The Shark Net

by Robert Drewe

  ‘Very fancy.’

  ‘I saved up for it.’ I wished I hadn’t said that. It sounded childish and conscientious. It had taken me two years to save the money for the bike. I suddenly felt differently about it.

  He arched an eyebrow. ‘Good boy.’ He swung himself off the bike and turned it upside down again. He spun the back wheel. ‘See you, boss,’ he said, and scampered down the stairs.

  I watched him go around the side of the house. The yellow-and-black Dunlop truck was too wide for our driveway, and he’d parked it hard up against some of my mother’s shrubs.

  He had to leap up to get into the cabin. The driveway was uphill to the street and when he reversed he revved the engine and spun the wheels and gravel flew up. He was steering while hanging half out the door to see behind him, and the open door stripped branches from the oleander and bottlebrush. When he swung the truck out onto Circe Circle it left tyre tracks in the lawn. I could see the trademark Dunlop tread in the flattened grass.

  After that I saw Eric about once a month. When he wasn’t delivering something to our house he was taking something away. My father used to pay the neighbourhood kids for every old car battery they found. Eric would take the batteries back to Dunlop HQ where they re-used some vital part of them. I didn’t know which part; once I’d got my cash I couldn’t have been less interested in car batteries.

  It wasn’t the most taxing collection job in the world; some weeks there were only four or five batteries to pick up. Eric would stretch out the time, have a yarn. One afternoon I was practising hockey, shooting for goal. ‘Let’s have a go,’ he said. I handed him the stick and he dexterously spun around, backhanded the ball through my legs and flicked it into the goals. He was good and I said so.

  ‘A-grade,’ he said. ‘Could’ve played State, maybe national, but the surf club took up too much time.’ Then he skipped off. He liked to leave on an upward note.

  The dining chairs Eric had been delivering were for the dinner party that evening for Mr Blackwood, my father’s boss from Melbourne. The chairs were old ones re-upholstered for the occasion with Dunlopillo, for maximum seating comfort.

  I thought about how Eric and Mr Blackwood were at precisely the opposite ends of the Dunlop spectrum. Eric was a relief delivery driver in the company’s most remote branch office. Mr Blackwood was the managing director.

  Eric had come around the back of the house. Mr Blackwood was ushered through the front door by my father. In the hallway my mother said, ‘How nice to see you,’ and he kissed her cheek. After they’d had drinks, as my father showed Mr Blackwood to his seat at the table, I remembered Eric delivering it that morning and thought how the biggest boss and the lowest employee were linked by that chair.

  It was a coincidence that both of them talked to me about the beach. Mr Blackwood said to me, ‘I hear you’re a man after my own heart.’ Was I? ‘Interested in the seashore,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, yes.’ I didn’t know what I was letting myself in for.

  ‘Excellent. Your dad says you can show me some intertidal platforms.’ I could? ‘Reefs.’

  Mr Blackwood’s first name was Robert. When my father was referring to him during company business he called him R. B., but in conversation he called him Bob. He was the big boss but he wasn’t the sort of businessman I was used to seeing. He wasn’t loud and bossy, he didn’t smoke cigarettes and he toyed politely with his drink. He wore rimless glasses, smoked a pipe and knew the names of twenty kinds of limpet. He was the first intellectual I’d ever met.

  When bigshots came across the country to inspect their western territory and address the troops my father wined and dined them. He’d give a cocktail party and dinner at the Esplanade Hotel. On another night there would be the dinner party at our house. Sometimes he’d also organise a golf day at the Cottesloe Golf Club or, in summer, an evening’s sailing on the river.

  Bob Blackwood didn’t want to play golf or go sailing. He’d been plucked out of Melbourne University to be Dunlop’s boss, and his manner was solemn and thoughtful. What he wanted to do after hours was roll up his trousers and paddle along the seashore.

  At the end of his first day in town, my father came home shaking his head in a bemused way. He poured a beer for my mother and himself, sat down on the back steps, took off his black shoes, and shook the sand from them and from his trouser cuffs. His feet looked oddly naked poking out from his suit pants. I’d never seen him sitting on the steps either. We all looked at him. He sipped his beer. Finally he said to my mother, ‘I know something you don’t.’

