Settlers' Creek by Carl Nixon Page B

Anywhere in the bay with a view, which was pretty much everywhere, could be, and had been, carved up and sold off.
    By then the road over to the city had been sealed, the worst corners smoothed out. In the winter the council trucks spread grit on the shady corners where the sunshine didn’t melt the black ice until afternoon. The people buying the new sections, building their dream homeswith views of the water, didn’t mind the commute to work. The new houses were crowded in, all up and down the hill above the main road and, down on the harbour side, set among what was left of the bush, harbour views from every room. The bay had now became just another suburb.
    Further up the road, past the café, Box drew alongside a group of half a dozen women walking briskly along the footpath, arms swinging. They were all in their mid-thirties, wearing Puma and Adidas tracksuits and coloured cross-trainers. And make-up, Box noticed. These were what passed for locals these days. Not that he had anything against them. Most of the newcomers were well off — lawyers and bankers and architects. You had to be something like that to afford to live over here. Professional couples. Big income, two-children families. Audis and late-model Subarus dropped the kids off at the school in the morning. Every time he came back here Box saw them angle-parked outside the café, and up their stamped-concrete drives.
    These people didn’t want half an acre around their house. Low maintenance was the thing. They believed they had a big section if they owned a patch of ready-lawn with a few hebes planted hard up against the fence. It was ironic, but when Box was growing up here, people thought they were living in each other’s pockets if, on a still night, you could hear your neighbour shouting at his wife.

    Down at the jetty, he parked on the shingle by the leaning rock wall. He got out and walked along the sea-worn wooden boards. The jetty was still the same as when hewas a kid, though boards were replaced at the end of every winter. And of course the harbour was the same. The tide was almost all the way out, the whole head of the harbour an expanse of grey mud all the way around to Warren’s Beach. The narrow jetty where he was standing pointed up the harbour from the rocky knuckles of the headland like a prosthetic finger. Half a dozen small yachts lay on their sides in the squelch, waiting for the high tide to refloat them.
    The jetty was at least a hundred metres long. When Box got to the end, he stopped and stood looking down the harbour. There were steep hills on both sides. What he was looking at was the remains of a large volcano. Time had taken the burnt scowl off the face of the landscape. Like layers of powdered make-up, wind-blown soil had been laid down over the cooked rock, and the crater had been breached and flooded by the ocean to form the long harbour. The hills were no longer raw and sharp edged against the sky. In fact, as he stood at the end of the jetty, the hills were laid out all around him like a photographer’s tawny blanket, artfully rumpled. Only around the remnants of the caldera’s rim did dark ramparts of volcanic rock protrude above the soil.
    The wind stroking Box’s face was coming off the water, pushing up from the top of the harbour, where there was a narrow strip of horizon between two headlands. It smelled of mud and salt, mixed with the whiff of dry grass off the hills. Someone had an open fire going somewhere. The smoke and the mud smells blended together in his nostrils.
    He closed his eyes and let his other senses reach out. He heard the soft lover’s slap of the water as the tide pushed back over the mudflats towards the rocks. The scream of an angry gull. And from behind him the sound, pushinginto the wind, of excited children coming from the school — morning playtime.
    As boys, Box and his brother Paul had regularly set out from this jetty at either end of a flounder net. Feet sinking deep into the