Secrets of the Sea

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  He held up the fragile length of sassafras for her to see, and snapped it.

  Minutes later, Rusty burst into the kitchen, followed by Alex, who scattered onto the table the Mercury and a bundle of post. And a black bin liner stuffed with something.

  He pushed it towards Kish.

  Kish glared over his cup at the bag, suspicious.

  “Clothes for you.” And to Merridy: “I bumped into Agnes.”

  Kish showed no desire to inspect this donation from the Op-Shop.

  Alex turned to him. “It’s probably just as well you’re up here. You can’t budge in town for journalists and photographers.” And when Kish did not say anything: “I spoke to Sergeant Finter. He’s put in a request to the Bilgola Mission that you stay here till Mrs Wellard comes on Friday. If we don’t hear back by this afternoon, we’ll assume it’s OK.”

  Merridy smiled; it seemed the best thing to do. “That’s settled then.” She held up the pot. “I’ve just made a brew. Want some?”

  “Give me half a cup,” Alex said.

  “If you don’t draw it a bit more, it’ll be like possum piss,” Kish scowled, and went on stroking Rusty whose head had popped up from under the table.

  “Sleep well?” Alex asked benevolently.

  “I suppose.”

  “How are you feeling?”

  “All right.”

  “Want to make yourself useful?”

  “How?”

  “Come and help me cut up that tree.”

  “No,” Kish said, and picked up a magazine that he had noticed in among the bundle.

  “What, it’s only leaves you sweep?”

  Kish opened the magazine.

  Alex exchanged glances with his wife. He accepted the cup from her. “I’ll be on the lawn. Come on, Rusty.”

  Outside, the jaded growl of Alex’s chainsaw.

  Merridy unfolded the Mercury. The front page devoted to the disaster at sea.

  Sitting opposite, Kish flicked through the pages of Bottleship, the magazine of the European Association of Ships in Bottles.

  Why Alex had not cancelled the subscription, Merridy could not fathom. He never looked at it. The only journal he liked to read was the Wilderness.

  Kish pushed back the magazine as though it might be one of her mother’s Methodist tracts.

  “Mrs Dove?”

  “Yes?”

  “Come on, the truth. How do you get it in there?”

  “What?” She tore herself from the photographs of the Buffalo floating raft-like beneath the water.

  “That coin,” and swivelled back in his chair, pointing his knife at the bottle on the dresser.

  So that was it.

  “Oh, that. You’ll have to ask Alex.”

  He observed her with his hard, white inscrutable eyes. “It’s against the natural law of things.”

  “You’ll find a lot of things are like that. Especially in Tasmania.” As Harry Ford once told her: “We’re too far out of reach here to be touched by any God or man-made laws, or even scientific ones.” She said to Kish: “In Tasmania, everyone is left to be as idiotic as they please.”

  “But you know, don’t you?”

  “I might.”

  “Then tell me.”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I promised,” she flared.

  “Is that all?”

  She studied him over the top of the Mercury. “First,” she said, “you tell me what you did to be on this boat.”

  He met her stare. “And then you’ll tell me?”

  “No.”

  Merridy had the distinct idea that Alex had once explained it to her. Too many years had gone by for her to confess that she had forgotten.

  Behind their lenses, Kish’s eyes had a tarnished, brash look, and there were dark specks under them like burned spots on a pan. He reminded her of someone, but no longer Alex.

  “I could tell you and you’d go white sitting there. You don’t want to know, Mrs Dove.”

  But she did. “What did you do, Kish?”

  He gave her an aggressive single-fingered salute and stood.

  “Catch yez later,” and slammed the door.

  Shaken, Merridy flicked through the Mercury. “Is your memory a sieve?” The same bland-looking man in a suit stared out, his black-and-white features unchanged over almost two decades. Next to the advertisement, a study on earthquakes. Men’s greatest fear was to be thrown up in the air, women’s to be gobbled up by the earth. And all of a sudden a bank of sandy soil stretched out on her inner eye, covered in roots and dried-out leaves, and a hole smelling of must, darker than any wardrobe.

