by Nikki Buick
Mum seemed to be enjoying the trip north. Sometimes she jumped into sightseeing mode a little too enthusiastically, but her smile seemed real enough. There was some tension around the edges but I was as certain as I could be that things were okay. The medication was working to keep her even and balanced. And I kept my fingers crossed.
I took my thongs off and carried them down the beach track that ended at a sandy stretch curving about a blue-cordial bay. The sun splashed blinding sprays of light across the water and it was so bright I started seeing black splodges. I knew you weren’t supposed to look directly at the sun but it was hard not to when the sun had swallowed up the whole world.
My feet sizzled on the crunchier sand and I bounded down to test the water. It was cooler than the sand but still quite warm. I watched a school of colourful snorkellers bobbing in the shallows. A splatter of clouds sprayed across the pale blue sky and I bent down to pick up a shell that had swum across my toes. With a sharp slicing action I skimmed it across the water. One, two, three skips toward the rolls of granite boulders framing the beach, which looked like short fat whales that had come ashore to loll on the sand. A screech of red-and-green lorikeets nearly took off my head as they came from nowhere and disappeared between the palm trees. The wind from their tails actually fluttered across my face.
The water was begging me to come and swim and I raced back up the hot, course sand to grab Mum and some snorkels. Ranger had bitten the rubber off the end of one of them but there were still plenty to go around.
Now, I wasn’t going all surfer-dude all of a sudden, but it was warm and being stuck in a car for hours left you smelling like old socks soaked in stale sweat and cabbage juice. Mum had been reading from the travel brochures and from all accounts this place was the bomb for snorkelling and seeing incredible things. I hadn’t snorkelled since the year seven camp. It was time to slip into my Action Man, Frogman, persona!
Half an hour later, after Mum had bundled up all the bags and bottles and junk that was required when taking a baby to the beach, we landed back on Horseshoe Bay. Pippa was having a meltdown and had been told to stay with Step.
‘How lovely,’ Mum beamed. ‘You were right, Hunter. This is great.’
‘How nice does that water look?’ I agreed.
‘I thought you might appreciate having a break from Pippa. I know she’s hard work but you are really terrific with her, love. You’re a great brother.’
I smiled sheepishly, thinking back to the stick incident. I shrugged. Pippa was alright.
Mum and I read the sign about the stingers. Apparently, the whole coast of North Queensland was a danger zone for jellyfish. I’d seen the signs before and the standard bottle of vinegar was always attached to the warning. If you got stung by something, the vinegar was supposed to neutralise the sting or kill the tiny stingers or something. It wasn’t stinger season so we were pretty right. The deadliest, the box jellyfish, was rare and most places had nets to keep them out. Those buggers could kill you in less than a minute. We’d studied them in school a while back. Something as see-through and seemingly small was actually the deadliest thing the country had to offer. It left the funnel-web spider for dead. No wonder there were signs everywhere.
‘It’s August, so we’ll be right,’ I nodded.
I pulled the mask over my face and squeezed it against my cheeks snugly so it wouldn’t leak. The snorkel was a bit wonky but I managed to wedge it into the socket at the side of my head. I walked toward the water. Holy crap. If Jesse and Beggsie could only have seen me, I’d never live it down. The water was warm – like a salty bath with a whole marching band of snorkel-tops bobbing in the water. Heads were popping up like periscopes. Mouthpieces could be seen blowing dolphin-like spouts of water, while flippers broke the surface of the water with tiny splashes behind them. Wading out up to my waist, I took a deep breath and ducked beneath the surface. A shelf of coral fell away from the sandy floor and opened up an amazing level of awe.
When I’d been little, Mum and Dad had taken me to see a movie at the Regent Theatre in the city. When I’d hung over the balustrade from the top balcony, Mum had almost had a fit, thinking I’d go over the edge. The aquatic show in Horseshoe Bay was actually just like watching that movie in a fantasy setting, only this time I couldn’t fall. Colourful and amazing, it was a circus with a bunch of human helicopters circling above. Alien plants danced on the spot while fish of all sizes and shapes darted in and out of chiselled caves and alcoves in the rocks. I took a big breath through my snorkel and kicked downwards into the underworld. I used to dream of flying and feeling so free. It was just like that. The coral was sharp to touch and reminded me of the terrible little clay creatures Pippa used to bring home from preschool.
