Pike's Pyramid. Michael Tatlow

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      In Irishtown the phones ran hot that night with the juiciest scandal of the decade. No one was going to miss the showdown with young Blarney back from Prague at Sean and Mary’s farm.

      CHAPTER 7

      A shaft of sun beaming through the window woke him at 8.30. Last night’s thunder claps had metamorphosed into a team of drummers beating resolutely in his skull. Even to the alcoholic smoker, the stink of cigarettes and rum pervaded the room. He left the bed and opened the room’s two windows.

      A shower of cold water drove out the demons as he contemplated his idiocy with the rum. To the west through a window he saw a sky of blue. White cumulus was bunched over the mountains like a flock of spring lambs.

      He made a quick and chirpy phone call to Alex. He would be home before two.

      Pike savoured eggs and bacon for breakfast. He smiled two hours later as the Ford passed little Elizabeth Town and crossed the creek that grew as it flowed north to the coast to become the majestic Rubicon River. ‘Don’t cross the Rubicon,’ Richard had counselled.

      He kept on a steady 110 kph past the horror spot at the floor of a grassy valley where his parents had died. It was called Devil’s Elbow. He drove up a small hill of trees and radiant green pasture that reminded him of Ireland. The panorama of farmland brought a wave of excited anticipation, banishing his bleakness from last night.

      At the Stanley turn-off, he stopped at the isolated service station, filled the petrol tank and tossed his remaining cigarettes into a bin. The highway continued west to Smithton and a score of settlements like Irishtown. And beyond to Cape Grim on the island’s far north-western tip.

      He drove past the Green Hills to his left, where Liam Pike and Ninginny had raised their children and died. Bits of the stone chimney were the only remnants of their shanty. To the right was the long and shallow curve of Stanley’s bottom beach.

      The odometer clicked to four hundred and ten kilometres from Hobart at the scenic lookout and information plaque facing the bay. A sign announced: STANLEY. AUSTRALIA’S TIDIEST TOWN 1996. The win had given the town a swagger. Summer tourists, at least, lifted the population of six hundred to more than a thousand.

      Blarney’s Irish eyes were smiling as he anticipated being called Hellsbells. He had earned the sobriquet as he stood, aged sixteen, with blood streaming from the deep gash curving from the brow to his chin, on the boat Victor, long-lining for shark way out west in the Great Southern Ocean, a deep swell surging from Antarctica. It was the birth of his big G.

      No one else on board knew if the injury was caused by the enraged wandering albatross he was freeing from a hook or a two-metre great white shark on the deck in the mayhem after Pike’s skipper Victor Harding’s wrist was nearly severed by the boat’s line hauler. A thunderstruck Pike had cried, ‘Hellsbells!’

      When the boat returned to Stanley, the two other crew members had embroidered the drama at the pub. Young Blarney’s cry of Hellsbells was always an amusing sidelight. The name had stuck. The pub was the birthplace of most of Stanley’s notorious nicknames.