  ‘I’ll bite,’ she said.

  ‘I know the difference between a western noddiwink and a checkered australwink,’ he said. He’d been rehearsing this. ‘And between a stripe-mouthed conniwink and a furrowed clusterwink.’

  He took another sip of beer and wiggled his toes. He was enjoying himself. ‘I’ve been paddling in the sea with Bob Blackwood. His latest craze is shell-collecting.’ He laughed. ‘Our branch is in his good books because we’ve got different shells than he’s used to.’

  My mother smiled. My little sister toddled up behind my father and patted his head.

  ‘And here’s my little kiddiwink,’ my father said and swung her on his knee.

  The big boss’s new sea-shell obsession was already the cause of much secret merriment at Dunlop. My father had no intention of carrying his shell bucket a second time, so he volunteered my services. The following early evening Mr Blackwood and I went wading over the Cottesloe reefs at low tide.

  Although I spent every spare moment at the beach, I’d never given much thought to shells. I regarded them as better looking gravel. Mr Blackwood had on his baggy shell-collecting shorts. He stooped down and pointed at a shell. ‘Do you know what that is?’

  I knew the names of about six shellfish – barnacles, oysters, clams, mussels, abalone, limpets. ‘A limpet?’

  ‘Correct. There are twenty types of limpets on the Australian coast,’ he said. This seemed a lot to me. On the rocks at Cottesloe he pointed out three kinds: giant, banded and flamed limpets.

  Mr Blackwood certainly knew his limpets. It was sort of interesting. I hadn’t given a limpet a second’s thought in my life. I’d never considered them as crawling animals and, what’s more, crawling animals with a homing instinct. I found older people’s enthusiasm quite contagious when they knew what they were talking about. But as we splashed and slipped about, and he kept going on about limpets, I fell into the sort of information daze that would creep up on me in school.

  The limestone rocks here were either jagged and sharp, or flat and slimy with weed. My soles were used to them but I still had to pick my way gingerly across the reef. His middle-aged white feet and ankles were already scraped but he was too overcome with limpet fever to notice that a big toe was bleeding.

  In his quiet voice he counted off the twenty types of limpets. He generously left their Latin names out of it. There were keyhole limpets and scaly limpets, star limpets and rainbow limpets. There were limpets named after the limpet lovers who had discovered them. There was even one called a cryptic limpet.

  I was surprised there wasn’t a Blackwood limpet. I would have been hearing about limpets until Christmas but just then I saw two girls walking along the shore towards us, heads together and arms gesticulating.

  In the way that a certain type of boy in Aircraft Recognition class in the Air Training Corps at school could recognise the silhouettes of Lancasters and Wirraways and Vampires, I knew and could recognise the outlines of most of the girls I lusted after.

  I knew the silhouettes of their particular curves and angles and faces and breasts and legs, and I recognised their swimsuits. They were fixed in my brain. These two girls were Ada and Lola, two legendary beauties. I couldn’t let them see Mr Blackwood and me. I couldn’t let these girls to whom I had never spoken, and who would look right through me in any case, see me (a) shell-collecting, and (b) in the company of a white-legged senior citizen.

  I was de
sperate. I pointed urgently out to sea and frowned. ‘Big evening tide coming in, Mr Blackwood. The tides come in fast around here.’

  I didn’t wait for him to disagree. I turned and began to hurry back over the reef to the beach. I held the shell bucket against my leg, on the side away from the approaching girls. In my haste, important limpet samples scattered and were in danger of being washed away but I didn’t stop to pick them up. The girls, skylarking in the sand, bouncing and jostling each other, came ever closer.

  I knew I was brutally ending the only acquaintanceship with an intellectual I’d probably ever have. And he was my father’s boss.

  ‘We’d better hurry,’ I called back to him.

  PROWLER

  My mother was lying in bed reading Peyton Place. Her friends had been making sly cracks about the book for months so she’d ordered it from the library. It was so notorious and popular that it had taken a while for a library copy to become available. The tale of life behind closed doors in a frosty New England town seemed to have touched a chord in this sandy West Australian town.

