by Neil Grant
31
CORD SOLACE COMES DOWN THE HILL on the final day of the school holidays. The taxi he is riding in passes Volvos stacked with tents and toys and kids and blow-up boats; roof-racks with boards; trailers with bikes and rods. Faces at the window, peeled red noses, appealing to the Summer God – the Lord of Zinc and Singlets – to grant them just one more day before they return to the outer west of Sydney. Three cheers for brick veneer, for morning commutes and pale, peeling paling fences.
Cord Solace looks away in shame and disgust because he has never known these people, though they have been coming to his town since he was born and long before. He has never got to know them because they don’t matter and if he ignores them they will soon be gone. He learnt this from his father, who learnt it from his. Don’t get attached, they said. They’re a temporary annoyance.
He passes the pub and sees the fish-and-chip shop is for sale. Now some Indians will take over, and what do they know about batter or fish? He blinks at the thought that his wife is Indian. How did that happen? He remembers a fish and a note and a feeling that swam up inside. Could it have once been love? And for the second time in his adult life he is moved almost to tears.
Almost – because ultimately he holds them back, as he knows he must. He’s seen this taxi driver play a set at the pub every now and then, and he’s known around the traps for his ship-sinking lips. And though Cord is sitting in the back seat, he knows the driver has spotted him in the mirror and it will be all around town quicker than a flash. Then it’ll be over. Once they sense his weakness, they’ll move in for the kill, like bloody sharks, and share the spoils between them. He is alone and has always been alone and will always be alone. Forever and ever. Ah-bloody-men.
The jacarandas are ringed with mauve carpets. Let go. Surrender. He doesn’t understand where that voice is from. Has to ignore it, because the mullet season is still to come and there’s fish to be had. How will he do it with this body slack and useless? He recalls how it used to feel – so powerful, solid, like a broadaxe. Some days he used to think he could bring the nets up without the winch, hand-overhand – that powerful, he’d want to sing for it. It is good he has a son, no matter how useless. He’ll take over now; he has the sea in him on both sides. Maybe, Cord thinks, I married well in that regard.
Dad, I’m not going out on the boat. Not this autumn. Not ever again. It stops with me. I know our family have been fishing here since they boated over the Hawkesbury. I don’t know what I am going to do but I know it isn’t fishing. I’m going back to school and you’ll find someone else. It doesn’t have to be a family member. I am still your son. I don’t feel for fishing, not the way you do. It’s not Mum’s fault. You can’t blame her. Or Didima. Things change, Dad. Everything changes. Tradition isn’t a reason by itself.
Rudra looks at the mirror as he speaks. Not out loud. Is that still counted as speaking? It’s more like rehearsing, he concedes. Lip-syncing without a backing track. The mirror is speckled with toothpaste, and inky shadows where the silver backing has dissolved. He looks carefully at his face. His skin that browns too easily in the summer. His mother’s nose but his father’s ears and mouth. He is the product of both of them – a confusing cloud of features and blended cultures.
When two currents collide, a whirlpool begins. A whole separate thing created from the mixing of waters. Rudra is the whirlpool. He is spinning, and it is hard to know what to grasp hold of. The tides that pull and push his parents feed this whirlpool. He is at the centre of this maelstrom.
His mum knocks on the bathroom door. ‘You okay?
‘Yup.’ Still spinning.
‘Your dad will be here soon.’
‘I know.’ Spinning, slower now.
There is a pause. Rudra holds his breath and the spinning stops.
‘It’s going to be okay,’ says Nayna.
Rudra can hear her forehead lightly touch the door. He releases his breath. ‘Is it?’
‘Sure.’
‘Mum?’
‘Yes.’
‘Everything is changing.’
‘Yes.’
‘It scares Dad, doesn’t it?’
‘It terrifies him.’
‘Why?’
Nayna sighs. Rudra can feel her shoulders slumping. ‘Change is hard, Rudra. But it’s as certain as the tide. Whether you like it or not, it comes, sweeping clean what’s been left. Your dad’s not alone in trying to ignore change, you know. But the tide is persistent. The tide is inevitable.’
