High Island Blues Read Online Free Page B

and ticked off the species. There were more rice fields, more cows.
    Despite Rob’s warning they had been expecting something more dramatic of High Island, perhaps a real hill rising out of the flat land. But as they approached the town all that broke the horizon was the steep, semi-circular bridge crossing the intra coastal canal. Beyond that they reached the town almost without noticing. They came to a field of nodding donkeys, part of the local oil industry, and then they were in High Island, which hadn’t seemed to be a hill at all, just trees floating above the marsh.
    Oaklands was to the north of the town. The bus turned off the highway just after the bridge and drove down a road of single-storey houses without boundary fences, mostly clapboard, some in need of repair.
    Rob, directing the driver, saw the detail as if for the first time, the wooden swinging seat outside one house, basket-ball posts and a kids’ climbing frame outside another. A dog chased out into the middle of the dusty road and barked at them. A woman flapped out in her slippers to call it back. She stopped to wave at the bus. High Island prided itself on being friendly to the birders.
    They came to a gate, already open, and a cattle grid. A track led through huge magnolias with shiny leaves and oaks covered in lichen. The house was surrounded by trees so it seemed that if it let up guard for a moment the woodland would take it over again. Then they saw the house.
    It was bigger and more ornate than any of them had expected, gloriously overdone, all turrets, and verandas and angled roofs. It was three-storeyed, L-shaped with a clock tower and pointed windows in the roof. On the inside of the L there was a magnificent wrought iron veranda and on the long side of the house a new wooden porch, with a view of a lawn which had been cleared from the woodland, and a pool.
    ‘It was built in 1897,’ Rob said, as proud as if he owned it himself. ‘At one time a railway line brought visitors right up to the door. It was very grand. Miss Cleary has brought it back to its former glory. When I first came here it was very different. Falling to pieces. You wouldn’t believe the change.’
    But nobody was listening to him. They had had enough of travelling. They had climbed from the bus and were waiting in the heat to collect their luggage.

Chapter Four
    When Rob had stayed in Oaklands twenty years ago it had looked like the set of a second rate horror movie. The paint had been peeling and the whole place smelled of decay. It had been run as a boarding house by a widow who had a child to support. Salesmen stayed there and student teachers at the High School, and a couple of elderly long term residents who should have been in a nursing home but couldn’t afford to move.
    It had been Laurie’s idea to stay there, after they’d picked her up on the road from Winnie. They had seen her from a long way off, appearing out of the heat haze like a mirage, watched her hitch a lift, slowed down the car to stop beside her.
    ‘Where are you heading for?’ Rob had asked, trying to sound cool.
    ‘Wherever you’re going,’ she’d said, corny as hell, but somehow carrying it off.
    ‘We’re making for the coast,’ he’d said. ‘High Island. We can take you there.’
    ‘Why not? You got somewhere to stay?’
    ‘Not yet.’
    ‘We could stay at Oaklands. They’re kind of family. It’ll be cheap at least.’
    So they’d stayed there for a week, the four of them. All the time his obsession for Laurie grew and they waited for the weather to change and the migrants to come. There had been plenty to see: egrets and ibises on the salt lagoons and coypu and alligator, but the humidity and the tension of waiting for a fall had made them as bad tempered and fractious as children. The weather was too still and warm and they had flown back to Britain without ever having seen the trees in Smith Oaks crawling with brightly coloured warblers. It was Laurie who said they