Attack at the Dolphin

Bridget Wilson

Description

Attack at the Dolphin is written by former Sydney Morning Herald journalist and woman-about-town Bridget Wilson. Set during the hard drinking high roller days of 1990s Sydney, this short entertaining read is a sometimes painful, always moving, often funny meditation on marriage, fidelity, love and lust, loyalty and betrayal. Married for many years to her most devoted fan, the books protagonist finds herself coming undone when a bright young cadet at the newspaper where she works starts paying her attention. Flattered and surprised, she finds herself drinking in Sydneys trendiest bars with a toyboy on her arm. Meanwhile her patient husband waits at home. Then one of her best women friends steps into the equation. And all hell breaks loose, The books central scene is set in one of Sydneys best known inner-city pubs, The Dolphin. It is here that the woman protagonist, all too aware of her own hypocrisy, confronts her unfaithful young lover and disloyal friend.

Informations

• Publié par: eBookIt.com
• Date de parution: 16 mars 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781456615048
• Langue: English

Extrait

Attack at the Dolphin
 
 
by
Bridget Wilson
Copyright 2013 Bridget Wilson,
All rights reserved.
 
 
ISBN-13: 978-1-4566-1504-8
 
 
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.
 
 
A Sense of Place Publishing 2013
ONE
THE DOCS
In the year Sara bought her first pair of Doc Marten shoes, they were the epitome of rebel cool. It had been a prolonged process. They had to be just the right pair.
 
When she finally found the right Docs, she chose the black, lace-up ones with a sturdy sole. To Sara they were the real deal. To her they looked perfect under jeans, or with white socks and a floral summer dress. In other words they went with just about anything. They were, if nothing else, versatile.
 
The Doc Marten shoes were expensive by her standards, setting her back $80 from an Army surplus store on the wide, ugly street of Broadway which led out of Sydney’s CBD and on into the spread of the western suburbs.
 
Docs, as they were almost universally known, were the boot of choice for skinheads in the 1960s and punks in the 1980s. It was 1991 when Sara got her Docs.
 
Sara grew up on a farm but was now a city girl through and through. Generations back her ancestors had made the tortuous trip by ship from Europe. She liked to think her rebel style originated in the toughness of her ancestors.
 
But the last thing Sara had intended was to use her brand new Docs as a weapon.
 
Sara had been married to her great love Paul for the past decade. They were comfortable together.
 
Paul worked as a television cameraman; Sara as a newspaper journalist. They had started out their married life working in television news – she in front of the camera, he behind it. They had made a good team.
 
Sara learnt all the tricks of the trade from Paul, who was tall, lanky and had a fine mane of long dark hair. Paul might not have been good-looking in the classic sense, but Sara thought he was beautiful – with his big brown eyes and long lashes, his soft skin and very large hands and feet. Sara loved her gentle giant. Paul was six foot six inches in the old measurement – a good two metres tall. There was no hiding out in corners for him.
 
After various stints in television newsrooms Sara returned to her original trade, writing for newspapers.
 
Her great-great grandfather had been a printer’s apprentice in Glasgow before emigrating to Australia, where he started up a newspaper in the 1800s. She was proud that printer’s ink ran in her veins.
 
As a child Sara had been a tomboy, a wild child preferring the company of horses to boys on the sprawling, wide-open spaces of the farm where she grew up. At a time when women were still pioneering their way into the trade, her rough and tumble childhood prepared her well for the daily mayhem of a reporter’s life.
 
By the 1990s Sara had been a journalist for 20 years and knew the newspaper business well. The three-hour lunches and rampant greed of the 1980s were morphing into a more sophisticated, sober tone, but the industry and its proprietors were still living in clover. The internet was yet to destroy the so-called ‘rivers of gold’, the tens of thousands of notices and advertisements large and small which filled the paper every day and were the source of editors’ massive salaries.
 
At the time of the buying of the Docs, Sara had a mane of thick curly brown hair, which she had dyed black to go with her shoes. Being a naturally maternal type, ample with her blessings both physical and spiritual, Sara thought nothing, at first, of befriending one of her younger colleagues, Anna. Anna was big and buxom and had very pale blonde hair. Her peaches and cream skin was her best asset, while her sharp wit and unorthodox approach to life gave her an appealing personality.
 
One day they were walking through Sydney’s famous botanical gardens when it started to rain. Sara put up her umbrella and offered room under it to Anna, who twirled around in the downpour and exclaimed: ‘I don’t believe in umbrellas!’
 
Anna’s thin summer dress stuck to her every curve. Her hair was plastered to her face, her mascara ran and she looked a mess. To everybody but a passing male.
 
