by Carmody, Sam
You heard what?
There is a boat in Carnarvon. You want to shoot everyone in it. I got that. Now you’re just repeating yourself.
Paul returned to his food while Tea Cup stared at the side of his head, apparently unsure what to say or how to proceed. Elmo gave a short laugh that convinced no one.
Think you are the big man now, Tea Cup said. Think you’re a fucking man now with your Polish slut.
It was then Paul noticed Kasia had stepped out from the bar kitchen. He saw the worry in her. She held the doorframe like her legs might give out. He felt a flash of heat right through his body.
You lonely, Tea Cup? Paul said, turning to look him square in his reddish face, seeing the spittle in the corner of Tea Cup’s mouth. I bet you beat your dick like it owes you money.
The bar seemed to fall into an even deeper quiet, a crushing absence of sound that felt to Paul as if they were all in that moment in a vacuum, the tavern drifting, listless, in outer space.
Outside, Tea Cup said, the anger in his voice weakening it, the words barely a wheeze.
Give it a rest, Tim, Richard said.
I fucking said outside, Tea Cup said again.
You going to show us how much of a hero you are? Roo Dog said from the other side of the bar. He stood up.
Reece, Arthur said. Leave it.
But Roo Dog ignored his skipper and rounded the bar.
You going to show us what you got inside, mate? Roo Dog said, grinning at Paul. Just like your brother did?
For god’s sake, Reece, Arthur said with a cackling laugh that Paul read as nervousness.
Jungle stood. You’ll have to deal with Jake, he warned.
Fuck Jake, Tea Cup hissed.
Jungle is right, Tea Cup, Michael said. Jake will be looking for you. I do not know if you want that.
What would a Nazi know? Tea Cup said, finding his voice again. The words reverberated through the restaurant.
Michael shrugged. Sounds to me like you have learnt plenty enough from the Nazis.
Michael, Roo Dog said, unsmiling. You got a death wish too?
That’s enough, Jules said.
It is enough, Jules, Michael said earnestly. You are right. Sorry. He pointed to his glass. He smiled at Shivani and then Paul. We should be going, he said.
Michael stood up and shuffled out into the beer garden, searching his pockets for his cigarettes. Shivani and Kasia followed, and then Paul, hearing the low, smouldering talk of the men at his back, like a fire lit.
In the void
BEYOND THE BLEARY GLOW OF THE JETTY and the lights along the inlet, the footpath ducked into bush and into unbelievable blackness. Kasia gave a mock squeal. Paul felt his eyes widen and his breath grow shallow. The thick scrub around them blocked the cool of the sea and shrouded the path in sour, musty fumes. The leafy pong of insects and decomposing reptiles. In the dark they slowed, laughed in whispers, moved hesitantly, walked the path from memory. Kasia grabbed Paul’s arm with both of her hands and leant against him. Her breath was hot against his cheek, sweetened with wine.
This is how it must be to be blind, she said, giggling, as they edged forward. Or dead.
Paul imagined a black hole. Depthless. Dimensionless. He noticed how his knees had become bent.
In the void, Kasia whispered about travel and the drugs she had taken. It hadn’t been much. Ecstasy a handful of times. Acid in Florence. Cocaine in Brazil. She told him how with cocaine, when you were up, even just someone touching your arm, raking their fingernails across your skin, was enough to make you crazy. A kiss was something else again. She said she wanted so much to have sex with someone while on cocaine. She had never done that before. Paul hoped she’d say she wanted to do it with him but she didn’t.
The bush tapered as the path returned to the roadside, within range of the streetlights. The sudden chill of the sea breeze made him shiver. Kasia let go of his arm and ran ahead. Paul pissed on the gravelly fringe of the path. The loose ground shifted underneath the stream. He briefly imagined her in Brazil, being held by other men, and felt the thought sweep bitterly over him.
Jack-in-the-box
ARCADIA WAS THE FIRST BOAT TO LEAVE the heads; Jake said they needed to make up time. He avoided Michael’s and Paul’s eyes as he said this and took his coffee with him up the ladder without another word.
