by Derek Hansen
‘Hi, Mack,’ I said. ‘I’ve been up to the hospital eight times but this is the first time they’ve allowed me in to see you.’ I wanted to give him some idea of how special the occasion was and how much I’d been looking forward to seeing him. I flashed him my statue-melting smile. Mack just nodded as if riding to the hospital eight times was on a par with enquiring if he’d like a cup of tea. He stared at me, then motioned me closer with the fingers of his right hand. He looked like he wanted to say something important. I leaned forward. His words came slowly and not without effort but they were clear enough.
‘Don’t waste your time, laddie,’ he said.
Captain Biggs tried to jolly Mack along by telling him who’d sent their best wishes and how my mum had put a blackboard outside the shop telling everyone how he was doing. He listened but he didn’t seem to care whether people sent their best wishes or not. It occurred to me that it wouldn’t bother Mack one bit if he’d died. When we said goodbye, he just rolled over away from us.
Captain Biggs tried to make excuses for Mack as we rode home. He said Mack was the way he was because of the medication he was on. Then it was because Mack was denied access to his favourite tipple. ‘You can’t just turn the tap off on someone used to having three or four bottles of beer a day,’ he said. That was being kind. Since I’d read Mack my essay, six or seven was closer to the mark. The captain was disappointed for me and made excuse after excuse for Mack’s behaviour, but by then I’d tuned out. Thoughts and sequences were taking shape inside my head and I didn’t like them one bit.
As soon as Captain Biggs had dropped Nigel’s bike off home, I wandered across Richmond Road and stood on the pavement exactly where Mack had been standing before he stepped out in front of the van. I knew I was wasting my time before I even glanced across at the Church Army buildings. Nowadays you’d say people were engaging in issue management or applying ‘spin’. Back then people just told little white lies to hide unpleasant truths or to protect the innocent. I suppose I was the innocent who needed protecting.
There was no way Mack could have seen Captain Biggs from where he’d been standing. The broken-down Maples delivery truck had been in the way. Captain Biggs would’ve needed to be twenty yards further down the road for Mack to have seen him. The fact that Mum, Mr Holterman and Captain Biggs had thought it necessary to conspire together and concoct a story confirmed my worst suspicions. Mack had tried to kill himself. Somehow it seemed typical of his state that he hadn’t even managed to do that right.
Nigel came home just as it got dark, his face flushed and his clothes covered in mud. Sixteen kids had turned up and his side had won 3–2. I found my ball in the garage where he’d left it. It was a sodden, muddy, pitiful thing. The lacing had broken and the bladder bulged out where it had pushed up into the gap. Despite his promise Nigel hadn’t put dubbin on the stitching before he’d taken the ball to the park.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The sun was still a good fifteen minutes from crossing the horizon when Mack gently pushed his boat off the trailer and dropped the anchor into the soft sand. He didn’t notice the man standing beneath the old pohutukawa until he turned to drive his truck back up off the beach. The man began walking towards him, walking stiffly with an obvious limp. But it was the black eye-patch over his left eye that caught Mack’s attention. Without knowing exactly why, Mack paused.
‘Good morning, Mack,’ the man says. ‘It seems we meet again.’
AN EXTRACT FROM MEMORY OF THE UNRECOVERED ESSAY ‘MACK’S STORY’
This much was clear. Mack desperately needed help and the only person who could help him was me. I’d done all I could to enlist the help of an adult to no avail. Somehow I had to find a way to help him, alone and unaided, using whatever abilities I had. The undeniable truth was that an essay had got Mack into this mess and my first instinct had been that a reinterpretation of Mack’s story, another essay, could get him out of it. Often when essays got bogged down I’d sit back, take another look at them and try a different approach. Sometimes it was simply a matter of telling the story from a different character’s point of view, as I’d done with my U-boat story. Sometimes I discovered the real story was hidden within the story I originally set out to write. Sometimes I simply changed the location. Sometimes I tried to picture the essay as a movie, which helped me identify the important elements. The night after visiting Mack in hospital I had one of those ideas that seems obvious later but was a breakthrough at the time. I decided to treat Mack’s story as fiction. This may not sound like much of a big deal but it was. Think about it. By treating his story as fiction the rules changed. I could apply the usual essaywriting disciplines, the things I was good at, and let my imagination do its stuff.
