Fury

by Kathryn Heyman

  ‘Here.’ Frenchie topped my egg with a small mound of the paste. ‘Taste.’ He waved the spoon at me accusingly. ‘Food is joy. To make. To eat.’ I couldn’t tell if his eyes were wet from the temperature, from the ocean, or from emotion. He glanced at my boiled egg. ‘This is not dinner. This is not joy.’

  ‘It is to me.’ I swallowed, the yolk slipping down my throat.

  Raising his level of insult, still pointing towards my egg, the engineer added, ‘Only the English eat like this. And Americans.’

  ‘Jesus, Frenchie. Give the girl a fricking break.’

  ‘It’s no break, skipper.’ Green drops splattered from his spoon as he waved it. ‘It is just truth.’ He pronounced is as eez, so that he sounded like that cartoon skunk Pepé Le Pew, which was the closest I’d come to knowing a Frenchman before now.

  Mick wiped at his beard, said, ‘He was like this with the last cook.’ He glared at Frenchie. ‘And look how well that worked out.’

  ‘What, um, what happened to the last crew, then?’ Karl smeared a piece of white sliced bread with Frenchie’s green paste and folded it in two. His plate was still half full of my meat delight.

  Frenchie became suddenly busy with his cutlery, polishing it on a piece of paper towel, scrubbing intensely, holding the knife blade up to his reflection. We sat, waiting, Davey wiping the last of the flavourless meat from his plate with more bread, Karl with his head tilted to the side. He asked again, ‘What happened? I mean, you lost the lot of them.’

  Silence pattered about the galley, only filtered by the buzzing of the fluoro light. Finally, the skipper said, ‘Cook and mate decided to go off to WA. Decky decided fishing wasn’t for him. Right, crew—’ he slapped his hands on to the table, one loud beat ‘—time to shoot away. Let’s go.’

  I had no idea what shooting meant, but I followed them out onto the deck, into the dripping sunset.

  Miss Pitt was my secondary school English teacher. Long-legged, with a boy’s haircut, she paced the length of the classroom, pointing, calling, demanding. When I finished school, she took me aside, said, ‘Kacey, you have all the potential in the world. Don’t waste it. Please don’t.’ But by then she’d disappointed me by marrying a man, growing her hair into a blonde bob for the wedding and turning into Mrs Him after it. Before she disappeared herself into someone else’s name, she introduced me to Slessor, to Hopkins, to the pleasures of speaking poetry aloud, to the thrill of the word. At night, I sat in the scrappy shed with the mosquitoes buzzing on my skin and I made my own heart pound by chanting poems, feeling myself taken elsewhere, any elsewhere, anywhere but there in that dank and dark shed. I had not yet read Larkin, not come across his explanation that when removed from the familiar, you are perceived differently, and so you perceive yourself differently. But even then, I knew the possibilities of elsewhere, knew that if I got there, I could be different too. And now, orange disc crashing down, seabirds skreaking and skerrecking, there I was: elsewhere. Better than the open road, I had the open sea. Hopkins: that was what I thought of then. His dappled vermilion gold burning ember birds, his thick painted world that had creaked my body and my longing open. At the stern of the boat, I stretched my arms out, turned my face to the horizon. Sleek wavelets crimped around us, coated in red, in gold, so solid, so real that I felt myself to be in a painting or a poem. Seabirds swooped and scooped on the shining surface of the sea, and there was nothing—no land, no boundary—to be seen. Just the Ocean Thief and the round circle of orange sun sitting fat on the horizon and yes, I thought, yes. This is the story, the song, that I have been waiting for, the one that is better than me.

  Karl shouted behind me, an instruction, and I tried to shake myself awake, to remember that I was here to work, though I had no idea what that work would look like.

  ‘Get the nets.’ Karl grabbed at my arm, pointed me back towards the galley. ‘You and Davey can take starboard—when I call, shoot the nets out—use the rope, here. I’ll winch them down, you need to make sure nothing catches, yeah? Keep the nets clear.’ He pointed to the end of the boom. ‘We want them out, so they can go wide. And the boards—see here?—they need to open when they drop in, to keep the weight on. Got it? Let’s go.’

  I didn’t have it; everything he said had rushed over me while I nodded in a panic and tried to make the words attach to some object. Nets, I could see. Boards? Winch? How badly wrong could it go?

