Billy knew it was a bad word because his father had long ago, and consistently, forbidden anyone in his presence to use the word. First came a warning, and then, if the warning was ignored, a demand to fight. Harry told Billy he did three things wrong. Firstly, he reacted without thinking, secondly he didn’t issue a warning and thirdly he hit a girl.
Billy didn’t understand his third mistake because girls pulled hair, and they punched and kicked and scratched and bit as good as any five-year-old boy he knew. But he realised his father knew a lot more about these things than he did, so he went along with it. As for Sep, he decided, with childish wisdom, that he would never again be different from the mob.
From that day onwards, Sep began to purge any connection of his name, and his manners, to his Italian descent. It saddened Sal that by the time Sep ended his schooling in year ten he was known as Harry Bernard to all but Sal and the Rigbys. They, out of deference to his father and a habit of sixteen years, still called him Sep.
“So you’re Giuseppi Harold Bernardini. I have no problem with that and I’m sure that Sal doesn’t ever think about it.”
“It’s Giuseppi Harry, Helen. Dad had a friend named Harry so that’s what he called me. What I regret is not allowing Sal a son to be proud of.” She took his hands in hers. “I’m sure he’s proud of you Harry Sep.” Her eyes were soft. Harry moved close and sought her lips. “Please don’t
Harry. I’m not ready for this.”
He cursed his timing and placed his hands back on the wheel. “I’m sorry. Bugger it!”
“Don’t begin regretting things now Harry Sep, give me time, it’s me, I’m just not ready. But Harry, or Sep, you’re still the same person.”
CHAPTER
10
“I don’t think he’s a cane cutter, or a brickie, or a builder’s labourer, Sep,” said Sal in the pub that evening, “his hands and feet are calloused and he’s pretty brown. I’d say he’s a fisherman.”
“Come on, Dad. He’s still unconscious, how can you say that? I thought you might recognise him.”
“I’m not saying that for sure, Sep, what I’m saying is that cane cutters, brickies and anyone connected with the building trade, usually wear some sort of foot protection. Thongs at least, and even thongs leave pale strap marks on your instep. If you wear boots or sneakers your whole foot from the ankle down is pale. This man’s feet are badly calloused and quite brown all over.”
“But…”
“But nothin’ son, listen to yer old man, he makes sense to me,” said Harry Rigby, “young Billy’s on ‘is way ‘ome from the Gulf, ‘e was up off Portland Roads last night, ‘e should be ‘ere tomorrer. I’ll take ‘im in fer a look when yer sheila’s on duty.”
“That’s tomorrow afternoon, Uncle Harry.”
“OK. Let’s piss off, Sal, Mavis’ll ‘ave my nuts if I’m late fer scran.”
“Alright let’s go. See you tomorrow, Son, look after that girl.”
As usual, if somebody, be they friend or a perfect stranger, asked a favour of Sal or Harry Rigby, and if it was humanly possible and didn’t cost money, it was considered done. And if that somebody was as pretty as Helen Bell, then it didn’t matter about the money, and even the impossibility could be negotiated. This was how they found themselves to be in town on the Tuesday following the dinner party.
Sal and Rigby left the pub with old Harry promising to bring Billy in to look at Helen’s patient as soon as his trawler tied up. After they left, young Harry went back to the hospital to tell Helen the news. He found her at the foot of the mystery patient’s bed studying his chart. Some obscure feeling started to trouble Harry.
“Dad thinks he might be off one of the trawlers. Uncle Harry’s going to bring his son in tomorrow, he’s worked on the boats since we left school together. He’d know most of the fishermen on the east coast. If he’s a career bloke he’ll most likely know him, but a lot of tourists lob here and go prawning for their keep, and for the buzz.”
“Are you two close?” asked Helen.
“We grew up together; we’ve known each other since kindergarten. He’s my best mate. Well he was until recently.” Harry looked her squarely in the eye until she looked away.
