The Ocean Thief was anchored a few hundred metres out, low waves washing against the hull. Sun glinted off it, and with the trawling arms stretched across the water it had, I suppose, a grandness to it. Bigger than I’d expected, with birds flocking about it, surging and settling like the froth of waves.
The town driver had dropped us with a cheery warning to watch out for crocodiles, but while I tried to keep away from the water Karl cantered up and down the narrow stretch of sand with no care for crocs, waving his arms in a semaphore arc.
There was no answering movement from the boat anchored offshore.
Above us the sun burned brighter, its sweltering call answered by the sand sparking on my feet. I sat under the sprinkling of stingy scrub—trees with berries I couldn’t identify, bushes I could not name—and wiggled my shoes off. We waited. The sun got hotter. Karl found an apple in his bag and we ate it bite for bite, swearing in turns. Honestly, it might have been less than an hour, but it felt as if days had passed by the time we heard the low putt of an outboard and saw the nose of an aluminium boat mousing out from the bow of the Ocean Thief.
Light glinted off the tinnie as it puttered across the bay. Karl ran to the shoreline, a smudge of crayon against the yellow sand and cobalt sky. Arms semaphoring, his skinny legs beat time while his shout whooped across the water. From my rock perch under the single scrappy tree, I watched the battered tinnie curve around, the bow pointing to land, to us, while Karl leaped and whooped some more. Shadow stretched across my legs, the shapes of the flimsy canopy creating dark trails across my skin. I ran my hand along the lines, tracing the strange language of tree shade written there, curved like the mysterious etchings on silvery scribbly bark. I’m trying, now, to recall my first sighting of a scribbly bark. Did I ever not know that tree, with its smooth trunk interrupted along the length of its body by alien etchings, like strange messages scribbled into the bark?
When, as a ten-year-old girl, I read Anne of Green Gables, I tried to harness the romanticism of Anne. In summer, I tried to stand at the base of trees in our yard, embracing the trunks, whispering to them. Even with no audience, I felt foolish; inauthentic, although I did not know the word. But the scribbly bark could always elicit wonder worthy of Anne. There on that beach, the wonder was returned, although the text was written on my body, not on the bark of the tree. Against my back, the bark was scratchy, peeling. The tree was flimsy, unidentified—not even a eucalypt—while I waited for new words, a new life.
Halfway to land, the tinnie made a deliberate turn away from us and headed to the far end of the beach. At the threshold between water and land, Karl stopped jumping and rested his hands on his hips, glaring along the length of sand. Not moving, I called out, ‘What’s happening?’ As though I were a queen on holiday, waiting for a weather update from her servants.
‘He’s—there’s some—I dunno. Maybe it’s not ours.’ He pointed to the distant rocks, where someone clambered into the hull. From where I stood, the person doing the clambering looked like a small skinny palm tree, a wild batch of branches moving about on top of a thin trunk.
I abandoned my shaded retreat and edged closer to the water, toes well away from the temptation of crocs, and peered at the boat now turning back, puttering away from land before, finally, turning towards us. Unthinkingly, I slipped my hand into Karl’s. He said, ‘It’ll be fine. Seriously. Everything’s fine.’
Gradually, the shape of the two people in the boat became clearer. Hand on the tiller, a man with a dark beard stared ahead, a peaked cap over his eyes so that he was just a shadow. Another shape: a wild-haired man. Or a boy? Shoulders like a wire coat hanger, hair making a dark halo. Skin so milky that it reflected the sun.
Karl kept his eyes on the water. As the tinnie came closer, he plastered that wild white-toothed grin on his face, lifted his hand in a salute and stepped knee-deep to grab the gunwale. ‘All right? What’s the story?’
‘Hey. Got your stuff?’ It was the bearded man, his lips barely moving.
Karl tried again. ‘You the skipper?’
‘Yep. Mick.’ He lifted a hand, tugged the cap further down over his eyes, and pointed towards the trawler anchored offshore. ‘That’s home.’
‘I’m Davey.’ The skinny boy in the bow—I could see now he was definitely a boy—stood up, wobbling. His knees were round orbs, covered in brown scabs.
