Last Long Drop Read online

  THE

  LAST

  LONG

  DROP

  A NOVEL

  MIKE SAFE

  IMPACT PRESS

  First published in 2017 by Impact Press, an imprint of Ventura Press

  PO Box 780, Edgecliff NSW 2027 Australia

  www.impactpress.com.au

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Copyright © Mike Safe 2017

  This book is a work of fiction. The characters and incidents are the products of the writer’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any other information storage retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

  Author: Safe, Mike

  Title: The Last Long Drop / by Mike Safe

  ISBN: 9781925384277 (paperback)

  ISBN: 9781925384291 (ebook)

  Australian fiction.

  Ghostwriting.

  Cover Illustration: Marcelo Baez

  Cover type design: Working Type

  Internal design: Working Type

  The paper in this book is FSC® certified.

  FSC® promotes environmentally responsible, socially beneficial and economically viable management of the world’s forests.

  Mike Safe was a newspaper reporter and feature writer for forty years, the last nineteen as a staff writer for The Weekend Australian Magazine. He lives at Bondi Beach in Sydney.

  For Jenni … then, now, forever

  ONE

  On the eleventh day of the rest of his life, John Harcourt lazed in bed and watched the ceiling fan as it turned slowly in the cloying January heat. It thwacked, thwacked away, carving through the early morning air that hung in the bedroom that was already saturated with eastern sky sunlight.

  His wife, Tess, a publisher, was already up and off, returning to her office after the Christmas break. Their daughter, Kirsten, multimedia star on the rise, magazine editor and TV and radio commentator on all matters pertaining to bright young things – and who didn’t live at the beachside family home anyway – was no doubt also back at her desk in the city. And then there was their son, Jack, in London with his rock band, the Solar Sons, coming to terms with the cold and grey of the English winter while attempting to build a profile before the release of their debut album over there. Well, good for them, Harcourt thought, and I’m lying here staring at the bedroom ceiling.

  Eleven days earlier, December twenty-fourth, Christmas Eve, he had left his job. No, he hadn’t resigned or been fired – he had been made redundant, which was a nicer way of saying ‘we don’t want you around anymore so piss off.’ He’d been a newspaper columnist and feature writer for fifteen years and before that an ‘on the street’ reporter for another fifteen or so. His culling had been inevitable. The newspaper game was dying. Too many bodies, too few sales, advertisers fleeing elsewhere. The internet, blogs, never-ending digital news cycles and all sorts of social network gibber now consumed attention spans. Everything you never needed to know about everything you never wanted to know was available right here right now.

  In this latest round of redundancies, packages had been offered to a number of others, all fifty-five, Harcourt’s age, or more. That was the crucial number, apparently – no doubt plucked out of the ether by some bean counter in Human Resources, better known as the Department for Unemploying People. Of late, the management big boys were seldom happy, although money could always be found to look after their own, including those who did the sacking.

  Harcourt hadn’t particularly wanted to go, but if the penny pinchers didn’t lop his head this time, they’d get him down the track – ‘Thanks for thirty-something years of your life, Mr Harcourt.’ Still, the payout had been reasonable, at least compared to the poor schmucks in ad sales and the like whose livelihoods had dried up months before.

  One of his best friends on the paper, Gordy Stone, a middling editor of undetermined responsibilities, had also been offered a redundancy but had decided to stay and tough it out. Gordy, aged fifty-seven, twice divorced with three kids still in private schooling, as well as a serious drinking habit to support, was in desperate need of a steady income.

  Harcourt had exited the newspaper’s sliding glass doors with nothing more than a large cardboard box containing years of reminders, some worthwhile, most forgettable, a lot of stolen stationary and a couple of bottles of decent red wine he’d nicked from the office of the loathsome deputy managing editor, Tab Markinson, when the little shit, known to one and all as ‘Toxic Tab,’ was off somewhere, no doubt ingratiating himself with senior management. Yeah, Harcourt had managed to get away free and fairly easy, his pride more or less intact.

