by Neil Grant
‘I’ll put the billy on and make us a cup of tea,’ says Wallace. ‘It’s been a big day. You can stay here tonight. I’m guessing Cord won’t be on the road looking for you.’
He goes inside. The phone rings and he reappears, thumbing over his shoulder. ‘For you, Rudra.’
Rudra leaves his mum in the guttering lamplight and picks up the heavy old receiver.
‘Y’allo.’
‘Ruds, it’s me,’ says Maggs, ‘Been trying to get hold of you. No answer at your place.’
‘Didima died.’
‘Shit, man. I’m sorry. When’s the funeral?’
‘There wasn’t one.’
‘Is that some kind of Indian thing?’
‘That’s some kind of Cord thing.’
‘He’s a bit of a dick, your dad, isn’t he?’
Rudra swallows the night air. ‘I’m going to India.’
‘No shit?’
‘True.’
‘When.’
‘Soon.’
‘Can you bring me back one of those pyjama suit getups?’
‘Sure.’
‘You scared?’
‘Plenty.’
‘Hey, did you ever get that thing back from your dad again?’
‘It’s a tiger skull.’
‘A tiger skull? From in the bay off Patonga? Shut. Up.’
‘It’s complicated.’
‘It’s beyond complicated.’
‘I need to take the skull back to India.’
‘Why?’
‘To stop the dreams. To set things right.’
‘You know that you’re saying this stuff out loud, right?’
‘I don’t know how they’re linked but they are.’
‘Well, mate, have fun with your craziness and all.’
‘I will.’
‘And call me when you get back.’
‘I will.’
‘And we’ll have a surf or something.’
‘Sure.’
‘Seeya.’
‘Yup.’
The line goes dead.
Rudra wakes late. His mum is still asleep and he leaves her be, sneaking out to where Wallace is squinting into the mid-morning sun. The photo of the hunting party is on his knee and there is a cold scum on top of his tea. Rudra sits down beside him.
‘What’s next?’ Wallace asks.
‘We take Didima’s ashes back to India.’
‘And the skull?’
‘It goes back too.’ He wants to tell Wallace more. How the skull belongs to a tiger god, who has been out for revenge all these years, and how returning it will stop the dreams and the killings. Instead, he says, ‘It’s the right thing to do.’
16
IN THE DARK OF A MOONLESS NIGHT, Rudra rows a dinghy out to Paper Tiger. Over the past two days, he has watched from Wallace’s house as Cord moved his life to the boat – one tinnie-load at a time. Damp clothes hang over the gunnels and net winch. The boat sits lower in the water, sadness settling like so much ballast in its hull.
It is as if Cord’s life is contracting – that he is giving up more and more each day. Soon there will only be a dark smudge where he once was, a ring on the water marking that final point where his flat stone once skipped across the surface.
Cord’s ute is not in the foreshore carpark. Still, Rudra has wetted the rowlocks so the oars don’t squeal. He will slip quietly on to the boat and work quickly. Get it all over and done with before his dad returns.
He reaches the boat and climbs on deck, moving towards the cabin with his torch probing the dark. There is a screech and Rudra swings the torch quick enough to catch a gull tumbling down from the cabin roof. In its confusion it almost blunders into Rudra. He can feel its wings graze his cheek and then it is off, low across the water, mewling like a saltwater ghost.
The cabin door is locked but Rudra reaches on top of the frame and his fingers find the key. He sucks up a breath and slips it into the door, hearing its serrated edge trickle through the lock barrels. He turns it and feels the latch ease out of the striker. Then he turns the handle.
He opens each of the lockers in the cabin and looks inside. Nothing. There are boxes of stuff stacked beside a mattress and he begins sifting through them. It is just old junk: his dad’s football trophies; a framed photo of his grandparents – stiff and solemn; a rubber band ball; a set of chipped china cups. And then he pulls out a photo album.
His dad held on to an old-style camera long after everyone had gone digital. Rudra remembers him grumbling that it would never last. Digital photography is junk food, he said. The only reason that people like it is that it’s quick and cheap.
Rudra opens the album. The plastic film has ruffled and made the photos look bleak and tacky. The first one is of him and his mum on Paper Tiger. He is a baby: a small pink, pinched face, eyes closed and mouth open, and a pupa body tightly swaddled in a blanket. It must have been winter because his mother is wearing a beanie. He recognises it as one of his father’s and he can’t believe that sometime, long ago, they would love each other enough to share clothes.
His mum looks like she is about to say something or has already said it. Something joyful because she is smiling through the words, and he knows then they must have been happy together. Once. Upon. A. Time.
Must have been happy. It feels like it was always as bad as this and that Cord Solace has never loved. It is easier for Rudra to believe this than see the possibility of change – for good or bad. It is simple to see life as static, like a photo, but there are frames and frames stretching back and forward from this captured moment. And frames to come that Rudra cannot know.
It was once explained to him that photography is just light captured over time. If the light decreases then the time needs to increase to compensate.