  I was reading it myself, too, but secretly, making sure I returned it to her bedside table in the same position and with the jacket flap turned to the right page. In this way, perched on the edge of the double bed, ears cocked for approaching footsteps, I’d recently read the ‘adult’ best-sellers From Here to Eternity, Moulin Rouge and Not as a Stranger, and was still contemplating the vivid images they’d etched in my brain, especially those conjured up by the phrase ‘mysterious black triangles’ in the brothel scene in From Here to Eternity.

  It was late at night when my mother was engrossed in the scandalous lives of ordinary people in Peyton Place. She didn’t know what made her suddenly look up. It wasn’t a noise, more an uneasy sensation. She glanced up and saw an eye at the edge of the bedroom window, watching her through the space where the side of the venetians stood out from the glass.

  My father was a thousand miles away, on his annual north-west trip. For six weeks every winter, when the far north-west of the State was warm and dry and the previous summer’s tropical cyclones just a memory, he travelled up the coast in one of the State Shipping Service’s cargo vessels, calling in at all ports to Wyndham or Darwin, flying the Dunlop flag and taking orders for Dunlop products.

  He loved this trip. He relished the hard-drinking hospitality of the north-west. He came back brown and sleek with tales of Dunlop adventures: of crocodiles chasing golfers on mudflat courses and people playing tennis on courts made of flattened antbeds and of finding entire stocks of the company’s truck tyres eaten by termites.

  He sailed so far north that three other countries, Portuguese Timor, Indonesia and New Guinea, were closer than his office in Perth. He was barely in Australian waters. He was in exotic-sounding places like the Joseph Bonaparte Gulf and the Arafura Sea. My mother couldn’t remember which tropical spot he was in at the moment. But the prowler was standing in the front garden.

  She could see only this single eye but she felt the prowler was smirking at her. The eye was dark and glinting with interest. It was – she thought, she couldn’t be sure – familiar. The eye didn’t move for what seemed like many minutes, taking her in, savouring the sight of her in her nightdress, while she stared back, shocked and unbelieving.

  She was scared but she was also annoyed. The north-west trip was a peaceful time for us left at home. No one ever said so but the house was much calmer when my father sailed north. Life was less dramatic and emotional. It was like a holiday, and now that serenity was shattered.

  The thought also struck her that for the prowler to be looking into the bedroom at that angle he must be standing on the flower bed, crushing her camellias, which were already languishing. She jumped up and shouted, ‘Go away! I’m calling the police!’

  When she leapt from the bed the face vanished from the window. She said to herself, I mustn’t panic, and she acted out a little performance while she ran around the house, switching on the lights and checking the locks on the doors and windows and shutting the doors of the children’s rooms.

  ‘I’m getting my husband!’ she said, for the prowler’s benefit. ‘Dear! Wake up! Come here quickly!’ Of course he was in Broome or Wyndham or somewhere tropical. And she didn’t want to make too much noise and frighten the children. Then she phoned the police.

  She didn’t tell me about the prowler until the next morning. ‘Why didn’t you wake me?’ I said.

  ‘You might have been hurt. Anyway, he was gone by then.’

  She shivered. I looked to see if she’d been crying. She looked drawn but calm.

  ‘The police came and drove around the block once or twice. They told me to leave all the lights on and make a cup of tea. They said he’d be miles away.’

  ‘Did you give them a description? What did he look like?’

  She seemed slightly embarrassed. ‘All I saw was one eye. I told the police it looked … knowing. And sort of amused.’ She shivered again.

  Knowing? Amused? ‘They said, “Not too much to go on, is it madam?” ’

  BURNING THE MIRROR

  It was late on a breezy Saturday afternoon in autumn and my father was prowling the front garden. He glared at the hibiscus and oleander bushes and snapped off an occasional dead branch. He glowered at fallen leaves and poked at the sandy patches in the lawn where the superfine couch grass had refused to mesh with the regular couch grass as it was supposed to. But his mind didn’t seem to be on the garden.

  I was sitting on the front steps convalescing, chewing a gumtree twig and patting the dog. Now and then my father gave me a sideways frown as if to say, Son, why are you hanging around? Go inside. But he didn’t say anything, and I knew he wouldn’t.

