The Shark Net

by Robert Drewe

  In my opinion, that made the journey more scary but more interesting. This was my first plane trip, heading towards my father and his new job and our new home. Everything I saw was the Great Unknown.

  The place that I knew, the ordered Melbourne world of frosty lawns and trimmed hedges, of grandparents and shoes and socks and winter overcoats, of our green Austin A40, of the zoo, Brighton Beach, the Botanical Gardens and the asphalt playground of Bentleigh East State School – even the intriguing world of bank typewriters – fell away as soon as I looked out the cabin window at the sharp mauve sky beside me fading seamlessly into the gold and grey desert below.

  Life was suddenly more unpredictable. When we left the plane at Kalgoorlie to stretch our legs there was a one-legged man balancing unsteadily in the red desert where the tarmac ended, trying to hit a little fox terrier with his crutch. Where the dog’s fur was supposed to be white it was pink with desert dust. The man was three novel humans in one: the first real-life drunk, the first cruel person and the first one-legged man I’d ever seen.

  The pink dog barked and sprang about as if it were mocking the man, and he was swearing and swinging his crutch at it. One wild swing landed him hard on his bottom. I laughed, and Billy copied me and laughed too, and my mother pulled us away. The man swore up at us from the red dirt, and spit flew out of his lips. He didn’t try to get up. My mother’s mouth tightened and she looked like she was going to cry again but she didn’t.

  My father met us at Perth airport. He was all smiles and wearing lighter coloured clothes than before. He seemed to have bigger teeth, a louder voice and less hair. It had been six weeks since we’d seen him and I hadn’t realised before that his head looked like an egg. He’d gone ahead of us to find us somewhere to live and to settle into his new job as Assistant State Manager of the Dunlop Rubber Company.

  There was an older couple with him to welcome us. Jim Chute shook my hand, and his wife, Gladys, kissed my mother and Billy and me as if we were relatives. In a way, it was true. We were all members of the Dunlop family.

  Apart from his war years in the airforce, my father had always worked for Dunlop. ‘I’m a Dunlop man,’ he’d proudly say to people. At seventeen, straight from school, he was even a Dunlop boy, quite an adventurous boy, too, for the Depression year of 1932. If he were going to make rubber his business he decided he needed to ‘see the full picture’. At eighteen he left for England to work for two years on the factory floor of British Dunlop’s dark and grimy rubber mill in Birmingham, making car, aircraft and bicycle tyres.

  He also needed to fix in his mind where rubber came from. On his way to Britain he travelled to Malaya. He wanted to see the actual trees growing in the plantations, the rubber-tappers at work, and the slender sliced trunks seeping their sticky white sap. He wanted to see the milky latex while it was still called gutta-percha.

  His enthusiasm for Dunlop reminded me of the beaming garageman in the advertisements who saluted and said, ‘Today You’ll Use a Dunlop Product.’ My father was always talking about Dunlop products or Dunlop people or the Dunlop office or the Dunlop factory or things made of rubber. Most things were, apparently.

  He’d met my mother at Dunlop, of course. This was soon after she joined the company as a stenographer-secretary at the main Melbourne factory at Montague. The occasion was the annual staff ball. Her partner was the dark-haired Davis Cup and Wimbledon tennis hero Adrian Quist. In their photograph in the staff magazine they made an attractive and neatly arranged couple. She was pretty, dark-haired and olive-skinned herself and, at five feet three, petite enough to make even Quist, only five feet seven at full-volley, look tallish. At the staff ball, as far as my father was concerned, Adrian Quist was just another smooth salesman from the sports department. Even if he was the only salesman with his signature embossed on the Dunlop Maxply racquet handles.

  ‘Who’s the brunette with Quist?’ my father asked his cronies, and soon his name was on her dance card.

  As a former employee herself, my mother knew all his work colleagues, all those Stans, Wals, Clarries, Horries, Syds, Lens and Alfs. When they visited our house she kissed them like friends. She understood his constant Dunlop talk.

