Gabriel's Bay

by Robertson, Catherine

  A lively, heart-warming, thoroughly entertaining novel about a whole community.

  Kerry Macfarlane has run away from his wedding-that-wasn’t. He lands in coastal Gabriel’s Bay, billed as ‘a well-appointed small town’ on its website (last updated two decades ago). Here Kerry hopes to prove he’s not a complete failure. Or, at least, to give his most convincing impression.

  But Gabriel’s Bay has its own problems — low employment, no tourists, and a daunting hill road between it and civilisation. And Kerry must also run the gauntlet of its inhabitants: Sidney, single mother deserted by a feckless ex; Mac, the straight-shooting doctor’s receptionist; a team of unruly nine-year-olds; a giant restaurateur; and the local progressive association, who’ll debate apostrophe placement until the crack of doom.

  Can Kerry win their respect, and perhaps even love? Will his brilliant plan to transform the town’s fortunes earn him a lasting welcome in Gabriel’s Bay?

  Contents

  Prologue: the dog

  Chapter 1: Kerry

  Chapter 2: Bernard

  Chapter 3: Kerry

  Chapter 4: Sidney

  Chapter 5: Mac

  Chapter 6: Madison

  Chapter 7: Sam

  Chapter 8: Kerry

  Chapter 9: Sidney

  Chapter 10: Madison

  Chapter 11: Mac

  Chapter 12: Kerry

  Chapter 13: Sidney

  Chapter 14: Sam

  Chapter 15: Mac

  Chapter 16: Kerry

  Chapter 17: Sidney

  Chapter 18: Madison

  Chapter 19: Bernard

  Chapter 20: Mac

  Chapter 21: Kerry

  Chapter 22: Sidney

  Chapter 23: Bernard

  Chapter 24: Sam

  Chapter 25: Madison

  Chapter 26: Kerry

  Chapter 27: Mac

  Chapter 28: Bernard

  Chapter 29: Sidney

  Chapter 30: Madison

  Chapter 31: Sam

  Chapter 32: Mac

  Chapter 33: Kerry

  Chapter 34: Sidney

  Chapter 35: Bernard

  Chapter 36: Sam

  Chapter 37: Kerry

  Chapter 38: Sidney

  Chapter 39: Madison

  Chapter 40: Bernard

  Chapter 41: Sam

  Chapter 42: Kerry

  Chapter 43: Mac

  Chapter 44: Sam

  Epilogue: the dog

  Acknowledgements

  Follow Penguin Random House

  To David, Callum and Finn, with love and gratitude.

  To Bex, who’s been looking forward to this book for ages.

  And to Dave Dobbyn’s song ‘Loyal’, because loyalty is what this book is all about.

  Gabriel’s Bay is an amalgam of several small New Zealand towns, so wherever you think it is, you’ll be correct.

  Prologue

  the dog

  The confidence with which the dog circuited the town — it stopped and checked before crossing roads and never hesitated about direction — might have led a casual observer to believe it would make an excellent guide for the blind. And indeed it would have, if the blind person had no other aim but to find food, and wasn’t too fussed about quality or freshness.

  The blind person would also have to be flexible about their intended destination. Not being stupid, the dog had a standard route for easy pickings — households that preferred flimsy bags to bins with tight lids, the back door of the bakery, where lazy workers took their time to dispose of old stock, and the front door of the takeaway, whose owner liked the dog and often saved snacks for it (yesterday, it had been a saveloy, which wasn’t meat by the dog’s definition, but was nonetheless delicious). The takeaway owner also liked to fondle the dog’s ears and speak to it in a friendly tone. Unlike some other people; for example, those in households without bins, who preferred to yell what sounded like ‘Gedardivit!’ and hurl the nearest heavy item, usually a boot. The dog had developed an instinct for the wayward trajectory of boots, and had not been hit for months.

