The Sea Bed

by Marele Day

  Chicken slipped the photo back into the writing pad and sat in the auditorium with pen poised, waiting for the powerful thoughts trapped in her head to come streaming down her arm.

  Confronted by the blank page they had become shy, none of them wanting to go first. Chicken looked at the faint shadow the pen made on the page, at the straightness of it between her lightly curved fingers. Nothing would change unless she started making marks on the paper.

  How are you? Every year around this time Chicken wrote to remind Lilli of the approaching festival. The letters were usually full of sunny days, stories about former classmates, anything of interest that had happened at work, how beautiful the island was in summer. Chicken picked out the good bits to use as a lure.

  When they first started writing Chicken used to ask Lilli when she was coming home. She said how much she missed her, that she was lonely without her big sister and would Lilli please come back, even if it was just for the weekend. Chicken could meet her in Boat Harbour if Lilli didn’t want to come all the way to the island. Or maybe Chicken could visit her in the city, she once suggested boldly.

  Lilli ignored all her requests. When she responded it was happy postcard stuff, and so eventually Chicken followed her lead. In the letters the real sisters disappeared and were replaced by two bright cheery girls who never felt sad or lonely, whose lives were perfect in every way.

  How are you? Chicken continued by saying she was sitting in the aquarium. Ry was working here now; it was much better than her previous job at Sea Breeze. She didn’t have to travel so far to work, just a ferry ride to Boat Harbour then a short walk.

  Chicken put her pen down. The letter was turning into a story about Ry. She began again. How are you? The pen remained inert, waiting for the next bit to come. Why was it so difficult? There had been shoals of ideas when she composed the letter in her mind.

  Alertness in the auditorium, a springing to attention. The doors had been opened. People started filing in, taking up their seats. Music squeezed through the speakers like extruded metal. Chicken put the pen and paper away.

  Ry strode onto the stage in yellow gumboots, royal blue pants and aqua shirt. She stood in the middle of the performance area against a blue painted sea and sky that matched her outfit. Variegated brown fibreglass rocks broke up the blue. The stage props were a basketball ring, a small set of portable steps, a stack of hoops. A large trough of water separated the stage from the audience.

  Ry held a microphone in one hand and a bucket of food in the other. She greeted the audience, shouting into the microphone as if she were mustering troops. At school she’d been so quiet and shy you couldn’t even remember if she was there some days.

  The seal made its entrance, lolloping on its f lippers. Everyone applauded.

  The show began. The seal caught hoops around its neck, followed when Ry called. It made its way up the portable staircase then slid into the water with a splash. The front row gasped at the possibility of getting wet. When the seal came sleekly out of the water it balanced a ball on its nose and tossed it through the basketball ring, getting it right the first time. Impressive.

  Every time it completed a trick Ry threw it a piece of fish from the bucket. Sometimes she patted the seal on the head. The performance lasted half an hour, maybe forty minutes. There was a final round of applause then the audience stood up and filed out.

  ‘Ry.’ Chicken thought she’d said it quietly but it boomed into the space.

  ‘Hi, Chicken. I’ll be another half-hour. Can you wait?’

  ‘I’ve got a few things to do anyway. Meet you at the noodle shop.’

  ‘OK.’

  As Chicken was about to leave, a young man walked onto the stage from the same direction the seal had entered. He was wearing white rubber boots and a loose grey shirt with the sleeves rolled up. He was tanned, like a fisherman, the sun and sea baked into him. Tall, with spiky hair, easy in his body, yet hanging back, as if he didn’t know what to do with himself. Quite endearing.

  Ry was teaching him to be a trainer. Chicken recognised the pattern—give the seal some food from the bucket, then pat it, holding the other hand just above its nose so it can smell the fish. Repeat the instructions, so that the seal associates food with performance. When the seal gets up on the bench and slaps its f lippers together it gets fed. When it balances the baseball bat on its nose it gets fed. Rewarded with food. This was a seal who knew the routine well, waited to be fed, showed the young man what to do.

