All night the sea moves restlessly under the jetty. The wind might drop, the swell might fade but the slave-driving moon keeps flogging the tides back and forth. Whenever Ned wakes, the symphony is still playing, sloshing around the pylons, exhaling on the beach, thumping under the boatshed as the incoming tide is whipped up by the northerly wind. The shed creaks and groans around him like a boat at sea.
He listens from the bottom bunk, half expecting the bay to ooze up through the cracks in the floor. His fingers brush the boards just to make sure they’re still dry. Since the shipping channel at the Heads was deepened, the high tide has swallowed whole beaches, and left teeth marks at the base of the cliffs and overhanging ledges poised in the air as if walking the plank.
Ned drifts off again and dreams of Angela somersaulting down an endless flight of stairs. Before he knows it, light is leaking through pinholes in the corrugated-iron roof and tiny gaps in the weatherboard walls. He yanks open the old wooden door and the newborn day washes in. At the edge of the jetty he fumbles with his boxers and shoots a glance up at the cliff. No-one is there, of course. Too early for sightseers on Millionaires’ Walk or for the few who live on this stretch of clifftop to be up and about. Too early for anyone but the fishermen and the birds that tell them where the fish are schooling. He relieves himself while staring out over the bay.
The wind has dropped, the water so glassy he can see the ripples on the sandy sea floor and a solitary toadfish is skulking through gold veins of light. Behind the eastern hills the radiance deepens. When the red ball finally appears, it is as if someone has thrown a match on oil, setting the sea on fire in sheets of copper and bronze. A flotilla of low-lying clouds blaze like plundered ships.
Ned can’t help grinning. It’s one hell of a way to wake up. Better than coffee, which is lucky because it’s been two weeks, cold turkey, and the headaches are only just beginning to ease. A month ago he wouldn’t have thought he could do it. He is beginning to discover that there’s no end to what you can give up when you have no choice.
The water boils on the camp stove and he pours it over wilting peppermint leaves he picked a few days back from a nearby garden, then adds a splash of cold water to stop it scalding his tongue. After stuffing his coat pockets with plastic bags, he climbs the wooden walkway that zig-zags up the cliff to the top where a sign on a gate warns passers-by: Private Property. Enter at Own Risk.
Catching his breath, he stops to survey the scene below. To the north, on the far side of the bay, the city is an apparition of sugary white pillars. From this distance it hardly seems to exist, except as a fading memory of a former life. The foreground, though, is crisp and picture-perfect. To the east lies the enfolding arm of the bay covered in tea-tree and the winking windows of houses catching the sunrise, the pale blue hills rising behind. Anchored just offshore are a decorative spray of yachts and motorboats. The tide is low. Beneath the shallow water, pale as honeydew melon, lurk submerged continents of dark reef and seaweedy rock. Jetties divide the shoreline into haphazard lots, each with its own fenced-off bathing area and boathouses that don’t house boats.
When he stands here first thing in the morning with his head blissfully empty, Ned can almost share the fantasy of the rich and the blessed that, at this moment, it is the best of all possible worlds.
His eyes fall on a nearby boatshed built like a miniature castle with crenellated battlements and a courtyard. The boathouse on the jetty next door has a large decking and Hawaiian-style bar with spherical glass fishing-boat lanterns, built-in barbecue and fixed stools under a bright yellow sunshade stretched taut in the shape of a sail. They look like expensive cubbies, places where adults play pretend. On paper the sheds are strictly for boats, they are not meant to be occupied. The council inspects them once a year to make sure the sheds comply with the by-laws. Inspects, that is, the exteriors. As to what happens inside, they prefer not to know. Which is lucky for Ned. His shed might lack the extravagance of these more lavish creations but he is happy, for now, to have walls, a roof, a bed and basic cooking facilities. Not to mention the restless sea shifting beneath the floor and the sunrise on his doorstep and a sense of bounty that only someone else’s money can buy.
He could start to enjoy this furtive life if things were different. If he hadn’t fucked up so badly. If it had been only his money he’d lost. People say money talks, as if it’s a kind of Esperanto, a universal language. But for the owners of these mansions and boatsheds money speaks a language all of its own, a tongue that everyone would like to command, but only a very few can. A tongue that speaks of the best of everything and has no word for ‘enough’.
For everyone else there’s the common tongue, the language of survival. People dress it up with borrowed phrases from the cliff-top language, and most of the time it is possible to forget the cavernous gulf between the two. You only notice when all the trappings have been stripped away. Like after Angela’s fall, when he heard the language of survival being spoken in its bluntest form. Money as life support. And in managing to lose almost everything she had, Ned might as well have pulled the plug.
He turns abruptly from the priceless view and heads across the grass to the cliff-top path, pushing open gate after gate erected by the property owners to make the gawking public feel they have no right to be here. But since the local tourist bureau began to promote it as ‘Millionaires’ Walk’, everyone knows that this stretch of cliff top—between the mansions and the private jetties down below—is crown land and open to all. Some owners have let their front lawns and garden beds of lavender and rosemary sprawl across the invisible boundary to generate a feeling of trespass in those who venture past. Others have forsaken the view and retreated behind high stone walls.
Soon the path narrows, becomes a tunnel through the tea-tree and umbrella-topped moonahs twisted over the by wind. Here the houses are set far back from the path and obscured by shrubbery and trees. With their established gardens and acres of lawn that have remained unchanged for more than a century, these secluded properties seem to suck the oxygen from the air and leave the viewer gasping for breath. Ned can’t afford to let himself dwell. Tying his guts in a knot won’t help Angela one bit. He has never been one to worry about anything much, never been driven by anything more urgent than what to do on a Saturday night. Worrying has always struck him as a pointless activity. But not worrying is no longer an option. Not with the limited time that’s left to recover what has been lost.
