‘Beautiful bastards. Murderous.’
‘No, mate. They’re always in there, but how many times have you been bitten? How many times have I? And I spend half my life in the water.’
Mick wasn’t giving in, though. ‘Knew a bloke in Geraldton, got his leg taken. Fricken white pointer.’
Karl’s eyes were dots of shine in the lowering light. ‘Mate, you can’t blame a whole species for that.’
Some, only some. Mick slipped back into the wheelhouse, started up, and the bow dipped a little as the engine took hold. I watched the water ruffle and rise ahead of me. Four men on a boat and me, and not one of them intending to do me harm. Not because I was sober, and not because I was not wearing silky underwear. Not because of anything I did or did not do. I simply was not their prey.
I stayed on the bow deck until the light left, watching them take it all, until the surface was only scattered with innards and thin trails of blood, and then we hauled up and started again, up and down all through the night.
On those wild nights when the wind whipped the waves into a frenzy, we felt only freedom. Airborne, wind making a choral harmony outside, my arms up, my legs loose. Flying, that was what it felt like. Beneath me, the floor of the galley rose up again, and I arrived, softening my knees the way I’d learned to in primary school gymnastics lessons. Another swell, the tub of the Ocean Thief riding up the wave, teetering on the smooth crest and dropping down. In that instant, the second between arrival at the crest and dropping to the base of the next swell, we jumped. Me, Karl and Davey, shrieking like kids. This might be the closest I would get to flight, the nearest I could get to freedom. At first, when the wind hammered and howled and the boat started to teeter on the wild swell, fear swelled in me, equal to the storm. Large enough to swallow me up. But, as it grew, Karl demonstrated the leaping-flying technique: jumping into the air as the boat rose, and the drop down giving a moment of flying.
Too wild to sleep, and too dangerous to winch the nets up, we squeezed around the galley table while Frenchie made hot chocolate that splashed across our faces. We shared more stories, and I swallowed them up, took them into my own self, and then the wind slowed, and we went out on deck. Moonlight made white patches against the A-frame and my chorus of terns teetered on the booms, their feet curved around the narrow bars. It was the moonlight, not our own artificial beams, that showed up the sword sticking through the net as we began to haul it up. That deep teardrop of net, fat and full of fish layered on top of each other, eyes pressing, bodies twitching. Halfway down, a swordfish: as large as a shark, its long, serrated sword breaking the line of the catch. I swear I could see its eye looking up at me.
Karl hung over the gunwale, peering down at the net. With each lift, each turn of the winch, the catch plunged a little more. When a woman is about to give birth, the baby descends into the cervix, easing its way down into the pelvic area, engaged, ready to travel through the birth canal. And this is what the net was like, the catch engaging, weight dragging. With each shift, each drop, the swordfish serrated the net, tearing bigger and bigger holes, risking the whole catch. Over the thump of the engine, Karl was shouting something, calling for Frenchie to bring his machete.
‘Kacey, go down to the engine room and get Frenchie. I need his machete.’
I hollered back. ‘Why?’
He was still draped over the gunwale and turned his head back so that his hair twirled out like a skirt. He hid nothing, ever, Karl. I could see the snap in him. ‘For real? Just get it.’
I backed away, but I hated that engine room with its dark and heat and constant engine churn. I hated being closed in. I hated the feeling that I couldn’t escape, that I was trapped, that the noise would press in on me, escalating the noise in my own head.
Davey put his hand on my wrist. ‘I’ll go.’ He clambered down the ladder to the engine room while the boat rocked.
We didn’t hear him fall, didn’t hear the thud or call or crack of bone. We only felt the lurch of the Ocean Thief when another wave hit; my feet slid from under me and I grabbed at the tray, pulled myself to standing. Another rise, another fall, and it was Frenchie who climbed out of the engine room and handed Karl the knife.
Karl said, ‘Where’s Davey?’
Frenchie nodded back at the engine room hatch, said, ‘He went on his arm. It cracked. The boy is crying. Here is the knife.’
And behind him, Davey, holding his arm across his waist. He was pale in the pearly light on deck, doubled over and moaning.
‘What happened?’
‘Fell on my arm. It’s—I think it’s broken. I can’t—it really hurts. I’m sorry.’
