by Nikki Logan
Apparently, Richard Grundy wasn’t going to be that someone.
She sighed. ‘You’re asking about...’
Funny how she always struggled to broach the subject. He helped her out.
‘About crayfish with optimism and the smug reef.’ She held her tongue, forcing him to go on. ‘You seem very connected to the environment around you. I wondered if it was a cultural thing. Some affinity with your ancestors...?’
Was that what he thought? That it was cultural? Of all the things she’d ever thought were going on with her, it had truly never occurred to her that it had anything to do with being raised Bayungu. Probably because no one else on that side of the family had it—or any of the community.
It was just one more way that she was different.
‘It’s not affinity,’ she said simply.
It was her.
‘If anything, it probably comes from my Irish side. My grandmother ended up marrying a Japanese pearler because other people apparently found her—’
Unrelatable. Uncomfortable. Any of a bunch of other ‘un’s that Mila lived with too.
‘Eccentric.’
But not Grandfather Hiro, with his enormous heart. A Japanese man in outback Australia during the post-war years would have known more than a little something about not fitting in. Pity he wasn’t still around to talk to...
Rich laid his fork down and just waited.
‘I have synaesthesia,’ she blurted. ‘So I hear some sensations. I taste and smell some emotions. Certain things have personalities.’
He kept right on staring.
‘My synapses are all crossed,’ she said in an attempt to clarify. Although even that didn’t quite describe it.
‘So...’ Rich looked utterly confounded. ‘...the crayfish has an actual personality for you?’
‘Yes. Kind of...perky.’
‘All of them?’
‘No. Just the dead one in your fridge.’
It was impossible not to ruin her straight face with a chuckle. Force of habit; she’d been minimising her condition with laughter for years. Trying to lessen the discomfort of others. Even if that meant taking it on herself. ‘Yes, all of them, thank goodness. Things are busy enough without giving them individual traits.’
He sat forward. ‘And the reef is actually—’
‘Smug,’ she finished for him. ‘But not unpleasantly so. Sky, on the other hand, is quite conceited. Clouds are ambitious.’ She glanced around at things she could see for inspiration. ‘Your stainless steel fridge is pleasantly mysterious.’
He blinked. ‘You don’t like sky?’
‘I don’t like conceit. But I don’t pick the associations. They just...are.’
He stared, then, so long and so hard she grew physically uncomfortable. In a way that had nothing to do with her synaesthesia and everything to do with the piercing intelligence behind those blue eyes.
Eventually his bottom lip pushed out and he conceded, ‘I guess sky is kind of pleased with itself. All that over-confident blue...’
The candyfloss surged back for a half-moment and then dissipated on the air rushing past the boat. She was no less a spectacle but at least he was taking it in his stride, which wasn’t always the case when she confessed her unique perception to people.
‘What about the boat?’ he asked after a moment. ‘Or is it just natural features?’
Her lips tightened and she glanced down at the rapidly emptying platter. ‘I’m not an amusement ride, Rich.’
‘No. Sorry, I’m just trying to get my head around it. I’ve never met a...’
‘Synaesthete.’
He tested the word silently on his lips and frowned. ‘Sounds very sci-fi.’
‘My brothers did call it my superpower, growing up.’ Except that it wasn’t terribly super and it didn’t make her feel powerful. Quite the opposite, some days. ‘I didn’t even know that other people didn’t experience the world like I did until I was about eleven.’
Before that, she’d just assumed she was flat-out unlikeable.
Rich dropped his eyes away for a moment and he busied himself topping up their glasses. ‘So you mentioned sensation? Is that why you tensed up when you shook my hand?’
Heat rushed up Mila’s cheeks. He’d noticed that? Had he also noticed every other reaction she’d had to being near him?
That could get awkward fast.
‘Someone new might feel okay or they might...not.’ She wasn’t about to apologise for something that just...was...for her.
Rich studied her. ‘Must be lonely.’
Her spine ratcheted straight. The only thing she wanted more than to be treated normally was not to be treated with pity. She took her time taking a long sip of wine.
‘Are my questions upsetting you?’
‘I don’t... It’s not something I usually talk about with strangers. Until I know someone well. People generally react somewhere on a spectrum from obsessive curiosity to outright incredulity. No one’s ever just shrugged and said, All right, then. More sandwiches?’
Oh, how she longed for that.
‘Thank you for making an exception, then.’ His eyes stayed locked on hers and he slid the platter slightly towards her. ‘More sandwiches?’
It was so close, it stole her breath.
‘Why are you really up here, Rich?’ she asked, before thinking better of it. It shouldn’t matter why; she was paid to show him the area, end of story. His business was as much his own as hers was. But something pushed her on. And not just the desire to change the subject. ‘I’m going to look you up online anyway. Might as well tell me. Are you a developer?’
He shifted in his seat, took his time answering. ‘You don’t like developers, I take it?’
‘I guide a lot of them. They spend the day banging on about their grand plans for the area and then I never see them again. I’m just wondering if you’ll be the same.’
Not that she was particularly hoping to see him again. Was she?