Sara was 12 years older than Anna but the difference in their ages didn’t seem to matter. For a period they were virtually inseparable, often going out on the town together. They both had a large capacity for alcohol and fun. They worked hard and played hard. Their after-work shenanigans centered around various pubs. Most often they frequented a drinking hole over the road from the paper – these sessions routinely beginning between the paper’s first and second editions. The first edition went to press around 10pm, allowing time for the papers to be loaded onto trucks waiting in the docking area and sent off to the country areas of New South Wales, Queensland and even as far afield as Western Australia.
 
The catch cry amongst the sub-editors, of which at this stage Sara was one, was, ‘I’ll see you over the road after the first’, meaning ‘Let’s see how many drinks we can squeeze in before we come back to put the second, or city, edition, out.’
 
The Grand had been serving hard-drinking journalists for many years. It was by no means a salubrious establishment. The poor lighting helped to hide the fact the tatty carpet had absorbed many litres of beer over the decades, creating a distinctive, atmospheric smell no amount of industrial cleaning could ever erase. Its biggest advantage, apart from proximity to the office, was the staff, who were friendly and never objected to their patrons’ often questionable behavior, which included smoking joints in the beer garden, snorting cocaine in the toilets and behaving very amorously towards each other after taking the odd ecstasy tablet.
 
Not everyone made it back from the Grand for the second edition. On a couple of occasions Sara had been tasked with getting the cartoonist Mayhew’s signature from him while he remained drunkenly glued to a bar stool. This was in the pre-digital days, so his barely legible scrawl had to be cut out and glued onto his cartoon, one of the paper’s most-loved features. Finally, Mayhew, not much liking his drinking sessions being interrupted by mere things like work obligations, got clever enough to leave his signature on a little piece of paper on his desk. Before the era of mineral water and gym bags, colourful drunks like the cartoonist were revered for their ability to drink and work at the same time.
 
Another colleague who was to play a large part in Sara’s life was Andy. Around six foot three, he too was younger than Sara, boyishly good-looking and a bit of a snappy dresser.
 
The first thing Sara noticed about Andy was a very good, well-rounded butt. He looked good in jeans and wore his Levi’s well, over long, nicely muscled legs. He usually wore brown Doc Martens shoes which he kept well-polished.
 
Andy was a cadet reporter and was learning the ropes on one of the weekly sections. He would often pass by Sara’s desk and often had a smart-arse thing to say. Sara was flattered that one so young would flirt with her. Not just flattered, downright intrigued.
 
Andy was at the Grand one evening after work and came over to Sara’s table with his drink. He had an unusual confidence about him for someone so far down the journalistic pecking order. They talked easily, their banter quick and witty. Sara found herself laughing a lot and wondering where this beautiful young man had come from. He too was a country boy and had moved to the big smoke after getting his degree from a provincial university.
 
As things turned out, Andy lived only a couple of blocks away from Sara and Paul and that evening offered to walk her home. The walk through the dark streets was fun and their conversation never flagged. Andy was clever and attentive and clearly very interested in hearing some of Sara’s stories.
 
They came to his house first. He’d been talking about a review he’d done of a play she liked and wondered if she’d like to come in and read it in his clippings file. ‘Oh, so you want me to come up and see your etchings,’ she quipped.
 
It didn’t take long for Andy to seduce Sara. She had been wondering for a while what that butt would look like out of those jeans. She soon found out. Sara had had a fairly rich sex life before she met her husband, so was no slouch in the sack. But she’d never had a lover quite like Andy. He was so adept it took her breath away.
 
‘Where did you learn this?’ she asked the 20-something man, genuinely amazed at his sexual prowess and technique. He just shrugged good-naturedly and grinned a boyish grin as if to say, ‘Dunno; it just comes naturally.’ He had a certain touch that sent her into a spin. Sara was a goner. In the weeks to come she sent him flowers and gave him gifts. Sara was completely in lust with Andy. One day after she had a huge bunch of flowers delivered to his desk, she was chuffed to see him blush.
 
‘Thank you, darling,’ he whispered as he brushed past her desk on his way to get a vase of water.
 
At first Anna was bemused at Sara’s affair with Andy. There was no judgment, just a genuine interest as to how Sara could juggle a job, a husband and a toy boy. Some days she would go along on Sara’s various assignations with Andy in different bars and restaurants. Anna claimed to think Andy was a dick. They were often rude to each other, which Sara thought was funny. Their insults towards each other became art forms as they competed to outdo one another with their putdowns. Sara was delighted. Sometimes she would roar with laughter as the two traded inventive barbs.
 
‘You’re the maypole around which we twirl,’ proclaimed Anna one day in yet another bar.