They were in for it. They both knew that. The German was already into the bream with his knife, whistling a jaunty tune in which Paul detected uneasiness as much as the deckhand’s typical irony.
Paul was nervous too. There was a bad feeling every time they set off with Jake primed like a fighter. Whatever it was the skipper was dealing with, he would take it all out on the boat. They would feel the skipper’s mood in the deck. He’d drive even harder at the swells and the ship would heave with the violence of it. And it would go like that all day. Jake punishing himself, punishing the boat, punishing them.
They pulled and rebaited pots on the sand-bottomed grounds thirty kilometres out, the sea dark with the trench beneath them, one hundred and forty metres of water deep. By noon they could barely hear the sound of the skipper’s horn for the wind in their ears, and the large swells had begun to whitecap.
Sometimes I think a mine wouldn’t be so bad, Paul yelled to the German as he pushed a pot into the water. The departing rope snarled against the gunwale. A billionaire’s sandpit, he said.
Michael grimaced, nodded his head. The deckhands took a moment to scan the ocean around them. The swells stood above the horizon line. But Paul felt a sort of calmness, resignation.
I could think of more fun things, Michael shouted. His face was so different without the smile in place.
The cray boat lurched down and white water surged over them. Both deckhands had to drop to their knees on the deck as they were pitched into the side of the boat. Traps clattered around them.
Holy shit, Paul gasped, and laughed.
Michael’s expression was blank, humourless, and as close to fear as Paul had ever seen it. I want this to be over now, he declared matter-of-factly. I want a beer and a smoke. I want them now. I want to be home. I want to be on top of my Shivani.
Paul nodded.
This place, Michael yelled. Stark. It is not so much fun now. It is dangerous for you here. You should go back to school.
I don’t mind it, Paul said. On a fishing boat at the centre of the universe.
Michael shook his head, unsmiling. He reached for a cigarette.
You really think if you hang around here your brother will show up?
What do you mean by that? Paul said.
Michael shrugged. Smoke scattered the moment it left his lips, broken by the gale.
I’ll keep moving, Paul continued. I’ll see things. Travel. Like you.
Like me, Michael echoed. Friedrich says I am lost.
Your father knows where you are.
My soul is lost. That is what he means. He worries I cannot be saved.
What does it matter? Shit, Michael. Your soul is lost?
It is my father telling me these things, Michael said.
You worry too much about what your father thinks.
I am not worried about my father. He paused. It is the world that is the problem.
The world?
Yes. The people like my father, they are the ones with their hand on the wheel, and they are driving us all into hell.
Paul sighed.
There is no stopping it.
I don’t think it has to be like that, Paul said.
You do not know what you are talking about. Michael breathed hard out his nostrils. Joseph Tainter, he said.
What?
Complexity theory. Civilisations rise and then they fall. It is in the design. There is no hope.
So you are Nostradamus now?
It has been like that from the beginning, Michael said. Why are we any different?
Maybe we’re smarter. Jeez. There’s always hope.
I guess there is pray
er, too. And lucky charms.
What’s wrong with you?
I know, Michael said. Maybe we can see off the fiery end to the industrial age with some garlic and a crucifix.
Paul swore.
Michael glared at him. There really is no place in this world for hope.
I think there is.
Tell me, then, what is your hope? Why are we any better than the Mayans or the Romans?
I don’t know, Michael. We went to the moon?
Michael laughed. We did not go to the moon. The US military went to the moon.
Even so, we are capable of it.
Capable of what?
Of anything. We could run cities off solar power.
Jesus, Paul.
We could harness wave power. The wind.
You really believe that shit?
I do.
Because the US military went to the moon? Buzz Aldrin was a fighter pilot.
So what?
So they were all in the air force. It was about power, Paul. It was flexing muscle and PR and shock and awe.
It wasn’t just that.
Neanderthals made weapons, too. It is not such an advanced idea. A rocket and a spear is the same thing.
