Secrets of the Sea

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  “Can you eat them?” he asked.

  She retrieved the answer from somewhere. “The French like them, apparently, but no one in Australia will touch them.”

  He came back and joined her behind the windscreen. “And those eggs”–he might have been waving at all the men, women, children who ever lived–“what happens to them now?”

  Hastily, she started the engine. “Let me tell you something interesting about oysters,” clinging to the lesson that she had resolved to give him. She knew it by heart.

  “In the normal course of events, the egg will spend the next few days trying to get it together with a sperm. Once fertilised, it’s called an eye larva. It has one eye and a foot and wanders around for up to three weeks until with its little eye it sees something that it can settle on, like a rock. Then this foot attaches itself to the rock and puts a secretion around the side of it like Super Glue, and for ever after it is attached to that rock. The foot and eye disappear and it changes completely from a free-floating creature to a fixed, sedentary critter. It changes anatomy end to end.”

  Kish was still listening. As if he had never wanted to know anything so much.

  “They trick them in the hatchery,” she went on. “They put down ground scallop shell, and the eye larva settles on an individual microscopic piece thinking it’s settled on a rock. But out here the process is interrupted. Something stops the larva, so it doesn’t get to settling. I don’t know what happens. A combination of the wind and grazing. Like everything else in the sea, something’s eating something. And in Oyster Bay something’s eating an awful lot of larvae–probably zoo plankton that floats on the surface and scoffs them down at a fantastic rate.”

  She wondered if she had lost him, but he was still there. “Hanging onto your every word,” as Tildy used to say of Randal Twelvetrees.

  “Something else I’ll tell you about oysters. They change sex.”

  “No!”

  “It’s true. When I buy them as two-millimetre seedlings they’re fifty-fifty male and female. But after eighteen months, there are twenty-three females to each male. The males have converted straight across to female.”

  “You mean, like Sydney boys at Mardi Gras?”

  Merridy burst out laughing. “If you like.”

  She returned her gaze to the sea, but the cloud had dissolved and the water was almost clear again.

  Over to starboard on the western side of the oyster lease Kish had spotted something. “Hey, Mrs Dove, what are those people doing?”

  “People?” What was he on about?

  Kish flattened his hand against the sun. “Over there–those heads.”

  Her initial thought: It’s a flock of gannets sitting around. Only as the Zemmery Fidd motored close did she realise the extent of the carnage. So taken up by the white sea and her lesson to Kish that she had failed to notice the mess of orange floats bunched together on the perimeter line.

  “They’re not heads,” slowly. Rather, evidence that her oyster farm was not unscathed after all. “Stand here, Kish. When I hold up my hand, put this into neutral.”

  Kish took her place behind the wheel. She picked up a grappling hook and moved to the bow-rail.

  Far below, a hideous tangle of rope, buoy and lantern.

  It would take a day or two fully to understand what had happened. The storm that had sunk the Buffalo had ripped one of Merridy’s polypropylene lines from its anchor and swung it south to north, enmeshing all its lanterns around the neighbouring six lines. They criss-crossed in every direction, the web of an aquatic spider.

  Merridy hooked what resembled a coffin suspended below the surface and winched it up, the lantern suddenly shrinking as it emerged from the sea.

  She made a rapid calculation. “We’ve got three thousand dozen oysters down there.”

  “What do you want to do?”

  “We’ll have to load the lanterns into the boat and transfer them to another line and put them straight back down.”

  “How long will that take?”

  “Three or four full days–of good weather, too.”

  “Then we’d better not hang around, Mrs Dove. I leave tomorrow, remember?”

  They worked until sunset. Tucked behind the windscreen on a plastic-covered clipboard was the mud-map, marking one hundred and thirty-three lanterns on the line. They picked up the easiest, until what they were doing made sense.

  Each time she saw a lantern she raised her hand.

  “Now reverse. Enough! Got him.” And with the grappling hook scooped the line expertly from the water, hitching it over the Kabuki roller.

  In this way, they raised and relocated thirty lanterns. They paused once, to refuel from the emergency tank on board.

