She picked out some of Alex’s clothes from the wardrobe and laid them on the chair by Kish’s bed, and after a while fitted on her gloves and went into the garden to begin the task of clearing the debris.
When he opened his eyes the first thing he saw were the lemony stars on the ceiling. He put on the spectacles that he had left folded on the bedside table and then the white shirt and the pair of green moleskins, and opened the door into the corridor. He peered into the kitchen. A pan with a cold egg on the stove. Newspaper on the table. He looked at the advertisement on the front page and turned a few pages and closed the newspaper. He opened the fridge and looked inside and sniffed and shut it and went over to the sink. He poured himself a mug of water and drank it and then walked back down the corridor into the living room and sat in a chair with his feet stretched out on the dog-basket. The sun shining onto the cockatoo. He stared at himself in the glass.
An hour later, she came upon him in the kitchen. He stood at the Welsh dresser with his back to her. Alex’s shirt stretched across his body.
She waited. Then: “How’s your head?”
He said nothing. Touching with awe something high up.
Merridy took off her gloves. “I made some bacon and eggs. I can heat them up.”
He remained on tiptoe. “What’s this?” and held up the shiny black rock.
“A meteorite. Alex’s father found it.” And Alex’s voice came to her: “One of twenty-four million a day that enters the atmosphere.”
He replaced it on the shelf. “Alex–he’s your husband?”
“Yes.”
Still the corner of the dresser attracted his attention. “And that?”
He squinted into the bottle, at the hull of cracked green paint.
“She’s called the Otago. My husband made her.”
“Where is your husband?”
“He went into town.”
But it was the ship that interested him. He took off Alex’s glasses, wiped them on his shirt and put them back on again. Polishing the lens had not unclouded his eye.
He placed the bottle on the table and gazed into it. He folded his arms and leaned forward and sat there, gazing.
“Insane,” he said approvingly.
She skirted past him and heated the pan and served him his plate.
He picked up two straps of bacon, swallowed them.
“You must be hungry,” she said.
“I could eat this all in one gobble.”
She watched his mouth open and close. “I’m afraid some of your crew–they weren’t so lucky,” she said after a while.
“You think I’m lucky?” hurling her an abusive look, but it was a pebble that fell short.
“You could have drowned,” she pointed out.
“Yes,” and laughed.
She tried another tack. “What about your parents?”
“What about them?”
“Don’t you want to telephone them? Tell them you’re safe.”
“No,” he said, chewing. “Not especially.”
“Do you have brothers, sisters?”
Again, that sawing laugh. “Not that I know of.”
He made her feel that her questions were indecent. As if she had asked a man to show her pictures of his mother naked.
Her tiredness dragged at her all of a sudden. “It’s all right, Kish. Don’t if you don’t want,” and opened the door to the corridor.
“Hey, Mrs Dove,” slyly.
“What?”
“I like your sneakers.”
She looked down. She had bought them in Hobart for her forthcoming trip to Melbourne. “Thank you.”
Alex arrived home just before noon. He parked the ute the other side of the fallen pine and climbed over the tree and went inside. Merridy was loading the drier with Kish’s sodden clothes.
“Where is he?” Alex asked, anxious.
“I sent him down to the beach. What are we going to do with him? I don’t want him here.”
He followed her into the kitchen and watched her squeeze out a dishcloth.
“It’s all right. Finter’s coming with Dr Musgrove to see him.”
“When?” Angry as the cloth that attacked the dresser and tabletop and dabbed at the dried bacon fat. Anywhere he might have touched.
“I don’t know. This afternoon.”
“It doesn’t take all day to drive out here, Alex.”
“Love, they’ve got seven others to attend to.” But her anger surprised him.
Late in the afternoon Kish returned to the house, bringing from the beach a twisted piece of tidewood. He went to his room and stretched out on the bed. He flicked open his knife and started to whittle the wood and only gave any sign of life when Merridy knocked on his door to tell him that the doctor was here to see him.
Sergeant Finter waited with Alex and Merridy in the living room while Dr Musgrove examined Kish.
“Where will he go?” Merridy wanted to know.
“A woman’s coming from the Bilgola Mission,” Finter said vaguely. “She’ll be here Friday.” He was a little overwhelmed. Nothing like this had ever happened in Wellington Point. Nothing remotely like it.
“Not till Friday?”
Alex said: “I’m sure he can stay here. If push comes to shove.”
But Finter had registered Merridy’s face. “No, no. He’ll need to be in touch with his probation officer.”
“Where is his probation officer?”
“In Hobart–for a check-up.”
“Is he seriously injured?”
“I haven’t a clue, but it does means there’s no one to look after Kish.”
“Shouldn’t he be with his mates?” Merridy said.
“The problem is,” said Finter thickly, “the hotel’s full.”
“Full?” Alex did not believe it.
“I had to reserve rooms for the coroner and his clerk. Plus the dive squad.” Four divers were driving up to survey and assess the wreck, whether it was a hazard to navigation.
“Surely, they can squeeze in one more person,” said Merridy.
