Cool Bananas by Margaret Clark Read Free Book Online Page B

able to find the spot for the police. Then she scrambled to the top of the cliff, took Boofa to his home, locked him securely in his yard, and went sprinting down the road towards the store.

CHAPTER 4
    ‘Life is a series of ups and downs,’ said Dr Fordham.
    ‘Yeah? Well, I think there are more downs than ups at the moment.’
    Flick was in her bus at the camping ground and the psychologist, brought in by the police to debrief Flick and to try to minimise the horror of her grisly find, was sitting opposite her.
    It had been awful. She’d burst into the store screaming about the body, even though she’d meant to be cool, calm and collected. She couldn’t stop screaming until Kay had given her a sharp slap across the face to bring her out of it.
    ‘I’m sorry,’ Kay had said with tears brimming in her eyes, ‘but I had to do that. You were totally outof control and hysterical. Now, tell me calmly what you’ve found.’
    And then Flick was icily calm. She repeated the whole story in a slow sort of monotone. The police were called and she had to do the same thing for them, sitting out in the courtyard on the same chair that she’d sat on just four hours earlier with Kiev, under the shady tree. With the retelling she felt a little better. When the police had heard her story and then the coroner had been flown in by helicopter and she’d repeated it yet again, she felt empty and drained. Now maybe the horror would go away.
    But Rob bailed her up outside the store.
    ‘So you found a body,’ he said. ‘Armless, legless and no brains either. What a little party animal she must have been.’
    ‘You’re disgusting!’
    ‘Nah. I’m honest. I’ve heard she was a druggo and a prostitute.’
    ‘How do you know that?’
    ‘Skag told me.’
    Skag was Rob’s drinking mate and had a brother who was a cop, so it was feasible.
    ‘Well, even if she was into that stuff it doesn’t make a scrap of difference. She didn’t have to die like that.’
    ‘And you know, if we didn’t have those recyclableenvironmentally friendly wheelie bins with two compartments that the council insisted on,’ Rob added sarcastically, ‘you’d never have found her because she would’ve fitted into a garbage bag and someone would’ve chucked her in an ordinary wheelie bin.’
    Flick had just stared at him in disbelief. Everyone at Coolini Beach knew he had a lot of anger towards the council, because he’d had a part-time job in the peak period helping the garbos, and with the introduction of the big brown bins with their double compartments and bright yellow lids, he didn’t have that income any more. The trucks scooped up the bins with a mechanical arm and emptied them, so they didn’t need extra man-power to provide the collection service other than the driver.
    Mind you, Rob hadn’t been the only angry person. The twelve permanent residents didn’t seem to mind the introduction of the new bins, but the hundred or so other part-time residents certainly hadn’t wanted them. Although there had been big protest meetings, the council had ignored their valid arguments and gone ahead with the project. A number of residents had refused to comply but this meant that the truck wouldn’t take their rubbish if put out in ordinary bins or bags. Also, the bins weren’t big enough in peaktimes, but the driver wouldn’t take the overflow. And in strong westerly winds the lids blew back and rubbish spewed all over the place and ended up in the sea.
    To complicate matters, notices had been pasted on all the public rubbish bins near the store and along the foreshore stating that anyone depositing domestic rubbish in the bins would be fined $2000, which meant that travellers with caravans or tourists in transit then dumped their rubbish over the cliffs. And residents sneaked down to Kay’s big green bins under the cover of darkness and put their rubbish in them, which meant there was no room for her garbage.
    Kay said you couldn’t blame the