The Bay by Di Morrissey Read Free Book Online Page A

and a man in bright pink pants tucked into gumboots, a pink shirt with lots of bead necklaces and a battered Akubra hat over shoulder-length hair, waved a plastic bucket. Andrew pressed the button and his window glided down. Before he could speak Holly leaned across him. ‘How much?’
    â€˜Two dollars. Dollar for parking, dollar for the charity of the day.’
    â€˜And what might that be?’ asked Andrew with an edge to his voice. He was thinking Protecta-Plantation, or bail for some dealer, maybe save the tree huggers.
    â€˜Helicopter Rescue Service. We need a chopper for this part of the coast. Good men can’t fly without machines, right?’
    â€˜Don’t they have helicopters to patrol the coast?’ Holly asked, somewhat alarmed.
    â€˜The men in blue have something of a flying wreck. We need to be able to pull people out of the sea, that kind of thing. You look like a surfer, you know what it’s like, eh?’ He gave Andrew a wonderful smile and Holly realised the pink man had a hint of shrewdness behind the grin.
    â€˜Yeah, yeah.’ Andrew fumbled and pulled five dollars from his wallet and dropped it in the bucket.
    â€˜Good one, man. Round to the right. Have a cool day.’
    Holly glanced at Andrew in his board shorts, T-shirt and tanned face. ‘There, isn’t it nice to be recognised as a surfie and not a city slicker?’
    They parked on the grass at the edge of an adjoining paddock, locked the car and followed others across to the centre of the field. There was a definite order to the snail coils of stalls. Holly stood beneath some bamboo poles strung with long, coloured triangular silk flags and huge painted three-dimensional stars. ‘Left or right? Food that way, crafty things that way. What do you think?’
    â€˜Clockwise. Just get on with it. We don’t want food, walking this way could take ages, everyone is wandering like Brown’s cows and it’s going to get damn hot.’
    â€˜Told you to bring a hat.’ Holly jammed down her own hat. It was a chic lady’s panama from Sydney and she felt it looked very out of place.
    They began walking past the rows of stalls that lined the path. Andrew kept striding ahead paying little attention as Holly hung back, fascinated by all there was for sale. He was feeling uncomfortable. These people unnerved him, and someone was always bumping into him. Why didn’t they walk on the same side? Everyone was smiling, stopping to hug and chat. Even men hugged each other. He supposed they only came out of the hills every so often. Kids were scampering everywhere and it was mostly fathers who were carrying babies in backpacks and cloth slings as women congregated in clusters like chattering birds. Andrew was hot and while he could see the appeal of the market, they had come for a reason. He hoped the old furniture and junk – if they found it – was worth all this.
    Holly’s fury at the loss of the house contents seemed to have dissipated with her enthralment at the markets. She was hovering at another stall. It sold hand-made cosmetics and Holly was opening jars and rubbing lotion on her hands and exclaiming in delight. The stallholder, an attractive young woman with auburn hair and flawless skin, explained to her, ‘These products are all made with natural ingredients – you can even eat them. I have done a lot of research with a pharmacist friend into retail cosmetics and you’d be horrified if you knew what they were made of.’
    Holly had looked at similar products when shopping in the city, tried a couple of them once but didn’t persist and eventually threw them out on the grounds that they were beyond their use-by date. Up here, though, the products seemed to demand more serious consideration. Why was this? Holly wondered.
    â€˜They really work?’ she asked, as if struggling for an opening line.
    The woman smiled. ‘Of course. It’s the only