Chapter Twenty-six

Early on Monday morning, with the sun refusing to bow to the changing season and already hot enough to sting, Sam borrows Jimmy’s tinny and zooms to The Briny to check out the newspaper advertisement in the campaign to save Garrawi. Tying up at the pontoon, he races up the gangplank and explodes through the back door. ‘Ladies!’ he announces.

Before he can say another word, Ettie hands him a frothy mug of coffee. Jenny thrusts an egg-and-bacon roll at him. The two hard-working women look fit to bust. Success is catching. ‘Jimmy was brilliant, wasn’t he?’ Ettie says.

‘Always said the kid’s a genius. In my humble opinion, last night he galvanised a nation. If there’s anyone between here and the Kimberley who isn’t onside they’re either asleep or dead. If you’re interested in a second opinion, I reckon you ought to batten down the hatches because you’re about to have the biggest day in the almost two-hundred-year history of The Briny Café!’ He jerks his thumb towards the Square. A crowd is building. ‘But for starters, you might want to unlock the door.’ He grabs a paper and takes off to avoid the stampede.

‘Shit,’ says Jenny, rocketing forward. Ettie slams eight cups in the coffee machine, presses the button. It’s going to be a long – and very profitable – day.

On the back deck, which he doesn’t expect to have to himself for very long, Sam lays the newspaper flat on a table, shocked by the difference between seeing a small piece of artwork printed on A4 paper and a full-colour advertisement at the bottom of page one of a mass-circulation daily newspaper. The impact is massive. ‘NOT FOR SALE’, ‘OUTRAGE’. The two words are plastered in red across an idyllic photograph of Garrawi Park.

The ad draws your eye quicker than the headlines (another pointless opinion poll rating the premier and the leader of the opposition – as if anything matters except election day) and dares you to ignore it. He whacks up his feet on a spare chair, crossing his ankles, and reads the ad line by line, letting his food go cold.

Too beautiful to lose! Garrawi Park is a pristine public space and natural wonderland on Cutter Island in Cook’s Basin. It is in danger of being stolen from the people of NSW and turned into an exclusive resort for the wealthy. The destruction of this unique and historic site is vandalism. Show you care. Join the Save Garrawi Campaign online by going to our website – www.savegarrawi.com – to register your vote against any future development. Join the fight to stop our beautiful beaches falling into the hands of profiteers. Force the State Government to abide by the wishes of the people. Vote now! Make a difference!

It couldn’t be a better end to a top weekend, he thinks, wishing Delaney had been around to share in the triumphs. He flicks through the news. Murder. Cricket. Tennis. Road accidents. War in the Middle East. Remembers the day he found an old newspaper under linoleum he was ripping out of the kitchen. Murder. Cricket etc. He scoffs his congealing roll and sculls his lukewarm coffee. Leaving greasy thumbprints on the newspaper.

Jeez, he’s late for work at the boatshed. Not good for a man who tries to lead by example. Star or no star, young Jimmy better be there. Fame is fleeting, according to Kate, and anyone who chases it better have a bread-and-butter job to keep from starving when the lights are turned off. His spirit falters.

Before the year is done, he predicts, Kate will coolly pack up, sell out and move on. A blow-in after all, despite Ettie’s faith, his hopes. By then, if business stays strong, Ettie will be in a position to buy out Kate’s share. The café will survive, Cook’s Basin will prosper. And inevitably, so will Kate. People who have little perspective beyond their own tend to come out on top. Must be a lonely life, he thinks. The tragedy – the big freaking tragedy – is that although Kate thinks she’s survived Emily’s influence unscathed, she is like a pot that’s on a slow simmer until someone suddenly turns up the heat. He can’t help wondering whether her latest flight to the wilds of Victoria has answered all her questions. Christ, as long as it hasn’t opened up an even bigger black hole.

