Secrets of the Sea

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  Nonetheless, whoever had instructed him had done their work. The boy had learned his lines so well, they might have become ingrown.

  Alex tried to catch him out, but Kish had an answer to everything. Where he did not reply, he deflected Alex’s questions with a sawing laugh.

  “Speak Dutch, do you?” Alex joked, playing his game.

  Kish looked at him over his mug of tea, not speaking. His eyes unreadable. His silence tightening its hold.

  Still congested by his flu and now by lack of sleep, Alex leaned forward, trying to anchor and clarify his thoughts.

  Was this man having him on? Or did he seriously believe that he was a sailor from the year 1804? If he did, then he was lost in a region where no one could reach him, and certainly no one in Wellington Point. They needed to get him to a doctor.

  If Kish was a ghost, his currency was worthless. Worth nothing to anyone. Like an old penny found in a grave. And Alex thought of the cow in the wood and Kish drooling in the pine needles; superfluous and dribbling.

  No, he was simple, that’s what he was. A simpleton. One of those street kids they took aboard ships to teach teamwork.

  But Merridy did not think so. To her, Kish was a lost soul. She wanted to lead him off into a quiet corner and read his face.

  “I think he needs to sleep, Alex.”

  Her husband took another look at the young man he had saved. He stood up. “I spoke to Finter again. He’s been in touch with the coastguard. It looks like three of the eleven crew are missing.”

  The sun had climbed over the Hazards by the time Alex stepped onto Dolphin Sands. He looked towards Maria Island. The sky red as a devil’s ear. But no sign of the Buffalo. The only vestige of the night before, the iodine seaweed smell and the havoc on the shoreline.

  Down on the severely eroded beach, the dunes had the shapes of cliffs. Scattered all along the sand like small alligators were the blue legs of starfish, ripped from their bodies by the battering surf. And grey sea slugs–dead men’s dicks, as Pam the shearer called them. And the most shiny, perfect shells: yellow, with scribbly-gum motifs, some with the red suckers of the whelk protruding, still alive.

  Alex followed two gulls. They picked their way through the seaweed, too bloated to fly until Rusty chased them. Clots of kelp lay drying in rubbery brown wigs or floated in submerged rafts close to shore. At the far end of the beach where it met the Swan River stood a solitary figure by a white van. Someone down early, no doubt to see what they could muster.

  He discovered the bodies rolling in a gentle surf. Two young men, both dressed in the same naval uniforms as Kish, and the corpse of an older man, togged up in yellow wet-weather gear and heavy sea-boots with electrical tape on the tops.

  Already the sun had reddened the faces, and large flies rose and fell from their lips and eyes.

  The tide was coming in, so Alex, with great difficulty, propped them upright, over his shoulder, and one by one carried the bodies to the ute where he covered them with a blue tarp against the flies. He scanned the water for a further hour. The calm procession of waves for some reason reviving a fragment of a poem that his father had liked.

  Between the sob and clubbing of gunfire

  Someone, it seems, has time for this,

  To pluck them from the shallows and bury them in burrows

  And tread the sand upon their nakedness…

  At 7 a.m. Alex drove back to the house. He left the engine running and Rusty panting on the front seat while he went inside to telephone Sergeant Finter.

  The Mercury was open on the table and the aroma of bacon filled the kitchen. Merridy had prepared a cooked breakfast on the stove. She must have returned to bed.

  He was devouring with his fingers a second warm strap of bacon when Finter answered.

  “Pete, it’s Alex. I have three bodies in the back of my ute.”

  The policeman was the only copper on this stretch of coast. He had been up all night and his reaction was not what Alex expected. “Hey, you should have left them where you found them and let us deal with that.”

  “Then you should have warned me about the effing gale,” with a streak of irritation. “Anyway, I’d have needed sandbags.”

  “Fuck you, mate, nobody told me either.”

  “That storm, Pete, had the ingredients of a hurricane.”

  “Well, what I’m being told is that it was too compact and fast-moving for anyone to have predicted.” Then, calming down: “Listen, Alex, thanks for finding those bodies. I’ll let Emergency Services know.”

