by Neil Grant
‘In the village, they’d always come to your dadu for solutions. He was a solution-wala. From a very good family.’
‘Fishing’s been our family business forever.’
Didima steals Rudra’s hand. Hers is warm from the cha cup. ‘Listen to me, Rudra. The sea doesn’t care about you. Why should you care about it?’
‘I don’t know if I want to keep on with school.’
‘But you are clever, Rudra. Just the right amount of education, na?’
‘Didima, you don’t know that.’
‘I know our family, and we are all clever. Your dadu was a solution-wala. He worked on solutions. For the whole village, Rudra. And it was a big village we came from.
‘He was wise and kind, your dadu, and your mother, she was clever. But she and her foolish choices, they were the undoing of her. There is a difference between wisdom and cleverness. She wasn’t so wise sometimes.’
‘Didima, you can’t say that.’
‘I can say it, and I will. I won’t stay silent and let you become an Australian.’
The words shock Rudra. ‘But I am Australian, Didima.’
‘That’s preposterous. You are my grandson. We are a clever family.’
Rudra lets it pass. Tries another tack. ‘Your father was a honey-gatherer.’
Didima drops Rudra’s hand. ‘Who told you that?’
‘Mum.’
‘But my husband was a solution-wala. A big man in the village. The village is one of the biggest in the Sundarbans.’
‘What’s wrong with being a honey-collector?’
‘Anyone can be a honey-collector. Or a fisherman.’ She spits the word and looks hard into Rudra’s eyes. Then she takes his hand again, so gently. ‘Your mother went to school and university in Kolkata. She was such a clever girl.’
‘She still is, Didima.’
He pulls his hand from Didima’s. ‘I’ll get Mum,’ he says.
‘Rudra,’ she calls as he escapes the kitchen.
There have been big hauls up the Hawkesbury – past Peats Ferry Bridge and towards the lower stretches out to Flint and Steel. The town has been alive with the news, fishermen wheeling crates of prawns down the pier, beers shouted in the pub. Everyone in on the game. Out on Paper Tiger Cord Solace works in fuming silence, piecing her tired motor back together for the fourth time this season.
Eventually, she is ready to go. Just after midnight, Cord, Wallace and Rudra motor away from Patonga and cruise up the Hawkesbury, burning fuel on the promise of a decent go at the prawns. Past Dangar Island, Cord pushing the boat between the gappy teeth of the old stone pylons. On beneath the steel rail bridge, pooled with light, the last train out of Central pushing towards Wondabyne. Rudra sees the people as though framed orange portraits – dead on each other’s shoulders, winding into the greasy blackness of Mullet Creek and down to Woy Woy, while Cord Solace and his crew pass Long and Spectacle Islands.
Wallace and Rudra stand at the stern looking at the swirl of white leading a trail all the way home. Wallace lights up and a bitter cloud of smoke mingles with the diesel fumes.
‘Didima’s a good old stick,’ says Wallace.
‘Yeah, I guess.’
‘I like her.’ Wallace turns his back on the river and looks sideways at Rudra. ‘And you should too. She’s your blood.’
‘I do like her.’
‘But?’
‘I dunno. It’s like she expects me to be the Instant Indian.’
‘She’s teaching me how to cook,’ Wallace says. ‘Real Indian food – like back home.’
‘So it looks like you get to be the Instant Indian.’
‘Not me, mate. I know exactly who I am.’
After the freeway bridge at Mooney Mooney, they shoot their net, trying three short digs near The Vines before heading over to Davo’s. Nothing but weed and trash – an old bicycle frame comes up knobby with rust and a crusting of oysters. At four in the morning they head back to the mouth for one last dig near Flint and Steel. Cord has this feeling that they will get lucky there.
‘I don’t like this place much,’ says Wallace.
‘Why not?’ asks Rudra.
‘Too much stuff hidden under. Chunks of reef, sunken logs, dead boats.’
‘Boats?’
‘Your dad never told you?’
Rudra snorts. ‘He never tells me anything.’
‘It’s the Bermuda bloody Triangle. Boats come here to die.’
‘I think you’re mixing that up with the Elephant’s Graveyard.’