  She stood unsteadily and poured herself a glass of water. Again, she was conscious of the silent windmill. It was the constant wind that made her feel silly. You never realised how much it irritated till it stopped. But the noise of the chainsaw had ceased as well. The only sound, the grind and groan of the bread-maker.

  On the lawn she saw him talking to Alex.

  Her husband had put down the chainsaw and removed his earplugs. He gestured at the fallen pine, the thick trunk that he was cutting into neat slices. Behind them, Rusty had found an interesting smell in the foliage.

  Kish sank on his haunches and tentatively reached out a hand to touch the single eyeball of exposed wood. Alex squatted next to him, explaining something, and Kish listened, running his hand up and down over the white surface. He appeared to make a request.

  Alex nodded and started up the chainsaw.

  “What were you two talking about?” she asked him later.

  Alex told her. “There was a lovely, rare treecreeper caught in the branches. I couldn’t resist showing it to him. Know what he said? ‘That may make your life, Mr Dove, but what I like is a police siren.’ Then in the next breath he was asking questions about the tree–why it was called an Oyster Bay pine, whether it grows in groves.”

  “And does it?” She was so accustomed to the lone pine that she had never bothered to ask.

  “Well, you don’t often see one independent like this, or so bushy. Normally, they grow up in preference to branching out.”

  She pondered this. “You cut him a piece, I saw.”

  “He asked for something to hew.” Then, with a boyish conspiratorial smile: “I have an idea that he wants to make a ship.”

  After dinner, Alex took down the dusty rum bottle covered with dried wasp wings and spiders’ droppings that once had contained his horizon.

  Childlike, all aggression fled, Kish sat rapt by the fire in the living room as Alex explained how he had crafted the Otago. And Merridy, reading the novel that she had put down weeks before, overheard them. Her husband remembering his passion; the young man bombarding him with questions.

  “All sailing ships go out of the bottle. See? This is sailing in.”

  “Why is it sailing in?”

  In case Merridy had refused him. But had he ever told her? He looked over at his wife. “Just to be different,” he said fondly.

  “Did you design it?”

  “It was built from a half-mould, so no original plans. I had to draw them and blow them up and cut them to shape.”

  “What do you make the sails from?”

  “Cotton japara, stiffened with water.”

  “What tools do you use?”

  “This pair of tweezers is all I need. You touch them to the neck of the bottle to stop your hand shaking, then put in the sail.”

  “What’s the sea made of?”

  “My father used putty. I prefer children’s blue plasticine.”

  “And the deck?”

  “Ice-cream sticks. Just like the bowsprit.”

  “You’re kidding!”

  “I’m not. Am I, love?”

  “No, he isn’t,” said Merridy from her chair across the room. Years ago she had had the same conversation, asked the same question.

  “Ice-cream sticks,” repeated Kish, and brought his face closer. “Jeez, man.”


  And the pleasure in his eyes transported Alex back further than a drizzly day in a playground to a period before he met Merridy. It’s absurd, he thought. A man spends his first forty years trying to escape childhood; his next forty, trying to retrieve it. We grow up, only to want to become children.

  “What about the coin, Mr Dove?” The intensity of Kish’s question made Merridy look up.

  Alex put down the bottle. “That’s just something my father found. So much rubbish we use as model builders. You need to be original, you need to be different. Not like Johnny-round-the-corner.”

  That night she lay curled on her side, legs tucked under, asleep, when she became aware of a pressure on her heel. Alex had it in his palm. In his touch she felt the heat of his desire. He followed the line of her leg up, tracking her, almost like a doctor, following the lineaments, making sure everything was there. When she stirred, he moved his hand to her knee, squeezing it, and there was a safety in that and in the weight of his arm on the outside of her thigh. He rested his chin on her hip and then moved up and pressed her shoulder in the same way, emphasising it. He might have been looking for all the ways to fit himself around her, to find her contours. He cupped her ear and held her forehead with his other palm as if to silence the silence. Barely moving, they slipped together under water. Not wishing to make any sound that Kish would hear. Only when needing to taste his breath she turned and rose above him, thighs, breasts, hair, and caused him at last to shudder, hurting–as though a heel pressed into his heart. While she could have been straddling some bowsprit that he had made for her, rising and falling through the phosphorescent waves. Until she floated.

