The Shark Net

by Robert Drewe

  I drove home to Circe Circle with my head and heart pounding. So I killed her … didn’t I?

  Everyone except Ruth and the baby was sitting in front of ‘Bonanza’. A flouncy middle-aged woman was flirting with an uncomfortable Ben Cartwright. The Cartwright boys were all grinning. My family’s faces were all expressionless. My father was brushing Jan’s hair and a Dewar’s was beside him. I didn’t know whether he knew about my being summoned to the doctor’s office. I didn’t mention it.

  It was very rare that he got home before me. ‘You’re late,’ he said.

  I thought that was a bit rich. ‘Work,’ I said. ‘I’m covering the court case. Your man Eric was committed for trial.’

  He had parted Jan’s hair and was attempting to make two plaits. The three hair divisions on either side of the part were uneven, some thick and bunchy, others sparse. I didn’t say anything. She looked up as if she knew her hair felt wrong but she was being patient. He loved her more than anyone on earth. Neither of them knew how else to deal with this. None of us did.

  He stared up at me, too. Suddenly I was the big crime authority. I was the one in the know. He was dying to learn more but he didn’t want to ask. He shook his head slowly and pressed his lips together as if he’d predicted it back then when the petty thieving started. ‘What’s the next step?’ he said eventually, in his Dewar’s voice.

  I said Eric would now go to trial. There was no doubt he’d be found guilty of murdering John. ‘They hang you for murder in this town,’ I added.

  Well, sometimes they did.

  ‘Not in front of the children,’ he said.

  NEWS SHARK

  I followed the pack north up the West Coast Highway, well outside my territory, with the two-way radio crackling in the Ford Anglia and the sun glinting off the white dunes and sandy verges, off the roadside bottles and approaching car windscreens and the glassy sea itself.

  Along the way I kept the news editor primed with the progress of events. I called him from City Beach and Scarborough and a couple of stops in between. He didn’t remind me that my territory stopped at Cottesloe. He liked reporters sticking to a story.

  ‘Tiger sharks,’ I said knowledgeably, trying to keep the self-consciousness out of my voice when I said ‘Come In!’ and ‘Over and Out!’ Then I stomped through the pigface and sandhills once more, training the office binoculars on the unbroken sea just beyond the surfline. Where were they?

  On the western horizon as usual Rottnest was mysteriously transformed by summer’s atmospheric conditions into a misty string of mirage-islands. They hovered like spacecraft above the ocean, well south of the island’s real whereabouts. As I searched for fins in the rise of each breaking wave, for those sinister, thrilling shadows in the swells, glistening women smelling of coconut oil glanced drowsily up at me from their towels. Children squinted into the glare to see what this fully clothed boy was peering at. Languid adults’ faces said: What do you think you’re doing?

  Willing you to be eaten. The sooner the better. Well, not a kid, but definitely a well-known businessman or sun-dried old socialite. If possible, I wanted even more than a shark attack on a noted victim. I’d learned my news values. The shark should be of record size and rare species. And I needed a garrulous old-timer as a witness. Someone like Ted ‘Sharky’ Nelson, every reporter’s favourite contact for shark stories. (‘It rushed at him like a Metro bus, bit him in halves and swallowed him in two bites. Never seen one that big this far north. Poor bastard never had a chance. I’ll never forget the look on his face.’)

  In the best possible world there would be still more. And not just that this excellent tragic day (Black Sunday? Bloody Sunday?) was the victim’s birthday or golden wedding anniversary or that he’d just won the lottery. (News editors adored the poignant coincidence.) I wanted more than to break news. I wanted to be the news.

  My fantasy front-page lead – shark attack or boating disaster or freak rip-tide – was a watery adventure story where I became the hero and got the scoop as well. Naturally it would take unusual circumstances for me to step outside the traditional role of neutral observer and modestly but heroically intrude. (Frantic captain of surf lifesaving club, through loud-hailer: ‘There’s still a little girl on a floatie out there! All my guys have major arterial bleeding. Does anyone on the beach have their bronze medallion for lifesaving?’ Me: ‘Well, if there’s a kid’s life at stake …’)

  Just as my dream scoop required loss of life, it required me to save lives, too. And, importantly, to risk my own. Then, dripping water, and possibly blood, over the Anglia’s dashboard, shrugging off medical attention, and modestly keeping news of my own heroism until the fourth or fifth paragraph, I’d dictate the story over the two-way for the first edition.

