Ba-Na-Na-Na

9

Ba-Na-Na-Na

    Tuesday. Queensland. It was very humid. Very, very humid. Hill’s Australian Hawaiian shirt clung to him clammily. Jim Thompson had given in entirely and removed his fiercely turquoise, heavy-knit Australian Aboriginal tee-shirt and tied it round his waist. As Polly had rung him up not long before they took off expressly to remind him to use loads of sunscreen, even if it looked overcast the ultra-violet would still get to you, Hill was well provisioned. But gee, Jim didn’t need to borrow his tube: he had his own tube, Caitlin had made him bring it and swear to use it, even if it was overc— Like that.

    “See, the beach is just down here,” said Sharon Wong.

    Correct: the beach—its name was Big Rock Bay and this was because it featured a very big rock—was just down here at the foot of the low cliff that was part of the Wongs’ farm property. Just down here, also, alas, were the motel and caravan camp which owned all the beachfront. Sharon had assured Hill that of course Isabelle and Scott Bell who ran the motel wouldn’t mind if people just came through to get to the beach but the look on Kieran Wong’s face had assured Hill that this claim was entirely inaccurate. Sure enough, as soon as the farmer had got him and Jim alone he’d confided: “Scott’d let your tourists through, no worries, he’s really easy-going, but that Isabelle, she’s as hard as nails. She’ll make ya pay through the nose.”

    Kieran and Sharon were fifth-generation Chinese Australians and, as far as Hill could tell, emotionally and culturally entirely integrated into the Aussie ethos. To the point, apparently, where Kieran didn’t realize that if he wanted to make a sale he’d better lie about Mrs Bell’s attitude to giving YDI’s clients beach access. True, Hill had met Australian businesspersons of both sexes who’d lie as soon as look at you, but they were the city-bred sort of Australians who went overseas to make a living out of the suckers. Kieran and Sharon were the sort of good-natured, honest-as-the-day-is-long country folk that Hill had not believed still existed outside the pages of Nevil Shute. They’d already admitted that this was cyclone country, yes. Well, you could get them any time from October through to April, really, only you didn’t often get a really bad one. And Christmas was the stickiest time of year: they did get some overseas tourists up here then, of course, but winter was the best time of year, really. It was the Dry, see? After some confusion on both sides Hill had determined that they didn’t get winter as such, and Sharon had meant the Antipodean winter, or the English summer. Well, good, that was when most of their clients did take their long hols. And possibly sleeping in high-ceilinged rooms under giant fans, which was what the Wongs’ large modern farmhouse featured, would appeal to the Christmas visitors.

    Hill stared at the beautiful circlet of silver sand, the frothing, white-edged, turquoise-shading-to-lapis-lazuli water and the decorative big rock for some time. Then he said: “Do you get sharks in these waters?”

    The answer was what he’d expected. Though Scott hired a couple of local boys as “surf lifeguards” when they had lots of tourists in. But they hadn’t had a shark in the bay for ages.

    Swallowing a sigh, Hill said: “Possibly Scott’d like us to share the cost of the lifeguards, then, as a trade-off against giving our clients beach access.”

    “That’s a good idea!” she beamed.

    Mm. Well, it might work, depending on how hard Isabelle Bell actually was. She was a slim, attractive enough, dark-haired person of possibly as much as twenty-six but Hill would have taken a bet she was right up there in the same class with those ebony-eyed top execs from the Gano Group once glimpsed crossing a lobby at Head Office with Maurice in tow, slavishly kow-towing to them. The motel’s success was almost entirely due to her acumen and only slightly to the amiable Scott’s brawn. Well, a fair amount of brawn was required—as the sweating Scott had explained, grinning over his motor-mower in thirty degrees and swaddling humidity, if he didn’t mow the bloody stuff no-one else would—but, having had the full saga of the filming of The Captain’s Daughter out of Sharon, not to say out of the lady behind the bar at the local pub, only ten miles or so up the road, Hill was in no doubt that had it been up to Scott the film company would have got the use of the entire site for free, not to mention the original beach house, which had featured very largely in the scenes where the luscious Lily Rose Rayne was pursued, almost done, pursued again, half-stripped and almost done again. As it was, Isabelle had made them pay through the nose for every square inch of the ground they’d used and every crumb or drop they’d consumed. Good for her. The beach house now bore a plaque mentioning its historic past and was available to suckers for only fifteen times the price of the other cabins. And was fully booked for the next year—honeymooners, largely. Chinese, Japanese and Australians, actually, Isabelle had said calmly to Hill’s poker-faced enquiry. Good old Scott had choked, though.

