Chapter 5
The steak is cherry red, dripping blood. The waiter sets it down on the pub table, wordlessly slides it my way. His hands are buried in tattoos, and there’s a thin strip of dried blood on the back of his left knuckle.
Heath doesn’t touch his chicken parma and fries. I steal a chip from his plate and stuff it in my mouth, waiting for a reaction. He smiles weakly, pushes his plate to me.
“You can have mine,” he says. “I’m not that hungry.”
I’m transported back in time to our dinner table, shoveling kangaroo into my mouth so fast I’m choking on it.
“Slow down, Min,” Heath cautions from across the table. “You’ll make yourself sick.”
But I couldn’t slow down. Hungry. God, I was always so hungry. We lived outdoors, the beach, the woods. Anywhere but home, where Dad was lurking. Hunger. It was always there like a toothache.
I’d scraped my plate and asked, “Can I have some more?”
He’d pushed his plate my way and said, far too casually, “You can have mine, Min. I’m not hungry.”
I’ve never been able to get that image out of my head.
God, how much that must have hurt him. Trying to provide and failing.
I was absolutely ashamed of myself for asking for more to eat.
Disgusted. It started off a complex relationship with food that’s worsened through the years. I only eat when I’m starving.
You’re punishing yourself, a counselor told me.
For what?
Asking for what you need.
The pub doors swing tentatively open, and a man, my age, ushers an annoyed woman inside. She looks around doubtfully, a toddler clutched to her chest. Tourist.
The waiter calls out, “After a table, mate?”
The woman’s eyes are locked on the fading photos on the walls. Dozens of dead fish, bleeding heavily from their mouths, held up by delighted fishermen. The woman winces, holds her baby closer. “No,” she says quite firmly. “We’re good.”
The man stuffs his hands into his pockets and gives an embarrassed nod before turning quickly to the door. Behind me, someone snorts.
The waiter gives them a tight-lipped smile. When the family are barely out of earshot, he mutters loudly, “Farken tourists. Wastin’ my farken time.”
Us. Them.
If there’s one thing that unites a fishing town, it’s burning hatred for the tourists. There used to be more fish in the good ol’ days, but then the farken tourists came and wiped out the population.
Of course, in the same breath, our dads will brag that they used to catch hundreds back in the day. But they’re not to blame, you see? It’s the tourists. The tourists with their broken rods and dead worms for bait, it’s all their fault. Let the fuckers drown.
We know they’re full of shit. But our dads have dominion, and this town, these waters, are their bloody playground. We are the mums and daughters. We are scared and silent, and so very agreeable.
We have to be.
Some of us hate ourselves for it. Some of us scream in silence because no one will listen until we shatter. Others, like my mother, run on empty to keep everyone else full. When that doesn’t work, they just run.
I used to blame the women in this town for looking the other way, for looking down.
I don’t anymore. Thanks to my father and Oliver, I know now why they had to run.
Because if you don’t, you’re emptied, bit by bit.
Voice first. Then your presence, the weight of you.
You’re still here, still breathing, but you’ll feel it: the fading.
Ghosts.
I chew the steak slowly, blood coating my mouth. Heath is hunched over the table, scanning the pub while his food goes cold.
I stop chewing. “You right?”
He nods automatically, forces a smile. “Yeah…hell of a night.”
“I’ve never seen one so close,” I say, thinking of the shark’s unblinking eyes, its pale underbelly, jaw jutting forward. “…Have you?”
He pauses. “Yeah, a few times. Comes with the territory.”
“Do you ever get scared to go out on the boat at night? Knowing they’re out there?”
“Not at all,” he says, surprised. “Most of the time, I feel safer at sea than on land.” He gives me a sidelong look. “It’s the people you gotta watch, Min. You should know that.”
He straightens up, slow and deliberate, spine locking into place. He eyes me, sharp and still, assessing. Not angry, exactly, just uneasy. “You attacked someone live on air?”
Shit.
“No, I didn’t. And anyway, they cut to a commercial before that,” I say, eyes downcast. “They didn’t get it on camera.” My once-a-month lunch friends texted me that. There’s a rumor you threw something at Joy Marriot? Good for you! She’s a nasty piece.
Mel, if the studio tries to fire you, just remind them of her charity fraud.
haha, yep, I’m sure they’ll change their minds pretty quick!
“It’s fine,” I insist.
“It’s not.”
I straighten up, too. “We’ve done worse in this family.”
“Yes, we have.”