Bubbles trickled out the top of my mouthpiece and I watched the sand beneath me stir into mini-tornadoes. A few people were diving deep beneath the surface, chasing the marine life, trying to touch a slippery scaled creature as it sped by. Schools of fish moved as one and I was amazed by their precision. There didn’t seem to be a leader. They all just knew exactly when to turn and flick this way and that. Perhaps they were psychic or shared a communal brain. Or maybe we were all in a strange computer game and the fish were being remotely controlled. The nautical atmosphere was doing odd things to my head, and weird and whacky ideas swirled about. When I saw a girl shimmy through the water I started thinking about mermaids and then Katie Ford with a tail. When I got a boner, I knew I was losing the plot. I pulled my head up and spat out my mouthpiece.
I’d managed to drift quite far out and Mum and Ranger looked like tiny, blurry, dark shadows on the beach. I waved. The sweep of green behind the sand reached up to more clumps of granite and much higher up, on a bare outcrop, sat a bizarre giant marble of rock. It was amazing. As the water dribbles cleared from the front perspex of my mask, I could see it more clearly. It actually looked as if someone had rolled it to that very point, on purpose, so that it could be pushed to tumble down on an approaching enemy. Just one completely round boulder perched alone against the pale blue sky. I was treading water, squinting through my mask at the spectacle, when I saw a dark splodge in the corner of my eye.
I turned quickly to see a triangular shape slicing along the surface of the water, cutting through the gentle peaks. I blinked, thinking it might be a fast-moving snorkel but then felt my bladder convulse. Shark. The word was stuck in the back of my throat. I went limp and my arms felt like jelly.
‘Shark,’ I warbled, watching the fin cruise along about ten metres away.
It wasn’t heading directly for me, but the ocean was not big enough for the both of us – in that moment. Panicking, I put my head under the water. Someone, somewhere, once said it was the shark you didn’t see that you had to worry about.
A stream of swearwords pattered through my mouth, before being tossed and turned in the salty water. The snorkel banged against my cheek, bobbing awkwardly. I was kicking my legs to stay afloat but remembered that sharks were attracted by movement. I stopped and just froze. The bubbles in front of my face, of my own making, were blocking any view. I began to pee. Shit, damn, I thought. Did pee attract sharks? I tried to stop but couldn’t and felt the warm cloud around my waist.
I saw it then. A grey shadow some metres away was moving like a machine. It was travelling north, pulling toward a shelf of reef to my right. It was close enough that I could make out its eye. And then I totally lost it. I put my head out of the water and tried to shout for help. There was a bobbing group of swimmers up ahead, closer to shore and they turned toward me as I began to splash and flap and swim like a mini-tornado in their direction, intermittently putting my head up to shout and take in more water. I spluttered and thrashed like a madman.
‘Shark!’
One swimmer began to close in on me.
‘Hey there,’ came a friendly voice as he paddled toward me. ‘It’s just a little reef shark,’ he said from b
etween teeth that were so white they were almost blinding. ‘Harmless. Shy. Lots of little ones. You … feed … sometimes.’ He had a French accent as buttery as a croissant.
I stopped, my heart still pounding, and began to tread water. I let his words sink in. The claustrophobic hum of the Jaws soundtrack began to recede. A reef shark. That didn’t sound too bad. Not like a great white or anything. I breathed hard, slowing the terror, and felt it ooze from my pores. And then I began to feel a bit stupid, embarrassed. In hindsight it was a fairly small shark, not much bigger than me.
‘A reef shark, eh?’ I smiled.
He nodded. ‘I’m in the next tent to you,’ he grinned. ‘Jacques. My name is Jacques.’
It sounded a lot like ‘shark’ when he said it, which, given the circumstances, was kind of amusing.
‘I’m Hunter,’ I replied, licking a salty bead of water from the corner of my lip.
