Fine

by Michelle Wright

  ‘Stumps,’ the commentator said. ‘Stumps at the MCG.’

  * * *

  When they reach the coast road, the rain begins. A constant light drizzle and, before long, pools in every hollow. His uncle tells him to close his eyes, but he sees them all the same. Bodies. Men and women, old and young—arms and legs splayed as though they’re exclaiming, What was that? Eyes looking skywards, asking, What has happened here?

  And those who are still alive standing amid the debris, looking down. No one talking, or just in three- or four-word phrases, and to themselves, to the air.

  ‘Look at that. All dead. No one left.’

  Their skin is lighter, greyer than normal, overcast like the sky. Their eyes, when he sees them, are emptier, like they’ve pricked them with pins and let the water run out.

  Concrete telephone poles lean into the wind like palm trees. Railway tracks twisted and continuing on their way above emptiness, the earth swept away from under them. The sounds of traffic, motorbikes, bicycles are dampened in the sodden soil. The birds are silent too. And all the dogs are gone.

  Men sitting on debris, standing with their hands behind their backs or arms crossed in front. Women with hands on hips, not in defiance, but to keep their shoulders up. To stop the sinking of their chests, holding off the gasping.

  Small slivers of walls, right-angled corners with serrated edges. Already, on the remains of a wall, someone has put out an offering of food for the dogs and crows—the first handful of rice on a banana leaf.

  The sea is what he notices most. So calm, hardly moving, watching. As if it had absent-mindedly done its job, like it didn’t have a choice. Had just come and then retreated, without even looking back. ‘What do you want me to say?’ it shrugged, like it had just tossed and rolled a piece of driftwood that was the town.

  Leaning his forehead against his uncle’s shoulder blade, Saminda keeps one eye closed and narrows the other. The world flickers through moist eyelashes like his grandfather’s old Super 8 films.

  * * *

  By late afternoon, they have reached Balapitiya and the bodies are starting to smell. Not overpowering yet, but sour, pungent, like a pot of buffalo curd left out too long in the sun. There are people stepping over debris, lifting their knees up high and gently placing their feet where it’s safe, covering the bodies with cloths. White flags of mourning have started to appear, but also clear plastic or strips of red-and-white shopping bags.

  He sees a Bo tree draped heavy with large coloured flags. As they get closer, he sees they are not flags but pieces of clothing—sarongs, t-shirts, shorts, skirts, baby clothes. Around the tree and along the path to the temple, monks walk, heads down. At the base of the Buddha statue, a little girl sits cross-legged with a cut on her head. Damp blood, still red, strings a ruby necklace round her throat. She looks up at Saminda’s face as the motorcycle rolls slowly by and the middle of her top lip forms a tiny v, just like his little sister’s.

  Near a hotel in Hikkaduwa he picks out suitcases, plastic chairs, a pool umbrella like a javelin in the ground. Wrought-iron screens caught against trunks, woven through with fishing nets, newspapers and leaves. Further along, a woman’s body is caught in the branches of a tree. Her long black plait wrapped like a noose around her neck. Children walk around silent, women drift with bundles on their heads, young girls with crying babies on their hips.

  Before the light begins to dim, they continue on towards Galle. Going through the old Dutch gate to the fort, things seem almost normal. But as they emerge they see the cricket ground, completely flooded. In the centre, balancing awkwardly on the pitch, are a red public bus and a battered yellow freight container. Water lies in stagnant pools covering the grass with a brown sheen. Dead fish stare at the sky. They avoid the bus station, entombed in metal and wood, and strewn with stranded bodies. They turn off along the beach road and weave their way through the turmoil at a walking pace.

  Among the debris, they search for kilometre markers. It’s difficult to know how far they’ve come otherwise. Saminda knows they must turn off at the one-hundred-and-eleven-kilometre mark. One hundred and eleven. Like Youhana’s score. When his uncle taps his knee and points to the marker, Saminda looks for the house of his best friend, Asanka. He looks for their food stall in front—the baskets of red rice and lentils, the heavy hanging stalks of bananas and clusters of yellow king coconuts, the bars of soap and packets of milk powder. He searches but it is nowhere to be seen.

