by Carmody, Sam
Sam Carmody is a writer and award-winning songwriter from the town of Geraldton on the central coast of Western Australia. He is a previous recipient of the Mary Grant Bruce Award as part of the Fellowship of Australian Writers (FAW) National Literary Awards and his short fiction and non-fiction have been published widely online and in print.
Carmody’s first novel, The Windy Season, was shortlisted for the 2014 Australian/Vogel’s literary Award. He is currently living in Darwin on Australia’s Northern Territory coast lecturing in creative writing at the Batchelor Institute of Indigenous Higher Education.
Shark Fin Blues
Written by G.Liddiard (Mushroom Music)
Reproduced with kind permission
First published in 2016
Copyright © Sam Carmody 2016
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.
Allen & Unwin
83 Alexander Street
Crows Nest NSW 2065
Australia
Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100
Email: [email protected]
Web: www.allenandunwin.com
Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available from the National Library of Australia
www.trove.nla.gov.au
ISBN 9781760111564
eISBN 9781952534614
Typeset by Midland Typesetters, Australia
Cover design: Christabella Designs
Cover photographs: Cihan Terlan / Shutterstock
In memory of my grandmother, and first reader,
Freda Vines
Standing on the deck watching my shadow stretch
The sun pours my shadow upon the deck
The waters licking round my ankles now
There ain’t no sunshine way way down
I see the sharks out in the water like slicks of ink
Well, there’s one there bigger than a submarine
As he circles I look in his eye
I see Jonah in his belly by the campfire light
From Shark Fin Blues, The Drones
THERE ARE THINGS OUT THERE worse than sharks.
He had been told that so many times. The German enjoyed reminding him. Three months he had said it and Paul never knew what it meant. He suspected he didn’t want to know, that it was wiser not to look that hard. After all, there were ten thousand kilometres of coastline, from the Northern Territory border right down to the South Australia border. Most of it unpatrolled. All that ocean to the west, the Indian Ocean. There were bound to be things moving about that you didn’t want to come nose to nose with. And Paul never did, not until the twenty-mile crucifix, when Paul saw the body tied to the marker above the old shipwreck. Unrecognisable from weather and sun and birds.
There are things out there worse than sharks. He would know that in the end.
Contents
I
Missing
Victim or criminal
II
A spectator enthralled
At sea
Ghosts in the water
Stark
Shadow
Hidden
Circus
Deadman
Jester
Torpedo
Twenty-one
Pantomime
Headwind
Parachute
Undertow
Locksmith
Life after God
Fever
Moby Dick on a handline
In the dark
Containment
Runner
The living dead
Spinning over and over, like a plane going down
The dam’s broken
Atomos
Outpost
Talk
III
The windy season
Afterglow
The swimming speed of sharks
Arm in arm with a hippy
Angela
Deluge
Wake
Big room
Off-the-boat
In the void
Jack-in-the-box
Memories for ghosts
Snagged
Filthy ugg
Falling through a building turned on its side
Scavengers
A sun that never comes up
Stripped
Like letting a glass fall from a counter
USS San Jacinto
Land of children
Zach
Leviathan
Witness
Twenty-mile crucifix
IV
Tornado
The Professor
Mirage
Whitebait
Poppy
Communion
They’re all ghosts
Troy
Abatement
Big Shit
Barcelona
Through the heart of everything
Acknowledgements
Missing
PAUL WAS WORKING HIS SUPERMARKET shift when he first heard Elliot was missing. It was a Wednesday morning. Seven o’clock. The dairy delivery had just come in and his fingers were blue from freezer cold. The floor was empty of customers when he saw his mother, crossing the fruit and vegetable section, tugging at the sleeve of her sweater. He waved to her but she didn’t smile when she saw him. She wasn’t wearing makeup. It was rare to see her outside of the house without makeup on.
Has Elliot called you? she said before she got to him.
Paul shook his head.
Shit, she said, stepping backwards as though she’d been pushed. Has he said anything to you? Was he going anywhere?
What’s wrong?
I don’t know where he is, she said. His mother was almost shouting. She looked into the misted glass of the fridges and seemed to catch her reflection. She put a hand to her face and looked back at Paul. He saw the panic in her eyes, how in that moment it changed her completely, made her seem like a teenager. We don’t know where he is, she said, quieter. It’s not like him.
With that she turned and walked towards the checkouts.
Paul spent the rest of the shift moving between the storeroom freezer and the supermarket floor carrying crates and sodden, frost-covered cardboard boxes. The store manager, Bec, had her word to him in the delivery yard. As usual she made him stand looking west, squinting at the ocean torn by the sea breeze, white with sun. Far out in the sea lane, freighters queued, their black flanks shrunken and blurred in the glare. He watched the ships as she recited some new complaint about him. He had been getting that speech most days, Bec’s hands jammed in the back pockets of her black pants, belly out towards him. She told him that he wouldn’t get checkout duties again until he looked customers in the eye, like a man. He needed to speak up. He needed to know that everyone thought he was a pervert. He could think about sucking clit in his own time, she said. He apologised. Paul didn’t tell her about Elliot, didn’t mention to anyone what his mother had told him.
