There is the line.
I cut the motor and clamber for the anchor to get it out fast before I blow away in the dark. Blow away? I pay out rope, in the event; maybe not enough because later the boat swings like the hand on the dial of a crazy machine, lurching with every gust. I am bewildered by my circumstances—just a bit. Not out of control; it’s more like I can never quite catch up to what’s going on. It’s only when I get a chance to settle that I realise the wind is an easterly, coming straight off the ocean over the top of the hill that cradles the estuary. The bottom of that hill was where I launched from. At the protected inner shore I couldn’t feel the wind, couldn’t see it, but it’s biffing unimpeded out here. It’s a while before I work out the gusts are coming in clusters with lulls in between. They don’t seem indicative of steadily worsening weather. But it’s still unnerving because I can’t see further than the immediate surface of the water to definitively judge the safety of the situation. Or track how it might be changing. I have a new respect for those old seafarers who worked their craft across dark oceans in whatever weather: the physical danger of it, and the tricks of the mind. How did they all not go insane? I have heard it said sailors feared land more than sea and I understand that now too, having seen for myself the deception, the shapeshifting, how quickly things manifest and disappear. How easy it would be to run aground on shoals or rocks rearing up to ridicule maps.
The shore is not far away, perhaps 300 metres. By daylight I know it as a steep bush-covered hill with a single line of houses tucked high in the trees. Between me and the shore the windy water is a slurry of short post-impressionist brushstrokes going fast through a pathway of light, cast from a roadside streetlamp to the boat.
I start to fish. Put my two big handlines out, leaving them unattended, and begin with my rod as well. But then the big lines run, taking turns, and I have to lurch from one to the other to deal with them. Sometimes it’s just the line getting dragged off the reel when the boat bucks as it swings on the anchor, but once definitely not, once with something strong on it pulling away. And I think, What are you, down there, and do I really want to know? What are you? The line seesaws, begins to cut into my hand, and I reach for a cloth to help hold it. I’m really going to need the cloth if this thing takes off. How will I manage if you’re something big, something too big? And in my mind I see into the future to something coming up out of the murk, something large and rushing. It gets off. I’m glad. I’m also ashamed to be glad, so ready to do without the experience before I knew what the experience was. But I do not want to wrestle something big in the night, nor take something’s life by accident if it’s not a keeper, such a thing—a stingray or a small shark—being harder to handle in the dark. I do not want something to die for nothing.
After that I think, keep this simple: one big line out is enough. I don’t really need to fish at all, except I said I was going night fishing so I need to be fishing. Otherwise this is just a fake outing, empty grandstanding. I thought this was going to be all Debussy, creatures gliding elegantly to me, not some ugly fight in the wind to the death. Keep it simple. A mistake could so easily be made, and alone here it could turn bad in ways daylight would never allow, that daylight would laugh at. Fishing is not the most important thing to do tonight. Look around.
And I do.
In the clouds there are torn holes showing patches of stars. Viewed this way, through tunnels of cloud, the stars seem all the more distant from earth, as if it’s only ever by chance they allow themselves to be seen by us at all.
For days the clouds have been low-uddered with rain, brooding uncomfortably for hours, then, with no apparent provocation, spilling in heavy showers. I cannot tell if tonight’s are any more or less threatening: the star patches open and close; the wind over the water seems a low animal. Nothing to do with movements above.
In the distance, the red and green blinking lights of the port and starboard channel markers are Christmassy pinpoints. Toggling off/on—the only sharp things in this thick humidity.
Gusts come and I wonder if it’s foolish to stay, if this is building to something that won’t abate. This is wind I would never normally fish in by day. But then the bullying is over for a few minutes and I think: I’m here now. Stay. This is what you came for, to be here, you’re here, don’t be frail. So I stay. But I think now that the anchor might not be holding. I seem closer to the sticks of the lease. Am I closer? On its tight rope the boat is perhaps bouncing the anchor free. I grab the torch and aim the beam: where? There? Yes, there are the sticks. They look closer. Are they closer? Soon I’ll be over the weedy bottom that precedes them. Do it now, move now, don’t wait until it’s urgent, not in this wind.
I start the motor, I go forward to pull up the anchor, scurry back to the tiller, the boat spins. Which way am I facing? Where am I in relation to the light on the wharf? Another spin in another gust, the wharf’s gone, there is the lease-line, is this far enough?
Hurried into my decision by the wind, I throw the anchor over and lean awkwardly around the lantern pole to tie the rope off. The lamp’s LED white light fills the duck-egg blue dish of the boat but spills nowhere beyond. How it must look from above—from a helicopter, say: something sacred in the olive dark, the almost eye-shape of the hull filled with radiant blue-white. The imperfect fleck in it, me.
For a while I do not put out any fishing lines but sit in my glowing blue cup aiming the torch out into the dark water. Through the narrow column of light, individual straps of green ribbon weed pass in the current. They are vertically suspended, but upside down, so that the succulent white ends where they have pulled away from the plant’s base ride nearest the surface. With their slightly curved-over heads, they look like Egyptian asps, risen up from the bottom. In imperious procession, on down their Nile they glide. And then a large, cobbled brown mass looms up from the cloudy deep—a lump of sargassum weed. It pulses, arms out like a ghost-train spook, before it fades back.