‘Whatever you reckon. But there’s plenty of dead boats beneath, and it makes it a fearful place.’ He looks into the night, his smoke down to a stub in the corner of his mouth. ‘One of them boats you may know better than you think.’
‘What do you mean?’
Wallace shakes his head. ‘Forget it,’ he says, as he feeds the net into the dark water. Cord slows the boat and begins a shot parallel to the shore. Across the water, Rudra can see the lights of Patonga winking at him – so close he can almost snuff them with his fingers. The light is beautiful in reflection; so much treasure against the velvet. Suddenly there is a grab at the net and the boat shudders.
‘What’s she stuck on?’ shouts Cord, throttling back.
Wallace tugs on the foot-rope. ‘Dunno. Something big. If we tear her free there’ll be a stack of mending to do.’
Cord swears, punches the roof of the cabin. ‘I’m going to have to pull her free. No other option.’
‘You know what’s under there, don’t you?’
‘I know well enough,’ Cord says between his teeth.
‘You know if we get into a pulling competition it’ll win. We’ll go under.’
‘The nets will tear first.’
‘Better hope,’ whispers Wallace.
Paper Tiger strains against the net. The ropes tighten until Rudra thinks they are going to break. Now they are tight as guitar strings. Now they are shedding drops of water. Now they are singing into the night – songs of tension and danger. Rudra looks for cover, imagining where they might lash out when they go.
Suddenly, the net pulls free and the boat lurches forward. Rudra watches as the net comes up from the secret deep, the otterboards breaking the surface and rising to the gallows.
‘Grab the lazy line,’ Wallace calls. And Rudra does, swinging the cod-end, when it appears, up and onto the sorting table. It should be full of prawns. Should be, but isn’t. A long gash in the net has seen to most of that.
It’s light. Way too light. And Rudra knows all the secret repercussions of this; knows all the muttered curses and silent treatments. Curiously, though, when the net hits the table, it clunks as if there is something solid in its core.
‘How’s it look?’ shouts Cord. But he knows already; knows it to be worthless.
They go to work, hooking out the weed and smaller prawns, the crabs and jelly blubber. Putting everything, apart from the prawns, back where it belongs. It goes like this for a minute, maybe less, before Wallace uncovers something.
‘What is it?’ asks Rudra, reaching forward.
‘I wouldn’t go touching it,’ Wallace warns, his hand on Rudra’s bicep.
Rudra holds his breath. There is a clicking in his ears that could be the snicking of crab claws.
‘What are you two bozos staring at?’ Cord yells from the cabin. ‘I’m not paying you to stand around. Get the prawns on the slurry and we’ll head for home.’
Rudra can see that Wallace is not going to touch the thing. He himself is weighing up the lesser of two fears: Cord Solace or the object on the sorting table. He knows how this traps him. Knows his dad to be a bully.
‘Get on with it!’ screams Cord. ‘Dump the shit. Keep the prawns.’
It is slippery with seaweed. Rudra’s finger sinks into a dark hole oozing with black sand. The smell is repugnant, thick and oily and full of decay, but he manages to pull the thing free without retching. He knows he should toss it back into the water. But the smooth
ness of it lures him; the hairline cracks that snag his nails are intriguing.
How to describe a thing without naming it; without truly knowing what it is? Rudra wants to say box but it is too smooth, less angular. How can he talk about its geometry without calling it something else? Perhaps it is entirely new in this world. Maybe they have dredged a new species from these familiar waters.
The thing is in two pieces, hinged with a glint of copper wire at the back. The top piece has the flattened sleekness of a racing bike helmet. The ‘helmet’ has two large holes at the rear (into which his fingers disappear alarmingly) and one at the front, with a fragile whirlpool growth that reminds Rudra of cave formation – a shawl of bitter bone. At the bottom of the bike helmet is a grill of sharpened pegs, two larger than the other and raked back as if designed for tearing. The bottom piece has a mirrored set of sharpened pegs, smaller but just as deadly looking. Could these be teeth? And if they are teeth, would this then be a skull?
‘Throw it over,’ hisses Wallace, backing against the gunwale.