  You would never get a fish to balance a baseball bat on its nose or catch a hoop around its neck. All that fish learned was to recognise the feed basket. No matter how many times Chicken pushed the big old groper at Oceanworld away she couldn’t train him not to stick his head in.

  Chicken left the auditorium, quietly closing the doors behind her. It looked like Ry and the seal were doing a good job of training the new guy. Would he stay or was it just a job for the summer? Perhaps he was a student of marine biology. At lunch she’d ask Ry, try and find out a little about him.

  Taming was a long slow waiting, best done in small but firm steps. Sometimes you just had to stand still and keep your heart open. Seals were fairly fast learners but even they took time. Birds varied. Some you could coax to eat out of your hand little by little, while others never really took to taming and always struggled to be free.

  There had been a birdcage in the house when Chicken was a child; a gift, according to the family stories, from Great-grandfather to Great-grandmother. It was made of thin metal rods with wider strips of air in between, and shaped like a dome. The door was hardly distinguishable from the rest of the cage, but when you found it you could slide it up and down to your heart’s content. Inside were little swings and perches at different levels. It was majestic, a cathedral for birds. The bars were far enough apart for the birds to see everything—trees, the tops of roofs, all the good bird places—but close enough to keep them captive. The original occupants—a pair of green finches—were bred for this, did not know the wild. Outside the security of the cage such birds rarely survived.

  As Chicken walked along the wide corridor she wondered how all the fish in the aquarium would survive if they were returned to the sea. Perhaps the fact that fish were so difficult to tame meant that they had not lost their wild ways.

  The second birdcage Chicken remembered was a wooden one, square and squat. A group of boys had found it one day after school in a section of the harbour where rubbish gathered. It was old and had no bottom to it, but the boys turned this to their advantage. The classmates tied a long piece of string to a clothes peg which propped up one side of the cage. Then they sprinkled sesame seeds underneath—until the mothers found out and said sesame seeds shouldn’t be wasted in this way, after which they used grains of rice instead. (The children also tried small orange berries that grew on the island trees but they didn’t prove as successful. Why, if you were a bird, would you go to that particular spot for berries that you could get almost anywhere?) The rice proved to be a perfect lure.

  The birds could see the children setting up the trap. If they understood what tying string to a peg, propping up the cage with it, sprinkling grains of rice then hiding behind bushes meant, they didn’t seem to learn from it. The birds approached the food on the ground the way they always did—landing nearby, cocking their heads and looking around, darting a few steps closer, grabbing the food in their beaks then f lying off to a safe place to eat it.

  With the trap, the usual chain of events was interrupted. Once the bird got to the food the string was pulled, the cage came down and the bird was trapped. It was usually a sparrow or something like that. The bigger birds, seagulls and kites, never seemed that interested. Though it was only a small bird, trapping it was as exhilarating as catching a lion, a tiger, but without the danger.

  The hardest part of catching birds was the waiting. You’d think doing nothing would be easy, but someone always wanted to scratch their nose, sneeze, make a comment, a movement that
would frighten the bird away.

  There was an art to knowing precisely when to pull the string. The bird had to be right inside the cage area, going for the grain and not looking around. The exact timing of the pull was often a matter for dispute, with someone hissing ‘Now!’ or grabbing the string and pulling it themselves. Often the bird was lost during the kerfuff le.

  When the children did catch one they ran over to the trap and got down on the ground so that they could have a really close look at their reluctant guest. Then they let it go.

  Chicken left the aquarium, crossed the busy main road then walked along a quiet tree-lined street to the post office. It was a red-brick building, with the important demeanour of a bank, yet the large window composed of many small panes of glass made it feel airy and cheerful. When the sun was in a certain position, squares of light appeared on the f loor.

  Chicken went in and stood at the bench beneath the window. The trees outside were in pots, leaves and branches trimmed to a perfectly round ball. There was a pen attached to the bench by a piece of string but Chicken used her own.