  Karl raised his hand, nodded up to the skipper, and the grunt of the engine escalated, along with a new sound, the roar of the winch. Nets swayed over the aluminium tray, with orange ropes tied at the ends, and while Karl shouted instructions, Davey and I yanked at the ropes, threw them out over the gunwale and shoved at them as the nets dropped in, each of us watching the other, nervy as unbroken horses. Water and sky merged, folding about us, and the ropes slipped into the water like snakes. They lay flat and hungry, until the weight of the boards and the thrust of the boat combined to swallow them, disappearing like a gulp of food. The whole thing: the rise of excitement, the sudden rush, the dance of the nets on the water, the swallowing of the sea, it all made a light ripple through me. It was the ripple of possibility, and of beauty. I was here, living it, being it. Fuck being on the road, being a cipher or a muse for the boys’ own adventure: I was on the sea, and I was alive, as alive as I could ever hope to be.

  Darkness came quickly. Traces of orange fire spread like oil across the water behind the boat, making a widening lane in our wake. Nameless birds flipped and soared, dipping into the disappearing light, and below them one fin, then another, and another, arcing in perfect rhythm.

  ‘It never gets old.’ Karl squeezed my arm, pointing to the dolphins leaping and dipping alongside the Ocean Thief.

  The light was going but I could still make out the ash-grey slick of dolphin skin, the squint of their small eyes, the curve of their beaks looking so much like smirking smiles. A calf leaped into the air beside its mother and, like a child, I squealed and clapped my hands, called for more. I could barely believe that I deserved this, watching these beauties while the last of the sun left reflections on their backs. I was as far away as I could be, as far away as I’d hoped to be. I was not that child in the bunk bed wondering how to escape; I had escaped, I was almost free, I would be free.

  We waited until the dolphins dropped back, or beneath, and then Karl said, ‘Come on, I’ll help you clean the galley. Only tonight. Only once.’

  Inside, Frenchie was parked at the table, his round belly prodding the table, a pack of cards laid out before him in an intense game of solitaire. Dirty plates toppled on the lip of the baize cloth. Reddish sauce trailed from the side of the table.

  ‘Here.’ Davey’s arm, skinny and pale, reached across the table, his grubby nails flicking under one of the glossy cards. ‘The black five on the six.’

  ‘Jesus. That is no good, no good at all.’ The engineer’s hand slapped down on Davey’s. ‘You don’t interrupt a person’s game.’ The rims of his eyes were red, his fingertips a deep yellow.

  Although he was older than Karl—older than me, too—Davey had the air of a child, and the soft unformed muscles of one. The milkiness of his arms in those first days was a source of wonder to me. Later, he said he’d spent the last months working inside a factory, slapping stickers onto plastic boxes. He laughed, said, ‘Challenging work for the likes of me,’ and for the first time I thought that maybe he was smart, smarter than I’d imagined. He was one of those kids who couldn’t sit still, couldn’t find a home at school, with the desks and boards and boredom, but despite that could be happy anywhere; just a living, that was all he wanted. Some money to go back home to Queensland and pay some rent and live near his mum. It was a mystery to me: the only place I’d ever found home was among books and words and learning, there in the rustle of pages where I could disappear, where I could think. That was where I had meaning, though it came with the cost of wanting more than I had. Davey needed none of that. Only to live, only to be. That was enough.
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  The flabby smell of beef filled the galley, swelling on the scent of diesel, and I scrubbed at the pans, trying to hold my breath until I could be outside again, with the air and the sea and the dolphins.

  Footsteps clomped on the ladder that led from the galley to the wheelhouse and the laughter around the table settled as though the teacher was on their way. He didn’t come all the way down, as though unsure of his welcome. He spoke to me, and to Davey, doubled in half, squinting down, trying to look friendly, like one of the gang. He said, ‘You’d better get some sleep. We’ll likely pull up about one.’

  ‘One in the morning?’

  ‘Yup. Get some sleep. And you—’ he nodded at Frenchie ‘—be on your best.’

  I waited till he climbed back up to the wheelhouse before I slid onto the bench beside Frenchie. ‘What does he mean, be on your best?’

  ‘Nothing. I don’t know. He’s—nothing. Perhaps it is because usually the skipper has the cook and you are not his.’ He moved a glossy jack of spades, placed it on a red queen.

  ‘Sorry, what? I’m not his; I’m not anyone’s.’ But I could feel my throat tightening.

