Choices. Jeff Edwards

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СКАЧАТЬ so there was little in my cubical to collect, only my personal coffee mug, a photo of Sandy and the kids, and some surfing magazines.

      Within minutes I had shaken hands with Bob and Ailsa and was back in my car and heading out into peak hour traffic, unemployed yet again.

      Sandy looked up in surprise when I walked in early, and saw the expression on my face. ‘You look like you’ve come back from the pub with no beer,’ she said grimly.

      ‘I’ve been given the flick by Bob Clements.’

      ‘Why?’

      I took a beer from the fridge before sitting down to relate how my day had begun so well, and ended so badly.

      ‘Murder!’ gasped Sandy. ‘You’ve been accused of murder?’

      ‘I haven’t really been accused of anything, but they seem to believe that I’m a likely suspect.’

      ‘But why you?’

      ‘I think they’re trying to make trouble for me as a form of payback.’

      Sandy nodded. It made sense. ‘What now?’ she asked.

      ‘I guess I have to go back out there and try to find another job. At least Bob and Ailsa said that they’d give me a good reference. That might help.’

      But it didn’t.

      Times were difficult and jobs were now much harder to find. After weeks of fruitlessly trying to find employment on my own, and receiving as many rejections as job interviews, I was forced to place myself in the hands of an employment agency.

      Here at last I was able to get work, but it was not regular, and it was mainly unskilled manual work, meaning the wages were well below the sums I had been used to receiving in the past. This placed more and more pressure on our already tenuous finances.

      One night, after I had settled the children down for the night, I found Sandy sitting at the kitchen table, sobbing with a pile of unpaid bills before her.

      I tried to reassure her, but she was fully aware of the size of our growing debts, and was inconsolable. ‘I’ve tried everything I can to plan ahead and to keep us out of trouble but it’s no use Dan. We can’t continue like this.’

      Every effort had been made to cut down on our spending, and I hadn’t gone near the surf since losing my job in an effort to save on our petrol costs.

      I took a deep breath. ‘What else can we do? What else can we cut out?’

      She looked up at me, her mind made up. ‘There’s only one thing we can do Dan. We have to sell up and move out. We simply can’t afford to stay here any longer. The mortgage payments are killing us.’

      ‘But you love the place Sandy. It means everything to you.’

      ‘It has to be done,’ she said in a tone of utter desperation. ‘If we don’t do it now, then it will be too late, and the bank will take it all.’

      ‘Where will we go?’

      ‘I don’t know.’

      I placed a hand on her shoulder and tried to sound confident. ‘Don’t worry love, something will turn up. It always does.’

      ‘In the dream world you live in it might,’ she said crossly, ‘but I’ve done the calculations and there’s not going to be anything left after we sell up. We can’t afford to remain in Sydney. Not unless you manage to get another full-time position.’

      ‘Even I can’t guarantee that will happen any time soon.’

      ‘I know. That’s why I was on the phone before tea. I was speaking to Mum. She thinks she can convince Dad to put you on.’

      I was silent for a time. Working at Rocky Creek Station was something that I had been avoiding ever since the offer was first made to me on the day I married Sandy. I had always used the excuse that I wanted to be close to the surf, but the real reason was that I had never wanted to be the low man on the totem pole, taking orders not only from Sandy’s father Peter McDonald, but also her brother Bruce.

      But now Sandy was right, there was no other way out of our dilemma, and I was ultimately forced to nod my head in agreement.

      ‘Where would we stay? It would be bad enough having your father look over my shoulder every minute, but I couldn’t stand living under the same roof as your brother and that bitch of a wife of his.’

      ‘There’s plenty of room in the big house, but I agree with you. I’ll ask Mum if we could use the old overseer’s cottage out the back. It might be a bit rundown but at least we’ll have a little privacy.’

      ‘What about the kids? How do you think they’ll take the move?’

      ‘I know they love living here Dan, but they’re resilient. They’ll survive.’

      ‘Yeah, I suppose they will. But will we?’

      CHAPTER 14

      The nondescript government car pulled up at the lookout beside the lighthouse and Diane climbed out to stretch her cramped limbs, easing her joints back to normal use after their long road trip. Even with regular stops along the way she and Pile were tired and very glad to have nearly reached their destination.

      ‘Why did we come up here? Why not stop in town?’ asked Pile as he joined her at the railing that kept sightseers back from the edge of the cliff.

      ‘We’ve got a map of the district, but I want to see what Seashell Cove looks like in the flesh before we head down there.’

      ‘There’s a picnic table,’ pointed Pile. ‘Let’s spread the map out.’

      The headland on which they stood made up the southern point of Seashell Cove, with a northern point of land a few kilometres away marking the cove’s other boundary. The northern headland did not protrude as far into the ocean as the one on which they now stood which Diane assumed was why it had been selected as the site for the lighthouse.

      Between the two headlands the cove itself was cut in half by the deep, swift flowing Cromwell River. It was fed by the steady rainfall that nourished the inland rainforests and pastures on its way to the sea. Having reached its salty end in the bay, schools of fish gathered there to feed on the nutrients being flushed out to sea.

      The original inhabitants had lived and thrived here for untold generations, but with the coming of ‘civilisation’ they had been decimated by the white man’s diseases, until their few survivors had been shunted off to a section of the coast where no right thinking white man had bothered to settle. It was nothing more than a rocky outcrop and had been promulgated by the government as an aboriginal reserve. The local population of coloured descent were obliged to live there under the ‘protection’ of the federal authorities.

      The first white men to arrive in the area had been the timber-getters, plundering the rich forests of cedar in the interior. Logs of the valuable wood were floated down the river to be sawn at mills established at the mouth of the river and loaded onto ships at the wharfs that had been erected there. To ensure that the river would not silt up, a pair of rock СКАЧАТЬ