Grabbing the hose, Rudra drenches the object in water. Silt gushes from it, and weed and lugworms and tiny crabs. Like water spiders, he thinks. Yes, like water spiders. He almost recognises the collection of shapes that make up the object; assembles them in his mind like a three-dimensional jigsaw. Not believing what he has made.
Rudra has seen many skulls in his life. The small, spaceship skulls of wallabies that sit well in the palm of your hand; the masses of muttonbird skulls – seemingly folded from paper during September storms. But this is so new. Even the human skull (Yorick) who lurks behind toughened glass in the science room, does not come close to this menace. Maybe it can’t be a skull. Maybe it shouldn’t be.
His dad guns the engine and a cloud of diesel smoke coughs itself into the night. ‘Get moving,’ he yells.
Carefully Rudra washes the object. He pulls the sea-things from it so it belongs up here. Scrapes its surfaces with his nail until it is yellow-brown, even white in patches.
‘I told you, dump the crap. We’re only after prawns.’ Cord stops at the door of the cabin. ‘What is that?’
He approaches the sorting table slowly. He picks the object up, looks at it close. His nostrils flare, his eyes widen and his top lip, Rudra notices, has the slightest tremor – hardly noticeable, but there for sure.
Without taking his eyes from the thing, Cord whispers at Wallace, ‘Put the prawns on ice. Get rid of the weed.’ With that, he takes the object into the cabin.
7
NO SLEEP. TOO FEW PRAWNS. The sun is a little too bright this day, the leaves too green, the air too soft, the insects too shrill, the birds too raucous. The world is too cruel. When they come up from the bay, Cord, Wallace and Rudra are painted with a grey brush while all about them is colour. In the playground the kids’ laughter seems directed at them – at their failure. Cord carries the object in a gunny-sack. They don’t talk about it or what it could be, but the question is burning inside Rudra. He knows Cord will take it to his office, where he will hide it. Where he hides everything, including himself.
All morning Rudra battles sleep. Around midday, Maggs calls.
‘S’up?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Wanna do something?’
‘Nup.’
‘How was fishing?’
‘Shit.’
‘I guess we’ll catch up soon.’
‘Yup.’
The line goes dead. He is weightless. The connection severed, he floats off into the gasping void. It’s just lack of sleep, he says quietly to no one. Nothing more.
The day begins to burn. The cicadas go wild for it but everything else is still. The house settles and moans. His dad locks his office door behind him and leaves the house.
Rudra puts on The Smashing Pumpkins. He lies on the bed and listens to Billy Corgan assure him that the world is a vampire. And he believes it, despite all his rage. Why not? Today is a waking dream.
Rudra wonders about the thing that came up in the net. He saw the way his dad looked when he seized it from the sorting table – like he recognised it from somewhere. It is in Cord’s office now – Rudra has seen its dark shadow drying on the windowsill. He wants to see it up close. Wants to turn it over in his hand, examine it. But Cord has the key in his pocket. And Cord has his fury.
Rudra sits at his desk. He pulls out an old exercise book and opens it to a blank page. He begins to draw, although art isn’t his thing and he can never could make what is in his head appear magically on the paper. Always coming out wrong until the paper, tired of his eraser, grows worn and grubby. Still he tries – drawing the half-helmet, attempting the smoothness of it and some hairline cracks that he remembers now. He sketches two large holes on each side and one at the front into which, he wishes still, he could ease his fingers. Below this hole, he details the grill of pointed pegs, two larger than the others, curved, stalactites guarding the mouth of a cave. His hand moving quickly now, shading in, brushing crumbs of rubber from the paper. The hinged flap assembles itself, with more pegs, curving upwards – stalagmites or teeth – he doesn’t know. He recalls the glint of copper wire holding this flap in place and his pencil scratches this in too.
When he finishes, he holds it at arm’s length. He rips it from the book and, Blu Tacking it to the wall, views it from the doorway. Then he approaches it from an angle, sneaking up and peering at it so closely that the breath from his nostrils laps back at him. Eventually and inevitably, it crunches itself into a ball and drops itself into his bin.
