Free Tide by John Kinsella

ignored him or said something like Fuck off … but he couldn’t discern, because it merged with the sibilance of the breeze.
    As for his ex-wife, she would have been chewing his ear off. Wouldn’t she love to see him now, desperate for the key. That’s why I left you, loser, she’d say … it’s why I married a better man, one with the foresight to own a metal detector! Yes, he thought, but what good would that be, locked in the boot with no key to get it out. He laughed, pulling up short with another thought: his supervisor at work … No point keeping your desk so orderly if your work is never done on time. We have deadlines, deadlines, deadlines to meet! It’s got to add up, it’s got to balance out. The supervisor was full of platitudes like that.
    A plastic blow-up beach ball bounced its harlequin course in front of him, and he gave it a hard kick. It bounced down to the beach and into the water, tapping at the shore cocooned in a bed of froth. Hey, mate! someone yelled. That was a prick of a thing to do.
    He didn’t take any notice. Key key key. His father had put a fork through Mother’s inflatable li-lo during a vacation at The Bay. Barbecue the bloody sausages, he’d shrieked at her. Stop lounging about on that thing in the damned sun, turning yourself into a beetroot. And I am sick of seeing those stretch marks. That was thirty years ago, and they’d been the only people at The Bay. He’d been a sickly child, and the tattoo of an anchor and a mermaid on his father’s left bicep terrified him. His father loathed hysteria, so the boy should have known better than to shriek: he’d seen a pod of dolphins and yelled SHARKS! SHARKS! His father had kicked him up the pants and called him a girl. But he admired his old man, who could build a boat or a cabinet or a cupboard better than anyone else. The glue in his workshop stank like cat’s piss, a bit like the coastal vegetation of The Bay. There was something dead about it all. Long dead and stinking to high heaven. Invisible fish corpses littering the beautiful white sand.
    The trick of loving a place, he decided, is being able to leave it. He no longer wanted to live on the beach, at The Bay. It was an epiphany. He was big on non-religious epiphanies. Couldn’t abide religion. He’d seen his cousin Lucinda eaten by a sect. They’re all sects, he’d said to his auntie, who belonged to a gigantic sect. He didn’t need to say God when he saw something as immense as the Southern Ocean stretching out beyond the headland all the way to Antarctica. That ineffable volume of water. That curving expanse all held in like a bucket of water swinging around your head. Swoosh swoosh swoosh. If the rope had snapped, the bucket could have killed someone! His dad never found out.
    Hey, mate, you looking for something?
    He was about to say, What does it fucking look like? when he saw the key, his car key, held out in front of him like a talisman. But it looked dull, not even a glint in the roaring afternoon sun. Just dull and flat and burnished by sand. A teenager held it in one thin-fingered hand. A hand so white it would be bright red after a day in the sun, smarting with protest. He vaguely recognised this teenager from somewhere. Maybe something to do with the ball he’d kicked out to sea, the ball that dribbled back to land. Yes, that teenager was there, on the edges … the edge of the continent … maybe he’d spoken to him. A family game of beach ball. All ages mucking around, having fun. Laughing.
    He reached out to take the key, half expecting it to be snatched back. Thanks, he said instinctively, then turned back to the track and his car, turning his back on the rock, the water, the blue and the bay. He wondered how far he could drive before he’d have to refuel.

FERRYMAN
    It’s not often you see a myth turned to a reality, or maybe realise that ‘myth’ is just