    Hill and Jim were staying at the motel, where all the rooms were air-conditioned, possibly as a concession to the sensibilities of the tourists, for, as Scott as had explained, kindly switching on the ceiling fan for the dripping Hill, it didn’t work too good in the humidity, not even the refrigerated sort, and the water-cooled sort didn’t work at all up here, you could give that one away, mate. Persons like Scott did say “mate” a lot, it wasn’t a myth.

    Isabelle had kindly given them a glimpse of the beach house while the current lot of honeymooners were off looking at a banana plantation and so they knew that while the very comfortable cabins were sort of modern Australian mixed with yer tropical Singapore (where the film had been largely set), with a slight touch here and there of Fifties kitsch (the film had also been set in the Fifties), the beach house, which Isabelle referred to relentlessly as “The Captain’s Daughter’s Cottage” but Scott just called the old house, was ’orribly Fifties, with just a touch of yer Singapore in Queensland.\

    Hill had been under the impression that the last phrase was all his own until the grinning Scott had kindly disabused him. “Yeah, thass what Rosie and Dot and their mates called it, too.”

    So all he’d been able to say, very weakly, was: “Rosie?”

    To which Scott had replied with a wink: “Lily Rose Rayne to you. Hard case, I can tell ya. Well, Isabelle’s known her most of her life—she’s Dot’s cousin, ya see.”

    Now Hill pulled his Australian Hawaiian shirt away from his sweating sides slightly, and sighed.

    “It is a lovely view,” said Mrs Wong uncertainly.

    He jumped. “Yes, of course it is, Sharon! This is a super spot, we’d certainly consider it for a very special private cabin if we acquired the site.”

    Reading his mind, Sharon pursued happily: “See, I’d plant a clump of trees just here—everything grows really fast up here, you wouldn’t have to wait long for them to hide the motel. You could have a banana, maybe,” she ended on a hopeful note.

    Hill swallowed. “Mm. That’d be nice.” Erin Arvidson, who’d stressed the banana motif, had got it wrong: Sharon and Kieran weren’t banana farmers, though there were some banana plantations not far away. What Sharon had, according to Kieran, was a pet banana palm. She fussed over the ruddy thing too much: it had never borne. He’d tried to tell her the banana farmers slashed the things down every year, for Pete’s sake, but she’d told him he was a brute. Hill had been trying to keep off the subject of bananas ever since. The Wongs had a mixed farm: dairy cows, and fields and fields of celery. Hill hadn’t been aware there was such a big demand for celery in the entire world, let alone in Queensland, but Kieran had wised him up on that one. They exported it. Eh? Not to Japan or any place like that, no! To New South Wales. Hill’s jaw had dropped but the farmer had been perfectly serious. They also had a flourishing lime orchard. He hadn’t dared to ask, really, but Scott Bell enlightened him. Kieran was doing really good with them. Exported them, mate. Mostly went to New South Wales: for the trendies with the weird sunnies in the trendy cafés. One slice of lime in their mineral waters that they ignored and the café had to throw out after. Made ya think, didn’t it?

    Down below them a neat dark-haired figure in blue shorts and pink tee-shirt was carrying a tray up the steps of The Captain’s Daughter’s Cottage. Late breakfast? Early lunch? He glanced at his watch.

    “They call it brunch,” said Sharon, reading his mind.