  Every night after dinner my parents would sit at the kitchen table talking solemnly about my father and Dunlop while they finished their glasses of beer and last cigarettes (before ashing them in an ashtray enclosed in a small Dunlop tyre, complete with distinctive tread). I’d lie on my mattress on the bedroom floorboards of the new house the young couple had just built and were gradually furnishing at No. 1 Melosa Avenue, East Brighton, and fall asleep as their voices murmured into the night. They seemed very proud of how my father was getting on in the world of rubber.

  This day I understood that rubber had even greater clout than I’d imagined. Dunlop had the power to separate you from your family. It could send you all – one in a state of teary fatigue with her shoes off, one passed out in her lap, and the other sucking barley sugar and staring in a trance out the cabin window – twelve hours and two thousand miles west.

  We were booked into the Palace Hotel in the city for a couple of days until we could move into the house he’d found for us. The Chutes insisted, however, that after our long journey we should come home to their house in South Perth for supper.

  The adults were soon all drinking beer and laughing, even my mother. ‘What a trip!’ she said. She seemed to have perked up. Now she wasn’t moaning that it might as well be Africa. She was telling the story of the one-legged man and the pink dog. She was swinging an invisible crutch and making it seem an amusing experience.

  Billy passed out on the lounge-room sofa. My mother said I was exhausted too, so I was put to bed in the Chutes’ bedroom. As she settled me down I sniffed suspiciously about the room. ‘Is there gas in Perth?’ I asked her.

  ‘Nothing to worry about,’ she said.

  ‘Is this Africa?’

  ‘Hardly,’ she said, and patted my head.

  As she left the room, Jim Chute appeared, holding his glass of beer, in the doorway. He had a dry, drawling voice and combed-back, oiled hair, and he wore his pants belted high over his pot belly. He was shorter, plumper and older than my father. And now he had a new younger boss from head office.

  ‘Sleep tight, sonny,’ he said to me. He gave a sly grin and cocked his head towards the window. ‘Watch out. There’s a lot of blackboys out there in the garden.’

  It was Africa. Why did she lie to me?

  Outside in the dark, something rustled against the fly-screen. I lay above the covers on the double bed in a strange bedroom on the far side of the country, thinking about the tribes of natives creeping around the garden. Twice I crept to the window, took a deep breath and peered out. It was too dark to see them but I could hear their whispers and the soft rattle of their spears.

  I was going to call out to the adults but I could hear my father’s voice confidently asserting something and Jim Chute’s voice drawling something else and everybody laughing as if they were all going to get on fine. West Australian rubber products were in good hands. Then I heard my name mentioned, and Billy’s, and everyone chuckled, and I fell asleep.

  PEOPLE OF THE DUNES

  We moved into a house in the dunes. Everyone lived in the dunes. From King’s Park, on top of the highest dune, you could look down and see the whole city spread along the coastal dunes and around the sandy river flats, from the ocean to the ranges.

  Something strange happened in the south in the late afternoon. When you looked south from King’s Park the whole sand plain and the farthest suburban roofs and treetops joined the clouds in a dense purple mirage which imitated a European forest. It was a gloomy storybook place of tall, angry-looking trees and hills and castles. But in real life we were all living in bright sunlight and on flat, dry sand.

  Some people lived in the loose white sand near the ocean. Even though everyone in Perth lived in the dunes I thought of them as the Sand People. Every afternoon the fierce sea
wind, which they dismissed as The Breeze, blew their sand into the air and scalloped and corrugated their properties.

  Sun and wind had rearranged the appearance of the Sand People, too – tanned, freckled, scabbed and bleached them. With their darker skins, red eyes, raw noses and permanent deep cracks in their bottom lips, they looked nothing like Melbourne people. Some were as eroded as the cliffs, their noses and ears worn and peeled away, so that grown men had the snubbed features of boys. Around their edges – noses, ear tips, cheeks, shoulders – they were pink and fraying. Shreds of skin poked up from their general outline and fluttered in the sea breeze. Boys bled if they smiled too fast.

  From a distance most of the adults seemed stained a smooth reddish-brown – my paintbox burnt sienna – but close-up at the beach, walking behind them down the wooden ramp to the sand, you saw they were stippled like people in newspaper photographs, spotted with hundreds of jammed-together freckles and moles – brown and black on a pink background. There were women with chests and backs like leopards.

