Gone Fishing Read Online Free Page A

‘This whole magic world, mate, is going to be ripped and gutted by tourists here for a week or two before roaring off, never to be seen again. Everything the Cook’s Basin community holds sacred wrecked forever. And that’s aside from the trashing of the park.’
    â€˜Ya sure?’ the kid asks again, teary now.
    On the verge of another tirade, Sam notes Jimmy’s growing distress and bites his tongue. Jimmy’s already fragile hold on the basic routines of daily life, all that keeps him balanced, is threatening to snap altogether. Sam fixes an easy smile on his face, places a comforting hand the size of a dinner plate on the kid’s bony shoulder, lowers the tone of his voice: ‘Relax, Jimmy. It’s early days yet. Nothing to worry about. You had breakfast?’ he asks, trying to switch the kid’s head from mayhem to manna before he has a complete meltdown.
    â€˜â€™Course. Mum put out twenty-four Weet-Bix when I told her about the steel beams. Reckoned I’d need me strength.’
    â€˜Right. So let’s get going, eh? Before we miss the peak tide.’
    â€˜What are they gunna rip up the Island for, Sam? When’s it gunna happen?’
    Not quite back on track yet, Sam decides, scrabbling to come up with a new distraction. He pulls out the book from his back pocket. ‘On your mark, get set, and it’s time for history lesson number one.’
    â€˜Aw gee, Sam.’ The kid slumps, scrapes a toe along the ground like he’s about to sign his name. ‘I thought ya were kiddin’.’
    â€˜Education, Jimmy. It’s the key to self-improvement. Now. Did you know that it’s taken nearly six million years for you and me to end up with shorter arms, longer legs and a bigger brain than our primate relatives?’
    Jimmy shrugs: ‘What about me dog, Sam? How long’s it taken for him to grow four legs insteada two?’
    Sam sighs. Snookered at the opening gambit. But the kid’s head is back in neutral territory, which has to count for something. As the two of them march across the Square to board the Mary Kay , Sam wonders if educating Jimmy is his ham-fisted way of disguising an attempt to better himself so that when he and Kate sit down politely to a candlelit dinner (presuming he wasn’t being turfed off the premises for good last night) complete with meticulously ironed and folded cotton napkins (not serviettes), he’ll be able to impress her with little-known but exciting facts. There is, he admits wryly, more than a pathetic grain of truth there. Yep, love does your head in. True as night follows day.
    Beams craned aboard and on a swollen tide, the Mary Kay sedately cruises to one of a hand-spread of blue bays hemmed by golden beaches and crowned by towering eucalypts, their leopard-spotted trunks washed clean by the recent rain. The sea drifts from navy blue to turquoise. The barge comes to rest deep in a corner where mangroves are a corps de ballet on a stage of shifting sand and sea. Sam kills the engine. Listens to the whispery song of cabbage palms while tree ferns, delicate as lace, spread like giant umbrellas in a damp green gully. The high humidity hangs like a bridal veil. Mysterious. Magical. Wondrous. ‘Over my dead body,’ he whispers, so the kid doesn’t hear and get knocked off his hinges again. In his ears, though, it rings like a war cry.
    On the way back to Cook’s Basin, Kate veers off the road home and heads towards the retirement village where Emily lived, presumably loved and took her final breath. Was she deep in a pleasant dream when the Grim Reaper came to claim her? Or did she wake, a pain so sharp in her chest she was unable to find the strength to press the emergency button strategically placed by the bed of every resident in a place where each night – she’d once told Kate – she could hear the discreet roll of mortuary vans creeping in to spirit away their