    Hill grinned at her. “Of course they do! What is it: eggs Benedict, Buck’s fizz, Melba toast?”

    Grinning back, Sharon replied happily: “Something like that! Well, I think it’s just ordinary toast, I don’t think Isabelle’s toaster’ll do fancy toast, and I’m not sure what those sort of eggs are, but it is that champagne and orange juice stuff, yeah. And they always seem to ask for tropical fruit, so she’ll of given them a bit of pawpaw or something. And coffee or tea.”

    He smiled. “Mm. We’d need to think carefully about the amount of work involved… Well, heavy on the tropical fruit side? You’ve got a mango tree in your garden, haven’t you?”

    “Yes, a couple. They are quite pretty trees, but our kids don’t really like mangoes. They can taste sort of sicky,” said Sharon cautiously.

    Hill would have said soapy, but in essence she wasn’t wrong. This was because, as he had now verified empirically, the Australians picked them too early. Anything with a black spot on it was considered rotten. However, the delightful lady who’d taught him about mangoes, quite some years previously, had explained that if they had a black spot that showed they were really ripe. And never eat a banana unless it had a few little brown spots. Hill had discovered after a visit to Sharon’s kitchen that Australians didn’t eat those: at best, they were incorporated into banana cake. Otherwise they went into the bin. It was an incredibly wasteful society: as bad as the Americans. Well, possibly Britain was just as bad, but he’d never bothered to look. He still felt strongly that ecolodges were potty but he was beginning to have a sneaking feeling, after being exposed to both Isabelle’s and Sharon’s kitchens, not to mention Scott’s feeling description of the fate of Kieran’s beautiful tropical limes, that maybe the eco-nuts and the permaculture nuts had a point. But at least at Big Rock Bay the discarded produce wasn’t completely wasted: both Isabelle and Sharon sent over buckets of stuff every day to Bri Smothers for his pigs. Scott had originally raised the subject of this gentleman: just in case Kieran and Sharon didn’t mention it, Bri Smothers over the ridge from their place, he had pigs. Ya didn’t wannoo be up the back of their place in a westerly, mate! However, Kieran had mentioned it. Glumly, but he’d mentioned it.

    It was around that point that Hill had realized he could stop worrying whether the property was about to slide into the sea, or whether the farm was periodically under six feet of flood water, or infested with white ants, or some such. After that he’d plucked up the courage to ask Kieran why he wanted to sell out. They were only in their late forties, and if the farm was doing well… Kieran had replied glumly that they’d had enough, really, it was a hard life and none of their kids were interested in taking over. And there came a point where ya sorta stopped and asked yaself, well, why? Mind you, Dad was wild with them.

    “Just hang on a minute, Sharon,” he said now, opening the laptop. He made a note: “Pigs - methane? Nat res for energy?” underneath his multiplicity of other notes. If only Hellen was with him! There was no-one but him to sort out these bloody notes, decide which needed some immediate action, and do something about them. Jim, of course, had a heap of notes of his own, though in some cases Hill did ask him to take the action. But it was the sorting and deciding that took the bloody time.

    “Is Bri Smothers pretty much a fixture here?” he said, closing the laptop and smiling at her.

    Poor Sharon replied in an agonized voice: “Well, pretty much, yeah, Hill. You can only smell them up the back, really. And only in a westerly.”

    “Not that, Sharon. I haven’t caught a single whiff of them,” replied Hill quickly. Jesus, by this time the poor woman must be thinking he was trying to beat their price down! “No, it’s possible to produce methane gas from pig wastes. I think it can be used for several purposes: firing of boilers—not that you’d need much heating here. Well, for fuelling power plants.”

    “Ooh, firing a farm generator?” said Sharon eagerly.

    He smiled at her. “I’d think so, Sharon, why not? Eco-friendly electricity, eh?”

    “Yeah! You and Bri could share it!”

