Dunger

by Cowley, Joy

  I don’t say anything. I can’t go fishing tomorrow, I really, truly can’t. At lunchtime the mailman will be bringing back my phone.

  When Mr Hoffmeyer shakes my hand, my knuckles crunch. He’s a big guy, square shape, wiry hairs sticking out of the top of his black singlet, and more hairs on his legs bristling between the bottom of his shorts and the top of his gumboots. He looks like everybody’s cartoon of a farmer. In his woolshed, he has a fridge without shelves, and inside it is the skinned body of a sheep hanging from a hook. He takes the carcase out, puts it on the bench, and with a meat chopper, bang, bang, bang, goes down the backbone, so the sheep falls in two halves. Just as quickly, he chops off a back leg and hands it to Grandpa who passes it to me. It’s heavy, a lump of raw meat with streaks of white fat. I put it in a double layer of plastic bags.

  I carry the meat to the car, wondering if all those sheep in the paddock know what I’m doing. Sheep are supposed to be dumb because they don’t obey people’s orders, but isn’t that smart? Has anyone done research on the intelligence of sheep? For all I know, the animals staring at me as I walk over their grass could be making judgements about me as a carnivorous murderer, and telepathically planning their revenge. I put the bag on the floor between front and back seats and make a mental note to ask Dad if there have been any brain scans done on sheep.

  Grandpa drives the car to the implement shed where Mr Hoffmeyer is waiting. Next to the tractor is a quad bike and next to that, a white boat on a trailer. Grandpa backs the car up close, then stops and gets out. So do I.

  The runabout is a good size for four people, and has a 120 hp motor that Grandpa says is not fast, but adequate. While I’m looking at it, Grandpa lifts the trailer drawbar and swings it towards the car. But then he drops it. He steps back, leaning against the car and breathing hard. I run out to help, but Mr Hoffmeyer is already there, picking up the drawbar and dropping the end over the ball. He clicks it, and then does up the safety chain.

  Grandpa is still huffing, holding his chest.

  “You all right?” Mr Hoffmeyer says.

  “Fit as a fiddle and ready to play.” Grandpa straightens up and smiles, suddenly perky. He gets back in the car, the driver’s seat, which is okay because I don’t want to drive with a boat on this road, and I am left to say thank you to the farmer.

  “You’re a good boy,” Mr Hoffmeyer says. “Look after your grandfather.”

  I want to tell him that I do, but also that Grandpa never says I’m good, never, and that I wish just once he’d see that I’ve been trying to do my best and it’s not my fault if things go wrong. But that would sound a bit melodramatic, so I just shake hands again with Mr Hoffmeyer with a crunch, and get into the car.

  Grandpa pulls up at the back of the bach, and Lissy brings Grandma out to look at the boat, although I’m not sure how much of it she can see.

  Grandpa is breathing normally again. “We’ll get the gear ready tonight, ready for an early start.”

  “Does it have to be tomorrow?” Lissy says. “The groceries are coming from the supermarket. Couldn’t we go the day after?”

  “Not a starter,” says Grandpa. “Weather’s packing up Thursday. Southerly bluster coming in, likely it’ll last three days.”

  Of course, Melissa is not thinking about food being delivered by the mailman. With her, it’s all about her stupid phone.

  My sister has three brain cells, one for boys, one for clothes and one for texting messages to other girls with three brain cells.

  Grandma wants to go fishing today. I seriously think she won’t manage getting in and out of a boat, and I offer to stay home with her, but she is determined.

  “I’ve always fished and I don’t stop now. Only thing is, I can’t see that damned nylon trace to thread the hooks. You’ll have to do that for me.”

  Will’s outside in the half-dark, helping Grandpa load the boat. Last night, they got the gear out of the garage, life jackets, rods, knives, cutting boards, two boxes full of hooks and stuff and some towels, and left it all on the verandah because of the overnight dew. Then, guess what, Grandpa and Grandma lit the kerosene lanterns and said they were going to teach us some chords on the guitars.

  “The basic E minor chord first,” says Grandma.

