The Gulf

by Anna Spargo-Ryan

  ‘My boys,’ he said, and smushed the guys’ heads together under his own. They didn’t fight him; if anything, the hug lingered. He hugged us, too, me and Ben squashed into one person by a stranger who had shown us more affection in ten seconds than our mother had in three months. ‘I’m Reg. But call me Uncle Reg.’

  Trey left with his girlfriend and a sleeping bag.

  ‘Where are they going?’ I said.

  ‘Where do you reckon?’ said Reg, and he winked.

  ‘Camping,’ Raf said, pushing Reg through the front door.

  He had put on a breakfast spread of fresh fruit and tiny fried fish, and we ate under his pergola and he smoked a metal pipe that he tapped on the table with a click.

  It was comfortable. I stretched my legs, extended them all the way under the table until they reached the ends of my toes. Let out a sigh I’d been holding since who knew when. I saw Mum’s face for a second, her eyes shrunken back into her skull and her skin pulled over it, tight as cling wrap. Tried to remember her before, when the flat hadn’t been sold, but just saw her with her head on the table and the flies buzzing around.

  ‘Uncle Reg,’ Ben said, with his mouth full of melon, and the old man turned to look at him, ‘have you ever tried turning a frog inside out?’

  ‘No, I never have. It sounds dangerous.’

  ‘It’s not. My friend Yiannis showed me once when we went in his parents’ caravan while they were out for dinner. We weren’t supposed to go in there but he said their other toilet wasn’t working so we had to go in there, and there was a frog in the toilet. Do you ever get frogs in your toilet?’

  ‘Sure do. Green ones. Brown ones.’ Ben laughed at brown ones. ‘You ever seen a snake in a toilet, fella?’

  ‘A snake in the toilet?’ Ben’s eyes were wide. ‘What if it bit, you know. Your, you know.’

  ‘Balls?’

  Raf spat his drink across the table.

  ‘Maybe just check before you sit down then, huh?’ Uncle Reg smiled and winked again, so easy, like it was the only emotion he had.

  Ben and I would share a room, but instead of overlooking a dead lawn we could open the window and hear the ocean, shouts from people walking their dogs in the afternoon sun. There were bunk beds and another single one with clean sheets and a single daisy in a jar.

  ‘He must have lots of visitors,’ Ben said.

  ‘I think Raf has a big family.’

  ‘Do you think there are really snakes in the toilet?’

  ‘Hope I don’t find out.’

  Later on we left Ben peeling prawns with Reg, and Raf took me for a walk down to the foreshore. ‘This is where I grew up,’ he said. ‘My best mate Eddie lived three doors down from Reg and next to us was my dad’s friend from the army and on the other side of him was my gran.’

  ‘Is Reg your dad’s brother? Your mum’s brother?’

  He kicked the sand. ‘Nah. He’s . . . he’s not really my uncle. Not my blood uncle, anyway.’

  ‘Oh.’

  He dropped into the sand and bent forward over his knees. ‘He’s a foster carer. You know, takes kids in when they’ve got nowhere to go. Just until they’re ready to go home again.’

  ‘Why did you need to go to a foster carer?’ I sat down next to him. ‘Am I allowed to ask?’

  ‘Yeah, ’course you are.’ He rubbed my knee. ‘Mum was sick. Couldn’t look after herself, let alone Trey and me.’

  ‘Sick?’

  ‘She had breast cancer. We were kids, we couldn’t help out. Dad was at work all the time and Trey started skipping school so they sent us down here. It was cool though. Gran knew Uncle Reg for years before we arrived. I’d met him heaps of times.’

  ‘You couldn’t go with your gran?’ I imagined Nonno bent over in his garden, too crooked to take us in.

  ‘Gran? Nah, her house is full of cats.’

  ‘Oh, right. But your mum got better?’

  ‘Yeah, she got better. Remission, anyway. She says you never go round saying cancer is cured.’ He waved his hand towards the sea. ‘So, yeah. Six months here with Reg, cricket on the beach, barbecues at night. Same as now. Nearly didn’t want to go home.’

  ‘Do you miss it here? Like, are you homesick?’

  ‘Not really. Even less to do here than in Port Flinders. Same goes pretty much all the way round, ’course, far as Port Lincoln. Anyway.’ He leaned back on his elbows, and I did the same. We sat that way for minutes, watching the water come and go.

