On a cliff face.
Oh shit. This was a really dumb idea.
“Please, Mr Drum, if you’re there. I’m a little scared about coming down to see you. I know I said I would, and I’ve come under the railing, but, um, I’m not sure how to get down to where you are from here.”
Oh bloody excellent. Tell the homeless vagrant you’re on his turf, but spinning out. This is how smart people end up murder victims. They miss out on a promotion, take an unreasonable dislike to the person who gets their dream job and make idiot ego-based decisions about their own safety—because they’re a flaming numbskull.
“Okay, I can see a way. I’m coming down to you.”
Bad karma to even think the word down, proof of insanity to shout it. Her sensible leather-soled shoes really weren’t at all, in hindsight. No grip. Marvellous. If she sat, she could wiggle her way forward, drop her feet over the edge and push off to jump the rest of the way to the lower ledge. She bent forward, put one hand onto the rough rock and went to her knees. From here it was a matter of flipping over to her bum and butt-walking the rest of the way.
That was a workable plan, except now she was in a crawling position, crawling felt safer than flipping anywhere so she crawled forward and yes, that ripping sound was the left knee of her suit pants. Fantastic. The toes of her shoes would be scuffed as well and she’d be pink with sunburn. All this and she’d achieved zip.
She looked up towards the walkway and safety. The rational, professional thing to do would be to call this little adventure off, and come again another day with better shoes and backup. So what if Gabriella was patronisingly pleasant about it. The woman would probably offer up aloe vera for the sunburn, a sewing kit for Foley’s pants, and a smiley face in her follow-up email, asking passively aggressively if Foley wanted to pass this responsibility on to someone better qualified after her horrible ordeal.
She was not passing this responsibility on. Disliking Gabriella wasn’t irrational, it was healthy. The woman swooped in from nowhere and took Foley’s promotion out from under her because she was a friend of the mayor’s, and now Gabriella very clearly wanted Foley gone.
And Foley wasn’t going anywhere. Which was the metaphysical, and the actual physical, truth. She was in a battle to the death at work, and on her hands and knees on a rock ledge, suicide distance from plummeting to the sea.
Freaking superb.
But pitting herself against Gabriella and not being able to follow through was definitely a career-limiting move. She crawled forward, took hold of the rough stone edge of the ledge and brought her legs around to drop them over and sit. She made a hmmm noise, as though she’d actually achieved something and looked at her watch. It’d taken fifteen minutes to travel sideways maybe two car lengths and sweat was running down her face.
Now she could see the rest of the tarp, a rusty, wrought-iron table, and two chairs, and an old barbeque cooktop. She peered over the ledge and a drop of sweat rolled down her jaw and off her chin to splash on the rock below. The distance between her dangling feet and the second ledge was about the same as stepping up onto a kitchen stool. The ledge she was sitting on would be about chest height.
“Mr Drum. I’m almost there. Sorry it’s taken so long. I was checking out the view. I can see why you’d want to live here. Magnificent, isn’t it?”
She smacked herself in the head. Lame, so lame. That’d sounded all right in the car on the way here. She pushed off the ledge and there was another tearing sound. She was safely on the lower rock platform but now frozen with a different fear. Her unsexy underwear would be on display. She felt her backside, screwing her head around to look and yes, she’d torn a hole in the bum of her pants. Could be worse. She could be wearing a g-string and there’d be bare white, fleshy, backside flashing. As it was, black undies under black wasn’t so bad and her jacket covered the damage. If she remembered to stand straight and not lean forward she’d be fine. Except she’d have to walk back across the ledge or he’d get an eyeful of Bonds Cottontails.
She patted her face with a tissue. She wasn’t going to think about the trip back to the path. She was going to go flap Mr Drum’s tarp and hopefully take a seat at his table and they’d talk about how it was dangerous for him to continue to live here. She’d tell him council was concerned for his welfare and ready to help him move to more appropriate accommodation, especially before Sculptures on the Coast kicked off, when there’d be thousands of people, including the visiting Danish Royal Family, trouping all over the park and the coastal walkway.
“Hello, I’m here.”
She walked forward and put her hand to the tarp. The ledge was much wider and deeper than she’d expected. He had to be asleep, or there was one big cave behind the tarp and he still couldn’t hear her.
“Hello.”
She stepped around the tarp, which was more of a windbreak than anything else, and the cave came into view. Shallower than she’d thought, less sheltered. There was a camp bed and a sleeping bag, a zipped suitcase, an esky, a torch, some kind of lamp, and a pile of books. No rubbish, no discarded crap, no hoarded junk. Not a single empty alcohol bottle or can. It was surprisingly neat, functional and heartbreakingly sad that someone would want this hunk of exposed rock for their home. It was also annoying free of life forms.
Why couldn’t an unemployed hermit squatter be home when you needed him?
2: Sting
The beach was officially closed. The lifeguards had packed it in for the day. Now it belonged to joggers, sweethearts strolling, surfers and locals who’d swum here for years and knew how to
read the sea. This was his favourite time of day in summer. The worst of the heat fading, the humidity easing with the setting sun, the sky gone shades of pink or orange, the beach returning to itself after hours of strutting the charm and acting the showplace for visitors from all around the world.
He was one of the many joggers who now pounded the impressive curve of shoreline when he saw them. He knew they’d all been stung. The way they shook their limbs, contorted, folding in on themselves. The child, the worst, screaming in panic. He kicked his jog into a flat run as the father grabbed for a handful of sand.
“Hey,” he called. “Don’t use sand. You need to wash it off.”
He got blank looks from the adults and the kid continued to scream. Tourists. Beside them now, he tried again in his halting Japanese. Telling them it was a bluebottle and they needed to wash the tentacles off, not scrub at them, not touch them or they’d be stung again. He squatted down so he was face to face with the kid. She’d been stung across her head and neck, one of her eyes was swelling and the blister of the bluebottle was trapped under the strap of her swimmers.
“It hurts, yes. Let me help you.”
He looked up, met the mother’s eyes and got a nod that was more a surprised tearful whole body shake than assent, but it would do. He picked the kid up and turned to carry her into the sea.
“Everything okay? Oh, bluebottle. Can I help?”