‘Kacey! Get on it!’ Mick hollered from the upper deck and he was right: this was not the time to be gazing dully at a dying fish. Still, I called back over my shoulder, to Davey, to Frenchie, to anyone who would listen, calling for help to lift and heave the cod back to the sea. They both helped, grunting with the weight of it, and we shuffled to the portside and dropped it in. Water fountained up around it; a shudder on the surface, and then it was gone, dropping down as quickly as rain.
Karl shouted something at me, gesturing towards a heavy hose, and I swung it into the tray while he blasted the water in. A small shark flipped beneath me, and I picked it up by the tail, ran to the gunwale, and heaved it out, dropping it into the water. We didn’t want sharks. We didn’t want cod, or this beautiful rainbow-scaled fish looking me right in the eye, its gills contracting in the wrong air, its lips puckering. We wanted the curved green prawns that scrabbled in the middle of the catch.
I didn’t expect it to be so industrial-loud. I didn’t expect the metal trays, and the chutes washing the life down, letting us sift and sort and throw, until the chutes expelled what was left back to the ocean. For a while, I tried to extract the larger creatures: the bream, the trevally, the sailfish. At first, I saw them, the large flailing fish, and I slipped my hands under the wet scales, the slippery slide of them, and I threw them into the sea, then ran back to the chute. Legs straddled against the rocking deck, we positioned ourselves on either side of the tray. At first, I reached and threw, reached and threw. Reached for the spiky green tail of a green prawn and tossed it to the chute, threw a reef shark, a bream, a coral trout back to the ocean. But I couldn’t keep up, I couldn’t rescue the undeserving fish, couldn’t throw enough of them back, and they kept coming, shooting down in streams. My gloved hands seemed disconnected from the rest of my body; bright red in the gloves, rapidly moving, thoughtless. Karl grinned at me from the other side of the chute and shouted, ‘Catch more money!’ and I remembered then why I was there, where it would lead me. My hands moved faster, grabbing for the tentacles or tails, the green sharp against the silver and grey and white. I saw only the throng, the heaving pile of scale and spike and skin as an amorphous whole, a spongy mass. Fish dropped down past me, no longer gasping for air, and in the higher ends of the tray the larger fish thrashed only lightly in the low water.
Something red flashed near me on the tray and Frenchie yelped. Gleeful, child-like, he bolted past me, shouting at Karl to hold off on washing the catch down the tray. Striped apron slapping at his knees, roll-up still drooping from his mouth, he heaved himself up to the tray until he stood in the metal sea of dying fish. His knees looked bony above the wide lip of his gumboots.
‘What the fuck, Frenchie?’ Mick’s hands were clean, but above us, from the upper deck, he saw everything, like God.
Frenchie was doubled over, elbows wide. When he stood again, he was holding a reddish fish in both arms, cradling it like a baby, and shouting. Karl shouted back; above the wash on the trays and the engine I couldn’t hear the words until the wash of water stopped.
‘Red emperor. Red emperor for dinner. And bugs.’ For the first time, Frenchie was grinning, prancing on the deck in his clumpy boots and grimy apron. Under Frenchie’s instruction, Davey filled one of the trench-like buckets with extra water, and Frenchie dropped the gleaming fish into it.
I couldn’t bear to look at it, but when I went back to the chute my hands began moving again, but not fast enough, not precise enough. The catch shot down, faster, and I stopped noticing, stopped connecting with the gills, with the lips, with the creatures thrashing without water. I no longer paused to deliver fish back to the ocean, no longer held the catch up so that I could save one creature from the slow suffocation of breathing air when it should be in water. Now, I reached, flicked, threw; it was a game, only a game. My hands, red, shining, grabbed prawns and threw them to the side chutes. The speed became numbing, the endless sweep of scale and skin indifferent. Catch more money. Catch more money. I reached, sorted, threw, racing against myself and against the nauseating swell rising in my stomach until the rush of fish and crustaceans slowed.
And then it was over.
