Tide

by John Kinsella

  BAY

  He’d lost his car key in the sand between the car and the great granite boulder that jutted into the sea at low tide; surrounded at high tide. He cursed himself for removing it from the key ring so his new girlfriend could use the house keys. He was going to get another set cut the next morning; his son had the others. It wasn’t a big expanse of beach, and he could probably focus the key’s ‘drop zone’ to a straight, thick line, zeroing in on the place he’d been sitting near a rocky ledge, but there was still enough sand to mirror the infinitude of the cosmos. He was in no mood for appreciating the irony of this place being called Little Bay.

  Yet it was an exquisite place. It was where he most enjoyed being. If it were possible, he’d live on the beach. It was isolated, and there were rarely more than a handful of people on its brilliant white crescent at any given time. But this was a warm day, and school holidays, and everyone who knew about it, plus tourists who’d found it online, seemed to have turned up. In the time he’d been down there – what, an hour? – how many people could have trampled the key, the solitary key, deeper into the vacuum?

  He thought about the rest of his keys as he began slowly and methodically to retrace his steps, from the car back down to the beach. He thought about them being in Ania’s oversized handbag, sloshing around in the bottom with other keys, lipsticks, a compact, used cotton-buds, stale cough lollies. He shuddered under the warm sun as sunblock melted on his nose. He could taste the chemicals in his mouth. Ania wasn’t much tidier than his seventeen-year-old son, who’d be waiting for the car, looking out of the window for the car, playing the stereo louder and louder as he got more frustrated. Pissing the neighbours off, for sure. He was a kid with no respect.

  Either side of the sandy track sloping down to the beach, a thick screen of vegetation threw shadows across the path. A southerly breeze was picking up, producing a strobe effect of shadow and light on the sand as melaleuca and wattle worked against each other. A red-eared firetail made itself known; his senses were overloading almost to the point of shutdown. He kicked at the sand, which was an annoying greyish colour at this point on the climb. Why am I trying to start over again now? A ‘new life’ – what a joke! he said out aloud, scaring a couple of young girls traipsing up to the car park, with their parents hand-in-hand a few metres behind. The kids were still wearing ski-diving masks with snorkels dangling at the sides of their heads. Their parents looked painfully happy, leaning against each other, walking a three-legged race with poise and equanimity.

  She really is too young for me, he suddenly thought. I mean, she’s over twenty-five, but I’ve still got fifteen years on her. Fifteen long bloody years.

  And then he thought he saw a silver glimmer. The key catching the sunlight. He fell to his knees and sifted the almost dirty sand. Shit, only a bottle top. Makes you sick, people rubbishing such a beautiful place. Should be some serious punishment for littering a national park. Not just the pat on the wrist they give out, when they even bother at all. He was feeling vindictive. He wasn’t usually that way; it wasn’t how he saw himself. He continued to crawl on his hands and knees, wanting to bite the ankles of curious passers-by who had been churning up the sand ahead of him.

  Pulling himself to his feet, he scanned the bay, as much out of habit as anything else. He was at the point where the beach joined the track, his favourite spot. He loved coming here in the early mornings and looking out at the sun sparking the ocean. In all weathers – even winter, when great breakers lifted from the deep and sucked the sand away, replacing it with another cycle of sand laundered on the most heavy-duty wash. It would be good to have someone sharing the running of the house. She wasn’t doing much yet, but she was still settling in, making friends with the boy as he lazed around, slouching. He said, Dad, she’s too hot for you!

  Where the greyish sand of the track mingled and blurred with the pristine white of the beach. A nexus. A decision had to be made. He needed to be systematic. He’d always been that. Meticulous in his habits.

  He shaded his eyes with one hand and surveyed the sand. I’ve never noticed how messy people make the sand. He thought of the long jump back in his school days, his delight in raking the pit flat, ironing out the impressions of the previous jumper. The satisfaction. How indecisive people are on beaches. Back and forth, wandering around, pushing it one way, then the next.