  No, the dog wasn’t stupid, but it was a dog, and as such was easily diverted from its standard route by interesting smells. This morning, the Master had got up early to go fishing and the dog had followed him to the beach, where it had sniffed out a long-dead fish-head and a pile of horse dung and rolled in both. Fortunately, by this time, the Master was already out on the boat, otherwise he might have chucked the dog in the sea. Or worse, marched it back home and blasted it with the hose. The dog hated the hose, but if the Master told it to sit, it sat. This was not just a dog thing; the Master had that effect on people, too. It could be because he was at least a metre taller and wider than anyone else, but then the Master’s wife had exactly the same effect and she was only five feet four. However, the dog did not have the same devotion for the Mistress. She was immune to big, brown eyes and ingratiating grins, and thus never slipped it food under the table and told the Master not to, either. The Master obeyed but had been known to throw the dog off-cuts out the kitchen door of the beachfront restaurant that he owned. The Master’s best human friend, Gene, called the dog a biological waste-disposal unit. ‘Put your foot on its paw and its mouth opens,’ he said. The dog was happy to be called anything if it came with scraps. The only name it refused to answer to was ‘Comebackhereyoubastard’.

  The dog pondered where to go next. The restaurant would be closed up because the Master was out fishing, and home was not an option until the dead fish and horse dung smell had faded, as the Mistress had been known to wield worse than the hose. It was also Sunday, which meant no access to the bakery and more people at home to keep an eye on their rubbish bags. The takeaway would not be open yet, but then again the owner might be cleaning or receiving a delivery. The dog headed off, knowing that the art of being a shameless opportunist was never to assume that any pathways to food were barred.

  En route, it checked out the old factory that still smelled faintly of fish, and failed again to find an entrance. It marked its territory wherever it scented another dog, even though everyone knew whose town Gabriel’s Bay was. A passing ute beeped at the dog in greeting — Sam, the young man with curly hair who was related to Gene. Sam and his friends often lit fires on the beach and sat around, drinking beer. Occasionally, they would feed the dog corn chips, but tended to keep the sausages and chops to themselves. Young men were unreasonably hungry in the dog’s view. Children were much more generous. The Master and Mistress were friends with a lady called Sidney who helped out in the restaurant some nights. She had two boys who loved to play a game where they put a liver treat on the dog’s paw and told it to wait for the command to eat. Fortunately, they had the attention span of hopping fleas and so the dog never had to wait long. It hoped the boys did not grow out of the game too soon. It also hoped they did not become more vigilant about where they left their half-eaten sandwiches, biscuits, carrot sticks and apple slices. Their raisins were safe, though. The dog did not like raisins.

  Alas, the takeaway was closed and dark, but discarded at the foot of the rubbish bin outside was a box containing greasy chicken bones. The dog was not allowed chicken bones at home, so it ate these bones, and most of the box as well. Further along the footpath, outside the pub, there was a splatter containing mixed food items. It ate those, too.

  Down the main street it went, checking bins, the gutter and the spaces between shops. Being a Sunday, not many people were about. Those who were hailed the dog as it passed. ‘On a mission, I see,’ they said. Or, ‘Fat git.’ The dog wagged its tail and carried on.

  The end of the main street marked the end of the town. If the dog kept going, it would be in the countryside, and if it followed the road all the way, i
t would be up on the big bush-clad hill that stood between Gabriel’s Bay and what his Master called the Big Smoke. The Master often took the dog into the bush when he went hunting deer, pigs and possum. The dog went off alone into the bush, too, though it was looking for animals that were already dead. Personally, it didn’t care how dead, but from experience it knew that coming home reeking of rotting corpse was a sure-fire way to bring out the hose. Most times, the dog decided it was worth it.

  The faintest scent in the air told the dog that, in fact, a deceased animal was lying further up along the road. The sun was high now and the dog was thirsty. It could turn around and head home. Or it could walk towards the smell and detour down to one of the many creeks that fed mountain water into the sea, or to a horse trough in a paddock that might also contain dung to roll in.

  The dog wagged its tail and carried on.

  Chapter 1

  Kerry

  At the airport, Kerry noticed a sign warning visitors to allow more time for their journeys on New Zealand roads. The sign included a picture of said roads, apparently drawn by a person with a partiality for Scalextric tracks made entirely from the curved parts.

