Ripple of Danger

By Desmond L. Kelly

It seemed such a good idea. Lockie, a retired New Zealand schoolteacher, moves to Macleay Island, in Australia's Moreton Bay after the death of his beloved wife. He settles to the subtropical island’s lifestyle and makes friends with the local characters, but his peace is disrupted when he rents the other half of his duplex to an ex-mo

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gumbark Books
• Release date: May 11, 2016
• ISBN: 9780994389848

Desmond L. Kelly

From the Author I live on a subtropical island in southern Moreton Bay about an hour’s journey from Brisbane, Australia. I was born in Australia, in Lithgow up in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney, but my mum whipped me off to New Zealand when I was four (because she couldn’t stand her mother-in-law) and Nelson became my home town. Still is. With my wife, I returned to Australia to live when I was seventy-seven. That makes me an Australian by geography and a New Zealander by culture, a fearsome state of confusion. I have been a geologist, a teacher, a professional actor and now I come back to the love that was always there, writing. That’s my daily pleasure and I hope you enjoy it too.  Desmond L. Kelly.

Book preview

Chapter 1

If the gun were in your hand, would you pull the trigger? If a blot on humanity who’d attempted to kill both you and an innocent child stood in front of you… if adrenalin poured into your blood like water into a sinking ship and you were twitchier than an electric arc… if every passion and preservational instinct you had in the world screamed KILL him – would you pull the trigger?

Is it a question you will ever have to answer?

Sometimes, I wake up dreaming of it.

Opening the door was a surprise. The act of opening it wasn’t a surprise, but the person standing there when I got it opened, was.

She was beautiful. Very beautiful. I’ve grown philosophic about beauty now that I’m old. I know it shouldn’t count. I know that human physical beauty is too often disappointing, even deceitful. Sadly, I’m not taken in by it as I once was, and even sadder, I still like it. One has to look at something, so why not beautiful? Mind you, I’m not sure what beautiful is. I guess it’s something that just looks back at you and says, notice me, and your heart gives a thump while your brain takes a holiday.

I suppose a regular bilateral symmetry makes a very good start and she was nothing if not wonderfully symmetrical. The eyes and the voice are also extremely important. Her blue eyes looked a tad tired for such a young woman. What was the voice like?

Good morning, I said.

Good morning. Mr Lockie?

Yes.

I’m enquiring about the house you have to rent.

Her voice was all right. It didn’t have the richness and the subtlety of tone that really good voices melt you with, but dammit, she was beautiful. Maybe not a raving beauty, not a knockout stunner… but then, on a second look… In her late teens or twenties she’d have nailed the stunner rating easily, but now in her early thirties I’d guess areas around her eyes and mouth showed the beginnings of tight little hawsers, betraying the inevitable first stages of the sag that years and gravity bring. I recognised them immediately from mirror training. She still had a good figure. No question of that as she stood there in aquamarine trousers and a plain white T-shirt, glossy brown hair pulled back in a ponytail to make the most of those handsome features. I liked it. Simplicity of dress, directness, carriage and manner, they say it all.

Neither shy nor forward, she patiently waited for what she must have recognised as yet another male assessment to be over. I shut my mouth, stood tall and pulled my stomach in. With a clear though understated gallantry I stood to one side, and with a free flowing wave of the arm invited her into my new living room.

Fifteen months ago I’d arrived in Queensland from New Zealand and bought a block of land on Macleay Island, in Moreton Bay. I liked the island the moment I saw it. This, I decided, was where I could settle in warmth and comfort.

I rented a high-set house in Wirrilee Street, bought a block of land and grappled with civic bureaucracy, trying to hurry it along. I found it better entrenched than I and soon learned where, and where not to push. The block was in a quiet street with beautiful eucalyptus trees around although, alas, no view of the waters of Moreton Bay. Water views were beyond my means.

In fact my duplex rose quickly, what with the prefabrication of sections and people told me I’d been lucky to have it up and ready so fast. Nevertheless, by the time I moved in I’d been working quietly and steadily at the garden for a year. The main shrub and tree plantings were done and the place laid out.