  “What about the boy? He needs to see a doctor.”

  “Can’t you bring him in as well?”

  “He’s the one who shouldn’t be moved. Not till someone’s seen him.”

  “Leave him, he’ll be right. I’ll speak to Dr Musgrove. In the meantime, get those bodies over here.”

  Alex waited in case Finter had anything further to say, but he did not.

  “How are you doing, Pete?” he asked.

  Finter’s laugh rattled with exhaustion. “It’s a fuck-up, Alex. And if it isn’t, I reckon I’ll keep my eye on it till you get here.”

  Half an hour later, Alex drove into Wellington Point. He found the policeman’s car outside the hotel, parked behind the community ambulance. He drew up alongside and climbed out and rapped on the window.

  Sergeant Finter sat slumped behind the wheel. His head at an angle on his large chest. His badged blue shirt covered with sand.

  “Hey, Alex,” blinking, and shook his head. “Boy, I needed that.”

  From far away up the street, faces pressed against Talbot’s ground-floor window watched Alex and Finter unload the bodies into the hotel.

  They carried the dead men across the lobby to the kitchen, their passage over the carpet leaving a widening trail of seawater. They were bringing in the third and heaviest body when a total stranger ran into Alex.

  “Hi, Murray,” panted Finter. “Hey, have you met Alex Dove?”

  “Hi,” nodded Alex.

  But Murray, a burly man with darting eyes, was in no mood for introductions. “Could you fetch a towel?” he snapped at Debbie who appeared in the lobby at that moment. Then padded after Alex into the kitchen, blenching when he saw the two bodies stretched out on the tiled floor.

  “Murray’s the new owner,” explained Finter, unshouldering the dead man. “He’s from near Canberra.”

  “Congratulations,” said Alex.

  Tildy’s father had died three months previously, since when Ray Grogan had been advertising for a buyer.

  In a drained tone, Murray asked Finter: “How long might you want to keep them here?”

  “Hard to tell. The captain’s got to identify them. Then you’ve got the coroner, and maybe a pathologist.”

  “It’s not ideal for business, you know.”

  “No, probably it isn’t,” agreed Finter.

  “How many survived?” asked Alex after Murray had gone to mop up the carpet.

  “Seven altogether. With the boy you rescued, eight. They were eleven in total, with these three.” Finter studied the bloated, sunburned faces. “Poor bastards. They’d have been better off playing cricket, not going to sea in a fucking brig.”

  Alex looked down. The skin was starting to peel from a pair of puffed-up lips. “Why did you want them in here?”

  “I didn’t. Nor did Murray. But Dr Musgrove does. It’s the only place with an industrial fridge. The coroner’s van isn’t due for another few hours and Musgrove’s worried about the heat.”

  “What, you’re going to put them in with the wallaby and ice cream?”

  Finter laughed. “Who’s going to notice? Have you eaten here ever? Anyway, it’s up to Musgrove to decide where they go.”

  “And the survivors?”

  “In bed. Where I’d swap this badge to be.”

  Finter had lodged the captain in a suite in the courtyard; the six remaining crew, who were suffering from hypothermia, in the Louisa Meredith, which was now full.
He hunted around for a dishcloth. “Lucky it didn’t happen at Easter or I’d be having to unlock the cells,” trying to be humorous.

  “Have you spoken to the captain?”

  “Not yet,” wiping the sand from his sleeves. “I was down on Cowrie Beach when he landed in the rowboat. But I need his statement. Ah, that may even be him,” at the sound of synthetic bird-song.

  Alex followed him into the lobby where Murray was wringing out a towel into a washing-up bowl. “Mind if I listen in?”

  Finter stopped. “I don’t think so, Alex.”

  “Come on, Pete.”

  Finter looked at him and he was no longer a policeman but a boy who used to bowl Alex seamers in the nets behind the school.

  “I’d like to hear what happened,” Alex persisted.

  “That’s not the point.” Then: “Hell, what am I saying–after what you did last night…Actually, I’d be glad of someone with a little nous myself, to help me work out what the fuck happened,” and opened the door into the restaurant, setting off a trill of chaffinches. “Jesus fucking Christ, how I abominate that noise.”