‘What for?’
‘If we have to go in …’
‘We won’t. I’m sure we won’t. I guess we—I mean, a splint? We could bandage it?’
‘Help Karl first.’
But Karl was already crabbing along the trawling boom. The water had calmed a little, and he’d strapped the knife to his belt. Glinting in the moonlight, it looked ready to slice his leg. The sword of the fish was halfway down the net, sandwiched between tonnes of fish still—for the moment—living, flipping, flailing. Below the boom, the boards dangled, a loose platform. When the nets went in, these boards parted, holding the mouth of the net open. When the nets were lifted, the boards hung below the boom, moving but stable. Karl lifted himself down to the board, while Frenchie and I watched anxiously from the safety of the deck and Davey doubled over, holding his wounded arm.
Karl scrambled down, his arms hanging below the boards, reaching down to the net. Still not close enough, he stretched his body out and swung from the net itself, slicing, sawing at the sword of the living creature caught there until, with a savage cut, he tore it free. In the dark, I couldn’t see the blood, but I knew it was there, and when Karl climbed back onto the deck, holding the sword aloft like a prize, I couldn’t look at him.
‘What?’ he said. ‘What did you think I was going to do?’
‘I thought you were going to release it. Let it go.’
‘How? Why?’
‘I don’t know how.’ I was shouting now, my throat tight. ‘But you’d do it because you’re a decent person. Because we’re here to catch prawns, not—I mean, it’s like a dolphin—it’s—’ And there I was, crying, like a baby, like a girl.
‘Don’t be such an idiot, Kacey. What did you think we were here for? How did you think you were going to get what you wanted without killing some fish, for fuck’s sake?’ It was the first time, the only time, that I saw Karl’s face change with anger. ‘How about thank you? I didn’t notice you going out to solve the problem.’
‘I’d have opened the nets.’
‘Then you’re definitely an idiot.’
‘And you’re a brutal fucking bastard.’
‘You’re crying for one fish. It doesn’t even make sense.’
It was true. It didn’t. And I didn’t have the words, not properly, to say that it was easier to feel compassion for one creature suffering in front of you then it was to feel compassion for a whole species, for several species. I hadn’t properly understood that compassion was not weakness. Words were simple tools for Karl, designed to do one simple job; he didn’t have the word hypocrite in his vocabulary, but I did. I shouted again, ‘You’re a brutal bastard,’ and I’d have stormed off like a teenager, slamming the door behind me, but there was nowhere to storm to. We still had a full net to haul in and to sort, a full night’s work ahead. I tried to keep my anger fuelled, topping it up with a list of injustices, but Karl had let it go before the catch was fully in, letting it swim away from him with no trace.
Plastic and shiny, the red needle slicked slightly in my sweaty hand. Legs stuck out in front of me, the weight of the net crushing on my knees, I watched Karl, mimicking the way his hand slipped under and over, knotting quickly. He squatted, his fingers moving like fish through the net. Davey had turned a tub upside down and sat on it primly, the net falling away from him like a wedding dress
train, his bandaged arm with the improvised splint folded uselessly on his lap.
It wasn’t holes in the nets causing a lack of catch, Karl said, it was dodgy finding, bad storms and too many, way too many, boats in the gulf. But the swordfish—he turned his body away from me, looked down at the needle in his hand—the swordfish had made a fierce bloody hole. In spite of everything.
At night, during so many nights, we watched the lights of scores of trawlers dropping in and out, signalling to each other. During those nights, and the days that led to them, I huddled in my bunk, or on the upper deck, watching my terns on the booms, the ones I had come to know, and I scribbled in my journals. I’d brought three of them with me, hard-backed, with cream-coloured pages, lined in grey. Contained by the Ocean Thief, crowded in by the sea and by storm, memories were swirling up at me. I had nowhere to put them but on the page, trying to wrestle them back to silence, back to invisibility, where I’d kept them for so many years.