I’d managed to make a good garden with plenty of grevilleas so the honeyeaters and the brilliant birds like the pale-headed rosellas and the rainbow lorikeets come every day – or they will when the bushes flower. That’s the idea. Right now in the tallowwoods and gum trees around the boundaries, the butcherbirds and the kookaburras keep an eye on me to see if I’m going to feed them. I’d like to but those two are meat-eaters, and if I feed them and their numbers increase there will be more of them to raid the nests of smaller birds and eat their chicks. I’ve learned that death is quite impartial.

I’ve put out a few seeds in a dish and tied up a couple of honey feeding bottles and watched the first of the lorikeets and galahs flash their colours in kaleidoscopic aerobatics, as they filled the air with their ludicrous and harsh parrot noises. A pair of magpies are my best buddies, so long as I put granulated peanuts out for them on the verandah doormat.

The finished building fits well into the landscape, for which I am both thankful and pleased. It makes for peace and pleasantness in the quiet and warmth of south-east Queensland. Nobody should live in ugliness.

That’s the plan anyway.

My idea in building a simple duplex was to have a little income from renting. I still get my pension from New Zealand but a small hedge against change seemed reasonable care to take and besides, the way eastern seaboard property in Australia is going there’s every chance that by the time I die, capital value will have increased sufficiently to leave my two grown children a little something. Mary would approve of that.

That was it. Retirement in a landscape not peopled by Mary’s memories, bask in warm weather, enjoy security of income, and…

Then she arrived.

I advertised one brand-new house for rent, which is why she knocked at my door, and why she was probably wondering as she looked at me, if I were a lunatic or a dirty old man. I was smiling like a lunatic to convince her I wasn’t a dirty old man. She looked so cool and pleasant. I stepped back and invited her in.

Well, she said, half turning towards her small yellow car parked on the street, my son’s out there and I shouldn’t leave him.

Really, on second hearing, it was quite a good voice.

Bring him in too.

She hesitated and I could see her thinking that she didn’t want to bring the child in but that she was going to have to if she wanted the house. She smiled, nodded and went back to the car, which told me she was serious about renting the place.

I went into the kitchen and put the kettle on.

Naturally, I’d advertised the place as soon as I could. Things were a juggle in my mind: I sought a careful tenant who could pay a reasonable rent and might make a friendly neighbour. I’d never been a landlord before and I was relieved to find there were three applicants.

The first was a young couple aged twenty and seventeen. They assured me they had work on the mainland, but I wasn’t convinced they would be getting out of bed long enough to go to any work. They were all over each other. The very time spent talking to me seemed to be a delay in the real purpose of life to them. I sympathised, but couldn’t afford to subsidise them.

The second was a middle-aged man who claimed to have his own small publications’ business based on the internet. The tasteless tattoos on his arms weren’t good advertising. He said he would be travelling at least one week in each month. I asked him about the publications because I’m keen on books and genuinely interested in this new world of business centred on home and the computer. He didn’t offer to show me any samples, didn’t have a card and didn’t seem very knowledgeable about computers. I appeared to know more than he did, which was certainly not a recommendation for him. He struck me as a very close man; a man of deep running secrets and dark pools. His dry face was a mask, which is his right I suppose, except when I thought about it, it was a relentlessly humourless mask. I deliberately pushed him in the direction of relaxation and laughter but he was having none of it. I decided to have none of him.

And now, her.

When I heard her arrive with her son at the front door, I called for them to come in as I made sure I had everything ready for whatever she would drink. Business is always best conducted over a cup of something.

She was standing in the living room by the time I finished putting a little warming water in the glass teapot and I motioned her to a seat. The boy stood with his back to me, and I was struck, as I always am, by that peculiarly smooth-necked, knobbly-legged disjunction, that vulnerability, which makes a child. He wore yellow jandals – no, I must get used to calling them thongs in Australia – fawn shorts of the style too long to be called shorts and too short to be called longs, and a yellow T-shirt. His skin was smooth and light, his elbows too big for his arms and his almost black hair was as shiny as his mother’s and cropped short. His back was to me because he was looking at my bookcase.

