Read Online Carnival Sky by Owen Marshall - Free Book Online Page B

didn’t return. Others, with increasingly less appreciated bonhomie, continued to appear, to loiter, while their former colleagues paid scant attention, or carried on with their tasks regardless.
    The editor rang Sheff at home not long after his visit to the journalism school. ‘What are you doing with yourself?’ he said, knowing well enough after talking to Nick and others that Sheff was doing very little, that there was no work for him at the university, that he’d set up no enterprise of his own, that he hadn’t yet departed on his vaunted overseas sojourn. As a means of bolstering Sheff’s esteem, Chris complained about the workload at the paper, the extent to which Sheff’s presence as chief reporter was missed, how much he himself longed for a change of lifestyle. Sheff recognised the ploy, but appreciated the motives behind it.
    ‘I’ve looked into a couple of opportunities, but nothing worked out,’ he said. ‘The thing is I don’t want to be full-time, or be tied into a routine.’
    ‘Still heading overseas?’
    ‘Yes, I think so. After a bit of time with family perhaps. Europe most likely. I haven’t been for years, and I’ve never been able to set my own itinerary before – never had time to poke around the less obvious places.’
    He’d been to the northern hemisphere three times: a four months’ journalism scholarship in Bristol, a year’s exchange at the
Daily Progress
, Charlottesville, Virginia, and a bus tour of Europe with Lucy four years ago. A kaleidoscopic thirty-seven days visiting the postcard centres of that part of the world, and a Hong Kong stopover on the way home.
    ‘If you want to come in on Wednesday morning, I might have something for you that could fit in with that,’ Chris said.
    A pelting rain came in from the harbour that morning, cloud lowered the sky, and even in the time it took Sheff to run across the car park to the newspaper offices, he became so wet that his hair was plastered down, accentuating the pale dome of his forehead, and his light trousers caught at his knees. At the door to editorial he stood for a moment to get his breath before entering.
    Everything was as he remembered it when he went inside, yet foreign also, because he belonged there no longer. Once he’d been part of it all, with relationships established by position and common purpose. As a visitor, shorn of both, he felt it quite changed. Although everything physical was in place, it seemed diminished, distanced, because no emotional tie remained.
    Nick was out on interviews, and Raewyn, instead of being at her usual desk, sat in Sheff’s glassed office.
    ‘It’s not confirmed yet,’ she said, after waving him in. ‘You know the protocols, and I reckon nobody’s in any special hurry because they can save money until it’s all sorted.’
    ‘They’re just bloody slow. You’re a shoo-in. They just want to see you doing the job for a few weeks, I reckon, and save some money, as you say. I’m chuffed, I really am.’ And he meant it. Yet it was strange to see her at his desk, with a pot-plant flowering yellow, andher blue, patent-leather bag before her. Where were his own heaped documents, work diary, the magnetised frog, and the paua shell he had used as a paperweight? He had several times requested a new screen, and saw that his departure had triggered its arrival.
    ‘Do you want a towel or something? You look like a drowned rat,’ Raewyn said.
    ‘No, I’m fine. Just the front of my trousers and my shoes. And it’s not that cold.’
    There was a time, not so long after his separation, when as well as admiring her skills as a journalist he’d hoped to make love to her, perhaps even live with her, but she had made it plain she wasn’t interested. She said it was fatal to have relationships with people you worked with – a general principle that made her refusal less personal. He appreciated the tact while not being taken in. And there she was, brisk, friendly and somewhat