Читать книгу Pilgrim Souls - Jan Murray - Страница 2

And I shall have some peace there,

for peace comes dropping slow.

W.B. Yeats

I recall with fondness, but also with some cynicism, the Byron Bay I found waiting for me the morning in September 1997. It was still pretty much the old Byron. Although the genuine locals will give you an argument about that.

In the Nineties, however, it was still Byron; a hokey little village where you could walk down the street and bump into a friend. Still a town centre where you could find a parking spot out front of your bank. The Byron before parking meters. The Byron of old timber houses. The Byron of rainforests and green hills. Byron of the Blues and Roots festivals that still felt small and user-friendly. Byron before over-crowded and expensive writers’ festivals. Byron before traffic jams. Byron of the genuine eccentric.

Byron when an impecunious writer could still afford to live there. In other words, it was Byron prior to rampant commercialism.

Byron Bay prior to the invasion.

Back in 1997 Ringo’s big friendly cafe in Jonson Street was still the beating heart of the small seaside village of surfers and New Age hippies, serving up its generous helpings of love, peace and harmony to all who felt at home within the faded glory of its walls. But sadly, Melbourne and Sydney money rode in to town one sunny day and tore down the iconic old cafe, leaving Byron Bay the poorer for it.

Ringo’s would be replaced by what would become just one more loud sportswear store among a plethora of other clothing stores and over-priced touristy food outlets.

Thanks to rapacious development that even green councilors failed to reign in, today’s Byron Bay has lost its unique sense of place, the feeling it once had of a laid-back rural coastal community. The comfortably familiar and quirky now has to fight for its place amid prosaic commercial starkness.

I told you I was a sentimental fool. But, my God, I see Byron today and I weep. Old timber houses that once sat on large blocks hidden behind rampant rainforests have been bulldozed to make way for Five Star holiday resorts owned by vulgar capitalists, the palms growing there now complying with landscaping architecture lining white gravel driveways leading to Reception.

In the centre of the village, on high street and down sequestered lanes, offbeat little timber shops that sold equally offbeat merchandise––hand-made clothing, candles, incense and Balinese Buddhas––were replaced by ubiquitous franchise stores stacked with cheap Chinese sportswear with slogans in windows that try too hard to catch the ‘cool vibe’ of Byron Bay. There is an obviously desperate attempt to ride the reputation of the rainbow district.

The casual, friendly attitude that was once unique to Byron has given way to a commercial mindset intent on capitalizing on the hordes of holiday visitors who swarm into town, including not only the Gold Coast crowds availing themselves of a freeway that in fifty short minutes of straight highway these days can rockets them into yet another theme park, albeit a quaint one without wet rides, but also the masses of young backpackers, domestic and international, who flock to what is touted on the web, and by word-of-mouth, as the coolest party town in the universe.

It is ironic that these starry-eyed young backpackers, the Gold Coast tourists, and the cashed-up middle class that migrated to Byron Bay in search of its sea change dream have all managed to squeeze the marrow from a once magical little New Age place. Ironic, in so much as what these questers sought is the very thing their numbers and their money were bound to destroy.

But enough of the lamentations.

On the morning in the mid-nineties when I found myself cruising into Byron village with not a clue why I was heading there other than the fact that a coffee and a walk along a beach seemed like a good idea, the iconic Ringo’s was still alive and well in all its shabby wonder and I believe it was the friendly embrace of Ringo’s Café that sold me on Byron Bay that morning.

I can recall the warmth of its rough old timber floors, a knocked about platform for the mishmash of old tables and chairs. And at Ringo’s there were rows and rows of bookshelves lining the walls. From memory, I think the bookshop might have operated on a swap, buy or help-yourself basis but for sure, it seemed an Aladdin’s cave of long-forgotten literary treasures.

I took a seat.

It might have been a booth. Not sure. Can’t remember. But I know as I looked around and took in the full ambience––the cork board on the far wall where colourful flyers spruiked yoga classes and rebirthing sessions at cut rates, where the art deco counter and hand-written menu stood beckoning, where the gallimaufry of old 1950’s crockery and cutlery beamed a message of welcome even to the discombobulated mental case I was that morning––it all felt enticingly homely and today, as you can see, I’m still grieving its passing.

As I sat there, waiting to be served, I noticed a faded floral curtain at the back of the shop and once I’d seen one or two Byronians going through the curtain, I followed and found a hallway lined with even more pre-loved books.

