The True Colour of the Sea

by Robert Drewe

  Doug and his fellow birders aren’t over-thrilled by pelicans and egrets either. However, he did emphasise several times that unlike your normal Central American egret (‘also known as the white heron’), these birds couldn’t wade because there was no available ground to wade on. They had to perch on trees because the overgrown jungle cliffs here reach right down into the river. There wasn’t even room for mangroves to grow. In the surrounding trees, more monkeys swung from branches.

  Doug said he preferred the birdlife of Belize, our latest port of call. Apparently Belize is noted for its varied and colourful birdlife, especially the red-footed booby. Doug bought a T-shirt announcing that he’s now a member of the Belize Audubon Society, founded in 1969. It has a red-footed booby on it.

  I’m feeling much better today. It’s been a beautiful day on Half Moon Caye, off the Belize mainland. Doug and I went for a walk along a deserted jungle path during which he informed me that this sandy island supports four thousand breeding birds, ‘the only viable red-footed booby breeding colony in the western Caribbean’.

  ‘Amazing,’ I said. Then he made a pass. My first one in thirty years. You know, like riding a bike, it comes back to you.

  Even in the sand!

  This news goes no further!

  *

  Today, our second day in Belize has been totally different – the hottest day yet of our tour. Belize City is said to be built on a foundation of logwood, mahogany chips and old rum bottles. The port was jammed with tourist boats from the US. Young men dressed as pirates greeted the arriving cruise ships and huge Americans on three-day tours from Florida waddled along the wharf.

  In the afternoon Doug and I played truant from sightseeing in the heat and passed up the House of Culture, the cathedral and the former jail-turned-museum and found a breezy bar on the harbour where Doug ordered icy cold Belikin beers and a DJ played Bob Marley and old pop songs, and drink waitresses in tight clothes bopped to the music. I felt about twenty again. Well, forty-five.

  From the bar we saw the ageing members of the SeaDream party returning exhausted and sweating from their tour of historic buildings. Ingrid was at the rear of the group, sauntering along alone. Smoking, of course. We saw her entering a pharmacy that advertised, in big type on its window,

  Special Price Drugs for Tourists!

  Everything You EVER Need!

  Viagra! Valium! Nembutal!

  Doug and I looked at each other. ‘Good god!’ he said. ‘Green Dreams!’

  ‘At the end of her tether,’ I said. I felt guilty for not trying harder to befriend her. Surely I could have done something.

  Ingrid came out of the pharmacy with a small package and entered the bar. She strolled to the far end of the room, and as she walked up to Diego the Club Bar musician, sitting at a table in the corner with two cocktails waiting, she wiggled her hips, ka-voom, and they kissed.

  On Sunday afternoon my brother and I were sitting at the window table at The Shelter, a smart new restaurant in Yallingup overlooking the ocean, when I saw something break the surface just outside the surf line and I said, ‘There’s a killer whale!’

  Mack looked out to sea and frowned back and forth. The ocean was murky and seabirds skidded over the low waves. A grey swell was slapping right on shore and no surfers were bothering with it. In the weed and cloud shadows it was easy to imagine things.

  ‘It can’t be,’ he said. ‘There are no killer whales this far north. They like cold seas. It must be a humpback or a dolphin. Or a shark.’

  He pointed to the sign on the beach cautioning fishermen against cleaning their catch on the shore. The sign said this could attract sharks to the swimming beach.

  ‘Now they’re a protected species there’s always a great white or two hanging about out there,’ Mack said.

  Mack’s an adamant person. He grumbles that sentimental conservationists now regard the great white shark as ‘the new dolphin’. He still calls sharks ‘man-eaters’ when even the local paper has stopped using that term and a big bold typeface every time a local surfer or skindiver is killed. Ironically, it was on Dad’s watch that the conservation tide turned and people started holding demonstrations to save the shark. ‘God’s beautiful toothy creatures’ was his not-for-publication expression for them.

  Mack also has a special beef about media interviews with the families of shark victims: ‘They always say, “Dad would’ve wanted to go that way.” I don’t think so. Did Dad really want to be torn in half by a great white? My guess is Dad was hoping to pass away quietly in bed at age ninety-six.’

