Free The Minnow by Diana Sweeney Page B

saying?’ Bill always knows what I’m thinking.
    â€˜Get out of my head, Bill,’ I say. ‘My thoughts are my own private business.’
    Bill sits down on the jetty and hangs his legs over the edge. ‘Water’s low,’ he says, stating the obvious. He reaches into his fishing bag and pulls out a roll of line, takes a hook from his shirt pocket and turns to me. ‘You want to hand me one of your fancy sinkers?’ he asks, looking at me coldly and challenging me to refuse.
    â€˜Sure, Bill.’
    I’m not going to take the bait. I know his moods, and this one is always ugly.
    I hand Bill the Townley-Morris fiske sinker. I made that name up, if you’re wondering. All my sinkers have names. Most of them come packaged with brand and model names, although sometimes the model is just a number. I rename sinkers if I don’t like the sound of the brand, and I always name the sinkers I find. It’s surprising how many get washed up, caught in old bits of line. Sometimes I find them on the pier. Once I found eighteen sinkers in an old tin. I keep those in a separate compartment in the FishMaster, just in case one day I meet their owner. Anyway, the Townley-Morris had a TM printed on it, so I named it to fit the initials. It got the ‘fiske’ because I found the sinker at Fiske Point.
    Fiske Point is a small bay with a sand spit that extends out from one side and dense scrub on the other. We usually fish from one of the bay’s feeder creeks, but you can also fish from the beach and from the sand spit. The sand spit is pretty amazing. At low tide it stretches for about two hundred metres and you can walk all the way to the point. The sand, which is only a few metres wide, is all there is between the clear calm water of the bay on one side and the deep choppy ocean on the other. The only downside is that the ocean breeze kicks sand into your eyes almost continuously.
    One of Fiske Point’s bigger creeks—Bill and I named it the Rumbly, I forget why—is wide enough for the tinny. You have to row hard against the current for about three hundred metres until it opens out into a large lake. The water’s deep and dark and the fishing is good. If it wasn’t so hard to reach, we would probably fish there more often. One time, we left the tinny tied to the embankment, but walking through the scrub was even harder than rowing, so we never did that again. Anyway, I was telling you how I found the sinker. It was late one afternoon and Bill and I were fishing at the Rumbly’s lake. It was surprisingly quiet—not much was biting. The last of the sun was flickering through the trees, and as it landed on the branch of an oleander tree, something shone out towards me like a torch. Bill was asleep so I pulled up our lines and steered the tinny over to check it out. The rest was easy. The branch grew out over the water and was low enough for me to reach. I felt around for the source of the shiny thing and found the sinker. Luckily Bill was dead to the world and didn’t stir even when the breeze picked up and leaves rained down on him. The sinker was attached to a piece of line that was wound around the branch. Unwinding it took a while. But by the time Bill woke, we were back in our spot, lines recast.
    â€˜How’d the boat get full of leaves?’ Bill said as he checked his line.
    â€˜Well, you should know,’ I answered. ‘Seeing as you say you never fall asleep.’
    â€˜Touché,’ said Papa.

Bill attached the Townley-Morris fiske and cast his line. I watched him out of the corner of my eye. I’ve learned to keep watch when Bill is in one of his moods. I was kind of wishing Jonah hadn’t left, so I was relieved when Papa appeared. Papa doesn’t like leaving the Mavis Ornstein Home for the Elderly, but he has started making it a bit of a habit ever since the police showed up. I haven’t had the nerve to ask Bill what