His body language was easy but there was an intensity in his gaze that she couldn’t quite define.
‘None of them ever come back?’
‘Some underestimate how remote it is. Or how much red tape there will be. Most have no idea of the access restrictions that are in place.’
He tipped his head as he sipped his wine. ‘Restrictions? Sounds difficult.’
‘Technically,’ she went on, ‘the land all the way up to the National Park is under the control of three local pastoralists. Lifetime leaseholds. In Coral Bay, if anyone wants to get a serious foothold in this part of the Marine Park, they have to get past the Dawsons. No one ever has.’ She shifted forward. ‘Honestly, Rich? If you do have development plans, you might as well give up now.’
Why was she giving him a heads-up? Just because he’d been nice to her and given her lunch? And looked good in board shorts?
Blue eyes considered her closely. ‘The Dawsons sound like a problem.’
The boiled eggs of loyalty materialised determinedly at the back of her throat. ‘They’re the reason the land around Coral Bay isn’t littered with luxury resorts trying to position themselves on World Heritage coast. They’re like a final rampart. Yet to be breached. That makes them heroes in my book.’
Rich studied her for a long time before lifting his glass in salute. And in thanks. ‘To the Dawsons, then.’
Had she said too much? Nothing he probably didn’t already know, or wouldn’t find out soon enough. But still...
She ran her hands up and down arms suddenly bristling with goose pimples.
‘Cold?’ Rich asked, even though the sun was high.
Mila shook her head. ‘Ball bearings.’
CHAPTER FOUR
RICH WANTED TO believe that ‘ball be
arings’ referred to the breeze presently stirring wisps of long, dark hair around Mila’s face, but what if she sensed ball bearings when she was feeling foreboding? Or deception. Or distrust.
What if she had more ‘extra-sensory’ in her ‘super-sensory’ than she knew? He was keeping secrets and she should feel foreboding. But that wasn’t how Mila’s condition worked. Not that he had much of an idea how it did work, and he didn’t want to pummel her with curious questions just for his own satisfaction. He’d just have to use the brain his parents had spent a fortune improving to figure Mila out the old-fashioned way—through conversation.
A big part of him wished that the heroic Dawsons were an impediment to his plans—a good fight always got his blood up. But Mila would be dismayed to discover just how easy it was going to be for him to build his hotel overlooking the reef. The handful of small businesses running here might have had mixed feelings about the percentage that WestCorp took from their take—the motel, the café, the fuel station, even the hard-working glass-bottom boat tours—but they couldn’t honestly expect not to pay for the privilege of running a business on Wardoo’s land, just as Wardoo had to pay the government for the privilege of running cattle on leasehold land.
Money flowed like an ebbing tide towards the government. It was all part of the food chain.
Except now that same government was shifting the goalposts, looking to excise the coastal strip from the leasehold boundaries. The only part that made any decent profit. And his analysts agreed with him that the only way to get them to leave the lucrative coastal strip in the lease was to make a reasonable capital investment in the region himself—put something back in.
Governments liked to see potential leveraged and demand met.
And—frankly—he liked to do it.
WestCorp needed the lucrative coastal strip to supplement the Station’s meagre profits. Without it, there was nothing holding Wardoo in any half-competent finance holdings and, thanks to his father’s move to the big smoke forty years ago, there was nothing holding him to Wardoo. His heritage.
That was why he’d hauled himself out of the office—out of the city—and come north, to see for himself the place that had been earmarked for development. Just so he could be as persuasive as possible when he pitched it to the responsible bureaucrat. He’d lucked out with a guide who could also give him a glimpse of community attitudes towards his business—forewarned absolutely was forearmed.
It didn’t hurt that Mila was such a puzzle—he’d always liked a challenge. Or that she was so easy on the eye. He’d always liked beautiful things. Now she was just plain intriguing too, courtesy of her synaesthesia. Though he’d have to temper his curiosity, given how touchy she was about it. Had someone made her feel like a freak in the past?
The Portus’ motor cut out and they slowed to a drift. Mila twisted and stared at the ancient rocky range that stretched up and down the coast, red as far as they could see. She knew where they were immediately.
‘We’ll have to take the tender in; there’s only a slim channel in the reef.’
It was narrow and a little bit turbulent where the contents of the reef lagoon rushed out into open water but they paused long enough to watch a couple of manta rays rolling and scooping just there, clearly taking advantage of the fishy freeway as they puttered over the top of it. Damo dropped them close enough to wade comfortably in, their shoes in one hand and sharing the load of the single kayak they’d towed in behind the tender in the other. They hauled it up to the sandbar that stretched across the mouth of Yardi Creek. Or once had.
‘This is why we couldn’t just drive up here,’ she said, indicating the mostly submerged ridge. ‘Thanks to a ferocious cyclone season earlier in the year, the sandbar blew out, taking the four-wheel drive access with it. It’s only just now reforming. It’ll be good to go again at the end of the year but for now it makes for a convenient launch point for us.’