With nothing to do and nowhere to be, I took my time flicking through dozens of yellowing pages of paperbacks, text books and once-fashionable coffee table books.

Dusty. Mouldy.

Tiny red mites scattering as I turned pages. Books smelling of other people’s houses, as if they’d had been locked up in an old suitcase in Aunt Myrtle and Uncle Alf’s back shed for decades. Romantic melancholy smells reminiscent of the many sweet wet Saturday afternoons I’d spent poking around in fusty second-hand bookshops in places like Paddington, Glebe, Brisbane and Balmain.

Many of the books had underlining and margin notes made by readers long ago who must have seen significance in a word, in a line. I love such books and chose several before I walked back to my seat across timber floors that smelled of beeswax and sandy thongs.

I was checking the menu when a freckle-faced girl with thick auburn braids and eyes the colour of expensive jade appeared at my side, notepad in hand and smiling down on me.

‘What’ll it be, then?’ said the young woman.

I studied the menu for a moment and decided to pass on Ringo’s special––a big country breakfast fry-up––delicious as it looked.

This was Byron Bay.

A brand-new day.

‘You know what? I’m going to have a stab at that.’ I laid down the menu and indicated the blackboard menu. ‘Your organic muesli with berries ... and … ah … I like the look of your apple, carrot and ginger juice.’ So much for the evil fry-up.

Welcome to Mung Bean World. I felt pleased with my choices. Virtuous.

‘Coffee?’ said the girl, flashing perfect white teeth and smiling green eyes that made even expensive jade seem ordinary by comparison.

‘Sure thing. Make it a long latte, could you?’

‘Soy?’

‘Why not?’ It was that kind of morning and I was in that kind of mood. I’d never tasted soy lattes but as I said to this pleasant young local who waited for my answer; why not?

‘Decaf?’

‘Okay.’ I was up for the new. And given my revving brain, it was possibly a wise choice.

There was no sugar pot on the table I had chosen. This, after all, was Byron Bay. Pure honey from the local bees left to graze on lotus blossom was possibly the sweetener of choice around these parts.

‘You need the sugar?’ The green-eyed one said as she reached for a funny old-fashioned glass and silver sugar dispenser on a nearby table.

‘Uh-uh. No sugar. Pure white and deadly!’ I had reared my five kids on that mantra.

The young Byronian––or maybe she was a backpacker from Tassie picking up a few holiday dollars––smiled her approval and with a wink, was on her way across the room to place my order and continue spreading the love.

A few minutes later I looked up from a dog-eared and much rubricated copy of Catcher in the Rye to see another young likely backpacker setting my decaffeinated soy latte down in front of me with a friendly smile. I thanked the tall, good-looking youth and asked where he suggested I go if I wanted to take a long, uninterrupted beach walk to clear my head.

‘You want to get away from the town?’ It was said with a European accent, so I guess I was right about the backpacker thing.

‘I think so.’ I’d had my look around the village, smiled and said hello to a dozen friendly locals.

I knew a little of Byron Bay, firstly, from having come down from the Gold Coast during the previous year to help a colleague, Lionel Midford, with his PR launch of a disco-nightclub. Although it seems my Gold Coast time was defined by my mental state, including a serious suicide attempt, there must have been some reasonably lucid periods, albeit, while still poised on an emotional precipice.

For instance, not long after moving up to the Gold Coast I had received a call one day from Brian Walsh, someone I had known during my PR days in the Eighties. Back then, my public relations business, JMA, was booming, thanks to the various high-profile briefs we successfully––and often flamboyantly––handled. Consequently, we received more assignments than we could take on, and often we would flick some of the smaller accounts––the ones we called the ‘rats and mice’ accounts––to the more modest PR businesses being run by men such as Max Markson and Brian Walsh. By 1996, however, having graduated to the big league via his work with the NRL’s Grand Finals, Brian Walsh was now a powerful Foxtel programming executive.

And here he was, offering me a bone, a ‘rats and mice’ one-off guest appearance on his new program Beauty and the Beast.

What Brian was offering was a guest appearance, with fellow panelists Margaret Whitlam, Catherine Greiner and Senator Bronwyn Bishop. It was a parliamentary-type panel to go head-to-head with the host, Stan Zemanek.

