The Shark Net

by Robert Drewe

Every time we ventured to the ocean, he’d bravely test the waters first. While we squirmed and jumped impatiently on the shore, he’d gingerly dive in, immediately leap up, shake his head and go, ‘Whoo!’ Then he’d brush the water back over the skin of his head, smooth back his hair at the sides, stretch out his arms to balance himself upright in the surf, blow his nose, and shake his head in wonderment at the extraordinary phenomenon of wave motion.

  In control of events now, he’d frowningly survey the adjacent waters for seaweed. If a piece of kelp bobbed nearby he’d snatch it up and elaborately dispose of it, flinging it far from him, as if he mistrusted its sinister kelpish intentions. From his solemn manner you’d think he was rendering a valuable service to all swimmers. Of course they were all carelessly brown and horizontal, languidly stroking past or riding waves to shore, while he bobbed there, white, serious and vertical, clearing the waterways and gauging the tides. Finally he’d stamp towards us and brusquely motion us in. ‘Be very careful,’ he’d warn. ‘There’s an undertow today.’

  All this was my parents’ Melbourne viewpoint. I didn’t find any of these things – waves, weather or the prospect of white pointers – unsatisfactory. I loved the whistling, windy Scrutton house with pine cones thudding on its roof. I wanted desperately to be like the salad-smelling Sand Children.

  I envied their rakish red and yellow feet. I envied the vinegary confidence with which they peeled sheets of skin from their shoulders and passed them around for comparison at the Saturday afternoon pictures. The aim was to peel off a perfect unbroken strip of skin from shoulder to shoulder. I was filled with wonder that in this delicate parchment you could see every pore.

  Most of all, I envied the superior foods they claimed to live on. Salad was for smearing on their burnt bodies – what they ate was fish and chips, chocolate-coated icecreams, spearmint milkshakes, Passiona drink and hamburgers, the aroma of whose frying grey mince patties and onions attracted both Sand People and outsiders after dark to a stark but oddly thrilling clifftop caravan named EATS.

  Some boys also ate themselves. Their scabs, of course – even Melbourne boys ate those – but also nose-skin, cheek-skin, forehead-skin and especially shoulder-skin. By now I was impressed, but not at all surprised, by boys who ate their own flesh. The coast seemed generally strange and risky. In a place smelling of coconut oil, hot human skin, drying kelp and fried onions, I thought anything could happen. Where else but the white sand could there be such prospects for pleasure and danger?

  2

  SATURDAY NIGHT BOY (I)

  What he’d do at midnight was run straight down the hill from the Embassy ballroom with the music still in his head and dive into the river in his Saturday-night clothes and swim across the river from the city to South Perth.

  Four Saturday nights one summer he swam fully dressed to South Perth. The way he was feeling, it was even worth risking the new midnight-blue pants and oatmeal jacket. Worth it for the cries and gasps back on the jetty, worth it for their rush to the water’s edge and the different – bewildered and curious – feeling of their eyes on him.

  Kicking away the lifebelt someone had thrown after him, striking out beyond the jetty lights into the black estuary, gave him a real payback thrill. He didn’t care if they were more panicked or impressed. Whether they thought him insane or just wild, it was something to savour, shocking those Nedlands and Dalkeith and Cottesloe girls with their smooth, bare shoulders, those tanned, snobbish shoulders always turned to his face as he came up to them.

  When the Ray Le Cornu Octet struck up something racy – first Les Boucher on piano, then Ray himself on drums and Brian Bursey on bass, and the others dropping in one by one – there were always three or four girls huddling on the far edge of the dance floor near the Ladies, heads brushing together and darting sly glances around to see whose groins they were going to be pressed up against next, and by Horrie King’s first few moody clarinet notes of ‘Caravan’ he’d think: That blonde’s giving me the eye for sure.

  He’d start to saunter over – and maybe he just knew instantly it was a mistake. But the clarinet and the warm desert air held him in an optimistic trance. The song of the sand dunes. He liked the idea of doing it in the sand.

