Secrets of the Sea

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  Memorial Service next Sunday at 10.00 a.m. All visitors welcome. Captain Vamplugh and his crew again extend their appreciation for the lovely knitted items they have received. With your generous donations of goods and money we raised $940.45. We also have 100 Wellington Point tea-towels for sale with pictures of the village drawn by Myfanwy Davies. Any profits go towards the Bilgola City Mission. Phone to place your order: Rev. Chris Mantle 63526836.

  Sister Surrage kept telling him: “You’re lucky to be alive.” He nodded. He could not forget the force of the waves that had dashed his speedboat against one of the pylons of the jetty, or the fury of the wind that tumbled her up the concrete ramp, to burst apart the hull against Mr Talbot’s garage–at which point he had jumped unceremoniously out and run, stumbled and collapsed. All the same, his concussion was not so severe that he could ignore the unprecedented publicity that the storm had attracted in its wake. Despite the constraint of his bandages, he was eager to tap into it.

  From his bed in the Louisa Meredith Nursing Home, Ray Grogan, who was now on the council, sent instructions to Tildy to open up the school kitchen and for the playing field to be made available to all camper vans. So many of these vehicles had converged on the promontory that the kids had nicknamed the area behind their playground Winnebago City.

  Wellington Point, meanwhile, blinked in the glare of an attention that old-timers could not recall since an aeroplane decapitated two locals in the 1930s. Day-trippers came from Hobart and Launceston. Bushies who never much liked to travel beyond sight of their shacks came from Royal George and Green Ponds and Llandaff, and combed the shore to see if they could spot a few deck boards, as often as not mistaking a fragment of Ray’s speedboat for a piece of the Buffalo. Eventually, a recovery barge anchored off Schouten and hauled away the wreck.

  There were those who pretended to dislike the publicity, but no longer Murray Went, who was forced to bus in extra staff from Swansea after promoting Debbie to manageress; nor anyone else in the hospitality business, for whom the sinking of the Buffalowas a bonanza. It was a novel sight for Alex to read the “No vacancy” signs outside the bed & breakfasts, and quite a few houses as well. As for the people thronging the street, Alex had never known such an invasion. The hotel’s restaurant and its two bars overspilled with reporters and photographers who had flown in from the mainland and even from abroad, a television crew from the BBC competing with one from Southern Cross to interview eyewitnesses and survivors. Agnes had filled a bin liner of clothes for each and every one of these–whom Merridy could not help remarking that Kish showed no inclination to seek out–so that the captain and his crew resembled members of a visiting cricket team as they sat in the hotel restaurant, dressed in baggy, white, moth-eaten jerseys, some of them from a batch donated by Harry Ford, and struggled to find different answers to the same questions posed over and over again.

  In this avid atmosphere, it was inevitable that stories began to circulate of Alex’s heroism.

  Late one morning, he came up from Moulting Lagoon to find a journalist tapping on the living-room window. The man–mid-forties, brown shoes, pot belly–had paid Rose-Maree the equivalent of a week’s salary to drive him out to the farm. She sat in her car, radio blaring, engrossed in Who Weekly and a feature about actresses with moles.

  “Can I help?”

  “Alex Dove?” jerking round. He had a beard and was bald.

  “No,” said Alex.

  “Where could I find Mr Dove?”

  “Who are you?”

  “Oh, friend of a friend.” His brown shoes stepped across the herbaceous border that Merridy had created, squashing a red peony and a white trigger-plant. “Marty Ponting. The Advocate.” And held out a hand.

  “He’s out at sea, he won’t be back till late.”

  “I see,” and inspected a spiral-bound pad with panicked ferocity. “Actually, it was Mr Cash I wanted to speak to.” He frowned at what he had written. “Or Cosh, could it be?”

  “They’re in the same boat.”

  Mr Ponting looked at Alex. “Who are you?”

  “A friend of Mrs Dove,” said Alex for some reason.

  “Could you ask either of them to ring this number?” and with his still-unshaken hand opened a wallet that bulged with receipts.

