Have You Seen Ally Queen?

by Deb Fitzpatrick

  It’s still so early. I’ve suctioned on my wettie and am ready to go. The water stretches out ahead of me. I take a deep breath to steady myself. It looks cold but good. This is something I want to do before I go away. Something for me.

  Dear Shel, I think. I’m going crayfishing. Wannacome?

  I’d forgotten how amazing it feels to swim a long way in the ocean. My body is tingling, and slack with tiredness. It’s in between sets and I’m beached on the reef. I dumped the craypot and made it back here to have a break. I feel unreal! Thank God for the booties, though. The reef is a killer, and you really do need them—reef cuts last for ages.

  Every now and then, I remember yesterday, and everything else. But I just push it away. I can’t see any point in thinking about it anymore. Not thinking about things works—maybe I should tell that to Mr Taylor. Just don’t think about your problems. Don’t go and talk to some other tosser about it all—that’ll just make it worse. Last night I decided: if I have to have no friends in this shitty town apart from Rel, then fine. They’re all pus-head lumberjackshirt-wearers, anyway. I’m just gunna ignore them, it’ll be a hundred per cent easier that way. That is, if I come back. I’m not sure yet how long I’ll be away for. Depends.

  A boomer’s coming, I’m outta here!

  I dive away from the reef. There’s a deep, dark patch just waiting for me. The cold streams in and I slip down to avoid the turbulence that I know is coming. Right down, to the sand, and I look up to a roll of green and white water coming over me, mixing right down towards me. It’s beautiful, swirling, like stirring green into a bucket of pure white paint. It’s powerful, too, and I stay low and still feel the force of it. I swim along the bottom until my lungs can’t take it anymore and then torpedo my way towards the surface.

  There’s a fair bit of whitewater all around my head when I come up and it takes me a second to see properly.

  It’s when I spin around to get my bearings that I spot the seal.

  It’s on the other side of the reef, just where the shelf drops off into the water—kind of semi-submerged, getting the best of both worlds. It’s checking me out! Waves are breaking a bit further back and the wash is keeping it wet. I head back to the edge of the reef so I’ve got something to hang on to. I don’t think I can tread water for much longer; I’m exhausted.

  Man. It’s the sleekness or something. The seal’s skin is like one of those stones that looks best when it’s wet, like the ones Mum keeps in a pile in the corner of the shower. She collected them on a beach in some country in South America, she reckons, and has put them in the corner of every shower we’ve ever had. During the day, when the stones are dry, they go pale and light-coloured and don’t look much at all—I told her once that they could have been gravel, and what a mistake that was. She was personally offended. But when you get them wet, they go jet dark all over and really bold, and they look so, so smooth.

  So the seal does hang around here. Just not all the time, or maybe I’ve been missing it, looking in the wrong spots. I can see its whiskers from here, and its big black wet eyes.

  Its head jerks away to the side and then springs back with half a fish coming out of its gob. It chews a couple of times and then it’s gone. I try not to move too much but I’m getting cold. I know I’m gunna have to go back to shore, but I don’t want to—watching this guy so close-up is awesome.

  I slip back into the water. It’s warm in, by comparison. No wind to give you the chills. My face feels blue, though, and my fingertips look like I’ve had smelly old bandaids on them all year. I’ve gotta come back later on, anyway, to check the pot. Maybe the seal will still be here. Right now I’ve gotta get these blue lips back to shore and have a hot shower. I think, Seeya! and it doesn’t even blink, just watches me in the water like I’m another fish, or something.

  I swim underwater as far as I can, coming up for air breaks. It’s easier than swimming on the surface, especially when you’re tired. And it’s more fun. I pop up not too far from shore and I can see our house, up there on the last sand dune before the water. That’swhere I live, I think .

  I shake my head. How bizarre. How totally bizarre.

  MISTER FIX-IT

  Dear Ms Carey,

  Sorry I can’t come to your class anymore. Afterwhat happened the other day, I asked Mr Fisher if Icould go into a different class. It’s just too embarrassingnow, with all those kids and what happened. I’m reallysorry because English with you was my fave. I hope youunderstand.

  Alison

  I’ll still see those kids, of course, but just not all together, in one classroom. Like a mob. I didn’t tell Ms Carey the bit about going away because obviously that’s restricted information that only Rel and I know about. And, well, I haven’t actually had a chance to talk to Mr Fisher yet, but I’ll do that first thing Monday morning, before I give her the note, just to be on the safe side. I just needed to write this down, somehow. Get it out of my head.

  McJerry runs into my room.

  ‘What’s up, big guy?’

  ‘Dad wants me to come and get you.’

  Uh-oh. This is it. He wants to have a deep and meaningful talk about everything. And I’ve been doing a great job of ignoring everything.

  ‘What for?’ I say innocently. ‘What does he want?’

  ‘It’s about the craypot.’

  ‘The cray pot?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘What’s going on, Jerry?’ I grab him by the shorts just as he’s turning to go.

  ‘I don’t know!’ he squeals. ‘Dad, she’s got me!’

  ‘Just you wait, McJezza,’ I say before letting him go. ‘The torture’s gunna come. Later.’