I’m sure he’s talking about our father. But why does it feel like he’s aiming that at me? And why does it feel like he’s not talking about what I did to Joy? Wounded, I meet his eyes and let the silence stretch. I wait for him to bring up Amy Anderson.
Thankfully, he doesn’t.
I reach for my Coke, take a small sip. “Is Tara coming back? Or has she…”
Left for good.
“Of course she’s coming back,” he says, frowning. “Why wouldn’t she?”
I give him a pointed look. “You tell me.”
My brother is the best person I know, but sometimes you have to squint to see that.
He has some questionable connections and can talk his way out of anything.
I’ve seen him bluff through situations he had no business surviving, and I’d bet he’s got some stories he would never tell me.
Strategic, I’d call him. But others might say he’s “a bit of a wheeler-dealer.”
“They’ll be back after the school holidays,” Heath says simply. “Don’t you worry about that, Min.”
I get the message: Don’t ask too many questions.
I don’t. If he’s into something, or up to something, it doesn’t matter. Not to me. I’ll stand beside him, quietly, a silent endorsement. Not because I believe in whatever he’s up to, but because I believe in him.
I’m sipping my drink when a man enters the pub.
He scans the room, and when he sees me, he does a double take.
His face tightens, the corners of his mouth pulling down as our eyes lock.
I wonder if he’s seeing my dad. I know I look like him.
We have the same brown eyes, hooded and suspicious.
Even when I force a smile in photographs, my eyes flatten into dark pebbles.
You look so angry in pictures, Oliver used to snap, peering down at the selfies he so loved taking.
Let’s do it again, he’d sigh. And try not to look like you hate the whole world, please.
Terry Hargrave is the owner of the Roo Bay pub. He owns the Titan, a forty-foot snapper charter he operated for thirty years. He has no kids and never married, and he’ll tell you it’s because he never found the right woman.
But I think he did. And I think it was my mother.
He’s older now, his face deeply lined, with eyes that look like they’ve seen it all.
He’s a no-nonsense type of man, but he lacks the cruelty of the townsmen.
I saw the way he was with my mum, how he softened around her.
I used to wonder what our lives would’ve looked like had Mum chosen him, not our father.
A moment later, he’s hovering above me, peering down.
“Hey, Minnie.”
God, I hate that nickname. Minnie. Minnow. All my life people have been trying to make me smaller.
And…I realize now, I have let them.
The last time Terry came around to our house was the week before Dad disappeared. I think of the newspaper clipping in my bedside drawer.
A man acquainted with Peter Greenwood allegedly attacked him at his Kangaroo Bay home. The man is considered a suspect in his disappearance.
The man was Terry Hargrave.
Terry places a paternal hand out, resting it gently on Heath’s shoulder, and I’m surprised when Heath sits up a little straighter as if the older man’s hand has anchored him, steadied him.
It’s no secret that the whole town thinks Terry killed my father.
Including Heath. Maybe he thinks Terry did us all a favor.
My dad was not a popular man. Territory is everything in fishing towns, and my father had a habit of overstepping.
Skippers have their fishing spot passed down through the generations, and they’ll defend it with their lives.
On the land, they’re nobodies. But on their boat, they are skipper, boss, and God.
Dad didn’t give a shit about boundaries.
He’d fish the best spots, even if they were yours.
Especially if they were yours. Not to mention the lies he’d tell.
I’ve been on the Deep Sea with Dad when we caught absolutely nothing, and he’d pull into the general store, windburned and snarling.
But the moment he stepped inside, he was slapping backs, bragging loudly about all the fish he’d caught.
He started poaching fishing customers, even Terry’s, moored the Deep Sea wherever he wanted.
But it was the way he treated my mum that caused the damage between Terry and my dad.
To my father, Mum was his to be emptied, drained.
Same with us. Who was going to stop him?
Terry, by all accounts. But in my opinion, it was too late.
I’ll always harbor a grudge against Terry for not stepping in sooner.
He was the adult; Heath and I were the kids.
We shouldn’t have had to shoulder what we did alone.
“Heard you been up in the big city,” Terry says with a trace of disapproval.
I nod, wondering if he knows about the attack tonight, but Heath hasn’t said a word.
“You hear about that farken journo?” Terry asks Heath, eyes full to the brim with anger. “He rocked up here the other day, askin’ questions.”
Before Heath can answer, I lift my head. “Who?”
“Chris somethin’.” He frowns. “Cooper. Works for the Daily.”