Light and time. Rudra can see the picture of his mum and him was taken close to Lion Island. Above baby Rudra’s round head, in the background, is the mouth of the cave – dripping with foliage. It is dark and it looks like that mouth is about to consume the child. Eat it whole.
The next photo, directly below, is the same scene, maybe with a second or so gap between. His mum’s smile has dropped slightly, her words sipped away by a wind that has begun to chafe at the bay. The mouth of the cave seems to have grown but it may have been a change of angle or light.
In another, below again: Rudra is struggling and crying and his mum looks as if she is about to drop him. The cave mouth seems even bigger, the light muffled by cloud.
Rudra shudders at how quickly things can change. Why would his father want to capture such a thing and hold it forever? He can understand the initial mistake: the almost-automatic winding on of the film and clicking of the shutter. But why save the next two shots when the first was the perfect moment.
It is then he hears the moan of the outboard and knows his dad is returning. Quickly, he switches off the torch and replaces the album. He needs somewhere to hide. There is a cardboard mover’s box up near the front window. Inside it – a couple of towels and not much else. He clambers in and pulls the lid over.
The outboard gets louder and soon he hears the tinnie clashing with the hull of Paper Tiger. Then, his dad climbing on board and pulling the tender to the mooring line. A silent moment while he ties it off. Opening the cabin door. Pausing. Knowing he had locked the cabin, that he always locks the cabin. Turning the light on.
Rudra holds his breath. Shuts his eyes on the violence that he knows will take place. Steels his body against it – making his body tight and impervious to pain. A ball of iron.
He waits. While his father moves around the cabin, picking things up. He can smell him. The odour of fish that never leaves. And something else – alcohol. A thing he rarely touches. The smell is deep – pub deep – a smell that Rudra has noticed in the men and women who make it their lives. Whose meat is marinated in beer and cask wine. It can’t be his father.
But it is his father. He knows it in the way he moves about the cabin – like he
owns every space, even the air; this final place. And Rudra can feel him claiming it, stealing the breath from him and calling it his own. And he shakes uncontrollably. The shaking becomes a roar and Rudra can taste acrid diesel smoke in his throat and hear Paper Tiger’s motor tack-tacking as its pistons and valves slowly warm. His father leaves the cabin, casts-off the mooring, returns and throttles the boat round in an arc out to sea.
When the boat stops, Rudra is pretty sure he knows where they are. If he can just get out of the box maybe he will have the time to jump overboard and swim to land. It is dark and the sea is full of things he cannot see but the danger here is greater.
He lifts the flap of the box a little. His father is outside. He can hear him talking and thinks it must be on his mobile. Now is the time. Rudra tries to stand but he has been curled inside the box and his body does not want to unfold. The box tips and he lands heavily on the floor. He holds his breath and his father’s voice stops.
He crawls from the box. His head is bleeding from a gash above his eyebrow. He staunches the flow with the corner of a towel and creeps to the door. Peering out, he can see the outline of Lion Island and the dark bulk of the headland leading round to Umina. Good. He can swim that far if he strips to his undies and kicks off his shoes. He just needs to reach the water.
He pulls himself upright. His dad is holding something, mumbling drunk. The sweeping light of the Barrenjoey Lighthouse combs the sea. Coming … coming. The white beards of waves like phosphorous. The light streaks from the stern of the boat to the bow, illuminating Cord Solace for a moment.
His father turns the skull on the tips of his fingers. So precarious. So precious. A thing that must go back. And, even though it knows salt water, it does not belong in the sea. Rudra runs towards him. He clocks the look on his father’s face and it seems like defeat. He sees the skull tip, balance for a moment on the thick prongs of his dad’s fingers, then fall over the gunnel.
Without thinking, he dives after it.
The water is a shock – thin and dark and cold. He surfaces, gulping air, sees his dad’s face over the hull of the boat as the lighthouse arm swings over. Then he dives, and as he goes he kicks off his shoes and his shorts and pulls his shirt over his head. The water feels slick on his bare skin. It is deep here and he cannot possibly find the skull, but still he dives.
He dives down until the air brings fire into his lungs then he claws his way to the surface. It is a long, long way up and he can see the light from the boat dancing up there but not getting any closer. Finally, he surfaces.
‘Rudra! Get in the boat!’ But Cord’s yelling is without menace, the fire in his voice nothing but a guttering glimpse.
Rudra gulps air and dives again, swimming down in a slow arc that he imagines the skull will have taken. And when the burning comes to his lungs again he keeps going downwards. The water gets colder. And colder. He feels the leather of kelp against his face and he holds on as a surge tries to carry him off. Then he sees a bright patch of light and he pulls himself along the weedy bottom towards it. The air is festering inside him. He wants to gulp at the water but knows that will be the end.
His fingers find the holes – the eye sockets – and he plunges them in and grabs the skull to his chest. The skull warms him. He looks above to the oval of light on the surface of the ocean that should mean home. His world. And although his lungs are screaming for fresh air, he lingers for just a moment. The sweeping arm of the lighthouse touches the surface so lightly, a caress. He would like to stay down here forever just watching it all go by above. Light and time – a perfect exposure.