And launch they did. His sea kayak was wider and flatter than a regular canoe, which made it possible for two of them to fit on a vessel technically designed for half that number. He slid down into the moulded seat well and scooted back to make room for Mila, spreading his legs along the kayak’s lip so she could sit comfortably between them at the front of the seat well, with her own bent legs dangling over each side. Once she was in, he bent his knees up on either side of her to serve as some kind of amusement park ride safety barrier and unlocked his double paddle into a single half for each of them.
They soon fell into an easy rhythm that didn’t fight the other, though Mila’s body stayed as rigid and unyielding as the hard plastic of the kayak against his legs. Given what he now knew about her, this kind of physical contact had to be difficult for her. Not that she was snuggled up to him exactly, but the unconventional position wasn’t easy for either of them. Though maybe for different reasons. He was supposed to be paying attention to everything around him yet he kept finding his gaze returning to the slim, tanned back and neck of the young woman seated between his knees, her now-dry ponytail hanging not quite neatly down her notched spine. She’d shrugged out of her uniform shirt and folded it neatly into her backpack but somehow—in this marine environment—the bikini top was as much of a uniform as anything.
She was in her mid-twenties—nearly a decade younger than he was—but there was something about her... As if she’d been here a whole lot longer. Born of the land, or even the sea. She just...belonged.
‘Looks like we have the creek to ourselves.’ Mila’s soft words came easily back to him. courtesy of the gorge’s natural acoustics.
Sure enough, there was not another human being visible anywhere—on the glassy water, up on the top of the massive canyon cliffs, in the car park gouged out of the limestone and dunes. Though it was easy to imagine a solitary figure, dark and mysterious, silhouetted against the sun, spear casually at hand, watching their approach far below.
It was just that kind of place.
Mila stopped paddling and he copied her, the drag of his paddle embedded in the water slowing them to almost nothing. Ahead, a pair of nostrils and a snub-nosed little face emerged from the water, blinking, checking them out. The kayak drifted silently past him on inertia. Only at the last moment did he dip back underwater and vanish to the depths of the deep canyon creek.
‘Hawksbill turtle,’ Mila murmured back to him once they were clear. ‘Curious little guy.’
‘You get curiosity for turtles?’
She turned half back, smiled. ‘No. I mean he was actually curious. About us. I get bossy for turtles.’
They paddled on in silence. Rich battled with a burning question.
‘Does it affect how you feel about some things?’ he finally asked, as casually as he could. ‘If your perception is negative?’
‘It can.’
She didn’t elaborate and he wondered if that question—or any question—held some hidden offence, but her voice when she finally continued wasn’t tight.
‘I’m not a huge fan of yellow fish, for instance, through no fault of their own. I read yellow as derisive and so...’ She shrugged. ‘But, similarly, people and things can strike me positively because of their associations too.’
‘Like what?’ he asked.
She paused again, took an age to answer. ‘Oak moss. I used to get that when I was curled in my mother’s arms as a child. I get it now when I’m wrapped up in my softest, woolliest sweater on a cold night, or snuggled under a quilt. It’s impossible not to feel positive about oak moss.’
Her love came through loud and clear in her low voice and he was a bit sorry that he was neither naturally oaky nor mossy. It threw him back to a time, long ago, when he’d done the same with his own mother. Before he’d lost her at the end of primary school. Before he’d been dumped into boarding school by his not-coping father.
There’d been no loving arms at all after tha
t.
She cleared her throat and kept her back firmly to him.
‘Once, I met someone who registered as cotton candy. Hard not to respond positively to such a fun and evocative scent memory. I was probably more predisposed to like and trust him than, say, someone who I read as diesel smoke.’
Lucky cotton candy guy. Something told him that being liked and trusted by Mila Nakano was rarer than the mysteries in this gorge.
‘What’s the worst association you’ve ever made?’ Curious was as close to ‘accepting’ as she was going to let him get.
‘Earwax,’ she said softly.
‘Was that a person or a thing?’
The kayak sent out ripples ahead of them but it was easy to imagine they were soundwaves from her laughter. It was rich and throaty and it got right in between his ribs.
‘A person, unfortunately.’ She sighed. ‘The one kid at primary school that gave me a chance. Whenever they were around I got a strong hit of earwax in the back of my throat and nose. Now, whenever my heart is sad for any reason at all, I get a delightful reminder...’
Imagine trying to forge a friendship—or, worse, a relationship—with someone who struck you so negatively whenever they were around. How impossible it would be. How that would put you off experimenting with pretty much anyone.
Suddenly, he got a sense of how her superpower worked. He was going to find it difficult to go out on this kayak ever again without an image of Mila’s lean, long back popping into his head. Or to watch ripples radiate on still water anywhere without hearing her soft voice. The only difference was that her associations didn’t need to have a foundation in real life.
Mila dug the paddle hard into the water again and turned her face up and to the right as the kayak slowed. ‘Black-flanked rock wallaby.’
Rich followed her gaze up the towering cliffs that lined both sides of the deep creek and hunted the vertical, rust-coloured rock face. ‘All I see are some shadowy overhangs. What am I missing?’
‘That’s where the wallabies like to lurk. It’s why they have evolved black markings.’