Bay of Fires Read Online Free Page A

liked it. Jake didn’t know how to make her tea; he had always needed to ask her. These were things sisters knew about each other.
    The thought saddened Sarah. It was only because she was feeling so horribly wretched that she felt this antagonism toward Erica. Over the years Sarah had made compromises for her younger, less resilient sister. When she was ten, Sarah had nodded mutely as Jane Taylor yelled at her for telling Pamela that Gary Taylor had been seen in town buying head lice shampoo. In fact it was Erica who had spotted Jane’s ex-husband in the chemist’s and shared the information.
    “We don’t need talk that the guesthouse has a nits epidemic,” Jane had said as Sarah stood stunned beside the lagoon one day. “Shut your little gob.”
    They had looked alike then, before puberty hit, two chubby, curly-pigtailed girls, and many times one had been mistaken for the other. As puberty arrived, Sarah took up rowing, developing her thick-muscled arms and legs, while Erica played tennis socially and maintained a girlish figure. These days no one would mix them up, although people did comment, pleasingly, on their similar catlike brown eyes.
    Sarah had lied, concealed information, remained silent, for Erica. At seventeen, when Erica crashed their parents’ car driving drunk, Sarah took the blame. At twenty-two, when Erica and her boyfriend accidentally left a condom wrapper underneath the hammock at the shack, Sarah had pretended it was hers. Sarah wasn’t a hero. She just didn’t care what other people thought of her. Erica, on the other hand, crumbled at a whisper of disapproval.
    There were things about Erica that Sarah would never understand. For instance, Erica had currently taken four weeks annual leave and planned to spend the entire time at the shack. Steve would come and go as his pilot schedule allowed. Who would choose to spend four weeks in a two-bedroom shack with their parents? Sarah was only here until she worked out what to do next. Sarah told herself she should be grateful Erica was here—at least she would have company.
    “Thank you for the tea,” Sarah said, sitting up. “It’s nice.”
      
    From the shack’s veranda Sarah watched the road. She still felt ill. It wasn’t the revolting smell, or the mutilated flesh, but the thought of that woman’s final hours that gripped her. There were kind ways to kill, if you wanted something dead. On the barramundi farm, fish that were to be processed were put on ice to slow them down. Sometimes they put a mild anesthetic in the ice slurries to slow them down even quicker. Sick fish that needed to be destroyed weren’t treated so kindly. Sarah preferred to put sick fish on ice, but some of the staff were ruthless and chucked the fish in the trash bin alive. For twenty minutes the creatures would flap away on top of one another until they ran out of air.
    Walking on the other side of the road in the gutter beside the farm’s barbed wire fence was Roger. If he had looked down toward the shack he would have seen her, motionless on the swing she had built herself when she was nine years old, her fists balled on either knee. Sarah watched him pass, a solitary shape huddled under the morning’s expansive pale sky.
      
    The fishing section of the Bay of Fires general store was a mere shelf. There were several bags of hooks, floaters and sinkers, reels of line, some butterfly nets, and an overpriced Alvey surf rod that had been there almost as long as Pamela and Don Gunn had owned the shop. Sarah knew the contents of that shelf as well as she knew the contents of her tackle box, and as she walked down the hill toward the shop, she envisaged which size hooks she was going to purchase. The wind had dropped, and there wasn’t time to muck around if she wanted to catch anything today. She also didn’t want to get embroiled in a long conversation with Pamela.
    Several people were sitting in front of the shop, under a plastic banner saying Real Espresso