  It was shortly after six o’clock when Merridy cupped a hand into the sea and splashed the sweat from her face. “OK, Kish, let’s call it a day.”

  She replaced the mud-map behind the windscreen and steered the Zemmery Fidd towards the river mouth. A hundred lanterns still to untangle. And tomorrow Kish was leaving.

  In bed that night, Alex said to her: “Have you noticed a change in him?”

  “Not really.” Why she did not tell the truth, it was difficult to say.

  “You know his course is supposed to last another three months?”

  “How does that concern us?”

  “I don’t think he wants to go back.”

  She sat bolt upright. “He must. We’re not probation officers!”

  “He could help finish sorting out your lines. And I could use him on the farm. Anyway, it’s not up to us.”

  Separated from them by the corridor of samplers, Kish lay on his bed with an illustrated book of verse. He had discovered it on the top shelf. He flicked through the pages, looking at the drawings, and when he came to the end he turned out the light and stared at the luminous stars on the ceiling.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  LATE ON FRIDAY AFTERNOON, a raspberry Hyundai with an Avis sticker on the windscreen advanced hesitantly up the drive and parked at the second attempt. A slender woman with a dumpy face climbed out. She stood and moved her eyes over the ruined lawn, the fallen tree and the figure of Kish on the edge of the grass, spading earth around the base of a clothes-line.

  Kish had spent all day with Merridy on the Zemmery Fidd. They had been back at the house less than an hour. Before he left Moulting Lagoon Farm for good, he had promised her that he would mend the Hill’s Hoist.

  Mrs Wellard had flown down from Sydney. In fact, she had been on holiday in Cairns when she heard the news of the shipwreck. She was accompanied by the probation officer who had been on board. He had survived with nothing more serious than a bruised ankle.

  Through the kitchen window, Merridy saw them ordering Kish to get ready.

  While Kish went to his bedroom, Merridy brought the visitors tea in the living room. The door into the corridor was open and she overheard the man speak in a rough whisper. He was talking about Kish.

  “Didn’t I warn you? Sheepish as a first-timer.”

  “I didn’t notice.”

  “I did. I tell you, Mrs Wellard, he’s cunning, he’s innocent, he’s scum. The judge was wrong.”

  “We don’t know if it was him or someone else. Maybe it was the one who drowned?”

  “Believe you me, he sent in the razor gangs, cut, cut, cut, no apprentices–though I have to say he did like the sheilas. In Sydney, he was shoving everything.”

  “Shoving? Say that again, Ricky. I don’t recognise the term.”

  “Local dialect, Mrs Wellard, that’s what it is. A wonder he didn’t wear his pecker out.”

  “What do you want me to do, ask him if he screws around? I’m not going to do that, it’s a leading question—”

  “I hope you don’t mind Bushells,” Merridy broke in cheerily, nudging open the door with the tray.

  She had left the window open; the collar blew up around the man’s neck.

  “Nothing wrong with Bushells,” he said, watching her
put the tray down. “Nothing at all.”

  She pulled Rusty’s basket away from the sofa and went to close the window latch. “I’m sorry if it’s stuffy. We tend to use this room only in winter. In summer, we keep the dog in here.”

  The woman sat back as Merridy poured the tea. “A dreadful tragedy,” she kept saying. She had plucked at the phrase so often over the past four days that her words sounded loose and twangy. She was called Annette. Her breasts had nudged together like croquet balls under her green wool trouser suit. In Sydney, they had warned that Tasmania would be cold. “But he’s as well as could be hoped. Didn’t you think so, Ricky?”

  “Oh, he seemed fine.”

  Gangell was the probation officer’s name. He was unpleasant and young and had a lean face that emphasised his brown eyes and sharp nose. He looked like a possum.

  “We’ve been expecting you for the last two days, Mr Gangell,” Merridy rebuked him.

  He shifted uncomfortably, stretching out a leg. “Yes, well, there have been some crossed wires.”

  It fell to Mrs Wellard to explain. “You see, we were given to understand that a colleague from Child Welfare would be standing in for Ricky.”