  Finally, I said, ‘Well, I am. Homesick, I mean.’

  ‘I know,’ he said. The sand was warm between us, our fingers nearly touching.

  ‘I miss getting up in the morning and knowing where I fit in the world.’

  He reached his arm around my shoulders and pulled me to him. ‘I’ve got a pretty good idea.’

  His body moved against mine and his arm was shaking holding up both of us, but we stayed like that until the tide had come in and the other families had packed up for the night.

  ‘I’m glad your mum’s okay now,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah.’

  I took a deep breath. ‘I don’t know if mine is.’

  The words came out and they hung out with all the other huge things we’d said. Raf shifted his weight. He took a breath, let it out again. His chest rose and fell. Finally, his mouth opened: ‘That sucks.’

  I let it sit there for a while.

  ‘What can I do?’ he said.

  ‘I don’t know. I just needed to say it.’

  ‘I’ll show you how to fish,’ he said. ‘This afternoon. In case you ever get stranded on a desert island without me.’

  The jetty stretched out white and glossy into the water. On all sides, people dropped their lines over the edge and stared down at them, drew up a stool, laughed with their heads right back. We walked out to the end and I pulled my hat over my eyes, tried to shield them from the glittering water.

  ‘So, this is fishing,’ I said.

  ‘I’ve fished before, obviously,’ Ben said. ‘I can show you how.’

  Raf set each of us up with a reel and a bag of bait that smelled like cat food. ‘Just wait here a second,’ he said, picking up his phone. ‘I’ll be right back.’ He disappeared down the jetty with his hand to his ear.

  Ben pierced the cockle with his hook, pulled it right down. ‘Let me do yours,’ he said, and slipped another slippery blob on to my line. We cast together into the water, watched our lures disappear into the murky depths.

  ‘I’ve never been fishing,’ I said.

  ‘I reckon I’ve been about three times,’ he said. ‘Yiannis showed me how to make a lure out of a real goldfish. You have to embalm it first, but you can do that with PVA. That means it won’t rot.’

  ‘Gross.’

  ‘Yiannis said his grandfather showed him how to do it when they went to visit him in Greece.’

  The lines moved with the currents.

  ‘Do you miss him?’ I said.

  ‘Who?’ He gave his line a jiggle.

  ‘Yiannis. Everyone from school. Amir?’

  He shrugged. ‘I guess. Who do you miss?’

  ‘No one,’ I said.

  ‘Nonno?’

  ‘No, I said “no one”.’

  ‘Oh,’ Ben said, and shook his line. A cold wind had come up and along the water, driving the lines further away from us. Fish curled around each other under the surface, brown ones with rainbow light reflected. They ignored our lures. When we pulled them from the water, the cockles were gone.

  ‘Oh,’ Ben said. ‘I thought I put that on pretty good.’

  Raf came back with cans of lemon squash. ‘Hey, Benno, let me help you.’ He squatted next to him and showed him how to get the bait right on and around and threaded back in on itself. ‘We can go crabbing, if you like. Get a net. Or squid! You catch them with a jig. It’s like heaps of hooks all stuck together.’

  Ben’s eyes widened. ‘What do you do with a crab, once you catch it? How do you get it out of the net without g
etting your fingers cut off?’

  ‘Practice.’ He tossed the line into the water. ‘The thing about catching crabs is, you gotta get a good little leatherjacket first. Pop them in with the net, or throw them down the bottom and the crabs go nuts for them. Cockles are for babies.’

  ‘I’m not a baby,’ Ben said, puffing out his chest.

  We let our legs dangle over the edge of the jetty. Raf’s thong slipped into the water and Ben started laughing. ‘Shit!’ Raf jumped to his feet.

  ‘Can’t you just jump in after it?’ I said.

  ‘Oh yeah, it’s real smart to jump into the water around a bunch of fish hooks. Everyone will be real happy to hoist their lines out while I dick around trying to get my shoe back.’ He laughed, sat one-shoed for a while.

  Ben stared at him. Raf pointed to the taut line. ‘You got one? Let’s reel him in.’ A tiny yellow fish swung from the hook, half its face coming away. Ben started to cry.

  ‘I don’t know if I like fishing,’ he said, and Raf tossed the fish back. It landed with a slap on his floating thong.

  ‘You’ll get used to it.’

