The Cuckoo's Child by Margaret Thompson Read Free Book Online

stupid thing.”
    â€œWhat happened?” asked Neil.
    â€œGrabbed a bunch of old line and net, set a triple hook in the palm of my hand. Smart, eh?”
    He held out his hand as if he were begging. It was filthy. Two of the hooks had burrowed out of sight in the middle of the palm; the third curved up, a scorpion tail ready to attack. A length of old leader trailed over his wrist.
    â€œNeed more than one hand to deal with that one,” he said. “Hurts like a son of a bitch. What did you do?”
    Neil looked sheepish. “Took a dive, playing rugby.”
    â€œGot a death wish, have you? Rough game, that. Not as bad as Australian football, though—now they’re crazy.”
    â€œEver seen a game of hurling?” asked Neil, warming to this topic. “Sort of a cross between rugby and field hockey—they can throw the ball and carry it or clobber it with whacking great sticks through the air. Fantastic! Irish, of course.”
    â€œAh well, they’re all mad buggers, aren’t they? Oops, I hope you’re not Irish, no offence. My name’s Jerry Murtry, by the way. That’s Irish enough, right? I live on a boat down at the government wharf. You ever want to go out fishing, I’m your man.”
    And that was that.
    Has anyone done studies on why we take to some people and not to others? Why some strangers immediately inspire confidence and liking, and some never get beyond our defensive barriers? It has to be an instinctive reaction to smell and body language, buried so deeply in us we don’t notice the mechanism at all. All I can say is that Neil and I, discussing it afterward, both commented on the same thing; we felt immediately comfortable with this little red-faced man, as if the period between acquaintance and friendship had been skipped as a waste of time. By the time both men had been patched up, we were friends. I drove Jerry back to his boat. Before going home, we had inspected his cramped quarters aboard and arranged to meet at our house the next week.
    So began months of casual, easy companionship. He would drop in for a beer, we would press him to stay for a meal, not that he ever needed persuasion, and the evenings would fly past. He returned the favour with trips to small islands inaccessible to everything but a boat, weekends of floating at anchor in small bays, watching the stars come out and the bats flick silently overhead. He would play his saxophone while Mizzen, his cat, sat on a hatch in the moonlight and lashed her tail, and the melancholy notes would linger and tremble in the soft air until they were almost beyond bearing.
    Jerry’s casual lifestyle was a blessing when Daniel was born. We’d had to wait a long time for a baby; I was thirty when he arrived and had almost given up hope. I took maternity leave but eventually had to go back to work—we needed the money and, besides, I liked my job. Mum tutted, of course. “What that baby needs is a full-time mummy,” she said. “That’s your job now.” But even she had to admit it was nice to eat regularly.
    I found a decent babysitter nearby, but Jerry was the saviour on the days she couldn’t take Daniel because her own kids were ill, or on the weekends, or when Neil and I were both tied up or simply wanted a night out together. He was wonderful with the baby, amazingly gentle despite his fisherman’s hands, holding him in the crook of his arm as he went on with mending his nets or polishing the brass fittings on his boat, talking to him man to man, as if Daniel understood every word.
    When Daniel got older, it was Jerry who made him a wooden train, Jerry who showed him how to jig for herring, Jerry who constructed the big wooden hutches for the guinea pigs, George and Emily and their large family, and supplied the sawdust for their bedding.
    And then, the day Daniel was four years old, Jerry announced he was leaving and trying his luck farther