Fury

by Kathryn Heyman

  Outside, I washed the deck alongside Davey, then climbed onto the tray while Karl showed me how to check the nets, lifting, stretching, dropping. They were heavier than I expected, the weight pleasing. Balanced on the brink of the high tray, arms raised above me, I squinted up at the net.

  Frenchie tapped on my feet. ‘Cook.’ It wasn’t a command but a salutation.

  Fuck off, I thought. Cook is not my name and it’s not the job I want. He tapped again, his nails scraping on my ankle bone. I kicked his hand away.

  He tapped again. ‘Kacey. Come with me.’

  On the other side of the tray, his arms heaped with netting, Davey said, ‘Go. I’ll lay these out.’

  Frenchie took me by the arm, led me as though I were a pet or a horse to the long trench-like bucket, the glossy red emperor lying glazed in the small space, the eyes bulging. The engineer said, ‘I kill him. You cook him.’

  I must have looked blank. Or repulsed. I must have shown something on my face, because Frenchie pulled me closer to the fish, bobbed down to it so that we were both squatting alongside the tray. ‘Here—’ Frenchie pointed to the spine of the fish ‘—you will slice him. Lemons. Capers. Butter.’ He took a knife from his belt; sun glinted off the blade and—I couldn’t tell; was it a machete? Was it stained with oil or blood? Was it him, Frenchie, with his red eyes and yellow nails, who had circled the deck waving the machete on the Pearl? Was it him, after all, who threatened the mate, the decky, the girl?

  He raised the knife—the machete, I suppose—and sliced it down in a fast swoop, hitting a spot below the emperor’s gills. Pink scales quivered as the fish, glorious, gazing, twitched. Its mouth opened slightly. Blood trickled from the wound, swirling in the water. Frenchie squatted by the bucket, dabbing at the scales of the dying creature. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘This will be delicious. So now—’ he turned back to me ‘—we take him inside, I show you how to fillet him, and you cook him. Tonight, with bugs. This is the feast of the sea. It is why we are here.’

  The eye of the fish began to turn cloudy. I said, ‘I’m not cutting that fish and I’m not eating it. You can fillet it and I’ll put it in the oven.’ One fish, only one shining creature, and I stared at it, watching life leach from it.

  Frenchie peered at me. ‘You are sentimental. Just sentimental. They are here for us, for our use. That’s what they are for.’

  I stared at him for a moment, wondering whose use I was for.

  Frenchie cradled the fish—the size of a baby, a human one—and carried it into the galley. He said, ‘I do not wish to work on the deck today. Today, I will cook this feast. You do my work on the deck for me.’ He tied a half-apron about his waist and squatted down in front of the fridge, muttering to himself, then glanced up at me. ‘Go. I wish to be here.’

  Outside, I coiled the ropes and Karl showed me how to check the cable on the winch, how to sidle out to the trawling boom and test the chains that held the boards. Rust scratched into the soles of my bare feet, the heat scorching me, but when I hitched my arm over the upper beam and heaved at the chains, I was a warrior. Standing on the narrow beam with the silvery ocean glinting beneath me, I told myself that I was brave, as strong as a boy, as a man, as anyone.

  Later, we dropped the nets again as the sun set and the water began to boil. In the galley, Frenchie bustled—the red apron knotted about his waist, an array of knives and boards spread out on the thin bench. He was bright with pleasure, flicking scales away from the pink of the fish, pressing garlic cloves and whipping the skin away with one thumbnail. Awkwardly, uselessly, I offered to cook potatoes, and he glanced at me briefly, then shook his head. ‘I am happy here, and you—’ he nodded towards the deck ‘—you are happy there.’

  Such a simple thing, to be seen, to have your own desires seen; such a simple thing, such simple pleasure.

  Davey and I stood out on deck, faces to the wind, until the last of the light left. Frenchie called us in to the galley, presented a tray of fish baked with herbs and butter and sweet carrots. Instead of the diesel smell of beef, the air was rich with something golden and sweet, an overlay of garlic. The baize cloth was covered with dishes: creamy potatoes, broccoli and almonds, Moreton Bay bugs in a deep tomato stew. He was like a proud parent, bustling and pointing, demanding that we taste, notice, enjoy, and even Davey—wary of garlic, and of almonds, and of broccoli—piled a plate high, swallowing in a blissed silence.