  Alex suspected Harry of priming this Ponting. The ex-Fleet Streeter could never forget the heavenly days of his journalistic calling that ill-health had cut short. Alex remembered that Harry, fond as he no doubt was of his mother and father, had orchestrated the newspaper coverage following their death. The morals of an alley cat.

  He watched the beard duck back into Rose-Maree’s car. Then went inside before she looked up. He ripped up Marty Ponting’s card and put the pieces in the compost bin.

  CHAPTER TWO

  THREE DAYS ON AND the journalists had begun to seep away, leaving their smears behind. And still the Oyster Bay pine disfigured the lawn.

  A pile of roots extended over the crater, tangled with stones and clay and Aboriginal shells. The roots had forced things down over the years. Alex picked out animal bones, farm equipment and an old whaling blubber-cutter that had lost its handle. He dreaded to investigate the dark hollow beneath his parents’ tomb-stones. He would attend to their graves once he had dealt with the tree.

  Already, he had chainsawed the topmost branches that obstructed the drive; the rest of the trunk balanced in an amputated column on its crushed foliage, a huge evergreen umbrella blown inside out.

  Even so, Alex felt a curious reluctance to dispose of the pine on his own. The tree could wait; there were fences to right and roofs to mend and sheep and cattle to find. The thought of Kish out in the bay with Merridy intensified the young man’s absence.

  Not until Sunday morning late did Merridy and Kish untangle the last lantern. On Monday, it became Alex’s turn to claim him.

  In the hour before dawn, as he drove his tractor across the darkened fields, Alex startled a bloated devil gorging on a dead cow on the other side of a fallen fence. He discovered the putrefying corpse a yard or two inside the adjacent Crown forest where the animal had blundered in the storm, its hide tined by fangs of barbed wire and a sheet of rusted tin embedded in its neck. He repaired the fence and afterwards dug a trench. Playing with the notion and then dismissing it that this was the very cow he had mistaken for a ghost. He levered the remains into the trench and covered it over with bark and leaves.

  The crude burial reminded him of the task that he had postponed, for which he would be glad of Kish’s assistance.

  Down the corridor he heard a mannish laugh. As he had not heard it in years. He refilled Rusty’s bowl with water and sat at the table and finished a piece of cold toast that he had left uneaten, and picking at the marmalade label waited for her to come into the kitchen.

  He stood up and kissed her.

  “What’s that smell?” she said gaily.

  He told her about the cow in the wood and the devil that had emerged from its backside, teeth clamped around an intestine.

  “Let me wash your clothes,” and started to unbutton his shirt.

  But he held her hand.

  “What’s wrong?” noticing his face.

  “You’re wearing mascara.”

  “I saw myself in the glass, I look so old.”

  But the lilt in her voice did not sound right. Her face above her green jersey over-bright and the make-up drawing attention.

  “Aren’t you going to your shed?” he asked. She was usually out of the house by now, dressed in her work clothes. There were nets and baskets to stitch with baling twine, mud-maps to fill in, outboards to mend. In spawning time, she often told him, you needed to get everything ready for the next run.

  “I have to ring Panasonic.”

  “What the hell for?” releasing her.

  She looked at him, surprised at his tone. “I lost a blade.”

  “What blade?” asked Alex. Her face seemed slimmer under her make-up.

  “For the bread-
maker. Second time, too! I’m going to have Panasonic send two this time. Oh, and Alex, I almost forgot–the new cleaner’s coming today.” Alice’s daughter having moved with her partner to Longford. “She should have been here at eight.”

  Alex heard Kish knocking around somewhere in the house and went to talk to him.

  By the time he came back in, Merridy had moved to the sink. Both hands held onto his plate that she had dried.

  “What’s up with Kish?” Alex wanted to know.

  “Why? Where is he, anyway?”

  “He refuses to leave his room, but right now I could do with his help.”

  “Just go and tell him you need him,” carefully stacking the plate.

  “It’s that lump of wood I gave him. He can’t keep his hands off it.”

  “A bit obsessive, isn’t he?”

