Secrets of the Sea

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  There came back to her an afternoon in Wynyard less than a year after her brother’s disappearance. She remembered burningly her mother’s blank disinterest, her father’s curiosity. “What’s that, Merridy?”

  “It’s what the Jumblies went to sea in. Look, that’s him steering.”

  Animated, her father set about making a model based on Merridy’s design. It was a vision they shared. When he retired, he promised to build her a full-scale version. For years she had looked forward to it. His sea-going sieve.

  It was not what Alex expected. He was braced for her laugh, not a fantastic floating colander. “This model, how big was it?”

  “Oh, no bigger than that,” and gestured at a bottle.

  “I’d like to see.”

  “I lost it when my parents separated.”

  “That’s a shame. What did you copy it from, a children’s book?”

  “It came out of my head. I don’t know where it came from, I can’t remember much about being six.” But she had the original drawing in her Glory Box. A fuel-section measured to scale. The whole thing nearly sixty-five feet in diameter. And her brother at the wheel.

  She elaborately averted her glance. “So this is where you work.”

  “I don’t consider it as work,” returning the light bulb to its shelf.

  She listened to him, his face exposed and fragile in the smell of Super Glue and varnish, his voice the tinkle of something becalmed. Something in a bottle perhaps.

  “Seems like work to me!”

  He ran his finger over the surface of the table and inspected it. “I really should get Alice to clean this place.” The words falling among the crumbs of wood and metal. He did not see that he required another sort of help. Or maybe he did, for his look would not retreat from the raft it had found.

  “What’s that for?” she asked, puzzled by the round smooth corner of an ice-cream stick pressed against his chin.

  “This”–he brandished it like a crucifix–“I use for decks and for stuff that’s out of sight, braces and bits and pieces that aren’t going to take much weight.”

  There was the sound of his little stick on a bottle, the tap, tap, tap that she listened to, her heart catching the pulse on the vacant glass until the two sounds beat together.

  “What about these?” Protruding out of the same jar she recognised one of the satay sticks that he had snatched so surprisingly from her plate. Still orange with Tildy’s lip gloss.

  “Satay sticks are good for masts.”

  It was only natural. People attracted to making boats should be attracted to each other. An unfamiliar creature scampered up and down her ribcage.

  On the scarred worktop a green ship lay on its side. She reached out and touched it.

  “That’s wet. Be careful!”

  The sticky varnish was like sap from a black wattle on her wool fingertip, or honey.

  Ever so respectful, he scooped the ship from the table and brought it to her.

  “The Otago. A three-masted barque. Conrad’s only command,” noticing the fluff she had left on his ship.

  “Conrad who?”

  “Joseph Conrad. My father loved his novels. Conrad captained the Otagofor a year and wrote a story about it. She was taken to Hobart and sold for scrap. Otago Bay–it’s named after her.” He tilted the ship. “See here? Over this side Captain Conrad was leaning when he saw a naked man looking up at him from the sea.”

  A picture of white legs and arms, desperate, floated into her mind. “Who was he?”

  “He had killed a man and jumped overboard. Conrad hid him in his cabin. He risked his ship so that the murderer could swim to the China coast.”

  She sniffed her finger thoughtfully while Alex explained how he had crafted most of the hull out of Huon pine from the timber yard in Strahan. Two of her masts from Merridy’s satay sticks and the main mast from kauri. And the deck out of ice-cream sticks that he had gathered from the bins behind the primary school.

  “You saw me—” He started to speak, but she talked over him. She remembered.

  “And what on earth are they?” rattling another glass jar.

  “Kidney stones.” His grandfather, a broom maker in Sedbergh, had collected them, apparently. “They make good cannonballs.”

  Still the fusillade did not let up. She nodded at what he was cradling. “Where do you get your bottles?” She was thinking of her sieve. She had looked forward to it so idiotically.

  “Your hotel, mainly.”

  “You go through the rubbish there as well?”

  He blushed. “That’s right.”