Would you like tea or coffee? I asked the woman.

Neither, thank you.

I was disappointed.

Would you like a drink of some sort, young man? I think I have some mango juice here.

He had turned when I spoke to his mother and stood looking at me. His large eyes gave him something of an angelic look and his smooth complexion was pale compared to his legs and arms and contrasted with his black hair. I guessed his mother insisted on his wearing a hat outside. Very wise.

No thank you, he said without reference to her. Are these books yours?

Yes, they are.

All of them?

Yes.

There’s a lot of them.

There’s a few. I had about four or five times that many before I shifted here. Why do adults have to preen in front of kids? In his eyes, I could see I’d made a ridiculous claim. He looked at me with a very level gaze, inviting me to retract the exaggeration.

Really and truly, I did. I felt guilty stating the truth. He looked at his mother who smiled faintly as though she didn’t believe it either, but said nothing.

Why do you want so many?

Well, I didn’t start out to get a lot. I just buy them one at a time and they mount up. Those are the books I really want to have, or some of them. And some of them are children’s books. Books my children grew up with and won’t let me part with. He turned back to look at them again. Do you like books? I asked. He nodded his head.

He’s always reading, said his mother, sensing it was the right answer. He’s a good reader for seven.

Do you read stories to him?

Yes. I try.

They probably had the house at that point, though none of us quite realised it.

How innocently things begin. I saw no danger.

Chapter 2

Scotty Devlin is a likeable man, younger but also retired. He lives across the road from me in an older house with all the living space one floor up. It’s a traditional design in this state, aiming to get more air circulation, called a high-set house, or a Queenslander. They’re very roomy houses and often there’s a workshop or a boat stored underneath. After living in one for a year in Wirrilee Street, I’m not so sure about climbing seventeen stairs just to get to the door. Not with grocery bags. Not at my age.

I point this out to Scotty but he tells me all New Zealanders are born deficient in understanding and cites as proof the fact that they live there and play rugby union. He and his wife Irma know the island and its ways thoroughly from having lived here for eight years.

Once I started gardening on the empty block, Scotty appeared. When he found we were going to be neighbours and that I was all alone, he spirited me across the road for morning tea and Irma plied me with good scones. Scotty, when he learned my background, immediately pointed out that a poor bloody New Zealander wouldn’t know anything, the result of which was that they went out of their way to be kind and helpful. It was Scotty who took me along to the bowls club, or, as he called it, the bowling club, and advised me not to be a bloody idiot when the bias wound up on the wrong side of the bowl.

Bowls frustrate me. My secret yearning has always been for the game of golf. Scotty’s also a member of the golf club – it’s easy to belong to everything on this island – and when I let slip I fancied the game, he insisted I go out on the nine hole course with him and learn to play. You can’t make a bigger galah out of yourself than you did on the bowling green. A man of infinite encouragement, Scotty.

He took me out there when there weren’t many other people around and, club in sweaty hands, I indulged myself in great free-swinging arcs and even managed to hit the ball once or twice. For the next couple of days Scotty and Irma looked after me until my stressed muscles recovered and I regained the use of my upper body and arms.

But there’s no such thing as making an idiot of yourself on Macleay Island. That first free swing was a while ago and Scotty and I have played regularly on Friday mornings ever since. I’m better than him now, which is not saying a lot. I’d like to call his action a swing, but truth gets in the way.

Scotty’s a really good companion. Walking and yarning the nine fairways and nine greens of this magical little course with him is one of life’s joys. He gives an honest unsought opinion on everything and plays with no airs, just a good wholesome slash at the ball from his lanky frame and a row of brilliant Australian words to speed the ball on its way – wherever it’s going.

Bugger the style, he says. Get the bloody ball down there. It’s a philosophy I’m coming to appreciate. But I’m ahead of myself.