  We sat in silence, staring at the thong. The men around us threw their lines in and out, sometimes with fish glinting in the sun and sometimes with bits of rubbish hanging from them. I reached under Raf’s hand, pushed my fingers through his. His hand was coarse and warm, gritty where sand had stuck to sweat.

  ‘Raf,’ Ben said.

  ‘Yeah, mate.’

  ‘You know your Uncle Reg.’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Is he your mum’s brother, or your dad’s brother?’

  ‘He’s not my mum’s brother or my dad’s brother.’

  ‘So he’s not your uncle?’

  ‘Kinda. A while ago my mum couldn’t get out of bed, so he looked after us until she was better. Sometimes we call people like him uncles.’

  ‘Your mum couldn’t get out of bed?’ I watched Ben’s brain tick over. He breathed faster. ‘Did they make you leave her?’

  ‘Nah, I mean, sort of. But she was really sick.’

  ‘So they only make you go if your mum is really sick?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Okay.’ He breathed out. ‘Our mum isn’t sick.’

  Raf looked to me. ‘That’s . . . good?’

  ‘Shall we go again?’ I said.

  ‘I don’t even have any shoes,’ Raf said.

  ‘You have one shoe.’

  He cracked a smile. ‘Fine. We can’t go back empty-handed.’

  ‘You could dive in and get Ben’s fish back,’ I said. It flapped around on the thong with its mouth open. ‘How long do they last out of the water?’

  ‘Few minutes.’ He pulled off his shirt and dropped into the water. The lines moved in his tide.

  ‘Dickhead!’ The men got up from their stools and shook their fists. ‘What are you doing? Scaring all the damn fish away!’

  When he resurfaced, the fish was gone but he held his thong aloft. ‘Got it!’

  Ben shifted across so his body was touching mine. ‘Did you see how I kept the secret then? Like you said. So no one will find out.’

  ‘You did a great job.’

  ‘It’s sad how Raf’s mum couldn’t get out of bed. Do you think he was worried, living with Uncle Reg? It’s pretty far from where his mum lives.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘We won’t have to do that.’

  ‘No, we won’t.’

  ‘Because Mum’s coming with us.’

  ‘Right.’

  He nodded and redid the bait, hooked it on the way Raf had shown him. Raf disappeared under the water again, appeared a minute later by my side and flicked water from his hair like a dog.

  ‘You’re a magician,’ I said, and he kissed my hands.

  ‘You wait here with the lines. I’m going to take Ben down to the bait shop.’ They ran off down the jetty, Ben shouting, ‘We’re gonna get crabs!’ and Raf laughing with all of his body. I held both lines in one hand, drank my squash with the other. Felt it trickle from my throat into my belly and around in my veins. The sun was hot and high.

  ‘We got a net!’ Ben came charging towards me. ‘Did you catch any bait for it? We can’t catch crabs without any bait. Raf says we can have a crab feast. He says to eat them you just break off their legs and suck out all the insides. From their legs. Is that the grossest thing you’ve ever heard? He says it tastes good though.’

  ‘Is this true, Raf?’ I said. ‘From their legs?’

  He nodded solemnly. ‘From their legs. Although if you get the itty-bitty ones, you can just fry them up and eat the whole thing, shell and all.’

  ‘Gross!’ said Ben.

  And there we were, on the jetty, three of us packed tightly together, peering into the water for signs of yellow fish stupid enough to bite down on a hook. Port Flinders seemed far away. Wet and dark and in another dimension.

  We caught two crabs. Three, if we counted the one that climbed into the net but then plummeted to its death on the sand as we lifted it. Ben was beside himself. Raf showed him how to lift them up by holding their backs and he ran around shouting, ‘You hold them by their butts!’ and waving them in the air. The first was big, with one huge claw and one tiny claw; the second was smaller, but put up more of a fight.

  ‘That big claw will be magic,’ Raf said. ‘We’ll have to rock paper scissors for it.’

  ‘I’ll have you know,’ I said, ‘that I am the reigning rock paper scissors champion at my old school and I will definitely beat you.’

  ‘You don’t even know if you like crab.’

  ‘I’ll win it just so you can’t have it.’

  He punched me lightly in the arm, then hooked his elbow around it. I leaned into him and we walked awkwardly together, a bit out of step, him first and then me, kind of up and down at different times. My head bounced on his shoulder. Ben ran in front of us, waving the crabs around.