  Presumably like our father was hoping for. Not while playing the ninth hole at the Margaret River Golf Club at sixty-six.

  As for my killer-whale sighting, I didn’t argue with Mack. They could be swimming anywhere, I thought, north or south. Who knew what the ocean temperatures were doing these days? Anyway, it was the whale migration season and, yes, the humpbacks were heading back to the Antarctic in a daily procession after calving off the Kimberley coast over winter. So I left it at that. But a moment later I saw two creatures with rounded and shiny black backs roll out of the waves again, heading south.

  They were smaller than whales but fatter and darker than dolphins. Their dorsal fins were sharply etched. And they weren’t breaching like whales or smacking the water with their tails, not showing off like adolescent boys. A flock of seabirds darted and dived around them. Crested terns. So whatever species they were, they were feeding. Terns don’t follow humpbacks because humpbacks eat krill, which is of no interest to terns. Like great whites, killer whales follow the humpbacks and bite chunks out of them. There’s plenty of meat residue and little fish in the water.

  ‘They’re definitely killer whales,’ I said. ‘Two or three of them. Orcas.’

  And then Mack saw them, but he still wasn’t prepared to admit they were orcas. Killer whales.

  ‘Something’s out there,’ he said. ‘But killer whales hang out in the Southern Ocean, off Tasmania or the Canadian coast, places like that.’ I knew he was thinking of the movie Free Willy we saw as kids. Icy waters. Oregon pines. And a tame orca like a puppy, not a wolf of the sea.

  I was going to disagree but then the killer whales disappeared around the headland and Mack said, ‘Forget bloody killer whales. We’ve got to talk about the funeral.’

  We were staying for the weekend with our mother at our parents’ new home, the sea-change retirement cottage they’d long planned for, to console her and discuss the arrangements for our father’s funeral. Particularly the extent of the government’s involvement, and how much of an official ceremony Dad was entitled to.

  He’d died on Wednesday night and we were still waiting to hear from some government protocol officer whether a former minister for the environment would receive a state funeral in St George’s Cathedral in Perth, with speeches and important guests, maybe including the prime minister. And, with the current political stalemate in Canberra, whether the PM and perhaps some cabinet ministers would bother to fly all the way to Western Australia for the funeral of a former environment minister. Not treasurer or minister for home affairs or defence or anything like that.

  There was a lot to discuss. Especially with our grieving mother not making much sense. In between sobs and brave smiles and narcoleptic episodes at the dinner table she was advocating a small, private, family-only affair one minute, then switching to wanting a state funeral with all the bells and whistles the next. It was as if her dead husband lying in a country-town undertaker’s was two different people. She kept moaning about Adam and Alisha, too, which jangled our nerves.

  ‘At last I can speak freely,’ she whispered to me at one stage before dozing off again. I noticed Dad’s single-malt stocks had taken a hammering. To be fair, Mack may have been partly responsible for that.

  Obviously Dad’s death had made her think about death and family sadness in general, mostly of Adam dying back in 2005, when he was only twenty-eight. And Alisha’s accident before that, in 1994. The
tragedies of our big brother and little sister.

  It’s over twenty years ago now but it still shocks me to remember hearing that Alisha had shot herself in the spine while rabbit hunting with Dad and Adam in the bush paddocks behind the Duncans’ Rosella Hills vineyard.

  How did she manage to do that? Apparently she was climbing through a barbwire fence and somehow the .22 she was carrying got caught up in the wire and she shot herself in the back. She was only twelve, so those of us who weren’t there that afternoon put it down to her youth and inexperience. Mack and I thought, but didn’t say (we couldn’t say), What was a small skinny girl doing in charge of a rifle?

  Anyway, from that afternoon Alisha was a paraplegic, and despite her accident, or maybe because of it, she bravely ‘made something of herself’, as Dad put it, studying science at UWA and doing well, and becoming a research scientist in the important fields of water engineering and groundwater studies.