If she’d asked his opinion, he would’ve told her to quit while she was ahead, cliché or no freaking cliché. Emily was as mad as a cut snake and the only way to deal with madness is to cut it out of your life. He heads for the café pontoon. Jumps into Jimmy’s tinny and roars off to Oyster Bay. A furry black-and-white dog streaks down the boatshed jetty, his tail whipping up a force forty gale, to greet him. He breaks into an ear-splitting grin.

‘Where you bin, Sam?’ shouts Jimmy, his red hair jammed into one of Frankie’s Greek fisherman caps. Sam waves. In the slip, the Mary Kay is on her way to full glory. He pats her hull as he passes. ‘All good, Frankie?’ The shipwright nods, keeps filling small cracks in the timber with putty. ‘She was due for an anti-foul anyway,’ Sam says. ‘Tell me, just how many caps like that have you got?’

‘The kid was going to need a number one. More shit in his hair than on the hull till he got the hang of it.’

‘Knew you were a soft touch under the bluff. How you doing, Jimmy?’ Sam tests the texture of the fill with a fingertip. Massages a little between his thumb and index finger. Satisfied, he flicks it away.

The kid slides back his cap, jiggles, giving the question serious consideration: ‘Rome wasn’t built in a day, Sam. Ya gotta have patience. But me an’ Longfella, we’re doin’ good.’

Sam pulls the kid’s cap over his eyes. ‘You’re a fast learner, mate.’ He looks up at Kate’s empty house, pleased to note he’s feeling more wistful these days than wounded. Soon, he’ll convince himself he’s had a lucky escape. Soon. Trouble is, every time he writes her off, she comes up with a thought, a gesture, that rips out his heart. There’s gold in her, he thinks, a pure seam of kindness that’s based on clear-headed common sense without any fiddle-faddling sentimentality. Made her effort to contribute worth more, if you took the time to think about it.

The phone goes off in his pocket, making a noise like a fly caught in a bottle. No caller ID. The press, he decides. The world, it seems, wants more of Jimmy. He dumps the call. ‘Jimmy!’

‘Yar, Sam.’ His freckled face pokes out below the hull.

‘You want to do more interviews?’

‘They offerin’ to sling me another fistful of dollars?’

‘No, mate. You’re not an exclusive story any more. You’re just fodder.’ He sees the lack of comprehension in the kid’s eyes and back tracks. ‘It’s like this. You did a good job last night and now more journalists want to talk to you but because you’ve already told your story once, no one’s willing to pay a fee. The law according to Kate.’

‘We got work to do, Sam, don’t we? How we gunna do our work if we’re buzzin’ all over the place?’

‘Decide what you want, and we’ll manage no matter what. Is it a quiet life or the limelight?’

‘What’s the limelight, Sam?’

‘A star, mate. Do you want to be a star?’

‘Aw jeez, Sam. Not unless there’s a dollar in it. Just a waste of time, me mum says.’

‘She’s a wise woman,’ Sam says, feeling a tide of relief wash through him; Amelia has clearly had an epiphany or Artie’s had a quiet but forceful word in her ear and explained the downside of celebrity. Who was it that said everyone would experience fifteen minutes of fame in a lifetime? The artist, what was his name? Loved Campbell’s soup cans. Warhol, that was it. Personally, he was a Heinz tomato soup man. Tip the contents in a saucepan with the same amount of milk and as much sweet sherry as you thought you might need to get you through the night. It was one of his mother’s favourite winter stand-by dinners, served with heaps of hot buttered toast. Guaranteed to ward off colds and flu. He didn’t remember spending much of his childhood prone on the cot with a runny nose and red eyes so she may have had a point. ‘You thought about this long and hard?’ he asks, giving the kid one last chance at the big time.

‘Bunch o’ wankers, if you’ll excuse me language.’

‘Your mum say that?’

‘Nah. That’s me own version.’