  ‘Dad!’

  I hear him almost crying as he runs back up the stairs.

  Dad eyeballs me as I go in. Jerry’s got his back turned, pretending to be absorbed in some stupid computer game.

  Dad says, ‘Jez, leave us alone for a bit, okay?’

  What is this? I feel like I’m in the principal’s office, or something.

  He looks at me with a What are we gunna do withyou? expression for a couple of seconds before saying, ‘I’ve told you before about the craypot.’

  I’m confused. All this drama because of the craypot? ‘What about it?’

  ‘Ally, you know what. That craypot is for family outings and usually requires a boat to get it in position in the first place. You did this once before at Rotto, if you remember, and your mum and I were both very concerned. It’s got seven kilos of lead in it, not to mention the weight of the pot itself.’

  ‘Yeah, well, Mum’s nowhere to be seen these days, so why would she care?’

  Did I really say that? Dad looks deflated. He hardly needs reminding. God.

  I stare at the floor, my face burning. ‘Sorry,’ I mumble. ‘That was ... Sorry.’

  He sighs, closes his eyes. ‘Ally, I can’t make things any better than they are right now. Things are bad, that’s true. Your mum’s sick, she’s not at home, you’re getting a hard time at school. It’s all pretty awful for everyone. I can’t make it better. We just have to get through it.’

  I don’t think I’ve ever heard him say that before, that he can’t fix something. That’s what he does, normally. We complain about things being badlydesigned and he tries to fix them. There’s a problem? Dad sorts it out. Or one of us wants something and he sees if he can make it, get it or do it. Dad, when arewe gunna go fishing again? Dad, the gate’s busted. Dad, there’s a huntsman spider in the corner of my room.

  I can feel the tears coming, the kind you don’t expect and have no hope of stopping. I’m crying because I should have been helping him with all this and I haven’t been. I’ve just been thinking about what’s happening back in Perth and what new tortures I can inflict on Jerry.

  He comes over to the sofa and puts his arm around me. ‘It’s all right, you know. Whatever happens, we’ll be okay.’

  And suddenly I can see all the possibilities of what could happen and I know that
as far as I’m concerned, some of those possibilities are not okay. Me ending up sleeping on a beach in Perth, Mum ending up in a mental hospital, Dad ending up on his own and cooking jasmine risotto every night—none of that is okay. Me staying here, me hitching up to Perth, me helping Dad, me not helping Dad—it all starts to fly around my head, and for once I really wish I was Jerry’s age again. I wish I was too young to understand any of it and that I could just be left out of this stuff altogether.

  ‘Right now, I just don’t want you swimming out that far on your own, and definitely not with the craypot.’

  ‘But I’m a good swimmer.’

  He nods. ‘Yes, Ally, but you don’t know enough about the water down here to be going so far out on your own.’

  ‘But what about the craypot?’

  ‘We’ll go back in the dinghy,’ he says, ‘in a couple of hours. And we’ll take the rods, chuck a line in at the same time.’

  I try not to look excited. What a cool way to spend the afternoon! But the seal, shite. It might be scared off by the motor. And I don’t want to show it off to anyone else—that’s more what it is. It’s nice to have something of your own. I like that. So I won’t tell them. I just won’t say anything. If I see the seal, I won’t say anything. That’s cool.

  I nod to myself.

  ‘Sound okay, Your Majesty?’

  He knows it’s cool.

  Something comes back into my mind like a bad memory. Not the whole thing, just enough so I get that nervous feeling in my belly.

  ‘Dad?’

  ‘Mmm?’

  ‘How did the kids at school find out about Mum?’

  He shakes his head. ‘I don’t know. It’s awful, isn’t it? That’s one of the things about living in a small place. It’s harder to keep things private.’

  That’s the first time I’ve ever heard him say something negative about this joint. It makes me feel so much better about all the things that I hate about being here. And how weird is this: hearing him say that makes me want to defend the place—for him, so he doesn’t hate it, so he can be positive about it like he’s always been. So I hear myself saying, ‘Yeah, but Dad, here you can go fishing whenever you want, and you don’t have to fight with millions of kids for a good spot on a crappy jetty. You can go right out into the ocean or down to the Cut or wherever.’

  He looks up at me and smiles with his whole face. I want to burst out into something, just seeing him grinning like that.

  MERMAID

  We’re just coming back in to shore. My hair’s stiff and thick—my own personal saltbush. My skin feels like it’s had a sun injection, and I reckon I might have been a mermaid for years.

  We caught herring, blowies and two tailor roaming the seas away from their school. Jerry’s getting his knots sussed, so he can fix his own lines now instead of having to wait for Dad or me to do it. Sometimes he just needs reminding about left-over-right-right-over-left with reef knots, but he’s getting it.

  When we went out with Rel’s folks, I pretended I didn’t know too much about the prawn nets and stuff. I know that’s dumb, I know it’s a modern world and everything, but fishing is still not something chicks are meant to be good at, is it? Swivels and sinkers and gangs and blobs—it’s blokes’ stuff. Put it this way: Rex Hunt is not, and never will be, Ruth Hunt. If you know what I mean. The day a chick runs that show is the day I’ll admit to being pretty damn good with a fishing rod. And Mum would spew if she heard me say that. So would Ms Carey, probably. Maybe it’ll be different when I’m older, but right now, no way. I mean, there is no way it would be cool for me to be better at fishing than Rel. And anyway, I’m probably not better than him. And anyway, who cares who’s better than who?