  The sound of a vehicle brought Alex to the window. “Your cleaner’s here.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  HER NAME WAS MADASUN, a Catholic from Devonport. She had advertised in Talbot’s Newsletter.

  She parked at an angle on the far side of the tree and tripped from her car, spilling keys onto the gravel. Her round face obscured by frizzy auburn ringlets that she brushed from wide trusting eyes. She had only recently moved to Wellington Point and had overshot the entrance to the house, ending up 30 kilometres away in Bicheno. She was dressed in blue dungarees and had a large watch on her wrist.

  “I was listening about the Pope, poor man.”

  Merridy showed her where the cleaning things were, and around the house, and introduced her to the figure who stepped into the corridor.

  “This is Kish.”

  “That’s a nice name,” not put off by the skull on his T-shirt. “Unusual.”

  “I’ll be in here if you want me,” said Merridy, and opened the last door.

  Barely twenty minutes had passed when the vacuum cleaner was switched off to be replaced by the sound of Madasun’s resonant voice. She was conversing with Kish in his bedroom and what they were saying, on that cool, overcast day, reached Merridy in Alex’s old workshop. It was clear that Madasun was not going to be efficient in the tradition of Alice or her daughter.

  “Where were you heading?”

  “Hobart Town.”

  “No, really?”

  “I was, too.”

  “What were you going to do in Hobart?”

  “I dunno, spear a whale or two.”

  “I thought they’d banned whaling. You’re not Japanese, are you?”

  He laughed.

  “I bet you’re a Virgo. I always get on with Virgos.”

  “Who are they?”

  “Oh, come on. When were you born?”

  He gave a date.

  The girl giggled. He was funny, Kish. “I don’t think even whales live that long. I’m serious, when were you born? What month?”

  He told her again.

  “Then that would make you, let’s see…a Pisces.”

  Suddenly, he did not want to play her game. He mumbled something.

  “Look, if you’d rather not tell, that’s OK,” she said concerned. “It’s not important.”

  But there was something, clearly, he did want to reveal. He spoke in a halting voice. Too low for Merridy to hear.

  “That sounds like head lice,” said Madasun. “Maybe you should go to the chemist’s.”

  But it was of a different category, evidently, from nits.

  “I know what you mean,” Madasun sighed. “I feel like that sometimes. Utterly lost. And with a fiancé, too.”

  So far as Merridy was able to gather, her fiancé was a fireplace installer from Beaconsfield who had a child by a previous partner. Her parents disapproved, but probably they would marry in October. If not, she had other plans. She would like to write science fiction. She would like to study Aboriginal art. She would like to travel.

  Until Merridy got up from her desk.

  “Maybe you’d like to get the cobwebs out from behind the fridge,” interrupting.

  Madasun jumped up from the end of the bed, impervious. “Oh, Mrs Dove, gosh, I was so enjoying listening to Kish that I forgot myself.”

  Kish lay across the unmade bed. He watched Madasun unplug the vacuum cleaner. Then he folded his knife, picked up his piece of wood and left the room.

  Merridy called after him: “Kish, where are you going?”

  Over his shoulder: “To help Mr Dove.”

  Merridy returned to her desk and flung herself into the mundane tasks that she had put off for the spawning season. After ordering the blades for the bread-maker, she compiled a list:

  –sort out cleaning schedules

  –sign and date harvests

  –order seedlings

  By ten o’clock, she had drawn a fresh mud-map, marking the new positions of the lanterns, and composed letters to the Department of Primary Industries and to Dmitri, apologising for having to postpone her visit to Melbourne. To leave the farm right now was impossible. I am still dealing with fallout from the storm, she wrote. Perhaps I could come next week?

  But it was sand to halt the tide.

  In Sydney, he was shoving everything. A wonder he didn’t wear his pecker out.

  The room she sat in was at the end of the house and the window at an angle to the lawn so that she could only see a tantalising portion of the grass. On another day she might have been too preoccupied to look out. But this morning her eyes kept straying. She watched the lawn as dutifully and carefully as Tildy used to watch Zac. The fallen tree with its massive claw of roots and stones and soil.