Funny, but the thing which sticks most vividly in my memory from my first day on Beauty and the Beast is of the four of us women in the dressing room, togging up for the show. Margaret kept making ironic quips. Catherine seemed aloof. Bronwyn wore a corset.

What comes around goes around. Foxtel, said Brian, would cough up for my travel expenses but from memory, I don’t believe there was an appearance fee offered. Negotiations of that nature would come later, after the producers realized I was good talent and offered me a binding contract as one of the show’s regular panelists.

The salient point here, however is this; I never for one moment let on to Brian that things had happened to my poor brain since our glory days in the Eighties. He knew me not only as a high-profile PR consultant who could handle herself in front of a camera, but also as the lippy wife of a Cabinet Minister who’d gone rogue, shocking the nation back in 1987 with her story of love-making with her ministerial spouse on his ministerial desk. Brian had no account of me as a mentally ill person who had recently been locked up in acute psychiatric wards in both NSW and Queensland, one who’d spent so many months in and out of clinics dealing with a serious bi-polar condition.

I guess he thought the opinionated and often controversial Jan Murray he knew of old would be a good performer on his shiny new agony aunt show.

Poor Mr. Walsh. He went into the thing with blinkers on and would, in the future, have many Jan Murray headaches to deal with.

While my friend Lionel must have believed at the time that I was up to the task he’d asked of me, with hindsight I think he regretted the invitation to help him with his client’s nightclub promotion.

And if you asked him today, I think he would admit that the memory of that weekend still pains him because whenever I mention Byron Bay, poor Lionel will rest his hands in his head and sigh deeply. His off-sider had behaved so unpredictably and erratically that weekend, doing the opposite of what a good publicist cozying up to the media is supposed to do.

Several foodie journalists had been flown in to cover the event and been accommodated at Strop’s Beach Hotel. I spotted several of them sitting poolside, sipping expensive cocktails on the morning of the Opening and figured they were getting in a little too early on the free ride. I lashed out in words that suggested they better earn their keep with positive reviews.

It wouldn’t have happened in my professional PR days, accusing my journalists of exploiting the client’s hospitality. Bad, bad me, but perhaps I was letting go of the years of pent up frustrations, the groveling, having to keep schtum so often when I saw free-loading media types hoovering up every last one of my clients’ canapés and downing jeroboams of the expensive champagne––and then holding back on the love, holding back on the "ink" as we referred to press coverage in an age before social media.

Long before that disastrous weekend I had known Byron Bay. As a child, I’d been brought to the North Coast by my parents on our regular camping trips. That was a long time ago, in an era when instead of million-dollar acreage properties dotting the hills, you had great herds of black and white cattle roaming that same hinterland and giving up their milk to the Norco Butter Factory. Pigs were sent off to the meat works. And for a few years a whaling station plied its merciless bloody trade.

It’s an era that’s passed and, thankfully, the meat works became a cinema and backpacker hostel and the whaling slaughterhouse was replaced by the thriving up-market Beach Hotel, owned up until recently by a man known throughout the nation as Strop, John Cornell of Paul Hogan Crocodile Dundee fame. These are the kind of displacement no one regrets.

After I’d eaten my Ringo Café breakfast, I started thinking about going off to some quiet place for thinking time before I got back on the highway.

To where, who knew? I hadn’t mentioned my morning’s decampment from the Gold Coast to any of my children in Sydney. No one would have a clue where I was or know that I had hit the highway at dawn for places unknown.

Despite the decaf, the adrenalin was pumping and the Voices were persistent.

There were always Voices in the manic phase of my bi-polar condition.

I describe it as being like a CD-ROM––remember them? It played inside my skull. No let-up. Just frantic messaging from one Jan to the other Jan. A constant conversation with the self. And boy, did it get exhausting. So, I was up for a long walk on a quiet beach where I might make some attempt to calm my soul and sort out the next phase of my life.

There would be no going back north. I had left Mermaid Beach and the Gold Coast behind.

I had also left behind a relationship with a sweet and gentle man called Robbie, a Vietnam veteran with a head and heart full of heaviness that in our companionable months together––part of which I spent living with him on his sailing boat Sutra in Southport harbour––I hadn’t been able to lighten. We had both been too emotionally fragile for the relationship to work. Robbie believed his ‘Nam’ experience hadn’t been all that bad. Hello? He had only had to drive the trucks that went out after the bombings and mine explosions to collect the dead, the almost dead and the strewn body parts of his mates! Poor man. If he is alive today I hope he has acknowledged his courage and that the post-traumatic stress arising out of that terrible and unnecessary war he had to endure has abated to some extent.

