Free Something Fishy by Shane Maloney Page B

stay at the beach longer, see how it goes.’
    â€˜With Jodie Prentice,’ said Tarquin.
    â€˜Get stuffed,’ said Red.
    â€˜Who’s Jodie Prentice?’ I said.
    â€˜A girl,’ Tark informed me, authoritatively.
    I glanced at the rear-view mirror. Tarquin clasped his hand to his breast, turned his gaze upwards and heaved a lovelorn sigh.
    â€˜Jeeze, you’re an idiot,’ said Red.
    â€˜This Jodie, she wouldn’t have been the one you were putting the moves on, back there?’ I said. ‘Little Orphan Annie.’
    â€˜She’s Matt Prentice’s sister,’ said Red, like I was supposed to recognise the name. And not notice that he was sidestepping the subject.
    â€˜The rasta?’ I guessed.
    â€˜Surfer,’ said Tarquin. ‘He’s in Year Eleven. She’s in Year Nine. Their mother’s an architect. Designs these ecological houses. They’ve got a place at Aireys Inlet, spend a lot of time there.’
    I got the picture. Aireys Inlet was just along the coast from Lorne. A couple of weeks surfside would give Red ample chance to pitch his novice woo in the general direction of the elfin Jodie.
    â€˜That was her in the Landcruiser,’ I said. ‘The mother?’
    â€˜She’s divorced,’ said Red. ‘Quite attractive, don’t you think?’
    â€˜Fancy her, too, do you?’ I said.
    Red shook his head, despairing. ‘It’s known as sublimation, dad.’
    â€˜Actually,’ I corrected him. ‘It’s called projection.’

By the standard measure, I was a man in the prime of life. My forties still lay before me, half of them anyway. I was moderately fit. I still had my own teeth, most of them. Secure employment, good pay, flexible hours, excellent pension plan. With the right lighting, not entirely repulsive. Hydraulic equipment in full working order.
    So there were, of course, women after Lyndal. Three, to be precise. Brief encounters, regretted even before they began.
    There was nothing wrong with the women. Except for the nut case, but she’d been so forceful as to represent a collapse of resistance rather than a lapse in judgment. Nor, with the passage of time, was fidelity to Lyndal’s memory an issue. I missed her and thought about her every day, but nothing would bring her back. I nurtured no illusions about dedicating the rest of my life to the chaste remembrance of my lost lover.
    Always pragmatic, Lyndal herself would have been the first to urge me to find a new squeeze. Although she might have had something to say about the randy desperation which led me to crack onto a half-sloshed twenty-four-year-old legal stenographer at the Lemon Tree by pretending to be a recently divorced commodities broker.
    Problem was, I needed more than a hump. I needed what Lyndal had embodied. Passion plus compatibility. A shared bed, a shared world, a shared future. A combination it had taken me the best part of my life to find.
    I’d met Lyndal during the ’88 election campaign when she was doing some sort of voter-profiling work for the state secretariat, number-crunching the demographics in a raft of wobbly seats on the urban fringe. Taking the customers’ measurements, she called it, so our wonks could tailor policy to a snug fit.
    I loved it when she talked like that, her scepticism pitched midway between the earnest cant of the old guard and the blatant cynicism of the up-and-comers. I quite fancied other things about her, too. Eyes, lips, hips, those kinds of things. I planned to make my move at the election-night party, the victory knees-up. I left my lunge too late. It was three years later before I got a second shot, both of us on the rebound.
    What I missed most about Lyndal, apart from the touch of her body, was her sharp eye for the nuances, her bedrock sense of justice and her bullshit detector.
    And there’s never a shortage of bullshit, not in my line of work. You don’t