Fishing for Stars Read Free

despite everything, I know she loves me and always has.
    I’ve often mused about how I could have loved and continue to love two such completely dissimilar women, both utterly convinced they were right in all matters. Absolute conviction must be a nice thing to possess, but it’s hell on everyone else.
    ‘Nick, I have to go. I have a meeting this afternoon with Macquarie Bank. They’re still young – unlike the others who are all ruled by old men with paunches – and they’re considering throwing their support behind renewable energy. It looks very promising.’
    I glance at my paunch. ‘I see, and their money isn’t tainted?’ My voice is still a semitone too sharp.
    She ignores this. ‘I’ll call you in a couple of days, darling.’
    ‘Yeah, righto, I’ll look forward to that. Morning business or evening pleasure?’ I ask, a touch acerbic. While Marg calls me often enough from Sydney, her ‘Lovely to speak with you, darling!’ calls always come in the evening when she’s through with her daily lists and is feeling mellow after a regulation gin and tonic.
    ‘Bye, darling, love you!’ The phone clicks in my ear. Corroboree frog will be duly ticked off as business completed. It is something I had wanted to do anyway. When you mention that frogs are endangered, people are at best only vaguely concerned. Frogs are not a priority on the endangered species list, yet they are often the canary in the coal mine, one of the warnings that our environment is changing, usually for the worse.
    Despite the humidity outside, I walk back onto the front verandah and flop into the cane chair; the view over Beautiful Bay never fails to calm me. It’s too early for a drink, although I’m almost tempted. That’s yet another thing that has changed: the level in the Scotch bottle seems to be dropping more quickly since Anna died.
    I am becoming dismayed at my despondency, a mood that in truth has little or nothing to do with Marg’s call, but obviously has something to do with my recurring dream about killing Anna.
    I’ve always been a loner, content with my own thoughts, but never moody or churlish. I’ve observed such weakness and self-indulgence in other men and thought less of them for it.
    Now I know that if I should allow the small dark cloud of despair hovering above my head to envelope me, at the very least I will destroy this gorgeous day and be tempted to open the Scotch bottle far too early.
    In an attempt to dispel my gloom I try to dismiss the Marg Hamilton of Japanese fishing licences and recall the stunning twenty-six-year-old WRAN in Naval Intelligence who stole my virginity in March 1942, a month after I’d turned eighteen.
    By sailing Madam Butterfly , a twenty-nine-foot gaff-rigged cutter, across the Pacific from Java to Fremantle, I’d escaped the Japanese invasion with only hours to spare. It had been in Java that I’d first met Anna, the illegitimate daughter of a wealthy Dutch businessman and a Javanese woman who had died in childbirth.
    Anna was my first love, a young girl so beautiful that my heart still pounds at the thought of her at sixteen.
    Upon my arrival in Fremantle after a difficult and eventful month at sea, I was questioned by a Naval Intelligence team, which included Marg Hamilton. She took me home and joyously bedded me less than a month after Anna and I had said a tearful farewell, promising to be mutually faithful and to ‘wait’ for each other until we could consummate our love, however long that might take.
    Alas, at eighteen, the one-eyed snake is king. Marg snapped her fingers and I was halfway through undoing my fly buttons before the snap had echoed round the room. She taught me everything a boy should know in the limited time we enjoyed before I left for Melbourne to join the navy. Whereas Anna made my heart pound each time she appeared, the WRAN with the beautiful breasts and long legs gave me a hard-on every time I looked at her. Duplicity had come early in my long