There is a knock at the door. Rudra turns down his music and goes to answer. There is Cord, leaning on an aluminium crutch, a plastic bag in his other hand.
‘Why did you knock?’
‘I’m not sure,’ Cord answers.
It is the first time Rudra has ever heard his father use those words. ‘Come in,’ he says, as if his old man is a stranger. ‘Let me take your bag,’ he says, like Raj at the Beamish Hotel.
‘I can manage,’ his father says, slightly slurry, clambering down the hallway, the pictures rattling on the walls. He pauses halfway down to look at one of the new additions – Nayna, Rudra and Raj on the banks of the river at Gosaba. Rudra holds his breath, watches his father’s hand tighten on the crutch.
Cord purses his lips and nods his head – this is how it is now.
‘Cord.’ Nayna comes out of the kitchen, the light behind her – a goddess, crackling with energy, the awesome Kali with blood and fire at her command.
‘Nayna.’ Cord – a dried sea dragon carcass collected from the beach, shrivelled, small, a husk that once filled a room.
‘Let me take the bag,’ says Nayna, and this time he releases it, watching it go as if it was the last thing he owned, his pride parcelled in grey plastic, bound for recycling. ‘Would you like tea?’
‘Yes,’ Cord says. ‘Please.’
They go into the kitchen and Nayna puts the cha pot on the stove, throws in a handful of black tea, pours in the milk, adds sugar, a stick of cinnamon, some cardamom pods. She pours three glasses. Hands him one. He accepts and holds it longer than he should, blowing across the surface. Rudra sees the tiny waves lapping at the far shore. Cord sips the cha, winces, puts it on the table in front of him. ‘Cha,’ he says, pinching the bridge of his nose.
They sit in silence for a moment, the old house creaking around them. Rudra can hear his music still blaring in his bedroom. A thing never allowed under the old regime.
‘It’s like this,’ Cord blurts, shifting anxiously in his seat. ‘We gotta keep fishing. Can’t let it go.’ His voice has that tinge of slur as if the sea has not quite drained from him yet. He looks at Rudra with such fear in his eyes.
Rudra wants to cry, wants to shrink away, wants to leap into his father’s lap and bury his face. ‘Dad, I’m—’
Nayna interrupts. ‘Rudra’s not going on the boat. Not permanently. He’s got other things he wants to do.’
‘Like what?’
‘I don’t know yet, Dad.’ He wrote this script, wrote it in his head and practised.
‘Until you do …’
‘I’m not going to fish Paper Tiger. I can’t be you, or Grandad.’
‘I want to tell you something, Rudra.’
‘Stop it, Dad. You’re not listening. You never listen.’
Cord’s eyes darken. Clouds roll in and slashes of lightning appear in his corneas. ‘I was under for a long time,’ he starts, gripping the chair as if steadying himself. ‘When I got caught in the nets. It was like a relief. I felt as if I deserved it or something. I spent every day of my life on top of the ocean, dragging stuff out. But I never looked under before. Wasn’t even curious. I don’t even go swimming – not for pleasure, anyhow. That day, the sea rushed into me, like I was a bay or something and the waves were coming inside and … ’ He puts his hand over his mouth. He never wanted it to come out. Why now? These secrets used to be so easy to keep. He doesn’t understand what is going wrong, why everything is crumbling.
‘What?’ asks
Rudra.
Cord shakes his head slowly. ‘I heard it. Music, like a finger on a glass rim.’
Rudra remembers Didima’s story. About her mother’s cousin, the truck driver, hearing a song through a fisherman’s oar in a Ceylonese lagoon. Singing fish? This is not his father. They did something to him in hospital, replaced something. A transfusion maybe? ‘You were drowning,’ says Rudra. ‘It was probably your brain shutting down.’
‘No,’ says Cord. ‘It was different. I’m, I dunno … different.’
Rudra feels something that could certainly be panic if he let it. ‘You’re not giving up fishing, are you?’
Cord looks at his hands. The glassy scars across the knuckles, the calluses like chitons on a rock. ‘Not that. No.’ He cups his hands to his ears as if blocking out the world. ‘I don’t know,’ he whispers.
This uncertainty in his father scares Rudra more than his anger ever did. Cord always knows what to do. No matter what.
