“Fucking bugs?” Patrick said.
Howard laughed. “You heard of Moreton Bay Bugs? No? Sometimes they’re called slipper lobsters or flathead lobsters. Anyway, they’re a kinda of lobster, obviously. There’s a variety you can only get right here, around this part of the coast. Go north of Enden or south of Monkton and you don’t get them any more. A few of the local fisherman always have them for sale at the markets. Get a bunch and I’ll make this amazing chili pasta dish with them for dinner.”
“Sounds amazing,” Ciara said.
“It’s to die for,” Edgar said with a grin. He looked at Patrick as he said it.
“Okay,” Torsten said. “Let’s stick around a bit longer, yeah?”
“Sure,” Ciara said.
“I want to,” Simone said, and shifted her chair nearer to Clarke’s. He leaned over and kissed her. The other band members laughed.
Edgar still held Patrick’s gaze.
Patrick tore his eyes away. “I thought we agreed to leave today.”
“Does it matter?” Torsten said. “We have no real agenda.” He rubbed under his eyes and Patrick thought the German looked a little pale and drawn too. All three of his friends did.
“I want to hear the band play again,” Ciara said. “You really don’t mind us staying here the week?” She looked at Patrick. “It’s free accommodation too!” She quickly turned back to Edgar. “We’ll buy some food and booze, of course! We don’t expect you to keep us.”
Edgar shrugged. “I already told ya, me cassa, you cassa.”
“Tell you what,” Patrick said. “We’ll stay if you four wash off your makeup!”
Edgar laughed, the other three grinned.
“Patrick, don’t be rude!” Ciara said. She looked at him with a shocked expression.
“How is that rude?”
“Excuse him,” Ciara said to the band.
“Don’t excuse me!” Patrick looked around the group and they all looked back, every one of them with some kind of surprise or pity in their eyes. How was he the odd one out here? “You won’t take it off? Or you can’t?”
“Patrick!”
Edgar raised his palms. “We are who we are, mate.”
“And who are you, exactly?”
“You want to change us?” Shirley asked. “We would never ask you to change.”
“Patrick, please,” Ciara said. “What’s got into you?”
“Nothing! I’m not the one under their fucking spell.”
“Chill out, yeah?” Ciara said, laying a hand on Patrick’s forearm. “It’s cool here, is it not? Hanging out with a rock band, immersing ourselves in local culture.”
“I’m not really a fan of this culture, Ciara.”
She smiled, shook her head. “Chill out. It’ll be a nice week, then we can get a room in Enden, watch the gig, crash there, and hit the road again on Saturday. No real plans, remember? Let the trip take us where it will, isn’t that what you said?”
“Yes, but–”
“But nothing. We made new friends, we’re seeing new things. It’s just a week, we have months more ahead of us.”
Patrick ground his teeth, looked around the group. They band smiled, patient and relaxed. Edgar seemed a little more smug than the others. Torsten and Simone wouldn’t meet his eye. He turned back to Ciara, but her eyes had hardened a little, daring him to challenge her further. He knew the look.
“Fuck it, I need some fresh air.”
Outside was still winter cool, but the sun warm as he walked across the grass. Patrick felt untethered, lost.
The Gulp has a habit of swallowing people. But sometimes it spits one out.
Patrick took a ragged breath, glancing back at the house. As he started to turn away, movement caught his eye. Something up above. He turned back and saw a window high on the house he hadn’t noticed before. Above the second storey, in the apex under a heavy chimney, a round window with a wooden cross in it making four even quarters of glass. An attic window. Someone looked out of it. Patrick frowned. It was an old man, pale, with long white hair. A moment of recognition tickled Patrick’s mind, but slipped away. He’d heard those footsteps the night before… The man snapped his head around and pinned Patrick with his gaze. Patrick gasped and took an involuntary step backwards, tripping on the edge of a flowerbed. He staggered but managed to regain his balance. When he looked back up, the round attic window was empty.
The Farmer’s Markets transformed the park behind Carlton Beach into bustling activity. Dozens of stalls under Easy-Up canopies were selling pretty much everything imaginable. Fruits and vegetables of every kind, nuts, herbs, mushrooms. Some of the mushrooms on sale looked decidedly weird to Patrick, but he chose not to mention it. There were arts and crafts too. Beeswax candles, watercolours, wooden carvings, leather belts.
“Here’s a seafood stand,” Ciara said, dragging on his hand.
Patrick was still smarting from the earlier shutdown of his concerns, but he tried to play along for now. If nothing else, he needed Ciara to trust him, not start hating him.
They went over, Torsten and Simone with them. The seller had several polystyrene boxes filled with ice, various fish and shellfish laid out on top.
“You have any bugs?” Ciara asked.
The man behind the table was short and squat, with a wide face and eyes too far apart. Looks like a bug himself, Patrick thought uncharitably.
But the man smiled warmly. “Gulpepper Bugs, eh? Keen to try the local cuisine? I can tell from your accent you’re not from around here.”
“We’re told they’re really good.”
“They are, but you have to know how to prepare them safely.”
“Safely?” Patrick asked.
“Yeah, they have a poisonous bit, like some crabs do. You know what to do with them?”
“A friend is doing the cooking,” Ciara said. “A local.”
“Ah, you’ll be right then. How many?”
“Eight, I guess?”
“All right.” The man stepped back and slid a large plastic tub out from under his table. It sloshed with water and he popped the lid off. Dozens of large shellfish, like wide, flat, shortened lobsters hunched and jetted over each other inside.
“Oh, they’re alive?” Ciara said.
The man looked up. “Yeah. You gotta cook ’em fresh. I’ll box ’em for ya, though, make it easy to carry.”
“Can you keep eight aside for us, so we can pick them up later when we’re ready to go back?”
“Sure, if you pay me now.”
“How much?”
The fisherman eyed Ciara for a moment, then smiled. “Let’s say ten bucks each, as you’re new to this.”
“Eighty bucks,” Patrick said. “We’re on a budget.” Ten bucks each for something like lobster actually seemed pretty reasonable, but he didn’t like the idea of eating anything so specifically local to this weird place.
“You’d pay three times that for lobster tails at the supermarket,” Ciara said. “Besides, we’re saving a lot staying with the band and they’ve been giving us loads of food and booze. This is a steal!”
Patrick kept his mouth closed, teeth clenched, as Ciara counted out the eighty dollars. She was right, after all, they’d had a free ride so far. Torsten handed her forty and she smiled at him, slipped some of her money away again.
“We’ll be back in an hour or so, okay?”
“Whenever you like before six.”
It was only a little after four by the time they headed back up the Manor, taking turns to carry the polystyrene box with the shellfish scratching and scuttling around inside. Howard was overjoyed to receive it.
“You remembered!”
“Of course,” Ciara said.
“You beauty! We’ll eat well tonight!” He took the box into the kitchen.