‘Go down Jonson, past the MITRE 10 till you get to the roundabout,’ said the green-eyed girl who had overheard my question to the youth and stopped, plate stacks in hand, and joined in. ‘Take the Bangalow Road exit out of town. It’s the other side of the lighthouse. Suffolk Park. You’ll walk forever without bumping into anyone down there. It’s just the best beach for some serious mindfulness, if that’s what you’re looking for. I go there, sometimes. Quite often, in fact.’ She shrugged. ‘Or there’s Main Beach, just up the road, here. Or Clarke’s further down.’

She looked deep into my eyes, possibly seeing the mania. ‘I’d go to Suffolk Park,’ she said, softly as she touched my shoulder with her free hand.

Suffolk Park. Mindfulness? A chance to put a sock in the Voices for a while? Okay, I thought. It sounded like a trip I could use.

I finished off my virtuous breakfast at Ringo’s Café and wandered outside, heading for the Golf. Its black bodywork had baked for an hour or so in the north coast morning sunshine and the little lady was a steaming hotbox. I wound down a couple of windows and while I waited for things to cool down, I followed my nose in the direction of the bakery.

Delicious aromas were wafting out of the tiny timber shop across the road. A feast of lovely pastries was displayed in the windows.

I’m not by any means a sweet tooth. Quite the reverse. I go for salty and sour over sweet and sickly every time. But on this odd morning of my flight to nowhere, things were a little topsy-turvy.

Lord make me virtuous, but not right now, said St Augustine, a wily fellow.

Mania feeds on excess.

I opted for not one but two scrumptious-looking big fat almond and cream croissants dowsed in icing sugar, and was devouring the first treat, up to my ears in icing sugar and almond flakes, when I heard a croaky voice behind me.

‘G’day, love,’ said the tiny crone as she passed me on the pavement, hauling a couple of heavy string shopping bags, plus a pile of books, under each wing.

‘Hi, there. Let me help you. Where’s your car?’ I said.

‘Don’t have one, love. She’s okay. I can manage. This and a whole lot bloody more, I reckon. How y’doin, anyway?’ The old lady kept going while looking back over her shoulder at me. ‘It’s young Gloria, isn’t it, Mabel’s girl?’ she called out.

‘No. It’s Jan. I’m new around here. Just passing through,’ I said as I caught up to the woman I guessed to be well north of her eighties if crocodile skin was a pointer. ‘I love your skirt. Did you get it here ... in Byron?’

‘India,’ said the cheerful soul, handing over her load to me then, taking the sides of her hand-embroidered mirrored skirt, doing an agile swirl, flaring the skirt’s long hems out with a dainty kick of a sandaled foot. ‘You been there?’

‘To India?’

‘India, yep. Been there?’ By now she was relieving me of the bundles and starting to walk off again, expecting, I guess, that I keep up the pace alongside.

‘No. But one day I plan to.’

‘Good for you, love. Bye, bye for now. Might see y’round at the Rails, okay? Say hello to y’ mum for me won’t ya?’

‘Sure. See you. Bye.’ I stood for a moment, my eyes following her as she strode towards a pushbike leaning against a shop front.

She dumped her load in the bike basket, tucked up the hem of her skirt and then this cheery little octogenarian, with all the eagerness of a horny back-seat teenager willing to give pleasure, straddled the bicycle.

She turned to wave at me.

I smiled and waved back as she peddled off, bemused as I drove away, heading for the place the young waitress had advised.

By the time I'd gone a short way I was lost. There were no signposts to Suffolk Park. Only to the Lighthouse. I pulled over. I was at Clarkes Beach.

‘A long walk through that rainforest path up there then a steep climb to get to it,’ said the elderly, slow-jogging gent who called out to me through the Golf’s passenger window.

I hadn’t yet asked for directions, although I had leaned out the window and had been about to do so.

‘Sounds good,’ I said to the wiry old codger who seemed as if he were about to attack the climb himself. ‘Thanks.’ He had presumed I wanted to walk to the lighthouse. A reasonable presumption I would later learn. It’s a favourite nature and fitness trek of locals and tourists, alike.

