasn’t good business practice. Yes, she’d have to try to talk to Kay.

Kay wasn’t the kind of person you could argue with, however. She had her own, set way of doing things, and rightly so because it
was
her business. But this was the first year that Cam wasn’t helping out, as he’d got a job driving the Elgas truck doing deliveries round the coast a few months before, and he couldn’t just chuck it in for the summer period. Plus he wasn’t eligible for holidays yet, either. According to Liz, what usually happened as far as she’d known was that Cam had done a lot of the heavy work, lugged crates and served petrol and filled gas bottles, while Kay had run the food and grocery side of things.

Kay liked to do everything herself, which of course was impossible, and she didn’t seem to have much clue about how to delegate jobs. But she was a fair boss to work for, and as the evening dinner crowd began to roll through the doors, she kicked into an even faster mode, cooking burgers, making chips, heating lasagne in the microwave, slicing
more ham, and generally behaving like a miniature cyclone.

Nathan was churning out multi-toppinged pizzas like a machine, and Flick felt as though her feet were on fire and her head was going to explode. It seemed like a
year
since she’d been on the beach, eating her lunch and enjoying the sunshine.

‘One regular Kayah Special with extra cheese,’ Nathan yelled, sliding a cardboard pizza container along the counter. ‘One small Vegetarian and one family Marinara.’

Two more containers followed. Cam was supposed to do the pizza deliveries but he was still out delivering gas cylinders to holiday houses. Pity he couldn’t deliver both at once. Flick could see it in her head.

‘One small Aussie and one large Elgas. That’ll be fifty-three dollars, please.’

So the people who would normally sit at home waiting for a pizza delivery had to get off their butts and walk or drive to the store to collect their orders. Some of them were not pleased. One large man with a puffy purple face like a beetroot and a posh voice who sounded like he was used to people jumping when he spoke, was most irate.

‘It says
home delivery
,’ he snapped, pointing to the
sign. ‘That’s false advertising and I could sue you.’

‘Normally we do have home delivery, but we’re a staff member down and as you can see, we’re very busy,’ said Kay, trying to keep her temper.

‘As the customer it’s not my problem. It’s
your
problem!’

‘It’ll be your problem in a minute, mate, if Kay upends that Mexican with extra hot salami on your thick bald head,’ Flick muttered to herself, as she scooped up some ice-cream to plop into the milkshake she was making.

‘This is the trouble with private enterprise,’ said Purple Face loudly to the other customers in the store. ‘Deregulation. People think they can do what they like. The worst thing to happen last year in this country was the sacking of so many public servants. I’m struggling to run a government department with a skeleton staff but do I let my standards slack off? No, I do
not
!’

‘Der,’ said Liz with her head down in the freezer as she searched for a Caramel Fudge icy pole. ‘Imagine working for
him
!’

‘I understand your irritation, but I can’t spare anyone to do deliveries,’ said Kay in a voice that meant any minute she was going to lose it and let fly with a barrage of words that would weld this
guy’s ears flat to his head like melted cheese onto corn chips.

‘Say, I’ve got my car and some spare time,’ said Rob, who’d come through the door in time to hear the end of the conversation. ‘Do you want me to run the pizzas around, Kay?’