  Anyway, all eyes were on him as usual so he had to see this through. He flicked back his hair and moved across the wasteland of floorboards towards the girl. Steadily, inevitably, he moved around shuffling obstacles, side-stepping sarcastic girls and arrogant boys with beery breath. The clarinet began hinting trouble, insinuating little sneers, but he wouldn’t be diverted. Sensing competition from everywhere, he stepped up his pace and hurried towards the girl. He felt his palms were damp and wiped them down his pants. George Kirkby’s trombone seemed to be blowing raspberries as he got closer. And suddenly, yet surprisingly, he was there at the girl’s side, at her actual ear, at her real shoulder, and was so dizzied by the din and the blunt intimacy of her hair and skin that he nearly fainted against her.

  The fierce way he was breathing her in through his mouth and nose he could even taste her.

  And, because the girl was always frowning away towards the band or the Ladies or somewhere (amazing how interesting they suddenly found the seating, the lights, the Exit signs!), he had to touch her to declare his arrival and intention. The usual choice of safe places, from the small of the back upwards. He’d gently prod her side or elbow, or the material at her waist, or above her hip where the dress flounced out. This time, yes, he’d put his finger on the high, bare part of her back. Or (exactly at the level of his mouth!) brush her naked shoulder, where he could just make out the finest pale gold hairs on a tan of tiny, delicately arranged freckles. No matter where he touched there was the female smell, the silky smell, the underwear, flesh and perfume smell. Perhaps – he loved that slutty touch on posh girls – a bra strap peeking out.

  He touched. Tap, tap on her bare skin. The warmth. ‘Kews-me-woodya …?’

  And then the familiar hateful routine: the whispers, stifled giggles and averted glances, the turned backs. Occasionally a bold face-off: ‘What are you saying?’ And of course he was trying to fashion a deep sophisticated voice out of the braying air and his own hollow skull.

  Horrie King was back on tenor sax and some fans of the band clapped in appreciation.

  ‘What? What? What’s he trying to say?’

  These girls were so tall and healthy he had to stand on tiptoe to shout his requests into their hair, sniffing (this close to nuzzling!) a reluctant scented ear or dodging strand of blondeness. Clearing his throat made no difference. Trying to rise above Jack Pope’s trumpet, his own sounds came out all clogged and weak.

  ‘Woodya lumph damph?’

  And now came down the old and smouldering cloud. As he fought to force it back, his desperate hair tosses and body moves shouted at the girl: Forget the voice, the face, the talking-through-the-nose! You’ve got it wrong! Announcing the real me, his gestures said: Man of many parts. King of the Embassy. Boss of the ballroom. Also nifty jive-maniac (well-known whirling dervish of the notorious Snake Pit), Scarborough lifesaver, tenpin bowling ace, hockey player, et cetera. To sum up: Loner, smooth operator, sportsman, proven stud. In other words, Joe Cool.

  So, said his tapping foot and snapping fingers, how about it?

  Baboom, kat-ish! went Le Cornu on the drums. The cymbal still vibrated in his head.

  ‘You must be joking!’

  The scorn of those posh girls. But worse – so bad that recalling it in bed at night made the blood pound in his ears and his throat squeeze off his air – were the overheard mutters, the whispers. ‘Look out, here comes …’ He could hardly bear his brain revealing the venomous word. Worse than ‘harelip’, worse than ‘cleft palate’.

  ‘Birdmouth!’

  The trombone sniggered as the derisive Nedlands girls turned their fragrant shoulder-blades on him.

  So, even alone again (especially alone again) there was an extraordinary charge in leaving the Embassy at midnight,
humming ‘Golden Wedding’ after the band’s big wind-up, and running down the William Street hill to the river, shouldering through those laughing bare-armed girls and superior, drunk boys (as if he were going on with them to Bernie’s for hamburgers, as if he were their friend), and calling out loud good nights to all and sundry before launching into his final sprint and dive.

  He made a splash. Considering the distance from wharf to water, his dive was shallow. He took the sting mostly on his forehead. The water’s slap went deeper than his skin; it seemed to smack and burn inside his head. With it came the jarring thought: This time I won’t come up. I’ll drown. That teenage dive flashed back: thirty show-off feet into the Araluen pool, then blackout, hospital, electrodes, more blackouts, headaches. Hospitals. In the brackish, oily coolness more neon lights fizzed inside his eyes.

