Secrets of the Sea

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  In the comfort of his cabin, he considered: What would he tell her, that he had been startled out of his skin by one of their neighbours’ cows?

  He parked the tractor next to the ute and walked towards the kitchen door, head down, hands pinching the bottom of his Driza-Bone pocket and pushing his smile against the gritty wind. The force of it bent back the pine on the lawn and clacked the blades of the windmill into words that belted out across the distance between Alex and the light in the kitchen, and chided him for his credulity.

  Through the window Merridy caught sight of Alex struggling up the drive. The pressure of battling against the gale gave him the exaggerated totter of a crippled person.

  “Listen, there’s Alex. Let me work on him,” and slammed down the receiver. She ran across the kitchen and flung open the door.

  He raised his head. “You’ll never guess—”

  Her pressing voice competed with the windmill. “Alex, there’s been an accident.”

  A ship was going down between the Hen and Chicks. The Marine Police in Hobart had picked up the call. They were requesting local volunteers to get into the water without delay. All the professional rescuers were indisposed.

  “Finter’s asked if we’d take the Zemmery Fidd.”

  “Where’s the police launch?” Alex asked.

  “In Hobart for repairs.”

  “And the Devil cat?”

  “Answering another distress call.”

  “What about Trevor?” Trevor was the fisherman in Coles Bay who had taught Merridy her knot and owned a cray-boat.

  “On holiday.”

  “And David?”

  “I just rang him. He’s sold his boat.” She was unhooking Alex’s oilskins from the back door.

  “You think we can? What if it’s too large a sea?”

  “I’m prepared to have a go–if you’ll come. How are you feeling?”

  “Fine,” he said. “Fine.”

  “Here. I’ll go and shut Rusty away. He’ll be a wreck with this wind.”

  Squeezed into his oilskins, Alex followed Merridy outside to the ute. The weather that morning had been unnaturally still and warm when he left the house, the bay the smooth opaque green of a perfume bottle. Now he felt the angry smack of the wind. A sheep rolled over in the next paddock and a kookaburra that had nested in the Oyster Bay pine flew off in a twisted parasol of black and grey feathers.

  He climbed in beside Merridy and turned the ignition. He was driving off when he heard a resounding crack.

  In the rear-view mirror, the lawn capered and twisted. Then burst apart in a dark clot of roots and earth. The tree had toppled over.

  Alex drove fast along the edge of Moulting Lagoon towards the jetty, gravel pinging against the windscreen. The storm was ripening. He had never known such a wind.

  “What kind of ship?”

  “A brigantine, could it be?”

  “A brigantine? In Oyster Bay?”

  “She’s a replica. It’s all over the Mercury. She’s sailing around the island.”

  Bored by the idea of yet another project to do with the island’s bicentenary, she had glanced at the article only out of respect for her husband and the anachronistic image of a ship that might have sailed straight out of one of his bottles. The Buffalo had arrived from Sydney the previous day in George Town, and was modelled on the brigantine that had landed two hundred years ago at the mouth of the Tamar, carrying the first European settlers. Hoods at sea ran the headline of the article, which she had not bothered to finish but reminded herself to show to Alex.

  He skidded to a halt at the entrance to the oyster shed while Merridy leaped out, unlocked the gate, raced ahead.

  In less than five minutes, Alex was reversing the Zemmery Fidd, with Merridy on board, down the bank. He aimed the stern at the lagoon and steered the ute, its wheels churning the seaweed and mud, until the aluminium hull clanked loose of its pivot and slid into the choppy water.

  Merridy started the engines and nodded at Alex. By the time he had parked the ute at the top of the bank, the Zemmery Fidd was rocking at the jetty.

  He jumped onto the deck, untied the rope. “OK.”

  Merridy opened the throttle and the force of the engines threw him against the crane. He held on as the boat sped into the river.

  Soon they were out of the river. The Zemmery Fidd slammed over the bar-way and twisted into the breakers, the spray falling in heavy sheets.

