Settlers' Creek by Carl Nixon Page A

like steep descents any more than labouring up hills. By the time Box rolls down off the steep winding road over the hills from the city into Regent’s Bay he can smell the rubbery stink of flayed brake linings. And there is something else too: burning oil, maybe leaking onto the hot engine housing. Or possibly a worse problem than that. The temperature gauge is into the red. Halfway down the hill he had switched to using the gears to slow the ute down, but judging by the noise coming from the gearbox it’s a close run thing as to which technique, brake or gears, is causing the most damage.
    But now, at least he’s made it onto the flat. He’s here. The bay. Home.
    When he was growing up here, the road over to the city had been unsealed. Back in the day — that’s what Pop used to say, ‘Back in the day, son’ — the trip used to take an hour and ten. Box still remembered the sound ofstones flicking up against the chassis of his grandfather’s Bedford truck and the sliding sideways drift around the bends on the thick banks of shingle. He could visualise the improbable roller-coaster steepness of the hill with a child’s eye: the Grand Canyon drops down into the gullies. The rare trips with his grandfather over to the city had been expeditions, adventures.
    Not that the dangers had existed only in his mind. The Frosts’ son, who had been a few years older than Box, had been killed at sixteen, in winter, while crossing the hills on his motorbike. And there was the time when Don Cooper had spent a night suspended by his seat-belt in his upturned car at the bottom of a gully with the heady smell of spilled petrol clouding his brain. It was a thin line between tragedy and a comic story to tell to your mates in the pub on a Friday night.
    When he was growing up, Box’s world had been neatly divided between locals and other people. There were sometimes families who came to the bay in the summer. Mostly they were from the city, out for a weekend drive, followed by a picnic. They stopped at the bay’s one pub for a beer, a shandy for the wife, lemonade and raspberry fizzy drink for the bored children. Box, the kid standing on the sidelines, had eyed these people curiously. To him, growing up in Regent’s Bay, they’d been as exotic as Oompa Loompas.
    The school Box went to until he was thirteen had only three teachers, and even then a lot of the kids who went there bussed in from outside the bay. They were from farms and the small clusters of homes dotted up and down the south side of the harbour.
    He drove past what used to be the Harbidges’ dairy. Afew years ago it had been converted into a café: all polished wooden floor and baby-iron on the front of the counter. The new owners had set up a sandstone fountain in front of the place, where there used to be a cracked concrete pad and a bicycle stand. The statue was of an ample woman with disproportionately large thighs, kneeling in the pool of water with her head back and her arms wide to the sky. Her large porous breasts hung free, water trickled from her navel. The whole thing was just short of being life size.
    Box wondered what his grandfather would have made of the statue. Not much, he imagined. The old bloke would’ve had something to say, slow and laconic, probably featuring the words ‘piss’ and ‘funny place’.
    Box smiled to himself and drove slowly on.
    Most of the market gardens and the orchards, similar to the one where he’d grown up, had gone. The Turners’ land was now a tract of houses. It was the same story with most of the Masons’ land, higher up the hill. All over the bay, fields and paddocks, which used to have nothing in them but sheep and the odd tatty-leaved cabbage tree, had also been roaded. Retaining walls were put in. In the late seventies and early eighties, people hadn’t been slow to wake up to how much their land was suddenly worth. Locals had either sold to developers or had subdivided their land themselves. Money was made.