by Tim Winton
Every year boats came into Longboat Bay on their way around the coast. They were a long way from any harbour. Yachts pulled in to shelter from bad weather, sometimes, but mostly their visitors were tuna boats and sharkfishermen who anchored for a rest overnight and came ashore to say hello and trade supplies. Some skippers let their crews snorkel off the boats to spear fish or catch crays. And every year Mad Macka the abalone diver worked his licensed patch around the coast. Sooner or later someone was bound to run into Blueback and that someone might be quick enough to spear him. Groper were good food; they fetched a big price at the market. The old fish was wily, but a good spearfisher might put a shaft through him if he was patient.
So that season as boats came and went, Abel’s mother told each skipper that there was a big blue off Robbers Head, a monster fish they should leave alone. Fishing people respected Dora Jackson. They talked about her with a kind of awe. They took notice of what she said. When she told Mad Macka he smiled and said he knew all about it. They needn’t worry, he said, old Blueback was safe with him.
‘That fish!’ said Macka. ‘Cheekiest fish I ever saw. Steals everything. Eat the wetsuit offa ya if ya stayed still long enough.’
So Blueback stayed on at Robbers Head without being hassled. Skippers talked about him now and then and stories grew about the kid and the fish. Abel took sailors and deckhands out to see him. He figured his secret was safer out in the open but he wondered if one day Blueback might be so well-known that some deadhead would come out there just to kill him and make themselves famous for five minutes. Abel knew all about fishing for food but he couldn’t understand people who wanted photos of themselves beside huge dead fish, fish killed for fun. One season grew into another and Abel grew old enough to take the dinghy out on his own. He swam with Blueback whenever work and the weather permitted. Some days he collected rock crabs on shore and fed them to the gluttonous old fish. Crabs were clearly his favourite. Just the hint of crab in the water sent Blueback into a darting, shivering frenzy.
Some afternoons Abel sat on the jetty to watch Macka work his way across the bay. His yellow boat throbbed with the sound of the air compressor. From the compressor the orange hose coiling out into the water took air down to the seabed where Macka worked out of sight, pulling abalone, taking a few from each seam, leaving plenty behind for next year.
‘It’s not safe out there alone,’ said Abel’s mother. ‘Not like that, using a hookah on your own with all that abalone meat in the water. He should have an offsider. He’s crazy.’
‘Guess that’s why they call him Mad Macka,’ said Abel.
It was a lonely sight, that was for sure. An empty boat drifting, tugged along by an invisible diver at the end of an airhose. Nothing moving on deck except that flapping blue and white diver’s flag. A few years ago an abalone diver had been bitten in half by a great white shark further along the coast. Divers usually worked in pairs for safety. But Macka didn’t want an offsider; he liked it on his own. Every season Macka came, Dora Jackson made the diver welcome in the bay, but Abel often saw his mother shudder apprehensively at the sight of that lonely yellow boat on the bay.
One season, the year Abel turned twelve, he came out of the vegetable garden with an armful of sweet corn and, looking out across the bay, he realised that Macka’s boat was silent. It had been thrumming all morning and now it hung there quiet on the still sea. The orange hose was out, Macka was underwater but the compressor had stopped. Abel knew it meant something terrible. He dropped his bundle of corn.
‘Mum!’
The pair of them raced to their dinghy and tore across the bay. They tied up alongside the abalone boat. Abel’s mother stripped off her jeans and jumped aboard. She snatched up Macka’s spear gun and opened his toolbox.
Abel watched anxiously as she fitted a power head to the spear. Her hands shook a little.
‘Toss me my fins and mask,’ she said.
Abel threw them across. Macka’s boat was eerie. The only sound was the crackle and flap of the flag.
‘He’s out of fuel,’ said his mother.
That could only mean two or three things and none of them meant Macka would be coming up alive. Abel looked at the powerhead his mother screwed onto the spear. One of those could blow a hole in the side of a boat. But could it stop a great white?
