Silver

by Chris Hammer

  ‘Yes.’ Jay Jay regards him fondly. ‘The same smile. The same playful eyes. The same hands.’

  Martin looks at his hands, shocked that his white-collar hands could ever be compared to his father’s gnarled worker’s hands. He examines them, finds they are totally his own, but she’s right: they do hold echoes of his father.

  Jay Jay grows serious. ‘Martin, I spoke to Nick Poulos this morning.’

  ‘About Ashton?’

  ‘No. About what happens if I die. When I die.’

  ‘I’m sure it won’t come to that.’

  She smiles a knowing sort of smile. ‘Let’s hope not. The point is this: I’m leaving Hummingbird Beach to you.’

  ‘To me? Why?’

  She shrugs, and tears again well in her eyes. ‘Because there is nobody else.’

  And it’s then that Martin understands what he needs to say. ‘Jay Jay, I forgive you. You were young, you were single, you weren’t cheating on anyone. You were just experimenting. You couldn’t have known what would happen.’

  She closes her eyes. ‘Say it again, please. Just once more.’

  ‘I forgive you.’

  chapter thirty-three

  Mandy, Martin and Liam are sitting on the wharf at the Caravan Park waiting for Vern to pick them up in his dinghy. The morning is warm, the on-shore breeze gentle. The overnight rain has cleared and the light is soft and autumnal, reflecting from the river. There is something about the day that embraces Martin, something akin to perfection. Mandy is next to him, bouncing her boy. She gives Liam a kiss and passes him to Martin. The boy is getting heavier by the day. They sit there, the three of them, not speaking, merely enjoying a moment in which there is nothing that needs doing, nothing imposing itself upon them, nothing to threaten them.

  It’s Mandy who speaks. ‘You gave it away, Martin. Your story. You gave it away.’

  ‘No, I didn’t. It’s there on the front page of today’s Herald, if only we could buy one out here. My by-line, mine and Bethanie’s.’

  ‘I know. But you had it all to yourself. The Drakes, their desperation, their deception. You had it all. But you gave it to the police and you gave it to Bethanie and you gave it to that bozo Doug Thunkleton.’

  Martin shrugs, grinning. He knows what she is saying, yet sitting here in the warmth of the sun and the warmth of his family, he feels no regrets. His family. ‘We owe that bozo a debt of gratitude. He played his part to perfection at that press conference.’

  Mandy smiles back. ‘I guess he did. But you know what I’m saying. You could have had it all for yourself. I reckon the old Martin Scarsden would have walked over hot coals to claim a story that big as an exclusive.’

  She’s right: something has changed. The story is no longer the be-all and end-all. He’s a different Martin Scarsden. Maybe not the better man he promised her down in Riversend, but heading in that direction. He’s discovered that some things are more important than the front page of a newspaper. ‘It had to be done. St Clair would have told the police what he knew and they would have worked it out in the end, but it could have taken weeks. And in that time Drake could have fled, or killed again. This way, we ended it. Saved both of us a lot of heartache.’

  ‘Saved me, you mean.’

  ‘Same thing.’

  It’s the sound they hear first, the soft putt-putt of the motor. And then they can see him, Vern coming downstream in his boat—not the large fishing boat, the small aluminium tinnie Levi used in the smuggler’s cove—swinging into the caravan park wharf where they sit waiting, Martin, Mandalay and Liam.

  ‘Boat, Liam, say “boat”,’ says Martin to the boy, holding him on his lap. ‘Boat.’

  ‘Boa,’ says Liam, eyes wide with surprise and delight. ‘Boa, boa, boa.’

  They laugh and clap, Mandy seizing the boy from Martin and smothering him in kisses.

  ‘Boa! Boa! Boa!’ yelps Liam, the centre of attention.

  Carefully, Martin passes Liam down to Vern. Mandy descends the ladder into the boat, then Martin. Vern insists they wear life jackets that look as if they are years old but have never been used.

  They putter down the Argyle, the engine throttled back, letting the river do the work, floating them under the bridge, past the harbour on their right followed by the Breakwater Hotel and the town, while to their left the bank climbs, becoming more precipitous. There is the sound of surf, the clean smell of the sea replacing the swampy odour of the river. The flow seems to accelerate, steep shore on the left and breakwater on the right, just as the river had quickened all those years ago under three boys in a canoe. They look up, Mandy trying to spy some sign of Hartigan’s, but they are too close to shore, there is only the dense forest. Martin has Liam on his lap, holding him tight, pointing at things, mouthing their names. Now they can see the swell sweeping over the sandbar, waves rising but not breaking. And now the outcrop of rock, still extending from below the cliff. They surge past it and Vern opens the throttle; they sweep around onto the secluded beach, the water placid. To Martin it appears unchanged from that day almost thirty years ago when it gave sanctuary to three desperate boys.