  Merridy punched out towards the tip of Freycinet, keeping close to the shore. The sky had darkened further. The clouds overhead a mass of shadows, now dense, now thinning, and tortured into antedeluvian shapes: hippogriffs, bulls, unicorns.

  She yelled: “See anything?”

  One arm hugging the crane, Alex looked out. The sea roughened and agitated. The bay rutted with deep waves. The waves not advancing in orderly lines, but frenzied like wild cattle. In the fading light, they came on at a gallop, horns down and backs tossing, sweeping water up the beach in a vivid white foam.

  She called to him again. The sea had matted his thinning hair so that the skull shone through. “Well?”

  He shook his head. As far as the eye could see waves kicked and reared, churning the horizon.

  The boat thumped into a trough, lashing salt water into Alex’s face. He ascended higher up the crane. At the crest of the next rise, he picked out Maria Island, the Isle des Foques. Then, to the right of Schouten, before a wave hid it, a tangle of white and black.

  “Over there,” he bellowed in the direction of the rigging. But the wind grabbed his words. “Merridy, over there.”

  It took the Zemmery Fidd twenty minutes more to reach the Buffalo. The brigantine was heeled in to land and lying on her side, the sea breaking over her in all directions.

  A yellow shape rolled up and down the quarterdeck. Alex saw with a sick heart that it was a body.

  The wind blasted fiercer. He felt his shirt heavy and wet under his oilskin and a cold razor of air slashing his face and hard bullets of rain. The waves frothed and seethed as though flames were burning under them, and the wind swooped the sea up into the sky.

  “Look, Alex!” Merridy was pointing.

  A dark blue figure clung to the flapping ratlines halfway up the mizzen mast.

  Alex shouted.

  No response.

  Above the stampede, the sky had turned the colour of black lava.

  He waved a hand, shouted again. His hoarse throat aching from his flu.

  A head turned. A hand detached itself from the mast. And this time waved back.

  CHAPTER TWO

  IT WAS, EVERYONE AGREED–although they were quite surprised, too–an amazing physical achievement. Nobody but a halfwit would have got out of that boat.

  Even as Merridy brought the Zemmery Fidd alongside, the Buffalo began to tilt. The mast that a moment before had pointed up at the sky now stretched at the angle of the horizon, in the direction of Moulting Lagoon Farm. The waves rose in a boiling fountain, snatching and whipping at the man who held on, one leg crossed over the other, one arm over the other, in the stoical attitude, Alex could not help thinking, of a grub clinging under the seed head of a stalk of barley.

  “Jump in!” he yelled. “Jump in!” the words funnelling off.

  Less than twenty yards away, the mizzen mast juddered. It sank further, towards the grasping sea. Quite soon, it would be pointing down.

  A wave licked up and there was a splash.

  Already, Alex was stripping off his life jacket, his oilskins. He tugged his shirt over his head and belted his life jacket back on and leaped overboard.

  The cold kicked the air out of him. He went up to take a huge breath and was slapped by a wave, inhaling it. He desperately tried to climb to the top of the water, dimly aware at the back of his mind that this was how people drowned, and broke the surface coughing.

  Vast waves crashed into the existing swell and lifted him away from the Zemmery Fidd, towards the sinking ship.

  Ten yards aw
ay an arm rose out of the sea. He flopped in its direction.

  “You all right?” through his throatful of water, approaching from behind. He knew that a drowning person had nothing to fear. They pushed you down to get themselves up. But the man appeared unconscious. Alex front-crawled towards him and reached an arm under his shoulder. When he lifted the head to clear the airway vomit spewed from the mouth. He started towing the man back, one knee up in case he had to thrust him away. At every second ready for him to revive and thrash around and drag Alex under in his panic.

  Alex had indeed nearly drowned, bringing in the man. He was sixteen minutes in the sea with him, before he got him onto the Zemmery Fidd, Alex shoving, Merridy tugging, having tied herself to the crane. At last the man rolled under the rail, into the boat.

  He was so relieved to let go that Alex was caught unprepared for the wave that knocked him back. The sea filled his mouth and he started to sink. He could make out Merridy’s distorted face above him, oscillating, coming and going in particles. He reached up his arm, but already he was subsiding. His fingers were grabbed just as he felt himself disconnecting.