  Dear Lilli, how are you? Things are not all right here. Once that was on the page the rest tumbled out. Chicken told her sister that this festival she had to come. Pearlie was behaving strangely and they were terribly worried. Chicken found herself writing about rubbish in the water, wilting seaweed, the hollows under the rock shelf where abalone used to be now filling with sand. She named all the old ones who had died, and the young who had left. She wrote urgently, as if this were the last chance she’d ever have, opening a vein into the unsaid things, whispering them onto the page.

  When she had finished writing she held up the photo and looked into the face of her sister, willing her home. Chicken folded the letter into the envelope, pressed the photo to her chest then placed it into the envelope as well. Sealed it.

  Chicken joined the queue. There were only two people ahead of her but it took a long time to get to the counter. The old lady being served was filling in a form of some kind and needed help. Other customers started lining up behind Chicken. The post office got quite busy at lunchtime. Eventually the girl helping the old lady called to one of her co-workers to come to the counter.

  Chicken looked at the clock on the back wall, a big old-fashioned clock with Roman numerals. She watched two minutes tick by. She scanned the cards and knick-knacks on display—key rings, fancy pens and coloured pencils.

  Eventually her turn came. She bought the stamp and left the queue.

  Chicken was outside, about to post the letter before she noticed. She had forgotten the heart on the back of the envelope. She took out her pen but instead of the curve of a heart the pen made a straight line, crossing back on itself enough times to form a star. For good measure Chicken drew the other part of the talisman—five vertical lines crossed by four horizontal. Lilli would remember.

  Chicken posted the letter. It made a soft, barely discernible sound, like a leaf falling to the ground. She stood there beside the red postbox, a waiting room for departing letters. It was cleared daily, except for Sundays, at four thirty. Chicken wanted to stay to make sure the letter was transferred safely into the postal van, began its journey and didn’t get left behind.

  ‘Excuse me.’ It was a man with a clutch of letters to post.

  Chicken stepped away.

  11

  A rare sighting

  By the time Yugen alighted at Finger Peninsula his mind had calmed. At the edge of the snug little harbour a group of children gathered around an older boy attaching bait to a fishing hook. They stood back while he threw the line. Generous, the boy let everyone have a go.

  Yugen began walking through the town, towards the Pacific Ocean. It was a town for the people who lived here—no Oceanworld, no displays for tourists. Instead there were shops that sold clothes, a pharmacy, stalls with fresh produce— fish, plums, mandarins, bunches of green leaves, radishes and cucumbers.

  The monk entered a convenience store and bathed in the sensation of being surrounded by innumerable things—suntan lotion, pins, toilet paper, rubber gloves, tomatoes, frozen fish, elastic bands, batteries, vitamin supplements, bottles of sauce, tins of mushrooms, bars of chocolate, bags of rice, noodles, sandwiches in triangular plastic containers. He still felt a lingering regret for what had happened in the pearl shop, for offending the girl with his ill manners and impulsiveness, for having improperly terminated the purchase of the key ring. In an attempt to re-establish equilibrium, he bought a notebook in the convenience store and waited while the lady at the cash register put it into a white paper bag, gave him change and a receipt. He did not ask any probing questions, merely thanked her when the transaction was completed, and left.

  From such small beginnings in the quiet bay, the town grew incrementally, expanded into a place as busy as the city. The long straight road Yugen was on came to an end but there was no sight of the ocean. Instead, he found himself at the intersection of a major thoroughfare lined with buildings three or four storeys high, tightly packed together. He could not be lost. Apart from entering the convenience store, he had made no diversion.

  Yugen crossed the busy highway when the traffic lights permitted, imagined a straight line heading east and tried to keep to it as best he could, dog-legging his way through the maze of smaller streets. The quality of the air was changing. Beneath the smell of diesel was the salty tang of the sea. Around the next corner he found the port.

  At one end was a row of corrugated-iron sheds, white with green roofs. From the chimneys rose drifts of smoke. The doors were closed and the windows had grilles over them. Bicycles and mopeds were parked out front. The most prominent feature of the port was right on the water’s edge—a large roof supported by steel poles. Under the roof were stacks of plastic tanks. Yugen waited for a truck to pass then made his way across. In the tanks were live fish. One container was full of barnacle-encrusted abalone.

