Blueback Read online

  For Jesse, Harry and Alice

  who love the sea

  . . . for today, for a while, his eyes are open harbours

  and the dolphins of his thoughts cannot obscure

  (look down) the coral bones of all our ancestors.

  Randolph Stow, ‘Portrait of Luke’

  . . . As for us:

  We must uncenter our minds from ourselves;

  We must unhumanise our views a little,

  and become confident

  As the rock and ocean that we were made from.

  Robinson Jeffers, ‘Carmel Point’

  Just as the sun came up, Abel pulled on his wetsuit and ran down the jetty. Already his mother was in the dinghy with the outboard motor running. It was cold this morning and Abel was still half asleep. He got down into the boat, untied the bowline and pushed them clear. With a purr of the outboard they surged away.

  In the bow, he looked around, slowly waking up in the cold rush of air. Sunlight caught the windows of the shack above the beach so that every pane of glass looked like a little fire. He watched his mother’s hair blow back off her shoulders. She squinted a little. Her skin was tanned and wrinkled from the sun. He felt the sea pulsing under him as the little boat skimmed across the bay.

  ‘Good morning, sleepyhead,’ said his mother. ‘Better get your gear out.’

  He bent down to the plastic dive crate and pulled out his fins, snorkel and mask. He found his weightbelt and bag and screwdriver and laid them on the seat beside him.

  After a while his mother steered them around the front of Robbers Head and cut the motor. The anchor went down into the dark, clear water and everything was quiet.

  ‘Stay close today, okay?’

  ‘Okay,’ he said, pulling on his fins and rubbing spit into his mask so it wouldn’t fog up under water.

  His mother pitched over the side, her fins flashing upwards. The boat rocked a little and Abel pulled his mask on and followed her.

  He fell back into the water with a cold crash. A cloud of bubbles swirled around him, clinging to his skin like pearls. Then he cleared his snorkel – phhht! – and rolled over to look down on the world underwater.

  Great, round boulders and dark cracks loomed below. Tiny silver fish hung in nervous schools. Seaweed trembled in the gentle current. Orange starfish and yellow plates of coral glowed from the deepest slopes where his mother was already gliding like a bird.

  Abel loved being underwater. He was ten years old and could never remember a time when he could not dive. His mother said he was a diver before he was born; he floated and swam in the warm ocean inside her for nine months, so maybe it came naturally. He liked to watch his mother cruise down into the deep in her patchy wetsuit. She looked like a scarred old seal in that thing. She was a beautiful swimmer, relaxed and strong. Everything he knew on land or under the sea he learned from her.

  With a quick breath he followed her down. He clutched his bag and screwdriver and felt the pressure prick his ears. On the bottom his mother had found what they came for. Abalone. In a seam along the smooth granite rock, the shellfish grew round and silver like shiny hubcaps. They clamped tight to the rock and only a hefty screwdriver could budge them.

  Abel saw the flash of his mother’s screwdriver. She prised an abalone off the rock and a little puff of sediment rose around her. The muscle twitched in its shell. The meat was white with a green lip. His mother shoved it into her bag and moved along to pick out another.

  Abel ran out of breath. He kicked back to the shining surface and hung there panting fresh air for a moment. His mother came gliding up with three abalone in her bag already. Her snorkel whooshed beside him. In a moment they dived again to work along the bottom, picking abalone and filling their bags. Up and down they went, hanging onto each breath, taking a couple of abalone from each clump, leaving the rest to breed and grow. Small fish came out of the weed and crevices to snaffle bits of meat and pick over the sediment they stirred up. Wrasse, sweep, scalyfins, blennies, foxfish and blue devils – all kinds of reef fish – darted about them in bursts of colour.

