Chapter 19: And die behind the wheel

Friday dawned foggily. That is unusual in my location, but a couple of times a year, a windless morning combines with other atmospherics to blot out the bay and everything else. The fog felt cold and clammy. An ‘inside day’ seemed in order, and after an omelette, I set out to clean the house. I had fallen behind a little in the six weeks Leslie had been playing hard to get, and fallen behind much more since she had (as she put it) ‘sooled’ Pauline on to me.

Ryan rang as I was cleaning the oven. It was good to stop. He wanted a blow by blow account of my dinner with Leslie and Pauline and I gave him one, answering his questions about who was up who and who hadn’t paid as well as I was able. Ryan was happy to be on an ‘all hanging out’ basis with the four of us, but was most immediately interested in stories about drug fuelled orgies, and I didn’t have any. He was keen to meet Pauline and Leslie.

“So you are allowed to talk to me about the widows and the drugs?”

“I just have been, ya silly old bugger. What is it that you want to know?”

“Who was having sex with who when they were tripping?

“Dunno – Pauline wasn’t into drugs but she had sex with Ivan and Barry at least. Leslie was tripping, but I haven’t any idea who she was having sex with apart from Tom. Dunno who else was involved, if anybody. I guess you can ask.”

“I tripped a bit when I visited Amsterdam and had a night with a couple of German girls.”

“That was fifty years ago. Your OE was in the early seventies – sounds like you are at least thinking about repeating the experience.”

“Maybe.”

“I wouldn’t hold my breath. Pauline has never been into drugs, Leslie hasn’t tripped for more than twenty years as far as I know, and is currently exclusive with ‘Weasel Tom’, and the guy who made the stuff will be cremated next week.”

“Fair point. So when can I meet these reformed degenerates?”

“Pauline would probably be available to go out in the boat next fine day. Leslie has her teaching commitments and the travel time is an issue for her, as well as her current thing with Tom.”

“How about you check weather and see what Pauline is up for and come back to me?”

I agreed and we said goodbye. I went back to the oven.

There is something remarkably satisfying about a clean house. On some level, I am a bit of a slob, but an early stint in the Army convinced me that the whole business of living is much easier when there is a place for everything and everything is in its place. I finished the morning with a sense of quiet satisfaction, and since the mist and fog had cleared, sat on my deck with a coffee and watched a couple of gannets feeding in the bay.

Gannets are amazing birds. They cruise around the coast looking for small fish, gliding up to 300 ft above the sea surface. When they spot something, they half fold their wings and kamikaze dive to grab it. In deep clear water offshore, they sometimes go down nearly 50 ft.

A couple of times I have had what my guru used to call ‘peak experiences’ with gannets feeding on baitfish a mile or two offshore. It’s quite a buzz to be swimming with a school of baitfish on SCUBA, and to have a gannet spear down through the mirror of the surface and plunge past, still trailing small bubbles. The baitfish scatter but the gannets are like smart missiles, steering with half folded wings. They almost always get one before pulling out of their dive and swimming back to the surface.

In the 25ft depth in my bay, they fly lower and go into the water at a shallow angle, and the two in the bay were feeding steadily. Dive, surface, swallow, take off into the wind, gain 20m height, circle, dive. Rinse and repeat stuff. And I knew that the gannets weren’t the only thing that would be feeding on the baitfish that were obviously there. There would be Kahawai for sure, and perhaps other fish as well. When half a dozen more gannets turned up and started feeding, the Kahawai called louder than the unpainted windowsills.

I grabbed a rod and some softbaits, and trailered my dinghy across the road to the beach. There was nothing feeding on the surface, and no particular place that was better than any other, so I just rowed out a couple of hundred meters, shipped my oars and drifted while I cast and retrieved. My arm seemed to have healed, and I was fishing with no pain at all.

My softbaits looked nothing like the anchovies that the gannets (and I hoped the Kahawai) were feeding on, but when a feeding frenzy is in progress, I have known Kahawai to strike at a bit of banana skin. Sure enough, I had a hit on my third cast, and as I brought a smallish Kahawai to the boat, I realised I had no ice, no knife, no phone, and no lifejacket. So I swung it aboard and broke it’s neck, promising myself I would go home and ice it as soon as I had a couple more. That didn’t take long, and I was back on my deck drinking coffee with half a kilo of Kahawai fillets in the fridge long before the gannets moved out of the bay.

Modern meteorology makes boating safer and more comfortable than it used to be, and the following Tuesday was predicted to be an ideal day to head offshore, so I rang Pauline. She was keen to come fishing and boating and meet Ryan, but was booked to see a movie with Henry on Tuesday evening. She seemed slightly embarrassed about that, and I wasn’t sure whether her problem was telling me that she was spending an evening with another lover, or guilty about getting the fishing/boating goodies and then not staying the night. So I asked her. Well sort of. In a roundabout way.

“Are you allowed to have piscatorial pleasures with one lover and then cruelly abandon him for film and fucking with another?”

“Jesus you’re weird!”

“Yup. But you did seem a bit embarrassed telling me about your date.” There was a long silence.

“I suppose I was. Ivan used to get jealous, but he’d always deny it. Then he’d shit on me for some other reason” She sounded sad, and I had no trouble visualising the hag on the other end of the phone.

“Just ‘cos you’ve told me you love me doesn’t make me your husband.”

“What the fuck? What has that got to do with it?” Pauline sounded really flustered, but I wasn’t backing off.

“If I get jealous – and you having other lovers almost certainly won’t make me shitty, I will talk to you about it and we will work it out.”

“Okay. I’ll remember that.”

“Sweet, and if you suspect I have got something going on and I’m not saying, you are allowed to give me a shove.”

We got down to logistics, calculating that if we were back at the ramp by five, Pauline could bring ‘date’ clothes with her and shower and dress and snack at my place and still make the movie.

Ryan was pleased to have a meeting arranged, and promised to bring bait and burley on Tuesday. I went back to my list of maintenance tasks, and planned to finish painting all the windowsills over the weekend.

The only excitement was a crash about 50metres down the road on Saturday night, and its fallout.

Our road is ultimately a dead end. During the summer holiday period and on fine weekends during the year, it carries a fair bit of traffic, with RVs, caravans, and trailer boats joining the daily commuters. But the nights are quiet except for the occasional ‘boy racer’. They favour overpowered Japanese sedans and the odd muscle car, all driving too fast and laying rubber in snaky patterns in various places, usually with a load of young people aboard in various stages of intoxication. They don’t often crash near my place, there are other locations posing more serious challenges for drivers whose confidence markedly exceeds their skill.