  So he lazed, gazing dully out of the bedroom window at the back garden littered with the detritus of the night before. Flies buzzed about the barbecue, which was slick with congealed fat from what had been overcooked steaks and gourmet sausages. The ever-present miner birds had given up on a cat or whatever had held their squawking attention over a back fence and were now squabbling over pieces of discarded meat and chewed bone. A group of diligent pigeons worked their way through stray bread crusts and the remains of a spilled bowl of potato chips and greasy dip.

  It had been a lively night and hence Harcourt’s sluggish disposition. Gordy Stone had been there with his latest live-in, a bottled blonde named Sandy, who did something or other in fashion PR and who thought she was still thirty. Tom Burkowski and his wife, Margie, had also attended. Burkowski was a sports columnist and Harcourt’s other close friend on the paper. Bent-eared and broken-nosed from his long-gone days as a star rugby league second-rower, Burk, as he was known to one and all, had made the surprising transition from scrum to press box, surprising because he could write with a lyrical quality all but missing in Australian sports reporting and even more surprising because in his playing days he’d been a forward, supposedly the brutal game’s bash and barge foot soldiers, hardly noted for their intellect. Now in his early fifties, Burk would be among the last to face redundancy as he maintained a remarkable ability to break the big sports stories, from football drug busts and racehorse dopings to the true confessions of those sportspeople who regularly ran off the rails in any of a dozen spectacularly awful ways. As anyone who had been around newspapers long enough knew, the most valuable member of the staff was the one guaranteed to tip winners at Randwick on Saturday, not the self-important Canberra correspondent who pontificated about the likely outcome of next year’s election.

  Working in book publishing, Tess, had an empathy with her husband’s newspaper friends. She was deputy publisher at the Australian headquarters of a New York based multinational, and had so far thrived in the upheaval that had now cast her husband aside. E-books, digital readers and other immediate ways of getting words before customers were where it was focused and Tess McCormack – she preferred her maiden name – was up for this challenge, even as old-fashioned paper books, unlike newspapers, were doing a good job holding the line in sales.

  Tall and long-legged with a mane of dark hair that had a habit of falling across one of her hazel eyes as she worked at her invariably cluttered desk, Tess, now fifty-two, had made her name more than twenty years before as a passionate editor, nurturing young writers in what had then been Australian publishing’s self-absorbed little world. Now it was like everywhere else, with the bottom line ruling, particularly in what was still treated as a far-flung outpost of the empire where print runs were comparatively modest and every dollar had to be accounted for, if not recouped and then some. Newspapers and books might have been heading in
different directions, but they had a lot in common.

  Harcourt contemplated the time-honoured Australian way of shutting down for the month from Christmas to the Australia Day holiday at the end of January. Even the most publicity-addicted politician understands this ritual as summer turns up the heat and turns off the national attention span while everyone goes to the beach, watches cricket on television, or the unfortunate fight drought-fuelled bushfires or cyclone-induced floods.

  Tess, however, had other priorities. Writers’ Week, part of the Adelaide Festival of the Arts, was on in March. There were always enough of the famous and not-so-famous who wanted to flee the cold of New York or European winter for the blindingly blue skies and potentially blast furnace heat of a South Australian summer that refused to end and these fly-ins could be just as demanding as any rock star or supermodel when it came to having their needs met.

  Therefore, she had driven off to tend to such things in her company-leased Mini, the kind of car this publishing company at least still gave to a female executive they valued – chic and zippy while still sensible enough to fit the book world demeanour in these cash-strapped times. Tess didn’t give a hoot about cars as long as they ran in a straight line and had a convenient cup holder for the endless skinny coffees she consumed. As Harcourt had still half dosed under the sheets, she’d called out that she would phone later. Then the front door slammed, the Mini revved up and she was gone.

