by Carl Nixon
When the net finally slipped free the seal just lay there. At least one of the cuts on its body was really deep and looked infected, and I wondered how long the seal had lain there on the rocks in the sun.
‘Why doesn’t it swim away?’
‘It will, honey.’
Maureen looked across at Phil but he just looked worried. He began trying to coax the seal back into the water. He started pushing it with his hands and then with his shoe, but the seal simply lay there with its eyes closed, breathing slowly. The seal’s lack of willingness to help itself seemed to anger Phil. He was suddenly yelling and pushing at it roughly with his foot.
‘Move! Come on, move, you bastard. Move.’
But the seal just lay there and in the end Phil swore loudly and moved away over the rocks towards the car park.
‘Is the seal going to die?’
Maureen sighed. ‘It might, love. We’ll just have to wait and see.’ The girl took Maureen’s hand and they turned away and set off slowly after Phil.
I went down to the water where thick brown kelp sloshed on the surface and tried to wash the stench of seal off my hands, but it didn’t work. I needed soap and my hands became numb in the surging water.
The smell of seal still hung around me when I caught up to Maureen and the girl who were walking along the beach towards the car.
‘I’m cold,’ said the girl, and she burrowed into her mother.
The clouds had finally decided to settle in and the wind had picked up. Sand was starting to move across the beach at ankle height in a rustling sheet.
As we walked I could see Phil ahead. He must have been walking quickly because he was already up in the car park, standing by my car. He’d picked up something, a large piece of driftwood, from the beach, and as I watched he raised it over his head and brought it down heavily on the bonnet. The wind plucked away the sound and blew it away from us so that the impact was silent.
It took me a moment to realise what was happening, and then I swore and started to run across the sand as Phil began to rain heavy blows down on my car. I couldn’t take my eyes off him and stumbled several times in the deep dry sand of the dunes. I was running up the track from the beach when I heard the windscreen crash and splinter, and then a panel popped in as like a softball player he brought the wood in a sideways swing into the passenger door.
He must have heard me coming but stayed focused on the car.
I finally got to him and grabbed the driftwood from behind as he raised it up over his head for another blow. I pulled and the wood came out of his hands surprisingly easily. He turned to face me and I considered hitting him with the wood but didn’t have something like that in me and simply threw it as far as I could. For a moment we stood staring at each other, and then Phil closed in on me and grabbed me around the chest like a wrestler.
‘Fight me,’ he hissed in my ear. ‘Fight me, you bastard.’
I knew, even then, that he wasn’t really angry at me, just at everything that had gone wrong in his life. Still I wasn’t going to let him hurt me, and clasped one arm around his neck and twisted my body so that I had him in a headlock. I could feel his wiry arms still wrapped around me. We did a kind of jerky little tango over the parking spaces until I lost my footing and we both fell to the ground. It was only good luck that meant Phil fell backwards and I fell on top. But by that time Phil had gone limp. There was no fight left in him any more.
‘Let him go! Let him go. You’re hurting him!’
Maureen had run up from the beach and was yelling at me. She hit me across the shoulder with her fist, a blow that hurt more than anything Phil had done to me and that left a bruise I didn’t discover until the next day. The truth was though, I was glad she was there. I had no idea what to do next. I relaxed my grip on Phil and stood up.
Phil just lay there on his back, staring up at the clouded sky and breathing hard.
I stepped back and watched as Maureen helped him to his feet. He was unsteady, and when he was standing she wrapped her arms around him. I saw that his head only came up to just below her chin.
‘Don’t worry. Everything is going to turn out fine.’ She was crying and holding him.
The little girl had come up from the beach with Maureen. She stood staring and then moved in closer, spreading her arms wide to hug both her parents around their waists. Phil’s hand dropped to the top of her head. She turned her face and gave me an accusing look as if everything was my fault.
