‘Robbie said you might be here.’
‘He did?’ He’d talked about me? Jesus.
Meeting Karl was a lucky accident. Courtesy of his brother, Karl arrived in my life suddenly and straightforwardly, the way he arrived everywhere. He was the most straightforward, the most guileless person I’d ever met.
It’s rare for me to think of him now. A year ago or so, a boy passed me, skinny in a Bob Marley T-shirt, his hair long, curls twirling about his face, then Karl popped into my head with a rush of tenderness, a desperate wish to know he was safe, well, happy. He will be. He’ll be skippering something gorgeous. He’ll be hunting and winning. With his surname long since forgotten, I tried googling ‘Karl. Trawler’ but got nothing.
‘Karl. Timor Sea. Skipper.’
Still nothing.
‘Karl. Trawler. Robbie.’
Nothing. He has disappeared, like so many others, into the gulf or the waters that surround it.
Karl and I sat in the dining hall of Lameroo Lodge, and he told me this: that I could get myself out of the unholy mess I was in, if I jumped on a trawler with him and went out as a cook. He was waiting for a boat to come in with a new skipper, a new crew that he was going to join. He’d missed the start of this season and the last half of banana season—the short months of mad frenzied catching before the start of the build-up—because his mother died. He didn’t want to talk about it. His usual boat had gone out with a different first mate so now he was going out on the Ocean Thief. The irony of the name, Ocean Thief, did not escape me. I’d topped my school in English; I knew what irony was.
He unfolded a map and spread it across the table, right next to the small shredded one I’d carried in my backpack all this way, taking it out at every truck stop, recording the route with a ballpoint pen, in tiny neat crosses, like a treasure map.
I traced the rim of the Gulf of Carpentaria with my finger. My nails were square and bitten to the quick—even now I struggle with my hands, struggle to make them look like lady-hands, manicured, soft. Once, a year or two after the gulf, a boyfriend ran his thumb along the rise between my palm and my index finger. Really, even by then, he was an ex-boyfriend. I’d ended it for complicated reasons and then wished I hadn’t. I was still desperately in love with him and I hoped the hand-holding was the instant that would lead us back to each other, lead him to forgiveness and recapitulation. Instead, he said, ‘Your hands are like dinosaur skin, aren’t they? What did you do to them?’
For (again, complicated) reasons, I’d never told him about the Ocean Thief. I’d never told him about the nights on watch, about the shift of water across the Arafura Sea, about the storms and the losses. I’d never told him about the trial, not any of that. I’d arrived in his life on my way to being fully formed, a woman. I didn’t want him to know me as the messy girl I’d been. Anyway, I knew then, when he looked at my hands and saw only abhorrent rough skin, I knew we were properly over. And that was one more thing to blame the gulf for.
Although later I’d know that it was one more thing to thank it for.
We’d woken on the grass outside Lameroo Lodge: me and Robbie with our legs entwined, his hand on my bare belly, his white curls matted with sleep and humidity. I trailed my finger along his nose, the breadth of it, and then across his eyelashes, white-blond like his hair. He blinked at me; eyes green beneath the pale lashes. Was I allowed to trace my hand over him like this, suggesting ownership?
Somewhere in the background there was a girl down south, studying, waiting for her on-off boyfriend to come back from the top of the country where he had gone to see his baby brother, the sailor, the fisherman, after their mother died. Robbie, smooth-skinned, pale-eyed, his curls like sandstorms—he was the one who was crossing into a different world, a world of books, of suits and ties, while Karl hung from booms and heaved on winches and stank of fish and fuel. Like Karl, Robbie did not want to talk about his mother, about the sudden loss and the gap she left behind.
Heat had already geysered up from the northern rim, sun spreading across the grass like butter. There were no footsteps. Karl arrived unbidden, moving like sunlight, the way he always did. Wet sprinkled down, a spattering of rain, or dew, and the wrinkle of a laugh. Robbie’s eyes blinked properly open then, his teeth gleaming with that smile they shared. Above us, Karl shook his head, water spraying out in droplets.
‘You’re like a dog.’ Robbie’s hand reached around his brother’s ankle, his hand pale against the deep dark of Karl’s leg.
