Secrets of the Sea

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  She had not seen him come in.

  He snatched it back. Settled his buttocks in a chair.

  “Hungry?” she asked.

  “I suppose.”

  He put his legs up on the table and she felt like a woman in a Western when she snapped at him to get them off.

  “I thought of making some pasta,” she said.

  He yawned.

  “Does that mean you don’t like pasta?”

  “No.”

  “What do you eat in Sydney?”

  “I dunno, meat.”

  She filled a pot with water and put it on the stove. “Weren’t you going to saw up the tree?” staring out of the window. That stagey tree she had never liked for its insistence upon itself. She had supposed that getting rid of it was the priority. So she understood.

  “Maybe this afternoon.”

  “What were you doing just now?”

  “Righting some stones.”

  “Oh,” before realising that he meant the granite gravestones.

  “Didn’t Mr Dove tell you? They were popping out of the ground.”

  “I know. I could see them from here.” She turned back into the room. “Something to drink?”

  “I wouldn’t say no to some moo-juice.”

  She opened the fridge and poured him a glass of milk, which he drank down in one gulp.

  Her breasts filled out her jersey.

  “Hey, don’t,” he said, over the top of his glass.

  “Don’t what?”

  “Look at me like that.”

  She took his glass from him, colouring.

  Tak, tak, tak. From over by the sink she watched him persecute the wood with his gleaming blade, and compressed her lips. She had worked hard with Kish in the bay, lifting and dropping oysters and altogether too busy for conversation. But after the quiet communion at sea, he had reverted to his former prickliness. All his childish seriousness transferred to Alex.

  “What’s that you’re making? Is it a ship for Alex?” Who had never, she realised, taught her how to put a ship in a bottle. Not even tried to.

  He rolled it over in his hand. It could have been a naked man swimming. Or drowning. “It still hasn’t told me.”

  “Then it had better get a move on or there’ll be nothing left.”

  Tak, tak, tak.

  “You know, Kish,” carefully. “It’s not good to tell stories.”

  “I don’t,” he frowned.

  “I overheard what you said to Madasun. That stuff about you being a long-lost sailor, well, it’s not really very funny.”

  “I wasn’t trying to be funny, Mrs Dove.” He was giving her a hard time, that was all.

  “She’s an impressionable girl, Madasun. She might believe you.”

  “So?”

  “It’s just that…Look, Alex and I, we want to help.”

  He said nothing. He had pulled into himself.

  “How old are you, Kish?”

  “Nineteen. How old are you?”

  “Thirty-six,” she shot back.

  “How long have you been married, Mrs Dove?”

  She looked at her fingers. There was ink on them. “Almost seventeen years.”

  “Why don’t you have children?”

  That fucking question. Again. Always. She hunted around for some soap and picked it up, but it had stuck to the dish.

  “Didn’t want them.” Her answer so harsh that he turned his head.

  He studied her face, whiter than the soap dish. “You’d like a child, wouldn’t you?”

  The energy had retreated from her shoulders and legs into her face. Her eyes shone like a sick person’s. She picked up a shaving that he had missed. “What I would like,” she said from within her invisible hole, “is for you to throw away your mess into that bin.”

  At the sound of her distress, he laughed. His sawing laugh that kept away questions.

  “Want to know what this is?” He held up his stick of wood, the colour of a dirty collar. “It’s a key.”

  “A key to what?”

  “Your wardrobe, I reckon.”

  On the stove the water bubbled away.

  Holding onto the table. “It doesn’t need a key.”

  She’d wanted to wait for Alex but her wish to shut Kish up was stronger. In silence, she prepared his lunch and served it to him.

  Two mouthfuls into the meal, Kish poked his fork at something on his plate. “What’s this?”

  “Anchovies.” As her father had taught her.

  “I don’t think I want antchervees.”

  “But you’ve got them, haven’t you?”

  In which position Alex interrupted them.

  “Ah, Kish. Do you have a second?”

  “I suppose.”