  The sand scratched his toes as he slowly moved forward. He would never delight in bare feet on a sandy beach again. The great granite boulder beckoned. Already, small waves frothed around its sea edge. The light blue shallows with their moody patches of weed were changing. The tide was ever so slowly returning. The dark blue of what quickly became very deep sea was lapping and gurgling forward. The southerly would bring the chop and waves that would help propel conical shells up with the swell, surging onto the beach to glint pointedly in the sun. Sometimes it brought weed, but mostly that was sucked back as it left the clear shallows where King George whiting darted around, camouflaged by light and rippled sand.

  He gently parted the sand with his feet, half forming letters and numbers, then rubbing them out. He yelled at a teenage boy, who ran past laughing, to have some respect and stop churning the beach up like a trail-bike. The kid ignored him or said something like Fuck off … but he couldn’t discern, because it merged with the sibilance of the breeze.

  As for his ex-wife, she would have been chewing his ear off. Wouldn’t she love to see him now, desperate for the key. That’s why I left you, loser, she’d say … it’s why I married a better man, one with the foresight to own a metal detector! Yes, he thought, but what good would that be, locked in the boot with no key to get it out. He laughed, pulling up short with another thought: his supervisor at work … No point keeping your desk so orderly if your work is never done on time. We have deadlines, deadlines, deadlines to meet! It’s got to add up, it’s got to balance out. The supervisor was full of platitudes like that.

  A plastic blow-up beach ball bounced its harlequin course in front of him, and he gave it a hard kick. It bounced down to the beach and into the water, tapping at the shore cocooned in a bed of froth. Hey, mate! someone yelled. That was a prick of a thing to do.

  He didn’t take any notice. Key key key. His father had put a fork through Mother’s inflatable li-lo during a vacation at The Bay. Barbecue the bloody sausages, he’d shrieked at her. Stop lounging about on that thing in the damned sun, turning yourself into a beetroot. And I am sick of seeing those stretch marks. That was thirty years ago, and they’d been the only people at The Bay. He’d been a sickly child, and the tattoo of an anchor and a mermaid on his father’s left bicep terrified him. His father loathed hysteria, so the boy should have known better than to shriek: he’d seen a pod of dolphins and yelled SHARKS! SHARKS! His father had kicked him up the pants and called him a girl. But he admired his old man, who could build a boat or a cabinet or a cupboard better than anyone else. The glue in his workshop stank like cat’s piss, a bit like the coastal vegetation of The Bay. There was something dead about it all. Long dead and stinking to high heaven. Invisible fish corpses littering the beautiful white sand.

  The trick of loving a place, he decided, is being able to leave it. He no longer wanted to live on the beach, at The Bay. It was an epiphany. He was big on non-religious epiphanies. Couldn’t abide religion. He’d seen his cousin Lucinda eaten by a sect. They’re all sects, he’d said to his auntie, who belonged to a gigantic sect. He didn’t need to say God when he saw something as immense as the Southern Ocean stretching out beyond the headland all the way to Antarctica. That ineffable volume of water. That curving expanse all held in like a bucket of water swinging around your head. Swoosh swoosh swoosh. If the rope had snapped, the bucket could have killed someone! His dad never found out.

  Hey, mate, you looking for something?

  He was about to say, What does it fucking look like? when he saw the key, his car key, held out in front of him like a talisman. But it looked dull, not even a glint i
n the roaring afternoon sun. Just dull and flat and burnished by sand. A teenager held it in one thin-fingered hand. A hand so white it would be bright red after a day in the sun, smarting with protest. He vaguely recognised this teenager from somewhere. Maybe something to do with the ball he’d kicked out to sea, the ball that dribbled back to land. Yes, that teenager was there, on the edges … the edge of the continent … maybe he’d spoken to him. A family game of beach ball. All ages mucking around, having fun. Laughing.

  He reached out to take the key, half expecting it to be snatched back. Thanks, he said instinctively, then turned back to the track and his car, turning his back on the rock, the water, the blue and the bay. He wondered how far he could drive before he’d have to refuel.