The two of them were like shadow negatives of each other: Robbie, steady and softly spoken, his face still, eyebrows raised while he listened carefully. Karl ran at the world, arms open, always moving, a dynamic streak. He lifted his foot, the grey heel hovering over Robbie’s face. ‘Come on. Up. Got news. And an idea.’
Something red was smeared across the surface of the plastic table. Jam, perhaps, or tomato sauce, just next to Karl’s map, unfolded in front of me. Carpentaria. Two limbs of land stuck out into the shock of turquoise, the wide expanse of water leading to Asia, leading to Away, leading to Freedom.
Karl pointed to the bite on the map that denoted the far side of the Territory, the space between the Territory and the broad reaches of the west. Bonaparte Gulf. ‘That’s where we fish for banana prawns.’
Banana prawns: it seemed like a made-up name. Like he was a kid playing at being a working fisherman. Karl kept his finger on the map, moved it across to the wider, longer space between land and ocean, the long tip of Australia butting into the Arafura Sea. ‘But here’s Carpentaria. Tiger prawns.’
‘For real? Tiger as in jungle?’
‘I don’t think tigers live in the jungle. But, yeah, same name. And those babies will bring in plenty of cash. Anyway, there’s some weird shit with this crew. The decky and the mate went AWOL. I don’t know what went down, but the cook’s gone too.’
‘Is the cook always a she?’
He looked at me blankly. ‘The cook is always a girl. Do you want to do it? Robbie said you were looking for a boat gig. You make more money on a trawler.’
Michael, the ride who delivered me to Darwin while sliding his hand along the crease of my leg, he’d talked about trawlers and cooks, made my head swim with memories of the docks. I’d made a mess of things. I’d made a mess of everything. But maybe, after all, there was a way. Even if I couldn’t cook.
‘Here,’ Karl said, his finger pointing out the borders of the country and the aquamarine expanse that surrounded it. ‘We fly into Groote Eylandt—there—and leave from here, and then we’re roughly in this area here.’
‘How long?’
‘Four months—if we get a good catch.’
‘How much?’
‘Ten grand.’ He grinned. ‘If we get a good catch. You make more in banana season, but that’s pretty much over now.’
‘I’d come back with ten grand? Is it dangerous? For a girl?’
He knew what I was asking. He looked down at his hands, his nails tapping on the tabletop. Then he said, ‘Everything’s dangerous sometimes. But if you come out on this boat, I’ll make sure nothing happens to you. No one will touch you.’
Ten grand. My mouth watered at the thought of it. I could feel the folded notes in my hand. Enough to buy a ticket, a steed, a lance, a castle. Enough to get me out, make me new, make me one of the great ones.
All those promises of gold and silver, the riches that would get me off this large island and get me to somewhere, anywhere else, the place where everything would be different. England, perhaps, where I would find my mettle. Why not there, in Fantasy Pre-War Upper-Middle-Class England? Home of Maisie of the Fourth and Susie of the Upper Sixth; refuge for bookish loners.
I knew this: the further I could go from the self I was, the more I could become my other self, the self I knew I could be. I was making this from nothing, from the tools only of imagination.
I would, if I could, start a bonfire and I would burn all that I had been, all that I had been told I was
, all that I’d been born to. I’d be the firestarter.
Dust covered my feet, my calves, my hands. Red tracks had formed under my knees though I’d barely made it from the small plane to the wire fence at the end of the tarmac. White paint proclaimed the words: Groote Eylandt Airport. Heat merged with the fumes of the plane, buckling the air, rippling it in the way that would signify a change in time, or memory, in a cheesy film. Karl bobbed beside me, his wild curls bouncing; he was like a puppy, leaping on the dirt, ready to be let off the leash, waiting for the smell of salt.
Salt water fixes everything: tears, sweat or sea. Someone said it. I believed it.