The lower deck made me think of the aftershock of a children’s party, with streamers scattered across tables, crisps and chocolates trodden underfoot, torn crepe paper banners. Instead of chocolate trodden underfoot, it was small fish. Trails of skin and weed were strewn across the stern, tiny white fish—sand whiting perhaps—flipped about the deck; scattered across the tray not streamers but lengths of knobbly weed and seagrass. It was as though we’d spent the last hour in a frenzied food fight, throwing fish and grass and water at each other while music pounded.
The frenzy and the greed were gone, and now it was just the shabby remnants. We hosed and swept and washed; we rinsed the nets and tied them neatly above the tray; we coiled ropes and we watched the sharks slowly drifting behind us. We laid the catch out in white cardboard boxes, weighing and counting. Karl checked and rechecked, shaking his head. And finally, when the deck was empty and the sharks had disappeared and there was once more just the twinkling gold of the fleets of trawlers across the water, then we peeled off our gloves, stepped out of the slimy boots and fell into our respective cabins.
Lying in the cabin, my body shook slightly, the lack of sleep burning in my veins like a drug. Fibreglass shards brushed against my hand inside the bunk. The colour of fibreglass, the mottled tan of the underside, the fibres threading through it, even the chemical smell—they made me think of flesh. Of the inside of a brain, of something troubling, something almost dead but once alive.
This was where I could be safe. Here, surrounded by strangers; here in this almost dead bunk, here in the dark. Beneath me, the engine thrummed, cradling me. Humming like a song; warming me, too. Lying there, I wished again, more than before, that I’d been born different, or elsewhere, or to someone else. Anything but what I had. Anything but me.
I hadn’t known, hadn’t anticipated, the way my body would shake with work, would unravel with exhaustion. I didn’t anticipate, didn’t know, that this unravelling would come with a stirring up of the past, a tearing up of memory. While we churned the depth of the gulf, my carefully buried memories churned and swam up. I’d been dancing, shouting over the sound of my own story. On the Ocean Thief, with such a narrow field of distraction, everything that I’d been shouting over—all the din, all the churning mud—came swimming up. And I was not ready.
Darkness then. The muffle of sleep. Spit drying on my lips, the depths of sleep so dreamless, exhaustion carrying it down. What a pleasure it is, that sudden and seamless descent, the going under, the giving over, the annihilation of the self.
There is a time before the word, before understanding how the word could give shape, give power, give reason. There is only jumbled confusion: the shape of him, his large booming voice; the tucked-away shape of her, the wetness of being swallowed by her. There is another shape then—or, rather, the absence of a shape. It is merely sound: my sister crying, a key turning in a lock, footsteps walking away, another door closing. The sound of my mother going away to rest.
This is before language, before words. So even these things—shape, sound, swallow—they are inventions. I have only the feeling, made formless without language. Without language, what I know is this: those feelings are too big for me. They will swallow me up and destroy me. I will be annihilated.
Annihilated is a word I learn later. Aunty June, who is not my aunty, is looking after me. Sally is her daughter and I love Sally more than I love any other person. And I want to be in their family. Aunty June irons clothes in the middle of the day, the sweet smell of Fabulon and water steaming the air while the television murmurs. There are people kissing on the television, and then a lady slaps a man and cries; I am very quiet because I know that Aunty June has forgotten I am here and, if she sees me, she won’t let me watch the kissing. The kissing makes me feel crumbly in my pants. At the start of the show there is
an hourglass, like the egg timer on Aunty June’s stovetop, and sand goes through it and the man you can’t see but can only hear says that the sand is like the days of our lives.
In the corner of Aunty June’s lounge room, I arrange my Fuzzy Felt—giraffe kissing elephant, lion putting his mouth on lady lion—and think about the days of our lives and the hourglass and then I think about it some more. When the program ends and there is another program, but still with people slapping and kissing and crying, I think about it some more. And I still don’t understand how sand or glass is like me, like my days. I count on my hand how many years I am—three—and I think that when I start kindy and I am four, I will ask the teacher. The teacher will know everything, and she will tell me all the things.
