I was doing some fishing of my own. I was hoping she’d say she’d miss the plague too. I could then follow up with a clever line. Exactly what that line would be I wasn’t sure—I was too out of practice to swagger smooth lechery. I was grateful when she didn’t speak: I hadn’t embarrassed myself by making a pass; hadn’t given town gossipers the chance of a field day. Mid-afternoon the CB radio crackled and gasped. It was Vigourman, with a favour to ask. There was a gentleman at the Gazette office, a Mr Cameron Wilkins. Had I heard of him? No. Vigourman certainly had. Cameron Wilkins was a writer with a national reputation, he said. A poet and playwright originally from Sydney, now a resident of Watercook. The clean country air assisted in his health problems. Two years earlier he’d been felled by a nasty bone cancer. It had gone to his brain but drugs and radiation had zapped it. He was thirty-three years old and married, his wife pregnant with their first child.
What do You think about The Amateur Science Of Love?
