by Erin Hortle
If it weren’t for the fact he was going with Rob, Shayne wouldn’t have got out of bed. It was dark and crispy cold outside when the alarm went off, while his bed was soft and warm and Angie was snuggly with sleep, in a way that suggested a little something something could be on the cards. He’d had a shower before going to bed the night before so his skin felt silky against the sheets and he lay there, nuzzling into her, prodding her a bit with the old dawn horn and flexing his toes happily. Then his second alarm went off.
Fifteen minutes later, Rob’s Nissan Patrol pulled into the driveway, boat in tow, and Shayne was climbing in, rugged up in his winter woollies, cup of coffee in hand. One of those keep cup things. The kids gave it to him for Father’s Day. So you don’t spill coffe in your lap when your going fishing really early in the mourning, Emma wrote on the blue card. Her handwriting is really neat. She was the third person in her class to get their pen licence and she was so proud when she came home with the news. They printed out the photo of Shayne standing next to Jake, who’s holding up the munched albacore, and glued it to the front of the card, then drew a border of little fish (with sparkly pens so it looked like the fish had scales) around the edges. In each corner they drew an orange starfish or octopus—something orange with numerous legs, anyway. Six or seven, they each had. So fuck knows what they were meant to be, really.
In the car, Rob seems as snoozy as Shayne is, so they don’t talk much as they drive, or as Rob drives and Shayne sits slumped in the passenger seat like a sack of potatoes. He rests his cheek on the taut seatbelt and thinks about putting the radio on to fill the car with noise and maybe amp them up a bit. He doesn’t, though; he can’t be bothered. But when they reach that bit of the road where, as the highway rolls down the hill, the bush opens up and you get that view of the neck laid out like a bridge between the bay and the sea, the energy in the car changes instantly. The sea is stretched out silky smooth and flat and is glary with the light of the sun, which is just tipping the horizon. It’s like the glare causes the sleepiness that had been humming quietly through him, lulling him into a drowsy halfway am-I-asleep-or-am-I-awake kind of state, to speed up and become a whirr of anticipation, while Rob’s eyes, squinting into it, shed their dullness and become bright and eager. Shayne can almost taste that first beer, which, in any other context would be raspy as shit. But when you’re motoring out into first light, with a lick of salt air priming your tongue, it hits the spot like there’s no tomorrow.
They follow the highway around the curve of the bay to the boat ramp, which is nestled in its southern crook. There’s no one in sight, which isn’t necessarily that surprising given the time of year. But word is that a few blokes caught some solid bluefin out off the continental shelf last week and there’s an easterly change forecast for later on, so if you were going to go, you’d be wanting to go early. But the place is deserted.
Sometimes it’s bumper-to-bumper at the ramp, everyone bubbling with impatient anticipation, like a bunch of kids queued up for a roller coaster at a theme park. You can see the whites of the eyes and knuckles of the young blokes, who are learning to reverse trailers while their fathers coach them and the queue stacks up behind them as they butcher it, time and time again.
That’ll be Shayne and Jake, one day. He can’t tell if he’s looking forward to it, or dreading it.
Rob taught him. He’s three years older and he had his licence and was halfway through his building apprenticeship when he bought his first boat. They’d had a rowboat at the shack as kids, but this was the real deal, or so they thought at the time: a sixteen-foot tinny with a forty-horsepower outboard. Rob taught Shayne to drive a car before he was old enough to get his licence, so that he could teach him to reverse the boat, so they could get out there and whack the flatties quicker. It didn’t take long before they were bored of bottom bashing for dead-weight lizards and onto targeting bigger and better things: fighting things.
At some point, though, they switched roles: now it’s always Rob reversing the trailer and Shayne driving the boat off—like now: Rob reverses straight down the ramp, stopping when the boat is a half metre from the water and Shayne undoes his seatbelt and cracks the door. A slice of icy air slips into the car.