There is always a precise moment when the most complicated plot becomes clear, when mysteries suddenly crystallise to become mundane knowledge, when vague fears and troubles are identified. It’s the epiphany. “Christ!” He muttered and immediately knew what was troubling him. It was the green-eyed monster. He was jealous and he’d never been jealous of anyone in his life before. Now he was wishing he was the one lying in that hospital bed. He wished he was this drunken bum who didn’t have a clue what was going on around him or just how many people cared
whether he lived or died.
“Please Harry give me time, I’ll explain when I’m ready,” she said with a trembling voice, “there’s something that I need to be comfortable with.” “Sure, I’ll see you tomorrow, I’m back on duty, I’ll come in early with Uncle Harry and Billy. They might be a bit much for you on your own.”
She thought Harry sounded a bit peeved.
CHAPTER
11
Next day young Harry phoned his uncle, he offered to pick Billy up and take him to the hospital. “Does he know what we want of him yet?” he asked.
“No,” Rigby said, “but you know ‘im, ‘e’ll be in anythin’ but a bath, an’ probably even that if there’s a grog in it.”
“Well I’ll have to catch up with him later, on the grog bit, I’m on duty for the rest of the week from tonight. Where’s he tied up?”
“Probably at the main wharf, if ‘e ain’t there try the sugar terminal, or the old cannery wharf. ‘E might even be slipped or moored in the stream.” “Well that’s covered all of Cairns, I’ll see if I can get him on his mobile or the two-way. I’ll find him.”
“OK, m’boy, talk t’yer later,” Rigby said and hung up.
Next day young Harry found the Paragon alongside the cannery wharf. The engines were idling and Billy had his head in the brine tanks, he was pumping them out with the venturi. Harry dropped lightly onto the deck and plucked a hair from the inside of Billy’s leg, just below his shorts. “Uhh! Shit!” Billy straightened and hit his head on the cover of the brine tank. It was hanging from a block and tackle just not quite high enough it seems. “Ow! Fuck!” His language was getting worse. He wheeled around. “Sep. You bastard! I thought you were one of those bloody March flies. They take a gallon of blood in one suck. How are yer, old colt?” He asked, rubbing his leg with one hand and his head with the other.
“I’m alright, Bill, where’s your deckies? How was the trip? Good catch? Any trouble?”
“Whoa back, old son, one question at a time. I gave the deckies the rest of the week off. They only get paid by the catch anyway, and the trip, man it was long. We’ve been away about five months. Troubles? Not many and nothing big. Right now I’m gonna rinse these tanks, hose down the deck and have a shower. Then I’m goin’ uptown to have a big steak and a few eggs. After that I’m gonna get pissed. Comin’?”
“I’d like to mate but I’m on duty tonight.”
“Well, why are you here?”
“Before you get on the grog I’d like you to do me a favour. Come up to the hospital with me and look at a bloke.”
“You used t’look at sheilas, what’s happened to you?”
Harry ignored him. “Helen’s got a mystery boarder at the hospital. She reckons he’s been mugged. I reckon he’s just a bum, but Dad thinks he might be a fisherman. If he is, your old man thinks there’s a good chance you might know him.”
“Why don’t you just ask him?” Billy wanted to know.
“You silly bastard he’s still unconscious.”
“Shit!”
“Yeah, he’s been out for about a fortnight now.” Harry said.
They wa
lked through the double doors at the front of the hospital and sidestepped to avoid Bramble and Miller. There was another man, he had a strip of plaster across his nose and two glorious black eyes, the trio were coming out the other way. Harry locked eyes with Bramble who glowered, then looked away and said something to Miller.
“Well there’s a nice pair of arseholes, Bill. Helen had to knee him in the balls one night.”
“Who? Miller? I’d have put his lights out.” Billy said with relish. “Not Miller, the other prick, the doctor, Bramble. He doesn’t like me
much, he’ll get me the sack if he can, I know it. He knows I told the boss that he went the grope on Helen. The good doctor’s got a reputation as a bit of a Casanova among the young nurses, but he met his match with the sister. And speak of angels, here she is.”