    Hill nodded slowly. He’d also read somewhere about combined biomass technologies that utilized a mixture of manures and crop residues. What about all those banana plantations they’d passed on the drive here from the little airport? Er—well, mustn’t get carried away: YDI didn’t want to be responsible for ruining the environment by erecting a giant biogas power station in this lovely area; but in principle, and if the plant needed more topping up than Mr Smothers’s pigs could manage…

    “Hey, you could supply Isabelle and Scott, too!”

    “Hey, yeah!” agreed Jim.

    “Um, don’t you have regulations about commercial electricity supply, though, Sharon?”

    Sharon scowled. “You betcha! See, Kieran, he asked them what happened if he put solar panels on the roof—well, heck, we get enough sunshine in these parts! Only they said any that was left over hadda go into the grid, wouldja believe? So we gave it away. I mean, saving the environment’s all very well, but no way are they gonna get something for nothing out of us! You oughta see our tax bill!”

    Er—quite. Well, possibly it wasn’t the same “they” supplying the electricity, in a federal system. In fact he was almost sure the Australian electricity industry was deregulated, these days—though possibly that depended on the individual states. But that’d be a fair enough summation of the average taxpaying citizen’s attitude, yes.

    “We might get over that by all going off the grid entirely and setting up a cooperative amongst ourselves,” he said thoughtfully.

    “Good one!” choked Jim.

    Sharon gave an evil chuckle, nodding madly. “That’d show them! Isabelle’d be up for that: their fridges are costing them a fortune!”

    Them plus the air conditioning and ceiling fans in every room—quite. Er… well, they’d have to go into it carefully: Mr Smothers’s pigs might not be able to satisfy the motel’s needs.

    “I’ll talk to them. When would be a convenient time to see Bri Smothers?”

    Sharon brightened terrifically. They could pop back to the farm and ring him now!

    Oops. Oh, well, it was a lovely site, and considerably cheaper than the couple of other possibilities Jim had tracked down in Queensland—there was a small island up for grabs but the seller wanted millions for the dump, on which there was precisely nothing. And the farm was, given the enormous distances in Queensland, reasonably close to facilities such as the tiny local airport (local in local terms, but still), the old pub about ten miles away on the main road (main in local terms) and, last but by no means least, the rainforests. In fact if they just left the celery fields alone Hill had a strong feeling that rainforest was what they’d soon get.

    “Um, I was wondering,” he said as they made their way back to the 4x4, “talking of tropical fruits for breakfast, would there be any possibility of getting organically grown fruit round here?”

    Not round here as such but Sharon told him happily all about the red-tipped bananas. Hill had deliberately avoided the word “banana”: he felt quite weak, but managed to query the red tips. Not natural: food wax. It had better be very eco-friendly food wax, coloured with edible and very eco-friendly food dye, in that case. On the other hand, would their clientele be so excited by organically grown bananas that they wouldn’t query anything? And there was the farm itself, of course: stacks of land to grow anything they liked. He reminded Jim to look into the Australian version of permaculture—no, not a joke. Jim ceased choking and hurriedly made a note in his laptop.

    Wednesday. Queensland. Maurice on the blower in the middle of the night—technically Thursday, in fact.

    “What the fuck is all this crap about biogas and pig muck? And where have you BEEN?”

    “Maurice, if you want an ecolodge for the top end of the market you’ve got to find some way of generating power to run the bloody fans you need on here all the time to make life even halfway bearable. Otherwise you’ll be running a motel that won’t be half as attractive to the punters as the one down on the edge of the bay.”

    “Buy them out!” he choked.

    “We can’t buy them out, this is their life. They’re happy here, a concept completely foreign to you in your air-conditioned, centrally heated city coffin, I recognize, but nevertheless.”

    “We need beach access!” he choked.

    “Isabelle and Scott will rent it to us, even allowing us to fence off a very eco-friendly path at the edge of their property all the way down to the beach. With a very eco-friendly fence.”

    “How much?” he demanded grimly. “WHAT?” he screamed as Hill told him.

