An Open Swimmer Read online

  ‘He’d know a lot’ve things, I reckon.’

  ‘You’ve been sucked, mate. Again.’

  Eventually, they slept.

  Into the soft dark before him, a silver gleam. Jerra sank in the blankets of eddying current. On the bottom, a blacker form, inside the skeleton. It sank darker, where he was hesitant. He longed to plunge into the thing, drag it thrashing into the clear, feeling the tough mosaic of scales, the muscle of tail, to brush lightly against the dorsals, to lever open the skull to see the pure white, feel it, hard as a pebble, in his palm. No breath. He clawed up the smooth curving walls for the surface, the clear sheen, feeling the grey coarseness against his cheek and neck, dry, chafing. In the smoke and gasps of kookaburras, his hands smelt of fish.

  ‘Sean?’

  ‘Yeah.’ He rolled over.

  ‘You remember the kingie my old man caught on the jetty?’

  ‘That was years ago.’

  ‘I was eight.’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘Remember the pearls?’

  ‘Oh, you’re not on that, again.’

  ‘It happened.’

  ‘You were eight years old; you imagine all sorts of bloody things, especially you. Gawd, between you an’ your grandfather and . . .’

  ‘It happened.’

  ‘An’ so there’s these things inside a fish’s head. It’s all fishermen’s bloody superstition.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Geez, Jerra. Next thing you’ll tell me is that you know God and Father Christmas.’

  ‘I’ve seen ’em.’

  ‘Who, God and Father Christmas?’

  ‘No, the pearls.’

  ‘Arr.’

  As an eight year old he remembered the noises the kingfish made as the air bladder deflated and the gush that came when his father opened it up and pulled out the roe, then opened the head and took one of the jewels from the base of the spine.

  ‘Why don’t you take them both, Dad? One for you an’ one for me.’

  ‘Leave one for the fish, eh?’

  He did not understand, but his Dad knew. They put the pearl on the jetty next to the fishing bag, and took the fish down onto the lower landing to wash the guts out and throw the head away.

  When they returned, the pearl had gone, slipped between the rough sleepers and disappeared into the dredged green.

  all the men . . .

  MORNINGS WERE cooler. Jerra walked along the beach, up and back in the arc, crossing and re-crossing tracks and prints, crab, bird, mudskipper, man. His own tracks, hardened and smoothed, looked as though they might hold water if it rained. He spat into a baked footprint and the gob disappeared, even the little stain gone in a moment.

  There was often new debris along the high-water mark; globs of plastic, splinters of soft pine, bottles, a petrel without legs (this disturbed him greatly), lengths of nylon rope, sea slugs, abalone shells like pale, open hands, all tangled in the thin stain of weed which re-lined the brow of the beach. And lines in the sand half obliterated by the tide that could have been sand crabs, but there were hand marks, too.

  Gulls would follow, hovering.

  At a gilt dawn he found a seal under a wreath of birds. The eyes had gone. Flesh had perished and ruptured, peeling, burst upholstery. A green slit, the hollow belly opened to the sky. It was big, old. Some of the weedy whiskers still showed. Gulls snapped, and the stench, too, forced him back. Jerra could not take his eyes from the slit of belly. He wondered how long his mind could remain numb. He pretended that he was not pretending.

  Sitting by the glowing mound spilling through the circle of rocks, Sean glanced up as he got back into camp.

  ‘How’s the swell?’

  ‘Piss-poor.’

  ‘Anything new?’

  ‘A seal. Dead on the beach.’

  ‘Goin’ fishin’?’

  ‘Yeah, some squid left.’

  It was apathetic conversation, even for them.

  Flakes of pollard dried on their hands. Lines bobbed on fingers. The squid dried in the sun, curling at the edges.

  ‘Thought they’d bite this morning,’ Jerra murmured.

  Sean suggested seal meat, remembering Jerra’s mention of the dead seal, but Jerra vetoed it quickly, stubbornly. If they were that desperate, he said, then he could dive and have a feed in ten minutes. It sounded arrogant, even to him, but it was true enough. He wasn’t using the carcass of anything washed up to catch a fish.