A couple of days after I told Renata she had the house, and a couple of days before she was scheduled to move in, Scotty and I were tonking golf balls under a sunny morning sky, dividing our time as we always did between teeing off and walking the rough looking for the balls, helping each other since neither of us has the eyesight of our youth. I brought Scotty up to date on the state of the renting and told him about the people who’d applied. Sight unseen he agreed with me that Renata was clearly the person to rent it to, and he looked forward to her contribution to the street.

Didn’t that bloke apply then? he said to me as we walked onto the eighth tee.

What bloke?

Dunno. Didn’t say his name. About average height. Maybe not. Bit shorter? Yeah. Strong bugger. Darkish. Well, I think he was. Had a hat on. You know, big brim? Akubra?

A what?

God, you’d think you’d have learned something by now. His long bony fingers did a quick flick about his head imitating a broad brim. Wearing sunnies so I couldn’t really see his face but I think he had a dark complexion. His arms were as brown as a pineapple picker’s backside – could be the sun.

So? What about him?

Well, I was in the garden – when was it? Wednesday? I think it was Wednesday morning.

Yeah. And?

Well. He comes up to me and leans on the fence and asks me about your place. I ask him why he wants to know and he says he’s looking for a place. So I tell him to go over and see you and he says he has but you’re not home.

I stopped swinging my five iron at the back of the tee.

I was home. I didn’t go out last week in case anyone called about the house. I deliberately stayed in.

Yeah. I thought you were. I saw you through the kitchen window soon after he’d gone and I thought, that’s odd. Oh well, I thought, maybe you’d just ducked down to the shop to get some milk and bread or something.

So what did he want to know?

Seemed interested in the lot. You know, the house, the rent – you. Quite interested in you.

What did you tell him?

I said you were an ignorant Kiwi, but that you didn’t always sound like one.

Thanks very much.

No worries, mate. You watch this land on the green.

He placed the ball on a white plastic tee, had a couple of practice swings, stepped up to the ball and with an ugly jerk, gave it a vicious belt. The ball rose and curved left with all the arc of a boomerang until it bounced on the neighbouring fairway and bolted across it into the rough. We made mental notes of where we had to look.

Pretty good shot, he said, looking around for the plastic tee.

Yep. One of your best.

I placed my ball on top of a red tee and pushed the point into the ground.

Well, I said, whoever he was, he’s missed out. He couldn’t have been that interested. I was swinging my club evenly the way I’d seen them do it on TV. It’s a good swing when I practise it at the back of the tee, and I don’t know why it leaves me when it comes to hitting the ball.

He sounded very interested. But I think you’re better off with the sheila.

So do I. She’s something to look at, Scotty.

No, it’s not that. Well, not just that. I dunno. It was something – the way he carried himself. Bloody strong fella, I’d say. Bit pushy maybe. I think you could be better off without him.

I didn’t give it any more thought.

Having Renata next door made me think of loneliness. Of course everyone is alone to some degree. Growing up means you become aware of it, growing old means you come to terms with it. I’m not complaining, I know that’s just the way it is.

I haven’t always been without companionship. Oh no. For forty-three years I was married to a wonderful woman. I suppose I married her because she was good looking and bright and all those things we learn to look for in a partner, but what I loved most about her was that she was supremely tolerant and had a great sense of humour. The sex was great, and on top of that she was kind. Of all the words in our language, kind is the most undervalued.

Maybe youth doesn’t notice kindness as much as age does. It should. Activity and competition obscure the enduring things. Especially sports competitions. I hate the way medals count for more than effort in the Olympic Games. Our two kids loved their sport but I think they learned a lot of their humanity from their mother. They’re good kids, we get to see each other here or there, when we can and that’s great.

Well, anyway, my Mary embodied kindness. She was just a wonderfully calm person to live with, and forty-three years of marriage was too short. Now I have to put up with the way my mind works on my own, I understand more clearly what a truly wonderful woman she was. If she too felt on her own, as she must have at times, she never said. I wish she had. I wish I had. Strange, isn’t it, how you can get to the end of your life and realise there are things you’d like to have talked