Nayna gathers the empty glasses. She puts her hand on the top of her husband’s and speaks softly. ‘Cord, maybe you need to consider getting someone else for the boat.’
Cord looks wild, frightened. ‘Who?’
‘We’ll leave that up to you.’
Rudra wakes from a dreamless sleep. He breathes the dark for a while, lying there and letting his chest rise and fall. It gives him peace, this old house, a place he has always known – his constant. He thinks of the Sundarbans, the bunds keeping the sea at bay, and the tigers with their soft footfalls in the forest.
He hears the sound of men’s voices, low, like thunder from across the bay – his father’s and another. Getting up, he creeps to the kitchen door, looks through the hinge gap to their kitchen table. Cord’s hands are splayed out like otterboards; he’s trying to funnel his words into a net. Rudra shifts to see who the other person is and catches Wallace’s profile between the jamb and the inside edge.
‘I gotta go where the money is, Cord, and with you out of action I had to go fish with Wink. It’s not like I had a choice or anything.’
Wallace has been on the receiving end of too much grief to use words carelessly.
‘Understood, Wallace.’
‘So, what’s this about? Are you asking me back? Because I’m onto a pretty good thing with Wink. He’s got the two boats now and he’s paying me more than you ever did. I get a percentage too. It’s a sweet deal.’
‘I am going to ask you back, Wallace, and I’m going to ask you as a friend.’
‘Is that what we are?’
‘I thought so.’
‘Well, maybe.’
‘And I want to take this to another level.’
‘Are you proposing to me, Cord?’
‘Don’t be a smart-arse, Wallace. I can still flatten you. I’m talking partners. You work the boat and get fifty per cent.’
‘And long term?’
‘I’m talking about long term.’
‘What happens to Paper Tiger?’
‘Paper Tiger stays with me. In the family. If Rudra …’ His sentence drifts to nothing.
‘Rudra’s not interested, Cord.’
Rudra turns his ear to the door to catch what his father will say.
‘Then we’ll see.’
32
‘IT’S BAD LUCK AND YOU KNOW IT, Nayna.’
‘Just pass me the brush, Wallace.’
‘And there’s Cord to think about.’
‘And the paint,’ says Nayna.
‘It’s not right.’
‘It is completely right. Isn’t it, Rudra?’
‘I guess.’ Rudra holds the tender steady against the hull of Paper Tiger.
Nayna begins by sweeping a broad brush along the hull. She works quickly, once on each side of the bow and then on the stern. By the time she is back at the bow, the afternoon sun has skinned the paint enough.
Nayna smiles at him. ‘Remember the sea goddess?’ she asks. ‘Remember leaving your trouble-words on the beach for her?’
‘I was such a sucker. No way that was ever going to work.’
‘You were a child. And it did work. When the tide came in and took the words, your pains were gone.’
‘That was just time. You can’t just erase history as easily as that.’
‘True. But when the time is right, you need to have the courage and belief to let it go.’
She goes to work with the fine brush and a pot of black enamel. She works painstakingly, one hand resting on the bow, her brush-hand on top, slightly quivering. First, a straight vertical line – the air roots of the sundari tree probing up from jungle mud. Then a bold curve like the god-archer Arjuna’s bow. And another directly below – the belly of a cow down by the river. Then a circle – a mouth opened by pain or wonder. A straight, then a curve – a meendhara bent to water, picking prawn seeds from her net. An upturned nine – a lucky number of sorts. A hook bothered by a dot – a mosquito? Then the last two characters repeated as if they have been stuttered in black paint.
Nayna stands back, the boat rocking slightly. She tucks a stray hair in with the handle of her brush. ‘What do you think?’ she asks Rudra.
‘I think Didima would have liked it.’
‘And you?’
‘It’s good …’
‘But?’
‘Dad’s going to freak.’
‘You need to stop worrying about what your dad thinks.’ She leans forward to the boat again. ‘I need to finish.’
Below the word she has just written, she draws a series of characters beneath a bold, straight line. To Rudra, they are a group of stray birds huddled under a roof.
‘I know it’s Bangla, but what does it say?’
‘It says exactly the same thing – Bonbibi.’