‘Could’ve fooled me that it’s spring,’ he mutters to Rob and climbs out.
As his feet hit the ground, they skate out from beneath him. The door’s still open and as he slips he twists himself and grabs hold of the car seat, throwing his arms across the base of it. His face rams into the upholstery and his shins smash against the metal step.
‘Fuck,’ he barks into the cushion while Rob has a right old chuckle.
Still holding the seat, he brings his feet beneath him and tests the ground. His shoes skate across it like it’s ice.
‘Must be some kind of algae or something,’ he says, looking down. He can’t see anything, but the creeping dawn rays still haven’t reached the ramp yet and it’s a bit hard to tell in the half-light.
The algae is thick everywhere, so he has to use his arms to pull himself, sliding along the length of the car, then boat. He unclips the strap from one side of the trailer and slides his way around the back of the boat, heading towards the other clip. But as he gets to the motor, his feet lose all traction and slip again. His arms go like a windmill as he falls, wrapping themselves around the propeller and pulling him up into its blades. His jaw bangs hard into one of the sharp steel edges and it fucking hurts. Still hanging on to the motor, he flexes, then paws at his jaw to see if the skin’s broken. It’s not, but it’s throbbing like it’s going to bruise something shocking.
This is a bullshit of a morning, he thinks to himself, and readjusts his grip.
Before he gets his feet properly sorted, they skid out from under him again. As he slips, all his weight shifts to the propeller and it feels like the boat moves, ever so slightly, towards him—like he’s pulling it off the trailer. But that isn’t possible because the boat’s not properly unclipped.
And then Rob starts revving the engine and the tyres whine as they spin out and realisation crackles through Shayne: the slime must’ve slickened the tread from the tyres. The car, the boat, everything is sliding backwards towards the water, and there he is, hanging uselessly off the prop like a dead weight—like one of those mermaid figureheads carved into the front of a pirates’ boat, except in reverse ’cos they’re going backwards and he’s an ugly bastard.
Fuck. This really is a bullshit morning.
As they slide, his feet slip and skate on the ramp, but they won’t grab—it’s too slick. Rob revs and revs and the exhaust fumes cloud to steam in the icy air and make Shayne’s head spin a little, but it’s not doing any good: the tyres won’t grab either.
A ribbon of panic wraps around his throat and he makes himself take a deep breath.
Then another.
There’s no traction but it’s slow, he tells himself. At the moment, this is happening slowly; he has plenty of time to get out of the way. Plenty of time before the tyres grab or momentum gets the better of the situation.
Plenty of time.
No worries.
He takes another deep breath, then tries to pull himself from the motor to the edge of the boat. But, what with the movement of the boat and the uselessness of his legs throwing him off balance, he loses grip. His feet slip out completely and he falls back, into the path of the edging boat. Pain shocks in his wrists and shoots up his arms and he’s caught in a strange bulging pause—a pause that feels like he’s looking through a round fish tank except it’s not just how things look, it’s the entire fabric of the moment—and then he feels his guts hit the back of his throat and his hearing deadens and his vision explodes with sparks of black and gold. It doesn’t fade completely, it just dances strangely and he’s floating as he slides and the pain is pulsing in his arms somewhere far away. The wheel of the trailer forces itself up and onto his leg, but it can’t gain enough purchase to run it over properly. It grinds down and the bone splinters
like a spray of sparks shooting out from fingernails scraping down a blackboard and he’s drifting in a haze of pain, dragged by his slowly shattering leg, pushed by the sliding trailer, and the wetness on his flopping hands and his pants is shot through with ice and he smells fish and chips and the fumes from the engine revving somewhere in the back of his head …
The splash of cold water on his face snaps him out of his daze and panic takes hold. His leg is trapped by the trailer, which is still sliding, still pushing him deeper into the water, which is rising to his chest, his neck, his chin. It’s so cold every breath squeezes out like he’s been punched in the guts, or it might be the pain, which is so textured, so varied: his arms ache fiercely, and hot jarring spikes jump rhythmically from his wrists up to his elbows and his leg groans as it splinters slowly beneath the grinding weight of the boat. And it’s all so slow.