It was about discovery.
It is never about discovery. That is not the way people work. It is always about making money or making war. Profit or perfecting destroying people. Dollars or disintegrating flesh and bone. That is all it is ever about.
That’s bullshit, Paul said. How can you not believe in the future?
Because no one cares for the future, Michael spat. Not my father, no one. Most of us do not even see it. We are blind to it. We share our blindness with the apes.
Paul sighed. So don’t go home to your father, then. Just don’t.
Why should I care for the future? Why should I not make money, enjoy the end of times like every other cunt?
Oh great, you sound like a true dickhead.
It is not so easy. Michael shook his head. My father said he is running out of patience with me. He said that I am running out of time to make things good with him.
Screw it. Who cares what he says?
He will cut me off.
So?
You are forgetting, Michael said. It is my family. He removed his gloves. It is not so easy.
Paul met Circus that afternoon, the shark emerging from the featureless depths and thudding hard against the hull right where Paul had vomited just moments before. It leant back in the water, mouth open in a slack, toothy grin. Paul yelled a garbled sentence to Michael, who was in the cabin making coffee. His words were swept away in the breeze.
The shark dropped its head to the water, sinking into the shadow of the bow, and was gone.
Ruth was in the car park when they returned to the inlet.
You need to watch yourself, she said through the driver-side window.
Why, he said, doing his best to sound nonchalant.
People say they’ve seen you looking around, she said. Poking your nose up the river. Talking to that copper. God’s sake, Paul. People see shit like that around here. There are—
No secrets, he finished for her.
She looked past him to the sea, breathed out. She looked afraid. There is bad shit in this town, she said. Things you don’t want any part of, I swear it.
Was that what happened to Elliot? he said. Bad shit?
Paul, she said. I don’t know what happened to your brother. But I don’t want anything happening to you. You understand?
Memories for ghosts
MICHAEL WAS ASLEEP, FLAT ON HIS back on the seats in the cabin. It was an hour journey back to shore after they had set the last of the pots. Paul stood out on deck in the glare and screaming wind, watching the sea to the west, thinking about what Ruth had said, thinking about Elliot.
He opened the box of gear on the outside cabin wall. Took up the Buck fillet knife, drew it from its sheath. It had a red rubber handle, the thin steel blade curved slightly upwards. The blade was longer than his palm, sharper than the others. He slid it under his damp t-shirt.
When they reached the inlet Kasia was waiting. She was leaning against a wooden upright near the jetty’s edge, striking a Hollywood pose with her left leg kicked upwards and her hair in her face. Michael wolf-whistled and she burst into laughter.
The two of them walked home along the footpath. He was grateful she was in a talkative mood because he felt almost too tired to speak. She talked about Poland, and about her grandmother. Katarzyna had been one of only a handful of Jewish survivors of the war who had returned to live in the town. Kasia described how, in the winter of 1939, after the Soviet army withdrew and the Nazis had come, they gathered all of the young men in Chelm, including Katarzyna’s father. Two thousand men forced onto death marches. She told Paul about the Ghetto, about the round-ups of 1942. How nearly all of the Chelmer Jews were taken or shot in the street. Katarzyna’s entire family; her sisters, her parents. They all went to the camps and she never saw them again. But she escaped.
She was my age, you know, Kasia told him. Twenty-three. She hid in a cupboard when the soldiers came to do the final round-up and miraculously they did not find her. A few of them in her street made it into the tunnels under Chelm, the chalk tunnels. They hid there before escaping to Warsaw. There she met my grandfather.
Why did she return?
Most Jews that survived the camps left Poland, almost all of them. They went to America, Israel—anywhere else. They just wanted to forget. But Katarzyna said she needed to stay in Chelm. It was where her memories were. She was very tough. Stubborn, my grandfather said.
If you carry your own lantern, right? Paul muttered.
Yes, Kasia said, pleased he had remembered. Exactly.
Katarzyna had told Kasia that after the war she lived surrounded by the dead. All of her memories were of people who no longer existed. She lived with ghosts.