  As his uncle slows to turn off down the road that leads to Saminda’s house, he sees a single plank of wood still partly covered with the bright red handbills advertising mobile phones that Asanka’s father had used as decoration when he rebuilt the stall just before Christmas. The monks had come down from the temple for the blessing. There is still a strip of the blue plastic bunting snagged on the broken piece of wood.

  Entering the mangroves, the dirt path alongside the river becomes too slippery for the motorcycle, so they dismount and walk. As the river turns to face the coast, they first see the vehicles, then the shoes and clothes, and finally the bodies. Before the turn-off to his parents’ house, the surface of the water is no longer visible. Just metal and cloth and tangled hair and bloated skin. And a sour smell like overripe wood apple pulp.

  When they arrive at the house, they understand at once. Pieces of furniture that have tumbled down to the paddy field. Strewn sandals and toys, cooking pots and carpets caught in window frames and bushes. A fragment of his father’s radio balanced on the fence. His uncle says nothing. Just presses down on Saminda’s shoulder, fixing him to the place he’s in, and turns to enter the house.

  Saminda waits without moving, eyeing his toes as they drill into the black sludge smothering the front porch. In pooled water by the edges of the concrete, a frayed shred of blue sky passes and unravels. His arms hang heavy by his sides with dread, and his tongue is swollen in his mouth. And still he stands and listens for a sign of life from inside the house, until the quiet starts to squeeze his chest and he has to get away. He runs up between the paddy fields, his feet skidding out from under him as he veers left and right around scattered objects. He crosses the main road, and heads up behind the temple and towards the school.

  The water has reached only as high as the school’s front gate. He runs up the steps to the junior secondary section and to the grade seven classroom. Placing his foot on the ledge of the windows, he hooks his fingers through the mesh grating and pulls himself up. With one hand he reaches up into the damp space on top of the window frame. His fingers skim over the splintered wood and stop as they touch the faintly curled edge of a card. He slides it off the edge of the wooden beam and brings it level with his eyes. He studies the image, the vivid green background and the white-shirted figure sweating in the bright sun. Murali doesn’t look at him. He’s leaning forward, eyes wild and glaring at the batsman, mouth wide open, his left forefinger pointing skywards. Saminda knows he’s the best spin bowler ever. He knows he’ll beat Warne’s record once again. His dad says he’ll do it next year for sure. His dad says they’ll go see him next time he plays in Galle. Saminda brings the card close to his face and smells the dust and damp. He squints until his eyes are focused on the sweating bowler’s face, on his bulging eyes, and then he brings it closer still, until it fills his field of vision and the image becomes a blur.

  Taken

  The afternoon he was taken, the rangers put up beach closure signs and the patrols began by sea and air. The lone witness had said it was a great white.

  ‘Big as a campervan,’ he’d said.

  The police officer introduced her to the man coordinating the search.

  ‘So, you’re the young man’s …?’

  ‘Mother,’ she said. ‘And his name’s Josh.’

  When they reopened the beach three days later, they warned her, as softly as they could, that there was little chance of finding body parts. ‘We think the shark took everything,’ they said. She looked straight into their faces, and
though they tried, they just couldn’t look straight back.

  * * *

  Four days after they set the drum lines, they called to say they’d caught it. She went down to the beach and waited. She so wanted to hate it. She wanted to spit on it, to kick its oily flank, to spew her grief into its jaws. She’d demand to know why, of all the flesh and blood it could have taken, it had chosen hers to take.

  But when at last she saw its face with its fearful, lifeless eyes, all she truly wanted was to stand and stare and weep.

  Late Change

  Walking back late afternoon, salt-crusted and heavy from her swim, Helen follows the high-tide line along the cooling sand. Her eyes search the ridge of drying seaweed, empty plastic bottles, lengths of yellow fishing line and decomposing birds. If she sees an especially smooth bleached piece of driftwood, she pauses to examine it, turns it over with her toes, maybe takes it home. Other than that, it’s an exercise in distraction, something to fill her mind with chatter. What’s that smell? Oh, a baby seal. Look at that. Another blue thong.