  I wasn’t long out of the Lucknow Hospital’s isolation ward, recovering from meningitis. Only a month before I’d been struck rigid and barely conscious from inflamed membranes of my brain and spinal cord. I was screaming with the head pain. My head wouldn’t move on my neck. Boiling brain had finally got me.

  The family doctor, Dr Owen Synott, had diagnosed influenza. Just in time he’d been countermanded by a second opinion, a lumbar puncture and the quick administering of sulpha drugs.

  Now my parents’ guilt gave me considerable leeway, at least for the moment. I was supposed to take it easy for a few months. If I wanted to sit on the step, I sat.

  I stayed sitting there, tickling Shandy and rolling the chewed twig around in my mouth. I didn’t particularly enjoy the taste of bark and eucalyptus but I didn’t dislike it enough to spit it out. Now and then I stroked the downy moustache which had miraculously happened, along with the three-inch growth spurt and the big weight loss, in the six weeks I was sick. I was bored but also quite relishing the boredom. I was pale, gaunt, taller, moustached and glad to be home. And I had nothing better to do.

  The drama of the illness and my absence from home had given the front garden an aura of novelty. While I was in hospital the seasons had changed, too. Familiar objects, angles and shadows had shifted position. Everything was more sharply defined. The garden and the house looked different to me. I looked different to me. And my father wasn’t himself either.

  His nervy pacing was making me curious. Ten or fifteen minutes had gone by and he still hadn’t said anything. He kept strolling up and down, and now he studiously examined tree bark for borers and tugged runaway strands of couch grass from the garden bed.

  After a few more minutes of grass-pulling he sighed and squatted down on the grass verge and half-turned towards the road. He took out his packet of Turf, stared intently into the packet, as if cigarettes came in a varied assortment like Black Magic chocolates, and slowly selected one. Staring into the distance, he tapped it on the packet. His tapping habit. He always tapped his cigarettes long enough to drive you nearly crazy, but not usually for this long. He tapped it and kept tapping. The tapping was supposed to pack in any loose strands of tobacco, but I couldn’t remember any of the Turf corktips that I’d surreptitio
usly smoked ever shedding that much tobacco.

  No one, I thought now, would keep tapping a cigarette like that unless it was a nervous habit or they thought they looked clever doing it. It was interesting when you looked at it like that.

  Before I was sick the cigarette tapping had grated as much as him saying blah, blah, blah at the end of a sentence, as if the subject was too boring to pursue. In the past year or so he’d introduced blah, blah, blah into his selection of favourite sayings, like by the same token and for crying out loud and, if we had company and he wanted to sound important, to cut a long story short.

  In the beginning he’d actually used blah, blah, blah to cut his long stories short. But soon he seemed to enjoy finishing nearly all his sentences with it, even short ones. He’d say, ‘I’ve had it up to here with the tyre retailers and all that blah, blah, blah,’ or, more confusingly, ‘I’m a full bottle on all that blah, blah, blah.’ It was like another language and it was contagious. We all picked it up. At the dinner table we’d say, ‘Pass me the butter and the blah, blah, blah.’

  He seemed impatient with the world, as if he were standing in line and everyone and everything was keeping him waiting. When he was testy and explosive he was a dead ringer for Fred Clark in The Solid Gold Cadillac and Don’t Go Near the Water. Fred Clark always played assertive bald-domed businessmen and politicians with short fuses. Lately he seemed to be in every comedy ever made. I’d squirm when I saw the name Fred Clark come up in the credits. I wasn’t the only one who saw the similarity. At the pictures Nick Howell would dig me in the ribs and say, ‘Hey, there’s your old man again!’

  Now as far as I was concerned – and that was strange, too – he could tap cigarettes and say blah, blah, blah from dawn till dusk and it wouldn’t worry me. I felt magnanimous. Dr Synott’s wrong diagnosis and the pain and being rigid were only part of it. The thing was, I’d been sick for two days before my parents had even called the doctor. They’d thought my sudden weakness and severe headache coincided too neatly with my mid-year exams. Now they were feeling so guilty and I had so many credits stored up I felt at peace with the world.