Peter Corris - Comeback

I could certainly do without it and I took a short holiday in the Illawarra. I stayed in the Thirroul motel where Brett Whiteley had died but I scarcely spent any time there. I met Sarah on the evening I arrived and we ate and drank and walked on the beach and made love on a mattress on the deck of her house with the waves just audible when we stopped panting and laughing. We body-surfed at Thirroul beach, ate in the cafes and pubs that provide good food and service that help to keep the area going now that the coal mines have closed and the heavy industry has mostly shut down. We watched the hang-gliders who took off from Stanwell Tops and drifted and swooped far out to sea. The sight of them reawakened a query that had lodged somewhere in my mind but in the heat of our reunion I couldn’t bring it into focus. She sang; I loved her voice. We swapped stories; it was all good, but she was Illawarra and I was Sydney. They weren’t so far apart and we thought we could see a kind of future for us.

When I got back I set up a meeting with Ray Frost and Jane Devereaux. It was sad, but it went well. We said we’d stay in touch but we haven’t. At Jane’s invitation I went to the launch of Harry Tickener’s book, The Whole Truth. There were a lot of media people there but not Michael Tennyson. The tape I had was insurance for Jane and for me and I wondered how long I should keep it and what I should do with it eventually. It was an uncomfortable feeling.

I haven’t heard anything since about Chloe Monkhurst but I keep expecting to. There were no proceedings against her but I couldn’t help wondering what she’d meant when she said: ‘I did, you know.’ She was stoned when she said it but not totally stoned.

The questions the hang-gliders, men and women, had prompted me to ask myself as they soared above the Tasman Sea were these: how disabled was Jason Clement? How competent or otherwise was he with firearms? He had had misadventures with guns before. Had Chloe really been in the car with him or was she as deluded and obsessed about Jason as he was about Bobby Forrest? I didn’t know, and although it niggled at me, I didn’t want to know.