  Later, as Mandy and Liam splash joyously in the shallows, Martin and Vern sit side by side on a driftwood log, looking out to sea.

  ‘Vern, you have to give up the endangered fish trade. You know that, don’t you?’

  Vern nods. ‘Yeah. I know. Pity, though. Family tradition and all. Helps break the monotony, a bit of law breaking.’

  Martin smiles. ‘It’s not a good fit, you must see that. Campaigning to protect Mackenzie’s Swamp on one hand while you’re pillaging protected species with the other.’

  Vern laughs. ‘Yes. Now you put it that way.’ They watch as Mandy bends and lifts Liam, careful to keep her back straight. The boy is growing, on the cusp of walking, on the cusp of talking. She can no longer simply scoop him up. ‘What will she do with the cheese factory and Mackenzie’s?’ asks Vern.

  ‘Don’t know. We haven’t discussed it. She still hasn’t been there, as far as I know. We might head out and have a look later this week. Denise Speight has first dibs on it, but I reckon she’ll renege on the deal with the bank. And I can’t imagine Mandy being in any rush to develop it.’

  ‘What about you? What will you do? I see you’re back on the front page today, a big spread inside.’

  ‘Yeah. They’ve offered me a job. Full-time. In Sydney.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘No.’ He’s looking at Mandy and their son as he says it. ‘But they’re still keen to keep me on the books. Use my name, have me at events, that sort of thing. They’ll pay me a retainer, expect me to file a feature every month or so. Mandy and I think it might work. We’ll see.’ Martin studies his hands, choosing his words. ‘I think there is something wrong with me.’

  ‘Martin?’

  ‘I always suspect the worst of people. Even people I should trust. You, and Levi and Josie. And Mandy. It’s like some disease I caught when I was a correspondent and now I can’t shake the symptoms.’

  ‘Give it time, Martin. Give it normality. You’ll be right.’

  ‘I hope so,’ says Martin, sounding doubtful.

  ‘You don’t think the worst of Liam, do you?’

  Martin laughs. ‘Of course not. How could I?’

  ‘Well, there you go. There’s your first step.’

  Martin smiles; it’s a point well made. But then he grows serious again. ‘I drove Jay Jay Hayes up to the station at Longton yesterday. She’s off to Sydney, to hospital.’

  ‘Nothing serious, I hope?’

  ‘Maybe very serious. Cancer.’

  ‘No. Jay Jay? Really?’

  ‘She says if she dies, she’s going to leave Hummingbird to me.’

  Vern turns to Martin, is about to speak, but then thinks better of it. He averts his gaze, looking out across the sandbar.

  ‘You knew?’

  Vern nods almost imperceptibly, eyes locked on the meeting of river and ocean.

>   ‘It was her, all this time. Leaving the flowers. You knew.’

  ‘I knew.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘When, Martin? When would I tell you? When you were eight? Or when you were sixteen or eighteen and didn’t want to know anything, when you couldn’t even bring yourself to visit their graves, when you’d never been out to the cross on Dunes Road, when you couldn’t wait to get on the train to Sydney and leave it all behind? When could I have told you?’

  Martin is silent then, chastised. The silence stretches, but it’s no good; the questions remain, he can’t escape them. He thinks of Jay Jay, travelling for years, trying to outrun her guilt over the deaths of his mother and sisters. And he thinks of Topaz, always on the move, haunted by the death of her sister, unable even to confide in her husband. And he thinks of Jasper, who never travelled, except through his postcards. And he thinks of himself, the eternal correspondent, preferring war zones to the memories of his own childhood.

  ‘I found some old newspaper reports up in the library at Longton,’ he says to Vern. ‘There was a photo of the car, your car, being winched out of the swamp. Dad’s car was there. So was he.’

  ‘He was first on the scene.’

  ‘Your back brake light was smashed. On the right-hand side.’

  Vern reaches across, places his hand on Martin’s. ‘It was smashed weeks before. It was my car. I know.’

  Martin is shaking his head. ‘I wondered. You know, Clyde Mackie, he was capable of turning a blind eye.’

  Vern smiles weakly, a smile not of humour but of empathy and understanding. ‘Not to something like that. And there was a formal inquest, there had to be. Months later. The coroner investigated the brake light, anything suspicious. He found it was death by misadventure. Accidental. You didn’t find that in your newspaper reports?’

