Sharp Turn - Marianne Delacourt [13]
I spotted him bounding crazily about in the sand below, chasing his ball, seagulls, anything that looked like fun.
I waved and called out to Smitty. She saw me and threw Fridge’s ball back up towards the dunes in my general direction. It landed on the rocks below where I sat.
Fridge bounded across the strip of beach and leaped effortlessly up the jagged outcrop to reclaim it. He paused at the top, his nose pricked up into the wind as he scented me. With an excited yelp, he dropped the ball and rushed at me like a bull. I reacted too slowly and he fell upon me before I could move. Giant paws knocked me on my back and gobs of stringy saliva slathered my hair. I tried to shout but a dog’s tongue the size of an Atlantic salmon muted me.
The next thing I heard was the gulping swallow of my burger disappearing into that giant mouth and gullet.
‘Fridge! Fridge!’ shouted Smitty, puffing up the rocks. ‘Bad dog! Get down!’
After a bit more remonstrating, some manoeuvring to attach his lead and some heavy-duty tugging, Fridge withdrew. Not without one final sloppy lick up the side of my neck and into my ear.
Dazed, I sat up.
‘Dammit, T, sorry about that, but you know Fridge thinks you’re cool.’
Barely restraining her laughter, Smitty handed her beach towel to me to dry off. Then she tapped Fridge on the haunches with his lead and he sat down, tongue lolling happily. ‘What are you doing here anyway?’
I scraped up the remnants of my burger – now only bits of beetroot and lettuce strewn across Mona’s bonnet – with the wrapper and dumped them in a nearby bin.
‘On my way to Sable’s. Jees, Fridge.’ I wagged my finger at the unruly dog. ‘Don’t eat my food or we can’t be friends.’
He yipped.
‘I think you’d better get going before he decides he’s coming home with you,’ Smitty said.
I nodded. ‘Good idea.’
Fridge howled as I jumped into Mona and began to reverse out. The last thing I saw was him trying to haul Smitty after me. I planted my foot to make a quick escape.
Sable’s was directly behind the Stoned Crow (a place of many a cider incident in my early drinking days). My cousin Crack and his go-getting girlfriend, Sable, had bought the warehouse lease from a fashion designer wholesaler and converted the place into a slick cocktail bar. The interior was all acid-cleaned walls and plush couches. Sable’s dad was a grano-worker who’d scored her a selection of granite slabs for a low price. With the right lighting on them, the bar tops twinkled greens and pinks and reds from their black rock backgrounds. Gorgeous!
Cousin Crack was behind the bar and gave me a wave. With his long dark hair tied back in a neat ponytail and a fitted tee-shirt and jeans on, he looked like a younger version of Christian Kane. The opposite sex had always dug Crack, but he generally only had eyes for girls named Ducati, Aprilia and Honda. Until Sable came along.
Crack’s mum, Cynthia (Syn to the family, on account of some of her wilder ways), was horrified to see her son change so much. But my mother lauded Crack’s new girlfriend as having ‘whipped the fellow into shape’. That was, until she and Sable went head to head over the intricacies of making pavlova one family Christmas. Since then Sable had been relegated, along with Syn and Crack, into Joanna’s ‘tolerated’ basket.
I ducked into the ladies, washed my face and hands, then combed the Fridge-attack out of my hair, before going over to say hello.
‘Hey, Crack,’ I said, plopping myself down on a bar stool. ‘How’s it going?’
Crack pulled a dismal face. ‘Slow. Sable wants me to sell one of the bikes to pay for next month’s rent. Or get a job.’
Until he’d met Sable, Crack had lived in a large room underneath his parents’ two-storey home surrounded by the bits and pieces of his thirteen motorbikes. One time, I’d crashed on his couch after a party and managed to step in a tub of sump oil trying to find the loo in the middle of the night.
‘That bad?’ I asked.
He nodded. ‘Worse. We had an investor to get us over the opening hump, but they went belly up in the recession