‘Stay in the boat,’ said his mother. ‘Do not get in the water, Abel.’
She plunged into the water and Abel watched her follow Macka’s airhose down into the steely deep. Her red fins flashed like a siren light. Abel’s heart beat so hard it hurt. He’d never seen someone dead before. Oh God, he thought, don’t let a shark take her too. Abel couldn’t imagine life without his mother.
A few seconds later Dora Jackson spouted beside the boat. She unscrewed the powerhead and passed the speargun up. She pulled off her fins and climbed the ladder into Macka’s boat.
‘Was it a shark?’
His mother began to pull on the hose. ‘No. There isn’t a mark on him. I think he’s had a heart attack. Maybe he just couldn’t swim back to the surface. Poor man probably just lay on the bottom helpless until his compressor ran out of fuel. Get a grapple, love.’
‘So he’s dead?’
She heaved on the hose and it coiled behind her. ‘Yeah, mate. He’s drowned. He’s gone.’
Abel jumped across and helped her haul poor Macka in. A cloud of gulls hung over the two boats. The sky was wide and blue above them and the bay was quiet, so quiet.
The year he turned thirteen Abel Jackson went away to school. Longboat Bay was a long way from towns big enough for their own high school so he had to live in a hostel in a big town inland.
On his last day home he planned to swim with Blueback. He wanted to find a few juicy crabs and feed the old fish and fool around with him a good long while. But the sea was up, huge, jagged swells thundered against the coast, and it was impossible to go out on the bay. So he spent his last morning chopping wood glumly for his mother. He split karri blocks for two hours and stacked them in the woodshed. When he was finished he walked up through the grapevines and the orchard and into the national park that surrounded the bay.
Birds chattered and flashed from tree to tree. The ground was heavy with bark and leaf litter. High above him the wind groused in the crowns of the karris. The flaky trunks swallowed him up like a noisy mob. From high on the ridge he looked down at the bay. Out at Robbers Head the sea heaved itself at the cliffs. Towers of white-water lifted in the air. Inside the bay was a rash of foamy whitecaps and wind-streaks. Waves smashed against the jetty. The dinghy was hauled up on the beach and Macka’s abalone boat still stood neglected on its trailer.
At the house he saw the flap of poultry, splashes of colour on the washing line and smoke angling from the house chimney. His whole life lay down there; everything he knew. He didn’t want to leave it but there was no way around the fact – he had to go. He’d just have to count the weeks till the holidays.
On his way back down, Abel stopped at the peppermint tree his mother used as a kind of shrine to his father. The tree was stout and sinewy and its thin leaves were fragrant. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a piece of craggy white coral. He laid it in the tree fork with all the other bits and pieces, pressed his cheek against the rough bark of the trunk and went down to where his mother was beginning to pack the truck.
I’ll wither up and die away from this place, he thought as they bumped off down the gravel road. This is my place. This is where I belong.
Abel didn’t wither and die but he didn’t care much for the big town he moved to. It was a long way inland and surrounded by wheat as far as the eye could see. The land was flat. All the trees were long gone, bulldozed and burnt to make way for croplands, and nothing seemed to move out there now except the endless paddocks of wheat-ears. Abel felt hemmed in. Everyone bunched up together in town as though they felt it too. Abel never seemed to be alone. He went to school in a crowd and he came back to the hostel in a crowd. Everywh
ere he went there were doors slamming and shoes clacking and a competing roar of voices. Even in his bed at night his dormitory was full of coughs and cries and the clanking of pipes.
Abel felt surrounded. He did his best to cope. He worked hard at school and made friends. New things and fresh faces came his way but here, where everyone seemed to move faster and bustle along, time passed more slowly than it ever did back at Longboat Bay. Home throbbed in him like a headache.
Only in his sleep did Abel feel free. In his dreams Blueback loomed up at him out of the blurry dark. The old fish’s eye was like a turning moon. In his sleep Abel swam and remembered and saw things he needed, things he wanted to see, and some things he didn’t expect.
