The Dreams of Summer Dartson
January 2025, in the Lyons Den, Lucky Bay, Kalbarri in the mid-west of Western Australia
“EVERYONE HAS A STORY TO TELL as their life rolls on,” says my best friend Willie Mack. “You can’t deny it.”
He’s the smart one. He’s Scottish. Been in Australia for six years and still talking like he’s just arrived. “Never mind my accent,” he tells me. “Australia’s rubbed off on me in other ways.”
It has too.
It’s like he’s one of us.
That’s why I consider him my twin. My bruh.
My twin? You wouldn’t think so.
We couldn’t look more different. Me with my brown skin and black hair, him with his ginger hair and those orange freckles all over him, the blotchy kind that don’t leave much room for the skin. He’s stockier than me at five six, with an interesting face. Green eyes with a dreamy look to them until he fires up with a joke or a pun or he’s taking the piss, then they light up like you wouldn’t believe and it cracks you up to look at him with his lopsided grin and a single dimple sliced into his left cheek. A snub nose and ginger eyebrows complete the picture. Put him in a kilt with a set of bagpipes and he’d look the part as a backup piper in AC/DC for Bon Scott singing It’s a Long Way to the Top.
We started off calling him Bluey at first, but he preferred Willie Mack. More class, he said, and it stuck.
He’s fifteen, like me. We both just turned—me on 1 January, 2025, him on the eleventh, exactly a week ago.
So we’re both Alpha gen, along with the other two billion Alphas. Already the greatest number of the same generation on earth ever.
Alpha says it all, I reckon.
We’re two Alpha males, sitting at the Hexagonal Table right now, in the Lyons Den, our shack, hidden among the dunes at Lucky Bay.
“You’re in God’s own country,” my dad’s always telling us. “And don’t you two forget it”.
Except Willie Mack’s an atheist, or so he informed me last year.
“Why an atheist?” I asked him at the time.
“God knows,” he replied with a tilt of his head and a lift of his right eyebrow. “He’s kept us guessing once too often, maybe. He starts off turning on the lights, then keeps us in the dark ever since.”
Me? I’m not too sure. Maybe it pays to be wary.
So anyway, back to our conversation.
“If we’ve all got a story to tell about our lives, is it fact or fiction?” I ask him.
“Fact, unless you’re lying to yourself. I figure it’s because we live in a world where things are happening all the time. Nothing endures. We’re changing every moment. You, me and all the other nine billion people crowding this little blue dot of a planet–which is definitely flat, by the way.”
“Flat?”
“Yep. All the way round.”
When I snort out a laugh, “If you don’t believe me, start walking it,” he says. “If you keep going it’ll be flat all the way, until you get back to where you started from.”
I recognise his way of foxing with words with a weird logic to them, so I take a deep breath and know it’s seaweed season. Great piles of it washed up in a brown knee-deep row at the high-tide mark along the beach, the fresh salty stink of it reaching us. It’s full of sand midgies that bite. We’ve both got itchy lumps on our calves from last night’s fishing. The lamplight attracted them until we switched it off. We caught some juvenile and jumbo Tailor and a decent sized Bluebone. The Tailor we threw back to live on after the adrenalin rush of the fight, and we enjoyed a monster fried fillet of the best fish in the world each for dinner, with more in the fridge for tonight. With the skin on. Charred and crispy on the barbecue. No blue bones—I used the pliers. Yum.
Publisher: Dune Publishing (16 January 2025)
Language: English
Paperback: 196 pages
ISBN-13: 978-0975621660
Reading age: 12 – 18 years
Brief Summary – Elevator Pitch:
2022-2025, Geraldton, Western Australia.
Six teenagers form binding friendships as they experience the joys and pains of adolescence on their way to becoming men. When fifteen-year old Summer Dartson is haunted by dreams and visions of a Ceylonese ancestor who survived a shipwreck in 1712, and the youngest of them, Mozzie Buzzacott, is found dead below the Kalbarri Skywalk, their lives take a sinister turn. That part of the West coast has become a gateway for the drug smuggling cartels. The five surviving members of the group pit their wits against the latest murderous drug smugglers, and win.