Gone Fishing Read Online Free Page B

once-in-a-lifetime clients. Hardly inspiring, being forced to consider death on a nightly basis. Survival of the fittest – law, according to Emily.
    By the time Emily moved into her neat little unit, though, she’d run out of options. Kate had questioned the rationale of the red button. Better to roar off into the great void of death than hover at the edge in pain and anguish, she’d said. Wait until you’re old, then you’ll understand the will to live gets stronger and stronger. And yet, seventy wasn’t a great age any more, not by ‘forty-is-the-new-thirty’ standards. So Emily must have slept peacefully through the point where she quit one world for another, depending on your school of spiritual thought. The bottom line was always the same, though. Everything that is born must die – one of the rare absolute truths.
    The village looms. She swings into the pretty driveway with the pretty herbaceous borders before she can change her mind. She unlocks the door and steps inside. Emily’s heavy perfume, trapped in her pink frills – chairs, clothes, curtains, lampshades – hits her like an assault.
    Here to empty the unit so village management can erase any lingering traces of Emily with new carpet, a fresh paint job and a new stove top before offering it as new to the next cab off the mortal rank, she stumbles for a second. She’d planned to ask Vinnies, the provider of luxuries small and large in Sam’s impoverished childhood, to blitz the place but kept putting off the call. Now, with the lawyer unable to shed any light on her mystery brother, she’s glad. Somewhere in the detritus of seventy years there must be a clue.
    Kate takes a deep breath and enters the bedroom to open the wardrobe. Suddenly finding it hard to breathe, she leans against a wall, slowly sliding to the floor. Eyes closed, she scrolls through the past like a black-and-white movie show, searching for hints, clues, answers. Or even a flimsy link she might be able to follow up.
    She remembers conversations between her parents that suddenly went silent when she, still a little girl, entered the room. She remembers her father’s quiet acceptance of Emily’s frequent absences. Once, when she plucked up the courage to ask where Emily had gone, he simply said, ‘Out.’ She knew the question was off limits forever after. Sometimes Emily’d be gone only a day and night. Sometimes a week. Once, she heard her father ask, ‘The money ran out, did it?’ Her mother’s response a murmur too low to catch.
    Out of the blue, Kate remembers being dragged along on a flight to the city to tour one of the few Australian navy battleships in operation. It seemed so weird at the time. Emily, a battleship nerd? Even weirder in hindsight, unless one of the sailors – no, never a sailor, Emily was a snob – one of the officers, then, was the father of her child. Or maybe her son had joined the navy? But why drag her daughter along? For appearances? As an equaliser? To prevent a nasty scene?
    Kate’s head is beginning to throb. It’s not called rotgut for nothing, Kate, so don’t bother buying me the cheap stuff, I’ll only throw it out . Birthday and Christmas gift law, according to Emily. Kate goes into the kitchen where a used coffee mug sits on a bench that needs wiping. She scours it, fills it with tap water, drinks thirstily.
    Revived and back at the wardrobe, she gingerly fingers clothing arranged fastidiously in strict colour order: red, green, blue, turquoise, yellow and pink, pink, pink. Underneath, a rack of shoes reflects the same colour code. She counts twenty cardboard hatboxes stacked on the top shelf. All of them almost certainly crammed with over-decorated hats representing the most outlandish fashion fads for the past fifty years. Kate had never considered her mother capable of such forensic order.
    â€˜The Secret Life of Emily Jackson,’ she