Once in his dreams, Abel swam with Blueback down into a deep crevice where the water was cold and lit palest blue. He held onto the fish’s fins and let himself be taken. At the bottom of the rock shaft was a great gathering. Abel saw men in uniform, dead sailors floating in the current. Their eyes were open and their brass buttons gleamed. They hung there like starfish. Blueback led him past them to more drowned people. He saw little girls with lace dresses and drifting hair. He saw young men in sea boots with puffy white hands. And right at the end he found Mad Macka in his wetsuit beside the ragged body of Abel’s father.
Blueback hovered over them. Abel looked down on his father, at the ragged hole in his side, at the grey skin of his cheeks. He was a young man still. No matter how old Abel grew, his father would always be thirty-two. His eyelids were pearly. He looked peaceful, asleep. Abel reached down to touch. He wanted to take his father back with him but Blueback finned upwards, keeping him out of reach. Abel lunged but the fish drew away and the boy saw his father’s body grow small as they swam up through plankton and currents to the warmer, safer water of the surface.
Abel woke from that dream crying. The dormitory was dim. There was no one he could go to, no one to tell.
His mother wrote him letters and sent coral and shells. She mailed him a dried seahorse and a starfish. Now and then Abel picked up a turban shell from his bedside locker and held it to his ear. He knew it wasn’t really the sea he heard, but he listened and let himself believe. He closed his eyes to school and the smell of dirty socks and the sight of the wide, flat land outside his window, and saw the ocean.
Before the summer holidays Abel’s mother wrote to tell him that a new abalone diver would be working their part of the coast this season. She was worried because she’d heard bad things about him. People said he was a reef stripper. But she had good news as well. Mad Macka’s family had decided to give his boat to Abel. Boat, trailer, the lot. All his. Abel counted the days.
On the first day of the summer holidays, Abel’s mother met the bus out on the highway. He saw her waiting in the truck on the gravel and he ran to her with his bags flying.
The moment he saw the green sea again his skin prickled. As they came out of the forest and onto Jackson land he hooted and crowed. The pair of them laughed all the way to the house. That night he stood on the jetty and breathed the salt air.
Next morning they dived for abalone off Robbers Head and Blueback flitted around them, insistent as a dog at the dinner table. Abel chucked him under the chin and felt the current the old fish made in the water.
That afternoon Abel stood on the beach beside Macka’s big abalone boat. It was a five-metre catamaran, wide and stable as a house.
‘I did some work on the motors,’ said his mother. ‘Four-stroke fifties. They’re good outboards.’
Abel climbed up and stood on the deck. He tried not to think about the last time he was in this boat. The dive flag hung limp.
‘You can clean it up yourself,’ said his mother. ‘We’ll take the compressor off it today. We won’t be needing the hookah.’
‘What a boat,’ said Abel.
‘Let’s get to work, then. Empty that icebox.’
Abel took it slowly with the boat. His mother showed him how to handle it, how to use the echo sounder and the radios. He learnt how to trim the outboards in different sea conditions. For a few days they stayed in the bay. Then they moved out to Robbers Head and finally they took it out onto the dark, open sea. Abel steered them out across the sloping backs of oceanic swells as the land shrank to a long smudge behind them.
All afternoon they drifted for snapper, trailing heavy handlines with baits of squid. The snapper and morwong came up, flashing from the deep. Abel laid them in ice and felt the wind in his hair.
About three o’clock a huge, terrifying snort went up beside their boat. Then another across the bow and two more off the stern. A foul mist rose over them and Abel saw the glistening backs of right whales all around.
‘Look at that,’ said his mother. ‘We used to hunt them. Your father’s family, the Jacksons, came here as whalers. Used to sit up on the ridge in a lookout and when they saw a pod of whales come by they’d row out in longboats and harpoon them.’