  At a table in the corner, Debbie flustered over the captain, trying to interest him in tea and scones.

  He had removed his frock coat and sat tightly wrapped in one of the hotel’s green blankets, his body shaking like a rope ladder down which feet continued to trample. His expression shambolic and frayed.

  “Thanks,” he muttered to Debbie. His mind still at the helm of the Buffalo.

  “You’ll be relieved to know we have another survivor.”

  At the sound of Sergeant Finter’s abrasive voice, he jerked his head. A light flickered in the dazed brown eyes. “Oh, yes?” and looked at Alex as though he might be the one.

  “This is Alex Dove. He and his wife rescued one of your crew last night. At considerable risk to themselves.”

  At Finter’s urging, Alex described the young man in his spare bedroom.

  “That’ll be Kish,” and nodded to himself. “So he’s alive,” subsiding ever so slightly into his blanket. He looked like the leftovers of someone.

  “Kish?” said the policeman. “How do you spell it?”

  “Oh, that’s not his real name,” the captain said dully. “It’s the name he was given. I don’t know what his real name is.”

  In childish capital letters Sergeant Finter wrote KISH. “Like that?” showing the captain. And the troubled look on the policeman’s face brought back a memory of Finter in class, sitting at a desk in front, labouring to spell the name of a medieval English king.

  “I suppose so.”

  “I have to be accurate.”

  “It was a name that was invented,” the captain said, moodily. “If you want to know his real name, ask Mrs Wellard.”

  “Mrs Wellard?”

  “She’s the one in charge.”

  “Wellard.” Sergeant Finter slowly wrote out the name and looked at it. “Like it sounds?”

  “Fucked if I remember,” and screwed up his eyes.

  The policeman selected a scone and popped it whole into his mouth. “Why don’t I take your statement now?” sitting down. “Debbie, if you would–two more cups.”

  Debbie looked at Alex and left. Already in the street, through the window that she had obscured, small clumps of dog-walkers discussed the drama of the night and every now and then peered out to sea or pointed.

  Alex brought his chair closer.

  He pieced together the story from the Mercury and from Kish and from the captain’s statement.

  The three dead men were part of a sixteen-week course run by the Bilgola Mission in Sydney for disadvantaged kids. “A shipload of crims,” in Finter’s estimation. “People not right in the head who didn’t know a boat from a banjo. Frankly, it’s a sodding marvel any one of them survived.”

  The idea was to generate self-esteem and responsibility by sending the boys away for a period of outdoor activity. Some rock-climbed, others chose white-water rafting. This year, seven had seized the chance of joining the Buffaloon her circumnavigation of Tasmania. The captain had given Mrs Wellard every confidence that he could handle these “hoodlums”, mainly from suburban areas around Sydney who were having trouble at home or with the law. He had led similar excursions in the Caribbean with black kids and Cubans. On such trips, generally speaking, everything went well. There was nowhere to escape to; they had to learn to work together, and while it could take several days to understand that they had to rely on each other, the outcome was nearly always positive.

  Because the Buffalo’s expedition formed part of Tasmania’s bicentenary celebrations, the captain made it his project to be as authentic as possible. He had borrowed the idea from the museum at Port Arthur. His crew were to live on board ship as if the previous two centuries had not been. “It was a lark. To get them interested.” He provided each boy with a fresh identity and a biography from the convict era. He had dressed them in authentic uniforms from the period. And had issued his crew, as part of their first-day equipment, with a marine rigger’s knife–“so if they fell overboard and got tangled up in ropes, they could cut themselves free. ‘Just don’t use it on each other,’ I urged them.”

  Sailing down from Sydney, he taught them how to tie knots and splice and to shake out the reefs; to learn the difference between a dolphin-striker, a fore topgallant studding-sail and a spanker-peak halyard; and to calculate their position by the stars, even though he had on board a Global Positioning System.

  “Otherwise, I was just there to point and shout and scream. You wait a couple of days to see who’s agile and put them on the wheel. The difficult ones peel potatoes.”