There was nothing I could do. What could I do? I looked back towards the beach and then back at the three of them holding each other in the windswept car park. My hands were numb from the water, and I was starting to shiver from the cold and I guess from the shock. I smelt of seal. I didn’t know what to do, so I went and sat in my beat-up car with window glass like rough diamonds scattered over the seats. I sat there and waited for Maureen and her family to finish and join me for the drive back to the city.
I didn’t lay any charges against Phil with the police, or anything like that. The way I thought about it afterwards was that things had just caught up with him. I’d never felt like that myself but I’d been close and could understand it. Insurance paid up on the car after I reported it had been vandalised.
I didn’t see Maureen again before I went to work up in Auckland for Radcliffe’s, an electrical wholesaling outfit. The building sector had gone into recession and the work wiring new houses had dried up down south. At Radcliffe’s I was what they called a ‘key account manager’ which was the flash way of saying a salesman. They gave me a car and cellphone and forty grand a year plus commissions. The money came in steadier than when I was working for myself, and it wasn’t an office job. I got to meet a lot of good people. I guess you could say I was happy with the way things had panned out. Happy enough anyway.
I had girlfriends, a couple of them pretty long term. I even lived with a woman called Penny for a while, but somehow that hadn’t worked out. But I wasn’t unhappy living alone in an apartment close enough to work that I didn’t have to stress about the traffic.
I saw Phil again about a month ago. I was in a supermarket, standing in front of rows of different soups, trying to decide what I wanted for dinner, when I looked across and there he was right next to me. He was wearing jeans and a long-sleeved shirt that hid his tattoos. If anything he’d lost more hair, but the row of plugs was still there across the front of his head. I thought I could smell alcohol on his breath. It was ten o’clock on a Saturday morning.
‘Gidday, look who it is,’ he said, and came the few steps towards me with his hand outstretched.
‘Hi, Phil.’
I’m not sure if he remembered my name or if Maureen had even told it to him. He was with a redheaded woman who must have been fifteen years younger than him. She stood apart and eyed me in a bored way.
Because we had absolutely nothing else to talk about I asked if he’d seen Maureen lately.
‘She’s still down south. Hooked up with some builder. Not a bad bloke though.’
‘And how’s Angela?’
He smiled and I was struck by his brown eyes. They were eyes too pretty for a guy like Phil. ‘Angela’s good. She’s right into horses — jumping. Bloody good at it too. I try and visit her a couple of times a year. I call her.’
‘I’m glad to hear that.’
‘She starts high school next year. Can you believe it.’ He shook his head in a slow, disbelieving kind of way.
‘She seemed like a nice kid.’
‘Yeah. She’s great.’
He looked across at the redhead and then back at me and raised his eyebrows. ‘Well, gotta go, eh. Don’t wanta keep the women waiting. You know how they get.’ He grinned. We shook hands again and they walked away down the aisle towards the tills.
I finished doing my shopping and wheeled my groceries out in to the car park where a few drops of rain were starting to fall. Phil was sitting in the front of an old Commodore with the redhead. They were parked in the handicapp
ed spot near the door. He got out when he saw me, and came over.
‘I just wanted to say that I’m sorry about the car.’
‘Sure. Forget about it. Ancient history.’
‘If you were out of pocket, I’ve got some money now.’
‘No. That’s fine. Insurance.’
‘You got kids?’ he asked.
‘No.’
He nodded but seemed reluctant to turn around. ‘You know, just between you and me, I worry that I’m not much of an excuse for a father.’
‘I suppose you try your best.’
‘Yeah. I try. I guess that’s what counts.’ But he didn’t seem convinced.
The rain was starting to fall harder. Phil turned suddenly and without saying anything else walked away, leaving me standing alone in the car park. I got into my car, started the engine and began the short drive home to my empty apartment.
