Laughs, Corpses... and a Little Romance Page 9

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  We finished our last run by seven o'clock that evening. I left the lads to lock up Annabelle for the night while I walked round to the pub, as I always like to enjoy a glass of beer and a chat with my mates before I go home for dinner. Our local pub, The Hawkesbury Arms, is a pretty average country pub, worn floor coverings, and a long bar with pumps for eight brands of ice-cold beer. The furnishings consist of kitchen tables and chairs. There are two rows of poker machines, all noise and flashing lights, and the occasional crash of coins into the winnings tray. Two TV screens show horse racing, dog racing, and replays of sporting matches. Another screen shows never-ending games of Keno, a new one every three minutes, five hundred games a day. The whole setup is designed to separate mugs from their money as quickly as possible. At seven in the evening the bar is full of blokes like me who‘ve just finished work. Often their womenfolk are there too, although my wife Nellie only comes with me occasionally. The kids and the dogs wait at the tables outside, the kids kept quiet with a bag of chips and a coke, unless of course they are racing round on their skateboards. It's not that I particularly like this pub above all others, it's just that it's the only one we've got. As I walked up to the bar the barmaid pulled my usual glass of Tooheys Old Black Ale.

  The pub has got a bistro selling regular Australian food over the counter; pies and hamburgers and stuff like that. Some parts of Australia have had lots of migrants from places like Greece and Italy and China and so on, and they’ve brought their own food with them but our town seems to have missed out on all that. We’re still pretty much an all-Australian town. There was an attempt once to open a Chinese take-away in the town, but it didn't seem to get many customers and soon folded.

  At least half the people in the town make their living from the river in one way or another. Some work at the boatyards scattered along the shore, renting out motorboats, houseboats, and so on, or repairing and servicing the private craft that pass through. Others go out catching fish or trawling for prawns. Prawns breed in the salt water on the bottom of the river and the trawlers scoop them up. There’s nothing I like more than a plate of fresh prawns, washed down with a couple of beers. Others in the town make their living as oyster farmers. They lease areas of the river shallows from the government, and build long racks in the water. First they catch young oysters on sticks covered in cement and tar, then the sticks are moved to the racks. Then there’s a three or four-year wait while the oysters fatten up, ready for the plates of fancy expensive restaurants. The oysters have to be guarded from mudworm and hungry fish, and fussed over all the time. They like to be out of the water for an hour or two at low tide and underwater the rest of the time, and they don’t like the water too fresh. It's a wet, muddy business, and oyster farmers have wet muddy workboats, but they grow more than twenty million oysters a year, so they’re not short of a quid. Now ever since I can remember there's been an invisible line drawn through the town, either you’re an oyster farmer or you’re not, and if you’re an oyster farmer then anybody who isn’t an oyster farmer isn’t worth speaking to. The oyster farmers have their jetty and everybody else has theirs. In the pub, the oyster farmers sit at their end of the bar and everybody else sits at the other end. If you try to step across the line, you get irritated glares for your trouble. I’ve never understood the reason for it, but that's the way it's always been. This night however there was a truce. As soon as I stepped up to the bar I was besieged by mates wanting to know the latest hot news about the murder, straight from the horse's mouth so to speak, and I noticed that even the grumpiest oyster farmers had come along our end of the bar and were listening too. Mates were buying me drinks as fast as I could knock them back.

  Two hours later the barmaid butted in, she'd just had a phone call from my missus, wanting to know when the hell I would be home. My wife, Nellie, is a wonderful woman, I’ve been married to her for twenty-four years, and we seem to fit together like a pair of worn shoes. Our mortgage was paid off years ago, and I’ve always had a steady income from Annabelle, so Nellie has never needed to go out to work to help make ends meet. It seems to me that in the sixties women’s lib encouraged women to “get a job, get your independence, get some extra cash for a few luxuries”. What happened of course was that house prices and then mortgages went up to soak up the extra cash, and now an awful lot of women have to work whether they like it or not, just to help keep a roof over their heads. I guess Nellie has been lucky in that respect; she’s an old-fashioned stay-at-home housewife. Anyway we’ve lived together all these years with very few arguments, and I guess in that respect we’re old-fashioned too, some would say we’re a couple of old stick-in-the-muds. Nellie’s cooking is very much in the traditional Australian style, a juicy roast with three vegetables, steamed puddings, and that sort of thing. I see articles in the magazines about foreign food and sometimes I think I'd like to try it, but who knows, maybe our food is the best.

  That night we had a lovely dinner. Everyone had all the happenings of the last few days to talk about. It was grand, the four of us sitting round the dinner table chatting, just like the good old days, before television. I went to bed that night a contented man. I felt we’d done a good job helping the police, and I had a belly full of roast lamb and a few beers.