It was staggering how many options and alternatives began to flit through my mind as I lay in bed waiting for sleep to come. Optimism is unlimited in twelve-year-olds and especially so teetering on the brink of sleep. I didn’t know what I was going to do but with so many avenues suddenly opening up to me I knew I could do something and was going to do something. For the moment the story didn’t matter. I knew I’d find one with the absolute certainty only children, popes and dictators enjoy. After all, writing was what I did. That was what I was good at. That was what made me different. That was who I really was, not the boy from the draper’s but the boy who wrote essays. I fell asleep convinced I could save the day.
The morning dawned dull and grey with a leaden overcast sky. It was the sort of weather that often brought localised squalls sweeping in from the Tasman. The showers usually lasted only ten to fifteen minutes and it was the luck of the draw which suburbs were drenched. These were the kind of storms we lived in fear of when we were playing in the drains. We could be in bright sunshine while Grafton or Mt Albert copped a soaking and it was just a matter of time before the run-off found its way to us. Days like this were fairly typical of August. They prevented us from playing outdoors or going on bike rides and caused soccer matches to be cancelled. They were only good for writing essays, flying the sofa to Dresden or turning chairs into barricades and having fights with tightly bound paper pellets fired from rubber bands. In other words, those days were only good for staying indoors.
Against all reason, I decided to go fishing. Rod caught me in the garage checking through my tackle box when he went to get his bike. He was in his first year at Mt Albert Grammar and had to ride four and a half miles to school.
‘What are you doing?’ he asked. Rod was always good like that. He didn’t come straight out and say I was crazy but always gave me a chance to state my case.
‘I thought I’d go down to the breakwater after school and see if there are any moochers around.’ Moochers were big, solitary snapper that liked to move in and occupy a territory, usually a reef, but they were known to take temporary residence among the piles beneath wharves. Mack had been an expert on catching moochers when he lived on Great Barrier Island. Sometimes the odd one was caught in the harbour in the middle of winter but those occasions were rare enough to make the newspaper.
‘I don’t fancy your chances. Think about it before you talk to Mum.’ Coming from Rod this was strong stuff. What he was really saying was, don’t get Mum into trouble. That gave me pause.
Rod rode off leaving me reconsidering. It was Thursday and Mum was down to the very last of her housekeeping. She didn’t draw wages until after dinner when Dad and her had checked the till against sales and balanced the books. If Mum gave me money for bait it would be all she had left for dinner. I wondered if I even had the right to ask her when I knew darn well my chances of coming home with fish were practically zero. As it was we were probably facing lamb’s fry with onions instead of bacon. If we were right out of luck it would be cauliflower cheese with recriminations to follow. On the credit side, if there was one day in the week when Mum and Dad wanted me to come home with fish it was Thursday. But it was a Thursday in August when fish were scarce and moochers not much more than a fantasy, a month when it was d
ark by five which left me little more than an hour to fish, and a day when it was more likely to rain than not.
The more I thought about it, the more the odds stacked up against me. Even under cover in the garage the cold and damp had started to seep through my school jersey making me shiver. It didn’t take much imagination to picture how much colder it would be down on the breakwater, especially if it rained and the wind picked up. Yet I was desperate to go fishing, not just on the off-chance of catching a fish, but because I wanted to get on with the job of saving Mack. Mack was my priority. Sitting on the end of the wharf with a rod in my hand, no one around and few distractions provided the most perfect opportunity to think and that was what I most needed to do. Given the right environment I was certain the right story would come. The breakwater was my favourite place to sit and think. It seemed to me that my mind split into two halves when I was fishing. One half of it could rig lines, bait hooks and cast almost on automatic while the other half could skyrocket away on ideas and organise thoughts into a credible plot. Mack told me whales do something similar when they sleep. Apparently if whales go completely to sleep they sink. So what they do is shut down half of their brain at a time. One half sleeps while the other half remains awake. He called it bifurcating, a fabulous word that instantly stuck in my mind. I liked to think that what I did was a form of bifurcating. The roof of the garage started drumming with rain as though to back up Rod’s plea. I put my tackle box away to bifurcate another day. Mack would just have to wait until the weather cleared.