    “Annually, you idiot,” he said tiredly. “Is that all? Because it’s the middle of the nigh—”

    “Shut UP! Where have you BEEN?” he roared.

    “As I said in my email, I’ve been looking at banana plantations and talking to organic grow—”

    “Fuck your bloody bananas! You’ve been there FOUR DAYS!” he roared.

    “Er, two and a half. I don’t think you’ve grasped the distances in Queensland, Maurice. The local pub’s a good ten miles up the road, for instance.”

    There was a short silence.

    “You mean it’s in the next village?”

    “No,” said Hill with a sigh, “that is their village. Well, village; there’s the pub and a petrol station. There was a small general store but it closed down some time ago: competition from the nearby supermarkets. –About fifty miles away.”

    There was short silence and then he said: “Well, how far is it to the airport?”

    “About a hundred miles to the nearest biggish one. I don’t know whether it’s big enough for jumbos or not. We flew to Brisbane and then took a much, much smaller plane to somewhere indefinable. The locals call it an airport but it’s actually more like an airstrip. Don’t worry, our clientele will find it all part of the eco-experience. Especially the pilot: every second word he uttered was ‘mate.’ Though I admit his main topics of conversation were the musical he and the wife saw on a recent holiday down in Sydney and Australian Rules football.”

    “Stop talking crap!”

    “Maurice, I’m talking crap because it’s the middle of the night,” said Hill with a sigh.

    “It wouldn’t be if you hadn’t been farting about all day looking at bananas! That’s not what I sent you—”

    “Look, banana growing is a huge industry here, complete with the huge tanker-loads of fertilizer and pesticides, and if you want our dump to be eco-anything we’ve got to see if there are any organic suppliers or the whole thing falls through! Well, we don’t get that rating on that Internet site you’ve decided is a must.”

    “Never mind that,” he said sourly. “It’s not in your brief. Just make a note of that sort of thing, it can be checked out from Head Off—”

    “On the Internet, I presume? Look, the organic growers are really up with the play, they’ve got websites and email addresses, but they’re all geared up to supply their markets in bulk. We won’t get organic produce unless we talk to them personally. As it is, I’ve got Wes lined up with organic bananas—they’re lovely, actually—and Bert on board with organic mangoes, both of which they grow in commercial quantities. Then, Len and Rae can supply the really exotic stuff like custard apples and mangosteens: they’ve got a smallish orchard—they’re hobby-farmers—and although they’ve got their regular customers will be quite glad to add us to their list. They could provide us with salad greens”—he ignored Maurice’s spluttering fit—“but personally I don’t call a salad fresh when it’s been packed in plastic and cardboard and trucked over two hundred miles in a refrigerated lorry.”

    “What the Christ do you mean, over two hundred miles?”

    He meant, actually, a rough translation of the local kilometres—Australia was fully metricated. “Len and Rae’s very lovely organic orchard is over two hundred miles from here, Maurice,” said Hill very clearly.

    “This is ridiculous!” he spluttered.

    “No, it’s the realities of the supply chain in Queensland,” said Hill heavily. “I’ve driven more than eight hundred miles today, starting at four this morning, and good-night!”

    Thursday. Queensland. Maurice on the blower again. At quite a reasonable hour Hill’s time, so he could only hope it was the middle of the night in Britain.

    “Look, pull your finger out! We can manage the organic produce—shit, fly it in from that place you found in New Zealand if we have to—but sort out the sites first!”

    Hill raised his eyebrows slightly but replied without emotion: “And the biomass plant?”

    “I’m getting someone on to that,” he said grumpily.

    “Mm. Well, do you want me to make the Wongs a conditional offer?”

    “YES!” he shouted. “What else were all your fucking emails for? YES!” Crash!

    As Hill had taken this call in the motel office the other occupants of the office—Jim Thompson, Isabelle and Scott Bell and Kirsty Wong, Kieran’s niece, who helped out—looked at him anxiously.

    “Is he hopping mad?” asked Jim fearfully.

    “Not for him: no. Well, he’s told me to make Kieran and Sharon a conditional offer.”