  When Alex hung his hands on the rail, he went to jelly, but with a wave helping, he held onto Merridy’s wrist and hauled himself as close as possible to the stern.

  Merridy pulled Alex into the boat, settling him between the engines, and returned to the body. She had laid him out on the bottom of the Zemmery Fidd. She knelt down, a knee on either side, water swilling everywhere, and pressed her head to the cold blue lips and inserted a few puffs of air.

  “Is he alive?” between breaths. Feeling the heat of the engines on his skin.

  The sea banged into the side, lurching Alex onto her.

  She pushed herself up, wiping her mouth. “Have a look while I grab the wheel.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  IN ALEX’S CHILDHOOD, SOUTH-EASTERLIES had cast ashore a giant squid, a sunfish and on one occasion the stringy orange remains of what might have been a coelacanth. But nothing was stranger than the young man whom the Doves rescued from the bay that evening and brought back to the farm. As Merridy later explained to Sergeant Finter: “It would’ve been madness to try for Wellington Point, the sea running as it was.”

  They laid him on the bed beneath the stars that she had stencilled all those years before. Small drops of perspiration sprang from his forehead and down his neck, and the breath bubbled awkward under his tongue.

  Merridy was put in mind of a horse’s nose, tender and pale.

  “Where do you think he’s from?” unfastening the brass buttons on his jacket of heavy serge. His numbed arms and legs belonged not to any port he might have sailed from, but to some region of his own.

  “Could he be a stowaway?” Alex wondered aloud. “One of those Afghans?”

  Whoever he was, he looked pretty odd in his uniform, a striped sailor’s top under the jacket and navy-blue trousers cut in the style of another century.

  But he did not strike Merridy as Afghan. His darkness came off with a flannel, revealing a white man in his late teens. Average height. Short spiky hair dyed blond, and on his left ear a gold earring that made her think of Ray.

  Alex looked at his watch. Eleven p.m. They had been away four hours. “I’d better telephone Finter.”

  “Yes, he ought to be told,” squeezing out the flannel into a bowl of hot water.

  Merridy had twice radioed Sergeant Finter from the Zemmery Fidd. The storm causing so much interference on the VHF that she understood nothing the policeman had said.

  At the door, Alex hesitated. “Could we have done more?”

  She gave him a brave smile. Remembering his expression as he sank beneath the surface. How she reached down with her whole body to catch his upraised hand. Something told her that if she failed to catch it Alex might not reappear. “No.”

  Alex left the room and she continued mopping the face. Eyes tight shut and streaks of tar on the scratched cheeks.

  His lips opened, sucking in another laboured breath.

  With great care, she rubbed at the corner of his mouth where the sand had compacted. His teeth were slanted outwards and chipped, the colour of dirty crabshell, and there was an ugly bump on his forehead.

  Another breath. The way he gasped for air, he might have been crawling out from the Buffalo’s dark hold.

  When she had finished washing his face, she raised him by the shoulders and removed the sailor’s top from his limp arms, revealing the surprise of a purple T-shirt printed with a skull and a cigarette dangling from its mouth. She slipped the shirt over his head and shook off his soaked trousers.

  His legs. They could have been the flanks of a horse.

  And felt the weight of something.

  Still he lay there, eyes closed, as Merridy drew it out of his pocket.

  A silver rigging knife, well-oiled and sharp. She tested her thumb on it and winced. Then closed the 4-inch steel switchblade and carefully put it on the bedside table.

  She covered him with a duvet and went to fetch some disinfectant to dab on that forehead.

  The storm blew itself out in the early hours. Rain replaced the wind and then the rain stopped and there was a damp silence. Outside, the windmill stood motionless. The only sound to penetrate the curtain the nervous cough of a foal.

  It was still dark when Alex got up.

  Merridy smelled his metallic breath before he kissed her cheek, but did not open her eyes. She heard him let Rusty out of the living room. Their footsteps–the scrabbling of a pent-up, excitable animal and her husband’s more measured tread–passed along the corridor to the kitchen.

