The Shark Net

by Robert Drewe

  ‘The war’s over,’ my mother said tartly. She didn’t encourage talk about it.

  He was probably right. Many of the back yards still had their old air-raid shelters. Ian Hodge’s grandfather had one in working order, half-hidden under his orange trees, with a faded sign outside which said, ‘Turn Off the Bloody Lights! Tojo Can See Them in Tokyo!’

  Eventually I found our shelter. It was covered by the lantana hedge. I’d just seen King Solomon’s Mines and when I levered up the rotting trapdoor in a Stewart Granger manner, the suspenseful squeak of the rusty hinges and the chance of discovering a treasure – or a skeleton – had me so excited I didn’t notice my face was bleeding from lantana scratches.

  In the cobwebby space of the shelter lay the treasures the Seftons had chosen to help them withstand the bombs of Japan: some bunches of rusted keys, a corroded torch, a pile of National Geographics turned to yellow pulp, a cracked rubber surgical cushion and a jar of dried peas. No diamonds. Not even any of Mrs Sefton’s occupational therapy.

  Aroused by the disturbance, dozens of red-back spiders scuttled from their nest in the surgical cushion. I’d also just seen The Treasure of the Sierra Madre so I didn’t need to be told not to return to the shelter. Living in Western Australia, I thought the Sierra Madre landscape looked quite familiar. Humphrey Bogart looked familiar, too, at least when he kept his hat on. Something about his eyes and top lip reminded me of my father.

  Forbidden to dig sand tunnels and wary of air-raid shelters, I waged sand battles with Nick Howell and Ian Hodge against our enemies, the Mueller brothers from Viking Road, in what we regarded as our territory, the sandhills and limestone fortresses and bamboo thickets along the river between White Beach and the old Gallop house, a mile and a half east. Here the rich sand-crust broke into handy egg-sized clumps the local boys called boondies, which kept their form during flight but which exploded on impact.

  Halfway along this riverbank was the Sunset Old Men’s Home. On the riverfront below Sunset hot water flowed from an artesian bore into a rudimentary and notorious swimming pool known as the Hot Pool. During the Depression poor families had camped there and taken their baths there every Saturday night. Now it was frequented by old invalids during the day, and at night, according to my mother, who’d heard it from the neighbours, by ‘peculiar people who get up to strange things’.

  I couldn’t imagine what things. Or what sort of people. The old men’s home’s air-raid shelters were still down there, hidden from Japanese bombs in the bamboos below the home, with swear words and drawings of sexual organs smeared on their sides. Broken bottles and cigarette butts were strewn around and the air reeked of piss. As for the Hot Pool itself, you couldn’t have paid any child I knew to swim there. Its time had passed. It was slimy and it smelled like rotten eggs. The only people I ever saw lolling in the pool were sad, creepy old men.

  Still, I knew I’d be mightily depressed myself if I were an old person living in a place called Sunset. You couldn’t get a blunter name than that. If I understood the name to mean the end of the day, curtains, the light going out, surely the old men got the point, too? How could the people in charge rub it in like that?

  When I needed to keep a straight face for some reason, like standing for two minutes’ silence on Remembrance Day, I could make myself sad by imagining I was a Sunset inmate. Maybe I’d be like the old Chinese man who nodded up and down twice, bared his teeth at the sky, and then shook his head twice, ceaselessly. This constant compulsive exercise had worn his neck as thin and taut as electric cord; a vigorous sky-smile or head-shake could probably have snapped it. Or the old fat man who inevitably sat next to me on the 201 bus. Every time I saw him get on the bus I’d will him, just this once, to sit somewhere else. Not a chance.

  With a whistling snort, he’d plonk down beside me. Where his nose should have been was a gaping hole, like the nose cavity on a skull. He’d grown a walrus moustache to hide it, but to no avail; of course the moustache grew downwards instead of upwards, accentuating both his noselessness and his walrusness.

