Bay of Fires

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T
he storm broke the night before the body of the second missing woman was found. She was face-down in the sand halfway along the longest beach in the Bay of Fires. Red polka-dot bikini bottoms were tangled below the woman’s hips. Sand maggots fed on her back wounds. Seaweed twisted through her hair, which was the only part of her that still looked human. She was swollen from days of floating in salt water before the sea finally spat her out on the high-tide line.

It was the day after Boxing Day when the fisherman discovered the body. He was wandering along the shoreline, taking pleasure in the heavy silence of dawn and the strangeness of the beach, newly carved by wind and rain. The sun had barely surfaced over the ocean horizon. The crisp sand, littered with marine debris, gleamed in the day’s freshness. Beneath a shapeless mountain of green eucalypts, the lagoon shimmered in purple darkness. It was full. Soon the Chain of Lagoons would overflow, pouring through the grassy dune and gutting the beach to meet the ocean. A sharp undertow sucked on a steep wall of wet quicksand, making it dangerous for swimming. This part of the seashore was visited only by fishermen, surfers, and the occasional shell collector.

The fisherman’s were the only footprints on the beach.

S
ix beer caps filled the pocket of Sarah Avery’s cutoff jeans. She checked her watch; Christmas lunch was over, but the afternoon was hours from ending. Lame jokes printed on slips of paper found inside Christmas crackers and long-winded stories that she had heard before became louder. It was time to get out of here. Sarah crumpled the paper crown she was wearing into a tight ball and flicked it under the table. She muttered something about checking fishing conditions. No one noticed her grab the bottle of Bundaberg rum, her gift to herself, from the top of the gas fridge. No one tried to follow as she left the family holiday shack, and that satisfied her. The thought of being alone on the rocks with her father or his mate Don was excruciating. From the outdoor cold box she took a six-pack of beer and a liter of Coke and shoved them into her Esky fishing cooler.

She did not relax until she was steering the car, in a pleasant alcohol-infused idle, along the gravel road. At the wharf she parked behind the boatshed. Low greasy cloud sweated over the ocean horizon. Close to the shore the sea was choppy. She could leave the car here and walk back to the shack if she wanted to. On the backseat was the wicker picnic basket her sister had given her for Christmas. What a stupid gift, she had thought, as she thanked Erica that morning. Now she realized it was handy. She took one of the cups and poured herself a rum and Coke.

Runabout dinghies, partly filled with rainwater and seaweed, bobbed tightly on their cable wire restraint. Some had not been taken out to sea in years. They remained here, tied so severely they were barely able to float. Perhaps she should come down with a box of salt and pour it into the point where the cable was drilled into the rock. Better off being a shipwreck than like this.

Halfway through her drink, a muscular guy wearing his cap back-to-front emerged out of the scraggly casuarina trees. He trod carelessly on the native pigface, a purple-flowered succulent vine that protected the dune from the wind. She watched him skim stones across the little harbor and smoke a cigarette. He tossed the butt into the sea. Sam Shelley—all grown up. The last time she had seen him, maybe seven years ago, he had played Chinese checkers against her and Erica. He had cried when he lost. To cheer him up, Sarah had taken him fishing at the jetty and helped him reel in a beautiful leatherjacket.

He said he remembered her and sat in the passenger seat, fiddling with the stereo, adjusting the mirror, storing his cigarettes in the rental car’s empty glove box. Several soft hairs that his razor had missed grew from his cheek.

Sarah didn’t offer him the first beer; he asked. That point would seem important to her when she recalled the evening later.

On Boxing Day the beach shacks huddled under one endless cloud of cold moisture. Sarah sat alone, watching the heaving sea through the window. It was perfect weather for reading, and there was a fly-fishing article in an old
Reader’s Digest
Sarah wanted to have a look at. Unfortunately, Sarah’s parents invited their best friends, Pamela and Don, over for a game of Celebrity Head. They had played some kind of game every afternoon in the week since Sarah had arrived, while summer rain blew sideways from a chilled gray sky. Her sister, Erica, said Sarah had brought the rain with her. Indifferently she agreed and took another large mouthful of beer. Noisy rain popping into bowls and saucepans strategically arranged under the leaking roof forced everyone to raise their voices as they drank Ninth Island champagne from glasses marked with individual charms. For the fun of it Erica had attached a charm to Sarah’s stubby. It was a single stiletto.

No one noticed Sarah’s sadness; they barely noticed as she stood up to light the gas lanterns. She had told them that boredom had been her reason for quitting her job at Eumundi Barramundi Farm. Man troubles, too, she had added, when Erica pressed her. They all assumed Sarah had been rejected. Fair enough, Sarah didn’t blame them; it was a safe assumption about a plain woman like her. It was easier for them to digest than the truth. Sick, perverted, mental; those were the names Jake had shouted across the wet asphalt that night. Her family didn’t need to know that. One by one she held a matchstick beside the soft wicks, filling the shack with milky light. Conversation drifted around her like a familiar, itching blanket.