  She played wheelchair basketball at a top level. And in life generally she also spun around recklessly in small circles, and kept smiling, although the smile was sometimes more of a grimace, and the veins in her neck stood out and her face got red and her eyes rolled back when she had phantom pains down her legs.

  And Adam? At eighteen he was already a drinker and chain-smoker and carouser. Soon, a big gambler, popular with the bookies. A classic bachelor. Nightclubs. Girls galore. Coke, too. Loads of similar gung-ho friends. For ten years he lived like there was no tomorrow.

  Sadly, for him there wasn’t. Although it was a surprise when his heart gave out so young, it wasn’t a huge surprise.

  Of us three boys and a girl, Adam was the child everyone said was most like our father in personality. Dad was a self-made man, as they used to call people like him. A successful builder and developer and investor: revered occupations in a West Australian boom. A hearty, blustery, stiff-drinking, sailing, golfing, fishing and shooting sort of man, with a network of important friends. And then a politician, too, winning preselection for a marginal seat. Still more mates in high places then, including the federal government.

  In the swing to the conservatives he scraped into parliament, surprising everybody, including his party. And after managing to retain his seat with increased majorities in the next two elections he was rewarded in the state-by-state ministry carve-up with the environment portfolio.

  Dad in charge of the environment? Some people, especially the Opposition, laughed at that: a bulldozing developer – a former swamp drainer and tree remover – running greenish matters. Not someone you’d think would be the saviour of the alpine echidna and the Bromley’s speckled froglet. Or the great white shark. But he relished being a minister, and everything that went with it. He even stared down the big mining companies occasionally.

  This particular Sunday when Mack and I returned from The Shelter, Mum greeted us surprisingly brightly at the cottage door. She’d put on fresh make-up and I guessed she was on sedatives or alcohol because there was lipstick on her teeth and she began firing off questions like bullets. She was anxious to know what the new restaurant was like, and what we’d eaten, and whether they served gluten-free and vegetarian options, or was it just fish, and was there a good view?

  ‘A great view.’ I told her of the killer whales. ‘Quite a surprise to me,’ I said. ‘If not to Mack.’

  ‘We‘re thinking of eating there soon,’ she said gaily, and then remembered she wasn’t a ‘we’ any more. And she had to sit down.

  ‘Alisha will be here shortly,’ she said then, and blinked as if to clear her head, and put her glasses on and took them off, and while we waited for Alisha to arrive in her specially adapted Subaru, my mother declared again, defiantly this time, ‘I can speak freely now.’

  ‘Freely about what, Mum?’

  She looked at me sternly. ‘Wait until Alisha arrives.’

  When Alisha turned up, and had barely got out of her car, and we’d unfolded her wheelchair and she’d made it to the verandah, my mother announced to her, to our surprise, ‘I’ve made a decision. We’re eating at The Shelter tonight. There’s no food in the house anyway, and the boys tell me it’s a fabulous restaurant. Not to be missed.’

  Alisha looked at us. Mack and I shrugged. Two meals there in a row?

  ‘Okay,’ everyone said.

  ‘Apparently you can see killer whales there,’ Mum informed us. ‘Thingamajigs. Orcas.’

  We noticed Dad’s golf clubs were still on the Range Rover’s back seat. ‘We won’t use your father’s car,’ she insisted. ‘Not tonight.’

  The sun was just setting when we arrived at the restaurant. We were the first diners of the evening and the wait staff, a blond youth and an ornately tattooed girl with two oceans and a tropical island spread across her back and shoulders, were surprised to see Mack and me back again.

  ‘I’m here to see the killer whales,’ Mum said.

  ‘What killer whales?’ the waiters said, and looked at each other, and at us, and Mack gave them a confiding wink.

  ‘We’ll see what we can do,’ said the girl, and showed us to the same table overlooking the ocean.

  The sea breeze had dropped and the ocean rolled calm and slick all the way to the horizon and beyond. It was too early to be dining and low pink sunrays slanted across our table and shone in our cutlery. Our mother took control of the wine list, and without asking our preferences (and disregarding her own fondness for chardonnay) she ordered the sort of heavy red that Dad and his business and political cronies used to favour.