  ‘I guess I didn’t look that far forward.’ He takes his uncle’s hand. ‘So he tried to get them out, he just couldn’t.’

  There is confirmation in his uncle’s eyes.

  ‘It fucked him up, didn’t it? Not just them dying, but dying like that, on the very day we won the lottery, when he was with Jay Jay instead of playing cricket with the rest of us. No wonder he drank, no wonder he pissed it all away. No wonder he could never look me in the eye.’

  Vern says nothing, just gives Martin’s hand a squeeze.

  ‘It was suicide, wasn’t it?’ Martin can’t let it go now; the past has him, compelling him to follow its three-decade-old logic. ‘When all the money was gone. When there was nothing left. He drank the only thing remaining, the champagne, drank it warm from a paper cup and then went out and crashed his car into a tree.’

  ‘The champagne?’ asks Vern.

  ‘You must remember. The day of the lottery win. We’d been playing cricket. I hit a six. Then we found out we won. Mum and the girls went to tell Dad, and you and I went and got fish and chips, and you bought the most expensive French champagne we could find. Veuve Clicquot, with the orange label. To celebrate the win, to celebrate our future together.’

  ‘No,’ says Vern.

  Martin turns. His uncle’s eyes are moist. ‘No?’

  ‘The champagne wasn’t to celebrate the win. It was to celebrate her divorce. That’s what she drove out there to tell him. The money would set her free. She knew where he was, what he was doing and who with. It’s why she took the girls, but left you behind. She knew how close you were to your dad; she didn’t want you to see him with Jay Jay, knew you were old enough to understand what she was there to tell him. She didn’t want you to witness it. She didn’t want to hurt you.’

  How long do they sit there, these two men, bound by blood and history and decades-old grief, holding hands and gently weeping, united in their separate thoughts as they stare unseeing at the sea, the roiling surface of the sandbar? Many minutes and half an eternity.

  It’s Mandy who breaks the silent vigil. ‘Here!’ she yells. ‘Come see what we found!’ She’s over at the bottom of the rise, where the sand meets the forest.

  Martin and Vern get slowly to their feet, walk across to Mandy and Liam, Vern’s arm around his nephew’s shoulders, the men wiping their eyes, reassembling their faces into the masks of the everyday.

  ‘Look,’ says Mandy. ‘What do you think?’ And there, eroded by wind and water and time but still unmistakable, are steps carved into the sandstone. ‘Will you rebuild them for us, Vern, you and Lucy May? Rebuild the steps up to the house, like they used to be?’

  Vern smiles. ‘Of course.’

  ‘We’ll pay,’ adds Mandy. ‘The steps and the house.’

  ‘You’ll have to,’ says Vern. ‘I’ve lost an income stream.’

  There is no containing Mandy’s enthusiasm. ‘It will be ours, our own secret beach.’ She scans the sands, eyes wide with imagining. ‘Does the beach have a name?’

  Vern shrugs. ‘It has lots of names, but nothing official.’

  ‘Then I name it Liam’s Beach,’ she says, bouncing her boy.

  ‘Boa!’ says Liam. ‘Boa!’

  ‘Okay.’ Mandy laughs. ‘Boa Boa Beach!’

  Her happiness is too much, too contagious, and Liam’s pleasure is overwhelming. Martin finds himself grinning stupidly, sees the same in Vern’s face.

  Then Martin speaks to his uncle, voice soft. ‘If you’re building it, would you mind if I helped? If you and Lucy May taught me how?’ He holds out his hands, opens them, flexes his fingers. ‘I’m told I have his hands.’

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Let me start by thanking every single person at Allen & Unwin, because I reckon every single person there helped with the success of Scrublands. Now the same remarkable effort is getting behind Silver; everyone from editorial through to publicity, sales and marketing.

  I am fortunate to work with arguably the best editorial team in Australia (and, possibly, on the planet): Jane Palfreyman, Christa Munns, Ali Lavau and Kate Goldsworthy. Thank you so very much.

  And massive gratitude and respect to agent Grace Heifetz of Left Bank Literary, for your unique mix of utter professionalism and wicked fun!

  A particular thanks to publicist Christine Farmer, for Scrublands and now for Silver.

  Alex Potočnik has outdone himself, making real my imaginings of Port Silver in a stunning map.

  My thanks to Helen Vatsikopoulos and Juhee Ahmed for guidance on Greek and Indian names. Any remaining transgressions are entirely my fault.

  Deep gratitude to all the amazing booksellers throughout Australia and New Zealand who have supported my books and the books of Australian and New Zealand authors: I am continuously in your debt.

  And, finally, thanks to my amazing and supportive family: Tomoko, Cameron and Elena.