Sarah had a sour feeling of déjà vu; they were talking about the same things they had talked about for as long as she could remember. Jane Taylor, the angry woman who ran the guesthouse, had let her dogs run unleashed on the beach and one of them had chased a child. That was irresponsible, Sarah’s mother, Felicity, said; Pamela agreed wholeheartedly.

Deep in the national park on the east coast of Tasmania, the Bay of Fires was a holiday community. People drove for hours from Launceston or Devonport every summer to open up their shacks or rent one of the humble fishermen’s cottages or pitch a tent in the camping ground beside the lagoon. Two people lived here year-round, Jane Taylor and Roger Coker, who kept to himself in his green cottage. There were no more than a dozen shacks, no room for more than a dozen tents at the campsite. Even now at Christmas, the busiest time of the year, the beach remained quiet enough to suit Sarah. Everyone said the Bay was crowded, but it was nothing compared to a tourist-packed Queensland beach in January.

Beer bubbled up the back of Sarah’s throat and into her nose. She swallowed and concentrated on the conversation. Simone Shelley had bought a new wave ski and had offered John and Don a lesson. Felicity, or Flip as everyone called her, and Pamela decided that was half funny, half pathetic. Simone was flirtatious, but that didn’t bother Flip and Pamela, so they said; it was more that she wasn’t warm, she wasn’t comfortable around women. Pamela ran the corner store and was pleased to share local news. She said the campers were drinking a lot more than in previous years; she could tell by how much ice they bought from her. She could tell other things, too, such as why certain people couldn’t lose weight, judging by what they bought from her store. It didn’t seem to occur to anyone that an apple or a banana in Pamela and Don’s store cost three times the price of a bag of potato chips. The campers presumably brought their own fruit and vegetables from Launceston.

The only customers who could afford Pamela’s fruit were the relatively well-off people who owned holiday shacks—professional people, doctors, teachers, business owners. Flip and Pamela were pharmacists. Flip owned a pharmacy in town, but Pamela had never used her degree. Instead, Pamela and her husband, Don, had worked in real estate and done so well they were semi-retired now. They ran the local shop in summer and then closed it and retreated to Queensland for the winter. Pamela and Flip had been best friends since studying pharmacy together. Sarah assumed they had been equally annoying back then: Pamela had been crowned Miss Pharmacy, Flip first runner-up. It was a story they still liked to tell—and with no embarrassment.

“Sarah’s turn.” Erica wrote on a piece of paper and passed it to Sarah. Sarah licked the back of the paper and stuck it to her forehead.

“Am I a woman?”

“Yes.” A circle of grinning faces surrounded her.

“Am I married?”

“No.”

“Am I alive?”

“No.”

Sarah couldn’t think of another question. She didn’t care. The celebrity head was probably some pop star she had never heard of.

“Give me a clue.”

“You’re an elderly virgin.” Erica’s laugh was a hoot.

“Who is it?”

“It’s not you!”

“Erica. Let her work it out.”

Sarah ripped the paper off her forehead. Everyone groaned. She was Queen Elizabeth the First.

“Good one.” She tipped her head back and poured the warm flat froth at the bottom of her stubby down her throat.

Outside, pink light was visible through cracks in the darkening sky. Red sky at night, shepherd’s delight. Although it was raining now, tomorrow would be clear. She would still leave. The week had dragged on long enough. The weather didn’t bother her. In fact she preferred it; bad weather brought schools of salmon close to the beach and kept the tea tree–stained lagoon pleasantly childless. It was the Bay of Fires that she remembered from her childhood, when all the shacks were tiny Fibro fishing cottages and there was never a queue at the boat ramp.

Erica cupped her hand around another slip of paper as she wrote.

“One for you, Pam.”

Pamela stuck it on her forehead.

“Am I a woman?”

Flip and Erica shouted yes.

“Am I a bitch?”

“Yes!”

“Am I Simone Shelley?”

Raucous laughter drowned the rain. It woke Henry, who poked his head up and barked. Sarah couldn’t feign a laugh. It had been a mistake coming here. After living and working for seventeen months in the cheerful nosiness of Eumundi, Tasmania’s isolation had appealed. Ninety kilometers down a gravel road to coastal wilderness. No electricity, no telephones, no television. Bay of Fires: summer population, seventy; winter population, two. But the isolation was not as reassuring as she had imagined. A week, a month here, nothing to talk about but Simone Shelley’s alleged flirtations, untrained dogs, and fat people. Before long they would want more details about Sarah. It was the intimate details of other people’s lives that nourished them. So far, Sarah had listed bare facts: she had quit her job and broken up with Jake.