  “I don’t know what the trouble was,” Merridy said. “I rather think he was waiting for you to contact him. Or maybe it was us. But, yes, it’s all been rather chaotic. As you may imagine.”

  “I hope this hasn’t put you out,” said Mrs Wellard, “having Kish staying.”

  “Oh, no. Not at all.”

  “I was in Hobart for tests,” Gangell piped up moodily.

  “Nothing serious, I hope.”

  “Not so far. Not so far.”

  “How long have you been a probation officer, Mr Gangell?” Merridy asked politely. As anxious to put off the subject of Kish.

  “Five years.” Before that he had trained as a psychiatric nurse at a remand centre in Brisbane. Screening inmates for suicide risk.

  “That must have been hard.”

  Gangell’s palpable relief to be alive made him talkative. “We assessed them, but they got wise to telling us what we wanted to know. ‘Oh, I’m cruising, seven out of ten.’ Then they killed themselves.” Three men had done so, apparently, who had spoken their last words to Gangell. He evinced a horror of being summoned to a coroner’s court. “I’d book a ticket to Norway!” In Gangell’s hardened opinion the men had been on speed. “Even in the straits they’d find drugs to be on.”

  “Straits?” said Merridy, and wondered what on earth people in Gangell’s charge might be doing in Bass Strait.

  “Straitjacket,” Gangell explained, accepting a biscuit. He sat back and bit into it, looking above the fireplace at the Lear lithograph. “Is it me or is something wrong with that parrot?”

  “I think it’s you, Ricky,” said Mrs Wellard quickly.

  She put down her cup. She could not stop thinking of the dreadful tragedy. “So awful about those boys…” Her bony hands were agitated and her face that was the colour of bread mix. Unlike Gangell, she was eager to convey to Merridy just how much the young men had looked forward to their expedition on the Buffalo.

  “They were terribly excited about the characters they were going to be. You should have seen them rehearsing!”

  “It’s Reg I feel sorry for,” said Gangell. “He used to give me a turn at the wheel. ‘Come on, Ricky, why don’t you have a go?’ He was anxious for everyone to be a part of it. ‘Hey, boy, want to take this? Come on, lend a hand here.’ If a slack-arse, he’d kick his arse. And there were some slack-arses.”

  “Really?” said Merridy.

  “Oh, yeah. Redfern Aborigines. Rich kids from Bilgola. Some quite savage–knifings and car thefts, all that hoonery.” And chewed his biscuit.

  “And Kish,” Mrs Wellard said at last, picking puppy hair off her green wool knee. “How have you found Kish, Mrs Dove?”

  “He was strange to begin with, but he’s become friendlier.”

  “He does find it hard, sometimes, to mix.”

  “I don’t know, he seems to like it here, on the farm.”

  “Oh, one can never be sure what they like,” Gangell said with a grimace. In stretching out his leg he had hit his bad ankle against the dog-basket.

  “My husband tells me that Kish is not his real name.”

  Gangell flashed a significant look at Mrs Wellard. “It’s a policy we have.”

  “I gather he was late in joining the boat.”

  “That is the case, yes,” nodded Gangell, attacking a second biscuit.

  “Is it too much to ask what he’s done?” This short-sighted knifer.

  Gangell looked for a fleeting moment as though nothing would give him greater pleasure than to be able to divulge this to Merridy, but before he could speak Mrs Wellard intervened. A professional tone had returned to her voice. “You will, I am sure, appreciate that we are not at liberty to say.”

  “Oh,” said Merridy, and found herself gazing at the cockatoo. “Then I suppose you’re here to take him back?”

  Mrs Wellard rocked forward. Her long arms crossed like mallets against her chest. “We are right now in the process of sorting things out. If I may be absolutely truthful with you, Mrs Dove, the whole thing has been rather difficult. You see, the Buffalo wasn’t expected home for another three months. Most of our regular staff are on leave and it’s taking time to organise. None of us could have foreseen such a dreadful…”

  All at once the painted bird was ruffling its feathers. Merridy turned and looked at Mrs Wellard. “You mean, it might be more convenient if he stayed here?”