Sometimes, we heard news of one crew or another. Bad news usually, flickering across the water like light. One of the old trawlers from a Cairns fleet had flipped and only three of the crew were found alive. Three boats from a rival fleet had gone into shore, abandoning the dubious catch after the last clutch of storms. A police boat had gone out to the Sea Beast and three marine cops climbed on board. Word had travelled via the radio that something was up, and Frenchie squinted at the action through his binoculars while Mick told him to mind his fucking business. The cops were on board, their white and blue boat tied alongside the Sea Beast, its booms dipping up then down. After minutes—half an hour perhaps, maybe longer—the police climbed back down onto their boat, taking with them the cook, wrapped in a reflective blanket. On that day, I’d slapped Frenchie on the leg, said, ‘How do you know it’s the cook?’ He kicked me away as though I were a fly and said, ‘It’s a girl.’
‘You’re not a girl, Frenchie, and you do the cooking on our boat.’
‘That’s only because you are a very bad cook.’
I’d grinned up at him. ‘But a very good deckhand.’
Frenchie looked down at Karl then, eyebrows raised, and Karl shrugged. ‘Not a completely useless deckhand.’ He paused. ‘Not the worst deckhand.’
When the police boat sped away, making a wide white wake, taking the blanket-wrapped cook with them, I’d climbed up to my perch on the upper deck. Huddled near the boom, I watched the terns and frigatebirds buffeted by the wind, and I thought about the girl with the marine policeman’s arm about her, and although I did not know, not really, what had happened to her, I felt unreasonably grateful for the simple fact of being on a boat with four men who would not hurt me. I was swollen with gratitude because they chose to honour the most basic of human exchanges.
Now, with the net spread across our knees, Karl said, ‘We were all blokes on my first boat. No girls.’
I wondered what his point was. No girls to shout and cry and carry on and make a fuss? There was just me and Karl and Davey on the deck; Mick was holed up in his cabin or the wheelhouse, too unsure of his own authority to hang with us.
And Frenchie: who knew where he was at any time? In the galley with a dirty checked tea towel tied about his waist or hiding out in the engine room. I’d been down there twice, only twice. Cloistered in that dark and hot space, where the engine thrummed and sweltered, I thought I would suffocate. For Frenchie, it was as inviting as a womb.
Davey tucked his bandaged wrist into his belly. For the fifth time, or the sixth, he said, ‘I’m sorry I can’t help. Stupid—’ He looked down at the improvised splint. ‘So fucking clumsy.’
‘It’s okay, Davey.’ To Karl, I said, ‘No girls, huh? How did that end up? Good catch?’
His curls shook. ‘We sank.’
I tied off the net, my knot a messy lump in the centre. ‘Sank metaphorically? Or sank for real?’
‘What the fuck’s metaphorically mean?’ Karl’s teeth were neat little squares; his mouth made the shape of an arrow when he smiled. ‘We sank. The nets were lodged, the boat went over, took water and went under. We sat in the tender, waiting, until another trawler came along and then we hitched a ride with that. They were all pissed, and we drank what was left of their bourbon, then passed out in the wheelhouse.’
‘Jesus. I mean—what happened?’
‘I just told you. We sank.’
‘That’s it? You really know how to spin a story.’
He laughed. ‘I come from a storytelling people.’
Davey snorted. ‘It must have skipped you, mate.’
Stripes of shade and sun danced across the deck and across our legs, lazy heat baking into our bones. I slung the net across my lap. ‘Yeah. Skipped a generation, or the gene mutated.’
Davey tilted his head at me. I could almost see his ears cocking. He’d left school at fifteen, and missed the knowledge that I took for granted, that I’d hungered for, that I held close to me, hoarding it. Trying to make my eyes glint mysteriously, I said, ‘I come from a storytelling people too.’
‘What? White trash?’ Karl was, I suppose, allowed to say it because I’d said it once to him, jokingly. But still it stung.
‘Great-grandfather William was a German Jew.’ But the truth was, I knew nothing of him, not of any of them, and I didn’t want to have to answer to them. I returned to the sinking. ‘Was the boat salvaged?’
‘Nah. Under without a trace. With my best fucking sneakers.’
‘But you wanted to come back for the next season?’
‘Fuck, yeah. What else would I do?’
I thought back to the night around the galley table, with that question burning: why, why are you here? And the only answer, for all of us: there’s nowhere else I can go. I tugged the last knot on the net and slung it back to the deck, wriggled my legs. Like doo-wop backing singers, Davey and I repeated Karl’s refrain. ‘Fuck, yeah.’