The shift finished at midday and when he reached home on his bicycle his father was already back from the university and his grandmother had arrived and installed herself in the kitchen, fussing over the few dishes at the sink and preparing food for no clear reason. She cornered Paul when she saw him and filled him in.
Elliot hadn�
��t been seen for days. He was last seen in Stark, the fishing town where he worked. His phone was going straight to messages, as though it were switched off; or he could be out of range, somewhere even further up the coast. He could be hurt, his grandmother said. Could have got himself into trouble on one of his surfing or fishing trips. Could have crashed his car or been washed off rocks by a king wave. His grandmother clenched his wrist as she said these things, not really looking at him. Then she let him go, returning to her post behind the kitchen counter to scowl into a white plastic mixing bowl.
Paul found his father upstairs in his study, still in his suit jacket.
Paul, his father said, and straightened his glasses. He was standing beside the wall-mounted bookshelf, leaning back on his heels. He held a large ring-bound document. You know, his father said, leafing through it, I met a student’s grandfather today. We had a morning tea for our doctoral grads and this very good student of mine had brought along his family including this grandfather. Ninety-two years old. First time I ever saw the man but then I remembered that the same man had died six years ago. Six years ago I gave an assignment extension to this student because one Mr Horsley, his grandfather, had died. But there today at this morning tea sat Mr Horsley definitely alive, and in reasonable health. Paul’s father smiled. A miracle, he said, and ran a hand through his clipped blond hair.
As usual, Paul didn’t know what to say to his father. He had expected that maybe this one time the Professor might even be angry, having to cancel a lecture, arriving home to bad news and patchy information. He had expected that he might be aggravated by the unproductive fretting of Paul’s grandmother, impatient with the whole thing, feeling all the same things Paul did. But the Professor stood there in the study as absentmindedly as a man standing in a park.
And I thought to myself, his father continued, that is dedication. To be willing to do-in your grandfather for a one-week extension.
Elliot, Paul said. The word echoed darkly in the study.
Yes, his father replied. Your mother is making calls.
Paul waited for more, but that was all his father said on it.
Where is Mum? Paul said.
Maybe try his room.
Paul waited a moment longer, watched his father’s back, turned to the door.
Paul, his father called after him, removing his reading glasses.
Yeah.
I don’t like you going on my computer. You know that. I have a lot of work on here. I can’t afford to lose it.
He didn’t answer as he left the room.
Paul’s mother spent the afternoon in Elliot’s bedroom on the phone. She tried to call Tess, Elliot’s girlfriend who had first reported him missing, but she didn’t answer. She spoke to the police in Stark and the city police. An officer told her they would send someone out to see them.
It wasn’t like Elliot. Paul’s mother repeated that phrase a number of times on the phone with people—to Elliot’s small circle of friends and their parents, in the phone calls from his aunty Ruth, and to the dozens of other concerned or curious people who phoned, some of whom she hadn’t seen in years. And she would repeat it to herself. It’s not like him. And it wasn’t. Elliot called regularly. Even when he was on his trips up the coast he had always been clear about when he was coming home. Paul didn’t think of Elliot as secretive. He was reclusive, but not shady. But no one knew where he had been for three days.
Paul’s grandmother suggested the possibility of an accident, that Elliot might have run off the road somewhere in a place that would conceal the car, hidden behind a wall of trees or deep in desert bush. In the course of the afternoon she became convinced of the scenario and suggested that she set off and begin a search of the country roads. Paul’s mother found the idea simultaneously irritating and overwhelming, and ordered her to stay until the police arrived. She said it was unlikely that Elliot could have left the road without a trace. Paul’s grandmother went quiet, as if suddenly realising the practical dilemma posed by the theory. Seven hundred kilometres of looking for brake marks on worn highways, of searching the roadside bush north of the city and the infinite maze of four-wheel-drive trails between Perth and Stark and all those barren stretches of coast and beaches that didn’t have names. And Paul suddenly understood the power of losing someone, just how big it made the world seem, so impossibly endless and silent and indifferent, and how small it made you feel.
It was evening when the police car pulled into the driveway, the headlights shining through the living-room windows.
They sat at the kitchen table upstairs. His father opened the balcony doors. The night was hot and still. The dog panted at their feet. Paul’s mother sat at the head of the table, opposite his father. Paul sat opposite the officer. He was not much older than Elliot, maybe mid-twenties. He smelt of spray deodorant.
He works on boats, right? the officer said, pen poised above a notepad. Crayfish?
Yes, said Paul’s mother.
Stark?
He’s been up there the last two seasons.
The officer paused to write notes. Paul watched his mother. Her fingers were curled in Ringo’s hair. The fox terrier’s panting smile looked ridiculous in the seriousness of the moment. For a second Paul had the terrifying sensation of wanting to laugh out loud.