  When we went back to get the craypot, the seal was gone, and I was glad. I’ll go out there again sometime, maybe without the pot, but I’ll go back, whatever Dad says. I know the reef now, and that’s most of it—knowing the conditions. It’s not so far out, and you can sit on the shelf and rest when you get there, so it’s not like you have to tread water for ages or anything. So long as I’ve got a wettie on, and booties, I’ll be right.

  The craypot had a little cray in it, well undersize. There was no way we could have taken it, so we opened the cage and it crawled out after Dad prodded it in the bum.

  Jerry loved going out in the boat. It seems like ages since we last went out. It was back in Perth, come to think of it. Dad told us a couple of his funniest stories about the guys he used to work with, and I didn’t feel too gigantic on the tinny. (Vertically large, I mean. I got called a stick-insect once at school. Nice.) Chucked myself overboard a couple of times, too. The water was gorgeous and deep.

  It’s been almost like old times, except that Mum isn’t going to be waiting for us with the milk pan on the stove and the big tin of Milo ready when we get home.

  MAGIC PYTHON BUSH

  I’m down on the beach on Sunday arvo, walking south. There’s a spit I’m heading to where the sand smooths out like it does in holiday brochures and where seabirds hang out and swoop the water for fish. It’s Mum’s favourite place for collecting dead stuff for the bathroom, and I thought I might find something cute (not dead) to chuck into a letter I’m writing to her. I’m looking for a piece of driftwood, a small bit. The wood is bleached by salt until it’s almost white, and worn and smoothed by water as though it’s been sanded back with the finest sandpaper. Mum keeps driftwood sticks in a mug like most people keep pens, standing up and spiralling outwards on the desk where she writes letters.

  Mum says she likes having the driftwood on her desk because it reminds her of how the coast should be, so it gets her really angry when she’s writing letters to the council and to the local parliament guy. She prefers to be feeling seriously outraged when she writes them; she reckons they come out much better that way. She’s had a few printed in the paper, and they’re pretty full-on. Mum slams those guys, accuses them of all sorts of things, and quotes from council documents and everything. I’m not sure if it’s embarrassing or actually pretty cool.

  I twirl in my fingers the piece of driftwood I’ve found. It’s a perfect addition to her collection.

  There’s no one around, so I sit down on the sand and scope out the beach. The dunes scale up behind me. In front of me are some classic peelers curling over the outer reef. It’s too far out to surf there, and that reef is evil, which is why everyone surfs the beach break near the car park. But Dad likes the bigger, slower waves out the front of our joint. He’s taken the mal out a few times and it’s just hilarious—I mean, he’s all right! He’s slow and not very cool, doesn’t do any bottom turns or 360s or anything, but he can surf. It makes me think of daggy sixties surf bands, like the Beach Boys. You can see Dad’s bald spot and everything, unless he’s wearing a Gath hat, which is even worse. Then he just looks like a spaz. We give him shit, sit on the verandah and shout out stuff like you would at the footy. Once he got torpedoed off and it took ages for him to pop back up. Mum was freaking. I saw her face turn down the colour till she was almost grey. It was a bit scary, but we knew he’d be all right. He always is. When he did emerge, he was pretty disorientated but he waved straight away so we knew everything was cool. Mum shook her head and went inside; she couldn’t handle it.

  There’s a small thud in the sand behind me. It’s a small, soft sound, like a boondie landing from one of the dunes above—like maybe someone threw a boondie. I don’t turn around for a bit, ‘cos someone’s taking the piss, I know they are. In all the time I’ve been here, I’ve never heard a sound like that that wasn’t man-made. Oops, get with the times, girl: human-made. Person-made? They both sound shite.

  I turn around, trying not to feel like too much of a geek. There’s something red in the sand. I look both ways along the beach and up at the dunes and I still can’t see anyone. As I get closer, it looks more and more like a ribbon, or part of a leg-rope, until I see that it’s not a leg-rope at all; it’s a Killer Python with a red head that’s poking up off
the sand. I burst out laughing. I laugh right at that Killer Python; it’s just so stupid! I pick it up—soft and squashy, which means it’s fresh. Yum. I brush the sand off it. Where is he?

  ‘I’m gunna eat this unless you reveal yourself now, O Snake Fiend.’

  As soon as I’ve said it, I realise how it might sound and wish desperately that I could dig a burrow into that dune and hide for the next century. Oh, Ally. Youreally do have a disorder of the mouth, don’t you?

  There’s a rustling, and a yellow python flings out of the saltbush.

  I manage to suppress a pig-snort. It hurts, like it used to in maths when Shel would pass me those funny notes and Mrs Crawley would look at us for a long, dark time before going back to the whiteboard and drawing up more meaningless squiggles.

  A green-and-blue python lands just to my right.