  Did he notice her figure, her eyes? Some men did and the idea of it made them stupid.

  A figure approached the tree. Kish! But it was her husband. He stood talking to someone out of sight.

  She watched the familiar face that time had nicked and hollowed. He bore the scars of two carcinoma operations, on his right cheek and right hand where he faced the sun when driving the ute. And all at once had no control over her emotions. Dark thoughts flapped around her.

  She forced her eyes to the tree. The simplicity of the fall was dreadful, the massive finger aimed at the sky in the angle of a benediction now pointed, stunted and accusing, at her.

  Alex said something and came on towards the house. She heard the fly-screen open and close. The sound of the cistern flushing. Her hands tightened into fists. In that instant she hated him that he could still pull a chain, still shut the fly-screen. He was like the air which she had expelled. And she hated herself even more–for this sudden and unexpected ill-will, this deadness towards her loving, decent husband.

  She picked up her pen again. Appalled and shaken that she could be capable of feeling like this. She took a fresh sheet of paper and started writing. Dear Mum…Drawing in the whole assembly of her mother’s church to her sense of shame and guilt. It has been months since I last wrote. And rummaged further into herself as if she was the wardrobe in their bedroom, to throw her sinful feelings out and leave only what was pure. But her pen did not know how to go on. What could she tell her mother? She looked outside to find the words–and found Kish.

  “A young man washed up on the beach the other day,” she murmured aloud. “En route to harpoon a whale in Hobart Town. I’ve hexed him with my lantern and he has sky-blue limbs, a shiny silver knife and a ring in his ear, his ear. I surprise myself in the uncomfortable position of wanting to sleep with this man, to taste the sea in his mouth. Do you see my quandary? Please advise, your otherwise faithful daughter, Merridy.”

  Her gaze did not move from the enigmatic figure who had appeared from behind the fallen tree. In Alex’s jeans and denim hat. He was playing with Rusty.

  “Know what you are, Merridy Dove?” she said. “You are a silly, silly cow.” But still her eyes fumbled after him.

  Partially concealed by foliage, Kish snapped off a branch and threw it across the lawn. Then as Rusty ran to fetch he leaned back against a bough and took something from his hip pocket.

  She ro
lled her chair forward. What was he carving? Whenever she woke, she could hear him through the bedroom wall, working on it. But if she asked what he was making, he told her it was a secret. She had little doubt that it had–obviously–to do with ships. Something about the Otago obsessed him. Once, on her way to collect firewood, she had startled him poking his rigger’s knife into the bottle, but the blade was too wide. He had leaped back, as when she had found him by the wardrobe.

  This time she smiled. “Still trying to get that penny out?”

  “Hey, Kish!” It was Alex, reeling him in again. Carrying across the lawn not the chainsaw, but two spades. “Come over here.”

  They walked to the base of the tree and the pine’s roots obscured them.

  She looked down and wrote quickly: It is very sad about the Pope. It doesn’t look as though he will survive much longer. I realise he has been a constant all my life.

  After a while her serenity returned.

  “Mrs Dove?”

  Madasun, knocking on the door. Her three hours up.

  Merridy scraped together forty-five dollars from her purse.

  “We need some bleach,” said Madasun. “If you like, I can get it.”

  “No, I’ll get it.”

  She had decided to tell Madasun not to come again. But what came out was: “Same time next week?”

  After the grateful girl had flustered her relief, Merridy returned to the letter that she was halfway through writing to her mother. Alex is still counting the damage from the storm. He lost eleven sheep and the roof of the shearers’ quarters. I wonder if the winds reached you in Devonport…

  By noon Merridy had covered six sides. She folded them into an envelope and went into the kitchen. Kish must have finished whatever he was doing with Alex because his silver knife lay on the Welsh dresser. Engraved into its handle, a name–Marlow–that she had not noticed before. Of the manufacturer, perhaps. Once again she tested its blade. This knife to cut ropes that threatened to entangle him, or her.

  “Hey! That’s mine.”