So he’d be making good money? the officer asked, looking up. Could take off any time he wanted? You said on the phone he travels a lot.
But always comes back, Paul’s mother said.
She’s right, his father said. Always comes back.
Does he go away for long periods?
He’ll be gone for a few weeks, sometimes, his mother said. About this time of year, after the season, in the winter. He’ll go up the coast.
Alone?
Sometimes he’d take that girl of his, Tess, she said. But he likes his own company.
So he could just be up the coast somewhere? It’s only been a few days.
Not without telling Tess, his mother said. He wouldn’t just pack up and take off without telling her where he was going.
The girlfriend, the officer said. Tess. She’s been in a little bit of trouble with the local police.
What does that mean? she asked.
Drug use, the officer said. Possession.
Elliot’s never said much about her, she said. He wouldn’t even bring her down with him to meet us.
He’s never got into any kind of trouble? Any disagreements you know of, people who might want to hurt him?
His mother shook her head.
The officer paused. And the cousin, he said. The one he works for on the boat?
Jake? his mother said sharply.
I read his file also, the officer explained.
He wouldn’t hurt Elliot.
I have to ask, the officer said, eyes down.
Paul’s father peered over as if trying to read the officer’s notes.
It was a long time ago, his mother said. What happened with Jake, it was a long time ago.
Okay, the officer replied. But you haven’t noticed anything strange or different about your son’s behaviour?
Elliot’s not the sort to disappear, his mother said, the volume of the statement causing the policeman to lift his eyes from his notepad.
Mrs Darling, I know this is difficult, but we see it every other week. Around forty thousand people go missing around the country every year. Ninety-five per cent of them turn up in a matter of months. I’m guessing Elliot’s had a gutful of cray bait and wanted some fresh air. He’ll be back.
There was silence. Paul looked at his parents. His father stood up and walked towards the kettle on the kitchen counter. His mother was staring at the tablecloth.
He’s just an ordinary kid, she said.
The officer nodded.
On that first night after Elliot’s disappearance, Paul found himself on the computer in the study long after midnight, unsure of what he was trying to do, what he was looking for. In the hours before dawn he gorged on t
he cases of missing people, the search results serving up the usual extremes: people who had returned or been found sometimes decades after they had disappeared.
There was the case of the Croatian woman who had been missing for twenty-five years. It had been big news years ago, when he was in primary school: the girl who had vanished as a ten-year-old only to be found in a makeshift enclosure in an inner-city backyard by fire crews responding to a blaze within a house, her now-elderly captor having left the kitchen stove on while he was sleeping.
He read dozens of articles. The Brazilian fisherman who had drifted a thousand kilometres to an island in the West Indies and was found by a BBC film crew who had come to do a story on migratory birds. A girl the same age as Paul, seventeen, who awoke with severe retrograde amnesia in a Los Angeles hospital. She had a Yorkshire accent but carried no identification.
There were more of these kinds of stories than were possible to read. The internet was thick with them. And it left his mind feeling choked and heavy, like a greasy washcloth, dense with information that it didn’t need, but couldn’t easily let go.
Elliot never did social media, thought the whole online thing was bullshit. Paul figured his brother was suspicious of the virtual world, uncomfortable with the performances of people. And how close you get to the shadowy core of them if you wanted to. It was all there online. And Elliot didn’t have Paul’s appetite for digging around. There was only one mention of his brother that Paul could find, in the result of a cricket match on the North Metropolitan Cricket Association website. Paul remembered the game. Elliot had filled in reluctantly for a team captained by an old high school friend and he had taken a wicket. E. Darling 1/12. And that was it. No video or photographs. In the infinite landscape of the internet, where Paul could find any mad story, where every wild hypothetical had a real-life, human example and every unfathomable, immaterial thing took shape, Elliot could almost have never existed.
The longer Paul stayed on the computer the harder it was to leave it. It was the illusion of doing something. Typing words into the search engine had the feeling of action. He would be better off sleeping. He knew that. But there was an element to it that he wasn’t in command of, hitting search on autopilot, feeling neither fully awake nor tired enough to sleep, feeling nothing much at all. 1994 Pajero Western Australia. Search. Car accident Brand Highway. Search. Young surfer accident Stark. Search. Each failure fuelled the next attempt, and each new search led him deeper. And then he would give in to the undertow of the search engine, its eddying into darkness. He found himself watching Russian dash-cam footage of head-on car accidents, and he saw the grainy CCTV video of a gangland shooting in Portland. He lingered over links to execution videos recorded on mobile phones. Brazilian drug-cartel beheadings. Sniper kills on Middle Eastern battlefields. He didn’t click on these but maybe he wanted to. Was it nobility that stopped him or gutlessness? It made him tired of himself, this tiptoeing at the threshold, like a pervert. Or, perhaps worse, a cowardly pervert. It left him feeling like shit and exhausted, but restless too.