  Then Jerra had a hard bite that slashed the line down and across, wrenching his arm. A silver flash like a mirror.

  ‘Skippy!’

  He pulled hard, hand over hand, the beaded line coiling at his feet. The skippy came out, slapping and smacking the water. He held it against his leg, threaded the hook out, saw the trickle from the corner of its mouth, and tossed it into the bag.

  ‘More of those, my son.’

  It kicked in the bag.

  ‘Bit of fight for a small fish,’ said Jerra, wiping the papery scales onto his jeans.

  ‘That’s ’cause they swim sideways coming up.’

  ‘Smart fish, skippy.’

  ‘Trevally.’

  ‘Not this side of the border.’ Jerra cast again. He spread some pollard onto the water. ‘What are you, a Sydney poonce?’

  ‘Ho!’ Sean dragged line. The fish slashed, skipped, shied, and was lifted onto the rock. ‘Howzat, mate? Nearly a pound!’

  Jerra meant to reply, but his line cut again. Down and across, then away, shivering. His hands burnt.

  ‘He’s turning, he’s turning.’

  It was bigger still, cold and sleek. The flanks were so fine, almost without scales. Sean laughed, slapping his side.

  ‘They’re bitin’, mate!’

  ‘That’s the last of the squid,’ said Jerra, threading it.

  ‘Arr. Just when they were biting.’

  ‘Oh well, there’s enough for a feed.’

  ‘What about seal meat?’

  Back onto seal meat.

  ‘Bugger off. You don’t know what it’s got in it. Been pecked over enough, anyway.’

  Sun glared hot from the water. Sean sighed.

  ‘What about the skippy? Why don’t we cut a strip off one of those?’

  He sliced the head off the biggest. It writhed in his hands. Blood ran on the rocks. He slit the belly and dug out the guts.

  ‘What’s this?’

  Jerra leant over his shoulder.

  ‘That? Worms.’

  ‘Worms?’

  ‘All through. Look.’

  Sean threw it on the rock.

  ‘You’d better try the others,’ said Jerra.

  ‘Ah, it couldn’t be in all three.’

  Jerra watched from the corner of his eye. The line shivered in the breeze. A gull screamed.

  ‘All of them! Every bloody one!’ Sean stabbed with the chipped blade. ‘Oh, what a fucken waste.’ He hurled the shabby things out onto the water.

  They picked their way back through the rocks, pollard and scales clinging to their palms. Birds bickered on the water.

  Sean strode ahead, muttering and looking up towards camp. Carrying the fishing bag, Jerra glanced down to the other end of the beach where he saw the tiny figure of the dog again. It got up on two legs and walked into the dunes.

  Later in the day, after a depressing tinned lunch – pork and beans and a Big Sister self-saucing pud (cold) – Jerra went walking – for wood, he said to Sean who looked at him with curiosity – and he found himself heading back up the hill on the rutted track.

  The grey ruts had smoothed in the afternoon winds. A rabbit scuttled across the track. The breeze blew his hair forward into his face. His hands smelt of fish. His jeans were crusty with pollard, sauce, blood, and scales.

  Nothing was different. Only the crumbling footprints and drag marks from the jerrycan. Twenty-eights tittered in the movement of the trees.

  Up at the shack, he stood for a while observing the silence until he found the courage to c
all out without unnerving himself.

  ‘Hullo! You there?’

  He tapped the door.

  ‘Anyone there?’

  He picked his way round the side, past the webs and rust of the tank, through the grass, flecked with hard old scales, past the brown and green bottles, until he was at the door again. Through cracks and knots in the shutters he could see a dim desolation, a fur of dust on the floor, broken glass in the corner, webbed, fluffed with dirt. Nothing lived here, he knew it.

  As he trudged down the track, something thumped in the bush. A roo or perhaps a rabbit.

  NO said the tree in scars and clots. He agreed, whatever it meant. NO sounded fair enough. Until you thought a bit.

  He sat on the crest of a dune overlooking the crescent of the beach, the sun pummelling his back, and wondered about fishing. He wondered about the waiting his father said was so good. Dad’s still waiting, he thought sadly. Geez, what’m I waiting for? To grow up?

  He told himself to bugger off and started a poem, the sun on his back.