  Despite the phenobarbitone, I was driven to keep busy. I couldn’t sit still. Ruth and I were now living near Swanbourne Beach in the one-bedroom, lamb-smelling ‘residence’ attached to the butcher’s shop in North Street. The butcher chose not to live there, and after a few weeks I could understand him needing a meat-free home life. But the lamb smell kept the rent down. We became used to the sight of the abattoir truck pulling up outside in the early morning and the men dressed like medieval executioners in leather caps and shoulder aprons lumping carcasses into the cool-room. We were fond of the House of Meat. When Ruth and I weren’t marvelling at our boy or making love, I was submerged in work or in the sea. I swam each morning before work. I was doing a stint in Fremantle, only six stations down the railway line, in the West Australian’s branch office.

  Fremantle was rarely short of news of a raffish sort. The previous century, Fremantle harbour had been blasted out of the limestone seabed where the Swan River estuary suddenly narrowed and twisted and flowed into the Indian Ocean. Ever since, as Australia’s first port of call for shipping from Europe, Asia and Africa, as well as the home of the State’s fishing fleet, it had been a rough-house town.

  A young chaser of ambulances and fire engines (as well as police-court reporter and shipping-list compiler) walked the windy night-time wharves and streets with caution. The waterfront pubs were bloodhouses. Most mornings Polish and German seamen appeared before the court for the previous night’s assaults with marlinspikes and vodka bottles on each other or the prostitutes in the Cleopatra Hotel. At nights and weekends the sons of Italian and Greek fishermen, Irish wharf labourers and Yugoslav vegetable growers circled the port in their V8s looking for girls and fights. At least one of their desires was usually met.

  But by day its population, maritime aspect and leached limestone buildings gave Fremantle a calm and distinctively Mediterranean character. It was a cohesive, strangely old-fashioned place, proudly independent for a town situated only thirteen miles downriver from Perth, with power more or less evenly divided between the Waterside Workers’ Federation and the city councillors (mostly second- and third-generation shipping and general merchants), between labour and capital, between Catholics and Masons, between the South Fremantle and East Fremantle football clubs.

  Its most imposing building was the old Female Insane Asylum, which had switched from madness to romance during World War Two when it housed US naval officers and became notorious as a sexual rendezvous. But the dominating structure was a high wall, quarried from the same local limestone as the old asylum, which seemed to ring the town like an ancient fort. The wall formed the boundary, warders’ quarters and gatehouse of Fremantle Prison. The prison had a grim history dating back to the earliest days of European settlement. Executions sometimes still took place there, for some reason always at eight o’clock on a Monday morning.

  I remembered four Monday-morning executions. Especially the first one. I was waiting for the school bus. I was nine, and I’d just seen the story in the paper, Killer to Hang, with a photo of him. I couldn’t believe this dark thing was happening. In the photograph he had black hair and eyebrows. The headlines were blacker than black. He was twenty-two, a migrant from Czechoslovakia working on a farm. On
e night he and the farmer got drunk, and he threw a stone at the farmer and hit him on the head. I’d thrown stones and hit people on the head myself.

  As eight o’clock approached I was staring so hard at the second hand of my watch ticking away that I didn’t notice the bus pull up. My ears were thudding as I counted down the seconds. The air held a different light. The shadows fell longer and darker on the road. They – someone, the government, important forces – were killing this man. Five, four, three, two, one – now!

  I felt an eerie vacuum, a black absence I hadn’t known before. The 202 United bus, with grinning boys pressing their faces against its back window, was already chugging away down Waratah Avenue.

  On my reporting rounds I passed the prison several times a day and each time it gave me a jolt. I never got used to it: its gates always closed against the gusty port; its clock always stopped, bizarrely, at either 12.05 or 10.15. The greyish-yellow wall was as sombre and ageless as murder and retribution. It seemed appropriate that over a century the sea winds had given it a patina of salty misery and that it looped around the neck of the port like a noose.

