Eyrie by Tim Winton Read Free Book Online

wounded silence, which is why he’d been avoiding her of late. It was no treat embodying something your own mother pitied, probably even despised. She loved him, her compassion seemed boundless, but her disappointment smarted more than any other humiliation. Problem was she thought he was strong, still judged him accordingly, and did not yet know he was lost.
    But he wasn’t going there tonight.
    He had to let it go. Doris’s scarifying empathy. The known unknown. All of it.
    I have, he told himself, I’ve let it go.
    Which was bullshit, really, but he kept thinking it because it seemed necessary.
    I’m okay, he muttered aloud.
    Which seemed slightly safer as a proposition but hardly sound.
    I’m good! he announced to a startled passer-by.
    And yet, righteous as he was in his misanthropic way, goodness was something of a stretch. Misunderstood Keely was. Yes. And it was true his intentions were invariably good. But only when he had them. Some days he struggled to even form an intention.
    He teetered at the fulcrum of his lighter mood. Darkness sucking at him.
    But the evening air was all salty grace. Close to the water it smelt divine, felt merciful. And whatever bollocks he told himself, however feeble and false the positive lingo was once you stacked it up against shitful reality, the lovely, saving night stole up on him. The rest didn’t matter. For reasons he couldn’t fathom, the hopelessness suddenly lost ultimate power over him. As if for a moment the chains fell off and his heart was free. Well, on the lam at least.
    He ambled along the wharf past rank-smelling sheds where the
Leeuwin
rode the tide on creaking hawsers. On deck, beneath the maze of spars and rigging, a dreadlocked kid stood hosing crates, the lights glancing off piercings in his face. To Keely he looked exultant, like a boy unable to credit his own youth and beauty and good fortune. To be there on a tallship as passing strangers took note – that had to be worth something, worth basking a few minutes in the palpable sense of envy and mystery, worth prolonging a simple task like rinsing dive crates. Barely suppressing the urge to huzzah, Keely bore on past families of low-murmuring Vietnamese as they reeled in minuscule yellowtail and fingerling trevally. He turned a forgiving eye to their lard buckets of bloody water teeming with fins and white bellies and hundreds of golden tails. He didn’t stoop to scowl or tut. They were folks catching a feed: tired, shy, suspicious. They didn’t need his purse-lipped concern tonight. The concrete wharf was gummy with pollard, mired with the innards of crushed blowfish, spangled with scales. Bored schoolgirls sat on milk crates, texting, jiggling, hating to be there while their fathers and grandfathers squatted in plastic sandals, grey trousers and white singlets to thread maggots onto tiny hooks and press damp pollard into berley cages. Peaceable, calm, purposeful folks. Keely strolled on – living, letting live.
    Out towards the end of the quay, in the lee of the shiny new museum, he rested against a bollard to watch a pair of romancing backpackers share a can of beer. Birkenstocks, topknots, golden limbs. They stared across at the otherworldly light of the container terminal. Their voices were soft and foreign. They sounded Nordic. And they gave off an irrepressible sense of contentment, as if this warm evening at the far end of the earth had been worth the journey. He lingered a moment, riding the swell of the contact high. Until they gave him a look that sent him on his way.

W hen the lift door opened at the tenth floor Gemma Buck stood waiting in some kind of uniform.
    Bloody hell, she said. What’s the odds?
    Hi again, said Keely as they stepped around each other awkwardly to exchange places.
    Out for dinner? she asked, holding the door back with a downy arm.
    Just a walk, he said. You?
    Work.
    In the hard light of the lift’s fluorescent he saw the supermarket logo across the breast of her