The Raft
shiny shiny bursts of silver sparkling behind the green leaves pretty as anything he has seen before behind him there is the sound of hammering and he knows he shouldn’t they’ll be mad and may growl but pushing through the bushes crawling when he has to so that his hands are dirty until he can see it properly and he has never seen anything so beautiful and he claps his hands in delight the gate pushes open at his touch and the concrete is hot on his bare feet and it is so bright that he squints his eyes and holds up his hand with the sticking-plaster thumb to shade his eyes as he reaches out to feel the beauty feels himself toppling forward
sudden silence
looking up he can see himself reflected in the sky
Rain falls the entire time they are driving to the bach. Tonia will say this for The Coast: they know how to do rain. Nothing pissy or drizzly, just pregnant drops that fall like they mean business, as if they have a firm destination in mind. The windscreen wipers move too quickly and are making her feel ill. Her right ear is sore and she readjusts the sweatshirt she is using for a pillow. Andrew does not look at her. He has not spoken the whole trip. He drives with his mind outside the car, staring past the windscreen at the late afternoon rain and the black eel that is the highway. If that’s the way he wants it, she thinks. She closes her eyes again. She curls her small body down further in the front seat and tries to hear each raindrop as it hits the roof of the car.
She wakes in an almost darkness to find that she is alone. Confused, she sits up. How long has the engine been switched off? It could have been hours. No, not hours, the inside of the car is still warm, probably just a few minutes then. Where the hell is Andrew? It is raining harder than ever, the noise in the car is deafening, as though the cats and dogs her mother never failed to mention on days like this are making fatal landings just above her head. She sees now that the car is parked almost at the front door of the bach, at the end of the two ruts that pass for a drive through the knee-high lawn. But there are no lights on inside, no sign of Andrew. She stares out at the weatherboard house chocked up on its high piles like spindly legs. It is, she thinks, ugly. Typically, Andrew’s father bought it cheap with no thought of aesthetics. It used to be an old forestry hut which became surplus to requirements. She twists herself in the seat to look behind but cannot see Andrew. Nor the lake. The rain falls like a stage curtain.
She is startled when Andrew reappears beside the car. He is holding the hood of his jacket forward from his face as he taps on the window. He gestures impatiently for her to follow. She opens the door and her jeans are immediately soaked. He runs ahead of her across the grass and up the steps to the narrow porch.
‘Where were you?’
‘Getting the key.’ He holds up a small glass jar covered in dirt, inside which is a single key. A slater drops to the ground and disappears over the edge of the porch.
The door opens to darkness and a faint whiff of something ripe and foul. Tonia waits while Andrew feels his way along the wall and out of sight. She can hear him cursing and a hollow thump as something falls.
‘Are you okay?’
Her answer is the lights coming on. The white light of naked bulbs spills out on to the porch and shows her a clutter of old shoes. Hats of all sorts dangle from hooks, and there is a stiff oilskin hanging like something shed. Remnants of Andrew’s family — his father, his mother, and his older sister Alice who now lives in Sydney.
Andrew is swearing. ‘What’s the matter?’
‘The roof is leaking. Come and look.’
An ugly brown stain has spread across the ceiling of the lounge, making the plaster swell and sag. There is another stain over by the wall close to the two doors which she vaguely remembers lead to the bunk room and his parents’ room, although she is not sure which is which now. Tonia has been here only twice before. Once when she came back from England that first time, and they spent three or four days here over Christmas. It was hot and they slept with the windows open and mosquito coils burning in the dark. There were screens over the windows to keep the sandflies out but even so they still found their way in and bit at her ankles and wrists. Each night she and Andrew had started off in separate bunks but ended up together, afraid to make even the slightest sound in case his parents, asleep in the next room, should hear.
She remembers little of the second trip, apart from the fact that she was pregnant and could eat anything as long as it was plain dry crackers. She’d spent a lot of time throwing up into the toilet and, just for variety, on to the garden. And then Liam was born, and because he was a fractious baby and, even when he was older, whined like crazy during car trips longer than down to the supermarket, they had not come here again.