  He took down the torch from the Welsh dresser and pushed open the fly-screen and went out. Around the house, pandemonium, as if an angry Zac had thrown a tantrum on the landscape–loose sheets of tin, tree limbs everywhere and dotted here and there in the darkness the white blur of a dead sheep. The most dramatic casualty was the Oyster Bay pine. Its topmost branches had crashed onto the drive a few yards short of the living room. Flashing his torch up and down, Alex saw his parents’ gravestones lopsided.

  He whistled Rusty away from the exposed earth. Then crossed the lawn and walked through the farm buildings, making an inventory of the damage.

  Inside the house, the silence unnerved Merridy. She lay awake, worn out but unable to sleep. Moments later, she heard a throat being cleared and quickly pulled on her clothes and stepped barefoot along the corridor.

  The young man sat up as she entered. He glanced over the room, the ceiling. Rubbing his head and turning it in her direction.

  She switched on the light.

  His mouth hung open, red and vulnerable like a child’s shoe. The face of someone who might have become a man too soon. And Merridy half-expected a neigh or a bawl.

  “You’re awake,” looking into his eyes. But there was no bottom to them.

  He peered back. With his spiky hair and unseeing eyes, he seemed like something hallucinated.

  Then she understood. “Can’t you see?”

  “My specs,” he mumbled. The accent Australian. “I lost them.”

  She went and fetched Alex’s spare glasses.

  “Here,” she said. “Will these do?” They did. They fitted. They seemed to be made for him.

  Glasses on, his eyes prised into her. The sabre of a smile guarding his thin, hesitant face. His eyes particularly white under her husband’s lenses.

  “Hello,” she smiled. “I’m Merridy,” and held out a hand. “Merridy Dove.”

  A long arm rose from the bed. Shaking hands, she could have been gripping a tiller. Then all at once he released his hold and leaned forward, fingers touching her face. Ripped by the splintery wheel or mast, their tips had the feeling of shells.

  She heard her young girl’s giggle. “No,” she hooted, closing her eyes. As if a young boy was splashing water at her.

  The kitchen door slammed.

  “Alex…” fluting. “Could you put on the kettle?” And to him, her hand hiding h
er flushed throat: “Would you like some tea?”

  “I…I don’t recall.”

  “Then I would.”

  At the sound of footsteps coming down the corridor he snatched back his hand and his eyes moved to the door where Alex stood.

  With Alex, his mouth was adrift; he had abandoned the certainties of speech.

  “What do they call you, mate?” Alex asked, dragging up a chair and sitting down.

  Without Merridy in the room, the young man looked worried, alert.

  “Kish,” he whispered.

  When Rusty tried to lick him, he shied back.

  “Come on, he’s not going to eat you,” Alex said gently. “Hey, Rusty, get out.”

  And when the dog had left: “Where were you heading, Kish?” It was strange to see someone wearing his glasses.

  “Hobart Town.” Rolling out his gaze from under the overhanging brows and scanning the ceiling for a path out.

  Alex gave a surprised snort. “Oh, come on,” he said. “Hobart.”

  “We were told Hobart Town. That’s what the captain said.”

  Alex thought: The bump on his head has caused these convolutions and made him lose his place.

  “How long have you been at sea?” he asked.

  “We left Port Jackson…”

  “Port Jackson? Oh, Sydney.”

  “…on November the sixteenth, eighteen hundred and four.”

  Alex looked at him kindly. “It’s OK, Kish, you’re on dry land now. You can relax.”

  They were still at it when Merridy came back with the tea.

  She poured for him and Alex resumed. “Where were you heading?”

  “China. I don’t know.”

  “You mean like those escaped convicts from Sarah Island?” said Alex cleverly.

  “Or maybe it was Chile,” said Kish.

  This game he was playing, it had begun to annoy Alex. The young fellow behaving as though he might have been blown for ever by icy gales in a purgatory of white ridges and penguin crap. His fate to go round and round the pole.