  “What about Kish?” Alex interrupted. “What did he do?”

  On the subject of Kish’s duties, the captain was evasive. “He joined us late.”

  “Why?”

  “That you’ll have to ask Mrs Wellard. But he didn’t have time to settle in.”

  “Who was Kish?” Alex suddenly wanted to know.

  “What?”

  “Who was Kish in your game?”

  “Alex, I do think this can wait,” Sergeant Finter said. More pressing for him to know were details of the shipwreck, what had happened.

  Required to relive the events of the past twelve hours, the captain shrank deeper into his green blanket. In a squashed tone he explained how he had sheltered from the south-easterly on the northern side of Maria Island. Then a change in the wind forced him to look for another anchorage. His crew being inexperienced sailors, he had not dared to send them closer on beam than 90 degrees.

  “The storm front hit us at 6 p.m.,” and recalled the noise, the big sea breathing, the wind shrieking through the rigging. The wind had come in so hard and sudden that the dragging anchor snapped its fluke. “I just didn’t want a knock-down. I ordered the others below, all except Reg—”

  “Reg?” cut in Finter. He did not need help in spelling that.

  “The skipper’s mate. I needed him to secure the boom while I kept at the wheel. I was steering through the breakers with water coming up over the bow at me. The wind was meeting the current and it all went to lumping up the waves.”

  In a small voice, he described how his mate was swept from the mast, onto the deck.

  “Reg was crawling along topside when he hit the jackstay. It ran like a dog on a wire and it snarled his legs as a breaking crest hit the boat and he went out straight over the top of the boom, a perfect dive…”

  The captain managed to bring the ship around, but as he moved to grab hold of Reg, who had plummeted to the deck, the Buffalo dropped into a trough and in the next moment struck the unmarked rock. “That rock–it wasn’t on the charts, you know.”

  After an interval, Finter asked: “Do you suppose you could have done anything differently?”

  The captain fixed his eyes on the glass bowl of strawberry jam. He wished he had cut away the mast when the Buffalo first struck, but the axe was in the hold. Otherwise, no, nothing could have been done
. The waves were washing fore and aft the deck. It was as much as grown persons could do to hold on. As for Reg: “I did reach him and keep him on board.” But his mate had perished in his arms while the ship broke up about them.

  “Why didn’t you get the kids to shore at the first signs of the storm?”

  “If I could have, I would have,” shaking his head. He had been twenty-nine years at sea. He had never experienced such a gale. Nor seen a vessel and people in a more dangerous position.

  “And they’ve been in dangerous positions,” noted the policeman.

  With the captain’s assistance, Finter wrote down the names of the six other survivors. He would take their statements later. “And I’d better speak to this woman at the Bilgola Mission. Mrs…” flicking back several pages in his notebook.

  “Wellard,” said the captain.

  There was one further duty to perform. Before leaving the hotel, Alex accompanied the captain and Sergeant Finter into the kitchen to identify the drowned men. The two bodies in their nineteenth-century sailor’s breeches looked sad and wet on the floor.

  Dead seamen, gone in search of the same landfall…

  “That’s him. That’s Reg Hull,” the captain said, his features buckling at the sight of his mate propped up against the fridge.

  They all stared at the face. The lids had started to swell up and close over bulging bloodshot eyes. Finter said to Alex in a contemplative way: “Know who he reminds me of? Cheele. Remember Cheele?”

  “Yes,” a little surprised to hear the name.

  A yard away, a hand trembled out from under the captain’s blanket and touched the sunburned, flyblown forehead. “I held him for ten minutes after he was dead. He’d got more brains than you can imagine.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  NO SOONER HAD SHE cooked Alex’s breakfast than Merridy felt exhausted and went back to bed. On waking several hours later, she telephoned her assistant and left a message on his machine. “Could you grade those lanterns? Oh, and Jayce–I won’t be coming out”.

  It was now after ten. Along the corridor, Kish had lapsed back into sleep, sprawled across the bed, snoring. She watched him breathing. From far away she felt something running towards her, and shivered.