It’s on the hourglass show that annihilated happens. Aunty June turns over one of Uncle Doug’s shirts, sprinkling water on it from the pale yellow Tupperware cup. Crispness creases the air and a small puff of steam rises. Something happens on the screen in the corner and Aunty June puts the iron down on the ironing board, turns her face towards the screen. Something good is happening, something that might give me the crumblypants feeling again, and so I go very quiet, very invisible, the way I have taught myself, and I watch the people inside the television box. They are not kissing but shouting and the man puts his hands on the lady’s shoulders, and he shouts right in her face: I will annihilate you. And then he kisses her against the wall, and she kisses him right back.
Annihilate. I turn it over and over in my mouth, whispering it so quietly that Aunty June thinks I am singing or mumbling. She doesn’t know all the thoughts and all the words I am storing up. I store them up to save me. Annihilate.
Later I take a crayon and I think about the word. I have a sheet of butcher’s paper from Firth’s Butchers on the corner of Fourth Street, and it is spread right across the back porch of Aunty June’s house. The sound of the word is so sure, and I make it there on the butcher’s paper, in green crayon and in ugly purple, the ugliest of all the colours. Right across the paper it goes, tearing the corners with its sharpness and then I walk on the paper, walk right there on the word, stomping around it and over it. When Sally comes home from kindy, I will tell her what I have learned because she is not the only one who gets to learn things. Here on the back porch of her house words are being made, and it’s almost as good as school.
The screen door squeaks and then crashes. Round hinges keep it open sometimes and then when it closes it makes the sound of a thunder-clap. Aunty June has a peanut butter sandwich for me, on a yellow plastic plate. She walks around the word carefully and then she says, ‘We’ll fold up your picture now,’ and she gathers up the paper and puts it away.
‘It’s not a picture,’ I say. ‘It’s writing.’
And this is the only time I hate Aunty June, when she laughs and says, ‘Writing? Words?’ As if there is something funny and not terrifying about my ugly purple on the butcher’s paper. When my mother comes to collect me at the end of the day the two of them stand on the back step talking quietly and I hear Aunty June say to my mother, ‘Funny little thing, isn’t she? Scribble all over the place, but she’s convinced she’s writing words.’ My mother laughs too. Annihilate.
I can hear them that night. I can hear her saying, Please, Joe, no, Joe, please, and I can hear him with his shouting, and I can hear the thumping against the wall, the wetness of her, the crying of her, and I blanket myself with words. Tucking myself under them, the warmth of them, I think of my hand holding not a crayon but a pencil, making mark after mark on the page, and they will be words and people—all the grown-ups even—will hear them and see them. In the room next door there is just weepy breathing and him being the worst kind of quiet, too quiet. My hand holding the pencil; I can see it. Curving the letters one after the other and the letters make words and the words can pile up one after the other and they can be warm, and they can make a wall.
There are other things we don’t say. Words that stay beneath us and, if they are spoken, we let them fall to the ground and we look away, pretend that we have not seen or heard. Uncle Doug is a drunk. The painter is ugly. My father has a mistress.
Outside, later, the moon is low over the Sweeneys’ roof at the end of the street and I’ve woken from the dream of flying, swimming through the air like a puppy or a princess. Something has woken me, a loud wail, getting louder, the sound of her in the dining room outside my door, crying onto the table. Moon still pulsing, I fly myself down from above Boolaroo, down from above the upturned faces of my sisters watching, mouths open. Now I am here, on my bunk, listening to her crying outside. She gets louder and louder. It is not necessary for her to say the words, Come out here and pat me like a puppy or a princess. I know that this is what the words in the air, the ones not spoken, are saying. I stand beside her, patting her on the back, waiting for her to stop crying and to say, I saw you flying. Or: Time for sleep. Anything. But instead of that she cries and cries and cries and, ‘Thank you,’ she says, ‘for making me feel better. Stay here for a minute and cuddle me some more.’
