The End of the World

by Paddy O'Reilly

  I am not squeamish. I have never cared particularly for fish, or worried about whether they feel anxiety or pain. Yet in the last few weeks, I had found myself turning away each time he reached into the bucket, pulled out a squirming fish, laid it on the wet, black boards of the pier, and raised the rod.

  On our trips we never strayed far from his favourite spot. We took the train to a station two stops down from Hitachi City. From the station we walked a few hundred metres, past a dozen stalls selling bait, down to the pier. We ignored the man trying to rent us a cruiser with a cabin below deck and polished brass fittings, and kept walking until we came to an unpainted wooden lean-to at the end of the pier. Before he paid the hire fee for the same dinghy that we rented every time, Mr Kato chatted to the old woman inside the shack about the weather conditions.

  ‘Good fishing today?’ he would call up from the boat as the woman hobbled out to cast off the mooring rope.

  ‘Always good fishing here,’ she would answer, then wink at me.

  Mr Kato was unaware that I understood their little joke. When I first met him I was new to Japan and could only say hello and thank you in Japanese. Now I could understand and speak a little of the language, enough to follow simple exchanges. But even after I understood the words of their joke, I didn’t follow the meaning until one day I boasted to a friend about how many fish Mr Kato and I caught, not occasionally, but every time we went fishing.

  ‘That’s no surprise,’ said my friend, who had been living in that area for ten years. ‘You’re fishing offshore from a commercial fish farm. What with the ones that get away and the ones that come for the food that filters out of the farm drains, you couldn’t fail to catch fish.’

  ‘Chaos,’ Mr Kato said. ‘Chaos.’

  The slap of water on the sides of the boat and the warmth inside my jacket often put me to sleep while we fished. I woke, but kept my eyes closed for a moment against the glare.

  ‘Chaos,’ I said. ‘Yes, chaos. If a butterfly flaps its wings in China, there are storms over America.’

  Mr Kato shifted his haunches abruptly, something he rarely did when we were fishing. The boat listed, then righted itself. He lifted his head until the peak of his baseball cap was saluting the sky, and he squinted through the sunlight at me.

  ‘I heard that too! It was in a film. And...’

  ‘There was a book.’

  ‘Yes, by someone...’

  ‘An American...’

  ‘Yes, an American...’

  After all the hours we had spent drifting and bobbing along the same stretch of coastline, I knew most of the landmarks. There was the Princess Hotel, with a revolving restaurant like a crown on its head. To the south was the Tenju Exhibition Hall complex, always displaying a different banner advertising a car show or electronics exposition. The banners were huge and faced out to sea, where only tiny figures like us in fishing boats could see them. To the north were the Hitachi factories, turning out electrical appliances, and further north, the great white dome of the atomic power station.

  ‘I don’t really understand chaos theory,’ I told Mr Kato. ‘I never read the book.’

  ‘I don’t understand relativity,’ he said. ‘Space and time. Curved.’

  ‘Postmodernism, I don’t get that either.’

  ‘Or people. Sometimes I don’t understand people.’

  Mr Kato’s rod bent down into the water. He leant back with the rod straining against his grip, and he reeled in a few inches at a time, chuckling softly.

  ‘C’mon, sweetheart,’ he murmured, and I could hear myself in his voice. Like a good student, he was picking up the vernacular.

  ‘Reeling in a sweetheart,’ I laughed. ‘This must be love!’

  ‘This must be love,’ he repeated, still reeling in line.

  He was a clever mimic. I knew that one day I would hear him say again, ‘This must be love.’ He would say the words exactly as I had said them but would probably use the expression at an inappropriate time, and I would have to explain why I had said it, and when it could be said, and what its nuances were. Then, a few weeks later, he would try it out again. ‘This must be love.’

  He often asked me to explain the rules about when to use a certain expression. The rules are difficult to explain, I would tell him. Once you get beyond a certain level of competence, once you understand the fundamental grammar and vocabulary, the rules begin to break down. I have trouble communicating sometimes, I said, even in my native language. Nuance, gesture, situation, innuendo–they all tip the meaning this way or that. It’s like sitting in a boat. The less you move, the safer you will be. Don’t take too many risks while you’re learning, I advised him.