Sam is floored, as he is so often, by the kid’s ability to cut through the crap without ever being seduced by it. He watches Jimmy work for a while longer. Seeing a new focus, less frenzy. A boy starting to figure out what makes him tick. Who he is and where he belongs. According to Fast Freddy, who sees his fair share of the Island’s more intellectually endowed kids searching for self-knowledge, Jimmy’s come from a long way behind to lead the pack. If everyone’s due fifteen minutes of fame, Sam’s sure as hell happy that Jimmy’s time has come and gone. No harm done, thank god.

The payment should hit the kid’s bank account by the end of the day. Jeez, the press weren’t a trusting lot, were they? No money up front – nothing till after the story went to air. Even a hint of a sneeze in the direction of an opposition television station, and all bets were off. Meaning no money because the exclusivity clause was broken. Anywhere else, and Sam was sure Jimmy would have blown the contract in happy innocence. But in Cook’s Basin, where strangers stood out like bad debts, the community – already on full alert after the sinking of the Mary Kay – was ready to steer the kid away from any wandering press people intent on wrecking the deal with what Kate called a ‘spoiler’. Which meant, she told him patiently, taking a couple of hiyas and giddays and fleshing them out with dodgy stuff based on quotes from ‘sources close to Jimmy’. He’d argued the point, insisting no bloke, no matter how great a bastard, would motz a deal that was going to set up a kid with one or two unique personality issues for life. Kate had given him one of those looks that made his toes curl, like he was two cards short of a full deck. ‘You think they care about Jimmy? They’d trample over their grannies to get a story,’ she said. He wanted to know if she’d been like that when she was a fully operational journo. ‘I worked in financial news. It’s a different scene.’

He finds a scraper on Frankie’s bench and goes to work alongside Jimmy. The kid gives him a comrade-in-arms grin that almost blows up his heart. If he was going to make a habit of picking up waifs and strays he’d be a fool to think he’d manage a one hundred per cent strike rate. Kate was a gamble from day one. You win some, you lose some. ‘Ya missed a bit, Sam. Ya gotta concentrate, ya know.’

‘Where’s your whip?’

‘Daydreaming again, were ya? Doesn’t get ya anywhere, ya know?’

‘Who said that?’ Sam, a great believer in the power of daydreaming to restore the spirit, is curious.

‘That TV bloke. Said we were daydreamin’ about savin’ the park.’

‘Bloody knuckle-head. What would he know?’

‘We gunna save it, Sam?’

‘The great lesson to be learned from this campaign is that no matter what gets thrown at you, never give up or give in. They can change the rules, break your windows or sink your barge, but you keep fighting. You getting my drift, kid?’

‘Never take no for an answer, right?’

‘Right.’

‘So what are we gunna do next, Sam?’

‘I’m working on it, mate. Trust me. It’s going to be big.’ Jeez, how often has he said that and how often is he going to have to say it?

A short time after café closing hour, Kate walks past the boatshed on her way home. He waves.

She comes over. ‘As a friend,’ she says with a wry grin, ‘would you be able to call in tonight?’

‘Sure,’ he says. ‘Give me half an hour.’

‘I’ll make dinner.’

‘I don’t need bribing, Kate.’

‘Didn’t think for a moment that you did.’

Under a canopy of stars made brighter by a moonless night, Kate tells Sam about her trip to Victoria to meet the man she thought was her brother’s father. Sam listens, stupefied by her lack of tact and sensitivity.

For the first time since he spotted her back in the days when old Bertie was behind the counter of The Briny Café serving shocker coffee and life-threatening egg-and-bacon rolls, the golden flame of infatuation flickers for what he honestly believes is truly the last time, before dying out.

Thank Christ the old bloke was waiting with a confession he’d obviously been desperate to unloose for decades. Probably did him more good than harm to get it off his chest. He wonders if Kate will stay in touch. Realises he couldn’t even hazard a guess, which doesn’t say a lot about his genuine understanding of a woman he was supposed to be in love with. Maybe falling for her simply came down to timing. Forty years old, a string of light summer romances in his past that required neither effort nor commitment, he was ready for more. He’d always thought there was something sad about aging men chasing young women. Never dreamed he’d be on the brink of becoming one.