  But on the surface, light and sound safely separated. The past vanished with the pain. The recklessness, the drama, the late hour, the apparent danger, the showing them, got him primed and going again. If you were trained for it, despite the drag and sag of pants and shoes and jacket, the whole gratifying performance was really a cinch. Even at fourteen he’d swum four hundred yards fully clothed for his bronze lifesaving medal. So night swimming in this black but smooth river, in this balmy air, was a snap. The stroke to use was the sidestroke – steady and smooth, no unnecessary overarm flapping. You stayed compact and the air in the clothes helped your buoyancy. And when the sidestroking arm got tired, you just switched arms.

  It was becoming his Saturday-night routine: swimming out three hundred yards or so beyond the glow of the street and jetty lights, then treading water in the dark, letting his clothes billow around him while he got his breath back. The only sound out here was the regular jump and plop of a feeding fish. Under the high moon, he’d float on his back and bask in the way he’d turned things around again. Put himself in the driver’s seat.

  I showed them all, he thought. It felt good. And now he calmed down by looking up at the backlit war memorial on Mt Eliza and the stationary lamps of the men kingfishing by the brewery outflow, the car lights cruising homeward along Mounts Bay Road and the prawners’ lamps slowly dipping and rising along the shore.

  When the street lamps went out at one a.m. he slowly swam ashore and walked the half-mile west along the bank to the Narrows. He liked it when the lights shut down for the night. He liked the idea of some old night-watchman at the State Electricity Commission pulling a switch and plunging Perth into darkness. Total darkness gave him an advantage, allowed him to see things other people couldn’t. Courtesy of the army, he possessed acute night-vision. During their brief encounter the army had taught him three valuable skills (a skill for each month of service). Of course his record had caught up with him before he looked like getting to Korea, but those three skills were plenty: firearms, motor vehicles and night-vision.

  In the river he squeezed his eyes shut and counted the twenty seconds to wipe out their memory of the light and bring his night-vision into play. But two distant cars, their headlights on full-beam now, messed up his gradations of blackness. Their beams blurred his night-time silhouettes.

  This was the place where he actually swam the river. No point any more in crossing Perth Water at its widest – two miles across – like he’d done at sixteen, eighteen, to make a point to the old man and a girl or two, people who didn’t believe he had it in him. At the Narrows the river was only a quarter-mile across and he still made his point. (Even though without the burden of clothes he could still easily manage the two miles. Probably even with his clothes.) The river was so narrow at the Narrows they were planning a bridge there, to relieve north–south traffic pressure on the Causeway, upstream. To bring together the southern and northern shores. That was fine by him. It’d make life easier.

  When he reached the Narrows he waded out into the river again and struck out for the pale gleam of the sand-spit on the southern shore. It deepened quickly here – the bottom was dredged out for the Rottnest ferries – and the tides swirled stronger in the channel. But he took it easy, clasping his rolled-up jacket to his chest with his left arm and sidestroking comfortably with his right. The night river didn’t frighten him. The noise of the lions coughing in the South Perth Zoo made him smile. Sharks? Not a thought. Everyone knew there were none in the river. He wouldn’t fancy treading on a cobbler’s spine in the shallows, but then he was OK because he was wearing shoes, wasn’t he? What a laugh. Before he knew it his feet were brushing the sand of the spit and he was walking up the beach, clearing his nose, dripping water and crunching mussel shells underfoot, and clomping past the Old Mill and on to Mill Point Road.

  He called it a night then. Anyway, he was too soaked to do anything more. It took him five minutes to find and hot-wire a Holden outside the zoo, and in another five or six minutes he was walking through his back door in Rivervale. Taking care not to wake the kids, he stepped out of his clothes and slid into bed beside Sally. (‘Slipped off the ferry gangplank, didn’t I?’) River algae was still in his hair and on his skin. As he dropped off to sleep his head swam with the algae’s yeasty smell, all mixed up with the bodies of standoffish girls and the sniggering of brass instruments.

  3

  YELLOW SAND

  We lived in the yellow sand. My father had swapped houses with a Perth family, the Seftons, who urgently needed to move to Melbourne. He thought the house-swap was a neat arrangement. My mother hated it. She was bitter that her new brick veneer house with its big windows overlooking her English flower beds and soft bowling-green lawn in East Brighton had been exchanged for a crumbling ‘Californian’ bungalow with small leadlight windows and a patchy lawn of buffalo grass whose coarse runners poked up from the sand.