He repeated my name back to me. When he said it in his French accent it sounded like Unta.
‘Are you French?’ I asked.
‘Non. Non. Non. Québec … Canada.’
The French accent always sounded like it was put on. Comical. Maybe that was because the only French accents I’d heard in real life had been fake. I kept expecting Jacques to start giggling and slip back into an Aussie accent and say just kidding mate.
‘Where are you from?’ Jacques asked. His skin and eyes looked like shades of the same caramel slice.
‘Brisbane,’ I answered.
‘Ah. Yes, Brisbane. I like Brisbane very much. But Surfers Paradise … that’s double good.’ He gave me a wink and began to swim away.
He then called back over his shoulder, ‘You like music? We’re getting out some guitars later. You should come. And your family.’ He said the word family in a sing-song voice.
Music? Guitars? Mum wouldn’t think much of that. Apparently she liked music a lot when she was young, but now whenever I put on my heavy stuff, she went into a flap and would yell at me to put my headphones in. I guess my music was a bit edgier and darker than the fairy floss pop that she listened to on the radio. It must be awful to grow old and be trapped forever by the music of your youth. Grandma still loved Frank Sinatra. I would evolve with music – be progressive and open to new sounds. In fact, I was thinking of learning the guitar. Maybe I could join a band one day. A backpackers’ music jam sounded like fun. I just had to convince Mum of that.
I looked back up to the boulder marble, the big round rock, and made a mental note to find out what it was and then shoved the snorkel back into my lips, flicked myself down into the abstract painting below and began to flipper back toward the shore.
BOWEN
‘It was called a pimple, you know?’ Jacques laughed. ‘Like on your face.’ He mimed squeezing a pimple and everyone groaned. ‘Pop.’ He laughed with his head thrown back, his white teeth flickering in the firelight like a string of pearls. I self-consciously touched the mountain range of zits on my chin.
‘That’s silly,’ Mum smiled. Her red hair seemed to tango with the flames from the big campfire in the middle of the pit. I was surprised that she had agreed to come to the jam at the communal kitchen area. She’d left Step with Ranger and came along with Pippa and me. I would have liked to have gone alone, but Mum was in the mood for some music. Having your mother and kid sister along for a night out kind of cramped my style and I felt like an idiot that they’d tagged along with me, like I needed supervision. I was sure Jacques had invited Mum along just to be polite.
The little group were all talking about the giant lone rock I’d seen perched on the hill behind the bay. A few of the guys had walked up to it and said the view was out of this world.
‘We’ll have to go for a stroll and check it out,’ Mum said, sipping on a plastic cup of goon and juice, which was known at school as goose – a combination of cheap orange juice and even cheaper cask white wine. Goon and juice. Goose. The drink of choice for poor people and underage drinkers. The girls in Jacques group were hitting the goose pretty hard and Mum wasn’t far behind them.
I really liked the Canadian dude’s crew. The accents were so melodic and they were always laughing and shouting like life was a non-stop party. Having them around made me miss my own little crew.
Jesse and Beggsie and I were like the Three Musketeers or the Three Stooges, depending on our mood. We’d been tight since primary school. The three of us skated after school, talked about girls, sat up all night every Saturday at one of our places and played Xbox until the energy drinks ran out. We tried smoking once, all of us, after nicking some off Jesse’s stepdad, Steve, but decided it wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. Also, we couldn’t afford the habit and I couldn’t afford the fallout if Mum ever found out. As a reformed smoker, she was a psychotic, born-again activist when it came to smoking. I was serious. She picketed in some rally to ban smoking in public transport zones a while back.
Jacques and his mates were only a handful of years older than me. See, this was what I wanted to do after school finished. Just bum around the globe, partying. Me and Jesse and Beggsie on a world tour of fun. Not necessarily the beach tour. Bali, Phuket and all that were not really my style. Despite browning up like some Malibu Ken doll and snorkelling with reef sharks, I was still not sold on the salt, sand and surf. My idea of a gap year would include Manhattan with all its crazy art culture. I’d like to check out the Tower of London and the Egyptian pyramids. Egyptian art was awesome. The idea of seeing some of that was what rocked my boat. But that would take money, hence my idea of working in retail until I’d saved enough. Life was too short to go from school straight to university. I wanted to live while I was young and all that. It was a shame that Beggsie might just have fathered himself out of that equation.