  He made many long, noseless trips into town sitting beside me, and every time I felt sorry for him. But as he breathed his snorting whistle, and his fat thighs took over the seat, and his fingers worried away at the edges of the nosehole until his eyes watered, I inched so far away from him that I was barely sitting. I was teetering on one buttock and I was half out the bus window. I had a crick in the neck from twisting and leaning away and desperately trying to avoid a view of the inside of his head.

  One day the news got out that Old Mr Mueller, the Mueller boys’ grandfather, had done something to Rosalie France down at White Beach. The Frances had called the police. My parents were, as always, both agitated and silent about ‘trouble’ but Nick Howell said Old Mr Mueller had lifted her dress and looked at her underpants.

  This didn’t seem particularly serious to me. Rosalie France’s underpants, like those of her sisters, Margaret and Natalie, were made by her mother out of sturdy maroon or purple cloth and were no surprise to anyone. The France girls spent most of the day hanging upside down, or doing headstands and handstands and cartwheels, with their dresses tucked in their pants. Try as we might, it was impossible for the neighbourhood to escape the sight of the France girls’ violently coloured homemade underpants.

  No one said anything more in my hearing about the underpants, or Rosalie France either, but two days later she was standing on her head in her front yard with her dress tucked in her purple bloomers as usual and the Mueller family was packing Old Mr Mueller off to Sunset to live with the head-waving Chinaman and the noseless man.

  Nick Howell was my link to the scandalous adult world. His mother told him everything he wanted to know, about the Muellers or anything else, and he passed it on to me. Both of them seemed to relish these roles. Mrs Howell knew details of the neighbourhood’s latest polio victims, how severely they had the disease and in what limbs. She knew which neighbourhood men were having affairs and which boys were romancing which girls. She knew what most kids’ fathers earned and everyone’s parents’ ages.

  She volunteered other things. She told Nick his father’s secretary’s boyfriend had given his father a heart attack. Nick and I rode our bikes to the private hospital where Mr Howell was recovering. When we arrived his father was sitting up in bed with a black eye and the Saturday Evening Post. He hugged Nick with tears in both eyes and said his heart was better now.

  ‘How did he get the shiner?’ I asked Nick as we rode home.

  ‘Oh, something about him and his secretary,’ he said airily.

  Nick’s life was different to mine, more sophisticated and strangely intriguing. He had the most freckles and the first crewcut I’d ever seen. Instead of Christmas presents each year his parents gave him a cheque made out to ‘Merry Christmas’. His parents slept in separate bedrooms. Mr Howell was a General Motors distributor and loved American things. He scoffed at me one day when I was talking about cars and I referred to the glove box and dashboard. He said, ‘It’s glove compartment and instrument panel, buddy.’ He wore bow ties, read American magazines and spoke in an imitation American drawl which intrigued the ladies. He’d also patented an actual invention: a type of wire coat-hanger in the shape of a sock which he said stopped woollen socks from shrinking. It would make his fortune. Then nylon came in.

  Nick was wearing a Davy Crockett coonskin hat his father had brought him back from America the day he told me of the existence of prostitutes, and what they did with Italians and South Fremantle footballers in Roe Street. ‘Oh, sure!’ I said. During the Coronation celebrations at school he said it was a fact that Queen Elizabeth had the smallest breasts in the world and Marilyn Monroe the biggest.

  He had one blind eye from being shot with an arrow by a boy called Christopher Catchlove after he dared him to. It looked the same as the other eye, just cloudier. After that his mother was fiercely protective of him. He could do no wrong. One day he remarked to me thoughtfully that he wish
ed he could remember what it was like to suck at the breast. I didn’t take much notice. He was always saying things like that. Next day he said, ‘Well, I found out.’

  ‘What? How?’

  He’d asked his mother to remind him.

  ‘You’re nine years old!’ I said.

  ‘So what?’

  ‘She’s old!’

  ‘So?’

  There was a fairly long silence. ‘Well, what was it like?’

  He examined a wart on his thumb. ‘OK. No milk, of course.’

  Once Old Mr Mueller was safely inside Sunset everyone calmed down again. The adults acted as if he’d been the only blot on Dalkeith’s reputation for respectable behaviour. But Nick casually said to me, ‘You know the old Gallop house? There was a murder there with an axe.’