  On the deepest dive, at his limit, Abel was almost at the end of his breath when he felt a rush in the water behind him. It felt like something big, like his mother passing. But at the corner of his eye he saw a blue shadow that blocked out the sun. He whirled around to see a huge mouth and an eye the size of a golfball coming at him. The mouth opened. He saw massive pegs of teeth as it came on in a terrible rush. Abel screamed in his snorkel and pushed hard off the bottom but the big blue shadow suddenly had him by the hand. The abalone he was holding came tearing out of his fingers. Abel thought he was about to die. He felt pain shoot up his arm. A vast flat tail blurred across his body. And then it was gone.

  Abel shot to the surface and burst into the fresh air with a shriek. He wheeled around, looking for danger, waiting for another rush from the lurking shadow. His whole body quaked and trembled. He looked at his hand; a tiny thread of blood curled into the water. It was only a scratch.

  His mother came slowly upward with her bag full. She gave him the thumbs up.

  ‘Get in the boat!’ he shouted when she surfaced. ‘There’s something down there!’

  She grabbed him by the arm and squeezed. ‘It’s okay, love.’

  ‘Mum, it nearly got me!’

  ‘Close call, eh?’ she said with a smile.

  ‘Look, it took skin off my fingers!’

  ‘Look down now.’

  ‘Let’s get to the boat. Please!’

  ‘Just look down,’ said his mother.

  Reluctantly he stuck the snorkel back in his mouth and put his head under. Near the bottom, in the mist left from their abalone gathering, a huge blue shadow twitched and quivered. There it was, not a shark, but the biggest fish he had ever seen. It was gigantic. It had fins like ping-pong paddles. Its tail was a blue-green rudder. It looked as big as a horse.

  ‘Come down,’ said his mother. ‘Let’s look at him.’

  ‘I – I thought it was a shark.’

  ‘He sure took you by surprise,’ she said, laughing. ‘That’s a blue groper. Biggest I’ve ever seen.’

  Abel and his mother slid down into the deep again and saw the fish hovering then turning, eyeing them cautiously as they came. It twitched a little and edged along in front of them to keep its distance. The big gills fanned. All its armoured scales rippled in lines of green and black blending into the dizziest blue. The groper moved without the slightest effort. It was magnificent; the most beautiful thing Abel had ever seen.

  After a few moments his mother eased forward with an abalone in one outstretched hand. The groper watched her. It turned away for a moment, afraid, and then came round in a circle. Abel couldn’t hold his breath much longer but he didn’t want to miss anything so he hung there above his mother and the fish with his lungs nearly bursting.

  The groper arched back. The mosaic of its scales shone in the morning sun. His mother got close enough to touch the fish with the meat of the abalone. The fish trembled in the water and then froze for a moment as though getting ready to flee. She ran the shellmeat along its fat bottom lip and let go. The fish powered forward, chomped the abalone and hurtled off into a dark, deep hole.

  The pair of them climbed into the boat laughing. They piled their catch into the crate and pressed towels against their glowing faces.

  ‘I can’t believe it,’ said Abel. ‘It’s big enough to eat your arm off.’

  ‘He must be old to grow that big,’ said his mother as she pulled on the starter rope.

  ‘He’s so blue.’

  ‘And smart,’ she said. ‘He knew what he was doing. We’re lucky, you know, lucky to see such a thing.’

  They skimmed back around into the bay across the slick green water toward the jetty and
the shack that was their home.

  Abel Jackson had lived by the sea here at Longboat Bay ever since he could remember. His whole life was the sea and the bush. Every day was special, his mother always told him this, but it all became much more precious the day he first shook hands with old Blueback.

  Even while Abel helped his mother shell the abalone and trim the meat for freezing that first day, he was already planning to get back out to Robbers Head to see the groper again. His mother set up a drum of seawater on a gas flame to boil the empty shells clean. People in town bought the shells as souvenirs. It made them a few dollars. As Abel carried the abalone meat up to the freezer shed an idea came to him. He’d call the fish ‘Blueback’. He didn’t know why but it seemed right. He had never seen anything so blue in all his life, not the sky nor the sea. Blueback. Yes.