  Uncle Reg had done his own fishing, and he had a whole snapper to bake in the barbecue. Ben watched him prepare it, still holding the crabs by their butts.

  ‘Bit of lemon,’ Reg said. ‘Good whack of pepper. Garlic. Look, you slice the garlic up like this and then you can shove it right in the holes.’ He wrapped the fish in foil. The air filled with magic smells – garlic and salt and holidays.

  ‘What about the crabs?’ Ben said. ‘We caught them with leatherjackets. Have you ever done that? We had to catch the fish first and put the fish in the net – Raf bought us the net from the bait shop but I went with him – and the crabs came to eat the fish and then whoosh! we just grabbed them right out of the water.’

  ‘Big day, huh.’ He took the crabs from Ben, who flopped on his back in the grass.

  ‘Huge day.’

  A couple of Reg’s friends arrived: a woman with orange lipstick and a potato salad, and a man wearing boardies with flowers on them, like he was on a Hawaiian holiday. She shifted the salad from one arm to the other, reached her hand out to the surfie guy and he grabbed it. They were part of the ocean, somehow, like they had crawled right out of it.

  ‘Kids,’ Reg said, ‘these are my friends Gert and Terry. Me and Terry worked on the trawlers together. Years ago, huh.’

  ‘Twenty years,’ Terry said, still holding Gert’s hand.

  ‘And Gert runs the local rec centre.’

  ‘Doing aquarobics classes for the old folk, mostly,’ she said, and she had orange lipstick on her teeth as well.

  When the crabs were cooked Raf showed Ben how to break them open and get the meat out. ‘Like I told you,’ he said. ‘You just crack it like this, and there’s the good stuff in there. You want the white bits. They’re the best.’ Ben stuck the leg in his mouth and tried to suck the meat out.

  ‘I think I need a fork.’

  ‘Benno, you think people in old times ate crabs with forks? Crack it and slurp it out.’ Ben tried again.

  ‘Ooh! I got a bit!’ He spat. ‘Ugh, it tastes like garbage that’s been floating in the sea.�
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  ‘Give it here then.’ The white flesh came out in one long tube. ‘And you, Skye.’ Raf turned to me, balled his hand into a fist. ‘We’ve gotta fight for the big claw, remember?’

  ‘Best of three,’ I said. Paper: me. Rock: him. Paper: me. ‘My reign continues.’

  ‘The thing about these big claws is, you smash them. Like, with a hammer.’ Uncle Reg passed it over. ‘So you line it up like this. You don’t want to get the shell in it. It’ll cut your stomach open.’

  ‘Sounds great.’

  The hammer came down and the shell cracked in a couple of places. He peeled it back. The meat inside was white and orange and soft. I pulled it out with my fingertips. It smelled of the sea and sun and the little yellow fish we’d used to lure it in.

  ‘Eat it.’

  It tasted like it, too. Like salty chicken, melting on my tongue. Salty, cheesy chicken. ‘This is so good,’ I said.

  Raf stole some from the plate. ‘Finder’s fee.’

  We picked at the snapper straight from the foil. Wrapped our forks around salad and garlic-laden fish and bits of herbs I didn’t know. Uncle Reg told stories of the time his dad had spent working in the mines, sixty years ago, heading into the middle of the Earth to find runs of copper in the soil.

  ‘They’re still there,’ he said. ‘Can’t go wandering round Kadina in case you fall right in.’ He took a big forkful of fish. ‘And if you do fall in, you’re dead.’

  Ben gasped.

  Gert said, ‘Where’re you kids from, then?’ Her skin had been prickled with pinkness and she scratched at it while she talked.

  ‘Adelaide,’ I said, as Raf said, ‘Port Flinders.’

  ‘Oh right, Port Flinders.’ Scratch. ‘I got a sister in Port Flinders. Nice lady. She’s a cleaner at that motel out on the main road. Near the beach. What’s it called?’

  No one knew.

  ‘Well, whatever it’s called. They get her to clear out all the sheets after.’

  Terry’s fork scraped on his plate. ‘Only one reason people stay at a place like that, and it ain’t the breakfast bar.’

  Gert chewed, pushed her food around. ‘Yep,’ she said, winked at Terry. Reg snorted, Ben said, ‘Huh?’ and Raf squeezed my knee under the table and we all shared this joke we didn’t understand, for a minute, all of us connected.