I pat her back and feel myself disappearing into the well of her sadness. I think of the words, of all the things I can name, the steps that will make a ladder to get me out of here. I think about moon and I think about bait, the word I saw on the side of the new fish-and-chip shop in Speers Point. Ba-it. I can make the sounds in my head, I can understand the letters now, but I can’t understand the word, and there is too much sadness and noise around to ask. Bait, I think. Moon. And I pat her back, whispering the words, making a ladder to climb me out of the well.
Before dawn, there was the pounding again on my door, and a repeat of the net rising, pulling in, sorting and washing. On deck, the red emperor gazed up blankly from the plastic trench and I looked away, at the tray, at the tip of the trawling booms, anywhere else. Once more we hauled up a fat, full net; once more I looked away from the mass of glazed eyes; once more I threw small sharks to the sea, and once more I sifted prawns in a frenzy, until I couldn’t see the individual creatures flipping and gasping on the tray. In the middle of the rush I saw only a mass, nameless, shapeless, and a job I had to do. Straining at the winch, hauling up the net, I saw only the thing I needed: money. Once more the tray emptied, leaving only fleshy remnants. Red light, then gold, washed over the gulf, and then over the Ocean Thief as the sorting came to an end. At the bow, a pod of dolphins surfed, squeaking and flipping, the low sun glinting off their backs. Karl scratched numbers into the columns in the black book, shaking his head again, then swung to the upper deck in two moves. Below him, I hosed out the tray, slapping at the last tendrils while Karl and the skipper stood on the upper deck, huddling together, arms folded, looking at the wide horizon.
Between the open deck and the enclosed space of the galley and the cabins, a canopy covered a series of metal benches and sinks. There, we left our boots and aprons, and there, we boxed up the catch while Karl blasted music across the deck. Always music with gravelly men singing about their needs and their wants, or about long road journeys where they’re going to get their girl. So loud that we had to shout across it; so loud that even the seabirds fluttered away. Like hell’s antechamber, or heaven’s, depending on what time of day you walked through it.
I was tugging my boots off under the canopy, ready to sleep again, when Karl hissed in my ear, ‘Breakfast.’
I nodded. ‘I’ll put some toast on.’
‘For real, Kacey? We need food. Real food. Eggs. Sausages.’
Nausea rose in my mouth at the thought of pink sausage flesh, the spots of mince escaping into pimples on the skin; the stink of the meat, the way it would fill the small galley. I nodded miserably and began grabbing eggs from the industrial-sized fridge. On the bottom shelf I found a tub of pink sausages and some watery-looking tomatoes, and I moved things around in the family-sized frying pan until it seemed like a meal, like something that the fisherman in a John West-the-Best commercial would eat.
The skipper droppe
d the anchor, and after the rattling grind of the anchor chain there was the sudden shock of silence. Engine off. Chain stilled. The bass and rattling guitars of Cold Chisel hushed. A brief murmur from the wheelhouse where Karl and Mick were laying out routes and charts, and then, nothing. Like a blanket being dropped over us; perfect stillness, perfect quiet.
We ate, leaving scrapes of sauce and sausage fat and tomato flesh spread across plates and the sticky baize tablecloth and finally, finally, finally, the galley was empty. There was at last just me, and there was quiet. For a moment, at least. Suds bubbled warmly on my wrists while I scraped and rubbed at the thick white dishes. I thought about my mother, about trips she did with Neil—and before that, with my father—when the men would do the driving, and the planning, and the tinkering with engines or maps or rudders, and the ladies—my mother and whichever wife was accompanying her—did the cooking and wrapping and thinking about food. Sometimes they arranged boat trips, motoring out to the scabby sand island in the middle of Lake Macquarie in my stepfather’s little half-cabin. The men would stand by the shore discussing maps and routes, traffic, the best use of boat ramps and winch power. The women huddled around eskies and rugs, discussing recipes and food: the preparing, the eating and the withholding of food. Voices sharply bright, ready to turn to a spiky snap, they listed ingredients and then patted at their own thighs, tutting. The men looked at the outside world, at how to navigate it, and the women looked at the body. How to nurture it, how to feed it, how to control it. Annoyance simmered in me, the way it did in those women.
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