  Harcourt hadn’t even heard her go as he lay there. He’d stayed up late after the barbecue, knowing he had nothing in particular to do in the morning. Slouching on the living room couch, beer in hand, while Tess prepared for bed and an early start, he’d flicked through the TV channels and happened across a nineties movie, Heavy Water Falling, starring the Australian actor Mike Vargas, who was about the biggest local box office star to light up Hollywood since the wild days of Errol Flynn and just as headline catching for all sorts of bad boy indiscretions. The surfing drama equivalent to the movie La La Land’s idea of jazz was a total cheese-fest, packed as it was with hunky-looking guys in board shorts and hot babes wearing high cut bikinis, while the fake tan bottle deserved a mention in the credits. Still, it had made many millions, peddling some sort of idealised big wave fantasy to the plains-dwellers of Middle America which, of course, was the whole point of the exercise.

  Tess, wandering by on her way to bed, had been suitably scornful. ‘Oh, my god, would you look at that! Heroic men with airhead women throwing themselves at them. Is it true all you surfer boys are really so lucky?’

  ‘Err, no,’ said Harcourt. ‘Not this one anyway.’ He knew she was just winding him up in her playful way. ‘But I’ll go for a surf in the morning and try to do something valiant – wrestle a great white shark or save a super model from drowning. I mean, what else have I got to do with my life at the moment?’

  ‘Poor boy.’ She’d kissed him goodnight. ‘That would be excellent. Get you out of the house for an hour or two.’

  Hmm, not so nice. Talk about damning with faint praise.

  As he’d slouched there taking in the crashing waves and Vargas rolling about on the wet sand with his all-but-naked love interest, Harcourt thought back a few years to when he’d gone to Vanuatu to interview the man himself and spent a couple of days on the set of a war movie he was starring in. He’d come across as an agreeable enough guy, super confident and still full of Aussie male bluster, but, hey, he was a star, a big, bankable Hollywood star. It had rained for most of the time Harcourt had been up there and so there was lots of downtime. Like Harcourt, Vargas was a surfer, even if getting on in years, having grown up on Sydney’s beaches, and they’d spent much of the time talking about waves, beaches and boards.

  Wherever they’d gone, they were shadowed by this massive black guy – what was his name? – Dexter something, an ex-Navy Seal, who was Vargas’s go-to man for anything and everything. Discreet and ever-watchful, Dexter had seemed to be much more than simply hired muscle as he worked an ever-present satellite phone, talking to all sorts of people about all sorts of logistical stuff, travel, contracts, personnel and the like. The couple of mornings Harcourt was there, and despite the rain, Dexter would have Vargas outside at the crack of dawn, putting him through a round of excruciating exercises that would stop a man thirty years his junior. To his credit, Vargas pushed through it all, dragging himself back inside looking like a half-drowned rat, an ageing drowned rat. It had been an eye-opener of a trip.

  Ah, those had been the days, he thought, when print ruled. Now he faced nights watching really bad TV and mornings slumped in bed looking for a reason to get up.

  After finally making the bed, Harcourt washed his bleary-eyed face, brushed his teeth, pulled on a rumpled pair of shorts, tee-shirt and well-worn sneakers and headed down the corner to the beach. Into the afternoon, a sea breeze might kick in and bring some relief from the heat, at least here along the coastal fringe. If it didn’t, the day would regress into yet another stinker. The beachfront was an often walked two blocks away down a street littered with the sorry detritus of a Christmas already forgotten – busted bits of tinselled trees and torn Santa wrappings, garbage bins tipped over by drunken backpackers while those that were still upright overflowed with beer and wine bottles from that other celebratory moment, New Year’s Eve. Every so often there would be a dried glob of vomit or a broken bottle, its shattered shards reflecting the sun that now climbed resolutely into the sky – ah, the joys of the ‘Festive Season’.

  Harcourt quite liked Christmas Day, even its faux rituals of happy family get-togethers, but being a man who’d seen a bit of life he had now grown weary of New Year’s Eve. Just how many fireworks displays exploding over Sydney Harbour could one watch, each bigger, noisier, costlier and smokier than the last? How many times could you be assured by some stupidly grinning television talking head that this year would be better than the last, which was supposed to have been better than the one before? For him, now jarringly unemployed and into the eleventh day of coming to terms with his new reality, New Year’s salutations rang about as true as Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.