Jacques gave me a beer on the sly and Mum didn’t even notice. It was bitter and cold and went down well. I turned down the offer of another one. If I went back to the tent with beer-breath and wobbly legs, it wouldn’t go unnoticed and then Step would be giving me a lecture – and his lectures were something I could do without.
‘It’s true,’ a solid blonde girl said as she snuggled up to Jacques. ‘It was named after a lady who had a bloody great pimple on the end of her nose.’ She spoke as if she had her tongue in her cheek. English.
They were still going on about the big rock ball on the hill. The goose was making these people repeat themselves over and over again.
‘I don’t believe you. You’re pulling my leg.’ Mum laughed.
‘Pulling your leg? She’s not pulling your leg?’ Jacques looked bewildered, holding his girlfriend’s hand as if Mum had accused her of something terrible.
‘Oh no,’ Mum was quick to explain. ‘It’s just a silly Australian expression. You’re pulling my leg … means you’re trying to trick me … play a joke …’
The Canadian guy and his girlfriend, Megan, nodded and smiled.
‘You Aussies say some very strange things, you know?’ he said.
I began to summon up some other sayings and explain them to the foreigners. Stone the crows, a knuckle sandwich, a stunned mullet, rough end of the pineapple and fair dinkum. Soon I had everyone laughing as I coached Jacques on how to sound like a true-blue ocker.
‘Crikey,’ he tried, sounding like a nasal version of Steve Irwin but failing miserably.
Mum and I laughed. Most of the others started doing their own terrible renditions of our broad accent, making us Aussies sound ridiculous.
By the ‘others’ I meant a bunch of half-dressed backpackers from every corner and crack in the world. They were the oddest collection of young travellers, so energetic and happy. Yes, I really liked them and they seemed to like me. It felt nice to be around people who weren’t family. A most pleasant and welcome change!
‘We’re going north for the fruit-picking, tomorrow,’ Megan explained to Mum. ‘To Atherton.’
‘Ye
s. We travel for the fruit, eh?’ the Canadian guy added. ‘But too early for the mangos.’
Megan reminded me of one of Pippa’s porcelain dolls. She had hair like the bristles of a fine paintbrush, eyes that looked like blue glass and an Alice in Wonderland curiosity about her.
‘We can’t wait around for the mango-picking here, so we’ll just take the van up the coast to Cairns and then up into the hills.’
‘I like your van,’ I said to Jacques. ‘Did you do all the painting yourself?’
Their van was decorated with dolphins and other marine life.
‘A little bit here and there. Megan is the artist,’ he nodded.
‘A bit more colourful than the usual grey nomads,’ Mum agreed and then quickly realised she’d have to explain herself. ‘We call the old folks with their campervans, “grey nomads”.’
‘Because they’ve all got grey hair and they’re travellers,’ I helped her out.
‘Yes, there are plenty of retired folk on the road,’ Megan said with a wide smile. ‘But it’s nice to see that adventurous spirit still going strong.’
At least I was getting this nomadic thing out of the way early. I could spend my retirement on the couch with my Xbox control in hand. I wondered what sort of technology would be around when I was old and grey. Maybe I’d end up on Mars. Who could say? Maybe I’d join some grey nomadic herd of space travellers zooming about the cosmos. There was talk in the newspapers of planning a manned mission to Mars. I doubted that my Maths marks were up to becoming an astronaut.
But this new idea of travelling about to New York and Egypt had put some fire in my belly. I could really get more into my schoolwork if I had some reward to look forward to, and frankly university and more study was not it. That was like a punishment. So, I started thinking that if I got a weekend and school holiday job at anywhere but McDonalds, I could save up. I’d run the idea by Jesse and Beggsie the second I got back or the second I made a sneaky escape and found some portal to Facebook somewhere.