  It’s on the calm windless afternoons that she’s most aware of just how wordless her walks have become. With Graham, there was always conversation. Or, rather, a monologue. Commentary on the weather mostly. That’s what comes from marrying a merchant seaman. Wind’s picking up. South-west swell today. Looks like that change might come early. But now that she walks alone, so often there’s a silence in her head that she’s still getting to know.

  * * *

  There are some afternoons, with the wind blowing east to west along the beach, when it catches in the hood of her jacket and whirs around like a seashell held to her ear.

  Those afternoons she hears him calling from behind. Helen … Helen. The first time it happened, she’d turned around and seen the empty strip of beach stretching back.

  Despite the strength she’d surprised herself with in the weeks since his death, she’d stopped there in her tracks and hadn’t been able to move. And then she’d sobbed and sobbed, while surfers and dog-walkers passed her by, not knowing how to help. Until finally another older woman, without asking any questions, came and wrapped a towel round her shoulders and waited for her to stop.

  And every time it’s happened since, that trick of the wind that calls in Graham’s voice, she has to dig her toes firm in the sand to stop from looking back.

  * * *

  ‘Look what I found,’ says Helen. ‘It’s quite rare to find one of these.’

  The little boy’s eyes narrow as they slide from her hand along her bare arm and up into her eyes.

  ‘It’s an egg case. There was a baby shark in there not long ago,’ she says, holding it level with his eyes. ‘Fancy that.’

  The little boy puts down his spade, dusts off his hands and holds them out in front of his belly.

  ‘Can I hold it?’ he asks.

  The mother, young and hurried, approaches and places her hands on the boy’s shoulders. She smiles at Helen, then crouches next to her son. He backs up against the inside of her sandy thigh and raises his palms to her face.

  ‘It’s a shark egg,’ he whispers.

  ‘No, it’s just curly seaweed, sweetie,’ she says with a smile.

  ‘Actually, it’s a Port Jackson shark egg case,’ Helen corrects her.

  The mother smiles, lips together.

  ‘I think it might just be seaweed.’

  ‘No, it’s not!’ replies Helen, a little too loudly, then lower and slower. ‘I know what I’m talking about.’

  The mother stands and combs the boy’s salt-stiff hair back from his forehead.

  ‘Come on, sweetie. We have to start packing up.’ She nods at Helen. ‘Enjoy your walk.’

  * * *

  Helen knows there’s going to be a late change today. Every day she checks online before starting the fifteen-minute walk along the cliff top and down the stairs to the beach. Today they’re forecasting a late change with squally winds and rough seas, so she sets off an hour earlier than usual. At the top of the stairs, she pauses and rubs her knuckles hard along the outside of her thigh, just below where the hip joint grates. Her fists are huge for a woman’s. As big as Graham’s had been. When she was a girl, her mother had made her take piano lessons, but her teacher had said her hands were too big. It wasn’t enough to have long fingers. They needed to be slim too. And hers weren’t. But they’re good for swimming. Her legs aren’t needed for propulsion. Her hips just roll with the strokes. It’s her arms that do the work. They’re still strong. Freakishly so for a seventy-three-year-old.

  Graham had been a reluctant recruit to the sea swims at first. He found it frightening and exhausting, but gradually took to it when she taught him her technique. She got him to think of his body as a boat, to apply the same principles of drag and streamlining, of balance in the water. To begin with, she led him out past the sandbank and let him just float on his back. She helped him feel the water nestle him, helped him feel the buoyancy. She showed him how to trust the sea, to feel safe out in its depths and currents; to know that, if you played by its rules, it would pigheadedly bring you back to shore.