  ‘All the men . . .’ he said aloud, and nothing else came. ‘All the men . . .’ Stupid talking out loud, anyway. He gave up.

  His grandfather was stuffed in the head thinking he would ever write poems. Jerra tried to remember the lines he had learnt but all he could remember was the deep mirror of water by the brewery and his little feet looking up at themselves.

  Then he remembered Gran bringing cups of tea, all afternoon, tending Granpa’s foot, hearing him whine, calling her out to the back yard.

  Remembered his own feet looking up at themselves as he hung over the retaining wall by the brewery, trying to learn C. J. Dennis, and catch tailor on the scummy night tide of the Swan River.

  He had forgotten the wood. He would get some tomorrow.

  Sleep came slow. Sean breathed a metric rhythm. Dying fire flickered on the windows. Surf rumbled, coming, going. A cricket began, then faltered, started, stopped again. Jerra rolled onto his side.

  N . . .

  O . . .

  no

  oranges

  not

  old

  needy

  orientals

  nok

  off

  neighbour’s

  oxen

  Nag

  O’Sarkey

  nourishing

  octopus

  NOel

  NOel

  now

  oracles

  NO said the scar-faced tree, in his blackness of sleep.

  Hovering. This wasn’t waiting. He hesitated, plunged into its diamond side. It tore the spear from him. He went for the opening. It fled, jammed half-way, flexing, writhing, tearing. The water clouded. No breath, and the entrance was obscured.

  Sean stirred, talking again.

  The beach breathed deep.

  fish and women

  and bollocks

  BLEACHED WHITE as the sand, the beam wouldn’t be moved. Whiskers of weed had caught in its coarsened grain. Bare white sticks, spindly crooked things, were all he could gather. Wind slopped the swell onto the shore. Sand was dredged up, swirled grey in the foam, almost settled, and was churned again as the shore ran with seething white.

  Jerra sat on the beam, seeing the wind whip the bay. There was no real wood around. Not that he expected much. He gazed towards the granite tumble at the other end of the beach. In all his solitary walking, the bleary dawns when he felt cold inside and had to walk and convince himself that Sean knew nothing of his secret – he wouldn’t be just cool and bitchy, he thought, he would be maniacal, tear him to ribbons – he had never ventured further than those blunt-faced boulders. He set off towards them, skirting the burst carcass of the seal that frightened him so much, triggering off all the memories. Close up, the rocks lost their darkness and smoothness and were blotched with little varices and pock marks, dissected by veins of algae, ribbed with salt. He climbed, walked carefully around the bigger boulders, and hopped to and from smaller ones. Nearer the surge, their surface was shiny and black, slick with turf, and in cracks and crevices running white with foam, beams, planks, and twisted white branches were wedged tight, old, old wood swollen and stuck hard in the rock.

  Stumbling down the other side, he saw a crazily constructed dwelling – a humpy of sorts – beyond the crisp high-water mark of a small cove beach. Dense brush, ferns, high timber and magpies crowded in on the little shack, hinting at a freshwater source, a spring, perhaps. The white hook of beach ran to more piled granite on a sheer fault-wall, toppling into the water. Gulls flitted across the cove, settling in the trees. Jerra whistled.

  ‘Didn’t expect to see you.’

  Jerra spun. The old man.

  ‘Frighten yer?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Jerra breathed. ‘Again.’

  ‘Lookin’ for wood?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘None ’ere. ’Cept for the hut. You can’t ’ave that.’ The old man wound his way down to the sand and sat at the base of a boulder, out of the wind. Jerra sat.

  ‘Find anything?’

  ‘Nah.’

  ‘Haven’t been up this end before?’

  ‘Thought I’d come and have a look.’

  ‘Caught any fish?’ The old man didn’t look up from rolling. The paper darkened as it slid along his tongue.

  ‘A few skippy. Sweep, leatheries.’

  ‘Fair enough.’

  ‘The skippy had worms.’

  He lit the end and Jerra watched it smoulder. It stank. The old man rubbed his scaly arms. Jerra carved in the sand.

  ‘You said you lived in the shack up from us. Were you bullshitting?’

