Silver Bay(45)
Author: Jojo Moyes

There was a weird silence. Liza was staring at me, as if daring me to suggest any other trips. It was as if I’d suggested doing something terrible to the little girl. Kathleen smiled at me, like an apology. She seemed about as out of her depth as I’d ever seen her.

I’m a simple bloke, not the kind to dig my way into a mess. I decided to make it an early night with the missus. That, of course, was in the days before she was out giving it up to her keep-fit instructor.

‘Good to meet you, Hannah. You keep an eye out for those dolphins, now,’ I said to her, tipping my cap, and she gave me a little smile that wiped out everything else around me. Liza McCullen already seemed to have forgotten I was there.

‘Hey, Greggy. You seen this?’

I was sitting in MacIver’s Seafood Bar and Grill, a five-minute walk up the path from Whale Jetty, trying to shift my sore head with a pie and a coffee. I figured it might work as a cross between breakfast, which I had missed, and lunch, which I rarely ate. It had hardly been worth going home; I had left the bar after a lock-in with Del, the owner, some time after two that morning, and virtually retraced my footsteps there as soon as I could get myself out of the shower.

The bar was quiet, the sun still casting long shadows over the bay, the stiff winter breeze keeping what remained of the tourists away from the front, so he walked over and sat down, shoving the newspaper towards me across the table.

‘What?’ I was having trouble focusing.

‘The front page. About this big old development in Silver Bay.’

‘What are you talking about?’ I squinted, pulled the paper towards me and scanned the front-page story under the headline ‘Major Tourist Boost For Town’. It said that a multi-million dollar development had been approved for the land along the bay from Kathleen’s. A major international corporation had got planning permission for the development after an unprecedented series of offers to safeguard the nature of the town and the sea life around it.

Vallance Equity, the financiers behind the plan, have put forward a proposal that includes a new Museum of Whales to raise awareness of Port Stephens’s sea creatures among tourists, whale-friendly watersports, with all instruction including whale safeguards, and a series of add-on benefits, including funding for a new library and a school bus for Silver Bay Elementary School.

‘We’re hoping that this is just the beginning of a fruitful partnership with the local community,’ said Dennis Beaker of Beaker Holdings, one of the British-based developers. ‘We want to take the relationship further to provide a benchmark for responsible building in the area.’

Mayor of Silver Bay Don Brown said: ‘We deliberated long and hard about the appropriateness of this development. But after a lengthy planning process we are happy to welcome both the employment and infrastructure benefits that the new hotel complex will bring. But most of all we welcome the companies’ responsible and thoughtful attitude towards our waters.’

‘“And the sizeable back-hander I’ve got stuffed in my back pocket,”’ mocked Del. ‘Kathleen know about this?’

‘Dunno, mate. I’ve – I’ve not been down there for a few days.’

‘Well,’ said Del, ‘I guess she’ll know now.’ He slung his tea-towel over his shoulder and waddled back towards the grill, where a burger was sending sparks up into the extractor fan.

‘“Whale-friendly watersports”?’ I said. ‘What the Sam Hill are “whale-friendly watersports”?’

‘Perhaps they’re going to teach them synchronised swimming,’ Del chuckled, ‘or train them to pull waterskiers.’

My brain had started to clear. ‘This is a bloody disaster,’ I said, reading on. ‘They’ve bought up the old Bullen place and the water round it.’

Del said nothing, flipping his burgers. I kept reading. ‘We’ll need permission to get the boats out next. I can’t believe what I’m seeing.’

‘Greg, you can’t say the town doesn’t need the business.’

‘You reckon?’ I suddenly saw the Bar and Grill through the eyes of a visitor. The linoleum had been unchanged for the fifteen years I had lived in Silver Bay, the tables and chairs more comfortable than stylish. But that was how we liked it. How I liked it.

Later I walked down to the ticket booth. Leonie, a student, was manning it for the winter. You could usually find some dolphin-mad teenager to work there for a pittance. ‘You’ve got four this afternoon,’ she said, waving a docket, ‘a family of six for Wednesday morning, and a two for Friday, but I’ve told them I’ll have to confirm that because the forecast’s not so good.’

I nodded, barely seeing her.

‘Oh, Greg,’ she said, ‘Liza’s coming up this arvo. She wants to talk to you and all the other guys about this development thing. I think she’s a bit worried.’

‘She’s not the only one,’ I said. I lit a tab and went to sit in my truck.

The first time Liza McCullen and I went to bed she was so drunk that, to this day, I’m not sure that she remembered afterwards what we’d done at all. It was about a year after she’d got here. She’d warmed up a bit – less a tropical warmth than a kind of Arctic thaw, I always say – but she was still pretty cool with everyone. Not a great one for conversation. She’d started going out with Kathleen on Ishmael. Kathleen was showing her the ropes while the little one was at school, and the more time she spent on the water the happier she got. I made a few jokes about her being competition and all, but Kathleen gave me the eye until I made some Shark Lady crack. Then she’d ask me why I couldn’t go and spend my measly dollars in some other bar. I think she was joking.

By then Liza would talk to me a bit. She’d sit out some nights with me and the other whalechasers – Ned Durrikin and that French girl with the moustache were running Moby Two – and chat a little – ‘Hi’, ‘Yes’, or ‘Thank you’ – it was like getting blood out of a stone.

I used to crack jokes at her all the time. By then she’d kind of got to me – I like to make a girl laugh – it bugged me that some nights I could barely raise a smile. I’d been working on her so hard that, if I’m truthful, it was probably about that time that Suzanne got fed up. I’d stay all night outside Kathleen’s, sinking a few, and before you knew it I’d be home half cut and Suzanne would be sitting there with a face like a smacked arse, the dinner so charred you could have drawn pictures with it.