  She hated its gloomy interior, especially the dusty homemade bric-a-brac left behind by Mrs Sefton. ‘I don’t want to inherit her hobbies,’ she complained. The knitted doilies and toilet-roll covers, the dried flower arrangements and ornaments of papier-mâché, the prissy lamps and vases made of jars and milk bottles covered with finicky little pieces of glued-on coloured paper, depressed her to tears.

  Mrs France next door cheerfully told us that Mrs Sefton was a regular patient at the Claremont Mental Hospital because of her obsessive desire to polish the front fence and path in her brassiere and bloomers. The news gave my mother further pause. While she gathered up all traces of Mrs Sefton’s occupational therapy and packed them out of sight, she worried what Mrs Sefton was getting up to in her house.

  The bungalow was at 30 Leon Road, Dalkeith, on the corner of Robert Street, near the top of a dune which rose from the river three blocks back. If you dug a hole in our yard the sand was pale grey for the first few inches, then it turned yellow and stayed yellow as deep as you could dig.

  The surroundings were greener than the coastal dunes (they could hardly be less green) and the prospects of danger and pleasure required more imagination here, three or four miles upriver. But they were there if you knew where to look.

  The front yard had poisonous oleanders which could kill you if you sucked their leaves and maybe if you even brushed against them. (It also had blackboys, which I discovered was the name for grass-trees with spear-like stems.) In the back yard there was a bobtail lizard and a grass snake or two in the lantana hedge and, overhanging Robert Street, a Japanese mulberry tree, big and leafy enough to hide in, which gave both fruit and efficient missiles that struck hard but squashily and left a satisfying indelible stain.

  As the neighbourhood boys showed me, the yellow sand was favoured for one of the two popular local customs – digging tunnels. The other craze was for urinating on moss. Whenever a boy saw moss growing anywhere – on a wall, rock, path or tree – he felt bound to piss on it.

  It was second nature. Perhaps growing up in the dry heat among the cardboard-coloured vegetation and pale dunes had given them an aversion to anything lush and green. My new friend Nick Howell was the chief exponent of moss-pissing. He was pleased to have us move into t
he neighbourhood. He’d already killed all the moss along the lee side of his own house down the road, and the Ivimeys’ moss at No. 34. He’d nearly finished Miss Thomas’s side fence at No. 35, and the three France girls at No. 32 wouldn’t let him anywhere near their walls. He was grateful to have moss access at No. 30.

  They called their sand tunnels ‘underground cubbies’. When we moved in, all the local boys were absorbed in some stage of the tunnelling process: digging a winding trench, roofing it with tin, cardboard or three-ply, heaping it with camouflaging sand, then disappearing down inside the burrow. In the hot sand they worked with the strange urgency and optimistic flurry of ants, pausing only to gulp water from the garden hose and piss on any available moss.

  Tunnel collapses were frequent. The walls or roofs simply caved in, or sometimes the boys forgot where the cubbies were and stepped on them. It didn’t seem to dawn on anyone that the speed of construction, the flimsy materials, and especially the loose, unstable sand could be to blame. Gasping boys crawled out from under the rubble, spitting dirt and shaking their heads as if to say, ‘How did that happen?’

  Most tunnellers were painted red and yellow, too, but on the other ends of their bodies. When I came home with a grazed forehead from a collapsed tunnel my mother shook me angrily. She couldn’t believe mothers allowed their children to go to school barefoot, much less risk suffocation by burrowing underground.

  Some local kids, even more strongly connected to the landscape, were named after West Australian geographical regions, native animals or plants. There were Kimberleys everywhere, named after the far north. I knew boys (Jarrah) and girls (Karri) with the names of hardwood timbers. Some parents chose to combine both marsupials and local building materials in their children’s names. Kanga Jarrah Tuart Wandoo Williams was the class librarian.

  The tunnelling craze, according to my father, had probably begun with those prison-camp escape books where cheeky British tunnellers constantly outfoxed their German guards. Then he decided the boys’ habit must have been picked up from their parents and grandparents. When the Japanese had bombed Broome, Exmouth, Onslow, Port Hedland and Wyndham, in the north of the State, the residents of Perth had sand-bagged their homes and rushed to dig air-raid shelters in their back yards. He knew all about bombing raids. He’d been a bomber pilot.