Rows of wooden seats curved around the wire fence, making a semicircle, a smile echoed by the toothless smile on the face of the old fella standing at the gate. Hair washed of colour, rainbow shorts sagging at his knees. He leaned against the wire, watching the dribble of passengers walk down the stairs and across the dirt, his eyebrows thick roads on his face. When we came close, he whipped his hand out and rested it on my shoulder. ‘All right, mate?’ I nodded, but before I spoke, he’d moved on. His eyes were on Karl and a stream of words came from him, musical and mysterious. Karl lifted his hand in an indifferent wave, but the man yanked him inside the gate, ferrying him to the gathering beneath the shelter. The toothless smiling semicircle of seats was peopled with women in flowery frocks, loose shifts sprinkled with blooming reds, yellows, greens. Five or six women talked over each other, laughter swelling now and then like a river, washing away the sandy banks with its overflow. One woman threw her head back and guffawed, her feet planted wide, her arms flung up in abandon. Her laugh surged and settled, an ebbing wave, and she was like a battered surfer, her arms resting on her knees, her head shaking as though that gut-rocking glee had drawn everything from her.
Watching her, a memory came of my mother, sitting at a table with her women. She was the first in our suburb to divorce. Somehow, she found a small tribe. I suppose she found them through the hospital, where she’d managed to get a job as a nurse’s aide. Even as a child I could see the electricity, the flow of energy that zinged through her with the opening of the world of work. Until the years when shift work and poor pay wore her down, this world—the hospital, the gathering of women in the staffroom cackling and chattering—was a door to another world, no less magical than the wardrobe that the Pevensie children found themselves in before their entrance to Narnia. Even with its emergencies and buzzers and demands, even with Christmas Day after Christmas Day spent in hospital staffrooms without her children, this world was a sanctuary for her, and the women she found in it were her gatekeepers.
Her little gathering of women would happen weekly, their arms resting on the laminate table, their hands touching, their laughter echoing off the walls, and always falling away with that hahaHAHAHAHAWwwwwoooh dear, and the wiping away of tears. Thelma, with her many chins and endless parade of kaftans, beautiful blonde Maureen, and Russian Nadia, always dressed in white, with gold rings flashing on her hands: the most exotic woman I’d ever seen, with the best laugh in the world.
Until now.
This woman was skinny, but with muscular arms, the sinew visible from shoulder to elbow. Her feet were bare, with a pair of plastic sandals plonked in the dirt beside her. When she laughed, her whole body rocked, her feet kicking at the dirt, her legs swinging back and forth. Red hydrangeas made a pattern the length of her smock. She stopped her laugh suddenly, like a tap being flicked off, and reached out her hand to Karl, the way the old man did. Karl grinned his grin at her, and she said something to him in her own language. Karl shook his head and she switched to English. ‘You comin’ home, boy?’
Unfazed, Karl shook his curls at her. ‘Nup.’ He lifted his chin, gesturing away from the seats, away from the road. ‘Going out fishing, Aunty.’ His words ran together, so that it sounded like garnoufishinarny.
Her hand curled tightly on his wrist. ‘Where’re your mob from?’
He did the strange tilt with his chin again, said, ‘Down west.’
‘You belong down there?’
He shrugged; she let go of his wrist. Where do you belong? Who do you belong to? I thought of my own traipsing across the map, my landless walk. There was no land that belonged to me, none that I belonged to, and no one who would claim me as theirs. I belonged only to myself. The voice in my head, chanting this, was defiant, chin up, fist up, loud. But perhaps there was an echo, just one, of a trailing sigh, like the rocking women. Wooo-oh dear; a basin of loss that sat beneath that chiming defiance. I wasn’t conscious of wanting to belong—but I was aware of my disconnect from home, my disconnect from country.
I sat on one of the empty benches. When Karl plonked himself beside me, I asked, ‘Why’d you call her Aunty?’
‘Respect.’
‘But you respect me—’
He let out a short laugh, like a bark.
‘—and you don’t call me Aunty.’
‘You’re not …’
‘What?’
‘You’re not old enough.’ He paused, shuffled his feet and added, ‘And you’re not my people.’
Again, that chanting voice. I have no people.
On a day much later than this, sitting with Karl on the bow deck, watching a flock of terns on the boom, I will ask him, ‘Why is Robbie white? What’s his story?’
And Karl’s face will close off to me; he will shift his legs in front of him so that he is turned away from me as he replies, ‘Why are you? What’s your story?’
On that occasion, with the warmth of the deck beneath my legs, I will think of the slow days of coiling rope, twisting them into order, each thread connecting to another. And I will say, ‘Got no story, got no people.’ And I’ll believe it to be true. No land, no people, no story, no worries.