  Frenchie squeezed beside me, so close that the hairs on his arm bristled on my skin. He said, ‘You taste the fish. This is food. Real food. Taste.’

  ‘I told you, I’m not eating it. I watched it die. I don’t want to eat it.’

  He slapped his hand on the table. ‘This is beautiful. This is for us.’ A tear dripped onto his long nose. ‘Why are you on a fishing boat, if you won’t eat this food? Why?’

  The table was silent then, Karl, Mick, Davey all watching the engineer squinting at me, his hand still on the table, his face wet while he waited for my answer. The scraping of plates, the chewing and swallowing, all was suspended while they waited.

  I moved some potatoes around on my plate and kept my eyes on my fork. I said, ‘I had nowhere else to go.’

  A pause while they each looked at each other, uncertain. And then Karl laughed. ‘Me too. That’s everyone in the gulf. Who else would have us?’

  After we ate, Frenchie said, ‘From now on, I cook. You do my deck work. Yes?’

  Yes, I said, yes.

  ‘I do only this and the engine room.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘But you clean up the dishes.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Later still, when the galley was empty and the last of the grease washed away, he added, ‘Kacey, you watch my back. I cover you, I cook, and you cover me. You watch my back for me.’

  Yes, I said again, of course yes, though I didn’t know—couldn’t know—what it might mean, to cover his back, to risk my own.

  Beneath me the churn of the engine was warm and soft, a soothing purr that lulled me. Already, time had become watery and I struggled to count the days I’d been on board. Lemony light beamed across my legs, angled up to make a resting place for my book. Lives of Girls and Women. I found it in the book exchange store in the Smith Street Mall in Darwin. I chose it for the cover—a headless man with a green field behind him—and for the glossy new smell of the pages. In front of me, the lines blurred, the yellow light flashing into shadow, the words tumbling. I thought about the story Frenchie told on my first night on the boat, of the cook and the engineer and the machete. I wondered how it might feel to hold a machete, to swing it. How it might feel, for instance, to find the barrister with the spot on his nose and the pointed chin, and to hold the machete up to his face, the gleam bouncing off it while I smiled. It was the barrister I wanted to find, or the horse-faced cop, more than the taxi driver. I didn’t know the driver’s name, I will never know his name, and later, when I try to find the records of my case, that will strike the records folk in the Office of Public Prosecutions as odd. Why would I not know his name? Why would I not notice, recall, attend? Why would a girl disconnect in that way?

  If I was innocent, I would remember. If I was innocent, if I’d been a good girl.

  The pages of Lives of Girls and Women were rough—a poor-quality print-run with some repeated pages. My thumb rubbed against a corner. I thought about the weight of the machete, about a headless man. Swing, flick, slice. Like Supergirl. Forgetting, pretending to forget, that I couldn’t even use my beautiful golden flick knife, not when it came to it. Outside, the water swirled while our nets trailed on the bottom of the seabed. Earlier, the surface had been calm and solid, glassy smooth. Now, all that perfect settled silt would be churned up, turned up, torn up. A mess would be made. I was being undone. I could feel it, could feel my tight hold on myself loosening, unravelling. Like the net, I was unbound, muddy memories emerging unbidden and unwelcome, the weight of me dropping, ready to be sorted.

  Half dozing, I felt t
he machete in my hands, the whip of it through the air, and it was Ben Billman I swung it at; Ben Billman, the red-faced next-door neighbour with his fat hands and his stumpy legs; Ben Billman, who owned the rented house that we lived in; Ben Billman, with the caravan in his backyard and the family of kittens and the oblivious wife. Ben fucking Billman. Silt should sometimes settle but now, with the engine shifting into a grunt beneath me, it churned up, the remembering and the rage and, when I finally told, the chorus of voices asking, ‘Why didn’t you say anything? Why did you hold your tongue?’