    “Hurray!” they all cried wildly.

    Er—yes. Something like that. Well, it wasn’t his money, was it? Grinning, Hill said: “Well, uh, celebratory dinner tonight, on me? Um, the pub? Think Laverne’d do her apricot chicken, if I ring now?”

    “Nah! I mean, she would, but let’s do it properly, eh?” said Scott eagerly. “Go into town! Decent feed of steak! If you wannoo, that is,” he added somewhat belatedly.

    Almost a hundred-mile round trip, just for a huge, bloating meal of steak and chips. Hill looked at their shining morning faces. “Right, you’re on!”

    “Hurray!” they all cried wildly.

    Friday. New South Wales. Maurice on the blower again. “What the Hell was that number in your email? Where the fuck ARE you?”

    “Sydney. It took all day to get here; one of the airports was closed because of fog and all flights were disrupted and I’m too tired to talk, and good-NIGHT, Maurice!” Crash!

    Saturday. New South Wales. Jim stood silent on a peak in Darien and looked thoughtfully at a wide blue view. Not the Pacific, no, they were far too far inland to see the sea. The New South Wales bush-clad countryside. Over behind them were the actual Blue Mountains, the big tourist attraction of the area—Jim’s folder had the brochures to prove it.

    “Hey,” he said thoughtfully at last.

    “Mm-hm?”

    Jim looked round cautiously but their guide had vanished amongst the boulders with which this part of the property was liberally strewn. “Ya reckon it’s mid-life crisis or something?”

    “Whose, Jim?” replied Hill mildly.

    “Well, all of them, really. No, um, this lot that wanna sell us this place and go round the world on a yacht.”

    “Well, yes, but so what? Good luck to them!”

    Jim looked at him dubiously. “Ye-ah… You wouldn’t go and do that, would you?”

    “What: chuck in a deadly job that was destroying my soul and escape on a round the world cruise—or, alternatively, to the peace of this extraordinary rural fastness? Can you smell it?” He sniffed ecstatically.

    Looking dubious, Jim sniffed. “Um, bush. It’ll be the gum trees.”

    Well, quite!

    “Um, but it isn’t, is it?” Jim pursued uneasily.

    “Mm? What?” replied Hill dreamily.

    Swallowing, the younger man said: “Destroying your soul. The job, I mean. At YDI.”

    “Oh! No, ’tisn’t yet, Jim!” he said with a laugh. “Not when I can get out onto the sites—this sort of globetrotting isn’t what I usually do, you know, not that it’s all bad! But when it starts to, this’ll be the sort of place I’ll be heading for!”

    “Um, yeah. Well, it’s not bad. Very dry in summer, though. They get bushfires, too.”

    “Er—yes, I suppose they do.”

    “Um, Hill, it’s a real danger over here. Sir Maurice’ll wanna know,” he said uneasily.

    “Well, uh, this hillside is pretty bare. Keep the undergrowth down, clear a space round the building—No?” he said as Jim’s agonised expression registered.

    “See, they can leap fifty metres or so, they can leap a four-lane highway, easy. They get into the tops of the trees and the wind blows them—honest! And the grass’ll be really dry in summer, that farmer I talked to earlier was saying it’s all tank water round here and there’s no way we’d be able to use sprinklers. Um, I think that might be partly why they want to sell out: it wasn’t as good a place for a bach as what they thought.”

    “Well, clear fifty yards or so round the buildings—”

    “The grass’ll burn!” blurted Jim with an agonised expression.

    Their guide reappeared from amongst the boulders. She panted a bit. “In a bushfire? Yeah, that’s right. There’ll be plenty of warning, though: you can see the fires coming from miles away.”

    “Right, and then they burn the place down and ya gotta start again!” agreed Jim fiercely.

    “If you’re unlucky,” agreed Hill.

    “No, what it is, see,” replied the New Zealander fiercely, “if you’re unlucky, you and your family all get burnt to a cinder and the house as well! If you’re only slightly unlucky you lose the house and everything on the place and have to start again.”

