High Tide

There’s a tide marker on a pylon 25 yards away and the water is slowly rising. That marker’s my clock. Every three inches is about 30 minutes. Nigel has been gone an hour. The thing about tides is unless you live by the sea, you never think about them. In school, I learnt how the…

Far from the Tree

It was five years since Maybe went over ‘rainbow bridge’ – a ridiculous American metaphor for pets dying – and David still hadn’t got over the loss. An ageing black Labrador with bad hips and big brown eyes. In her younger years, she ate through a third of the weekly household budget. The medical expenses…

The Crazy Red Squiggle

Jimmy was a mid-60s, six foot string bean with long silver dreads who loitered around the entrance of Woolworths calling people ‘fucking pricks’ and ‘scum sucking motherfuckers’. The police moved him on but back he’d come with the delight of a dog returning to a bone. Since the factories on the industrial estate closed down,…

Laying on Hands

We’d bought Lily from the back of a ute in a country town. She was Belinda’s dog as a puppy. A black mongrel Labrador cross Rottweiler – a Labweiler – who ate us out of house and home and slept on the bedroom floor next to her. Then Lily slowly changed allegiances. Could that mutt…

The Beckoning Beyond

Louise Marshall, 24, blonde, petite and moon-faced, regretted giving up a lucrative side hustle as a call girl, after graduating with a journalism degree. The trade of the keystroke queens quickly lost its lustre after 12-hour days writing stories. She earned more as an escort in a month than on the social affairs round in…

The Onion Woman

When Cynthia’s third boyfriend in four years left, it didn’t set off alarm bells. She’d just turned 50 and was at an age when suitors (a funny word she thought), could come and go as she pleased. If men felt uncomfortable in her presence, that was their problem. She liked the word ‘presence’ because it…

Headlights in the Vines

We left early. Five superannuated rock bands played their hits from the 1980s and 90s in a country vineyard, as the crowd of salt and pepper-headed rockers, drank like they were 25 again. A ripple of Altamont aggression ran through the throng as the sun set and the queues for the women’s toilets grew longer….

The Coffin

“And another thing, mate. I need a big favour. There’s a place that makes reinforced cardboard coffins, one hour south of Adelaide. Can you pick it up, put in on a plane and I’ll meet you at Coolangatta Airport? It’s a cluster fuck.” Steve’s step-daughter Angela had stepped out on to Highway One five nights…

Island Housekeeper

The car ferry docked at Penneshaw on Kangaroo Island as Callum stood on the foredeck in the scorching heat and scanned the brown hills, looking for his parent’s house. They’d built it on a vacant hillside 40 years ago, to fish and garden in retirement. Now it’s green roof was in the middle of a…

Contours of Memory

I’ve set the GPS on the tractor and it will till this field by itself for the next eight hours. That doesn’t sit right with me, so I sit in the cabin and let the machine do its job. I should be helping my wife back at the homestead. She’s crook but doesn’t want me…