‘Whoa. Steady.’ Karl held his hand out, grabbing Davey’s elbow.
‘Ain’t got my sea legs yet.’ He smiled at us both, open, seemingly not at all embarrassed by his lack of sea legs.
When the skipper lifted my pack into the tinnie, he grunted at the weight and said, ‘You got rocks in here?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Books.’
He raised his black eyebrows at that. Said, ‘You’ll be working, not reading.’
I thought about the hundreds of thousands of words gathered in the bottom of that pack, the answers to everything, but I nodded.
Mick started up the outboard and, over the whine of the motor, said, ‘You know how to cook?’ and I said that of course I did, although I didn’t, not really.
I don’t know if Karl knew then that Mick had never skippered before, that he’d been given the job by his fleet-owning uncle, but he grinned and said, ‘What about you, Mick? You know how to skipper?’
Mick said, ‘What? What the fuck’s that supposed to mean?’
‘Nothing, man. It’s a joke.’
‘Right.’ The skipper smiled briefly and turned the tinnie back towards the Ocean Thief, the aluminium hull thudding slightly as we slapped across the swell. My pack bounced with each dip, making a series of dull clunks. The enamel mug I’d strapped to the outside chimed so that all I could hear was the thud and beat of the boat and my pack, and the cymbal chime of my cup making a musical accompaniment. Light glinted off the water in diamonds. White-faced gulls swooped above us, in and out of the glinting light. I let the wind brush my neck, and I watched the sunshine dance. If I tried, I could feel that I was in a film.
We were close to the water in our little boat, and the trawler loomed up, dark and broad, the words Ocean Thief in white on the tip of the bow. It seemed right that I’d be on a boat branded for theft, but I was still trying to find the glory and romance. Broad booms stretched on either side of the hull, crucifix-style, a metal frame soaring above the hull. Scores of seabirds swirled about the booms, grouping and separating, their hopeful squawks drowning out the drone of the outboard.
Mick smiled so that the thick mask of his beard moved sideways; a gold filling glinted in his mouth and I couldn’t help but think of pirates. ‘Beautiful, huh?’
Karl grinned up at the cobalt mass, his curls whipping about his face, but all I saw were thick mounds of bird poo and great streaks of rust. We scooted about the stern, bumping against the tyres extending the length of the hull. Karl tied us up while the new deckhand and I sat uselessly.
A sunburned face appeared above us, peering over the gunwale. ‘You pass me the bags.’
We lifted my pack up and once more there was the joke about the rocks—this time from the voice above me. I wobbled when I stood and had to keep my hand on Karl’s shoulder. I stretched, grabbing at a tyre, and stepped into it, then hauled myself onto the Ocean Thief. When my bare feet hit the deck, I had to stop myself applauding.
‘I am engineer. He calls me Frenchie.’ The owner of the voice and the sunburn nodded towards Mick, still sitting in the tinnie.
I said, ‘What should I call you?’
‘Frenchie.’
‘Oi! We’re waiting for help down here.’
We scrabbled up and over. First Davey, then Karl and then the skipper, until we were standing in a reluctant circle on the deck. Most of the open space was taken up by an aluminium tray, long and deep, so that we had to skirt it to get to the galley door. Mick nodded towards Frenchie, said, ‘This is Frenchie, the engineer. Once you’ve put your bags in your bunks, I’ll give you the tour.’ He nodded at each of us in tu
rn, the straggle of crew, and we each gave our names. Something strange sat over us, a heavy discomfort, a nervousness, like we’d arrived too early at a party. Everything smelled of salt, and fuel.
From there, high up on the trawler, the land already looked far away, and I told myself that I was escaping at last. Like Moriarty, like Quixote, like Caulfield, I was embarked, adventuring, starring in my story.
Inside, in the dark nudge of a cabin that was to be mine and mine alone, I dropped my pack against the door. Two bunks nestled against the wall. I squatted down beside my pack and took the books out one by one, lining them up on the narrow shelf carved into the end of the bunk. They made it feel more like a room, like a home. I ran my finger along the spines, grateful that they would be my travelling companions. Outside, the voices of four men merged into one, growling like the low hum of the engine beneath me, merging into one booming bass. When they laughed, the voices bled together, so that all I heard was a bass thud, like a hammer pounding down, bang-bang.