‘That’s the lighthouse walk,’ he said, doubling back and jogging on the spot. ‘But if it’s solitude you’re after, love, then I’d give Clarkes a miss and keep heading down Bangalow Road. Turn off at the Suffolk Park pub. Clifford Street corner. Camping area at the bottom.... but turn left into Alcorn. You’ve got a lovely long beach there. No one’s gonna bother you. You look the thoughtful type to me.’

‘Y’reckon? Thanks.’

Seems Suffolk Park wasn’t letting go of me this morning.

After kitting myself up with instructions from the Samaritan on how to proceed to Suffolk Park I took off and within a few short minutes down Bangalow Road I was making the left at the hotel, at the Clifford Street corner, driving almost to the end where I turned the Golf left onto Alcorn Street as directed, and thinking that I should have invited the friendly jogger to join me. Manic people reach out to the world. Depressives retreat.

Alcorn was a street of ordinary-looking homes, some brick, some fibro, some timber, but typically holiday houses on huge flat blocks of land lining both sides of the street. There was the odd vacant block covered in ferns and pandanus trees but mostly the landscape was unexceptional. The beach was hidden by the houses.

At this point, I have to say, Suffolk Park seemed underwhelming. I was tempted to keep going. At the far end of the street I turned in to a shady cull-d-sac, parked the car and took the sandy track and steps down through the bushes to the beach.

Stunning!

The panorama took my breath away.

Laid out before me for as far as the eye could see were miles and miles of the whitest, purest beach fringed by sand hills and dune grasses and in all its aquamarine glory, a rolling, crashing surf. The magnificent Blue Pacific Ocean.

Imagine this in Europe, I thought once I’d caught my breath. There’d be wall-to-wall deck chairs and touts hitting on sun bathers like botflies on a carcass, hawking their trays of kitsch souvenirs and over-priced sticky umbrella cocktails. The Rivieras, French and Italian, have to suffer over-crowded oily dirty pebbled stretches of the Mediterranean as an excuse for their beaches. And don’t get me started on California’s much flaunted golden shores. Oil pumps blot the horizon.

‘Hi, how y’going?’ The young man stopped sprinting and strolled up to me, his hands on his hips, bending in the middle and straightening up to gasp hungrily at the air around him. ‘Sensational, hey?’ he said, straightening up and throwing his arms out to emphasize his point.

‘And what do they call this ‘sensational’ part of the world?’ I enquired, making sure to keep my eyes modestly focused on his facial features rather than letting them slip to the Speedos.

‘You’re at the far end of Tallows Beach. Broken Head’s the next around the headland, and that pile of rocks you can see out there? That’s Julian Rocks. The Bunjalung call it Nguthungulli.’

‘Nguthungulli, hey? Thanks. It’s magic.’

‘They reckon. See you!’

‘Bye.’

Coming upon a jogger in yellow budgies, running along the lonely strip was one thing but I wasn’t prepared for the man in full business suit and shiny shoes I saw stepping out from the dunes a little way up from me. He carried a clipboard and had a camera hanging on his chest.

‘G’day,’ I said as I came up to him. ‘What’s happening’

‘We’ve got a property for sale in there.’

‘A beachfront, hey? I bet they don’t come up all that often.’

‘Sell to the first person who walks through the door with the cash. That’s the owner’s instruction.’

Why not check out what this young pup was selling, I figured?

‘He just up and left for good, this time. Shot through. Had enough of the place, I guess,’ the salesman informed me as I followed him through thick undergrowth, and he held bracken and bushes out of my way as I ducked the spiky stuff and wondered what I was going to find at the end of this jungle trek.

‘Had a bit of trouble of one kind or another, so he decided to sell. Found another wave, I guess. That’s what they’re like around here.’ He seemed embarrassed to be showing me the property before his people had had a chance to tidy it up.

‘Can’t imagine where he is now could be better than what’s out front, there.’ I pointed over my shoulder to the beach.

‘You won’t think much of the property. Be prepared.’

‘A magical mystery tour?’

‘You wanted to see it, right?’

‘Right.’ Not a lot of humour there. I took the business card he handed me.