Kate appeared like a prize. He should have known it was never going to be easy. He resists an impulse to indulge in a round of self-pity. Sacrilege when you live in a strong community that never lets you down. Jeez, what’s the point of her sad and pointless crusades to get to truths that should have no real bearing on the way she lives her life? ‘The sins of the fathers,’ he says, out loud without meaning to.

‘That’s the point, isn’t it? Who is Alex’s father if it isn’t Timothy Terence Martin O’Reilly?’ she replies.

Sam closes his eyes. ‘Does your brother care?’

‘Of course,’ she replies, looking surprised he’d even asked. ‘I told him I’d keep looking. And I will, even if it takes a lifetime.’ She looks at him defiantly. ‘Can you imagine how hard it must be to have no knowledge of who you are? Where you really come from?’

‘I’ve never met the bloke but from what you’ve told me, he sounds pretty grounded. Reckon he knows who he is, and maybe, just maybe, even though everyone’s intentions are pure gold, digging into stuff that Emily went to a lot of trouble to hide, might rock him right off his foundations. It’s risky, Kate. If he wants to search, maybe he should go it alone.’

Kate pulls a spag bol sauce out of the freezer, and holds it up in a question. Sam gives in and nods. ‘I just can’t let it go,’ she says, shoving the container in the microwave, putting a pot of water on the stove to boil. ‘It’s obsessive, I know. Maybe I want to prove once and for all that Emily was a monster in her own right and not one that I created out of . . . well, whatever the many and varied reasons behind some kids turning their parents into fiends.’ She throws a small handful of salt into the water. The microwave pings. She tips the softened sauce into a saucepan: ‘Ettie says it’s OK for defrosting, but warming pre-cooked food in the microwave is like nuking it,’ she explains. ‘Slow and easy gives a better result.’

‘She’ll make a chef of you yet.’

‘No. I’ll always be a read-the-instructions type of woman. I don’t have the instinctive flair she has.’ She stirs the sauce. Throws the spaghetti into bubbling water. Steam rises and hits the ceiling where it hangs like tears. Kate opens the top of a window. Sam watches vapour twist and curl outwards into the open air.

He asks: ‘You sure there aren’t any more clues in the grey box?’

Without a word, she leaves the kitchen. When she returns, she lays out all the information she has. Only half engaged, wishing he had the sense to follow his own advice and leave the subject alone, Sam searches for links, a pattern, a joining of action and result. Keeps coming back to the word suicide. It bounces loudly off the inside walls of his skull. A single tone that resonates more and more strongly. ‘Why would Emily’s mother kill herself?’ he asks after a while, more out of curiosity than a belief it holds a vital clue. ‘What makes someone decide that death is preferable to life?’

Kate shrugs. ‘Where do you start? Grief. Pain. Hopelessness. Or all three. But if there’d been a hint of mental illness, I’m quite sure Emily would have used it as a weapon: You’re as mad as your grandmother . . .’

‘I’ve always thought something awful must have happened to Emily when she was very young,’ he says. ‘O’Reilly’s story backs me up, too. No mother, not even Emily, could hand over a baby without a backward glance unless there was something so hideous about the conception she couldn’t bear to look at the child.’ The sins of the fathers, he thinks again. Ah jeez. The sins of the fathers.

Sam knows he should change the subject. Knows he should stop his thoughts rocketing in the kind of directions that could lead to endless pain and anguish. He knows all this but still he says: ‘Has Alex ever considered a DNA test?’

Kate scoffs at the idea. ‘What’s the point?’