  ‘Net,’ he called.

  I scooped up fish number eight, a fat sea perch. Mr Kato reached into the net to pull the hook from the fish’s mouth, but he frowned and pulled back. I looked into the net and gasped. The fish had no eyes. Instead, two fleshy, red, empty sockets stared blindly at me. Mr Kato and I looked back into the sea, he with his eyes widened and me squinting, as if we would find some answer there. The sea swelled and sank, chopped and foamed as always.

  ‘Well,’ Mr Kato said. ‘A new kind of fish.’

  He eased the hook from the fish’s mouth and tipped the flapping creature into the pink bucket.

  ‘Shouldn’t we throw it back? There’s something wrong with it,’ I said.

  Mr Kato looked into the bucket, then shrugged his shoulders.

  ‘It’s a fish,’ he said. ‘A fish is a fish.’

  ‘Is a fish,’ I finished.

  ‘Hey,’ he said. ‘Isn’t that...’

  ‘Yes, it’s Germaine, no, it’s Gertrude...um...’

  ‘Mm, Gertrude...’

  ‘You know...whatsit?’

  ‘Yes...’

  I caught another sea perch next, and after that a strip of bubbly seaweed. Our two hours were up. Mr Kato started the motor and steered the boat back toward shore.

  ‘What about famous Australians?’ he asked, shouting over the noise of the outboard.

  ‘Have you seen Crocodile Dundee?’ I shouted back. I was not disturbed by the abrupt change of subject. Mr Kato and I really had very little to talk about. We grasped at any topic that came into our minds.

  ‘Ah yes, very famous crocodiles.’ Mr Kato slapped his knee. ‘A joke.’

  Beside Mr Kato sat the bucket containing the eyeless fish. I pointed at the bucket. Mr Kato didn’t look down. He kept smiling at me, his weatherbeaten face black against the sky behind him, nodding up and down. Behind him, like painted background scenery, was the distant white dome.

  ‘Perhaps we should give it to someone,’ I shouted. ‘For tests.’

  ‘Do you think so?’ he called back. I heard the tone of voice that meant he wished to change the subject.

  ‘Biochemists,’ I called. ‘Australia has famous biochemists.’

  The next week, in the boat, I asked Mr Kato what had become of the fish. He told me he cut off the head and gave the body to his daughter and son-in-law for their dinner.

  ‘They said it was very delicious,’ he said, nodding.

  I couldn’t help glancing up every now and then at the dome of the atomic power station. Apparently, radiation causes cells to mutate, to start behaving erratically. I read somewhere that even the human body is in a constant battle against disintegration. Cells break down all the time, so they have to be expelled before they do damage, infect their neighbours, upset the balance. Like society really. No one likes people who make a fuss, get above themselves. It’s better not to stand out, not to rock the boat. Like Mr Kato being thrown out of America. If the cell was allowed to go on behaving erratically, the body would collapse into chaos.

  ‘Net,’ Mr Kato called.

  As I scooped up his catch, I peered down at the fish t
o make sure it was normal.

  ‘Is it a nice big one?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes. It’s perfect.’

  I unhooked the fish and threw it into the pink bucket.

  ‘Remember chaos, Mr Kato?’ I said. ‘Remember how we were talking about chaos?’

  ‘Yes, I remember. The butterfly and the storms.’

  ‘Do you think chaos is everywhere?’

  ‘Perhaps,’ he answered. He laid his fishing rod across his knees and hunched over the rod. He paused before he spoke. ‘But I prefer obsession, not chaos,’ he said, and laughed loudly. He looked down at his wristwatch. ‘Only fifteen minutes of fishing left. Please pass the bait.’

  I had been thinking of admitting to Mr Kato that I read the chaos book, and that I knew who said ‘A rose is a rose is a rose.’ I had been thinking of telling him, but instead I pulled in my line and rebaited my own hook. I suddenly understood why Mr Kato and I got on so well. We were both doing our best to keep the boat steady and calm on a sea of chaotic possibilities. He had become a careful man; I already was one. For a time we sat quietly nursing our lines.