We laughed as we said it, in unison like that, and held up our hands like schoolkids, linking fingers, calling ‘Jinx, jinx, double-jinx,’ and we were still laughing when Mick clambered down the ladder to the stern deck. We stopped laughing quickly; he had that effect. It wasn’t that we were frightened of him, but that we felt sorry for him, for the way he stood on the fringe all the time, his hands tapping at his belt, his beard twitching while he decided whether to speak or remain mute. He nodded at Karl and said, ‘Right. We’re going to head down to Bonaparte.’
At the tip of Australia there are two long promontories. As a child, they seemed elegant to me, a perfect balance, appearing on maps as twin daggers. Between these two capes is the Gulf of Carpentaria. On the western side of one of these points—the Northern Territory—is Bonaparte Gulf, leading into the Timor Sea. Named for Joseph, Napoleon’s brother. There are two seasons for trawling: one, during the winter storms, is in the exposed Bonaparte Gulf. Here are the fat banana prawns. By the end of winter, the boats move to Carpentaria, and to the thinner tiger prawns. We were now in the season for tigers.
The last of Karl’s laugh dropped away, sank. He dropped the net to the deck but stayed squatting, his bare feet solid on the deck. ‘Bonaparte? Why?’
‘We’re not catching anything here.’ Mick nodded towards the boats surrounding us. ‘Too much competition. No one’s down in Bonaparte.’
‘That’s because the season there is over. Bananas ended two months ago.’
‘Six weeks ago. We can catch the back end of it.’
‘We’re here to catch tiger prawns. It’s tiger season. We’re not taking banana prawns back. Anyway, we’ll be too exposed in the storms.’ Karl stood up, folded his arms. ‘Seriously, skipper, there’s a reason no boats are down in Bonaparte.’
Mick shook his head. ‘Yep, well, as you say, I’m the skipper, and we’re going to Bonaparte.’
‘We’ll lose four days’ fishing to get there.’
‘It’s worth it. Can’t be worse, anyway.’
But, as was the case with so many things, he was wrong.
He ta
kes the stand. His cheeks are round. Dark hair covers his chin. Thick shoulders, thick hands. Meaty: that’s the word you would use to describe his hands, the word I would use. Someone has advised him well on his wardrobe; I look over to his wife, small, dark-haired, her legs neatly crossed at the ankles. He wears a navy tie that matches almost perfectly the dress she wears. He says, ‘I thought to myself, well, she is a pretty girl, but that is all. I would not even kiss her unless she said yes.’ He shrugs, smiling, and the jury look over at me. Sitting opposite his wife, I’m aware that I will seem plump, my arms flabby despite the weeks of barely eating. Despite those dieting days, my chin has an extra layer, an almost-double that wobbles when I turn my head too quickly. I watch the shine on his face as he speaks, his mouth wet and troubling beneath the thick beard. On the other side of the courtroom, his wife dabs at her eyes. Her nails are long, painted shell-pink.
I am not on trial, the prosecutor said. But already the jury are comparing us. His delicate fine-boned wife, newly emigrated to be with her husband, and me, with anger blazing in every scrape of my hair, every red blotch on my face. It’s true, when I tied my hair back, resisting any instinct to fluff a tiny fringe out, to soften it, I mouthed, ‘Fuck you,’ at the mirror. If I could stand in the middle of the courtroom and scream those words now, the way I shouted them in the middle of the field while Tony de Ropp and his idiot friend skidded around me, I would. It worked with those early high school boys, astonished by my breasts, but my anger can’t save me now.
My dress is a shiny polyester, an unappealing beige. My chest is bare of jewellery but, anyway, I am covered by the beige polyester, the square neckline cutting at the base of my neck so that not even a trace of chest or clavicle can be seen. I hesitated over black tights—were they too saucy? Too sexy? After all, on the night I got into that taxi my legs were bare below my short skirt, but my boots—it could, and would, be argued—created a deliberately tempting eyeline, a teasing gap between thigh and knee that invited the eye and therefore, inevitably, the hand. If I’d gone looking for the least flattering item of clothing, this would be it. Sexless, schoolmarmish. I bought it the previous year for a fancy-dress party. I went as a public servant. I thought I was hilarious.
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