Starlight Peninsula Read Online Free PDF Page B

primitive impulse, like a panic — he’s gone so I have to find him. I walk for hours. I’m not sure where he’s living; I haven’t found out and he won’t tell me. I just walk and walk, looking in places where he might be.’
    ‘What would you do if you found him?’
    ‘I don’t know. Yell at him. Punch him. It’s not rational. None of it’srational.’ She tipped back the glass, drank. Strange, it was nearly empty. ‘I’m not looking for him in order to punch him,’ she added.
    ‘I understand.’
    ‘What do you understand?’
    ‘The impulse. To go looking.’
    She stared. ‘Really?’
    ‘Sure. I split up with someone not long ago.’
    ‘You’ve got me drunk again.’
    ‘You’re fine.’
    Eloise felt a slackening, she wasn’t able to shut up. ‘My marriage was a cure. A barrier. A remedy.’
    ‘For what?’
    She whispered, ‘Grief.’
    ‘I see. For a previous relationship?’
    ‘He died .’
    ‘Oh. Sorry. Did he have an illness?’
    She looked sadly at her glass. He filled it.
    ‘I shouldn’t drink this.’
    ‘Yolo.’
    She snorted. ‘Did you just say “yolo”?’
    ‘Go on, tell me about it.’
    ‘My partner, before Sean, he was found dead outside his flat with his neck broken. The police found he’d been taking pills for insomnia, and they thought he might have sleepwalked. There was a flimsy wire fence; he fell against it and it gave way. He went over the retaining wall.’
    Silence. The sudden deep barking of a dog along the peninsula.
    ‘It was strange.’
    ‘Why?’
    ‘He never sleepwalked. He might have taken the odd pill, but they told me he took a huge dose. The police told me he had a bruise on his thigh. They never found out how he got it.’
    ‘So what do you think happened?’
    ‘I don’t know. Arthur was a journalist. We both worked in TV, that’s how I met him, just after I’d done my communications degree at AUT. He was older than me.’
    ‘Was he an investigative journalist?’
    ‘He did all sorts of things, TV One current affairs, wrote for Metro and North & South . Worked on screenplays. We were living between his flat and mine. I was about to leave mine permanently and move into his. That morning I’d been in Sydney, I went straight to his flat from the airport.’
    She paused, sipped her drink. It was the crime scene at the house next door that had brought it back. Summer. A hot morning on the side of Mt Eden. Towing her suitcase up the hill to Arthur’s, she’d passed a man wearing a white boiler suit and a shower cap, his shoes encased in bags. When she stopped outside Arthur’s gate a group of people with notebooks looked towards her. They’d been clustered at the top of the retaining wall, looking down.
    Opening the flat she went in, called out, walked around. The rooms were full of sunlight. The doorbell rang.
    On Arthur’s front steps a blonde woman, a detective, asked for her name and spoke strange words. ‘A man has been found dead. We haven’t identified him. We’ve had a suggestion from a resident he might live here.’
    They took her to him. He’d fallen against the rickety wire fence and gone over when it gave way. He was lying on the hot asphalt terrace below the retaining wall. She saw his thin ankles, one dusty shoe come off. She wasn’t allowed to touch him, but she saw that his eyes were closed, his mouth was pursed as if in shock or surprise, and a part of his skull was broken and sticking up out of his matted, bloody hair in a triangular shard.
    After that, the morning had turned unreal, toy-coloured. Therewere seams of evil pulsing behind the sky. Eloise stood on Arthur’s back deck looking at the grassy mountainside, the walking track winding to the summit. There were police up there, searching through the waving grass, pacing along the path, inspecting the wire fence and the stile. She turned to the detective and said, ‘Why are they up there? You must think it wasn’t an accident.’
    ‘We don’t know anything at this