But he knows he doesn’t belong. His pulpy lungs are telling him to rise. And slowly he goes, gripping the skull to his chest. The water glows inside him. He is slipping upwards.
Someone told him once to never trust an animal that walks sideways. And the way it takes the landscape so seriously makes him want to scream. It fills his whole vision and wills him to rise. And when he does, the sea comes from him in a burning rush. It pours from him, stinging his throat.
The crab scuttles back to the safety of the rim of seaweed at the high tide mark. There it watches him. Him, as tall as a tree and clutching the polished white skull of the tiger to his chest. Him, brandishing a new-found bravery.
After the dark of the night before, the day seems clean and right. He feels good, even though he is only wearing his undies, and the morning is chill.
But the mainland shore is a good swim away and he knows enough about sharks to fear them. There are rules for dangerous dogs and nesting magpies involving territory and respect. Same goes for sharks. The channel is a known spot. They’ll be there for sure, nipping penguins and fish from the water. Most likely they were there last night too and, if he’d thought too hard about it, he would never have jumped from the boat.
It will take him ten minutes, at a lick, to make the other shore. Holding the skull will slow him down though. Plus, swimming with one arm will make him look and feel like a wounded animal and those vibrations will excite any sharks big enough to take him.
He searches the high tide mark and finds enough nylon cord to make a strap. He passes it through the nose then down and out through the mouth. The lower jaw has been attached to the skull with old copper wire. He takes a turn round the jaw with the cord, to make sure he doesn’t lose it, and slings the whole thing over his back.
The water seems benign – a scattering of baitfish easing past the rocks, a flat mirror with clots of weed breaking the surface. As he wades off the point, he shivers with the early morning chill. Suffer in your jocks, they would say.
When he reaches the other shore he’ll need to walk round the point and through the reserve, coming out at Dark Corner and then having to cross the beach to get to Wallace’s place. It’ll be mid-morning by then and the tourists will be there.
One thing at a time, he thinks. First the swim. He feels the power in his body, the muscles in his arms and legs under tension; the lightness of himself skimming across the surface of the sea – sixty per cent water already, come from the sea and always returning. Him, with sea people on both sides of the family.
The strokes become automatic and the rhythm calms him. The skull, nuzzling between his shoulder blades, sets him to thinking about its owner. The tiger that killed his great-grandfather on one side and, in turn, was killed by his other great-grandfather. All this happening over sixty years ago in the jungles of the Sundarbans and bouncing down through history before coming to rest at his feet – the world’s biggest coincidence. Is it possible that his family on both sides are linked by this one terrible event? Were his mother and father brought together by something far more powerful than chance? Or is all this just lies – another convenient story to trick him, the gullible kid?
He recalls his mother and a much younger him, scribbling letters on the sand for the sea goddess to take – a myth created to protect him and to dispel his fears. But more often he would listen to Nayna debunking the myths of her childhood – gods and goddesses crumbling before her strong, sweet voice. She would tell him to believe only in what he could see, to shrug off superstition and acts of faith. Now, one half of him wants to believe, while the other knows it to be lies.
His hands rise and fall from the water – like the blades of an oar, or the cups of a waterwheel. The strange thing about thinking, he realises, is the more you try and do it, the harder it gets. The slow rhythm of this swim is enough of a distraction that the thoughts keep coming like waves on the shore.
Can he, Rudra, take this skull back to where it came from? A place his didima waved goodbye to as a little girl and now can only return to as ashes?
Halfway across the channel now, with a side rip carrying him towards Pearl Beach. His hands slice the water and it comes over his head in silver strings. And with each stroke the far shore comes closer. He imagines the shallowing, the floor rising up to meet him. He sees his shadow flying over the sand. It’s like a desert below. And he knows out in the kelp
forests fish are hunting, and there are hills and valleys like on land. And the fish are silent as they hunt, and they cast small shadows.
17
CAN YOU OPEN YOUR BAG, SIR?
Why?
Just open your bag, please, sir.
What’s wrong, Rudra?
They want me to open my bag.
What do you need him to open his bag for?
I just need to check inside, madam.
What for?
Would you prefer to do this in private?
No.
I’ll do it, Mum.
Good lad.
Okay.
What’s this?
Ashes.
Ashes?
Ashes.
What ashes?
Not what, whose.
Whose ashes?
My grandmother’s.
I don’t think that’s allowed.
You don’t think.
Mum, I can handle this.
I’m sure it’s not allowed.
By who?
You mean by whom, madam?
Don’t be pedantic.
Mum!
He’s being pedantic, Rudra.
By India. They won’t allow it.
Pretty sure they will.
How do you know?
I’m Indian.
By birth?
Yes.
But not a citizen?
No.
Well, I’m sure you can’t just bring ashes into India.
You’re Border Security, right?
Yes, madam.
Australian Border Security?
Yes.
Is this a risk to Australia?
No, madam.
I think we’ll let India worry about this one then. Put it back in your bag, Rudra – we have a flight to catch.
Sorry. My mum…
Don’t apologise for me, Rudra. Let’s go or we’ll miss our flight.
