I made Mum’s lunch and gave it to her, then sat with her while she ate. It was a nice day outside, bright and warm, but Mum liked to keep the curtains in the living room drawn. It was always dark in here, no matter the time of day. Too dim, half the time, to see the framed photos of Mum and Dad on the bookshelf. Sometimes I wondered if she liked to stay in here to be close to them. I didn’t like to look at them much. Every memory I had of Dad was backlit by sunlight and set to a soundtrack of the waves lapping at the sand. I didn’t like to think of him when the world was dark and still.
I watched one of the women on the soap opera detail her nefarious scheme in a monologue. She was going to destroy her sister’s business empire and steal her man, or something. She was probably supposed to be the evil character, but maybe her sister was like Nipper Will, in which case, good for her. I always liked on soap operas how characters said what they were planning out loud. If you did that in real life, you’d be called crazy, but in real life nobody’s got an audience hanging on their every move. Most of us hardly get noticed at all.
I imagined my own unblinking monologue. Clenching my fist and saying in a fierce undertone: “I will clean out Dominic’s yard, and I will talk to him, and I will stare at his arse, and nobody on Dauntless, not even my brother, can stop me!”
It wasn’t revenge—it was barely even rebellion—but it wasn’t like Nipper Will had a multimillion dollar fashion empire I could sabotage. But it made me feel both powerful and petty to know I was doing something that Will didn’t like.
“Hey, Mum?”
She didn’t look up. Her fork scraped across her plate.
“I have to go do some yard work,” I said. “I’ll come back before it’s dark outside.”
I grabbed a few things from our kitchen before we left, including a big pot, because I didn’t know if Dominic would have everything we needed. A strange burst of nervousness bubbled through me as I stepped over our back fence into his yard, like I really was that soap opera character planning a seduction, instead of just going over there to show him how to cook a mudcrab.
Button John didn’t think Dominic was that hot, which just showed how ridiculous he was, because Dominic was hot. Button John had also said he’d do him anyway, because he might have been blind, but he wasn’t totally stupid. Pickings were slim on Dauntless. And it was all well and good to say you’d do someone, but how did that work? Like, what were you supposed to do? Yeah, I was a nineteen-year-old virgin, and, as I knocked on Dominic’s kitchen door, I was suddenly acutely aware of that.
He opened the door, a grin spreading over his face. “Hey.”
His uniform was also hot, which felt wrong, because I was a Dauntless Islander, and we were only supposed to think fuck the police in one very specific context. And not the one that involved nakedness.
“Hey,” I said.
His kitchen hadn’t been remodelled like the front of the house, but at least someone had got rid of all the chintzy shit that Short Clarry’d had hanging up when this had been his place, like someone’s nana’s sewing box had exploded. The kitchen was bare whitewashed walls and mostly empty counter space now. The only flash of colour was the purple and orange striped tea towel hanging over the oven door.
There was a big cat sitting on one end of the benchtop, like it owned the place.
“Oh, hey,” I said. “You’ve got Princess.”
“Princess? I called him Frank.”
“She was Short Clarry’s cat, and she’s a girl.”
“Well, she’s called Frank now,” Dominic said. “And she doesn’t speak English, so she doesn’t know Frank isn’t a girl’s name.”
“I used to leave food out for her,” I said. “But she’d never come inside our place. I guess she was just waiting for someone to let her back in here.”
“I’m going to need to order some cat food,” Dominic said. “I have to phone the barge company and see if they’ll bring my groceries over every month if Woolworths will deliver to them, so that Mavis can’t starve me out.”
I set my pot on the benchtop next to the cat.
“What have you got there?”
“Stuff we need for the crab. Did you put him in the freezer?”
“Yeah. I even apologised to him first. I’m honestly too scared to open it again. What if he’s not dead? What if he’s in there just biding his time?”
I snorted, those bubbles bursting in my bloodstream again—he was hot and funny—and unpacked what I’d brought from home: salt, a chilli, a lemon, an onion, two tomatoes, and a can of sardines.
“What’s all this for?” The heat from Dominic’s body leached into mine as he stood beside me. “Don’t we just boil it?”
“Yeah,” I said, “but this is for the sauce.”
I filled the pot with water, dumped some salt into it, and put it on the stovetop to boil, and then rummaged around in the kitchen drawers while Dominic leaned against the bench and let me.
“You don’t have a mortar and pestle, do you?”
“No,” he said. “Because this is my kitchen, not Gordon Ramsay’s.”