  Ambling along, still fuzzy headed and stiff limbed, Harcourt started humming the tune to Kris Kristofferson’s ‘Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down’ where the hung-over guy wakes up from a Saturday night of carousing and guitar picking to walk the streets where he is greeted by the hushed morning after. Three chords and the truth, as the cliché went about such country songs. Except for Harcourt it was more ‘Monday Mornin’ Wakin’ Up’.

  Reaching the beachfront, he crossed the already busy coastal drag, a Rip Curl surf shop franchise on one corner, a pizza chain on the other, and walked through the park, its rubbish bins also overflowing, the grass scuffed and half dead, to the concrete promenade that ran the length of the kilometre of sand. More surfers than he could count, scores of them, were already in the water, hardly unusual for early January, hot and humid, the height of the holiday season. The waves were a couple of feet in the old language – half a metre plus, metric-wise – with an occasional bigger one. Hardly the sort of conditions to set the pulse racing, but still kind of fun.

  The kids, the grommets, were in their element, ripping up the dumping little shorebreak on their short, lightweight boards and showing an enviable contortionist’s ability to put their bendable bodies, and hence boards, in positions that older guys like Harcourt could barely remember let alone match. At a nice little peak, up towards the middle of the beach, the longboards were at what appeared to be a more reasoned sort of play. Here were the older guys, cruising and gliding, catching little left and right handers that spiralled off the peak to offer smooth rides of fifty metres or so to the beach. A shallow sandbank that was the reason for the peak had been there and in good shape for a month or so, unusual for summer when the banks normally deteriorated under fluky sea breezes and lacklustre swells.

  As Harcourt slouched along the promenade, shielding his eyes from the steadily climbing sun, he noticed a familiar figu
re out-paddle the mob to snare a slightly bigger wave. The surfer cranked a smooth turn off the tail of a nine-foot-plus longboard, turning it sharply off the top of the then breaking wave, bringing it back around and into perfect trim before picking up speed and flying down the line. As the wave broke with precise symmetry, the rider gracefully cross-stepped his way to the nose of the board and held this position all the way to the beach, his back classically arched, toes of both feet draped casually over the front tip. A perfect hang ten. With the wave about to dump onto the sand, he then back peddled towards the tail of the board before neatly flicking it over the top of the expiring wall of water.

  It was Cruz Jones. His proper name was Malcolm but no one, among the beach crowd at least, had called him that for as long as Harcourt had known him, which was from way back when Cruz was a kid, thirty or more years ago. Cruz, as in Cruiser, or so Harcourt supposed, was deputy chief lifeguard, and one of the better surfers on the beach, especially on longer boards. He never had much to say and like a lot of class riders, at least among this crew, let his actions in the water do the talking.

  Lazing against the promenade railing in front of the break was a pair of other long-time locals, Bobby ‘Brown’ Burns and Sam ‘Carpark’ Shannon. Surfers, certainly those who had known one another long enough, had that Australian way of handing out silly nicknames. Bobby Burns was called ‘Brown’ after a much admired Sydney surfer from the sixties, Bobby Brown, who had made the final of the first world championships held in 1964 at Manly Beach – only to die a few years later after a barroom brawl in which he was stabbed with a broken beer glass. As well as the obvious connection because of the name Bobby, derived from the more formal Robert, there was a more sardonic reason: Brown seemed at times to have what could only be described as his own version of a death wish. He would paddle out on the biggest, most dangerous days, taking off on monster waves that others, including some very committed surfers, wouldn’t even contemplate. In his time, Brown had suffered some horrendous wipeouts, being held down under tonnes of crushing white-water for seemingly lung-busting periods before somehow surfacing to reclaim daylight and his life. On such occasions, he was also known as the Toad – as in Take Off And Die – although this was more in grudging admiration of his daring than any sort of disparagement. When asked why he did such things, Brown would simply smile in his haphazard way and reply, ‘You do what you do.’