  I wasn’t alone. There were three of us. Three nine-year-old girls who took up jogging to keep ourselves trim because Nadia Comaneci was a tiny little girl and our gymnastics coach warned us that we were in danger of getting fat. And so we jogged past Ben Billman’s house until the day he invited us in to see his new caravan and we all went in and we all sat obediently while he stretched our leotards aside and peered at us and pressed his face to our private part, the soft little crease. One at a time we sat obediently on the strange little bed he had in there; one at a time we sat at the bench and didn’t look at each other’s faces; and one at a time, when we left his caravan, we agreed we would never speak of it again.

  It wasn’t me but Lisa O’Daniel who told. It was her mother who called the police. They knocked on the door of the house we rented from Ben Billman, a lady and a man police officer, and they sat outside with me and my mother and two of the sisters, and asked me all the questions, and later my mother said that Lisa O’Daniel had always been a liar and was I sure I wasn’t making this up to go along with her.

  After that, my mother went to bed, her head beneath the covers as she wept and wept for days.

  When I swing the machete in my imagination, his head topples, and then I swing it through his whole house: his wife is sliced in two, his pilot certificates are shredded, his leather recliner chairs are sliced into belt-sized pieces and with the strips of leather recliner I tie them up, both of them, all of them, the remains of them, and then I burn the house down and I stand outside and scream and scream and scream.

  But I don’t have a machete, I don’t have a sword, I don’t have a knife. I just have words. Thousands and thousands of them, and each time I swing another one, now, decades after all this, I feel my stomach tighten and the fear rise. It wasn’t the first time I wished I’d held my tongue, and not the last time I wished I’d kept my eyes closed. There’s purpose in letting things lie, reason in letting the silt settle.

  After three weeks on the Ocean Thief my palms were crisscrossed with cuts and calluses, I could haul the nets up myself and I had stopped counting out time in hours. We woke, gathered on deck and called across the escalation of the engines as the nets dropped in; we watched the sun come up and we watched it set. There were snatches of sleep, and then pounding at doors, and then we gathered again, hauling up, untying, watching the mass of life, of colour, of skin, toppling into the tray. Music blasted across the deck while we rinsed and scrubbed and sorted. We stumbled from sleep to waking, and our path grew more and more erratic as the catch got thinner and thinner. On quiet afternoons we folded boxes ready to fill with curved prawns. We folded and folded until Karl told us to stop, because the catch was slow, slower than he’d ever seen it, and we’d be waiting a long time to fill these bloody boxes. Nameless birds flocked on the trawling boom, on the gunwale, on the roof of the wheelhouse. Like the catch, I saw them at first as an unidentifiable mass: wings, beaks, squawking. Black or white, an occasional flash of brown.

  At night, when Mick was worn ragged, we took turns on watch, sitting up in the wheelhouse, observing the navigation lights of other trawlers dotting across the water. Alone in the wheelhouse, I felt myself to be finally, perfectly solitary. On deck, I was once more surrounded by moving, jostling male bodies, but here, there was silence and darkness. Just the flashing of the sonar, its vivid green lights a friendly beacon, the soft ping of the radar a comfort. And there was this, too, this perfect gift: the mistakes I made when talking, the awkwardness of being me, saying the wrong words, making the wrong sounds—no one cared on the Ocean Thief. Only one thing mattered: were you awake and ready for the catch? Nothing else counted, and it was like being untied. Beyond the wide booms of the Ocean Thief, there was perfect liminal space, without boundaries, without restriction. There was the dark curve of the horizon, the kiss of it against the sky. But within that endless space I was contained by fifty feet of steel.