‘Now Dad is really going to freak. Once in English was bad enough.’
Nayna shakes her head. ‘Row me to the stern so I can finish that one.’
She repeats the words on the stern and on the other side of the bow. Then they row in and sit on the beach. Clouds begin to roll over Barrenjoey Headland and soon the bay is obscured by rain.
‘Reckon we should have some sort of ceremony?’ asks Wallace.
‘No,’ replies Nayna.
‘Pretty sure there has to be a ceremony.’
‘I changed the name with Maritime – that’s all we need to do.’
‘Will the rain take the paint off?’ asks Rudra.
‘It’s oil-based,’ replies Nayna. ‘Permanent.’
33
THE TINNIE CHAMFERS A SOFT ARC across the bay, peeling the water back like a shaving of wood. The water is so pale, like the air itself. A shoal of fish careens from deep, cold water, passing underneath as if it is a cloud and they are a flock of birds.
Wallace is in the bow with Maggs, and Rudra is steering. Nayna sits in the middle, her hands flat against the seat, arms splayed like wings, hair ruffled like feathers. The fishing boats are set at chaotic angles on their moorings. The wind usually gives them a common direction; without it, they are bereft.
Rudra thinks how this town has been forever in his memory – the tall pines, the pub, the flame trees and the pier. People come and go. They thin in winter to a weeping spring. In summer they become a flood. But the things – the pines, the pub, the pier – they are constant, like beacons to steer by. The smell of two-stroke gusting from the old outboard fills him with joy. It is so familiar that he wants to talk about it in the way people speak of their grandmother’s baking or the smell of mown grass.
In autumn, the mullet run from the cold river, their steely heads buzzing with new direction – swooning and fading to a song they hear so keenly. The men, sitting high on the hill, call down to the boats. And in they go with their nets, working together, running them around in an arc. The water boils white with fear and fish tails. The mullet are dragged onto the beach in a fearsome gnarl of dying. The men box and ice the fish and the birds come in: the pelicans with gullets like skin bags, the gulls setting on each other, arguing ov
er disgorged sprats. Even the cormorants get their fill; preening their oily wings out on the pier rails when they’re done. And finally, the kite spirals down from the pines and over the bay. For her, there is a single fish left on the sand. If she could read music this would be a clef – indicating the pitch and roll of death across the beach.
Rudra climbs onto Bonbibi – their newly named boat – followed by Maggs in his new kurta. Nayna and Wallace are in the cabin. It feels strange to be back here, remembering the last time – when Rudra swam from Lion Island to the shore, the skull strapped to his back.
His dad was living on the boat before he got dragged under, and it is a mess. Rudra rights a drum of oil and pushes a damp wad of blanket against the wall. He expects to find some sign of his father’s repentance – a photo of Rudra as a kid, a letter apologising for being such an arse. But there’s nothing.
His mum pops her head into the cabin, haloed by cerulean sky, a patch so small it would be hard-pressed to make a sailor a pair of trousers. ‘You okay?’
‘I’m fine,’ he says.
‘Come on,’ says Wallace. ‘Let’s get this done before the whole of Patonga wakes up and sees us.’
‘You’re not still frightened of Dad, are you?’
‘Me? I’m frightened of everyone.’ Wallace pushes past him. ‘I just don’t let it get me down.’ He fires up the old diesel. ‘Make yourself useful and cast off, will you.’
Rudra goes on deck, walks to the bow and unhooks from the mooring. Wallace backs away, then slips into forward and cuts out in the direction of Barrenjoey. When they clear the headland at Dark Corner, they hang a left, as snug to the coast as their draft will allow. Maggs clambers up on the cabin roof and sits there, smug as ever. That is something Cord would forbid, thinks Rudra as he crosses his legs in the bow. His mum walks across the deck and crouches behind him, not saying a word.
In the silence between them, Didima arrives, smelling of ladoos and dhoop – the small cones of incense she would burn at her altar to Bonbibi. Rudra feels her there, as real as the ocean, sighing and plucking at their hull. A little girl who fled a drowning island. An old woman with skin like brittle paper. He never saw death up-close before this summer and now he has seen so much.