  In the morning, Alex had to leave early to meet his agent in Launceston.

  “I ought to ring Finter,” he said. “I don’t know why the probation officer hasn’t been in touch.”

  “Go. I’ll be fine.”

  “You’ve got his number. Maybe you could call him?”

  “Alex. I’ll be fine.”

  She found Kish lying, legs crossed, on his bed, whittling his piece of pine. He wore a blue-and-white striped shirt from the Op-Shop, an oversized grey cable-knit jersey and a pair of faded brown corduroys the colour of dried figs. Merridy caught the frowsy aroma of dead skin and old wool and too much soap. She had preferred it when he smelled of the sea.

  In a voice that she tried to keep vague, she asked: “Why is it called an Oyster Bay pine?”

  He laughed. “You don’t know?”

  She blushed to be caught out. She would know if she had grown up on this coast and not in Ulverstone. He was always catching her out. “Of course, I do.”

  He went on honing.

  “Are you making a ship?” It had upset her when Kish snapped his piece of driftwood. The audacity of his look had made her shudder. She said: “Haven’t you had enough of ships?”

  He ignored her needling tone. “You have to wait for the wood to tell you what to do with it. That’s what Mr Dove says. I’m waiting for it to tell me.”

  “Well, until it does,” she said tartly, “maybe you’d like to help out on a real boat.”

  A day cooped up in the house and she fretted to be back on the Zemmery Fidd.

  It was Alex’s idea for Kish to join her. Before her husband set off for Launceston she had shared with him her concerns for the fate of her oysters. “I ought to check the lanterns. The storm might have damaged them. But who can I get to help?”

  “Why, what’s happened to Jason?”

  “I’ve just given him a fortnight off. I can’t ring and say I didn’t mean it. Anyway, he’s gone to Flinders with a girl he’s crazy about.”

  “Take Kish, why not?”

  The idea had not crossed her mind. “Kish? Would that be allowed?”

  “I don’t see anyone rushing to stop you. Until that probation officer turns up, I reckon we can do what we like.”

  “But won’t Kish be terrified?”

  “He can always say no. And what else is he going to do until Friday? You could try asking him to repair the Hill’s Hoist. But I tell you, he’s not going to help me take out that tree unless I’m standing right behind him with a chainsaw in his back.”

  Against Merridy’s every expectation Kish accepted her offer. “OK, Mrs Dove, if you want a hand, I’ll give you a hand,” and folded away his knife.

  Once inside the shed, she fitted him with the orange life jacket that normally Alex wore. For someone who had all but drowned in the bay two days earlier, Kish showed remarkably little apprehension about returning to sea.

  “We’ll take these lanterns,” she pointed. “I’ll start the crane, you loop them onto the hook and I’ll raise them onto the deck.”

  The scallop lanterns were stacked adjacent to a large metal perforated tube, through which Kish poked a finger. “What’s this for?”

  “Do you really want to know?” He was always poking fingers.

  “I asked, didn’t I?”

  The answer shamed her. “That’s the rotary grader. It knocks their shells about and stresses them. They think: ‘Oh, God, I’m dying, I need to sort myself out.’ It makes them concentrate on the inside.”

  Kish ran his hand over the perforations. He had revealed the same interest in Alex’s bottles.

  She added: “We call it the wheel of fortune, because it’s fortuitous if they survive.”

  If Merridy feared that her talk would bore him, she was mistaken: his curiosity had only sharpened.

  She undid the stitching and plucked an oyster from the lantern. Very well, if he wanted a lesson…She indicated the ridges on the shell. “Oysters get handled about ten times in their lives. That’s ten shocks. Each touching leaves a stress mark like a tree.”