  In the West Australian office on the corner of Adelaide and Queen streets, the reporting staff of two senior and two junior reporters worked out of a back room on the west of the building behind the classified advertisements’ counter and the ad salesman’s and typists’ tea-room.

  The other junior reporter’s name was John Dare, in my mind the perfect by-line for an intrepid journalist. Each afternoon either Dare or I prised the daily shipping list from the reluctant sausage fingers of the harbourmaster, Captain Oliphant, whose phobia – the waterfront equivalent of worrying whether he’d left the gas on – was checking and re-checking the sailing times in case four hundred passengers missed the Fairstar to England. Then, in the two hours where our day and night shifts crossed and the late afternoon sun made our shared desk uninhabitable, Dare and I played office cricket in the back corridor, with a ruler for a bat and a ball made of copy paper and Scotch tape, and cheerfully pondered ways to scoop each other.

  A good fellow and a Fremantle boy himself, Dare had the advantage of local knowledge and an easier way with the cops. My own relations with the local police hadn’t recovered from my inquiries into the aftermath of a retiring senior inspector’s farewell party. The party boy’s car had jumped the pavement near Fremantle Hospital, struck an Italian family of four, seriously injuring a little girl, and accelerated away. I spotted the distraught family at the police station making their complaint. I couldn’t open my notebook fast enough. ‘Tell me about it,’ I said.

  If the drunken, hit-and-run senior cop wasn’t the story, it was a good story. An earnest young constable had reported it in the Incident Book. I took down the details. I interviewed the witnesses. I got details of the farewell booze-up and the child’s admission to hospital. I felt indignant on the family’s behalf. So was the story I wrote.

  I was surprised not to see it on the front page next morning. I flipped through the rest of the paper. It wasn’t there. I guessed they had to run it past the lawyers. Such a strong story would need some legal tinkering here and there. I envisaged Roberta’s irascible father, R. I. Ainslie QC, the company’s lawyer, perusing it.

  But it wasn’t in the paper the next day either. Two days later I was summoned back to Perth. The chief-of-staff, Mr Goldsmith, told me that he, Ralph Wheatley and I were to attend a meeting with Police Commissioner O’Brien. Of course. I was awestruck. The power of the Press!

  On the way to police headquarters in Ralph’s police-rounds car no one spoke. I’d been expecting congratulations all round. I supposed they were holding off until publication. I reminded myself this was the newspaper world. Praise was rationed; envy was everywhere. I should be content that my exclusive story was finally getting serious attention.

  As we entered his office the Commissioner was frowning. That was to be expected – his force was in a spot of bother. He already had a copy of my unpublished story in front of him. He flipped through it dismissively and then tossed it aside.

  He didn’t look at me. He looked over and around me. He said it didn’t happen like that. The child’s family wasn’t unhappy with the police. Anyway, the officer had officially ceased to be a policeman at five p.m. that day. He’d retired an hour before the farewell party began. He was a member of the general public. So no story.

  Again the feeling of being in the principal’s office. I took a deep breath. My voice was husky; I cleared my throat. What about the little girl in hospital? Her condition was still critical. She could die. The hit-and-run was entered in their Incident Book. The driver was named. What about the official complaint? Charges must have been laid?

  The Commissioner still didn’t look at me and he didn’t answer. I looked at Mr Goldsmith and Ralph. They’d back me up. The Commissioner looked at them, too, and smiled grimly. ‘You teach your juniors the defamation laws, do you?’

  ‘Just doing his job,’ Mr Goldsmith said. His tone was soothing and confiding. ‘You know how it is.’

  ‘A new chum,’ Ralph muttered in his moustache. ‘Keen as mustard.’

  The Commissioner appeared slightly mollified. He picked up my story again, held it in the palm of his hand as if weighing it, then let it fall. ‘There’s nothing on our books about this,’ he said. ‘Nothing at all.’ He stood up. ‘I’ll handle it from here,’ he said. ‘I’ll calm down the Fremantle blokes.’

