The Lightkeeper's Wife - By Karen Viggers Page 0,30

taxi service, but I’ll give you a lift today. You need it.’

She moved to wave him away, but he gave her no space to protest, grasping her elbow strongly and heaving her into the car. A stiff silence settled between them as he drove back to the cabin, bouncing mercilessly over the dunes. He was clearly impatient with her antics and wanted to be done with her for the day.

At the cabin, he swung open the passenger door and shepherded her out. Then he helped her into the cabin and sat her on the couch. ‘Remember, I have a job to do. My brief is only to check on you.’

She felt humbled and reprimanded. He slammed the front door to punctuate his resentment, then threw himself back into the four-wheel drive and roared away.

8

Leon gripped the steering wheel hard as he hammered along the sand. He couldn’t believe he’d been lumped with this chore. Who was this crazy old dame he had to check on every day?

‘Mrs Mary Mason.’ He said it aloud in a whining derogatory tone. She was not part of his job description; that’s what he’d said to his boss when the idea had first been raised. But his boss had waved Leon’s protests away, saying it’d be a simple task and worth every cent of the extra money. Yeah, right. He’d imagined it’d be a quick drop-in, a wave through the door and a distant cheerio. But he could tell already this old woman expected more from him than that. She wanted company. She wanted attention. Her very greeting today spelled needy, in capital letters. He had enough stuff going down at home without having to take this on too.

He slung the car up the ramp from the beach and made a circle around the empty carpark at Whalebone Point. Should he bother with the toilets today? Or could he just leave them till tomorrow, given that he’d have to pass this place every day from now on, for who knew how many weeks? What a waste of time. And where had this old duck come from, anyway? His boss said she’d paid plenty to enlist some support. It was just to put her family at ease, apparently. Nothing too demanding. Leon snorted. What a pain in the arse. And she expected him to be polite and have cups of tea. To have conversations. That wasn’t part of the deal as he’d understood it.

He slammed out of the car and marched into the restrooms. Some idiot had pulled on one of the toilet rolls and there was a trail of paper all over the floor. Once he’d cleaned it up, there wasn’t much else to do. He ought to head back and confront the home scene. Not much to look forward to there either.

He’d been in this job a while now: three, maybe four years. It wasn’t quite what he’d expected—stocking toilet rolls, clearing rubbish and counting money out of National Park permit envelopes . . . if the tight-arse buggers decided to pay. Most visitors slunk by the pay stations, pretending they hadn’t seen them. Nobody would know, of course, because there were no manned booths; it was an honesty system.

When he’d done the ranger training in Hobart, he’d imagined himself in one of the big parks—Cradle Mountain and Lake St Clair, or doing track maintenance in the Eastern or Western Arthurs. That would have been his prize posting—being paid to go bush, and maybe even manning one of the huts on the overnight walks. But once things had deteriorated at home, he hadn’t had a choice. With his sister gone up to Devonport years ago, he’d been the only one who could step in, like a United Nations peacekeeping force.

He hadn’t been particularly keen to get back to Adventure Bay. It was too damned quiet. Tourists might think it was pretty; the beaches were nice and there was a spectacular boat tour you could take out along the south-east coast of Bruny. But the place was a backwater, just the musty old museum and a few monuments and a coffee shop. If he hadn’t left Bruny for a spell to complete his course in Hobart, he’d have gone mad . . . although perhaps that was an exaggeration. He did love Bruny. And the coastline was in his blood.

But what was he going to do about this Mrs Mason? He cursed himself for agreeing to a cup of tea tomorrow. And what was he