  FERRYMAN

  It’s not often you see a myth turned to a reality, or maybe realise that ‘myth’ is just a word to help us cope with the weird and grotesque. We don’t want the mythological coming too deeply into our living days. And the day the ferryman of the Swan River ferry service became the ferried dead … well, it was memorable.

  It’s not a long haul across the river. The ferry departs on the half-hour either side and takes a bare ten minutes to sail from the Barrack Street Jetty to the South Perth Jetty. Visitors use it as the most convenient way of travelling between city hotels and the zoological gardens. The ferry service’s history goes way back; this particular incident took place some decades ago. I was a witness, and it has stayed with me for over thirty years.

  Back then, there were no women skippering the ferries as there are now. It was still a man’s province, at least in terms of employment statistics, payroll records. But on the day the ferryman last crossed the river to deliver his load of human souls for their tour of the gardens of the tormented and imprisoned birds and beasts, the ferryman was a woman, if only for part of the journey.

  I was seated a few rows behind the ferryman, as always. If I did not get my familiar seat, I was disturbed and could not function properly. Most of the regulars knew me, and kept the seat for me. After all, I had always crossed the river from my South Perth flat, opposite the zoo, to my job in one of the earliest high-rise towers built along Saint Georges Terrace as a result of the 1960s mining boom in the north-west. I trained as a solicitor, and I was in on the ground floor when the great iron mines started doing their Japanese business. I went up floor by floor until my view of the river I crossed, there and back every day, was glorious and overwhelming.

  I love the river now as I did then. I love the pelicans, the occasional dolphin one sees, even the bronze whaler shark I spotted from the ferry one wintry evening – its fin reflecting the ferry’s pilot lights. I am sure that’s what I saw. And the yachts and gulls and cormorants. Colours changing with the seasons. I felt every scrap of pollution. I used to be a member of the neighbourhood ‘Keep the River Clean’ group – four times a year we did a clean-up along the banks. There is no such group now, but I still pick up what I can, though my movement is so limited.

  I was lucky to be sitting in my regular seat, because I had been working a Saturday, which was unusual, and heading back home after lunch: peak time for daytrippers to the zoo. Many tourists and local families just heading across the river on the ferry – kids, prams, the lot. I have to admit, I slightly pushed a kid across the bench to ensure I got my spot, but he was distracted by his sister, who was eating (and dropping) a slice of chocolate cake. There was a greater injustice taking place there than in the closest-to-the-window realm. Their mother looked exasperated, as if she’d made the promise of a zoo outing she wished she didn’t have to keep.

  Though a pretty woman, she was haggard and worn down by much more than her kids. I noticed she wore no ring on her finger. It wasn’t quite the age of women’s liberation in Perth then, and I cocked an eyebrow. And she noticed, because she looked embarrassed, told her kids to behave, and drew them nearer to her, leaving a half-person’s space between me and the family, which suited me fine.

  I turned to my thriller. I always read thrillers on the ferry. True, there wasn’t much reading time during the crossing; mostly I’d be staring at the light play on the murky water, or looking up at the majestic trees in Kings Park to the southwest, or the sombre, brooding aspect of the Darling Scarp to the north. But there was always plenty of waiting time, because I’d board the ferry as soon as it arrived from the far bank and the passengers had departed. Being early Saturday afternoon, my usual crowd weren’t there to exchange pleasantries, although we kept those to a minimum. We all, all of us men and even the odd office girl, carried paperbacks like Bibles.

  I love the moment the ferry shoves off as much as I sadden when it arrives and manoeuvres into place and the gangplank goes down, ushering one off. I enjoy glancing up to watch the ferryman spin the wheel and take the ferry out from the jetty, looking over his shoulder to ensure all is clear. Then he settles in to small-talk with regulars, chastising children, and complaining to the conductor (yes, they had conductors back then!) about a passenger with the wrong fare.