  ‘What about famous Japanese?’ I asked.

  Snapshots of Strangers

  My godfather conned us. He ran off with the family fortune, my brother’s cricket bat, and a small, secret part of my mother’s heart. We heard he bought a motel in Queensland, but he never contacted my family again.

  After Dad had worked fifteen hours a day for ten years and built up enough for us to behave like a normal family again, we decided to take a holiday. Mum suggested Queensland, and from the look on his face I thought Dad was going to simply walk out of the house and never come back, like my godfather once had. From that day, no one at our place ever mentioned Queensland again. Queensland ceased to exist. Where Queensland should have been on the map, there was a blank. No roads and rivers, no uncharted land. Nothing. Two straight lines where the Northern Territory and New South Wales ended and fell into emptiness.

  There was a part of Dad that seemed the same way. Certain words, certain times of day, certain aspects of light and shadow across the backyard fell into him and disappeared, and he would stand silent and empty for a moment or two. Over the years we watched him shrink as if he was evaporating. When I was angry I called him the Dry Man. Even his coffin was light, as if a crackly old stick lay inside. My brother, Gerard, helped to carry it down the church aisle. He said the coffin was so easy to shoulder he cried.

  A week after the funeral, we go through the thousands of photographs Dad left stacked in boxes in his study. Among our family snapshots of birthday parties and days at the beach are hundreds of photographs of strange people and places. One photo shows the wreck of a car that rolled down a cliff. At the centre of another, shot in a city street in the 1960s, a man holds his hat against the wind as he hurries across the road. Some of the prints are buildings–motels, suburban houses, service stations. And beaches, mountain tops, empty fields. All places we have never been. Mum behaves as though these photographs diminish our family history. Each time she finds one she purses her lips and rips the photo in half.

  ‘More rubbish,’ she says. ‘As if I need more rubbish in my life. I have absolutely no idea why he put these with our family things.’

  My father was an insurance adjuster. He had men followed and photographed carrying heavy objects then sent the photos to the companies that paid their disability money. He measured skid marks at the scene of accidents. He interviewed accounts clerks about their spending patterns and handed cups of tea to women crippled by machinery to see if they could hold them. For some reason he kept all of their photographs with ours, as if these strangers gave his life as much meaning as his own family did. The strangers even crept into our dinner conversations.

  ‘Dad, what happened to that lady who said she went blind in the accident?’ Gerard asked. Gerard loved Dad’s stories. He thought Dad was a spy, like James Bond, fighting for justice and truth. Dad told us that on Saturday night the woman had driven her four children in the family car to the Coburg drive-in for a double Disney feature. Gerard laughed so much he spat out his peas. When I told a couple of the stories to my friend at school she said something I never forgot. She said, ‘Does your dad hang around in the bushes taking photos of people?’

  In one box we find a set of photos of my godfather before he left. Mum says nothing, sets the photos aside in a separate pile and goes on sorting. Gerard and his wife raise their eyebrows.

  My godfather, Jimmy Botham, ran off when I was eight. I hadn’t noticed he was gone until my birthday. Every birthday, Jimmy and his lady friend came to tea. She was an air hostess. She was the most glamorous creature I had ever seen. Her toenails were painted hot pink. Her smooth gold hair was coiled in a bun that had no end and no beginning. She would lean down to kiss me happy birthday and hand me a Qantas carry-on bag full of lollies.

  ‘Where’s Uncle Jimmy? Did he send the lollies?’ I asked Dad as we sat at the table, eating party pies and sausage rolls.

  ‘Your Uncle Jimmy’s off spending my money,’ Dad said.

  My mother handed me a cocktail frankfurt on a toothpick. ‘Your daddy and Uncle Jimmy aren’t partners anymore. Daddy’s in business on his own now.’

  A couple of days later Gerard told me he’d seen Jimmy cuddling Mum in the kitchen one night not long before he left. Dad had stood behind Gerard with a trembling hand on his shoulder, then turned and left the room, pulling my brother behind him.