  She reaches the bottom of the stairs and goes straight into the water. She wades in waist deep and swims out past the bank. The rocking motion of her torso is entrancing and keeps her stable, balanced. The flow of cool across her back rolls her thoughts from Graham to the water and brings the two together. She knows the change is coming. It’s just that it’s come earlier than she thought. She’s out quite far, past the rock shelf that catches the northerly swell when it blows in. The rain starts up and is hitting heavy from above and bouncing off the sea against her face. She knows she mustn’t turn her back to the waves, but she feels uneasy too about losing sight of the shore. When she’s looking at the cliffs, she feels tethered like a kite. She turns away and faces the incoming waves. They approach in silence, lifting her high and sliding her down their backs. She turns to see them peak, the wind pushing silver spray off the tops and whipping it up and out. A couple of metres past her, the waves stretch and tear as they fall away and break. There’s a long gap between them and they’re bigger than she’s swum in before. Above and below the surface, everything’s gnarled and scrambled. She takes a few quick strokes, trying to get a bit closer to the beach. The rain is falling heavy now and through her goggles all is bleary grey and white. The next set approaches and she strains to see. By the time the outline of the wave is hanging over her, it’s too late to dive. She ducks her chin to her chest and lets herself be tumbled, doesn’t fight, tries to keep her head amid the surging and wrenching, with salt stinging high up in her nostrils and her eardrums booming. Her feet are above her head and she flips, dishevelled and knotted with seaweed. Her mouth emerges into the air and through the churn she sees the next wave coming. She gulps a breath before the water pushes her down, hands scrabbling for the bottom, trying to stabilise and push her body upwards. She surfaces, her arms too heavy to lift, and dog paddles forward, fighting to keep her head above the surface, among tangled flashes of sky and waves. Her throat is clenched against the chaos of the wind and foam.

  She’s left of the break zone now, between the sandbank and the rock shelf. The outgoing backwash builds in pressure as it tears through the channel, sweeping her horizontal. The water charges under her, panicky, pushing, desperate to escape. She keeps as vertical as she can, trying to get her bearings, her arms outstretched, her knees drawn up to her chest. Her neck is strained and sore. On the rock shelf to her right she sees a figure. She struggles to focus through the steamy goggles. It’s a young woman. Her bright orange hair is leaping around in an updraft like her head’s on fire. It’s the same colour her own hair was as a girl. She’s wearing a yellow-and-white-checked dress just like one Helen used to own with big white pockets in front that she used to hide her boy-sized hands in whenever she was nervous. The young woman’s right arm is waving high above her head, big arcs left to right like a metronome, and Helen is sure she hears a ticking in time with the mov
ement of her arm. She blinks and looks again and she could swear the woman is waving straight at her. Her face is pale and nervous and Helen feels a shudder travel down through her belly and flow between her thighs. It’s colder and the sky is heavy. There’s the clear awareness now that she could die out here.

  A big wave lifts her and then slides her back down into the trough and the young woman is hidden from her view. When she bobs back up high enough, the rock shelf is bare. The ticking is still there, regular and slightly faster now, and she realises that it’s the throb of the pulse in her neck. She watches the rocks receding and she’s slowly turned around and round.

  The wind drops slightly and she’s no longer part of the storm. And suddenly, the water is calmer. She stretches her limbs out and floats on her back, breathing deep, the rolling still high, but regular and firm. The sky is clearing, clouds drift and dissolve, showing background glimpses of blue. Her neck is aching less now, but her thighs are tired and her feet are starting to cramp. Her lips are numb and she knows she has to start moving again, make her way back to shore. When she lifts her head and finds the beach, she’s not sure where she’s drifted.

  The cliff face is higher and there’s a ridge of red rock splitting the sand. Her arms are limp and she lets herself be rolled in under the waves. They’re smaller here and break neatly on a low bank. When her feet touch the sand, she buckles and pitches forward. She pulls her torso along with a few strokes until her knees scrape against the coarse grains of sand. She pushes herself to her feet and reels through the thigh-deep swirls, spitting foam from her lips. When the water is low enough, lapping at her calves, she lowers herself onto her knees and hangs her head in exhaustion, eyes closed.

  The sea has fallen silent and all she hears is the rasping of her breaths against her teeth. She opens her eyes and looks down at the surface of the sea. It fades in and out of focus with the pulsing thump of blood beneath her temples. She lifts her hands from her thighs and out of the water. They drip sand and salt and pucker with the cold. On the beach before her, the strandline is lower. Just feet way she sees the thick flat belts of kelp. There’s a huge piece of wood, like a sleeper, half burnt, and a dead fairy penguin. Further along there’s a seal as well. A big one.