  The men and boys all looked tough but relaxed, even sleepy. My mother said they were half-dazed from the sun. They were indeed slow smilers, but I could see it was because they were being careful of their split bottom lips.

  I was impressed that all the males and some of the younger girls went bare-legged and barefoot most of the year. From my sandalled perspective it seemed clear that life in all of Western Australia, not just near the sea, revolved around bare feet. There was obviously something important going on with feet.

  Foot knowhow seemed the key to belonging. Feet were an instant giveaway for a newcomer. Only mothers’ boys and English kids – or Melbourne boys – wore sandals in summer. Or, worse, shoes and socks. So said Miss Langridge, my new second-grade teacher, when I relayed to her my mother’s message that despite Miss Langridge’s advice to the contrary she would be continuing to send me to school with ‘covered feet’.

  Miss Langridge attempted to mask the bitter plump redness of her face with overlapping layers of powder which subdued her colour to pink. She bent down and hissed at me, ‘Does your mother think her little darling will get a cold in the tootsies?’ The force of her words dislodged tiny clumps of powder from her cheeks and they floated in the air between us.

  The heat was just part of the daily contest for feet. Boys merely wandering home along the road felt bound to compete at withstanding the searing sand, melting bitumen, rocky road verges, bottle shards and grass prickles with their bare soles. The darker the surface the hotter, but it hardly mattered; everything underfoot was either sizzling, prickly or sharp. Feet, generally, took a thrashing. Those grazed ankles and blackened toenails, the blood-blistered heels, the festering reef-cuts criss-crossing their soles, showed a boy’s familiarity with reef, surf and cliff-face. Their feet were painted so boldly with Mercurochrome and flavine antiseptic they looked like they were wearing red and yellow socks.

  Their brave bare toes gripping their verandas, the Sand People were forever squinting into the summer sun and wind, the winter rain and gales. Whenever we drove along the coast road I’d follow their gaze out to sea and wonder what they were looking at. There was nothing out there. They seemed so proud of their views but all I could see were straight lines of sand, water and sky, the speck of Rottnest Island on the horizon and the wind forever chopping the ocean.

  They acted like they owned the weather and the coastline, too. But my father told me knowledgeably that their situation depended on limestone. ‘They’d be lost without it.’ They’d had to build high limestone foundations to stop their houses sliding down the sandhills, and they’d had to erect limestone battlements against the onslaughts of the wind – called the Fremantle Doctor because it brought relief to the sunstruck city. Even so, their houses rattled and whined and their clotheslines bent like trees in the wind. You could see their flyaway front yards streaming down the street. The roads lay under drifts of sand as white and thick as snow. Everything outdoors was faded, pitted and smoothed by salt, sun and sand.

  The coastline reminded me of ancient religious backdrops at Sunday School: the Dead Sea and places waiting for a miracle. It looked as old and bare as the moon. It was also like living in a geography lesson here where the land and sea met. The Indian Ocean was supposed to be constantly invading the shore and the land plants forever edging towards the sea. But apart from the wind nothing seemed too busy to me. The only flicker of activity was from blue-tongue lizards rustling in the pigface and a sand-coloured bush whose spidery tumbleweeds blew along the beach faster than I could run. On the sand cliffs above the shore the wind fizzed through a single clump of pine trees. The way the swings creaked and swung in the children’s playground even when it was empty made me think little ghosts were playing there. Drowned kids perhaps.

  After a while I worked out why the Sand People were always staring over the cliffs and out to sea. They were trying to see Africa. It was an exciting idea that Africa was the next continent, just over the horizon. In the atlas it was a straight line from us to Namibia in south-west Africa or, going the other way, Valparaiso, Chile. We were thirty-two degrees south. That sounded much colder than it was, until you found the places that were the same latitude north: Tijuana, Mexico, and Casablanca, Africa.