  ‘When? Who?’

  ‘Dunno. A long while ago. They found a woman’s body. Chopped up,’ he added with relish.

  ‘I don’t believe you.’

  ‘God’s honour. Ask Mum.’

  Our mothers could have been from different planets. I was still living down coming home from school with a song for my mother. The official version was on the hit parade. My barefoot friends had been singing the local version in the playground. I ran in the door and sang it for her: Lady of Spain, I adore you. Lift up your dress and I’ll explore you.

  Coming after the Old Mr Mueller Business, my song made her face go blank. She pressed her lips together. ‘I think you’d better go to your room,’ she said.

  Our house rested on foundations of limestone, too. Limestone is only compressed sand, after all. It was easy to carve your initials in the foundations with a stick. Indeed, their bland facade and lemony softness begged to be scratched and scraped, especially the bigger, yellower supporting stones in the front of the house.

  My new neighbourhood friends Nick Howell, Ian Hodge and Neil Liddell had all dug their initials in their foundations. But their initials were arrangements of straight lines. When I carved mine with a screwdriver something strange and fascinating happened. The D crumbled instantly and gently into a powdery cave, which engulfed the earlier R. As I watched, almost hypnotised, the cave quickly grew. Out of its mouth dribbled a pale lemon stream and then such a frightening rivulet of sand that I envisaged the whole house pouring into the street in an avalanche.

  The foundation stone seemed to be melting. Soon it was more crust than stone. It was behaving like a big hourglass, with a neat heap of fine-grained sand piling up at its base. At the same time, a thin plume of dust rose into the air like a tiny signal of disaster and softly blew away.

  In fright, I looked around for a rock or some solid object to plug the hole. The only things in sight were two of my brother’s Dinky toys: a Ford Customline (a miniature of my father’s new company car) and a red London bus, and my cricket ball. I pushed the Customline in first. It disappeared entirely inside the cave. Then the double-decker bus. It vanished too. I tossed in the screwdriver but still the trickling continued. Desperately, I even offered up my six-stitcher. The cave swallowed it, and sand still trickled merrily onto the ground. As a last resort, I unscrewed the sprinkler from the garden hose and jammed it in, vertically. The sprinkler was metal, about eight inches square. The pace of the trickle seemed to slow. It hesitated and as I held my breath it stopped.

  Now I had to put back the lost sand. I tried to scoop up the mound but it was so fine it fell through my fingers. I needed to wet it. The hose was nearby, but by now logic was beyond me. Addled by destruction and panic, my brain instructed me to urinate on the pile of sand. (Of course! That’s how they did things around here.) Then I packed the mud into the cave, jammed it tight over the Ford, the London bus, the cricket ball and the screwdriver, packed it around the sprinkler, threw more mud over everything, patted it down, and waited. The entombed offerings held fast. The plug stuck.

  Our foundation stones were made of sand and they rested on sand. My mother made a rule that children weren’t allowed to run madly around the house. Running made cracks appear in the walls. So did big trucks rumbling past. For a long time I lived in fear; not so much that we’d all be buried under a limestone avalanche – that seemed inevitable – but that the house, agitated by some racing boy or delivery van, or my father’s temper, would one day pop its cork and spit out the evidence of my evildoing.

  Growing an English lawn, English roses and deciduous trees on dry sand in a place of water shortages was hard work. So even moderately successful gardeners liked to grow their front lawns right to the road, without a fence, to display their good intentions. Having a front fence was considered standoffish, in any case. It could prevent Sunday drivers from admiring your home. Similarly, people who didn’t keep their lawns green were thought to be of low moral fibre. Not to try to overcome the odds was regarded as ‘letting the street down’.

  In order to boast greener grass in a place of constant water restrictions and infertile soil some people sank bores in their back yards. These places were easy to pick. Their sprinklers whirred at hours when everyone else’s were forbidden. Instead of the usual cardboard-coloured buffalo and couch grass their lawns were an eerie Technicolor green and the walls of their houses looked bloodstained from the iron in the bore water.