  Karl’s curls shimmered about his face. ‘Nope. I told you I’d keep my eye out. That’s not happening. He needs me more than he needs you. Anyway, he’s made it a dry boat, he’s okay. He wants a decent catch more than he wants a quick fuck.’

  ‘I can hear you.’ The feet were just above us, Mick’s bearded face smiling down at us. ‘At least wait until I’m out of earshot. One: ask Frenchie why it’s a dry boat. Two: I’m married. Happily. Or I will be as soon as I get back. Three: we’re here to work. Which is how I’m going to pay for the wedding. And the house. Four: get some sleep.’

  And then he was gone again, but the wake behind him was lighter, easier, and I was grateful for his interjection.

  But we didn’t sleep. Instead we sat at the table moving Frenchie’s cards around until he snatched them away, told us in his thick accent to bloody off. When Karl asked to bloody-what-off—Bugger off? Fuck off? Get off?—Frenchie gathered all the cards in, his arms sweeping across the table. ‘Just bloody off,’ he said. ‘That’s all. Bloody.’

  The cards reflected the stark white light as he bound them with a green rubber band and tucked them into the groove between the table and wall. Karl made another pot of coffee then we told story after story of our lives. Davey told us about his first job, washing dishes in a bistro, and how the owner kept slipping his hand into his pocket and jiggling while he watched the girls bending over the low sink, and he told us about his mother’s homemade mint slice, and I told them about Sylvie going off to India and how I’d almost gone too but changed my mind at the last minute, just before we booked the tickets, and then I told them about how I’d had a boyfriend in a band in the city, a bass player, and who knew what would happen with us when I got back, if I ever went back.

  Was it Frenchie or Karl who told the story of the machete? I’m pretty sure it was Frenchie, but later, when I came to claim some of those stories for my own, their origins got murky.

  Hours passed; we made toast, and drank more coffee, and made each other laugh and roll our eyes, and then Frenchie said, ‘Before this boat I was on the Pearl.’ To Karl, he said, ‘You know the Pearl?’

  Karl shook his head. ‘Which fleet?’

  There were scores of boats in the gulf at that time. Their lights dotted the water, flicking on and off, homely beacons. Beneath the surface of the water, the ocean was being stripped: net after net hauled to decks of boat after boat. The Pearl was just one of those boats from one of those fleets. And on that boat, Frenchie had his first engineer’s job in Australia. The skipper was a drunkard, beginning with a morning beer and moving to bourbon by the afternoon, throwing the bottles overboard when they were empty so that the crew could never keep track. Not that it mattered; they were all weaving and bobbing about the Pearl, not one of them ever quite sober.

  One night the skipper drank his second bottle of bourbon and was barely able to keep them on course. The first mate—a bloke from Far North Queensland who never showered and stank like the mud from the flats—took charge, got the nets in, kept them on course, until the skipper got his bloody back up and stomped up to the wheelhouse. Bloody mate taking over. Trying to get the girl. Always the trouble was the girl. Skipper shouted so loud spit was coming out of his mouth; what the bloody hell was the mate doing driving the boat? Was he the skipper? And still the Pearl motored up and down the trench line, the nets dragging behind.

  The girl was English. Blonde. Going around all the time in a bikini top and little shorts. Already sleeping with the skipper. Almost definitely. Probably, anyway. And while the shouting and spitting is going on, she’s in her cabin with the door locked. She doesn’t want to know. Causing the trouble and then getting out of the way.

  Frenchie shrugged at this point, the reds of his eyes showing.

  And then, out on the gulf, there is the loud horn of another trawler. The Pearl has drifted over, off her path, almost smashing into another boat. The mate signals the other crew, gets them out of the way. Everything is good. All calm. But then there’s the skipper, pissed as a bird, and he’s waving a huge curved machete over his head, threatening to kill the mate, weaving his way around the deck, and it’s all looking pretty bad. Cook is screaming in her cabin, decky hiding out in the galley.

  Frenchie has to do something—someone has to, anyway—and so he clambers down to the chug and comfort of the engine room, where the heat blossoms up with the roar of the motor and wraps him in certainty before he kills the power, all of it. Lights. Motor. Action. He’s locked the door to the engine room and no one else can get down there, no one can work the power, it is all his, Frenchie’s, down there in the hot dark.

