The kid muttered something below Jake’s hearing.
‘Just let me park the car up there in the shade, okay? It’s too hot for Percy otherwise.’
At the mention of the bird’s name, Sam’s head came up. Jake saw the shine of tears.
‘Okay,’ Sam said.
Jake stepped on the accelerator and turned into the east road. He parked a couple of slots up the hill, under one of the big gums, and he was about to buzz all the windows down to let air in, but heard Percy whistle at him from the back seat and changed his mind. Walking around to the rear, Jake released the seatbelt, pulled the cage out and put it on the grass on the verge.
Jake had a broom, a rake, a shovel—all the type of kit he kept for emergencies—stored in a modified compartment under the back of the seven-seater. He pulled the rake and broom out, and walked back to where Sam waited.
‘Here.’ Jake handed the tools to the kid.
‘I thought you said you’d help,’ Sam grumbled.
Jake put some lead in his voice. ‘I didn’t make the mess, mate. You did. How about you quit grizzling and start raking before I have to tell your mum?’
‘Like she cares.’ But he took the rake.
Jake bent to get his hands on some of the biggest pieces, more to encourage Sam along than to really help. The kid wouldn’t respect him for it in the long run if it was Jake who raked up the rocks. Right now, Sam reminded Jake of a bolshy young ram, running about butting into everything and not achieving much but a hurt head.
Ever tried telling that to a bolshy young ram?
Sam raked in silence for a bit, but he looked up the hill towards the bird cage when Percy began to whistle.
‘So how come your mum likes Kieren Perkins so much?’ Jake said, by way of breaking the ice.
‘Cos he’s a swimmer. Mum loves all the swimmers.’
‘Does she?’ It struck Jake as a strange thing to catch a woman’s eye. Football players. Movie stars. Singers maybe, but swimmers? Not so much.
Sam scraped the rake over the cement. Rocks rattled and rolled under the metal tines. The sound set Jake’s teeth on edge. Eventually, Sam had a kid’s version of a neat pile and cast about for what he might do next. He couldn’t leave the rocks there, and he probably realised Jake wouldn’t let him sweep the pile onto the street.
‘So what do I do now? Where are the bins in this dumb town anyway?’
‘There’s a bin outside the Post Office, you just can’t see it from here. Come on.’ This time, Jake bent with Sam and together the two of them picked up the largest pieces of smashed rock. Sam ran out of hand space well before Jake did.
‘Hold out your shirt,’ Jake said.
Sam did that, and Jake dumped the bigger pieces he was carrying into Sam’s shirt. Then he got the shovel, swept up a load in one long grating go and filled the kid’s shirt with rocks. The kid’s mum might have something to say about the dirt, but that was kind of too bad in the grand scheme of things.
‘There you go. Bin’s that way.’
The boy made his way to the bin, and Jake’s thoughts returned to Ella and why she liked swimmers so much.
Chalk Hill wasn’t the destination he’d have chosen for someone who liked swimming, or swimmers. They weren’t that far from the ocean here as the crow flew, but getting to it required an hour’s drive west via Manjimup or east via Mount Barker before you’d hit a sealed road that cut north–south and let you get to the West Australian south coast. Chalk Hill wasn’t a place to live if you liked to duck for a quick swim after work on a summer afternoon.
Sure, they had a bridge and a river. No one ever swam in it though, not in summer. Cutters Creek dried up like a prune after November and didn’t start running again till at least May. The town had had a swimming pool once too, over on a corner of the sports field near the bowling club, but the pool was dry these days.
Whenever he was hot and bothered, Jake took a quick dip in his dam. The water there ran about as blue as the ocean anyway, and there weren’t any sharks.
Sam appeared around the corner of the Post Office. There was a moment where Jake thought the kid was going to jump straight on his bike and piss off, but at the last moment he veered back to where Jake stood in the shade.
‘You won’t tell my mum about the rock thing, right?’ Sam asked.
‘That depends.’
The kid’s chin came up. ‘What on?’
‘On whether I ever catch you doing something that dumb again.’
Sam scuffed his shoe at the pavement. ‘Okay. I won’t.’
‘Glad to hear it. You wanna say a proper see-you-later to Percy before you go?’
Sam’s eyes lit up. ‘Okay.’
The kid walked to the cage and knelt on the grass. All the bolshy ram bravado oozed out of him, as if the grass and the ground could act like an attitude drain.
Jake understood. He’d been Sam’s age once. Ten, eleven: hormones on the brink of exploding, and if you threw into that mix a change of home town—new friends, new school—you had trouble with a capital T.
For the first time, Jake wondered where the hell was the kid’s father in all this?
CHAPTER
4
To say Ella agonised over the time and date of her first Home Open at the Honeychurch house didn’t quite do the word agonise justice.
She searched property internet sites from Albany to Mount Barker,
