Free Changeling's Island - eARC by Dave Freer Page B

And like she didn’t want to, but still did it. “Thank you. I’ll try my best.”
    “You do that, and I’ll be well pleased, I reckon. Now you be polite to young McKay. And make yerself useful on the boat. Don’t wait for him to tell yer what to do; ask and watch. Then he’ll maybe take yer again.”
    Tim nodded. “I thought he said he’d take me…just to be polite.”
    “His Uncle Giles was a decent feller. Kept his word. Seems like this young feller is like him. I made extra porridge, as I reckon you’ll be hungry after last night.”
    He was. Starving, actually. He had three platefuls, and was just finished when his grandmother cocked her head. “I reckon I hear yer ride coming.” She didn’t seem to see too well, but his gran could hear a mouse tiptoe across the barn from inside the house.

CHAPTER 7
    Tim found himself cramming into the front of the ute with another plump man. “Mally, this is Tim,” said McKay. “Tim is coming along to show you how to fish.”
    “Last time you tried to do that,” said the other man, offering a sideways hand to Tim, and grinning like an overexcited kid. “And I remember the score was ten: three, even if you don’t.”
    “This time,” said McKay loftily, “it will be different.”
    “Ha ha. We’ll see,” said Mally, with a wink to Tim.
    “Seriously, this is Tim’s first fishing trip, and the first time he’s been to sea,” said McKay.
    “I bet he still catches more than you do,” said Mally. “You’ll have to get the gate, Tim.”
    Tim didn’t say much on the trip to West End, but McKay’s friend Mally made up for it. He made them all laugh quite a lot. They turned off the main road next to a lovely old colonial house, and bounced down to the coast on a bush track. In front of them lay the rocks and the crystal-clear, turquoise sea, and across the water stood an island that looked just like something out of Treasure Island . “Roydon. It’s pretty,” said McKay, turning the ute and reversing the boat toward the sheetrock at the end of the track.
    “You live in paradise, mate,” said Mally reverently.
    It did look like a travel brochure for some tropical island holiday.
    “Yeah. But wait until you try it in winter with the westerly pumping, rain coming down, and you have an abalone order to fill. Come on, we need to take off the ties and get the bungs in. The fish are waiting and the tide doesn’t.”
    So they got out, and Tim tasted the breeze off the sparkling water. He learned what bungs were, and Mally took great pleasure in telling him how his friend had, when they were at Uni in Melbourne together, omitted to put them in once.
    Tim had mostly forgotten about being miserable for now. The mention of Melbourne brought it back, but then McKay was expertly reversing the boat down the curving rock into the water, and, two minutes later, Tim was out on the sea for the first time in his life, catching the spray from the bow in his face and heading away from land, and then seeing his first ever wild dolphins swimming past.
    “There goes the fishing,” said McKay, as Mally tried to photograph them.
    “Ah, but they’re a beaut sight. And I’ll swear I saw a seal too,” said Mally.
    “They’re even worse for fish. We’ll run to the eighteen-fathom line. Leave them behind, with any luck.”
    They did, and then McKay cut the outboard, and they were bobbing silently a long way out from the island. Tim looked around for fishing rods. He didn’t see any. He was handed a big plastic spool with a thick green cord wound on it, with two hooks and a heavy weight on the end. McKay had a bait-board and was cutting strips off what looked like thick, semi-see-through plastic. “Here, Tim, weave a strip of squid onto your hooks like this,” said McKay, “and then you let out the line until it hits the bottom.”
    Tim joined in doing as the others were, and let the line down. The boat was drifting and the line didn’t go straight down, and he wondered