It was womb-like, that cabin: dark, windowless, contained. I unpacked, laying everything out on the bed: stolen Ray-Bans, painstakingly stitched cut-off denims, cute halter tops that I now understood were ridiculous in my new environment. The enamel mug, teal-rimmed and chipped, I wedged on the narrow shelf between the rail of my bunk and the cabin wall. Then I put three pens in it, angling them jauntily, although I had no audience. Two red A4 journals, lined. A toiletry bag full of optimistic creams and unnecessary mascara, sheer lip gloss, nail polish which would chip off with one evening’s catch. I wanted this little womb to feel like home, although I had no home, had not had a home for as long as I could remember. Someone in Sydney had given me a silk cloth, red, stitched with black, and I placed that like a coaster, or a 1950s doily, beneath the cup of pens. I’d sketched a picture of Robbie—his narrow nose, his curls—drawing him with a wild puzzle-door opening in his head, though he wasn’t complicated, not in the way I’d wanted him to be. I stuck the picture to the wall as a sort of scarecrow: I hoped that the ownership the sketch of a man implied would keep any others from my door.
Outside, I could hear the voices separating, footsteps tapping out over the engine, coughing. Karl called something—the eagerness in his voice recognisable even in the audio murk of engine noise—and the new deckhand, Davey, called back. A rattling on my door then; Karl’s voice calling, ‘Kacey?’ I didn’t feel ready for the jostle of people and voices, the wide expanse of sea, the uncertainty of it all, the fear. And I didn’t yet understand what it meant to need my own company, to be enriched by it. When I opened the door, Karl’s face was beaming, his feet planted wide. It was clear that on this hulk of steel, with the stretch of water outside, he was himself. He nodded at the sketch above my bunk, though if he recognised it as a picture of his brother he didn’t say.
‘Come on,’ he said. ‘You need to see where we are.’
And I followed him, ducking my head as I stepped out from the galley to the shelter of the stern deck. The engine was louder there, and I wondered if I’d made one more stupid mistake. Already I wanted to shout at it all to shut up, to stop, to give me the silence and the romance and the grand adventure, yes, that I was there for. Not this grubby industrial roar, the battering of wind on the hull, the shriek behind us. But I followed Karl, clambering behind him up the ladder to the upper deck, sidling around past the wheelhouse until we were on the bow deck, looking down at the way ahead of us. Sun streamed onto the steel, bounced off the glass of the wheelhouse, bounced into my eyes, and the mouth of the gulf opened up ahead of me and if I squinted just so, the way I had with that boy who took me to the restaurant with the beef Wellington, if I squeezed my lashes and looked only at a corner of the frame, my God, after all it was the grand adventure. Beautiful, wild, romantic and true.
Kerouac could take his prosepurpleprose and shove it, because there I was, wind in my hair, salt on my skin, the dock and town becoming a small dot behind me while I clambered on the deck. Sun on my hands, on my way to freedom.
The narrow stretch of beach with the stringy scrappy trees disappeared, and then after it the cars behind the car park disappeared, and then the road was a line behind us, and then the stretch of the wide mouth of land grew distant.
Paint flaked on the gunwale, small islands of dark steel emerging beneath the enamel. Karl careened on the stern deck, moving like a piece of the boat. The four of us climbed up to the wheelhouse to join the skipper as we left the wide mouth of the harbour, faces to the blazing horizon.
And then Mick said, ‘Dinner?’
I nodded. Yes, dinner would be lovely. It took a blink, a breath, to remember, to understand. I was the person responsible for dinner.
The galley was tiny, suffocating compared to outside. Already listing to one side, the sweep up and down of the galley floor made me queasy. Grey laminate covered the bench, cutting the galley in two: above it, the bars holding everything in place, the clips on the doors, the order. I had no list, no order, no thought. Onions. There were onions. Everything should have onions. And as I chopped, my mouth filled with saliva, and the galley walls squeezed in on me. Inside the galley was filled with the fume of oil and onion, and outside there was sky and sea. Already I was stuck again, contained, held inside, because I was not a knight, not a beat boy, just a girl. Outside, Karl called to Davey, leaping on booms and nets; this was what I imagined, fuelling my imagination with a vague resentment. I did not want to be a cook.