  After Jimmy left, Mum carried on with life as if there had never been a Jimmy Botham. It was Dad and his desiccation, his disappearing act, that kept reminding me how we had been wronged. Gerard’s story explained Dad’s behaviour. I imagined what it would have been like to see my mother and Jimmy Botham together. I had been robbed and I wished I had caught Jimmy Botham in the act.

  The death-benefit cheque proves Dad knew insurance. Mum invites us around for champagne and crayfish. I’m going to put a down payment on a house. I raise my glass in a toast.

  ‘No more dodgy landlords!’

  ‘Thanks, Dad,’ Gerard adds.

  Gerard and his wife have already chosen the colour of their Mercedes. Mum stands up with a glass of champagne in one hand and a crayfish claw in the other, and announces that after all these years of cooking and cleaning house she’s going to do something she’s always wanted to do. She’s taking a trip.

  I know where she’ll go, even though she says she is still thinking about it. The map of Australia has changed completely. Queensland is now marked in scarlet while the rest of the country has faded to grey.

  ‘You know,’ I say to Mum after Gerard and his wife leave, ‘I was going to take a trip to Queensland myself, look up my godfather.’

  ‘Were you?’ she says.

  She sits at the kitchen table, making a list of what to take on her trip. She keeps writing, the list getting longer and longer, the wedding ring on her resting hand clacking against the table as her scribbles become fiercer and the table starts to shake.

  ‘I don’t know why you would do that,’ she says without stopping her list, now at two pages.

  I wait. She runs out of paper. She puts down the pen and twists the ring on her finger. I wonder whether Jimmy Botham would even recognise her now with her grey hair and papery skin.

  ‘I’m going on a holiday,’ she says. ‘I don’t remember inviting you.’

  ‘Well,’ I answer, stung. ‘I want to meet Jimmy Botham again. I want to tell him what happened when he left.’

  ‘What? What happened?’ Mum says, leaning back in her chair and staring at me.

  ‘It’s all right. I don’t blame you.’

  I stand up and walk out to my car. As I pass through the lounge room I glance at the chair where Dad used to sit and watch the cricket. I remember him waving me over, wanting me to kiss him goodbye as I clattered out of the ho
use at night when I was a teenager, the way I sneered at him and kept walking, wobbling off in my stiletto heels and muttering ‘See ya Dry Man’ under my breath.

  Investigation is in my genes. Jimmy Botham lives in a caretaker’s cottage in a motel in Tully. He drives a 1987 Corolla. He gambles on the horses every week.

  ‘That’s where our money went,’ I tell Gerard.

  ‘So what? That was twenty years ago. Get over it.’

  ‘He was supposed to give me moral guidance. He was my godfather!’

  Gerard’s wife sits opposite me nodding politely.

  ‘Christ,’ Gerard says. ‘Now she wants moral guidance. Next thing she’ll be suing for the thousand pounds he took with him.’

  ‘A thousand pounds? That was the family fortune?’

  He rolls his eyes in the direction of his wife.

  ‘So, what, she thought we were millionaires? That’s why we lived in a weatherboard dump in Oakleigh?’

  ‘But...’ I say.

  My father had no stubborn streak. A man with a stubborn streak doesn’t let his life ebb away, doesn’t go dry with regret. It must be my mother who passed onto me this need to forge onwards in the face of scorn, even while suspecting that what I am doing might be foolish. I think about that as I drive toward Tully in my rented car.

  Fifty kilometres from Tully the rain starts. The air conditioning has sucked the heat out of the car and I feel a chill when the first fat drops of rain splatter on the windscreen. When I open the window for a smell of the Queensland air, the steamy heat rolls in and slaps my face like a sloppy tongue.

  By the time I check into my motel and unload my car it is 10:00 pm. Dark, still raining, still muggy. A green tree frog squats on the floor of the shower recess. A television prattles in the room next door. Overhead the fan beats the air into moist currents that roil noisily around the room, lifting papers and rattling the venetian blinds. I lie naked on the bed in the dark, trying to sleep. At 1:00 am the television next door is turned off.