  “Why would you want to shock an oyster?”

  “Shock is good for them. Gets them working, stops them being lazy, wakes them up. Otherwise, they just grow their shells to be beautiful, but their insides go yukky.”

  “What does yukky look like?”

  “Not much, thin and grey. Here, let me show you.”

  She opened a couple of oysters until she found one with the telltale watery flesh. She handed it to him. “This one’s lazy, needs a bit of a shock.”

  Kish lifted up the oyster until it was level with his spectacles. “Boo!” he yelled. Then ate it.

  Soon the Zemmery Fidd was banging out towards the mouth of the Swan. Kish sat in the stern, between the two engines, and looked with a baleful expression at the white breakers curling along the far side of the sandbar.

  He nodded at the engines and muttered something.

  “What?” Tense, she leaned towards him.

  “That’s a lot of grunt.”

  “Seen a Suzuki Ingus on the road?” she shouted. “One of them is one of those.”

  The boat slammed over the sandbar and twisted into the breakers. Then they were through.

  Beyond, the sea stretched calm and windless and it was impossible to conceive that this tranquil plain was where the Buffalo had splintered apart. Maria Island sat like a hat on the horizon and a sulphur-crested cockatoo flapped alone through the warm blue sky.

  Kish lapsed into silence.

  “Better than lying on your back,” she shouted, and opened the throttle.

  She steered west, parallel with Dolphin Sands towards Wellington Point. The water so clear that she could gaze all the way down to the sandy bed. Ahead, she kept her eye out for the orange buoys that supported her lines.

  But something was wrong with the sea.

  “Hey!” Kish tapped her shoulder. He had sprung to his feet. An expression of wonder in his face.

  She looked around. And suddenly there was no end to the whiteness in which they floated.

  Kish leaped forward and gripped the bow-rail, leaning over. “It’s like something’s burning underwater,” excited.

  Merridy cut the engine and stared into the white cloud that was the colour and consistency of moonlit fog. Mirages enveloped her. Sea-green faces and sky-blue hands. She
tried to pull her eyes away, but an inexpressible longing tugged at her. A vertigo that made her want to jump into the water and dive down, down into the centre of this awful whiteness. Then it dawned. “The oysters are spawning.”

  “It’s like snot,” Kish had decided.

  In a distant voice, she heard herself say: “It’s no different to when coral releases its seeds, or a squid lets go its ink. The same deal. Except white.”

  Still, it bewildered him. “What is it, actually?”

  “Eggs mainly, plus some gonad.”

  “Gonad?”

  “Sperm.”

  The word carved a raw gap in the air. She burbled on to plug it. “Like everything else, they’re born to spawn. Their whole life, they’re looking to cast their germ-cells into the water. There may be more living creatures in that cloud than there are human beings on the face of the earth.”

  Kish peered into the white water and his eyes struggled to penetrate the cloud that could contain so much life. The cocky leer had vanished from his expression. He had a child’s thoughtful clear face. A child who listens to everything, sees everything.

  “How long do they spawn for?” in a fascinated tone.

  “What we’re seeing will only last an hour. After this they’ll be unsellable for three months. They go without telling you. Don’t even leave a note on the fridge.”

  What Merridy knew of the phenomenon she had learned from Les Gatenby, who had witnessed it once in the shallows off Bruny. But she had never seen it for herself until now. Perhaps the storm was responsible.

  She was content to let the boat drift. The only sound the gentle slop against the hull. Even so, she flinched from the whiteness. The sea that was blinding her.

  Kish remained at the bow-rail, looking over the side of the boat, his back to her so that she was unable to make out his expression. Every now and then he expelled a moan, like a child calling out to itself in its sleep. She pretended not to notice, but she could not help what she felt: a strange and intensely painful sensation, not to be compared with anything she had experienced. His stance so like her brother when he looked over the deck that it produced the illusion of Kish being the same person. It seemed to her, at that moment, as if Hector had not died and was standing in front of her, staring over the edge.