  “I’ve never seen you.” She picked up the rum bottle that he had been tapping. Had she tossed it away herself, into a bin behind the hotel? Something grated and she peered inside. “What’s that?”

  “A penny.” Alex’s father had found it in a grave on the edge of his land. The blackened coin had belonged to a family of early settlers who had drowned in Moulting Lagoon, their boat overturning in a sudden gale. “It’s old. You couldn’t cash it in.”

  She rattled it. The coin had a face on it, but whether of a man or woman she could not make out. Her lips parted between curiosity to see the face and incredulity as to how it could have got there.

  “Just how did you squeeze that in?”

  “Ah, that is a secret.” He spoke in such a serious way that she turned her head. And now she felt his eyes, how they stayed on her, and smiled confusedly.

  “But Alex, I want to know. It couldn’t possibly fit through this neck.”

  He stepped closer. Their arms brushing. “Take off your gloves, why don’t you?” He wanted to stop her questions. To speak of things that had nothing to do with ships or bottles or coins that today would not pay for a telephone call.

  She was staring into the rum bottle.

  “Will you come to bed with me?” he said in a flat voice.

  She could feel the bone in her denying smile. The horror of the black word forming in her throat. And looked for help at the grating penny.

  “You never answered my question.” She spoke at random, holding up the bottle and peering through the circular base at Alex. He was so unlike Ray. It was essential not to hurt him. “You never answer my questions.”

  “Which one?”

  “Do you want children?” to her magnified brown palms. And thought again how uncanny it was that the uttering of her wish should have created it.

  He nodded. Anything she wanted, he wanted too.

  But she needed to be sure. “How many?”

  “Oh, if they are like you, mobs of them.” He took the bottle from her and laid it on the table.

  She rubbed at her eye with the scratchy glove.

  “Then you’ll sleep with me?” His voice was flat, but his eyes shone. She could feel his fingers moving on her shoulders. And with no struggle at all her resolve fled out of her, a wave retreating from the ramparts of a child’s sandcastle. She returned the pressure of his body.

  Outside, what was going on was the chirring of the windmill.

  She looked at him with the eyes of someone who was looking at all the children they would have. She peeled off her gloves and they went back along the corridor and into the bedroom.

  Quickly, they undressed. At the touch of her warm skin he felt the blood startle in his hands and chest. His thought was not of the sea, but of the water that serpented along the dry furrow he had dug for his potatoes, the sun on its snake-dark back. It hurt.

  She felt the tip of his cock on her chest and pressed herself against him.

  In the darker room their bodies were the only light. She caught sight of her raised legs reflected in the patina of the ancient oak wardrobe, his back braced and then flowing into her into her. He could have been swimming for his life.

  In shadow his face had grown thinner, his eyes rounder. Sound was the gasp as he replied to her with his whole body, the hiccup of flesh. Smell the varnish from his unfinished deck on her fingertips.

  She pulled hi
m to her breast so that he would not see her sadness. She felt no aversion to his neediness, no fear. Part of her had found a berth. Someone to share her obscure hurt. She looked over her arm that held him and envisaged in the colours that she could see through the crack in the curtain–a squalor of reds and blues in a grey sky–the children whom she would make happy with every scrap of love that had been denied her brother and, obviously, Alex.

  “She’ll be coming round the mountain,” sang Mr Twelvetrees in the corner. “Singing Yi Yi Yippy Yippy Yi.”

  The dog sat under the bed, eating. Through the window, the sound of the windmill and the clack-clack-clack of the yellow-tailed black cockatoos pecking at damp pine cones.

  Sometime later the face on the quilt took the shape of Alex.

  “Hello,” she smiled and sat up. She had been looking at something on the sheet.

  With a finger he traced the scatter of moles on her shoulder as if he was connecting them.

  She shivered happily. “Dad used to say that in another life I must have been blasted by grapeshot through a sieve.”

  “What other life?”

  Her silvery voice thinned out. “Don’t you believe we were other things before?”