“The press have taken every other bed. I should have moved sooner.” Finter thought. “Maybe I could try the Malvern.”
“Please do,” said Merridy, and pointed to the telephone.
Finter dialled the Malvern, but the bed & breakfast, too, had stopped taking bookings. The owner suggested Tasman Cottages. No vacancies there, either.
“He might have to go in the cells after all,” Finter said. Wanly, he explained to Merridy: “I was joking to Alex a little while back that if it was Easter I’d have to open up the cells.”
Merridy nodded.
At last, a room was found at the Oyster Bay guest house in Swansea. But it would not be free until the morning.
So did Merridy accept the inevitable. “I suppose we could look after him for another night.”
A knock, and now Dr Musgrove entered. Slightly concerned about the bump on Kish’s forehead–it would need watching. Otherwise, his patient seemed as well as could be expected under the circumstances.
Confused by lack of sleep, Sergeant Finter flipped open his notebook. “My turn.”
Kish remained seated at the kitchen table after the visitors had left. He got out his knife and flipped it open and started assaulting the stump of driftwood.
Merridy leaned, arms crossed, against the dresser while Alex explained: “A room has been reserved for you from tomorrow in Swansea.”
Kish did not look up, but twisted his head as if reacting to some buzzing or twittering that only he could hear.
“Swansea’s just across the bay,” Alex said.
Kish scraped a sliver onto the floor. Sullenly, he said: “I’d rather stay here.” Which surprised them. “Maybe I could sweep up some leaves.”
“Leaves?” said Merridy.
“Why not?” asked Alex.
“You heard what Sergeant Finter said. It’s not suitable—”
Kish stabbed his knife into the table.
&nb
sp; “Hey, don’t do that!” Merridy leaped forward. She seized the knife and snapped shut the blade. “I’m taking this away,” and marched out of the kitchen, down the corridor, not knowing where she was going, where to hide the weapon.
Kish looked at her when she came back in, but said nothing. Rusty’s head on his lap and his index finger caressing the length of her puppy’s muzzle, from the nose to between the eyes, back and forth.
She cupped her hand and swept the shavings into it and dropped them in the bin under the sink. It was clear to her: Kish’s good points had died in him some while ago.
“Here, Rusty.”
At dinner, he ate with his mouth open. She wanted to smack him. It was a face that was made to look the other way, not like Alex’s. The violence of her reaction, what she felt, shocked her. She did not like the way that Rusty had attached himself to Kish.
“What do you think he did?” she asked Alex later in bed.
“No idea. It’s like adoption, the same procedure. They don’t let you know the sin any more than they tell you the father or mother.” And she wondered how he knew.
“That knife will have something to do with it,” she said. “I bet you it does.”
“He’s only had it since he joined the ship,” Alex pointed out.
“I wonder if he’s quite right in the head?” remembering the way he had batted away something invisible. A gesture–thinking of her mother–that was the prerogative of the insane.
Alex swallowed two Nurofen and switched off his bedside light. “He’s probably no different to any of these kids from halfway houses. He goes into pubs and has fights and works things out, and one time he gets caught.” He did not tell her about the captain’s uncomfortable reaction. Nor about his conversation with Finter as he saw the policeman to his car.
Finter had said: “You’ll keep your eye on him, Alex? Strictly speaking, he shouldn’t be staying here ‘without supervision’. Those were the words. But everything’s gone to buggery.”
“Then find somewhere else for him to go.”
“At any rate, the probation officer has promised to come out to see Kish once the hospital release him, which should be any minute.”
“Did you find out what he’d done to be on that boat?”
“He doesn’t have a record, if that’s what Merridy’s doing her melon about.”
“Why was he late joining the Buffalo?”
“I don’t know that, Alex,” rubbing his eyes. “He didn’t tell me. Nor did I get anything out of the Wellard woman. That was the excuse–that they wanted to help him–but I don’t know what went on and I don’t want to know either. Right now, I just want to catch a few zeds.”
That night Merridy lay awake. She felt a heightened alertness since Kish’s arrival. He was hard to understand, but he seemed to express something that she could not articulate. Sitting next to him at dinner, she had felt out of breath.
Beside her, also awake, his thoughts inflamed by the Nurofen, Alex indulged himself. The idea was ridiculous, but supposing just for a moment that this man–this Kish–was who he said he was…what could Alex tell him that had been learned by men and women over the last two hundred years?
In the room across the corridor, a light was still on. Kish had taken off his borrowed shirt and lay on the bed. He was looking at Merridy’s drawing of a sieve and remembering something.
Alex rose later than normal. He ate his three pieces of toast and went outside to start sawing up the tree that blocked the drive. A moment later, he was back.
“Chainsaw’s out of fuel, I’ll have to go to Swansea hardware,” collecting the keys to the ute. “Is he up?”
“No.”
“Darling…”
She saw his concern and was touched. “I’ll be fine. And Alex–I don’t see why he can’t stay on here. He’s spent two nights already. It’s only till Friday.”
He tossed the keys in the air and caught them. “I’ll tell Finter, then.”