I return to fishing for a while, no bites; then finally get two small whiting which I give back. I do not in all truth want to catch anything. I reel in my lines. Take a last look at the boiling banks of sodium-infected clouds. A last look at the humped hill where the old holiday house of our childhood stood. Goodbye.
•
The way back is straight into the wind. The boat is so light, and so badly trimmed with my weight and the weight of the motor all in the rear, that the nose sticks right out of the water. I forgot my extension pole for the tiller. With it I can redress the balance by sitting on the middle seat to steer. I’ve forgotten it before, no big deal, I just drive along looking like the sort of rank fool I would myself scorn, but in this strong night wind, lifting and snatching, the hull’s got no purchase on the black-mash of water. Gusts cuff across the bow, wresting the boat off course, and I tug and adjust. My sound mind says it’s not that bad, nothing that can’t be managed, while my unsound mind yelps, THIS IS MADNESS. Passing the wharf—the streetlight at the end broadcasts a cone of white light down over the main landing, a facility in waiting for a UFO.
Then, not long past the wharf, the land blocks the worst of the wind and crazed life suddenly flips again from the water in small explosions. I throttle back and put the motor into neutral to drift for a few minutes to watch. Blue fingerlings come close and become stationary, seeming to fall into a dream. A little red-eyed mantis shrimp skates into view. All around, things plip and plash. Mullet skip, a big one flashes by in an arc too fast to see but, like the cow jumping over the moon, it clears the boat, I swear.
That’s enough. The tide is full, easiest to go the last part of the way home now while the water at the shore is deepest. That’s enough. Some giant swordfish will be leaping next, twisting into the air, slashing arabesques with its swizzle-stick bill. Enough.
I pull in to the shore. Toss everything out of the boat onto the grassy bank. The breeze has now reached into this corner of the bay and the casuarinas respond. The sound through their needle leaves i
s a hollow note, sustained and choral, lifting and falling, wrapping around me and the boat and the street. A sound that’s empty in the same way open arms are empty.
I am the only one out on this windy night. There’s not a light on in any of the houses, no one, it seems, who can’t sleep, who is reading, who is keeping company with a rerun on TV. This is my daytime dream, to have the entire place to myself. It’s exhilarating. But it’s also sobering, as if these people have turned their backs on me—this me—the strange wild thing out at midnight. I stand in the middle of the road. I have stepped out of the parallel universe of water and night and I could walk all these deserted streets, range far and wide around this model town. But they would not like to think of me out here if they knew. What are you doing? What could you possibly be doing? What sort of person, what sort of woman, is willingly out there in the wind, at night, alone? Delivered up from the estuary.
But what if I’m the one that’s sane?
The salty air surges around me where I stand, bare feet splayed on the bitumen.
It’s so powerful.
One spark in the combustible dark and the whole joint’s gonna blow.
III.
husband
In my first or second year of high school the idle talk among a group of girls one day revolved around the question, What sort of man will you marry?
When it was my turn to speak I had an honest answer ready, although how much I’d thought about the subject prior to the question being asked, I can’t now say. But I was sure.
I would like to marry a fisherman, I said. The girls rolled their eyes and shrieked as one at such a choice, ‘A fisherman!’
It hadn’t occurred to me it might seem strange.
‘Yes, but he would be a fisherman who loved reading.’
This the girls scorned, both as a possibility and as a redeeming quality.
I had not thought of my husband’s work as low caste, or as barring him from books or learning, but if literature could not signal him as a man of worth and intelligence and thus elevate him, then clearly the wider world did not accord it the same importance I did. This was another shock.
But I could see it all. We would live in an isolated cottage by the sea. My husband would go out in his trawler at dawn and I would write. At night we would sit by an open fire and read books, classical music playing low in the background, perhaps. He had dark hair and a beard and wore roll-neck woollen jumpers (in all, bearing quite a strong resemblance to Mr Morrison, my primary school librarian). My husband was quietly spoken, thoughtful and strong, confident in himself and his capabilities. He often had a nice smile in his eyes when he looked at me. We would be equals in everything, except he would be more widely read than me (owing to the fact he was slightly older). He would bring other subjects and learning to me beyond the scope of my own interests, and I would never feel hemmed in by him.
Sometimes I would go out in the trawler with him and I would stand beside him at the helm, and although the deck might pitch as the boat bit into the swell (early-morning metallic blue; the odd gull riding the cold-edged breeze), we would be safe and all was exactly as it should be, heading for the fishing grounds.
Before I’d got much further than my husband’s physical description, the girls laughed in chorus, so I cut the rest short.
‘He’d stink!’ they said.
‘Would not,’ I countered, hurt on his behalf.
‘You couldn’t want a fisherman!’
But I did.
•
Where have you been, my husband, my lover? Absent all these years.
Lost at sea.