  ‘Will it be there again tomorrow?’ he asked at breakfast.

  ‘Gropers are territorial,’ said his mother dishing up the eggs. ‘That means they stay in the same area most of their life.’

  ‘Can we go tomorrow?’

  ‘There’s school tomorrow. Besides, we have enough abalone now.’

  ‘We could fish off Robbers Head. There’s jewfish out there.’

  ‘After school, then. If the weather holds.’

  After breakfast Abel carried seaweed up to the fruit trees. He filled bags of washed kelp and heaved them up the slope from the jetty to the orchard. The ground up there really stank. Every year Abel and his mother netted pilchards and salmon to dig into the sand for fertiliser. The whole bay would stink for a week as they chopped the fish into the rich compost they made from tree bark, vegetable scraps and seagrass.

  Abel laid the kelp around the fig trees and the apricots. There were orange and lemon trees in the orchard as well as olives and mulberries. Every row of trees jangled with bells to keep away the birds. After emptying each bag, Abel looked out over Longboat Bay and thought about seeing Blueback again.

  Abel and his mother lived off the sea and the land. Jacksons had been living here like this for more than a hundred years. The land at Longboat Bay had been theirs since whaling times and all the land around them was national park. Behind the orchard, where the bushland and forest began, there was a little family cemetery, a patch of white crosses and headstones to mark all the Jacksons who had lived and died here. There was a cross there for Abel’s father but no body was ever buried beneath it. On their own now, Abel and his mother fished and grew fruit and vegetables. They kept ducks and chooks for meat and eggs and had a goat or two for milk. There was no mains electricity out at Longboat Bay, no water except rainwater and no TV. It was hard work sometimes, living the way they did, but Abel had never known any other life. He roamed in the forest of the national park and swam in the sea every day. He was lonely sometimes but he liked being with his mother.

  Some nights he stood on the back verandah to watch the kangaroos gather in the orchard. They came in large groups to graze in the open. Looking at those roos he wondered what it would be like to live in a big family like one of theirs. He figured it would be crowded and noisy but probably a lot of fun as well. When I’m older, he thought, I’ll have a family of my own. I’ll make sure we’re a crowd, a real mob.

  When Abel got back to the house he could hear his mother clanking around in the shed. She was working on the diesel generator with grease all up her arms. His mother was a good mechanic. She kept the truck and the outboard going on her own. She said every engine was just a puzzle to solve.

  ‘Mum?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Let’s not wait till tomorrow.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘To see Blueback. The groper.’

  ‘Blueback, is he? I must say, you’re keen, love.’

  ‘It’s Sunday. We could go back out to Robbers Head after lunch.’

  His mother thought about it for a moment. ‘Okay, why not. If the weather holds.’

  ‘Oh, yes!’

  After lunch Abel and his mother anchored the dinghy off Robbers Head and dived into the luminous water. Brilliant red schools of nannygai parted before them as they slipped down. They found the patch of abalone but Blueback was nowhere to be seen. Above them, on the rippling shiny surface, the boat hung like a kite; it tugged on its anchor rope and turned to and fro.

  Abel’s mother swam from one rock crevice to the next, looking for the big blue groper, but couldn’t find him anywhere. Abel glided along behind her, following her gaze. In a dim cleft they came upon a big, twitching crayfish. Abel’s mother reached in and dragged it bucking and flapping out of the cave and both of them kicked up toward the surface. Quite suddenly, Blueback was above them. He swooped down and took the bucking cray in a single swipe and was gone in a flick of the tail.

  ‘Well, he’s a crafty old thing, I’ll give him that,’ said Abel’s mother as they floated, puffing and blowing, on the surface. ‘I was looking forward to a crayfish dinner.’

  ‘Let’s go back down,’ said Abel, still tingling with excitement.

  So they dived again but Blueback was holed up somewhere scoffing crayfish and wouldn’t come out. In the end the water got cold. They headed home.