  The Pearl drifts, dark and invisible, on the current. The screaming from the cabin stops. The machete drops with a clunk to the deck. The skipper shouts, What the fuck? What did you do, engineer? But Frenchie is in the dark womb of his engine room, humming to himself, and if they nudge another trawler, or drift too far, he cannot be to blame. He waits there, as though it is a bunker, for the fire to stop. With the earphones on his ears, warm like a hug, and the air like a smelter around him, he dozes off, his chin falling to his chest, his back against the soft folding deckchair he has down there. The skipper cannot bring lights on, even the navigation lights are off; nothing is what he can do; not switch on an engine, nothing.

  In the morning, Frenchie climbs up to the deck, grainy-mouthed, to find the cook sitting in the wheelhouse with the machete across her knees and a marine patrol boat heading towards them. She keeps the machete on her knees, nods at Frenchie, says, ‘The others have passed out. I radioed in. The lead boat is coming out to collect us. It’s over.’

  She didn’t even say sorry. She didn’t even say thank you.

  And that is why Frenchie is on this boat, the Ocean Thief, with a green crew—yes, okay, except for the mate, who is not green, certainly—and a cook who can’t make food taste good and who thinks an egg in a cup is dinner. Like a bloody English.

  I felt the change in the engine before I heard it—a deeper thrust, a twist, something exciting building. And then the shift in gearing; a horn sounding and Karl pounding on my door, his gleeful voice calling that it was time, that we were up. On the deck, everything felt charged: the swoop and cry of the seabirds, the furrowing excitement of the arcing and zigzagging fins, the deeper dark of the sky. Karl was a kinetic dash, leaping from the upper deck to the high trays, looping down to the bottom deck, throwing ropes to Davey, to me, and to the unwilling engineer. Roll-up drooping from his lips, Frenchie curved into an upright comma, an unwilling pause on deck.

  Behind the galley door, four striped butcher’s aprons hung, splattered with green and grey. Below them, neatly laid out like shoes in a children’s story, four pairs of gumboots. Karl handed me an apron; it drooped down to my shins; I tied a knot at the neck, marking it as mine.

  ‘I don’t need the
boots. I’m a barefoot girl.’

  ‘You need to wear them for this. There’s all sorts of shit that comes out of the sea and we need a working crew.’

  I slid my feet into the boots, toes curling at the damp, slightly sticky insides.

  He handed me a pair of thick plastic gloves, the colour of raspberry cordial. ‘You’ll need these too.’

  In the wheelhouse on the top deck, the skipper slipped the engine into reverse to make us slow and stop. Despite the slowing of the hulk of the Ocean Thief, everything else escalated: Karl leaping and shouting, the birds squawking, the sharks slipping closer. Everything around us could feel the change as the nets closed and drew to the surface. Karl held his arm up as he winched, calling for us to wait, to hold, to be ready. I had no idea what was happening, or how, but everything in my body was charged, on high alert, and I was soaring like the birds making circles at the stern of the boat.

  It was like a reverse birth when it happened: the mouth of the net and then of the water closing, a suspension while the winch connected to the straining nets. And then, on either side of the boat, an ascension of two nets, made sack-shaped with the life within them, the crush of shining scales, the shine of eyes. Karl heaved at the winch, and up the nets came, over and across. He called to me and Davey, and we tugged at the ropes, heaving the nets across to the midpoint of the boat, and while the skipper shouted at us to move it, to work faster, to shift our arses, we untied the nets and the mouths opened. Karl was whooping, arms raised in victory, but I watched the tumble of faces, of beings, of beauty, and my bubble blistered, festered, seeping something poisonous into me like pus.

  Everything had slowed as the nets lifted, but then it turned, escalating into a frenzy of noise and speed and action. The catch tumbled to the tray, thousands of fish, scores of species, all caught up with weed and clump and cockle shells. I tried to feel nothing, to be hard, but I watched a cod the size of my own body, its cartoonish lips fat and curved into a serious frown; I knew I was holding everything up, but the cod was brown and speckled grey, its wide eyes bulging right at me and I must not anthropomorphise, I must not anthropomorphise, but I swear it gazed right at me, right into me, with fear or desperation or the hope for help. Did cod feel hope? Desperation, surely. I must not anthropomorphise. But was the capacity to feel solely human? Then solely which sort of human? Those boys with their cars and their laughter and their door-locking, bra-flicking, dick-flashing; those boys, I must assume, believed my feelings to be different from, or less than, theirs. The cod’s mouth opened, lips back, tail flipping.