Tonight, the ribbon weed asps have risen from the deep to tell the hard truth: ‘It is we, instead of you, who have lain with him.’
The Nature of Words
Sometimes, in the recesses of the night when I can’t sleep, I ask words to come to me. I give them a blank, black field to fly into. One at a time, I say in my head, whichever of you wishes, come forward.
For my part, I promise to do nothing. I don’t want to rate them or otherwise judge, I don’t want to join them together or mark them for future uses. I want only to look and listen to them in their plainest state, without any accompanying context.
When you have shown as much of yourselves as you wish, I tell them, you are free to go.
So they come, sometimes wanting to follow each other in a little trail of alliteration, but I discourage that. I want them at random. Unrelated. And absolutely unattached. Because it’s their unadorned substance and character I want to appreciate, the entity each is unto itself.
Do painters do this too? Ask to be attended by colours?
apprehend
coo
parsimony
dolomite
Whether noun, verb or adjective, words are animated—by sound, definition, operation, rhythm, appearance or some combination of these. For example, coming out of the dark:
apprehend—
I like its measured air. Its meanings and the way they rock against each other: to catch, take into custody; and to understand.
coo—
Its compact simplicity and sound, inextricably bound up with the ancient impulse to soothe. Look at the way it’s made: the shape of the ‘c’ an open mouth from which the ‘oo’ issues.
parsimony—
That long first syllable (at least the way I say it), sped up by the quick nimble rush of the rest. As if it regrets its duty to represent frugality and would rather have done with it.
dolomite—
Sharp edges, and the reliable heft of rock in its ‘d’. I can almost feel a lump of it in my hand, begging to be chucked.
You see now how words have individual properties? Have active lives entwined with our own. Are more than mere signs. This is why they are fascinating to me and dear.
But if the words of my language are a precious part of my existence, how must others feel who have lost so many of theirs?
garawa sea, ocean
wudal rain, pour
gurumin shadow of a person
mumaga be lightning
warama suckle, suck, feed (of a baby)
mudang alive
These are words from the Darkinjung language group, one of the languages spoken on the New South Wales Central Coast and hinterland, collected as part of a language reclamation project. They’re words I’d like to add to my lexicon, but they belong first to the families of their original speakers, who, for so long, have had to make do without them.
•
Maybe I invite words in in the middle of the night to make sure they’re really all still there. Massed in their dark reservoir. Every word I ever heard, ever read. Maybe. Because some that come, surprise.
•
Words are company, comfort. And a means of escape. It was my mother who, by her example, taught me this. My parents weren’t readers of books, but read the newspaper thoroughly each day. And Mum always did the crossword. The firm blue biro strokes of her block letters in the white squares demonstrated that thinking about words and sifting them were worthwhile. The right one mattered. Sometimes she would call out an easy clue but mostly it was a private, quiet pleasure, done at the kitchen table with a cup of tea.
In my mid-teens, when we were living in Melbourne, my dad lost his job in a recession. The family fortunes wobbled. Unable to find work, he bought a small business that made and sold billiard tables. It was the 1970s and the leisure industry was growing, but the downturn soon hit that sector too. Additional troubles followed.
Initially my mother worked two days a week in the showroom, which was distant from the workshop, but in short time she was needed Monday to Friday and Saturday mornings. She hated it. But she didn’t complain, not wanting to make my father feel any worse than he already did. It was excruciatingly lonely and depressing. Sometimes the only time the shop door opened was to admit the postman bringing letters. When there was no mail, the door might not open at all. She spent her days behind a veneer partition
which marked off a small office at the back of the shop. It was cheerless, with a concrete floor and spartan fittings. To occupy herself she sewed and, of course, did the crossword. By this stage my sister and brother had left home, so sometimes during the school holidays I’d go with her to keep her company, but it was hard to fill the hours. I read. We did the crossword together. We played Scrabble. In the showroom beyond the partition the different-sized billiard tables stood in ranks, as inert, and yet as pregnant with their future function, as coffins.
In the first weeks, when there was still cause for optimism, Mum came home one day laughing at herself. She told us that as she drove along Beach Road towards the shop, she was in the habit of glancing down the short side streets for snatched views of Port Phillip Bay. At a beach down one street, she noticed three swimmers. And they were there again the next time she drove by. In fact, every day, there they were. There was something robust and free about them that she admired, especially when it was windy and the waves were choppy and drab. The way they turned up regardless. But that morning the realisation finally hit: the black, distant figures were actually the last remaining stumps of a derelict pier.
In the car on the way to work with her months later, I’d glance at those three stumps and hate them. Mum did not look. She didn’t laugh at her mistake anymore.
Only once did she give voice to her despair. She told me that sometimes she felt like driving on and never coming back. It was a huge and frightening admission. She never said anything she didn’t mean. What an enormous act of self-discipline and self-sacrifice it was to make the turn and pull in to the shop. She was so dignified about it, but now I imagine her, alone in the parked car, struggling to make herself get out, her head whirring with suppressed panic, wondering how she could manage another day.
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