“Hello, Harry,” Helen greeted them, “and you must be Billy, I’m so glad you could come.” She offered her hand which was swallowed by Billy’s roughened mitt. He realised straight away that he’d met Helen a number of times before, always in adverse circumstances. It was usually after minor injuries or punch-ups had landed him on the dunce’s stool in Casualty. She had once helped sew his eyebrow back on his face. But she could hardly be expected to remember one face from a parade of fools. And at that moment he thought, “Thank Christ.”
They went through casualty into the recovery ward and Helen led the way to a bed screened from the other occupants. Harry and Billy stood at the end of the bed and Helen slid back the curtain. Billy looked at an unshaven, bruised and scabby face with moderate interest for a full minute. He frowned and suddenly stepped forward, then just as suddenly stepped back. “Gawd!” he half shouted and then lowered his voice, “it’s fu…it’s bloody old Mac.”
Chapter
12
Billy Rigby left school at the same time as Sep, they were both sixteen. Sep wandered about the countryside moving from job to job without finding anything attractive enough to capture his interest for more than a few months. But Billy knew what he wanted – the freedom of the sea. He was focused from childhood.
When he and Sep would play together in their pre-teen years, Billy would take over the theme. He would, somehow, steer the games through conflicts between sea serpents and sailing ships, buccaneers and ships of the line, drug runners and the coastguard or some other seaborne confrontation. And it was always Sep who had to die or spend the rest of his life in prison.
Sep often wondered why Billy didn’t become a policeman, but Billy wanted nothing to do with anything that would take him away from the sea. He virtually lived on the waterfront and got in everybody’s way. He met every trawler and mother ship that tied up. He inspected every catch. He helped the deckhands knit up their nets. He hosed down their decks. He ran their errands. He cleaned out their brine tanks. He wielded a paintbrush at the slipway. He fetched their dry-cleaning and their laundry. He did everything, and anything, to ingratiate himself with the people with whom he knew he would be working when his dream became his career. He became a local character, like a dockside dog that everybody stopped to pat.
Billy spent the first couple of years after he left school scouting the waterfront for these menial jobs, which to him were a source of satisfaction and enjoyment. Some of the errands he was sent on were wild goose chases, merely to get him out from under the fishermen’s feet. From time to time, though, he earned money.
On odd occasions his reward was an overnight trip, trawling the muddy bottom of Trinity Bay. He would stand, proudly, at the sorting tray on an upturned plastic bin, a self-important member of a team. On these occasions he spent the whole night helping to separate hundreds of kilograms of Tiger prawns, Endeavouri and occasional Kingies from the teeming life which poured in silver cascades from the cod-ends of the great nets onto the sorting trays.
The individual beauty of the rejected creatures on the tray passed unseen in the fishermen’s haste to be ready for the next catch. They were tagged ‘trash’ and directed quickly, by sorting bat, down the rubbish chutes and back into the sea to float, belly-up in a long silver trail.
But each haul for Billy was a brand new adventure to be pored over in open-eyed wonder. From the Moreton Bay bug to the hapless cod caught wandering in alien territory across the muddy sea bed. From the deadly poisonous sea snake, which regularly reared a head from its piscine company on the sorting tray, to the tiny stinging Fortescue which gave many a deckhand a ‘Happy Moment’ and were so named.
During this time old Bluey Bilson was keeping a fatherly eye on Billy. Bluey was the owner and skipper of the Paragon working out of Cairns. When a deckhand’s position became vacant on the Monterey Star, he went to see Harry Rigby. He explained that he’d been watching Billy for a couple of years and in his opinion the boy was a natural fisherman with skipper potential. Bluey told Harry he could get the job for Billy, if he liked. Harry said, “Bloody oath!” and that he would talk to Mavis, but she’d love it, “That’ll keep the young bloke off the streets.”