Andrew is still investigating the damage. ‘This couch is absolutely soaked. I think the carpet might have to be replaced. Fuck knows about the floor. The boards are most likely rotted through by now.’
She does not feel that he needs her to comment. ‘I’ll go out and get the bags,’ she says.
‘There’s nothing much we can do about this tonight anyway.’
‘Maybe there are some extra towels?’
He shakes his head. ‘We’ll need buckets.’
In the end it takes two buckets, three ice-cream containers and an old green glass vase which they find under the sink to catch all the drips. They arrange them on the couch, the kitchen breakfast-bar, the green Formica table and strategically around the sodden floor. After they are finished she finds another leak in the bunk room — the door on the left, she has discovered — and puts a glass bowl underneath the slow drip of water. She wrinkles her nose at the smell of rotting carpet.
‘I need a drink,’ says Andrew. ‘Do you want one?’
‘No.’ She stands and watches while he makes himself a gin and tonic. He is casually careful about how much gin he pours.
‘What?’ he demands.
‘Nothing.’
‘If you’re going to start …’
‘I’m tired. I think I’ll go to bed.’ She takes her bags and goes into the bunk room. She lies in the darkness, listening to the endless rain and to the metered plop plop plop plop of the drips falling into the bowl.
After a long time she hears Andrew go into the other bedroom and close the door.
He is swimming slowly across the surface of a vast black lake. He opens his eyes and looks down through water the colour of weak tea. The light travels down below him but then is quickly twisted and swallowed. There is the familiar feeling of hanging near the ceiling of a huge room with walls he can’t see. A hollow place. Below him long shapes trail up, strands of weed from the bottom.
Something moves. A thing that does not match the rhythm of the weed’s slow sway. Something sleek and black. And then it is gone. He falters in his stroke and floats face down, turning his head from side to side to try and see clearly. But whatever it was it is hidden now. There is only green-black water and weed trailing up from the bottom.
Raising his head, he starts to tread water. He looks around. Dark clouds have gathered, the makings of a thunderstorm, and the shore is still a long way off,
barely visible. The clouds are piling up in the sky and the light is fading. He is tired and unsure of how long he has been in the water. He is stone cold and the shore never seems to get any nearer. Something is down there amongst the weed. Something much bigger than him that is watching as he thrashes across the surface, biding its time.
He looks down again past his pale dangling legs. The weed is much closer now, as though it has grown up in a sudden spurt to touch him. Brushing his feet. He pulls his legs away and suddenly knows without doubt that whatever it is waiting down there is rushing up towards him. Here it comes. Fast. Mouth agape. Up through the weed and the dark water. He just can’t see it yet. He starts thrashing wildly but has suddenly forgotten how to swim. He is like a bug trapped on the surface of the lake.
It is rushing up fast through the dark water. Any moment and he will feel the creature’s teeth sink into his flesh. He screams.
It is the terror that always wakes him.
Andrew lies on his back and listens to the sound of his own tattered breathing. He is tangled in the sheets and dripping wet so that he thinks for a moment the ceiling above his bed has sprung another leak. It is hot sweat. He wonders if he has been screaming in his sleep again, but Tonia does not stir in the other room. It is still raining, and he has no idea what the time is. There is no clock and he has stopped wearing a watch. Even when he climbs out of bed and turns on the light the feeling of being hunted stays with him. His sweat dries cold. He wraps a musty woollen blanket from the closet around his shoulders and goes into the kitchen.
He rolls a cigarette without looking at his hands, and stands staring out at the rain from the bay window that was added on to the house after it was moved. On the window sill a thin white fuzz of mould is growing like fine new hair. The air inside is heavy, damp. The tattered couch and the armchair with the tiger-patterned throw-rug give up their moisture. The carpet seeps. Everything smells of the damp which comes from the furniture but also from the lake and from the dripping bush behind the property where moisture creeps like a squatter, waiting only for them to go before it slips back inside. Careful not to wake Tonia he rummages in a kitchen drawer until he finds a lighter.