  That is amazingly exciting. Will has the smaller red guitar because his fingers fit the frets. I have the big one that sounds dreamy mellow, like chocolate and cream. They show us three finger positions and then we actually play and sing Dad’s song about the old lady who swallows a fly. It is really awesome. Afterwards, we both have crease lines across the tips of our left fingers, but Grandma says the skin will harden up soon enough. I think it already has. If we could stay home today I’d do more practice. I try that on Grandma, but she just says, “Plenty of time tonight.”

  Incidentally, the bread turned out to be excellent. I’m making meat sandwiches with it while Grandma fills bottles of water and lemon cordial for the picnic box.

  The bellbirds are singing their hearts out. They have a long day, beginning before dawn and ending after dark, and it would be cool if you knew what they were saying. The chiming echoes from one side of the bay to the other and I think maybe someone could make a recording that is part orchestra and part bellbird sound. It shouldn’t be too difficult.

  What is going to be difficult is getting Grandma into the boat. I’ve been in a boat before and I know how this works. The boat goes in the water and we all climb over the side. But even with the three of us pushing, Grandma won’t be able to do that.

  I carry out the picnic box, the last thing to go on board. Well, I think it’s last, but Grandpa sends me back for the low stool in the bathroom and a kitchen chair. I wonder why he wants to take furniture on a fishing trip, but he sets them up beside the boat. Well, how about that? Grandma is going on board before the boat gets launched.

  Will gets into the boat to help her from that side. Grandpa and I are on each arm to guide her up onto the stool, then the chair, then over the edge into the boat. With Will’s help she settles in one of the seats and yells, “Ahoy, you landlubbers! Let’s put to sea!”

  Because I’m slightly sunburned from swimming, I’m wearing a hat borrowed from Grandma, the hideous T-shirt and the gross sneakers with holes and, oh yes, my very old jeans. Normally I wouldn’t be seen dead in these but Grandpa says sunlight is stronger on water than on land, so it pays to cover up. On top of the shirt goes a more-than-hideous life jacket, and we’re ready. Grandpa drives the car with the trailer-with-boat-with-Grandma-on-it out onto the road and then reverses down the access path to the beach.

  He has chosen this time of the morning because the tide is right: almost fully out, the sea is at a place where the beach drops away steeply. He drives the car so that the back tyres are just in the water, then we all get out. Grandpa loosens the rope that holds the boat on the trailer. It slips back, back, with Grandma giving advice, until it’s off the trailer and floating. Grandpa wades out to hold the boat. He turns it around so the back is facing us. “Okay, boyo. Take the car and trailer up the beach and park it by the road. Melissa, you climb on board.”

  “How? I’ll get wet!”

  Obviously, he can’t hear me, and neither can Grandma.

  I yell louder. “I’ll get my jeans wet!”

  Will is already in the car, and the noise of the gear change sends a shiver down my spine. Bet they can’t hear that, either. The empty trailer rattles as it bumps over the stones, and over the noise I hear Grandpa yell, “You waiting for the next tide? Stop dreaming, girl!”

  There’s no way you can pull up the legs of skinny jeans. Even with the back of the boat pushed into the shallows, I am wet to the knees.

  “Step onto the landing board and over the stern. Hurry up.” That’s Grandma’s voice.

  “All right, all right!” I yell back.

  “Oh, my!” she says. “The princess got out
on the wrong side of the bed this morning.”

  I climb into the boat. “The bottoms of my jeans are soaking!’ I explain.

  “That’s the sea for you.” She waves her hand. “But look at it this way, if it was the top of your jeans wet, you’d have some explaining to do.”

  I have to laugh. “Grandma, I can’t believe you said that!”

  She wags a finger at me. “Girlie, bear this in mind. I know what it’s like to be thirteen but you don’t know what it’s like to be eighty-two.”

  “Fourteen, Grandma. I am fourteen and I’ll soon be fifteen.” I want to add that she lived in the age of the dinosaurs and my world is entirely different, but I can’t be bothered putting all that into a yell.

  “Whatever,” she says. “A year or two makes little difference when you’re my age. Now come over here. No, not that close, I don’t want you dripping on me. Hand me the tackle box and I’ll get you to make some nylon traces.”