  It was during one of our first summers in this place of anguished gardeners, when we thought we’d grown accustomed to living in the sand (after my mother had hysterically axed her first grass snake), that our neighbours began to shyly ask my parents whether our garden hose was trying to escape.

  ‘Hmm,’ said my father.

  They had heard stories of this problem, the neighbours said, and now their own hoses had tried to make a run for it. The hoses seemed to be attempting to tunnel down into the earth. As if to freedom. They seemed to have a strange, well, rebellious force. When you tried to pull them up, they pulled against you. It took all your strength to hold them. They were straining against their taps and water pipes, some stretching to breaking point like big rubber bands, others bending the pipes and, in some cases, snapping their shackles and diving into the earth.

  ‘Goodness,’ my father said.

  As the mystery of The Great Hose Escape grew and spread, quiet suburban gardeners began writing whimsical but increasingly anxious letters to the newspapers about their rebellious hoses. What was going on underground? The thinking seemed to be that the hoses were in cahoots. Water diviners and dowsers weighed in with their theories. It was hinted that strange subterranean, even supernatural, forces were at work.

  Geologists finally stepped in to solve the mystery. The problem, they declared, was caused by drought – several years of declining rainfall had made the surface of the dunes even drier and looser than usual. The dripping water from any garden tap which was not completely turned off could make a connected hose sink into the deep tunnel it was making. A suction effect was occurring underground. The solution couldn’t be simpler: disconnect your hose from its tap after use, and make sure it was firmly turned off.

  Dunlop, naturally, was a leading maker of garden hoses. It had recently developed a new lighter, green-coloured plastic hose to compete against the common black rubber hoses that were heavy to haul around, blackened your hands and – bad commercial sense – lasted forever. During the height of the furore my father was telephoned at seven one morning by a reporter from the evening Daily News to comment on the phenomenon.

  ‘Dunlop garden hoses will not run away,’ my father, in his pyjamas, declared firmly. ‘Their behaviour is impeccable.’ Indeed, our own new hose, even then coiled obediently and motionlessly in the rose bed, hadn’t moved a muscle during the fracas.

  ‘What advice do you have for people whose hoses are trying to tunnel underground?’ asked the reporter.

  ‘The culprits are your older, heavier rubber hoses – those out-of-date ones that soil your hands. My advice is to buy a new Dunlop plastic garden hose immediately. And, of course, one for the back garden.’

  When he was pleased with himself he remin
ded me of the English film comedian Terry-Thomas, all teeth and moustache. He put down the phone and, carrying his cup of tea with two Granita biscuits, his Turf cigarettes and the fresh copy of the West Australian (whose crumpled disorder, bad odour and steamy dampness would soon make it untouchable by any other member of the family), he disappeared happily into the bathroom.

  Over the following few weeks the word ‘hoax’ came into my vocabulary. It cropped up for a while, among gusts of laughter and mild protests from my father, during their drinks parties.

  It was in Leon Road that the lions began to come into our house. Once or twice a week I’d catch a glimpse of a lion padding down the hall, another one climbing through the dining-room window, its mane disturbing the curtains. Sometimes I’d hear them breathing before I saw them. They had a chesty wheeze like Ian Hodge’s asthma. Their visits were quiet and unfussed. I was the one they were interested in. They didn’t act ravenous or angry but I naturally presumed they wanted to eat me.

  Sometimes it was just a single lion, big-maned and yellow. Other times a whole pride of lions and lionesses would come sauntering into our yard, looking for a way into the house. It didn’t take them long. They jumped in through the windows or pushed their way in the back door. Soon they were padding through the house with that thin-hipped, quiet urgency that lions have.

  I didn’t waste time hiding. It didn’t matter which room I was in, I knew they’d find me. Often they found me lying on my bed in the sleep-out. The sleep-out’s louvres and fly-wire screen opened right onto the side garden with its overhanging mulberry tree. They padded straight over and surrounded me, studying me and weighing things up. They stood so close I could feel the warmth coming off their flanks and the meaty heat of their breath on my cheeks.