Gone Fishing by Susan Duncan Page B

away, tasting the sting of salt.
    Near dawn, with the wind dropped to a breathy murmur and the sea flat calm, his anger compressed into a tight little kernel and stored away for the time being, he knows he has to make a start somewhere. He feels pressure build again, time running out. Maybe a visit to the address in tiny print secreted away in the bottom corner of the last page. Find the head honcho where the buck always stops and force the bastard to see sense. How hard can it be? He hits the sack to grab a couple of hours’ sleep.
    Â 
    Â 

 
    Chapter Four
    Sam wakes to the screaming harangue of cockatoos, the loony racket of kookaburras and a low-grade clench in his gut that he knows from long experience is born of dread. Hot and sweaty for all the wrong reasons, he throws back the sheet. The sea breeze is long gone; the mercury is rising. He pulls together the pieces from yesterday until they fall into place. Garrawi, he remembers. They’re trying to steal Garrawi. He glances at the clock his mum bought for his eighth birthday and that he’s kept ever since even though the tick tock is loud enough to shatter the peace of the kitchen four doors away. Swings his legs to the floor. There’s work to be done. He reaches into the wardrobe for a clean pair of jeans, a halfway decent shirt. He’s going calling.
    Ten minutes later, showered, shaved and out on the flat, shimmery water on the magnificent Mary Kay , he passes the usual early-morning commuters, all of them barefoot to avoid ruining their good shoes in the petrol scum that pools in every hull. He waves a hand out of his cabin door. Gets a nod, a flick of the wrist in return. Bob the Rower raises a leg in acknowledgement, not missing a stroke of the oars. The morning light is fuzzy with heat. It’s going to be a scorcher.
    A civilised chat with the people at the top. That’s the go. He’ll mention storms that wash fragile beaches out to sea. How it can take years for nature to repair the damage. He’ll tell them about towering eucalypts and their frail grip on the land. How they suddenly let go and keel over, destroying anything in the way as they crash to the ground. Then there are death adders. Spiders big as a man’s hand – although it’s the smaller ones that carry enough poison to kill. Goannas that rip your guts out if you get in their way. He’ll point out that the Island survives mainly on tank water. How many tanks would they need for a resort catering for . . . He hauls the development pamphlet out of his back pocket, slowing the Mary Kay to a crawl to avoid rear-ending a yacht on a mooring. Eighty. No change since he last looked. With more staff quarters at the rear. Insanity. It won’t work. It’s a bad investment. Sam likes the leaden certainty of the phrase bad investment . Surely they’ll see the risks, the downside of a still-raw paradise that is not necessarily everybody’s cup of tea. Feeling like he’s on stronger ground, he pushes the throttle forward.
    He’s on the road in his battered white ute twenty minutes later, the already burning hot bitumen shimmering wetly, pollution thick in his nostrils, his vision blurred by salt scale glued to his windscreen like dry skin. Suburbs unfold on either side of the road in different shades of baked brick. Red. Cream. Brown. Speckled. Grey. Liver. Solid and serious houses, crafted to last for generations. He’s a timber man himself but in Cook’s Basin, where white ants are voracious, just about the only houses still standing after a hundred years are built from brick or sandstone or both. One day, he thinks, when he and Kate have a brood of kids . . . Ah jeez. He’s fairdinkum off with the pixies. Everyone steps off on the wrong foot once or twice in the early days of a new romance but the core issue – the fact that he is besotted and she is engaged in a disengaged sort of way – is hardly