She watched his ute disappear behind the tree and was wondering what to do about Kish when the telephone rang. Jason, speaking from the boathouse. He had got her message and had graded the oysters. He had also been down on the beach, collecting the remains of oyster trays that the wild weather had broken apart. But he was calling for another reason. A mate had been in touch who worked for Les Gatenby. “He says they’ve started spawning.”
“When?”
“Last week.”
Merridy swore. “That’s early.” She had been hoping that St Helen’s would not spawn at least for another fortnight, until after her trip to Melbourne. But if the water temperature and conditions were right anything was possible.
“Do you want a holiday?” without thinking. It would be two or three months at least before her oysters were back in condition and she could resume selling them to Dmitri. It was a phenomenon that she had mentioned before to Alex: “Once St Helen’s goes, it’s a rule of thumb that within ten days the jellyfish start turning up in Oyster Bay–and bang, we’re gone.”
Jason laughed. “Since you ask, I wouldn’t mind going up to Flinders.” And she remembered a girl at the Taste of Tasmania, a singer in a band from Lady Barron. His utter excitement.
“OK. Take the next fortnight off. You’ll love Flinders.”
“I didn’t know you’d been.”
“On my honeymoon, Jayce.”
Preoccupied, she returned to her bedroom, where she found Kish.
“Get back from there!”
He stepped away from the wardrobe, Alex’s shirt undone on him and pleated from being too big. His eyes alarmed at the fury in her voice.
He touched his earring. “I…I was looking for a shower,” without conviction.
“Down there,” sounding just like her mother.
But instead of reacting to her imperious voice, he walked over to the wardrobe and looked inside.
“Hey, what’s wrong with the door?”
“It’s always been like that.”
She would have told her husband anything, had he asked. Even about the chandler. But he never asked.
“You should get it fixed,” Kish said, and poked his fingers through the hollow heart, the cross.
It was uncanny. Dressed in Alex’s glasses and clothes, he gave her the distinct impression that he was Alex, only younger. She was looking back through her husband’s eyes to a parallel time where what was dead lived.
“Maybe I could fix it.”
“Out!”
Still, he lingered. His gaze locked on the wardrobe at which he stared long and hard. Until some inkling of obedience led him in the direction of her pointing hand and into the corridor.
She left the door to her study ajar so that she could monitor him taking his shower. Any other day, she might have driven to the oyster shed. But she was not prepared to leave Kish alone in the house. Friday stretched too far away.
It therefore dumbfounded her to see the transformation in the young man who emerged from the spare bathroom. His shirt buttoned and his blond hair brushed back. Lean and narrow-shouldered–with his chipped teeth concealed behind tight-drawn lips–he had the look and smell of a clean, oiled knife.
“Wait here,” she relented, and went into her bedroom. She retrieved it from its hiding place and returned to where she had left him standing beside her desk, and gave it back to him.
He opened and closed the blade. He believed in his knife quite fiercely, she could tell. It was his crucifix.
Satisfied, he slipped it into his hip pocket.
She followed him down the corridor to the kitchen.
Restless, he opened the fridge and took out a carton of milk and sniffed it. He put it back and rummaged some more.
“What are these?”
“Oysters.” Then: “I grow them.”
He looked interested. “You grow scallops too?”
“No.”
“Oh,” disappointed. He picked one up and studied it. “Get pearls from these?”
“Unfortun
ately not. Different oyster and warmer water. These are for eating.” She shut the fridge door. “Have you eaten them ever?”
“Course I have.”
He took out his knife and started to open the one in his hand and all but ripped his thumb.
She showed him how. “Stab it vertically at the end, then work the blade back under the muscle.”
He studied the watery grey flesh streaked with black.
“Try it,” she urged.
He looked reluctant.
“Go on.”
With great caution, he raised it to his lips.
Then spat into the sink.
“Your first one?” amused.
“Course not. But the other was nicer.”
“Oh, you won’t get nicer than these.” Her eyes sparkled. “Our oysters are so good, you get a stiff neck when you eat them.”
“Is that all, Mrs Dove?” he said. “Then I’d be pretty right as an oyster farmer. I’d be like walking around with a horn all the time.”
She ignored the look that had come into his face, but he was not to be put off. “Aren’t oysters supposed to be good for you or something?”
“They have amino acids that you won’t find in other foods,” in a neutral voice.
For something to do, she opened the cupboard and took out the bread-maker. But even as she prepared ingredients, Merridy was conscious of the watchful eyes behind her husband’s spectacles.
Presently, a regular rasping sound made her turn. Kish sat facing her. He was honing his stump of wood and had made a point of creating out of the shavings a neat pile on the table.
“What are you making?”
He twisted his head, and once again Merridy had the idea that he was responding to a noise audible only to him.
“What are you making?” she repeated.
“Nothing,” he said, and investigated the thin scrap of driftwood that he had pared down to an entrail.
There was something unplumbable about this young man. At the same time she recognised in his face some sign unknown to Alex, belonging to a sect of which only they were initiates, and it did not make her comfortable. She stepped closer. “Show me.”
Secrets of the Sea Page 24