She didn’t know that she could keep her secret hidden. Kindness would be enough to shatter her fragile shell. The problems that had forced her self-imposed exile from her life up north would provide her mother and Pamela hours of intense discussion. Worse would be their disgust if they found out that she had messed around with Sam Shelley, Simone’s seventeen-year-old son. If she was honest, she hadn’t given his age a thought. And on Christmas Day, no less. It was so bad it was almost funny. But she had not drunk enough to laugh.

Sarah looked around the room at her family and their friends. If they turned on her, she could handle herself in an argument. But to be the focus of their concern would be unbearable. Sarah twisted the top off another bottle of beer.

Sarah went to bed too early and woke in the dark, with nothing to do but wait for day, prey to a contorted parade of raw memories. She tried to control her thoughts by focusing on work. On the barramundi farm there was order, systems, programs that required finite concentration. Before she quit she had been improving staff training. She’d taught them to diagnose diseases that the caged fish suffered. Each ailment had specific symptoms: gill disease, skin lesions, sores, viruses similar to those humans could contract. Lying in bed, Sarah visualized each symptom. Some were psychological, and she concentrated on recalling each troubling behavior, such as fish swimming unusually, or sitting at the bottom of the tank, or floating on the top, gasping for air.

Some of the blokes on her staff never got it. Glorified tank cleaners. Not that she’d ever say that to their faces; she had encouraged them to take pride in their work. But still, how many times did she need to remind them to be alert to the reactions of the fish every time they brought in new water or new breeding stock? Old anger temporarily contained her shame. She focused on her breathing, counting each breath, releasing it slowly. Maybe she was the problem. She had high expectations of people and got frustrated when her expectations weren’t met. But so what? If they didn’t like it, she could handle that. She only wanted them to reach their potential. Some of them had never had a chance; one older bloke had spent so much time moving in and out of prison, he had never had a proper job until Sarah made him full-time. No doubt some of the Eumundi Barramundi staff were glad she had quit. She could see them standing around the Pineapple Hotel pool table, laughing about her over Friday afternoon beers.

People were more of a challenge in land fish farming, as opposed to ocean fish farming. Storms and sudden shifts in currents, hot autumns and freezing springs, pollution; there were many unpredictable elements in ocean fish farming. The thing is, you expected these to occur. On a land farm, you were supposed to have total control of the environment.

Quiet and dark, that was how barramundi liked it. It was her job to make the environment as friendly as possible for the fish. Healthy fish lived a peaceful life, rippled currents on the surface of the tank their trademark. She imagined herself submerged near the bottom, slippery skins slicking past her, flipping somersaults in the cool darkness. On the tank floor, the sun would belong to another world. Oxygenized water bubbled upward to the top. She closed her eyes and allowed herself to be absorbed into the undulating swirl of four tonnes of barramundi. The distraction worked for a while until the madness crept in, her thoughts more frightening than any bad dream.

As soon as light appeared at the sliver where the mold-stained Ken Done curtains did not join up, she slid out of bed and hung a towel around her neck. She closed the shack door on Mum’s and Dad’s and Erica’s sleep noises, escaping before the cups of tea and conversations that would follow her from the solitude of the couch to the wooden chair under the old beach umbrella on the front veranda.

Dad had mowed the track to the beach. It was reassuringly wide, but Sarah set each foot down with a deliberate thump and hummed to warn the poisonous black snakes that thrived in the area that she was coming. It was a childhood habit and she was barely conscious of it. Dad had done a good job of mowing the track, especially for someone who was not used to doing it. Sarah’s parents had a gardener who came weekly. When Sarah had lived at her parents’ home in Launceston, it seemed her dad had never had time to do anything more than tend his herb and flower gardens, his time stretched between his job as a lecturer in history at the university and his research on Tasmanian tin mining in the nineteenth century. Her father still made Sarah lists of handyman-type jobs to do whenever she came home.

Erica had mentioned that she had the same gardener tending the lawn at her place, which was a smaller version of the family’s red brick and red tile roof Federation-style home. Erica worked as a flight attendant, her boyfriend, Steve, as a pilot, and they said they didn’t have time to do it themselves. Sarah wondered what other aspects of their parents’ lives Erica and Steve would eventually emulate. She could see Erica educating her children at one of Launceston’s private schools and spending the next decade watching rowing regattas, netball matches, and ballet recitals in lieu of a social life, as their parents had done. It was not the life Sarah desired and had been one of the reasons why she had moved away from Launceston as soon as she finished university.