  But he had been nailed in too straight; he had grown up in a period of thank-you letters and lace-up shoes and watches that you wound before you slept. At the bottom of his heart he had believed in his parents’ love and, he supposed, their God. Until Miss Pritchard came into the kitchen and told him it was best that he stay up at the house, not leave, least not till the policeman returned.

  He moved his head. “I don’t know. I never really thought about it. Maybe I was something before.” He looked down at the feet of his mother’s wardrobe and it seemed to Alex that the talons were loosening their grip on whatever it was they had been clinging to.

  He caressed her and she turned to him. In her need to be held, his to hold, to love.

  They made love again and afterwards dozed. It was six thirty when he woke. Merridy no longer beside him.

  His eyes darted around the room. She stood naked in the corner. Inspecting two frames on the wall–photographs of his parents.

  Aware of his gaze, she said dutifully: “I can see a likeness. You take more after your mother.”

  Of greater interest was the hand-coloured lithograph of Baudin’s cockatoo. Delicate, accurate, gleeful–it was Alex’s favourite of their pictures.

  “Edward Lear,” she read. “Not the poet, surely?”

  “He was a bird artist before he wrote limericks. He was eighteen when he painted that.”

  “I had no idea he painted birds! Australian birds!” and looked back at the soft undulating feathers, the unblinking eye. Another sign. A sermon could not have said more.

  She returned to the bed and leaned over Alex, stroking his temple. “What can I tell you? Is there anything I can tell you?”

  “No.” Then: “Yes. I’d like to know how your brother died.”

  She gulped. Recovering herself, she rested her head on the dune of his chest and stared across it into the wardrobe.

  “You don’t have to tell me,” he said.

  “I know,” and went on looking into the wardrobe.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  FROM ACROSS THE ROOM she could see her mother at the basin, flannelling her brother’s forehead. It was his seventh birthday. A Sunday morning at the family’s shack near Wynyard on the north-west coast. The sun shining, the wattlebirds singing, the dry fresh scent of the eucalypts.

  Nothing had happened, but she knew from a tenseness in her heart that something was about to happen.

  “Mummy,” he questioned the reflected face, “why is an island not a house?”

  “I don’t know, darling.” Mrs Bowman squeezed out the flannel and rubbed it behind his ears.

  In the mirror he caught sight of Merridy, stealing close to watch. With a quick flick of his wrist he dipped his fingers into the basin and splashed her.

  “Hey!” closing her eyes and holding up her hands.

  “Stop that this minute!” Mrs Bowman rammed a straw boater on his head and tried to fasten the strap under his chin, but gave up.

  “Go and wait on the deck. Now, Merridy, your turn.”

  Her father had organised an outing to see the steam trains at Sheffield.

  “We were in high spirits, my brother most of all. He had a new pair of Blundstones that he wanted to wear, a birthday present from Dad. Mum had given him a sailor’s hat.”

  She could see her brother–out on the deck–toying with the strap and wiggling his toes to tell everyone how well his boots fitted.

  “Mummy,” she asked earnestly, “why is a house not an island?”

  He leaned over the deck, staring at something.

  “Oh, Merridy!” vigorously scrubbing her daughter’s cheek.

  What was he staring at?

  At last, Merridy was all washed and dressed.

  “Go and wait with your brother,” and picked up the towel from the floor.

  Merridy ran skipping out to join him. She loved her older brother. She looked up to his friends who came to the house, who sat in a row on the top step and flipped his Slinky towards her down the stairs. But not as much as she idolised him, sometimes to the point where she developed a stitch in her side. It did not matter that he believed in the silliest things. Things that existed, as she tried to explain to him, only in the imagination. Like the stalagmites they created out of wet sand that hardened into towers and battlements, where he patrolled with cobweb spear, a sentry visible only to his child’s eye. Her brother was always sending his mind into places where she could not follow. At breakfast, when their father asked him: “Have you decided what you want to be, now you’re seven?”, he had answered with his most serious face that his life’s ambition was to be a sailor in one of Edward Lear’s drawings. He was a child enchanted by sandcastles and Jumblies.

