Free The Wave at Hanging Rock: A Psychological Mystery and Suspense Thriller by Gregg Dunnett

through the outer shell and severed the four legs as one.  
    “Now let it go, see if it can walk.”
    The crab had barely reacted, but finally released from the pressure on its back it made a move to scuttle sideways to the pier edge. Its good side still worked and it was able to make some progress, but the stumps of the legs in its broken side just waggled in their sockets while more green juice oozed out.
    “If I was a flattie I’d eat that,” said John, satisfied. He reached for his own rod and easily caught up with the crab. He picked it up and after a moment’s consideration poked the hook into one of the sockets, and forced it through the body until the shiny silver tip reappeared through the creature’s belly. John let it go and it swung out from the end of the rod. He walked a few feet to the pier edge and began to swing the line as he manoeuvred the rod out behind his head. When the crab was at the far extent of the swing behind him he cast it forward, pointing the rod out to sea. The crab flew out into the air behind the lead weight, the whole assembly seemed to hover briefly as its momentum carried it away, and then it plopped into the water and John’s reel fell silent.
    “There. Now we’ll see which works better.” John settled the rod against the handrail and sat down with his back against the stone wall.  

    No one talked much for a while. It sometimes took ages to catch anything, and sometimes we didn’t catch anything even if we fished for hours. We had a few more mussels, but I didn’t want to catch any more crabs for a while and I could see that Darren felt the same. Instead we watched the two rod tips, waiting to see which one would twitch first.  
    “Fishing is pretty boring,” John said after about fifteen minutes had passed.  
    “Yeah,” Darren agreed. You could see the distaste had gone away already. We were back to normal.  
    “When are we going to get any waves?”  
    “Dunno.”  
    Surfing was our fall back conversation. I read somewhere that part of what makes it so addictive is that you can’t do it every day. It can be flat for ages and there’s nothing you can do, just wait and make sure you’re ready for when the waves do come. And all you know is that one day they will come again. Maybe that’s true, I don’t know, but I do know that whatever it was we were doing pretty quickly became boring compared to the thrill of surfing.  
    “I bet your old beach in Australia has got perfect surf right now,” said John.
     
    John did this sometimes, talked about Australia, or about other places he’d read about in the magazines. The way he talked about them was like they were somehow nearly within reach, the sort of place we might go to for a holiday or something. I guess it was because he did disappear every now and then on a holiday, mostly with his mum, he’d come back tanned and full of tales about it, what the pyramids were like inside, or how warm the Caribbean was in February. But it seemed impossible to me by then. I felt like I could barely even remember Australia. I sometimes tried to remember the way from our old house to the beach and I could never do it. I could never quite connect the two. And the beach, that white sand, the azure waters and the lush green of the jungle on the bluff, all that had got mixed up with the images from the surf magazines I binged on.  

    “We should go there,” John went on now. “When we’re older and we can go places I mean. Or Indonesia, we should go there and explore and find places that no one has surfed before. We should open a bar in Indo. That’d be cool.”

    That silenced us all for a while. It would be forever before we were even old enough to drive. Until then we were trapped here. A one-beach town where the waves had to be big enough to push up the Irish Sea before they could get to us. It was a depressing thought. I looked around at the coastline that by then was so familiar. The tide was dropping now and the