  “It’s that bloody windmill,” to Merridy.

  “I thought you’d fixed it.”

  “Yeah, but it’s gone again. I reckon it hasn’t worked for days. The storm must have buggered it.”

  “I’ve made some seafood pasta.” This being Alex’s favourite.

  “It can keep, love, can’t it?”

  Merridy looked hard at the bowl. “I suppose.”

  She waited for him to leave the room. His unshaven chin, his reek of dead cow.

  Guided by the snorts of thirsty cattle, their heads scraping empty tin and feed on their damp noses, Alex had only now discovered that the windmill was not pumping water to the troughs.

  He hoped that the fault lay with the spear beneath; with Kish’s help he pulled up the black plastic tube and staring down saw a little rear-mirror of light and his face taut and stubbly.

  It puzzled Alex. “Plenty of water there.”

  “Can I look?”

  Kish kneeled, screwing up his face like a photographer at his reflection. Then he twisted round and nodded at the windmill. “Bet you London to a brick the problem’s up there.”

  “It’s always caused grief,” Alex acknowledged. Most probably, the storm had been the final straw, the wind pumping the machinery into a frenzy so that a vital part had snapped inside the maze of rods and pistons. This time, Alex was determined to get the thing properly repaired.

  As he struggled to his feet, he noticed Kish’s eyes still on the ladder. “Want a look?”

  They climbed to the viewing platform.

  Kish took off the denim sun hat that Alex had lent him and raked a hand through his spiky hair, then put it back on, and shook his head. “Good view, Mr Dove.”

  The grey sky had gone and the sun was out. From far below, Rusty whined up at them.

  “Hi, Rusty!”

  His back to the rail, Kish turned and looked the other way.

  “Hey, what’s that?”

  Before Alex could stop him, he bent forward and ran his fingers over the faded orange letters that the wind and salt had all but burned off.

  It was hard to believe that this was the same angry and confused young man whose lunch he had interrupted. Unlike Merridy, Alex had not warmed to the arrogance contained in the skull shirt, but as he watched him puzzle out her name that had bled into the rust he was glad that he had insisted on Kish staying.

  “Been on a farm before?”

  “I have been on one, I think,” straightening up. His eyes did not budge from the vane. “But I can’t say it was anywhere like this.”

  Alex checked his watch. Now that he had made his decision, he was impatient to press on, find the right person to fix the windmill. And there was still the pine to clear from the lawn. But he had forgotten how pleasant it was to have company.

  He looked at Kish. “Ever sat on a horse?”

  For the rest of that afternoon, as he had with Merridy half a lifetime before, Alex rode Kish over the farm.

  “Just hang on, he’s a tame boy.”

  Alex led the way, opening and closing gates.

  The far side of Barn Hill, a piece of wood came away in his hand. He reined in. Legs the larger for a pair of his own trousers kicked Merridy’s horse until it came up beside him.r />
  “Look,” showing Kish the decayed fence post. “Mayfly caddis.”

  Splashing across the rivulet where his father liked to swim, they saw a cormorant take a trout on the wing. Kish watched the bird flash through the air and the wriggling silver fish.

  “That’s a beaut,” a sly respect in his eye. The sun glinted on the lens of the borrowed glasses and on his smooth cheeks. One week on and still no beard.

  “Better than a police siren?” asked Alex.

  “I reckon.”

  And Alex, on the horse beside him, felt a shot of paternal pride at how this confused Sydney boy responded to his land, his animals. He indulged in the extravagant idea that he had plucked from the sea a child he had never had. He had stuck a life jacket on him and now he had put him on horseback. And he admitted to himself how much he would have liked as a parent to teach Kish a whole lot more.

  Three months, though, would be ample. Because what would Kish turn into if he stayed? He would pick walnuts, work for Nevin at the garage, peddle porn DVDs. Or worse. Look at Zac, loved to death and caught stealing from Talbot’s. Or so the rumour had it at the RSL. No, three months would be ample, and sucked on his blade of grass at the prospect.