    Hill looked dubiously at their guide. Certainly she, her husband, and her brother-in-law and his wife were all of an age—and socio-economic bracket—to be suffering from mid-life crisis, but very possibly Jim was right and the prevalence of bushfires was the main reason they’d decided to get rid of their holiday property. They didn’t seem to have done much with it in the time they’d had it, though the house wasn’t as elementary as Fern Gully Ecolodge.

    “He was talking about clearing the ground round the house,” said Jim, giving him a look of dislike.

    “Well, keeping the undergrowth down is the first thing you have to do, yes,” she granted. “And keep the spouting clear of leaves. And no trees near the house.”

    “See, yer ecolodge is gonna look good with no trees in sight!” snarled Jim.

    “Jim, if you’re completely against it you’d better write up a memo,” said Hill feebly.

    “I’m not completely against it, I just don’t think you’re taking the threat of bushfires seriously!”

    “There are warning systems in place,” said the would-be seller on an uneasy note. “This area hasn’t had a bad one for a while. Um, well, it’d be easy enough to evacuate. Um, well, you just aren’t used to Australian conditions, Hill.”

    Hill looked at Jim. “What do you think?”

    “Tell Sir Maurice he’s gotta do a risk management assessment, and if it’s worth going ahead, then a proper risk management plan. And you’ll need proper emergency evacuation procedures in place or the insurer’ll never cover you.”

    He swallowed. “Of course—yes. Thanks.”

    Quite some time later, when they’d given up the effort to get back to the city and settled for a motel in the middle of nowhere and a dinner of fish and chips, Jim ventured cautiously: “Um, if ya don’t mind me saying so, your life doesn’t sound too bad at all, Hill.”

    Hill was silent for some time. Then he said: “You’re right, Jim. Thanks; I was letting myself slide into the sin of envy, a bit. Especially after meeting Jan and Pete. And, well, the Wongs as well. And those two couples today: nearly thirty years of marriage and they’re so comfortable with each other, not to mention with the in-laws, that they’re prepared to set off round the world together… Insidious thing, envy, isn’t it? Though you’re too young to have really felt it, I think.”

    Jim sighed a little. “I can see what they’ve got, though. Ya sort of lose sight of things when you’re busy making a living and coping with the kids, and so forth. I s’pose me and Caitlin oughta talk more… Maybe her mum’d take the kids if we wanted to get away. Um… can’t next Christmas, she’s got it all planned out. Well, um, bit of a break during the year, if we can swing it. And, um, well, it sounds dumb at our ages, but maybe we should think about what we’re gonna end up doing, eh? I reckon the Wongs have got it right: retire before ya too worn out to enjoy it. I mean, say we put a bit by—I mean, we don’t need a flash new car, the station-waggon’s okay—and, um, well, think about early retirement, maybe somewhere a bit like this, eh?”

    Many possible—and very sensible—objections could have been raised to this plan, but Hill just replied with a smile in his voice: “I would, Jim.”

    Monday. New South Wales. Maurice on the blower again. At quite an early hour, Hill’s time, so he could only hope it was the wee small hours in Britain.

    “Where the fuck have you BEEN for the last two days? I told you to KEEP IN TOUCH!”

    “In a motel on our way back from Outer Woop-Woop.”

    “You can drop that now, thank you,” he said icily.

    “I sent you innumerable emails about it, Maurice. In summary, a great site, wonderful view—like nothing in the whole of Europe: the Australian landscape is fantastic—and risk of bushfires as per email. Up to you. Dare say that syndicate Uncle Hubert’s in at Lloyd’s might take you on. Well, they insured some idiot single-handed yachtsman, so presumably—”

    “SHUT UP!” he roared.

    “—they’ll insure anything,” finished Hill kindly. “Sorry, gotta go or we’ll miss our connection to Tasmania.” He hung up.

    Jim Thompson had been standing on one leg throughout this exchange. Now he said: “We couldn’t get on that early flight, Hill.”