  But that Saturday’s skipper was one I’d not seen before, and had none of these habits. He was frightfully old. I felt intimidated by this. It made me feel vulnerable in my suit, in my high office tower, and in my flat, the only almost-high-rise on the eastern bank of the river. I was doing well. Not rich, but very well-off. I drove a Porsche, racing up and down the new freeway as if there were no law to constrain me. I’d paid the odd bribe here and there upon being caught. I was living the life. I part-owned a nightclub I rarely visited, but I liked to let my rich mates know. I did well with the women, and had no intention of getting ‘stuck’ … But the skipper’s sheer age, his shock of white hair and grizzled face, which I hadn’t fully registered when boarding, struck me as he swung round to check his wake, catching my eyes with his bloodshot stare. I imagined spittle dribbling from the corners of his mouth.

  His death wasn’t a possibility; it was inevitable. I was caught in the gaze of a man already dead. The ferry started to veer off course. The ferryman is dead, I called – no, screamed. Some people laughed, and the children next to me huddled closer to their mother.

  The ferry was heading down towards the ocean. No-one seemed to notice. This ferry always goes to South Perth, I called. There’s never a variation. It takes visitors to the zoo, to see the lions and the polar bears!

  Then the ferryman, now crawling along the floor of the ferry, said, Polar bears? Here? In such a hot climate? What are you on about?

  I was stunned. The passengers were sitting and chatting, pointing and relaxing, as if nothing were happening. Disaster was imminent. I stepped up to take the wheel of the ferry. The dead ferryman grabbed my ankles, gripped them like steel. He said, And lions? Lions need room, my friend, lions need to roar across Africa, they need space to roam! They will tear a human apart. There are no lions here.

  Yes! yes! I called down to him, trying to prise his bony fingers from my ankle, my Italian trousers. Yes! There is a lion, and polar bears, and even rare birds, and orangutans, and a gorilla who smokes cigars and sits in a giant bird cage. A gorilla smoking in a giant birdcage in South Perth? You are dizzy with being so high in your towers. The shaking of the earth, the exploding mountains of the north have unsettled your sanity. You have vertigo!

  We are going to crash and sink! I called to everyone.

  They looked at me, laughed, then appeared nervous. I don’t like that man, called one boy. A large gentleman got off his seat and came over and told me to settle down or he’d ditch me overboard. I frantically pointed to the wizened corpse of the ferryman gibbering out of death at my feet.

  The gentleman – the very large and brutish gentleman – ignored me. Shut ya face, mate, or I’ll give you a hiding.

  Well, at least grab the wheel yourself, I begged. The gentleman looked at me as if I were mad, beneath contempt, and returned to his seat.

  I was in tears. I couldn’t drag the ferryman off me. I couldn’t reach the wheel. It was just a matter of time before
the ferry collided with the supports of the new freeway bridge. We’d die, and so would those in cars racing across above us. I opened my hands to the other passengers and implored them.

  Then the woman who had been sitting on the same bench as me, she of the squabbling chocolate-cake children, calmly telling them to sit and be quiet, came over to me and said, It’s okay, I’ll take it from here.

  I had collapsed in a heap by then, my body entwined with the gibbering dead ferryman’s. He started to roar, and growl, and make bird sounds. Then he was a boa constrictor squeezing the life out of me; then he howled like a wolf. No-one took any notice of him or me.

  The lady without the ring on her finger had the ferry in hand. She brought it about, and within ten minutes we were moored at South Perth. She even put out the gangplank, and told waiting passengers on the jetty to hold off until everyone on board had safely disembarked. Then she went and comforted her children before saying to me, You’d better go home and rest.

  But the dead ferryman won’t let me go, I pleaded.

  Don’t look at him, she said.

  I fixed my gaze on her. She was really something, even with what having kids had done to her. I forgot about the ferryman. I stepped off the boat behind them and heard a man say to his wife, Makes a visit to the zoo worthwhile, this ferry service. And pointing to his watch he added, Look at that, right on time, will depart on the minute. Pity the rest of the public transport system doesn’t run as smoothly!

  I could hear the zoo animals and birds calling and crying to and against each other. A cacophony. I heard that every moment in my apartment when I didn’t have the television or the hi-fi on. Once, it was a pleasant noise – exotic – but I was growing tired of it. Time to soundproof the apartment. After all, where we live is about the address we put on our official documents, which we share with those we need to impress. Nothing more, nothing less.