  On the sofa the thin woman with the fat face blathered on. “That wouldn’t be legal. There’d be a lot of administration. You see, when he’s not at the Mission he ought to be under supervision.”

  “Would it help if Kish stayed here?”

  Mrs Wellard looked at Gangell. “Funnily enough, we were talking about that, weren’t we, Ricky?”

  “It would not be regular,” shaking his head. “For one thing, Mrs Dove, you’re not a qualified handler, and Kish, as I ought to make clear, is someone who very much needs careful handling. Anyway, I doubt if he’d want to—”

  “Ask him,” Merridy interrupted reasonably. “We don’t mind looking after him–that is, until you are ready to take him back.”

  “But what if that’s not for several weeks…?” fussed Mrs Wellard.

  “I’ve discussed it with my husband. If Kish does any work for us we’d pay him a wage.”

  For the first time since Mrs Wellard had sat down a modicum of cheerfulness animated her rotund features.

  “What do you think, Ricky? Of course, we would have to get clearance.”

  Gangell looked at the possum rug and frowned. “I don’t know, Annette. This lad, he’s not like the rest of them. If I were here to keep tabs on things, it would be different.”

  “Ricky is taking a sabbatical,” Mrs Wellard quickly explained. Which for some reason annoyed Merridy.

  “A sabbatical?” she said.

  “It’s actually really rather interesting. I’m going to do a course in biodynamics.” And that annoyed her even more. All at once she saw him for what he was. Lackadaisical. There for the trip. Issuing institutionalised warnings to the effect that Kish would never be any better than he was, a savage little bastard.

  “Ricky kindly agreed to look after the boys for the first fortnight, until they got their sea legs, so to speak.”

  Merridy was no longer interested in Gangell or his biodynamics. “If Kish likes it here, why not give him a chance?”

  But did he like it?

  “Why not, Ricky?” Mrs Wellard echoed. Pleading, almost. “If we get clearance, why not?” And Merridy could see her thinking: If it was a libertine house full of fourteen-year-olds…But a nice, childless couple on a farm!

  Besides, they wanted to be rid of him, that was obvious. One less statistic.

  “Because, in my opinion,” Gangell said gruffly, “he needs supervision.”
/>   “You could always delay your sabbatical,” Merridy suggested brightly.

  “Mind you, if he did stay here,” said Gangell, beginning, at last, to see certain advantages, “it couldn’t be for any longer than the duration of the course.”

  “I understand,” Merridy said. She stood up. “But please, before we go any further, shouldn’t we ask Kish?”

  She found him, glasses off, lying on his bed. He was wearing his purple T-shirt with its gruesome insignia, and had folded his uniform that Merridy had washed, hung on the line and ironed, into the bin liner. On the floor at the foot of the bed in two neat piles were Alex’s clothes that he had borrowed, plus Alex’s spectacles on top; and the clothes that Agnes had donated. He was shed of all his possessions save those that he had worn in the sea.

  Merridy led him into the living room. She realised that she had no idea what his answer would be.

  Mrs Wellard had adopted a formal attitude before the fireplace. “Mrs Dove has kindly invited you to remain at Moulting Lagoon Farm for the moment. Subject to what you would say if this could be arranged.”

  Kish stood with his mouth open. Uneasy, he turned to Merridy. “You mean you don’t want me to go?”

  “If you’d like to stay, you may stay–for a little while. You’ll have to go eventually, obviously.”

  “It’s only for the time being,” Gangell said. “An interim period.”

  “Sure,” he said slowly. “I’ll stay.”

  “Well, that’s settled then,” said Merridy.

  Two hours later Mrs Wellard telephoned from Wellington Point. She had spoken to her superiors. Provided that a probation officer could be in touch once a week, there was no objection to Kish remaining at Moulting Lagoon Farm until 23 March, the date on which the Buffalo had been due to drop anchor in Sydney.

  PART IV

  Moulting Lagoon Farm, 17–20 December 2004

  CHAPTER ONE

  UNITING CHURCH, WELLINGTON POINT.