  ‘A blatant exaggeration’ had been Kerry’s thought then. Two days later, on the hill heading over to Gabriel’s Bay, his thought was ‘What the infernal hell?’

  What kind of sadist had decided this was suitable for vehicles? Kerry had motored over mountain passes in Europe with fewer and more manageable bends. The streets of Mumbai had put less demand on his driving skills. He’d felt safer descending into the Grand Canyon on the back of a mule that insisted on walking right near the path’s crumbling edge.

  He considered pulling over for a breather, but on either side of the road was nothing but a tiny strip of gravel shrouded by forest that looked dense and unsettlingly primeval. Dinosaurs could indeed be dwelling within, happily unaware that they were supposed to have become extinct sixty-five million years ago.

  That was probably why New Zealand had no snakes or tigers or, in fact, anything keen to poison and maim you. They’d all been killed off by something worse.

  Get a grip, Kerry said to himself. New Zealand has no nasties because when the continents divided, its islands floated away carrying nothing but birds, leaving all the crocodiles, snakes and venomous hairy spiders in Australia, as if the two countries had made a bet and Australia had lost. Besides, it was too late for second thoughts. He was here now, and committed to a new job. He’d had his time to travel the world, put the past behind him, or at least in a place where it wouldn’t catch his eye too often and double him over with shame. Eighteen months had passed since the wedding-that-wasn’t. Seventeen months and twenty-three days, if you insisted. Seventeen months and twenty-three days trying to reclaim his sense of the man he was, the man he should be. Trying to make up for all those years of simply going along, unquestioning, sucked onwards in the slipstream of other people. Being, as Kerry reproached himself on an hourly basis, a twat.

  The car’s radio yelped back into life, and Kerry yelped right along with it. He’d bought the station wagon at a place called Cheap Cars, which could not be accused of over-promising. It was a Japanese import, a model called a Fielder, which to Kerry had sounded reliable and sporty, despite it being fifteen years old and in a condition that pushed the boundaries of the word ‘used’. It was a necessarily no-frills purchase, as Kerry’s funds had been reduced by months of travel interspersed with sporadic bouts of poorly paid employment. The car came with air-conditioning that had already stopped working and a dual air-bag that Kerry hoped had not, considering that a crash on this benighted hill had to be inevitable. The radio had first picked up a concert programme and then switched mid-Mahler to a Christian station, on which a father was earnestly explaining blasphemy to his child. Kerry had fiddled but found nothing but static or ‘You know, Timmy, “gosh” is really just another way of saying “God” ’, and then left it hissing white noise because the hill had begun and he needed two hands on the wheel and all his concentration.

  When his nerves stopped jangling, Kerry recognised the radio was now playing ‘Child in Time’. Deep Purple. Not the Christian station, then, thank Gosh. The song was a favourite of Kerry’s for its anthemic quality and its showcasing of lead singer Ian Gillan’s ability to wail. He was a fine wailer at the best of times, was Ian, but this was him at his virtuoso best. Just when you thought he’d hit his peak, he stepped it up a whole other octave.

  And, Great Gosh Almighty! Here was the top of the hill! And what a view! As if ordered by Nature’s generals to retreat, the forest on both sides thinned and dropped away, revealing a stretch of rolling green dotted with trees and wound through by a glint of river. Kerry could see across the river an old-fashioned bridge, miniature scale at this height, and in the cleft of distant hills a slice of sea, a shifting sparkle of light all that delineated it from the bright blue sky.

  Down there, over the bridge and before the sea, was Gabriel’s Bay. All the climbing was behind him, and the downward slope looked nowhere near as challenging. It helped that the forest had receded, though Kerry could see that the range continued along to his left, dark green and forbidding. The first settlers must surely have got to Gabriel’s Bay by boat, thought Kerry. Where, if they’d been sensible, they’d have stayed until the invention of modern earth-moving machinery made hacking a road over this satanic mound a viable option.

  He gave thanks that the Gabriel’s Bay website proclaimed it a self-contained town, with a supermarket, two pubs, a petrol station and a doctor’s surgery. With luck, he would never need the latter, but nice to know it was there.