  Abel caught the bus into school next morning. He kept Blueback to himself, a secret from the rest of the world. The school bus rattled along the Longboat Bay road, spitting gravel and raising dust until it reached the highway.

  ‘Gettin’ any fish out there?’ called Merv the driver.

  ‘A few,’ said Abel.

  Merv laughed. ‘You Jacksons have been sayin’ that for a century. Ha, ha, a few. You always get a few.’

  They picked up kids from farms along the highway and the school day began.

  All day Abel daydreamed about Blueback. He wondered how old that fish must be to have grown to such a size. Just imagine all the things he’d seen! All the creatures that had come and gone around him all those years, the boats and people and time that had passed out there at Robbers Head. Even the reef would have changed in that time.

  Abel knew that if you cut down a karri tree you could see its age by the growth rings in the timber. You could even tell the changes in seasons, see the droughts and the good years written into its heart. People spoke to each other. They told stories and remembered. But a fish was different. All its years were secret, a mystery. He wondered if a fish even remembered. When a fish died, did all those years just vanish? Abel thought about it for hours. He got into trouble with the teacher for daydreaming again. He was given a hundred lines:

  I must not daydream in class

  I must not daydream in class

  I must not

  But after fifty lines or so he went back to thinking about Blueback and never actually finished. The teacher sent him home with a hundred more.

  After school Abel collected the eggs and changed the ducks’ water. The ducks swam in an old pink bathtub. Their water went greeny-black after a few days and stank to high heaven. Bailing it out was a messy job but he liked to hose the ducks down after the bath was refilled. They stood with their chests out as he drilled them with hosewater. They looked like silly fat businessmen in white suits. They shook their heads like bankers.

  When his mother finished fuelling up the generator they climbed into their wetsuits and headed out to see Blueback.

  The old fish scooted in circles as they dived into the clear deep. It was almost as though he was waiting for them. He came in close as they reached the bottom. Abel stretched out and touched him under the chin. Blueback’s eyes rolled, watching him. His fins vibrated. Abel felt the enormous weight of the fish’s body as it brushed him. His mother floated nearby, her hair like kelp above her.

  Up and down they dived, stretching every lungful of air, while Blueback hovered around, checking them out. In the end, Abel found he could hold out a hand to Blueback’s big blunt snout while the fish pushed him backwards through the water. It was nerve-wracking at first because Blueback was strong enough to crush him against the reef or even grab his
arm and drag him over the dark drop-off where the water went all hazy, deep as deep. But the boy and the fish fooled about safely in silence, back and forward, familiar as old friends.

  Abel rode home in the boat with his head buzzing.

  By the open fire Abel did his homework. One day, he decided, I’ll study fish until I know what they think. I’ll become an expert.

  He looked up at the mantelpiece and the old photo of his father. Abel didn’t really remember him. He died when Abel was two years old but the bay and the garden and the house were like a memory of him. Abel saw his mother as a memory of him. Everything she did seemed to have something of his father about it – the way she was with boats and motors, her tough working hands.

  Abel knew she remembered his father every day. Near the orchard there was an old peppermint tree with a deep fork in it. His mother kept a candle there and some pearl shells and a dolphin he once carved from driftwood. Some days she stayed up at that tree for hours. Crying sometimes, thinking, remembering.

  Abel’s father had been a pearl diver. Every year he went north for the pearling season. He came back with the year’s money and swore he would never go back. It was boring work, he said. But he always went back. And then one year a tiger shark took him. The crew of the lugger pulled in his air hose to find no one at the end of it. They found his fins on the murky bottom of Roebuck Bay but his body was never recovered.

  As well as wondering what fish thought, Abel also wondered what dead people thought. Both things were mysteries; they tied his mind up in knots but he never gave up wondering.

  Every day he could, Abel swam with Blueback at Robbers Head. Some days the fish didn’t show. Other days he was nervy and distant, but often he was simply bold, even mischievous. Abel kept him a secret but as spring became summer it wasn’t safe to keep it to himself.