  Over by Moulting Lagoon, Kish watched Alex and Rusty move the herd between paddocks. The cows bellowed, stretching black necks, and swayed reluctantly through the gate.

  Alex could hear Kish talking to his horse as he closed the gate. He swung back into his saddle.

  “Let’s go before it breezes up again.”

  High up in the clear sky, a flock of tiny birds dipped steeply up and down like a shoal of fish in the air. Alex scratched between his horse’s ears and the animal quietened into a lope.

  “They’re fast,” Kish remarked, staring at the birds.

  “You’d be fast, too, if you flew a hundred miles an hour.”

  They rode on at walking pace. The bird’s twittering audible above the squeak of leather.

  “What are they, actually?” Kish leaned forward in the stock saddle; the jolting had sifted away any last trace of discontent.

  “Magic birds. White-throated needletail swifts. They fly everywhere, except the ice cap. And you know the most amazing thing about them? They sleep in the air, they feed in the air–even mate in the air.”

  “No way!” said Kish.

  “It’s true. They spend their nights up there on the wing. And only come to earth to perch or nest.”

  “Where do they nest?”

  “Treetops in north Asia. They find a hollow and go down deep into it, or cling to vertical, rough bark. But it has to be vertical.”

  “What, you mean they don’t land on the ground?” in a marvelling tone that reminded Alex of his own reaction as a boy on first hearing this fact.

  “Their legs are so tiny, they couldn’t stand up. They wouldn’t be able to fly off. You could say being on the ground doesn’t suit them.”

  Once again it struck Alex that he had no one to talk to; on his own for most of the time, he lacked opportunities to share his thoughts, his enthusiasms. He had Merridy, but Merridy was not always enough. Especially after she discovered oysters. Not for the first time, it made Alex think that he needed another person about the place.

  “What I love about those swifts is that we know so little about them,” he said. “There’s a lot of people hell-bent on taking the mystery out of life. Bit of a shame, really.”

  On hearing this, Kish seemed to fall into deep contemplation. He did not speak again for the rest of the ride home.

  Growing restless after the two men trotted off, Merridy put on her Driza-Bone and went outside. She had no destination in mind, but once on the lawn she walked across it until she stood before the graves of Alex’s parents. The stones upright again, the neat earth patted around and sprinkled with the oyster-shell fragments that always reminded her of chicken claws. Her shoes crunched on the mended soil before the names. Basil. Marjorie.

  And without warning thought of Hector.

  It was not, in fact, the inscriptions that brought her brother clattering up from under the seashells and pine needles and small woody cones, but the touch of grey feathers.

  Merridy hauled herself onto the fallen tree that she had never bothered to climb when it was aimed at the sky, and was rubbing her fingers over the abbreviated trunk, exploring the scarred wood from which Alex had sawed Kish’s fragment–when she looked down.

  Hemmed in beneath a mattress of browning twigs, the mangled body of a kookaburra.

  She had not brooded on her brother since her marriage, nor discussed him with anyone, not even Tildy. Instead, she had created a space where he could not enter. But the longer she had refused to think about him, the more insistent–in a cavity of her mind–the memory of him became. It seemed to Merridy, leaning down to discover the snarl of feathers and crushed bones, that Hector was still there, trapped in the amber. Trapped like this sheltering bird.

  So she walked back to the house, as isolated in her thoughts as the two men riding towards her. More isolated even than in the painful months and years when she nursed the infantile idea that her brother might return a stranger from another place and time, but would she recognise him?

  Twenty minutes later, she discovered Kish sitting in her chair in the kitchen. He was bent over a white cereal bowl and stabbed at something in it with the tip of his knife.

  “I thought I heard the phone. Where’s Alex?”

  “In his office.”

  “Enjoy the ride?”

  “It was good. Real good.”

  She looked over his shoulder. A few seconds passed before she absorbed the latest object of his persecution.

  “What are you doing, Kish?”