  We got into the police-rounds car and drove back to the office. I was in the back seat. I didn’t say anything. Ralph drove through the city like an exasperated uncle. ‘Thanks very much,’ he snorted over his shoulder. ‘I’ve got to deal with those bastards every day.’

  Mr Goldsmith turned in his seat and smiled at me, coolly but not unkindly. He was a gentleman. He summed up my scoop. ‘It was your job to report on the matter, Rodney, and you did. You got the facts. You did your job as a reporter.’ He could have been addressing a new boy scout who’d attempted a badge test way above his abilities. ‘And it’s our job to decide whether to publish it.’ Rodney? He’d got my name wrong, too. Now I needed my big coastal story more than ever. My hunger for it easily matched Dare’s amiable street-wisdom and cop-friendly banter. I even thought about the story in my own time, jogging along the beach each morning from Swanbourne to Cottesloe and willing a passing container ship or crayfish boat onto the reef. I wanted the story so badly that I studied for it.

  I went up to town on my day off, and in the West Australian’s library I got out all the files on shark attacks and shipwrecks and coastal disasters since the colony’s first European settlement. The more marine mayhem the better.

  ‘How’s married life?’ asked Roberta, as she passed me the files. ‘How’s the baby?’

  ‘Terrific,’ I said. Was she smirking? She seemed very confident all of a sudden. I could feel my cheeks burning. I still couldn’t tell whether girls were needling me, or gathering gossip, or genuinely passing the time. She was wearing an engagement ring. I’d read about her engagement to a young grazier, Digby Lee-Steere. It had made the social pages.

  ‘By the way, congratulations,’ I said. I couldn’t wait to get out of the library, out of the city and back to Fremantle where no one knew me or cared less. Where teenage fathers weren’t such a novelty, for that matter.

  And in the Fremantle City Library, a hundred yards across King’s Square from the office, I read up on local history, too, right back to the early Dutch mariners, the Dutch East India Company, the mutinies and marooned sailors.

  There were tragedies I’d never heard of. Like Charles Robertson being taken by a whaler shark near the Claremont Jetty in 1923. He was a thirteen-year-old coxswain thrown laughing and kicking into the river by the crew of his Scotch College rowing shell. Straight into the shark’s mouth. There was the middle-aged bookmaker’s clerk, Simeon Ettelson, who died after a twelve-foot tiger shark mauled his thigh down to the femur in the shallows at Cottesloe in 1925.

  I was surpr
ised I’d never heard of them. I’d swum heedlessly in those places for years. Maybe they’d happened so long ago they’d passed out of memory. Or maybe they’d been regarded as bad for the real estate market.

  While I liked this sort of grisly information I had no idea what to do with it. But I was getting my optimism back. Parenthood was part of it. I was happily dazed by marriage. I adored our little James. He was a card and the apple of my eye. Being a father and breadwinner made me feel more mature and responsible.

  And a germ of an idea was growing. In the way that John Dare’s Fremantle background helped him understand the port better, this coastal knowledge could perhaps give me a background of my own. Maybe it could help me make sense of events in my own life. I’d spent my childhood and adolescence on this sandy moonscape. I was sure I had something to say about it. I just didn’t know what.

  For a year after my mother’s death my father lost himself in work. He made risk-taking business decisions. He pulled off a major deal with the government: he would build the State’s first tyre factory if the government gave Dunlop all its business. His standing in the local business community had never been greater. He was made an executive councillor of the West Australian Chamber of Manufactures and a committeeman of the Perth Chamber of Commerce. He was always hosting receptions and giving speeches. He was a leading branch manager in a branch manager’s town.

  In the evenings he still came home late, brushed his daughter’s hair in front of the television, then drank Dewar’s until after midnight. But by day he seemed fired with energy.

  Dunlop head office, sensing a national economic slump, had announced a motivating contest with the prize of a trip around the world for the State manager (and his spouse) with the best figures for the year. The recession came as predicted and car sales plummeted – and the sale of fewer cars meant the sale of fewer tyres. Western Australia was the only State to actually increase sales. My father won the trip hands down.