  But he was nowhere to be seen.

  “As you yourself know,” she said to Alex, “in life anything can happen, anything at all; you can be watching the person you love most in the world and you turn your head for the briefest moment and when you look back they are gone.”

  She shouted into the shack: “Mum, he’s not here.”

  Mrs Bowman’s first thought–he’s run off. “Leonard, come quick.”

  Merridy’s father, fiddling with a button on his shirt cuff, went down the steps three at a time. He called out into the bush.

  Everyone stood still and listened. A wattlebird answered.

  “We went looking through the bush, yelling for him.”

  The shack was on a sandstone bluff in lava-flow country. Potato fields interspersed with thick woods, along a cliff-face of rich volcanic soil that descended to a pebbled beach. The closest neighbours were a mile away, the closest town a twenty-minute drive in the family Holden. After searching for two hours, Merridy’s father drove to Wynyard to get help. Soon a line of seventeen men and women–bushies, fallers, police constables, even some wives and children–fanned out from the deck and pushed their way knee-high through the potato crops and woods.

  “We searched all that afternoon, and the next day. We were desperate. For three days, we searched. The only thing we found was his sailor’s hat with the strap still loose on it that Mum had promised to mend.”

  At the sight of the straw hat Mrs Bowman burst into tears. She refused to eat or to sleep. She was aware that her son had not come back. Beyond that, her mind was a blank. She spoke of it as a “real shame” that he should have chosen to keep everyone waiting.

  “It was weird at first, and then pretty scary. Everything, from what she was eating to the whole plot-line, was just gone. Daddy had to reiterate everything calmly, three to ten times–no exaggeration.”

  Eventually, she lost herself in household chores and made it clear that she anticipated her son’s return at any moment. He would want his meal, a change of trousers.

  “She cooked all his favourite dishes for hi
m, put his best clothes out on his bed.”

  Then on the fourth day after her brother’s disappearance, Merridy was trailing her father along the edge of a cliff about half a mile from the shack, when he halted, paralysed. His lips sucked tight. Like a man who had glugged down a bottle of gin in a minute and was trying to keep it in.

  That summer it had rained heavily; the bush became a swamp of chocolate-coloured mud, ponds formed in the paddocks and along the cliff-tops holes appeared where tiger-snakes and devils had burrowed. One hole was bigger than the rest and suggested that an animal of some size had made its lair here. This was the hole before which her father stood.

  “Daddy, is it him?” taking a step.

  He whirled round. “No! Merridy, no!”

  Too late. She had seen for herself the large round hole in the bank, as though something had shrugged its way into the earth–and, on the dead leaves to the side of it, her brother’s Blundstone boot.

  “Wait here.”

  Merridy watched him on all fours disappear into the burrow–if that is what it was. She pressed her brother’s small boot to her face, recalling the way he had looked down at it, and prayed with every fibre in her body for his safe return. Presently her father reappeared. Shook his head.

  She knew what she had to do. She had not kissed her brother goodbye. Thinking that he would always be there, wiggling his toes in his new boots. Or tearing, furious, after Merridy to retrieve a toy tractor that she had snatched. Or growing up to be a sailor in a drawing.

  “Let me go,” she said. She was small. She might be able to penetrate further.

  She crept on, her father’s black rubber torch between her teeth. The beam fell on dead leaves and violent green moss and the dart-boards of torn cobwebs. Clay gave way to sand. Smells of fungus and mould to the damp marine scents of the sea. She lowered her head. The passage narrowed until she could crawl no further, ending in a wall of sand. The air was thicker, but when she stopped to catch her breath she could hear a tiny voice calling. It was barely audible and she did not know if it came from inside her head or where it came from. She removed the torch from her mouth and shouted his name. The two syllables rolled along the passage. She listened. Silence. Then a distant sound. The dull roar of the ocean sucking on its rocky teeth and sighing, and somewhere in the middle of this dull seductive roar a small voice persisting.