They shook hands. The ex-SOG man, Jacobs, walked onto the forecourt to see him go. In the mirror, Cashin saw him give a mocking wave, fingers fanned, right hand held just beside his tough-guy smile.
Cashin gunned the cruiser, showered Jacobs with gravel, saw him try to protect his face.
CASHIN DROVE out on the road behind Open Beach, turned at the junction with the highway, went back through Port Monro, got a coffee. He parked above Lucan Rocks, below him a half-dozen surfers, some taking on the big breakers, some giving it a lot of thought.
It was a soothing thing to do: sit in a warm car and watch the wind lifting spume off the waves, see the sudden green translucence of a rising wall of water, a black figure’s skim across the melting glass, the poetic exit into the air, the falling.
He thought about Gavin’s shark-bitten board, paddling out on it, the water warm as a bath. The water he was looking at was icy. He remembered the testicle-retracting swims when he was a boy, when they had the family shack above Open Beach and the Doogue shack was over the next dune, rugged assemblages of corrugated iron, fibro sheet, salvaged weatherboards. In those days, the town had two milkbars, two butcher shops, the fish and chip shop, the hardware, a general dealer, one chemist, one doctor. Rich people, mostly sheep farmers, had holiday houses on the Bar between the sea and the river. Ordinary people from the inland had shacks above Open Beach or in South Port or in the streets behind the caravan park.
Cashin remembered his father stopping the Falcon on the wooden bridge, looking down the river at the yachts moored on both sides.
‘This place’s turning into the bloody Riviera,’ his father said.
‘What’s a Riviera?’ said Joe.
‘Monaco’s on the Riviera,’ said Michael.
Mick Cashin looked at Michael. ‘How’d you know that?
‘Read it,’ said Michael. ‘That’s where they have the grand pricks.’
‘Grand pricks?’ said Mick Cashin. ‘You mean the royal family? Prince Rainier?’
‘Don’t be rude, Mick,’ said Cashin’s mother, tapping his father’s cheek. ‘It’s pronounced pree, Michael. It means prize.’
Every year there had been more city kids on the beach. You knew city kids because of their haircuts and their clothes and because the older ones, boys and girls, wore neck chains and smoked, didn’t much care who saw them.
Cashin thought about the winter Saturday morning they had driven up to their shack and Macca’s Shacca next door was gone, vanished, nothing there except disturbed sand to show where the low bleached building had stood, gently leaning backwards.
He had walked around, marvelling at the shack’s absence. There were marker pegs in the ground, and the next time they came a house was half-built on a cement slab.
That summer was the last in their shack, the last summer before his dad’s death. Years later, he asked his mother what became of the place.
‘I had to sell it,’ she said. ‘There wasn’t any money.’
Now you would have to be more than just rich to own a place in the teatree scrub on the Bar and no shacks broke the skyline above Open Beach; on the once worthless dunes stood a solid line of houses and units with wooden decks and plateglass windows. Nothing under six hundred grand.
A fishing boat was coming in, heading for the entrance.
Cashin knew the boat. It belonged to a friend of Bern’s who had a dodgy brother, an abalone poacher. Just six boats still fished out of Port Monro, bringing in crayfish and a few boxes of fish, but it was the town’s only industry apart from a casein factory. Its only industry if you didn’t count six restaurants, five cafes, three clothing boutiques, two antique shops, a bookshop, four masseurs, an aromatherapist, three hairdressers, dozens of bed-and-breakfast establishments, the maze and the doll museum.
He finished his coffee and went to work the long way, through Muttonbird Rocks, no one in the streets, most of the holiday houses empty. He drove along two sides of the business block, past the two supermarkets, the three real-estate agents, three doctors, two law firms, the newsagent, the sports shop, the Shannon Hotel on the corner of Liffey and Lucas Streets.
In the late 1990s, a city drug dealer and property developer had bought the boarded-up, gull-crapped Shannon. People still talked about a bar fight there in 1969 that needed two ambulances from Cromarty to take the injured to hospital. The new owner spent more than two million dollars on the Shannon. Tradesmen took on apprentices, bought new utes, gave their wives new kitchens-the German appliances, the granite benchtops.
Two men in beanies were coming out of the Orion, Port’s surviving bloodhouse, still waiting for its developer. In Cashin’s first week in charge, three English backpackers drinking there at lunchtime gave some local hoons cheek. The one took a king hit, went down and stayed down, copped a few boots. The others, skinny kids from Leeds, were headbutters and kickers and they got into a corner and took out several locals before Cashin and his offsider got there.
The bigger man on the pavement was giving Cashin the eye. Ronnie Barrett had various convictions-assault, drink-driving, driving while suspended. Now he was on the dole, picking up some cash-in-hand at an auto wreckers in Cromarty. His ex-wife had an intervention order against him, granted after he extended his wrecking skills to the former marital home.
Cashin parked outside the station, sat for a while, looking at the wind testing the pines. Winter setting in. He thought about summer, the town full of spoilt-rotten city children, their blonde mothers, flabby fathers in boat shoes. The Cruisers and Mercs and Beemers took all the main street parking. The men sat in and outside the cafes, stood in the shops, hands to heads, barking into their mobiles, pulling faces.
But the year had turned, May had come, the ice-water rain, the winds that scoured skin, and just the hardcore left-the unemployed, under-employed, unemployable, the drunk and doped, the old-age pensioners, people on all kinds of welfare, the halt, the lame. Now he saw the town as you saw a place after fire, all softness gone: the outcrops of rock, the dark gullies, the fireproof rubbish of brown beer bottles and car skeletons.
Ronnie Barrett, he was Port in winter. They should put him in an advertisement, on a poster: GET TO KNOW THE REAL PORT MONRO.
Cashin went in, talked to Kendall. It was overlap time, the two of them on duty for a few hours. He wrote the report on his visit to The Heights, sent it to Villani, printed two copies for the file.
Then he rang homicide and spoke to Tracy Wallace, the senior analyst.
‘Back in harness, are you?’ she said. ‘I gather it’s titsoff down there.’
Cashin could see the flag, plank-stiff in the arctic wind. ‘Nonsense. Only people with over-sensitive parts say that. What’s the word on Bourgoyne?’
‘Unchanged. If you’re recovered, please come home. The place is filling up with young dills.’
‘Be patient. They’ll turn into older dills.’
THE SHIFT went by.
Cashin went home, along the country roads. Newly milked dairy cows, relieved for a time of their swaying burdens, turned to look at him, blessed him with dark, glossy eyes.
No sign of Dave Rebb.
He walked the dogs, made something to eat, watched television, all the time the pain getting worse. It took revenge for the hours he was upright. For a long time after he left hospital, he had been unable to cope without resorting to pethidine. Getting off the peth, the lovely peth, that was the hardest thing he had ever done. Now aspirin and alcohol were the drugs of choice and they were a poor substitute.
Cashin got up and poured a big whisky, washed down three aspirins. Callas, Bergonzi and Gobbi always helped. He went to the most expensive thing he owned, two thousand dollars worth of stereo, and put on a CD. Puccini, Tosca. The sound filled the huge room.
He owed opera and reading to Raimond Sarris, the mad, murderous little prick. Opera had just been rubbish arty people pretended to like. Fat men and women singing in foreign languages. Books were okay, but reading a book took too long, too many other things to do. There were few spaces in Cashin’s days before Vickie and, afterwards, he left home early, came back in the dark, ate at his desk, sitting in cars, in the street. His spare time he spent sleeping or someone, a cop, would hoot outside and they’d go to the races, the football, fishing, stand in some cop’s backyard eating charred meat, drinking beer, talking about work.