‘I warn you, it’s a mess. You had surfies twenty, thirty years ago throwing up these shacks all along the best beach frontages,’ said the man I now understood hailed from First National Real Estate and who obviously thought he had a potential buyer while, at the same time wishing to make it clear he was not at one with Byron’s hippy surfie culture, particularly its impact on local real estate values. At any moment, I expected to be given a spiel about the attractive all mod cons, security lock-up cream brick townhouses he had on his books back at the office.

We broke through the last of the shoreline scrub into the clearing and straight away I knew I was home, knew I was looking at my future. No more than a dilapidated one-room beach shack, but yet a piece of magic nestled behind the dunes on the doorstep of that wild Pacific Ocean out there!

The Voices were clamouring. Buy it! Buy it! It’s ours! It’s ours!

The little shack and its environment were beyond romantic, beyond any of the normal parameters one sets when contemplating a real estate purchase.

It was a keeper.

The agent was right, however. It was a mess. The owner had left behind the detritus of a surfer’s life in the rectangular little fibro hut with timber veranda. And, suspiciously, left it behind in a hurry. Apart from the two enormous surfboards I noticed sticking out from under the wide veranda, when I walked inside the shack the first thing I noticed was the old double mattress laying on the wooden floor down the far end. It had a faded pink cotton blanket crumpled across it.

‘Feels like he’s just gone down to the beach and will be back for breakfast,’ I said.

The agent shook his head. ‘He’s not coming back, I assure you.’

I walked across to the tiny kitchen, no more than a cornered-off section of the rectangle. Doors on the two timber cupboards had come off their hinges a long time ago and hung at an unhealthy angle to the uprights. Their dusty shelves displayed a motley collection of plastic plates and dishes as well as empty jam jars and stoneware coffee mugs, the type I hadn’t seen since the early Seventies. Sitting on the chipped green Formica kitchen bench were several more cups and plates haphazardly stacked, and on closer inspection it was clear they had been abandoned before the remains of the owner’s last meal had been scraped and rinsed from them. Two battered aluminium saucepans and a dirty fry pan similarly stained languished in the putrid sink.

I shuddered, imagining the cockroach colonies that must be celebrating the abandonment of this hovel.

The place had the look, feel and smell of a squat, of casual visitors coming and going and not bothering to clean up. A pile of dusty mosquito nets Methuselah might have slept under were piled in a corner of the room and all around the walls hung faded surfing posters. Globs of old Blue-tack adhered in some spots, evidence of other posters long discarded.

Outside again, and I noted the few sheets of corrugated iron thrown up at the northern end of the veranda and a net curtain strung across. Someone’s ad hoc attempt to accommodate overflow guests, no doubt.

The place was hokey, but it worked, and I was in love with it. Except for the aluminium sliding doors and window frames, which were an affront to any right-thinking person’s sensibilities. But none of this mattered. It would be a challenge.

I felt an empathy with the neglected little shack nestled in behind the dunes. It was begging me to love it.

‘There’s more to see,’ said the young agent, stepping down from the veranda and walking me around to the front of the wide, deep property.

We needed to beat through further undergrowth, lush green rainforest rather than the dryer, greyer dune vegetation this time.

We emerged onto a long front yard, overgrown with rapacious blue flowering vines that climbed up through the trees and ran along the fences then climbed back down to strangle a pile of old timber stacked against the fence. Creeper vine overwhelmed anything standing in its path. A huge four-car garage, grey splintery timber walls, a green iron roof and brown double roller doors stood at the side of the property, up front, at street level. Paspalum weeds grew around the base of the garage, and the two narrow windows facing onto the yard were boarded up. Unlike the cozy-but-grubby shack, there was nothing quaint about the garage. Possibly a fairly recent addition, utilitarian at best. It lacked charm but it would be useful for storage.

It would only be later that I learned what had gone on in that huge garage with its boarded-up windows, rows and rows of shelves lining the interior walls and its extraordinary amount of overhead lighting.

‘The keys for this are back at the office. I could go get them if you’re interested?’

I shook my head. ‘Uh-uh. I’ve found what matters. It’s what’s back there, the shack and the beachfront.’

I left the young man and walked up the yard to the street. Parking earlier to go down to the beach, I’d tucked the Golf in a sandy cul-de-sac, somewhere along this stretch. Now I realized the car was on the other side of the high ti-tree fence and bushes.

‘Serendipity,’ I whispered.

‘Sorry. What did you say?’ The agent had come up behind me.

‘Nothing. Just getting a little carried away,’ I said with a smile.