  I bet Melissa will tell Mum and Dad that I drove Grandpa’s car. I hope she does. I want her to describe how I drove up the beach, towing a trailer, entirely on my own, over the stones and the grass of the access, then turned into a siding on the road and parked under a big gum tree. Handbrake on. Car locked. Grandpa couldn’t have done it better. This will dispel the myth of the nerd who’s not practical. When I was using the washing machine one day and it chose to flood, Mum told me, “Never mind, Will, you’ll work with your brain and not your hands,” which is a ridiculous statement, I mean, how does a brain connect to a computer without hands? I believe in all sincerity that a smart brain can teach hands to do anything. In a few days I have become a chopper of wood, a fixer of water, a student of guitar and the driver of a gear-shift Vauxhall. Which is why I’m surprised when Grandpa lets Melissa steer the boat.

  “This isn’t your job,” I tell her. “You helped Grandma set up the lines.”

  “So?” She smiles. Her hair is blowing all over her face. I don’t know how she can see to drive a boat.

  I explain it to her. “You help Grandma. I help Grandpa. You cook. I drive. Understand?”

  So what does she do next? She turns and yells at Grandpa, “Will says I shouldn’t be driving the boat.”

  “He’ll get his turn,” Grandpa says, chopping up bait on a board.

  Oh, all right, fair enough, considering she didn’t want to come at all today and her sole training in boat skills has been making bread and scones. This is an echo of Mum’s shop, where Melissa gets to serve customers while I carry heavy boxes of old magazines to the recycling bins.

  I sit at the stern of the boat near Grandma, and put a safety pin swivel on the line on my rod, a simple task complicated by the way Melissa bounces the boat over waves.

  We are now in the outer Sounds and the edges of hills have the sun on them, although the shadows are still dark. Our wake is astonishingly smooth compared with the sea on either side – I mean, you could ski behind the boat and feel you were on glass. The fringes of the wake are turbulent immediately behind us, diminishing to bands of white froth as far as I can see. Occasionally, a bit of seaweed or driftwood slides by, and something hard, wood, I expect, rattles along the bottom of the boat which I’m sure is called a keel, even on runabouts, and I think it’s just as well for Melissa that it didn’t smash into the propeller.

  Grandma’s voice is louder than the motor. She tells me the names of the various bays and things about them, like the people who built their house around their caravan, and the man who ate everything raw, vegetables, fish and meat, because he said cooking took life out of food.

  “See that hut? Doesn’t look much, does it? An astronomer lived there. Came all the way from California with his telescope, to see Halley’s Comet.”

  “Is he still there?”

  She shakes her head. “I don’t know and if I did know, I’ve forgotten. Over there is D’Urville Island. The bush was cleared by burning and when the smoke was over, the ground was littered with kiwi skeletons.”

  Too much information! There are some things you don’t need to think about. But both my grandparents have an appetite for the sensational, a genetic trait that is lacking in my father and me, but occasionally apparent in my sister. Melissa has a flair for the dramatic.

  At a suitable moment, I say to Grandma, “Did you know that Melissa stabbed an inflatable castle to death with her spiky shoes?”

  Grandma laughs. “Yes, she told me. A pity no one filmed it.”

  That’s exactly what I mean about being dramatic, my sister indulging in sensationalism even when she is responsible. The truth is she should have been too ashamed to mention it.

  As we get close to D’Urville Island, Grandpa takes over the wheel and throttles back. He calls me up front to man the anchor. It turns out that anchoring a boat is not a simple matter. It requires knowledge of wind and tidal currents and the amount of chain and rope to be let out, approximately four times the length of the boat. This is a grapnel anchor like the skeleton of an umbrella, and suitable for these conditions, Grandpa says.

  “How do you know it’s suitable?” I ask.

  “I just know,” he says, which is not helpful to some-one wanting information. Then he yells, “Right you are! Drop your lines.”

  Our bait is frozen pilchard, half-thawed and very effective. The second my sinker hits the bottom, there is a heavy tug and my rod jiggles.

  “Wind it in!” yells Grandma. Her voice gets louder. “Oh boy, oh boy! I got one!”

  We wind in two big cod, almost black, and swing them over onto the deck. They flap close to our feet.

