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‘Oh, thank you, but I don’t—’
Too late. The leaflet was in her hand, and the woman was gone in a swirl of beige organic cotton. Shrugging, she shoved the green paper into her pocket then headed round the back to where an open-air laundry shed sporting concrete tubs vied for space in the neat garden with an old-fashioned spinning washing line.
‘With you in a sec, love.’
An older man with a shiny bald head, bushy eyebrows and a moustache that belonged on a muppet cop was standing amid a garden bed, a pair of secateurs in one hand and tweezers in the other.
‘No hurry,’ she said. Which was a lie. Now she’d made the decision to blow some cash on a motel room, the idea of an actual bathroom with no frogs lurking in the corners, with an actual towel, and actual blessed hot water rushing out of a spigot, had taken hold of her imagination in a big way.
‘Mealybug emergency,’ the man said. ‘Heard the bell but I’ve just got the little bugger cornered.’
She wandered closer to see what he was up to.
‘You see this little brown fleck?’
‘Yes.’
‘Thought I’d seen the back of him last year, but it looks like he’s back, and he’s brought his family with him. You know what I told him?’
She grinned. ‘I have no idea what conversations you’ve been having with your mealybugs.’
‘I said,not on my watch, mate.’ The man plopped the offending pest in a plastic bag, then brushed off his hands and puffed out his chest a little. ‘Now, my name’s Ken Kwong. I run the cleanest hotel motel in the Northern Rivers. How can I help you?’
‘A room,’ she said.
‘How long for?’
That was the question, wasn’t it? A day? A month? How longdidit take for brain lesions (probably fatal) to repair themselves? ‘Can we say two nights and maybe more?’ That would give her a chance to visit the history place and time to think about Bill’s plane.
‘We can say anything you like, lovey,’ he said. ‘Come along, and let’s get you settled in.’