  He walked along a seawall harbouring large fishing boats. Beyond the concrete was the great blue-ruff led expanse of the Pacific Ocean. Yugen gazed into the distance, into the elemental vigour of water and air. This was the sea of his imagination, sunlit, endless, profound. He was surrounded by it, saw the whorls and vortices on its surface, patterns created by movement without rest, heard the water slapping up against him. This ocean stretched to the other side of the world.

  Yugen brought the key ring out of his pocket. The pad of his thumb and forefinger felt the star and netting etched into the pearly white disc. The prayer bag with these markings had been one of Soshin’s treasured possessions. Perhaps he was from a family of sea women—his mother, grandmother, sisters.

  Perhaps before coming to the monastery Soshin had had a sea wife.

  Another truck entered the port, its brakes wheezing to a halt. When the monk looked more closely at the water immediately below him, he saw rainbow patterns of oil. It was the Pacific Ocean but he could not cast Soshin’s remains into this polluted edge of it.

  Yugen retraced his footsteps back along the seawall and crossed to the other side of the port. As he approached the row of corrugated-iron sheds he heard boisterous conversation punctuated by bursts of throaty laughter. Was this private property? Instead of walking past, he went closer.

  At the back of the sheds was a washing machine, and a hose feeding water into plastic buckets. Pairs of f lippers were leaning against the wall. Hanging on clotheslines were thermal underwear, knitted gloves, and what appeared to be human shadows—wetsuits, twenty or thirty of them. Sea women.

  Yugen stood at the corner not moving, his breath suspended, as if he had come across the habitat of a rare species. The back doors of the sheds were open. He could look in if he wanted.

  He strode boldly along, with purpose, passing through the pockets of warmth emanating from the interiors. He glanced in, very brief ly, his eyes taking snapshots he would examine more closely at leisure. He did not want to pause, to risk being asked to leave.

  When he got to the end of the
row the monk savoured what he had seen. In the centre of each room was a square fireplace, f lames rising up from a thick bed of ash. Suspended overhead were several sturdy hooks for the pots that were now sitting on the bricks surrounding the fireplace. Around the hearth sat three or four women and sometimes a man, eating lunch, heads bent over bowls of fish and rice.

  They were not at all like the young performers at Oceanworld. These sea women had time-and-weather-wrinkled faces, sensible short-cropped hair, the well-worn feet of old mountain monks. They were dressed in tracksuit pants and tops, robust women, comfortable in their bodies. They held their bowls close to their faces, shovelling the food in.

  His first sighting of sea women in the wild. If Yugen cast a shadow as he passed by the sheds, none of the occupants seemed to notice.

  He hesitated. Perhaps he should reconsider his decision. Leave Soshin here. At least there were sea women. But they were in corrugated-iron sheds surrounded by concrete.

  Perhaps others could be found somewhere less industrial. Words from the Oceanworld commentary drifted back—sea women along this coastline and on offshore islands. Islands.

  An island with sea women would be ideal.

  12

  Pearlie leaves the big house

  Chicken stood on the corner, waiting for the lights to turn green, thinking about Pearlie. In the letter she’d summarised Pearlie’s departure, but it had been brewing for a couple of years now, ever since Violet’s decision to take in tourists. ‘It’ll just be for the summer, the odd weekend and public holiday,’ Chicken recalled her mother saying. Pearlie had remained silent. Violet’s dimpled lips f lickered and twitched. ‘To supplement our income. What we get from the sea is simply not enough anymore.’

  ‘That’s because they’ve taken everything out and put it in that glorified fish tank,’ Pearlie scoffed. Chicken crossed the road. The new aquarium had been a big topic of conversation on the island before it was built, even among the grandmothers. When they weren’t diving they sat on the bench outside the corner store, like seagulls on a wall, listening to the ocean, watching the sky. Gossiping. The aquarium was going to be so colossal, they’d heard, that you’d be able to see it from the island. It would have millions of fish in it, from all over the world—Arctic and tropical varieties, fresh and saltwater, all in the same place. Chicken glanced back at the aquarium. It was huge, but from the island it was no bigger than a speck.