Rudra curls on his bed and slips in his earphones. He closes his eyes and imagines the ocean, a street away, sucking at the rocks and pier, swirling into the river mouth. Billy Corgan sings to him of 1979. Of a time Rudra will never know. He knows what Maggs would say – who cares what Billy thinks or sings; that Billy doesn’t know where his own bones will rest, much less theirs. The music is soft but it has a menace grinding inside. Music is the bait, he realises. Beneath it, the barb. The deep swallow. The guthook.
He feels himself slipping under. He tries to make it back to the surface. He realises he has missed one song, or maybe two. He fights sleep for the enemy it is. He is irrational at the end of this long day – at the edge of dreaming. His bed is so comfortable. He has known it his whole life. This house that grows around him is like a forest of kelp, so familiar. He drifts towards the sound of the ocean. Gives himself up.
The beach up near the dunes is fringed with pumice, blue with night and frosted where the new scar of a moon edges it. And on that sand, prints, waiting for the sea goddess to accept them. Prints too big and too foreign for this shore. Prints with a central pad, four toes, the slight impression of claws.
He tracks them up the beach towards the creek, notes the lazy scuff of the leading paw, the careless way the animal has moved. He loses the prints in the scrub near the caravan park but by the cyclone wire, in the dusting of sand, the prints resume. Round by the kids’ jungle gym, wires strung like a trap.
Then round the camps – the big square tents pitched, beers cans in piles. Them all snoring inside, forgetting what they left – jobs in warehouses and caryards, a square of burnt kikuyu beneath that Hill’s hoist, periods four and five in classrooms with peeling posters. They are alive for these hot, sunlit weeks and it will keep them going for another year.
Up by the gutting tables, there is blood. On the ground. So dark it eats the light from the moon. There a finger – or could be a chunk of bait. And there an ear – or could be an abalone heart. The prints here are mangled, worked together into a frenzy.
He moves around to the river mouth, seeing the sway of a night animal, the quiver of its flanks. Its eyes are so round and yellow, the pupils as black as the deep pulling in the grey-blue wash, the frenzy of trees up on the headland, the boats straining against their ropes. And he slows and he slows. And every time the animal looks up, he is frozen into a rock, a tree stump.
He wakes to a furious heartbeat, feeling th
e realness of the dream slowly dissolve. Only a dream, he whispers. Only a dream. Only.
8
HE FINDS WALLACE DOWN AT THE PIER mending the net. Tangent is curled in a tight little ball in the netting.
Rudra sits down beside Wallace on the wooden bench. ‘What’s happening?’
‘Don’t ask,’ says Wallace. ‘And especially don’t ask him.’ He points the net needle to where the dark figure of Cord is sitting in the stern of Paper Tiger. From this distance Rudra can see he’s on his mobile. Out there in the bay he gets good reception, so he often uses it as his office – calling suppliers, arguing over prices. Now, it’s obvious from his body language that he’s shouting, even though the offshore breeze bundles his voice towards West Head.
Rudra grabs a spare needle, a flat piece of beige plastic with a hole in one end.
‘Wanna hand?’
‘You hold it, Rudra, I’ll run the needle along.’
Rudra pulls the tear together while Wallace runs in and out with the needle loaded with nylon string. Wallace is quick. It’s one of the many reasons his father uses him. No one can mend a net as neat and fast.
‘Been thinking about that thing,’ says Rudra.
‘What thing?’ asks Wallace.
‘The thing we pulled up in the net.’
‘What about it?’
‘It’s like Cord had seen it before,’ says Rudra.
Wallace doesn’t look up from what he is doing; his needle keeps shuttling along. Rudra follows its hypnotic movement, staring first at the diamond patterns of cord and then through the holes between. Is it the holes or the cord that make the net? he wonders. The things you see or those you can’t? The intruding thought only stays a moment before he pulls his mind back to the job at hand. The muscles between his thumbs and forefingers are growing weak but Wallace’s needle doesn’t stop, his quick fingers running it along the tear, drawing the edges together.
‘I got another question for you,’ Rudra says. ‘What was that about the sunken boat out at Flint and Steel?’