Everything in his body is screaming at him to get out, get his leg out from under the trailer, but each time he moves to do it, pangs of pain spear up his arms to hit him, reverberating, in his chest and throat; and still he slides slowly into deeper water. He throws his head back and puckers his lips as high as they’ll go and sucks in a breath and then he’s under, closing his eyes against the salt instinctively and his head throbs with the cold or the pain, or both.
He’s almost floating. If he can just get his leg free …
He tries to tug at it, but his wrists flop uselessly like the sleeves of an old coat. The pain that spikes through his arms is so shocking he gasps and as the air bursts from his mouth water rushes in. It burns as it presses down his throat and he coughs but there’s nothing to cough with but water pressing and he thinks: I might—
That afternoon, the weather sets in. A sheet of drizzle shimmers against the window, bending in on the light easterly breeze which ruffles the bay coarse. The hold the low pressure system out in the Tasman had over them has faded as a high pressure system, which had been churning slowly above South Australia, moves across and scoops them into its sway. It’s forecast to sit stagnant, fanning a slow, dreary easterly across the island for days. Zach disappeared home at some point in the late morning, and in the early afternoon, Jem drags himself from bed and grunts to Lucy that he’s heading west to dive for a few days. It’ll be calm on that coast, easy to get into spots that normally heave and churn with swells from the west. Rich pickings on the abalone front, might get a surf in, too. He kisses her on the cheek and promises that they’ll talk when he gets home.
‘I’m sorry,’ he says, as he gently closes the door.
She’s still at her computer, working, a couple of hours later when there’s a knock on the front door. She pads down the hallway in thick socks and opens the door to Mitch Saunders, who’s standing on their veranda in the swirling grey drizzle, in uniform and looking grim.
‘Mitch. G’day,’ she says.
‘Lucy,’ he says, nodding his head by way of greeting. ‘Can I come in?’
‘Sure.’ She moves to make way for him, in what feels like a re-enactment of last night.
He marches straight down the hall to the kitchen. She scurries after him.
‘Here on official business,’ he states and plonks himself down at the table.
‘Righto then,’ she says. She’s not quite sure what to do, so she sits opposite him and her kitchen morphs into an interrogation room as he gazes steadily at her, as if waiting for her to speak. She has no idea what to say, what he’s doing here, so she says nothing. The silence is excruciating.
Finally, he takes a deep breath, then he tells her what’s happened. There was an accident at the boat ramp this morning. A couple of people were trying to launch first thing.
‘Seemed the bloke in the car had just stopped reversing and the other bloke had walked around the back of the boat when the car slipped out completely and slid into the water. Knocked the bloke down then ran over him. He got caught on the trailer and dragged under completely.’
‘Did he … ah. Is he okay?’
‘No. He’s dead.’
Lucy stares at Mitch vacantly. She knows what he’s saying; she knows she’s waiting for the words to register. She breathes in, out. Then it hits her: Jem. Jem, what have you done?
‘Jeez,’ she can barely choke the word out.
‘There’s more,’ Mitch says grimly. ‘Of course I was called to the scene and upon investigation I discovered foul play.’ He pauses for a moment, then elaborates: ‘In the bushes, I found a big, empty drum of oil that was pilfered from outside the pub last night. Seems someone had slopped it all over the ramp.’
‘God,’ Lucy says, heart racing.
Mitch peers at her expectantly, waiting for her to speak.
What can she say? What does he want from her?
‘Why would someone do that?’ she finally blurts out.
‘Well, that’s what I was hoping you could help me with.’
‘Me?’
‘Yes, you. What were you doing last night?’