Delighted that someone of Bluey’s expertise, and stature, should take an interest in Billy, and pleased that his son had some career prospects, Harry Rigby was filled with satisfying warmth. The feeling expanded when Bluey confessed to him the slightly selfish part of his proposal. He was seventy-two, it was all that he owned up to. People knew him as the ‘father’ of the east coast fleet but he was slowing down, considerably. He was looking three or four years down the track to his retirement and Billy was the best prospect he’d seen around the waterfront for many a year. Here was a good opportunity to keep him working around Cairns so his family, and of course Bluey, could keep in touch with him.
The Monterey Star was a local boat where he would get excellent training. When Bluey retired, he would offer the skipper’s job on the Paragon to Billy with a generous percentage of the catch. There would also be, at a later date, an opportunity for the Rigbys to buy the boat on instalments which could be negotiated at the time. Old Harry was delighted, if this plan was to work then Billy’s future was guaranteed.
Bluey’s boat, the Paragon was a timber vessel one hundred and ten feet long and about fifteen years old. It had a flying bridge and twin trawling gear controlled by the rear end of a farm tractor, seat and all. This welltended piece of machinery was secured to the deck just aft of the wheelhouse which was slightly forward of midship.
The tractor was modified so that the transmission complete with the differential had a steel cable winding drum and an independent capstan winch on the end of each axle. The inclusion of the diff, in the winch winding member, was intentional by Bluey. His idea was that as soon as the winch hand began hauling in the nets the slip in the diff would begin to give problems. None of these problems were immediately serious but they had to be considered and, as a result, all hands got their brain into gear early in the operation.
It was a plan that seemed to work. It also meant one net came to the surface first. This allowed the deckhand to gaff the rope sling that permanently encircled its cod-end. He could then hook the tackle to it and the winch-hand could capstan the catch aloft the sorting tray. There the deckie would empty it, re-tie it and have it back over the side waiting for its mate so both nets could go down together. If the sharks were too bad it would be suspended above the surface until both nets were ready. Theoretically, at this time the other trawl was surfacing and ready to be handled.
This theory was dependent upon many variables such as the weight in the net and depth of the trawl – a factor indicated by colour coded markers at measured intervals on the steel winching ropes. Sometimes, for any number of reason, usually human error, all this went terribly wrong. But more often than not it went according to plan.
The cone of repose of a slippery catch in a rolling sea does not have a high axis. As a result, a sorting tray needs to be somewhat larger than wouldnormally be required to hold the contents of a cod-end. For this reason, the tray on the Paragon, situated as on mo
st trawlers near the stern, was quite large. It was hinged on its leading edge. When lifted it revealed stainless steel brine tanks baffled, like the rest of the Paragon’s water tanks, to help contain slop in a rolling sea.
The brine tanks which were only ever filled even close to capacity by Banana prawns in the Gulf were capable of holding the combined weight of four thousand kilograms. Just forward of these tanks and below-decks was a cold storage hold with snap freeze facility with triple the capacity of the brine tanks. Access to this hold was by means of a hatch cover at deck level and under that a ladder.
Forward of the wheelhouse, and again below-decks, were the fresh water tanks. The anchor locker was also up front, and so too were the large symmetrical ballast tanks, pump operated to compensate and trim for degrees of load at the stern. Between the wheelhouse and the bow, below-decks, was the fo’c’s’le where the crew bedded down. Access to the fo’c’s’le was from inside the wheelhouse and gained via a ladder.
Directly under the wheelhouse was the engine-room where two Cummins diesel engines lived. They were justifiably pampered and kept in pristine condition, with each engine driving its individual propeller shaft for power and manoeuvrability. In case of an engine failure a mechanical set-up of clutch and gearbox linked each propeller shaft; this was to allow the Paragon, in case of emergency, to limp to safety.
Also in the engine-room were two Yanmar one lung diesel engines affectionately called Granma One and Granma Two; they drove the generator and the alternator, respectively. Running the full length of the engine-room were the port and starboard fuel tanks.
The Cooktown Grave Page 5