‘Maybe,’ he says, skirting around the hideous idea that’s latched onto his brain and refuses to budge, ‘to verify that Alex is really, truly your half-brother and not a kid Emily snatched.’ Dumb, he thinks, really dumb. No one snatches a kid and gets away with it. He tells himself to back-pedal fast. Get out of the hole he’s digging deeper and deeper. Before he can swallow his words and in a final roll of the dice, he impulsively and foolishly opens what he knows in his gut is the real Pandora’s horror box. ‘You might want to get Emily’s DNA and O’Reilly’s at the same time.’

‘What? Dig up her grave?’

‘I dunno,’ he mumbles. ‘O’Reilly could be lying. Alex might be a fraud. Or maybe just closure.’

‘Crazy idea,’ she says. Sam breathes a sigh of relief. He may be a firm believer in steering clear of fibs, but seeking out the secrets of the past when they could do more harm than good is a no-win bet.

Thoughtfully, Kate adds: ‘Maybe not so crazy. I’ll talk to Alex and Timothy. See if they approve. I’ve still got Emily’s hats. They should do. All I need is hair, don’t I? Exhuming a body is going a bit too far.’ She grins, to show it’s a joke. Sam wants to cut out his tongue.

Jeez, he thinks, sculling his beer. Fighting an urge to jump into the water and start swimming. No good will come from all this. Ah jeez. He feels like he might suffocate if he stays a minute longer.

‘Feel a bit fluey,’ he croaks, struggling to his feet, ignoring Kate’s surprise. And it’s the flat-out truth. He feels sick to his gut. ‘Might have to skip dinner, love. Sorry. Suddenly feel crook as a dog.’

‘You’d be better off with someone around to look after you,’ she says.

‘Thanks, but when I’m this bad, all I want to do is crawl in a corner and curl up like an old dog. Sorry, love. Just hit me all of a sudden.’

Kate sees him to the dock, holding onto his arm. ‘Call me,’ she says, ‘if you need anything.’

‘Of all the shocker clichés,’ he says when he’s on the water and safely out of earshot. ‘A freaking tragedy, that’s what it is. I’m as sure of it as I am that the sun comes up every morning. The sins of the fathers. Dear god.’ He has never in his life ever wanted more to be wrong.

Sam wakes in what feels like the dead of night. He switches on his bedside light and checks the clock. One am. His mobile phone pulsates. You’d call it the death-throes if you saw a person in a similar condition. Bzzzzz. Too late to be anything but a crank call. While he’s still deciding whether or not to answer, the call rings out. He rolls over in bed, pulling the sheet up to his chin, hoping he’ll be able to go back to sleep. He makes a deliberate attempt to switch his mind from Kate to Garrawi and the urgent need for a new thrust in the campaign. Aside from the art auction, future plans are a blank page.

Ring. Ring. Enough to drive a bloke to distraction. Ah jeez, get it over with, he thinks, reaching for the phone to put it out of its misery.

‘Sam Scully.’

‘I know who you are. I called you, didn’t I? You need any more money? I got a million here that’s yours. Say the word and it’s in the account.’

Sam sits up. Fully awake now. ‘You got a name, mate?’

‘Yeah. Max. Short for Max.’ He chuckles, like he’s making the joke for the first time.

‘If you don’t mind me asking – and please don’t think for a moment that I’m not grateful, mate, when there’s no way I could even begin to measure my gratitude and the gratitude of the community – why are you doing this?’

‘Sailed past the park every weekend when I was young. Magic, it was. Places like that? They’re breathing spaces. Stop people going mad when the pressure gets too much. Know what I mean?’

‘Yeah. But, mate, tell me, how can we thank you?’

‘I’m not looking for recognition, if that’s what you think. Doesn’t mean diddly-squat to a man as old – and rich – as me.’

‘There’s got to be something –’

‘Gimme a plaque after I’m buried.’ The old man’s laugh turns into a coughing spasm. Sam waits it out. Max continues: ‘Just wanted to say the ad was good. Real good. Here’s my number. When you need more money, call. Any time. Old people can sleep when they’re dead.’