In Sydney, I’d tried to get a job as a labourer, walking from building site to building site in my cut-off jeans. On each site I was laughed off with one look at my soft arms and the curve of my breasts. But I knew a boy in the town I grew up in who had padding on his belly and flab on his arms. He got a job as a brickie’s labourer, and I watched his arms grow muscled and his belly hard. That work—being outside, lifting and carting and carrying, and being so tired in your body that you have no room to think, that you are forced out of your head and only your body does the thinking: that was the work I’d wanted. I had knocked on every door I could find and then I put an ad in the local paper: Work wanted. Nineteen-year-old girl. Strong. Willing. Did I say I’d do anything? Or just that I’d work hard? I can’t be sure of the ratio of naivety to blind hope, the naivety that was hidden deep in me, with my swagger and my sophistication borrowed from books. The day the ad came out in the paper, I perched on a broken stool in the dingy sitting room of the share house, next to the phone, waiting for it to ring. One man called. Would I do any work? What did I mean by labouring? What size uniform would I wear? What about on the top? What size on the top? I answered each question, waiting for the job offer that would mean I could pay my rent, while I sketched pictures of flowers in the margins of my journal. When he asked about the size of my top, I hesitated, and only then noticed the panting on the other end of the phone, the words coming out in croaks, the escalating sigh. I disconnected, left the phone hanging by a cord, the disconnect signal pinging into the empty sitting room, while I brushed my teeth and scrubbed my face and squinted at my own stupid self in the fly-spotted bathroom mirror.
Three industrial-sized fridge doors lined the wall in the galley. I stared at the shelves inside: the fresh food sprouting at the bottom of the cool boxes, the jars of pickles and sauces. A pair of legs appeared on the ladder that led up to the wheelhouse, the skipper’s bearded face peering down at me.
‘All right?’
I nodded. ‘Yep. Fine.’
He unfolded himself, so that his head was again out of sight.
‘Mick?’
His face appeared again. ‘Yep?’
‘What would you normally eat?’
He spoke as he moved upwards, so that I could only see his knees, and then his feet. ‘Meat. Frenchie took some beef out of the freezer this morning.’
In the sink, I found a plastic container full of chunks of red flesh. I’d stopped eating meat during my time in the hostel in high school—first because I couldn’t afford it, and then becaus
e I wanted to stop eating, wanted to stop thinking about food, wanted my body to shrink to a tiny acceptable size. Now, I picked out the fat chunks with a fork, flicking the shining squares into the pan of onions and moving them about until they seemed brown. The cupboards had canned tomatoes and so I poured them in and watched it all bubble, making a sour metallic stink in the narrow galley. I burned the rice and scraped the black bits off the bottom of the pan.
Dinner was silent at first, while everyone but me tried to chew the lumps of meat. I’d cooked myself a boiled egg, and a piece of toast. We were squeezed around the table, backs against the walls, with the engine blissfully silent, the fluorescent light blasting cold white on our faces. Eventually, Frenchie said, ‘What did you do to this meat? You have destroyed any flavour. This is—’ he waved his fork at me ‘—this is not good. This is very bad.’
Karl swallowed, put his fork down and grinned at me. ‘It isn’t horrible. It’s—I mean—I’m usually more hungry than this.’
Davey stared at his plate. Bravely, he took another mouthful, then smiled. ‘It’s okay. It’s fine.’
Frenchie slid out from the table, legs first, round belly following. He opened the fridge door and stuck his head deep inside, rustling and harrumphing, until he emerged with a jar of something and a pot of herbs—parsley, and something dark and leafy. We sat like children, hands on laps, while Frenchie chopped and pounded and mixed, finally presenting a bowl of something green and garlic-fragrant. Tenderly, he scooped spoonfuls onto the plates of gelatinous meat, then stood watching as it was tasted. First Karl, then Mick, their faces opening into a wash of pleasure. Davey sniffed suspiciously at the bowl and shook his head, declaring it too green.
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