  Casablanca sounded right to me. From the sea, the houses of the Sand People loomed like Foreign Legion forts. In the sun their quivery roofs melted into Sahara mirages. There was nothing in the straight white coastline to give your eyes a rest – no bays, few trees, to break the line and the glare and the shuddering mirages. Often on hot days the smell of something dead rose from the dunes and filled your head. Perhaps it was a blue-tongue stoned by boys. You became dizzy and got a headache if you looked towards Africa too long on a summer day.

  My mother had been given bad information about Western Australia by a great-uncle who’d gone to Kalgoorlie looking for gold in 1902. He warned her of ‘boiling brain’. Apparently it was an extreme form of sunstroke. It began with a severe headache. You turned feverish, her great-uncle said, and then delirious, and you saw spots like hundreds of red suns. If an ice-cold bath and a dark room didn’t bring you round, you thrashed about and died.

  Because she was an outdoor person herself her boiling-brain warnings rang true with me. She’d been a sportswoman: a swimmer, tennis player and horse rider. But Victoria’s weather was colder. Her beach experience was in relatively sheltered Port Phillip Bay. At first she was suspicious of the surf and relentless sun. Now we were in a strange, hot, dry land, she was a mother, and she was taking no chances.

  I imagined a boiling brain. It looked like a big jellyfish melting on the sand – just a circular outline of smeared and fading slime. For our first few summers, whenever Billy or I made a particular peculiar face on a hot day, or said something odd – and she was the judge of the strangeness of these grimaces or statements – she’d feel our foreheads and stare into our eyes to see if we were delirious. Just in case, she ran a mental check on us.

  ‘Where do you live?’ she’d snap. ‘How old are you? Where does Dad work?’

  ‘Goodyear,’ I cracked once. That earned me a smile. It was lucky he wasn’t there then. He would have thought I had boiling brain.

  Eventually Billy and I turned the delirium tests into a farce. We cottoned on to the particular strange expression that panicked her: a sort of jaw-dropping, upward eye-rolling and stretching of the face, as if our skin was too tight. And after a day in the hot sun, it did feel ready to burst. We made this moronic stretching face all the time. The shouts of, ‘Come quickly, Mum. He’s got boiling brain!’ palled for her much sooner than they did for us.

  At the same time as my mother was testing us daily for boiling brain she scoffed at the local mothers’ remedy for sunburn: a potion of brown vinegar, sliced tomato and cucumber. When my new red- and yellow-footed friends padded into our house with tomato skins sticking to their shoulders and cucumber seeds in their ears, she sniffed the spicy air and said, ‘It’s not on
ly people who don’t wear hats who’ve got boiling brains.’

  My father’s bald, pale head never went uncovered outdoors, but for reasons of vanity rather than health. According to him, the real beach terror lay in the undertow, the shark: the unruly sea itself. He preferred to keep his distance from the coastline.

  For him the coast was under a cloud in any case. He’d just had a shock at work. Head office had suddenly recalled the State manager, Ern Kellam, and abruptly appointed Ken Scrutton, an older Dunlop man from South Australia, in Kellam’s place. The Scruttons had moved into a big old house on the wind-buffeted hill above the ocean at Cottesloe. It was a bigger and better house than ours. For my father it was a symbol of head-office injustice. ‘You wouldn’t catch me living there in a fit,’ he said. ‘Blowing a gale all day long.’

  As Kellam’s deputy my father had presumed he’d get the job. But Kellam hadn’t gone to bat for him. ‘I was knifed, pure and simple.’ For weeks this was the drift of my parents’ after-dinner conversations. Night after night I heard my mother making soothing murmurs over their last cigarette and glass of beer. She pointed out yet again that he’d been assistant manager for less than a year. ‘You’re only thirty-five. There’s plenty of time.’

  But my father was in a hurry. He was on the ladder now. He was working harder and finding it increasingly difficult to relax outside work. When it was hot he sometimes took us to the ocean after work or at weekends, but it was under sufferance, and he regarded it warily. The ocean was such a mysterious, unknown quantity that he even put a veto on us using inflatable tubes and surfboards. We could only use them in the river. He thought a rip would suck us out to sea on our Dunlop products. The irony of Dunlop sweeping his children to destruction was too terrible to contemplate.