Blessings come in the strangest disguises. It rained all day Thursday and Friday. On Friday night we heard on the radio that soccer was cancelled on Saturday because the grounds were too wet. Some time in the wee hours of Saturday morning a westerly front came through and blew the rain and clouds out to sea. I got out of bed to bright sunshine and the stillness that often follows a storm. Normally this would’ve driven me to distraction because we probably could’ve played soccer but, for once, I didn’t mind. Another opportunity beckoned, the same one I’d been denied on Thursday.
I set off for the breakwater at ten in the morning for a high tide just after two in the afternoon. I was fully prepared to use all of my pocket money to buy bait but the butcher was closed on Saturday. Mum made me two Chesdale Cheese sandwiches and cut me off a piece of skirt steak she was going to turn into a stew. Taking hold of my arm she warned me not to come home emptyhanded. She was indulging me, knowing as well as anyone that my chances of catching anything worthwhile before the soccer season ended were pretty slim.
I wasn’t thrilled at having skirt steak for bait. When you go fishing in August you need everything going for you and the lack of a slab of liver was a definite setback. On the other hand, I had all day to catch a fish and think. I was pretty hopeful that sooner or later a fish would come along. Maybe a kahawai or a gurnard. Mack always said that if you’re prepared to put in the hours something will come along eventually. But fishing took a back seat to my real purpose. I wanted to find my story. Any fish would be a bonus.
My hopes plummeted when I unwrapped the bait. I couldn’t believe it. The skirt steak had looked all right in the kitchen, maybe because it was part of a bigger piece and looked a lot more red. There on the wharf I could see it was mostly fat and membrane and everyone knew fish hate fat. My spirits sank even further when I started to trim it. I was left with just over a third of the amount of bait I needed. What a disaster. I’d planned four hours fishing and barely had enough bait for two. I couldn’t help feeling that the forces were conspiring against me as I baited my hooks and cast out as far as I could. I didn’t hold out much hope.
I started thinking about Mack’s story as soon as my sinker settled on the bottom, trying to picture it as a movie and what would have happened if I changed the storyline. I used to annoy my pals when we went to the matinee at the Esquire cinema because I could nearly always guess what would happen next. They reckoned I ruined the serials for them. I tried to picture the sequence of events from the time Mack discovered he was out of diesel to his encounter with the U-boat and his return to Medlands Beach. Perhaps because of my disappointment with my bait, my predictive skills deserted me. I bogged down on his conversation with the policeman and the fishermen who were about to go out looking for him. The story petered out when I needed it left up in the air and hanging. The thing is, although I wasn’t making progress I’d become convinced that treating Mack’s story as a movie was the right way to start.
At least it was warm. There were no clouds for the sun to hide behind and the sea had that flat, oily look it gets when there’s no breeze. These were exactly the sort of conditions Mack always claimed were good for fishermen but bad for fishing. Once again, it seemed he was right. The tide came in but didn’t bring any fish with it, at least none that were tempted by my fatty bait. I left the strips of meat out on my hooks until the sea soaked the colour from them, re-baited and tried again.
A bloke I knew by sight set up on the wharf along from me. I liked him because he always made a point of saying g’day to me even though he was older than my father. His favourite bait was trevally but he wasn’t having any more luck than me. I started concentrating on Mack’s story again and, because of the combination of sun on my back and the lack of activity on my line, this time managed to get right into it.
For some reason I started to home in on the German Commander. I sensed he was the key. I remembered how he’d asked about Great Barrier Island. The whatifs began to scroll through my mind. The last words the German officer had spoken were, ‘Go home. But you must go slowly.’ That was good, but what if he’d said, ‘Go home, Mack. Maybe one day when this war is over we’ll meet again.’ My heart leaped. I knew I was onto something. That’s what the Commander would’ve said if it had been a movie. That’s what Curt Jurgens would’ve said. I knew instantly I’d found the beginning of my sequel to Mack’s story. My mind raced with possibilities. Of course! They had to meet up again after the war. But how? But when?
