Attack at the Dolphin

By Bridget Wilson

Attack at the Dolphin is written by former Sydney Morning Herald journalist and woman-about-town Bridget Wilson. Set during the hard drinking high roller days of 1990's Sydney, this short entertaining read is a sometimes painful, always moving, often funny meditation on marriage, fidelity, love and lust, loyalty and betrayal. Married for many years to her most devoted fan, the book's protagonist finds herself coming undone when a bright young cadet at the newspaper where she works starts paying her attention. Flattered and surprised, she finds herself drinking in Sydney's trendiest bars with a "toyboy" on her arm. Meanwhile her patient husband waits at home. Then one of her best women friends steps into the equation. And all hell breaks loose, The books central scene is set in one of Sydney's best known inner-city pubs, The Dolphin. It is here that the woman protagonist, all too aware of her own hypocrisy, confronts her unfaithful young lover and disloyal friend.

• Language: English
• Publisher: eBookIt.com
• Release date: Apr 26, 2016
• ISBN: 9781456615048

Book preview

2013

ONE

THE DOCS

In the year Sara bought her first pair of Doc Marten shoes, they were the epitome of rebel cool. It had been a prolonged process. They had to be just the right pair.

When she finally found the right Docs, she chose the black, lace-up ones with a sturdy sole. To Sara they were the real deal. To her they looked perfect under jeans, or with white socks and a floral summer dress. In other words they went with just about anything. They were, if nothing else, versatile.

The Doc Marten shoes were expensive by her standards, setting her back $80 from an Army surplus store on the wide, ugly street of Broadway which led out of Sydney’s CBD and on into the spread of the western suburbs.

Docs, as they were almost universally known, were the boot of choice for skinheads in the 1960s and punks in the 1980s. It was 1991 when Sara got her Docs.

Sara grew up on a farm but was now a city girl through and through. Generations back her ancestors had made the tortuous trip by ship from Europe. She liked to think her rebel style originated in the toughness of her ancestors.

But the last thing Sara had intended was to use her brand new Docs as a weapon.

Sara had been married to her great love Paul for the past decade. They were comfortable together.

Paul worked as a television cameraman; Sara as a newspaper journalist. They had started out their married life working in television news – she in front of the camera, he behind it. They had made a good team.

Sara learnt all the tricks of the trade from Paul, who was tall, lanky and had a fine mane of long dark hair. Paul might not have been good-looking in the classic sense, but Sara thought he was beautiful – with his big brown eyes and long lashes, his soft skin and very large hands and feet. Sara loved her gentle giant. Paul was six foot six inches in the old measurement – a good two metres tall. There was no hiding out in corners for him.

After various stints in television newsrooms Sara returned to her original trade, writing for newspapers.

Her great-great grandfather had been a printer’s apprentice in Glasgow before emigrating to Australia, where he started up a newspaper in the 1800s. She was proud that printer’s ink ran in her veins.

As a child Sara had been a tomboy, a wild child preferring the company of horses to boys on the sprawling, wide-open spaces of the farm where she grew up. At a time when women were still pioneering their way into the trade, her rough and tumble childhood prepared her well for the daily mayhem of a reporter’s life.

By the 1990s Sara had been a journalist for 20 years and knew the newspaper business well. The three-hour lunches and rampant greed of the 1980s were morphing into a more sophisticated, sober tone, but the industry and its proprietors were still living in clover. The internet was yet to destroy the so-called ‘rivers of gold’, the tens of thousands of notices and advertisements large and small which filled the paper every day and were the source of editors’ massive salaries.

At the time of the buying of the Docs, Sara had a mane of thick curly brown hair, which she had dyed black to go with her shoes. Being a naturally maternal type, ample with her blessings both physical and spiritual, Sara thought nothing, at first, of befriending one of her younger colleagues, Anna. Anna was big and buxom and had very pale blonde hair. Her peaches and cream skin was her best asset, while her sharp wit and unorthodox approach to life gave her an appealing personality.

One day they were walking through Sydney’s famous botanical gardens when it started to rain. Sara put up her umbrella and offered room under it to Anna, who twirled around in the downpour and exclaimed: ‘I don’t believe in umbrellas!’

Anna’s thin summer dress stuck to her every curve. Her hair was plastered to her face, her mascara ran and she looked a mess. To everybody but a passing male.

Sara was 12 years older than Anna but the difference in their ages didn’t seem to matter. For a period they were virtually inseparable, often going out on the town together. They both had a large capacity for alcohol and fun. They worked hard and played hard. Their after-work shenanigans centered around various pubs. Most often they frequented a drinking hole over the road from the paper – these sessions routinely beginning between the paper’s first and second editions. The first edition