Later, in his bed, Kasia read while he slept. He dreamt he was swimming after Elliot. But he never saw him. There were bubbles always within sight, the fizzing wake of flippers, but the further he swam out, the darker and colder the water became and quickly his brother’s trail of bubbles dispersed and then vanished.
It’s hard to account for the importance of what goes on in a person’s head at night when they close their eyes. Brain still fizzing and ticking like a dirt bike engine just shut down. People who talk about their dreams like they are important always sound dumb-headed and kind of religious. The way they recite fictions as if they really happened. Trying to make sense of it all like scripture.
But of course I dream too. Every night in that desert. And here at the farmhouse. And I’ve thought some bit about what they all mean. And I’ve come to think it’s just the way of the brain to discharge the things that don’t come out of a person’s mouth. That maybe all the silences got to get spoken somehow. People groaning or screaming out in their sleep. Save it all up during the day so it comes out like an awful song in the darkness.
There is a lot that don’t get said by fellas. A different kind of detail they register but don’t mention. They’ll take on facts but save the information on how it makes them feel. A fella will see somebody get hit by a truck and the fella will talk about the sound the body made and the colour of the truck and the speed they guess the truck was going but if any of it made him think about god or his own beating heart you wouldn’t know. And it’s all got to get out somehow. Like bullets sitting in the chamber of a rifle. Unspent. Clogging things up. So it makes sense the mind would keep firing while you’re knocked out. All those things not said and not entertained while the sun is still up. The brain uncasing every unspent thought while you’re asleep and trying to fire them into the night.
I dream about my grandmother. See her lying in her bed. And that look she had. Eyes still open. Like she was trying to call out to me.
And I dream about this job I’ve got to do. Don’t think so much about it during the days but I dream it nearly
every bloody night. Hear that .308 going off. The roaring call of it. See the surprise on his face. See the moment he knows he’s dying. See him looking at me.
Snagged
PAUL HAD SEEN THE BOAT EMERGE OUT of the whiteout of the horizon, disembodied by the distance at first, its shape stretched and almost unreal, disappearing for seconds at a time behind the swells, as though it were only ever in his imagination. But as Arcadia motored towards the boat he quickly knew it was them.
Deadman sat low in the water. Engines off, or dead. There were a couple of figures standing at the rear of the deck, leaning over the stern railing. As Arcadia neared them, Paul could make out Anvil peering into the sea. Arthur, too. Thought of the fillet knife. It was in the cabin, inside his backpack.
Jake slowed, cut the engines. Paul heard him call out. Arthur waved him off, one hard swipe at the sky. Jake yelled again, asked if they were snagged, if they needed help.
It was then that Roo Dog stepped out from the cabin. He stood shirtless. A smiling corpse, so pale Paul had the impression he could see through him. Sun catching the round edges of ribs, his collarbones. Long hair in his eyes, stiff like wheatgrass, twisting in the sea breeze. He reached behind him, into the cabin, and drew out a large gun, cradling it in his arms. Michael swore without moving his lips. Up on the bridge Jake said nothing. Roo Dog raised the gun towards them. Two barrels. Michael and Paul stood only a foot or two from each other on the deck but Paul knew the gun was trained on him, he was sure. Could almost feel it. And it was so quiet with no engine noise. Paul heard the flap of his t-shirt against his chest. Wash against Arcadia’s hull, like a crowd shushing itself. Arthur called out to the deckhand. Roo Dog ignored him. Lowered the gun toward the sea. Gun blast, and then silence. He laughed, walked back into the cabin.
Arcadia’s engines growled and they turned shorewards.
Filthy ugg
WHEN KASIA FINISHED HER SHIFT SHE wanted them to walk to the jetty. She was excited to see him, eager to talk.
In the dark of the path, as he listened to Kasia, he thought about what happened that afternoon as if it were on a loop, repeatedly playing out in his mind. Roo Dog drawing the rifle from behind the cabin door, pointing it towards him.