  “Get them off the hook,” Grandma says. “Both of them. I can’t see to do it.”

  I’ve caught fish before, herrings off the end of the wharf, and Mum or Dad has always taken them off the hook. It’s not that I’m afraid of cod, simply that no one has explained the technique for doing this. I touch the fish’s head and it goes into a spasm, jumping over my feet and tangling my line.

  Grandma says, “Grab a cloth and hold it by its stomach. Go on, grab it! That’s right. The spines can’t hurt you. Now hold it firmly and work the hook out.”

  It is a very unpleasant task. I imagine how I’d feel with a hook through my upper lip and then I think of the holes in Melissa’s ears. She sticks earrings in and out and it doesn’t seem to hurt. Her friend Jacquie even has a couple of holes in her nose – and I’m not talking about her nostrils.

  Still holding the fish with the cloth, I drop it into the plastic bin. It thuds against the sides, desperate to get back to the sea. It’s gross. I’m not super keen on fish and if I have to eat it, I’d prefer it came from a shop. But now I have to get the hook out of Grandma’s cod. This one has swallowed the bait and the hook is deep inside. It all turns out a bit messy, and the fish looks quite dead when I’ve finished. I think of a lion biting a gazelle. I read somewhere that lions bite the back of the neck to break the spine so that their prey feels no pain. It would be good to know that fish, being cold-blooded, don’t feel pain. That would be a logical assumption since they frequently take chunks out of each other.

  Grandpa is taking Melissa’s fish off the hook and that’s okay because she hates wet and slimy things. We now have four cod, all in about five minutes of fishing.

  Straight away Grandma gets another, but this time it’s a small cod, pale brown. “Too little,” she says. “Take it off the hook and throw it back.”

  I wrap the cloth around its belly and gently ease out the hook. As I throw the cod into the sea, there is a splash, a flash of silver and the little fish disappears.

  “What was that?”

  “What was what?” Grandma asks.

  “A big fish, silver, maybe it’s a shark.”

  “Barracuda!” she calls to Grandpa.

  “Flaming barracudas!” he yells. “Lines up, everyone. No use fishing when the barracudas are around. We’ll
try somewhere else.”

  We all wind in our lines and put the rods in their holders.

  “Hey, laddie!” Grandpa calls. “You pull up the anchor. Your sister can take the wheel.”

  Melissa takes off her hat, scoops her hair back and puts the hat back. “Don’t worry, Grandpa. I can do the anchor. Let Will drive the boat for a while.”

  Cool! I go up to the skipper’s seat.

  She gives me a cheeky grin. “Your turn, snot-face,” she says.

  Grandma catches a snapper so big that Grandpa has to bring it into the boat with a net on a pole. “It’s not snapper territory here, but she always does it.” He taps his nose with his finger. “Don’t know how. Magic maybe, she always was a cranky witch.” He laughs and calls to Grandma. “You hear that? A cranky witch!”

  “Envy won’t get you anywhere, you silly old fool!” she yells back. “Are you going to fillet it? Or do you want me to do that too?”

  “I might just chuck it back overboard,” he says, “seeing it’s too big for the pan.”

  She snorts. “That’d be more than your life is worth.”

  Grandpa lifts the snapper onto the board, and with a spoon, takes off the scales.

  He cuts a huge fillet from each side, puts them in the salt water with the cod flesh, and throws the snapper head after them. “Lot of meat in that head,” he says. “Best part of the fish.” He stands up straight, putting his hand in the small of his back. “All done, snapper-witch!” he yells.

  “I’ll put a spell on you!” she yells back.

  “Woman, you did that years ago. If you hadn’t, I’d have walked right past you.”

  I wish they wouldn’t do this. Will says it’s all an act, but I see fight in their faces. They’re like hissing cats, fur prickling with electricity, then laughter, then sparks again. They don’t care who’s listening. And please don’t think I’m being goody-goody. I understand that it’s perfectly natural for a couple to argue when they are getting to know each other, although when I find the right partner, I am sure that won’t happen. He and I will discuss things while holding hands, which is some extremely good advice I read in a magazine. You can’t fight while holding hands, it said. Our differences will never become rows.