  “You don’t understand how small we are, Mrs Dove. We want to walk big. Be important. Someone dying, people have this idea it affects the whole world. And yet we’re not so much as the smallest scraping off this piece of sand. We’re so small, God doesn’t even know we’re here.”

  “Don’t be silly.”

  “He doesn’t.”

  “I don’t know what He knows and I don’t suppose you do either.”

  “What do you reckon God looks like, Mrs Dove?”

  “How would I know? I don’t think like that any more.”

  “You’re not listening to me,” he said to Merridy who thought that she was. “What do you think He looks like?”

  “That’s not the point,” irritated. “Why? Do you have any good ideas?”

  Kish stood up and walked over to the Welsh dresser and took down the Otago from the shelf. He held up the ship as though it were a telescope and investigated her through it.

  “I’d say He could look like anything. He could look like the face on this coin.”

  “You don’t mean that.”

  He put down the bottle on the table and stared at the coin. He stared at it and he thought about it. “I do.”

  “Tea?”

  “You know, I’m sick of tea, Mrs Dove.” He turned to her. “Ever heard of Rudolf Steiner?”

  “No,” surprised by this turn in the conversation.

  “He must be close to whoever made us. He discovered that when you bury a cow horn with cow manure at a certain time, the manure is fifty times more powerful. It’s the same with iron. Gearboxes made for Ford cars in 1977 last for ever. Those made in 1978 go to pieces.”

  “Honestly, Kish! Where did you hear this?”

  “Gangell told me.”

  She remembered the probation officer with the gammy leg and the face of a possum, how she had disliked him.

  At that moment the door opened and Alex strode in, smiling broadly. “It’s all on,” he said, addressing Kish as much as her. “I’ve spoken to my agent and he’s put me in touch with this bloke in Woolnorth.”

  She was lost. She had no idea what her husband was talking about. “What bloke?”

  He took a bucket from under the sink and filled it with water. “The windmill expert. I caught him in the nick o
f time. He’s about to go to Alice Springs for three months, but he can look at it tomorrow. Only snag is, he refuses to leave Woolnorth. I’ll have to take it to him.”

  “What, dismantle the whole thing? Isn’t that excessive?”

  “That’s what he says. Hey, Kish, fancy a trip to the north-west?”

  “You want to do this now?” she said.

  “Come on, love, you should see the state of the animals. What choice do we have? Kish and I can drive it up tomorrow.”

  “But is that allowed–I mean, for Kish to leave here?”

  He turned off the tap. “I don’t see why not. Not if I’m there to look after him. It’s no different to you having him out on the Zemmery Fidd. And we’ll be back for dinner.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  IT TOOK UNTIL NINE the next morning to unbolt and collapse the windmill.

  With a sense of relief for which she chided herself, Merridy watched Alex and Kish load it onto the ute and leave. “It’s not a bad thing that you’re going,” when Alex asked if she would look after Rusty. There was tack to clean, her trip to organise. “I can spend the rest of the day preparing for Melbourne.”

  For Dmitri had now insisted on a date. “We want to do promotion. Send photographs, anything you’ve got to make you look good.”

  They had been gone four hours when the woman telephoned.

  “Mrs Dove?” That mainland voice.

  “Mrs Wellard.”

  “I’ve rung about Kish. How is he?”

  “Kish is fine.” Although he had seemed awfully glad to be getting out of the house.

  “I spoke to Sean.”

  “Sean?”

  “From Child Welfare.”

  “Oh, Sean.” On Sunday afternoon, Sergeant Finter had arrived with a man who stayed for coffee and had a word with Kish and left.

  “He sees no reason why the arrangement can’t continue. If you’re happy, that is.”

  “Oh, we’re happy,” said Merridy.

  “Could I speak to Kish?”

  “I’m afraid not.” Licking her lip. “He’s away with my husband.”

  A pause. “I see. He’ll be back when?”

  “I’m expecting them for dinner.”

  “Then I’ll ring tonight.”

  Merridy put down the receiver and returned to the stove.