‘Me?’ she asks again, shocked. ‘You saw me. I’d been swimming.’
‘Seems pretty unlikely,’ Mitch says. ‘Seemed pretty suspicious to me last night.’
‘I had, I … I’d just been over to the Seabornes’ for a drink and on the way home the bay looked so pretty in the starlight I just … decided to swim.’
‘To the Seabornes’, hey? So they can corroborate your story?’
‘Um. Yes?’
He looks unconvinced. ‘So I could call Flo and she would tell me that you were with her all last night, having a drink?’ he asks sceptically.
‘Well, no,’ Lucy admits. ‘Flo wasn’t there.’
Mitch’s eyebrows shoot up, and a nasty grin sidles onto his face. ‘So I could just call Harry then,’ he says slowly, ‘and he would tell me that you were with him last night having a … drink?’
‘Yes,’ Lucy says. She knows the word comes out sounding like she thinks it’s the clang of a death knell.
‘Don’t mind if I do,’ Mitch says. He leans back in his chair so that he can wiggle his phone from his pocket, then places the call, watching her while the ringtone chirrups. She hears Harry’s muffled voice answer, but can’t make out the shape of his words. Mitch doesn’t take his eyes from hers for the entire conversation. His smile grows steadily wider. Lucy’s heart sinks.
‘Mate,’ he says. ‘What were you doing last night?’
‘Night in, hey? Anyone with you?’
‘Just a quiet one, hey?’
‘On the beat, actually. You know how it is.’
‘Nah, not too much. Mrs Buchannan’s car broke down and caused a traffic hazard but that was about it.’
‘My little men? They’re doing well thanks, mate. Anyway, just checking in. Gotta get back to business.’
‘Yep. Bye, mate—beer soon!’
Mitch puts his phone carefully on the table. ‘Well,’ he says. ‘Seems Harry didn’t verify your story.’
Lucy sighs. ‘He was covering for me,’ she says.
‘What, by not covering for you?’ He smirks.
He knows, she thinks. Knows I didn’t do it and now all he’s doing is using the clout of his badge to pry shamelessly. She resigns herself to it, closes her eyes and says: ‘He’s covering for me, because last night we slept together. And then I had a swim. And then I saw you and we came here, and I went to bed.’
‘I’ll bet you had a swim,’ Mitch says, leering.
Lucy’s phone starts ringing.
Mitch is grinning widely now. ‘That’ll be Harry, I expect,’ he says, heaving himself to his feet.
She looks at her phone. It is. She flicks it to silent.
‘Well, now we’ve cleared all that up, I’ll be on my way,’ Mitch says.
She stands too, but he fobs her off. ‘Don’t worry. You answer that.’ He nods to her buzzing phone. ‘I can see myself out. And Lucy? No hard feelings. It was just civic duty, you see? And don’t worry: me lips are sealed.’
Harry is at the front door five minut
es later. He follows her mutely down the hallway and then, in the kitchen, he bundles her in his arms. She explains it to him in a jumble of words, which spill into one another in a torrent only cut up by her sobs. Her cheek is pressed flat against his sternum and his hands stroke her hair as they talk.
‘There’s something about Mitch,’ she says. ‘It feels like he really hates me, or something. Like he wants to watch me squirm.’
Harry’s quiet for a moment, then he rumbles, ‘Mitch can be like that. He’s always had weird hang-ups about women.’
Lucy doesn’t say anything; she just nuzzles closer.
‘So what do I do?’ Harry asks.
‘What do you mean?’
‘If he comes and asks me. What do I say?’
‘The truth, I guess. It’s not like he doesn’t know.’
‘No. Not about that, about … about the other thing. Jem?’
She stiffens in his arms. ‘I won’t ask you to lie, Harry.’
‘Did you?’ he asks.
‘What? Lie?’
‘Yeah.’
‘No,’ she says, voice stilted. ‘I just didn’t answer questions that weren’t asked.’
