‘I am not annoying,’ came a high voice from within the portaloo.
Will caught Jackson’s eye and winked, and the kid lost his fearful look and started laughing. Jodie came to stand beside him as he worked the thin end of the screwdriver into the exterior of the lock. The groove, designed for this exact purpose, looked like it had been warped by a lot of inexpert rescuers over a long time frame, and was weather damaged and pretty much rendered useless by age, but he leaned into it until the screwdriver had found some purchase and gave the thing a twist.
‘Your sister will be out any second now,’ he said to Jackson, ‘so your worries are over.’
‘Oh, I wasn’t worried at all,’ said the kid. Definitely a lie.
A bit of jiggery-pokery, some brute force, and a second later he was hauling the door open and a little girl in a spotty frock with fairy wings strapped to her back stood in the doorway, looking sweaty and dishevelled, but not at all unhappy.
‘I’m not trapped anymore!’ she said.
She seemed to have forgotten her bum needed wiping, thankfully, and Will was keen to move on to the next item on his agenda: snaffling that alone time he’d been wanting with Jodie. Somewhere a little more salubrious than the portaloo corral.
‘You right to get Bindi back to your mum and dad?’ he asked Jackson.
‘Sure. Thanks for rescuing me—I mean, her,’ said the boy.
All in a day’s work. Fingers crossed the rest of the evening’s dramas resolved themselves as easily. Will had places to go, a woman to woo.
He waited until the kids had disappeared into the crowd, then turned to Jodie.
‘You were so sweet with them.’
He grinned. ‘Come with me.’ He grabbed her hand and set off, weaving his way through the back of the candle stall, where kids were dipping wicks into coloured liquid wax, then behind a food truck serving lamb kofta, and then to a section near the side fence where the string of coloured lanterns hadn’t quite reached and the noise felt a little less frenetic, and where the sky above could be seen: endless indigo blue and twinkly with stars.
Thank you, serendipity, he thought.
He pulled Jodie in close to him. ‘At last. Just you and me. Where have you been? I’ve been looking all over.’
She smiled at him. ‘Keeping my nerves at bay. Carol abandoned all committee duties once we got here and entered the judging tent to keep an eye on her darling cake. I’ve been standing guard, watching for Joan Sloane to make sure the two of them didn’t find themselves alone in the cake tent together. Then I came looking for you when you texted me.’
‘I’ve seen Joan. She entered the pub garden via the gate by the river about thirty minutes ago, carrying a large catering box, which I can only assume isherdarling cake.’
‘Oh, crap.’
‘Yep. She made a beeline for the judging tent and I haven’t seen her since.’
‘Are we thinking they’re standing at twenty paces, cake knives drawn?’
He chuckled. ‘God, I hope not.’
‘Maybe now’s our chance. We leave. The pub, Clarence, the Northern Rivers. Let’s spend the rest of our lives in a different state under assumed names.’
‘Nice try.’ He grinned then checked his watch. ‘We have about ten minutes until judging and I was hoping to have a word with you before then.’
‘Oh. Okay. What sort of a word?’
‘An under-the-starlight sort of word.’
But the very next second, as though serendipity was tired of waiting for him to get to the point, the fairy on stilts entered their small, shadowy space.
‘Fuck, I hate kids,’ the fairy said, pulling a pack of smokes from her pink-glittered cleavage, lighting one up and sucking down enough smoke to give her stilts lung cancer.
Will raised his eyebrows at Jodie, who gave a little snigger in return. ‘Let’s go,’ he murmured, and without waiting for an answer, pulled her through the crowd in the direction of the wheelie bins. Romantic? No. Place most likely to be uninterrupted within a hundred metre radius? Absolutely. Even a mean fairy wouldn’t follow them there.
He came to a stop when the hubbub was muffled by the six-foot timber exclusion fencing and faded, industrial-plastic dumpsters.
‘You know,’ Jodie said, looking around, ‘if there was suspense music playing I’d be wondering if you and I were both characters in a crime novel, and one of us is about to end up face down under a bunch of garbage bags with a knife in the chest.’