  This evening we were giving her leeway about everything. She was a new widow after all. ‘This is what he would be drinking if he was here this evening,’ she said firmly, as if that settled it. ‘He would be sitting there,’ she went on, indicating the vacant chair at the head of the table that all of us had avoided, as if we were deferentially saving it for him. ‘And he’d be drinking this. And holding forth, of course.’

  And then she raised her voice and said, ‘And I wouldn’t be brave enough to say what has been troubling me ever since Adam died.’ At this stage a tremble came into her words, and she wiped her eyes and reached out and put a hand on Alisha’s shoulder, although she wasn’t looking at her.

  ‘Alisha didn’t shoot herself. Adam shot her accidentally. He tripped. And Dad switched the rifles around. Alisha’s terrible misfortune was bad enough, he said. He told me he didn’t want Adam to suffer any more punishment than he’d be suffering already. And Adam certainly did suffer ever after.’

  She took a sip of wine and went on. ‘Dad said a shooting accident wasn’t good for any politician. Even though he was going after rabbits, he thought a gun-toting environment minister was politically unpalatable. So was a twelve-year-old daughter going shooting. And her climbing under a barbwire fence with a loaded gun was really bad news. But the fact that she’d shot herself was the best and most sympathetic option in the circumstances. For the public and the media. There would be sympathy for Alisha and for the family.’

  Alisha made one of her fierce grimaces, and shook her head and went all wall-eyed. It was frightening to see.

  Mum went on, squeezing Alisha’s shoulder while she addressed the table. ‘You weren’t to know that the bullet came from elsewhere. While Adam never let on, he never recovered from the guilt. In the end it did him in.’

  I wasn’t sure if Alisha’s contorted expression was from the regular ghost pains in her legs or if she was in savage disagreement with our mother.

  ‘Jesus!’ Alisha exploded then. Mum removed her hand from her shoulder. And the words burst out of our sister.

  ‘Dad insisted on taking us shooting in the bush in the late afternoon. After lunch! He and Adam were firing away at rabbits. Dad had had his usual few glasses of wine and he sort of stumbled on something and shot me. I’m sure of that. In his panic that day he must’ve immediately told Adam that he’d done it. Then he thought it over and told the police and the world I’d got tangled up in the fence and shot myself. No one questioned hi
m – he was a minister. Adam always thought guiltily that this version had saved his bacon, and he felt guilty ever after. I wasn’t conscious enough to disagree. And Adam and I were forbidden to speak of that afternoon again.’

  We sat there at the table, no one speaking, as the sun sank below the horizon and the pink and gold streaks faded from the sky and the restaurant’s lights came on and the geographically tattooed waitress brought us water and asked for our orders.

  ‘Did you hear me, Mum?’ Alisha said, in the calmest manner, and took a long sip of wine. ‘Were you even listening? My father shot me.’

  My mother was yawning in the odd way she had before a narcoleptic episode. If you weren’t watching her, she could go face- down into the soup. I nudged her and she blinked several times and put on her glasses and took them off again.

  ‘Where are those killer whales anyway?’ she asked the waitress in her new bossy widow’s voice.

  We all stared out to sea. The four of us, and the two waiters as well, frowning and searching the horizon. Time passed and no one spoke. But in the whole panorama of the darkening Indian Ocean there was nothing to be seen.

  On their island honeymoon, David Lang remembered, they’d disagreed first over a flea she said she spotted on the hotel bed, then a jellyfish sting and Byron swimming the Hellespont.

  The flea on the bedspread had sent Angela into a panic the moment they entered their room. She refused to even sip the champagne he’d organised until he phoned ‘for someone to hunt it down’.

  David examined the bed and shook the coverlet with an elaborate flourish. Her flea anxiety was disappointing and embarrassing. He didn’t want anything as silly as a flea to mar their honeymoon. It was kind of ridiculous. He couldn’t spot anything, and said so. Fancy her being troubled by a flea – an alleged flea – at a time like this!