    “I know that, Jim and you know that, but Maurice doesn’t need to,” replied Hill with an evil grin. “Come on, brekkie. It’s a lovely day, so we can take that ferry ride on the harbour, and go to lunch at that highly recommended fish restaurant!”

    They did that.

    Monday night. Tasmania. A really lovely motel, sheaves of messages, all from Maurice. Hill didn’t ring him back, damn struggling with the time difference, he just waited for the call.

    “Tasmania. It’s a very long way from Sydney. Think in terms of Seville to Stockholm. We’re seeing things tomorrow. Good-night, Maurice.”

    Tuesday. Tasmania. Gosh. Eco-friendly and a half! The waste water filtered through what? Help, Hill had never known yer green-growing rushes-oh could do that and by the look on his face Jim Thompson hadn’t, either. The owner was obviously a dedicated eco-nut and very clearly dedication was what it took, they’d never get the staff— And God, they had seen a bit of Australian laissez-faire in the shops, petrol stations, pubs and so forth they’d patronised, not to mention the bloody airports, and one micro-millisecond of neglect of this sort of system and you’d be liable to the local environmental authorities for millions in damages, the tourists would stay away in droves, your neighbours would sue you for pollution or infringement or whatever for further millions, you’d never be able to clean up the site within two generations, and, in short, no way.

    “We’ll never be able to compete with that,” croaked Jim as, the eco-nut having let them out of his clutches at last, they tottered into the bar of the first scungy roadside pub they met and attempted to drown ’em. “I mean, on a commercial basis? No way!”

    “No,” croaked Hill.

    “Think they’d put us up here for the night?”

    “No,” croaked Hill.

    “No, ya prolly right. Bugger.”

    “Get drunk, Jim,” advised Hill kindly. “I’ll drive.”

    “Ta,” he said gratefully, starting.

    After three whiskies he was capable of admitting: “Well, that site we looked at—shit, was that only this morning? Yeah, well, it was okay, and there’s great trout fishing round there, but heck!”

    “Mm. I’ll wise Maurice up.”

    “There are some other sites in Tasmania; it is quite wild—undeveloped, ya know?”

    “Er—mm. Is it always this cold at this time of year, though, Jim?” he asked cautiously.

    “Think so—yeah. Well, Caitlin’s dad, he reckoned it was bad as Dunedin.”

    Hill didn’t ask him to clarify the precise reference: it was bloody clear what he meant. Though he was rather surprised to know that Caitlin’s dad was still with them. “Mm. What does he do, Jim?’

    “Nothing. Hides in ’is shed,” he revealed morosely.

    Hill swallowed.

    “Uh—that just come out,” admitted Jim sheepishly. “Well, he does. He’s retired. Only she won’t let him do his stamps in the house.”

    “Philately? That’s clean and harmless enough, surely? –Stamp collecting,” he clarified, as Jim was just looking at him drunkenly.

    “Eh? Aw! Neh! Rubber stamps. You know, with ink. Dunno why he’s hooked on them, but then collecting takes ya that way. He makes them, too: makes them to order. She doesn’t want little bits of rubber in the flaming body carpet, geddit? He goes out there at nine-fifteen every morning, comes in for lunch at twelve-thirty sharp, goes back out until six, and most evenings he’s out there from about seven until nine-thirty, that’s when they always have supper. Doesn’t really like TV. Well, used to watch Open All Hours, ’member that? Yeah, it was good, eh? Makes ya flaming think, eh?”

    “Mm,” agreed Hill very cautiously indeed.

    “Don’t ever ask me to take up a hobby, matey,” Jim adjured him solemnly, if drunkenly. “Cos I don’t plan to spend me declining years in me flaming shed!”

    No, quite. It certainly did make you think. It and a few other things unexpectedly encountered on this trip.

Next chapter:

https://theprojectmanager-anovel.blogspot.com/2021/12/meanwhile-back-at-abbots-halt.html