  The trusty Fielder descended like a champ, positively luge-like on the bends. The Deep Purple song was still going. It was over ten minutes long, Kerry recalled. DJs must love songs like that.

  ‘Ahhh, ahhh, ahhh,’ sang Ian, and Kerry sang right along with him.

  The road finally began to flatten out, the scrub on either side now making way for fences and the occasional gravel driveway that led to some hardy person’s farm. Kerry’s Northern Irish ancestors had been landowners, wealthy ones back in the day, with a big house and race horses and undoubtedly their very own bunch of bog-cutting peasants to flog. That was his mother’s line, the Irish Protestant Macfarlanes. Not to be confused with his father’s line, the Scottish Catholic Macfarlanes, though most people did indeed find this highly confusing. Your parents have the same last name, they’d ask? Kerry would confirm this, and if he didn’t know the person well, see if he could get a laugh by adding that it was the only thing his parents had in common. He could only try this with strangers because it was entirely untrue. After thirty-five years of marriage, Kerry’s parents were as much in love as ever. Perhaps that’s what is wrong with me, thought Kerry. I’ve been a gooseberry all of my life.

  No. He knew his parents loved their only son dearly. That’s why it hurt so much that he’d let them down.

  He passed a driveway with stone pillars and a sign — Something Wines. A vineyard? That might be nice on a sunny afternoon. Kerry wondered how strict the Gabriel’s Bay policepersons were about drink driving. He made a mental note to ask around first before putting it to the test.

  Ian was in the final throes. A last series of wails before the jangling guitar and drum finale.

  ‘Ahhh—’

  ‘ARGHH!!!’

  The Fielder’s brakes juddered, tyres crunching on the loose chip-seal and Kerry held hard on to the steering wheel as the car skewed to a halt.

  ‘What was that!’ he yelled to the world.

  Whatever it was it had gone. He’d seen a movement in the scrub to his left and then a creature had dashed out across the road, right in front of him, and disappeared into the scrub on his right.

  He could not identify the creature other than to say it was brown, shaggy and barrel-like. A pig? A short-legged cow? Some kind of squat, round, hairy deer?

  ‘Jaysus, me fecking heart,’ as his mother, Bronagh, would have said, even
though she’d lived all her life in north-east London. His father, Douglas, being a school science teacher, would have gone online immediately to Google ‘hairy brown wild animals of New Zealand’ and scrolled through the options until he’d found it.

  The radio station was now playing ‘Barracuda’ by Heart. Its throbbing guitar beat wasn’t helping Kerry’s own heart adjust to normal, but he decided it was at a safe enough level to put the Fielder into first and drive on.

  At least he was nearly there. Five minutes tops, he reckoned. How many other tests could the place possibly throw at him?

  He arrived at the bridge. It was, as it had looked from a distance, the old-fashioned span kind. It was also one lane. The road on the other side went up and directly around a bend. You couldn’t see what was coming. However, a sign with red and black arrows seemed to indicate that he had the right of way, so on he went, slowly.

  Round the bend, at speed, came an ancient bus. As Kerry was now two-thirds of the way across the bridge, who had the right of way seemed irrelevant and he assumed the bus would stop. It didn’t. Well, it did, but not until it was right in front of him, a manoeuvre which obviously forced him to stop also. A woman was driving. Mid-fifties, round face, masses of brown curls pulled back in a rough ponytail. She waved at him in a manner that could be taken as friendly but probably wasn’t, and then sat there, the bus chugging on idle, wobbling gently. Kerry caught a shadowy glimpse of passengers’ heads craning into the aisle, the better to see what was going on.

  What was going on, of course, was that he was now reversing, the bus trundling in pursuit, like a circus elephant nudging a ball. He backed up all the way to the start of the bridge and circled onto the gravel shoulder to let the bus pass.

  As it did, the woman gave him another wave. Either that or she was swatting away a fly. Kerry saw the passengers’ heads turn now towards the bus’s rear window, as if intent on memorising the face of the idiot who’d held them up.