  Jerra thought this over for a moment, waiting for the old man to explain, then; realising the old man had nothing to add, turned his attention to the humpy.

  ‘Where’d you get the wood for the hut?’

  ‘Driftwood, mainly. Found the tin on the other beach.’

  ‘Must’ve taken ages.’

  ‘I got plenty o’ time.’

  The ply walls shivered slightly in the wind, leaning in on themselves.

  ‘Boat ply, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Smoke burnt Jerra’s face, wafting over, a thin edge in his nostrils. Boat ply.

  ‘Pretty rough, living out here alone.’

  ‘Alone, yeah.’

  ‘You like it, I s’pose?’

  ‘Have to.’

  ‘Lonely as hell.’

  The smoke was shoved into the sand. A wisp seeped out, disappeared. The old man’s belly strained against the safety-pins. When you looked closely at the sand, it was not really white, but a motley of gold and black. After a time, the black became dominant. Jerra blinked.

  ‘See many people out here?’

  ‘All that come.’

  ‘Many come?’

  ‘Enough.’

  ‘When was the last?’

  ‘Couldn’t be sure.’

  ‘Anyone been here before?’

  ‘Not here. Not this beach. You’re the first.’

  ‘Always a first time.’

  ‘Everything’s been done. At least once.’

  Both sat, eyes on the sand.

  ‘You don’t get on with him, do you?’ The old man stated with authority.

  ‘Yeah, sure I do.’

  ‘Doesn’t look like it.’

  ‘How would you know?’ He glanced quickly at the eyes behind the clotted beard.

  ‘I met ’im. You remember, after a while.’

  Jerra got to his feet, annoyed.

  ‘Hey, who owns this land? The Crown?’ Jerra was getting edgy about all this; he had enough on his mind already.

  The old man smiled, taking out his stinging mixture to roll.

  ‘It’s mine. To the high-water mark.’

  ‘We’re trespassers, then, eh?’ Jerra lifted his chin. ‘Didn’t see any signs.’

  The smile was bent.

  ‘Well, didn’t you now?’ He rolled without looking. ‘What’s a sign?
People shoot holes in it, knock it down.’

  Jerra rubbed his thighs in agitation.

  ‘They see you don’t want ’em around, so they think they’ll have a look. Wouldn’t blink at the place, otherwise. Not lookin’ for anything in particular.’

  ‘Well —’ He thought of that damned tree, puzzled.

  ‘Still, what people can’t have is what they want most.’

  ‘What the hell are you smoking?’ Jerra asked in exasperation to change the flow of talk.

  ‘Stinks?’

  ‘Not baccy, is it?’ It was impossible.

  ‘Me mixture. Tea-leaves, seaweed, all sorts.’

  ‘Stinks.’ Jerra laughed. He sat again. ‘Smells like the bollocks of Ben Cropp.’

  ‘Ben Boyd, more like it.’

  Then suddenly the old man was singing.

  Well the south seas’re fickle

  In the winters of June,

  An’ the wind from the Pole sings the

  Riggin’ a tune,

  When the sperm and the humpback

  Come northwards they say,

  When we found them in shallows

  Down at Two Peoples Bay, Two Peoples Bay.

  Jerra smiled, nervous.

  ‘An old whaling song,’ said the old man, sucking on his smoke. ‘My ol’ man taught me that. We ’ad whaling in the family, right back to Two Peoples Bay.’

  ‘At Two Peoples?’

  ‘That’s where it started round here. Used to whale here when the bay whalers spread in the 1830s. Ten or fifteen blokes dropped on the beach with a keg of rum, a boiler, a boat and a gun. Used to row out to the whales that came in to sun and harpoon ’em, then wrestle one for a mornin’ an’ tow it back in. If they wasn’t all towed out to sea. Next land south is the Pole. Bugger of a life, that. If the whales didn’t get ’em, the Abos did, or they shot each other.’

  ‘Now they use harpoon guns and spotter-planes and fast little chasers.’

  ‘Not the same.’

  ‘Yeah, I sup—’

  The old man rattled off into the song again, mucus bubbling in his throat as he growled the swinging lines.

  Well we anchored her in and off old Coffin Island,