Only the last bit isn’t true.
There was no closed-in building in the tin-shed airport, apart from the tin-bound toilets labelled Lady and Man. We waited beneath the hand-painted Luggage Collection sign until a woman wearing a straw hat the same colour as her face wheeled a caged trolley out in front of us. Perspiration patches made maps of New Zealand beneath her arms, beneath her breasts, on her belly. When she lifted her hand to remove the hat, her wide orange T-shirt rode up to her bare thighs. Another sign read Town Bus Here.
Leaning in to reach for my pack, I glanced up and saw him on the other side of the road, inside the tin bus shelter. Wearing loose khaki shorts and a matching shirt, a grey-haired man sat with his legs spread wide, so wide that I could see his testicles poking out. Round and pink—even from that distance there could be no mistake. While I watched, the man widened his legs and looked up at me, grinning. I could see the crimson tip of his tongue sliding between his teeth.
How do they know we will keep our mouths closed? How do they know we will simply turn away, these men? How do they know, have always known, that I will take the mortification into myself and feel the blaze on my cheeks and keep my eyes on my feet while I walk away? Mouth closed, face burning, bile in the stomach. This is what it’s like to be a girl, to be this girl.
The high school in Warners Bay was a series of brick buildings, square and unyielding, arranged in random patterns, squatting wherever they landed. A Block. B Block. D Block. Prison titles. Prison architecture. And from that prison Lisa O’Daniel and I walked home most afternoons in our first year of high school, making each other collapse with laughter, having to stop and rest our hands on our own knees like old men, losing the ability to speak, losing breath.
We only ever saw the man under the car. We never saw his face, only his legs. Most afternoons he’d be there at the time we walked past, under his black Holden, his King Gees hitched up, his testicles—and sometimes his penis—peeping neatly out the bottom of the shorts. The first time, Lisa glanced down and squeezed my hand. We stopped, giggled, and walked on. We were twelve. We told each other, told ourselves, that this man was hilarious, that his dick was simply a gross joke.
We saw him—or,
rather, his testicles, and sometimes his mottled penis—four or five times after that. We didn’t giggle the second time, or the third, just squeezed each other’s hands and kept walking, agreeing to silence. The last time we saw the wrinkled package arranged outside the shorts, I stayed silent while Lisa shouted, ‘You forget to put your underpants on, you dirty great perv.’ Hands on hips, she added, ‘Fucking perv.’
That summer, a man at the Speers Point Sailing Club asked me if I’d like to crew for him during a race. I’d taken myself down to the club, wandering up and down the line of men—mostly men—and older teenagers rigging up their boats, asking each one if they needed a for’ard hand. This man, with a thick spring of dark hair and a gut that curved over his board shorts, said yes. I was quiet during the race, unsure. I remember a yellow sail, and a spinnaker covered in vivid stripes. I remember looking up at it, the spinnaker, full of wind, and glancing across to the man. He was perched on the gunwale, legs wide and that little pinkish package protruding, making a flabby worm on his upper leg, a broad grin on his face, eyes on mine. Was it deliberate? Was it just the unfortunate by-product of having physical bits and pieces that wouldn’t stay put? I squeezed my own knees together and chewed on my lip, kept my eyes on the yellow sail until we sailed back to the clubhouse.
We stopped walking home together after that, me and Lisa O’Daniel. I caught the bus home alone instead, staring out the window, burying myself in silence.
At the Groote Eylandt Airport, the town bus arrived, blocking the view of the bus shelter and the testicle display across the road. Karl nudged me. ‘You okay?’ And I said, yes, I was fine, absolutely fine.
Pale blue butted against the horizon, the sky meeting the water, so that the whole seemed like a cerulean wall against which one might crash. Sand had trailed up my calves, into the creases of my knees, down into my socks. A wide groyne extended into the water and, beyond that, the red chute of the mines, cutting up the land. I wanted this to be pretty, I wanted it to be a story of beauty and wonder, and so I squinted towards the blurred horizon and held my hand to the side of my face, blinkering myself, horse-like, from the red rust, the corridor of industry chugging up and down the road. This was the way I lived in that time, blinkering myself, looking only at a narrow field, so I only saw what I wished to see.
Fury Page 11