  Mick had decorated the wheelhouse with shells and amulets: an amethyst on a cheap gold chain dropped from the ceiling; a faux-antique miniature chest was wedged into the shelf above the desk. Maps of the gulf, shaded in blues and browns, covered the table, and I traced my fingers over the lines that delineated the borders of property, of ownership, of territory. At the side of the table, a pine shelf was attached to the wall, each shelf fitted with its own railing so that the books and objects wouldn’t fall. There were no novels, just books on boats, game fishing, one on zoology. A paperback of How to Win Friends and Influence People, so battered that the cover had torn completely off. On my second night on watch—in my third week on board—I found a dusty hardback on the bottom shelf, half hidden by a child’s kaleidoscope. The Handbook of Australian Seabirds. The pages were sweet with the smell of high-quality glossy paper. With the fine beam of pale light overhead, I pored over the photographs until my shift was over and Davey clambered up the ladder, a cup of instant soup in his hand, and then I took the book with me, slipping it into the gap beside my bunk and the cool hull, my wall.

  Streaked shearwater. Lesser frigatebird. Caspian tern. In the quiet hours between catching and trawling, between waking and sleeping, I watched the birds lining up along the metal boom and began to name them. The forked tail of the frigatebird. The black hood of the tern. Cross-legged, my back against the sun-warmed wheelhouse, I pressed my fingers to the page, peering at the likenesses. Given names, given titles, the birds emerged into shapes, became less formless. Sometimes, an eastern osprey hovered above us, keeping perfect pace. One roseate tern returned each day, wherever we were, and stayed rooted to the boom while the wind buffeted it. Its wings spread wide when we were trawling, the long tail feathers trailing like kite strings as it sidled closer to the hull, looking down, waiting for our catch. One afternoon, Karl squatted beside me, asked what I was reading. Wordlessly, I flipped the cover closed and showed him the title. He said, ‘You into birds?’

  The cover was warm in my hands. ‘Not really. I just—there’s something powerful about knowing the names of things. About being able to name what is in front of you.’

  I thought of me and Sylvie listening to her father’s old Bob Dylan album, from the Messianic years, the low wailing voice listing the naming of the animals. Pig. Bear. Bull. Like a child’s version of Genesis. We thought it was ridiculous. Ridiculous words, ridiculous old voice. I had not yet learned the importance of naming, had not yet understood what putting words to things might mean, what power it might give me, how it might teach me to see.

  Karl looked at me, quiet. Then he said, ‘Kacey, Robbie’s got a girlfriend. I mean, another girlfriend.’

  ‘I know.’ I squinted out at the boom. A Caspian tern joined the flock, the beak a cheerful red pointer. I pointed to it. ‘Look—see how it’s got a different hood to the others?’

  Karl stayed sitting next to me, watching the tern sidling along the metal. I glanced at him, wondering whether it had been his idea to suggest this job to me, to get me out here on the Ocean Thief, away from land, away from Robbie, or whether it had been Robbie’s. It didn’t matter. I was here, on board, and I wasn’t going back.

  There was no book in the wheelhouse shelves that told me what the fish were that we hauled out and threw back in as mere waste, not useful for our purposes: the smooth silvery ones, the ones with sharp pointed spines, the ones with narrow long eyes. There wasn’t a book to give me a name for my own particular pain, the set of things that had led me there, onto that boat. But I
knew my own names, some of them at least. When I was eight, one of my Christmas books was a satisfying hardback, a gift from my father’s new wife, called Hebe’s Daughter. The girl in the book—who became a teenager, then a woman—was called Elizabeth, and Betty, and Hebe’s daughter. Different names for different people.

  When I was seven—before I read Hebe’s Daughter, before my father found his new wife—I waited with other kids in the afternoons to catch a bus. Because we had a new house, away from my father, and I had to catch the bus from my old school to my new house. The bus stop was in front of a pub, the Commercial, with individual balconies above the street. Inside the pub, in a dark room on the first floor, my father stayed, and in the afternoons he came out to his own balcony and waved to me or called me inside. Once, he let me have lemonade from the pub, in a round glass with Commercial Hotel engraved on the side and a special paper umbrella.

  And in those afternoons, while I waited for the bus in front of the Commercial Hotel, if anyone came near me, if anyone spoke to me or asked me where I lived or called me names that I did not choose, I bit them. My father saw me bite a bigger boy and he lifted me up in front of the other kids and stared down at my face and he called me a little fury and I puffed up with pride. After that, the big kids called me Little Fury, or sometimes Little Cannibal. Each time they said it, I bared my teeth and growled, warning them off.