‘Want the rest of my bait?’
I jumped. Forget bifurcating. Every ounce of my brain was committed one hundred percent to my sequel. I nearly dropped my fishing rod. I was so lost in thought I hadn’t heard the other fisherman come up to me. He’d packed up and was leaving.
‘Nothing out there,’ he said. ‘But if something does come along, I reckon you’ll do better with trevally than you will with the meat you’re using. What happened to your liver? You usually use liver.’
I thanked him for the trevally and again silently for bringing me back to reality and reminding me of my other obligations. I also had fish to catch. If I could catch dinner I’d be doing Mum a big favour and there’d be less pressure on her later in the week. I decided to let Mack’s sequel sit and stew for a while. My first cast with trevally was productive, but only just. I brought in a small snapper. It was undersized and so small there was no point in keeping it unless I caught at least three more. I decided to back my luck and tucked it into the cotton flour bag Mum had given me to put the fish in. The trevally gave me confidence. It was even better bait than liver. So it should be, it was twice the price. I caught another baby snapper with my next cast and kept it as well. All I needed was two or three more and I could count the day a roaring success, at least from the fishing point of view. But the school the two baby snapper had come from had moved on. It went as dead as a dodo. I changed baits and directed my next cast inshore. I tried to concentrate on fishing but nothing happened. Inevitably my mind returned to Mack’s story and the wonderful options that were opening up.
The U-boat Commander’s expressed wish that one day he and Mack would meet up again created opportunities but did nothing to exonerate Mack. I searched for the missing ingredient. Maybe ten minutes later, while my mind was burning with possibilities, something hit my line. My rod doubled over and line fizzed off my reel despite the fact I’d set a fairly heavy drag. I was late striking and I paid the penalty. The line stopped running out and went limp.
I nearly screamed with frustration. It could’ve been a big snapper, a winter moocher, and I’d missed it through not keeping my mind on the job.
I cast again and wound up the slack as soon as my sinker hit bottom. Bang! Talk about a strike! This time I was ready and hooked up. I knew straight away this fish was a good size, the sort you expect to catch way out in the Gulf on the La Rita. I was so scared of losing it I didn’t dare play it. Against all the rules I tightened the drag and winched it in. The snapper still had plenty of fight in it when I began to lift it out of the water. It wouldn’t stop thrashing. I would’ve given anything for a gaff but I’d never owned one, and didn’t know if they even made them seven foot long, which was how far I had to lift the fish to get it onto the wharf. The line snapped just as I swung the snapper over the edge of the wharf and, mercifully, the fish’s momentum carried it onto the planks. Even so, I had to dive on it to stop it skidding back into the water. I dragged it away from the edge towards my tackle box, grabbed my knife and shoved the blade up through the gills into its brain, the way Mack had taught me. The snapper stopped flapping, but there was no way I could. I was shaking with excitement. Somehow against all the odds I’d caught a good four-pounder, what Mack called the perfect size. I reckon I felt better than Sir Edmund Hillary did when he finally set foot on top of Mt Everest.
I didn’t waste time trying to fit it into my flour bag because the earlier strike raised the possibility my snapper wasn’t a moocher but part of a school swimming past. I fancied my chances of catching another. I re-rigged, cast again and, unbelievably, hooked up again. Incredible! When you think of the time of the year and how slowly things had begun this shouldn’t be happening. But that’s fishing for you. The fish took off on a run I thought would never end. It headed inshore and I had to walk with it to save line. When it turned, I had to walk back the way I’d come, past my tackle box, right to the far edge of the wharf. I’d thought the four-pounder was big but this was the four-pounder’s great-grandfather. This was a Mack special. This was the sort of winter fish that made the newspapers. I had no choice but to play it. I slackened off the drag to make sure the fish had no fight left before I brought it up near the piles. I could afford to be patient because I already had the four-pounder and I was all too aware of the risks I’d taken with that one. So I concentrated on bringing in the fish to the exclusion of everything else. I never gave Mack’s story a thought while I was reeling it in, never thought about anything except catching that fish.