‘I wonder if they remember, the whales.’
‘Who knows. I hope not.’
Abel and his mother stopped fishing and just watched the whales.
‘I used to feel bad about it,’ said his mother, ‘even though it was before our time. But the sea has taken its fair share of us. I think we must be even by now.’
Abel thought of all the crosses up behind the orchard.
A whale cruised past with its mouth wide. It strained water through its baleen, rolling as it fed.
Abel laughed. ‘Glad I’m not plankton, that’s all I can say.’
That summer, as his skill and confidence grew, Abel took his boat up and down the coast exploring the long lonely stretches that made him feel small. Land and sea were so big he became dizzy just imagining how far they went. He felt like a speck, like a bubble on the sea left by a breaking wave, here for a moment and then gone. He pulled into tiny sheltered coves and swam with his mother in turquoise water beneath streaky cliffs and trees loud with birds. Some days he sped close in to long sugary beaches. He stayed just behind the breakers and was showered with their spray and saw the great, strange land through the wobbly glass of the waves. He saw the sun melting like butter on white dunes. Dolphins rose in his bow wave and he slapped them playfully with his rolled up towel. He drifted amidst huge schools of tuna as they rose around him, feeding like packs of wild dogs on terrified baitfish that leapt across his boat.
Some days out east, he saw a big red jet boat working its way along the coast with its dive flags streaming.
‘Costello,’ said his mother. ‘The abalone diver. He’s a hard case.’
‘He’ll be here soon,’ said Abel.
‘I know,’ said his mother.
‘What about Blueback?’
‘It’s not just Blueback I’m worried about,’ said his mother. ‘It’s the whole bay. People say he takes everything he sees.’
‘So what do we do?’
‘Nothing. We stay out of his way.’
‘But Mum, what about Blueback?’
‘He’ll have to look after himself.’
‘Can’t we keep this bloke out of the bay?’
‘This patch of land’s ours, Abel. But the water belongs to everybody. Costello has a licence to take abalone. There’s nothing we can do about it.’
‘Can’t someone stop him?’
‘Only the Fisheries Department. They’ve been watching him.’
‘But out here he can get away with anything, Mum. This is the middle of nowhere.’
Abel looked out across the moving water. He knew that when the time came he wouldn’t just do nothing. He couldn’t do nothing.
Abel swam with Blueback every chance he had. He tempted him with squid and cray legs. He felt the broad blade of the fish’s tail against his chest and touched those flat white teeth with his fingertips. Abel held his breath and stared into the groper’s face, trying to read it. Blueback swam down to his crack in the reef and looked out with moon eyes.
It was dawn when Abel heard the jet motor burbling i
nto Longboat Bay. He climbed out of bed and found his way to the verandah. His mother was already there. The red boat slid in around the point and drifted with its motor off. An anchor splashed in the quiet. Then the compressor started up and two divers went over the side.
Abel’s mother watched through binoculars.
‘Things aren’t the same, Abel. It’s getting harder to hold on to good things.’
‘Let’s go out and cut his hoses,’ said Abel.
‘Don’t talk like that.’
‘Well, we have to stop him somehow.’
‘We don’t know that he’s doing anything wrong.’
‘And what happens when he starts doing wrong?’
She sighed. They went indoors.
At breakfast Abel’s mother looked sad and thoughtful. All these holidays he’d been feeling bigger and older. Now that he looked properly he saw that his mother was ageing too. It was a surprise. To him she had always seemed the same age. In a year or so he’d be as tall as her.
‘I’ve been wondering,’ she said. ‘Do you think I should sell up?’
Abel was speechless.
‘I mean, I could buy a house inland,’ she said. ‘We could be together more.’
‘But, Mum.’
‘I suppose you’re used to the hostel now. Living with your mother wouldn’t be the same.’
‘I hate the hostel,’ said Abel. ‘But you can’t leave here.’
‘But what if it’s the best thing?’
‘For who?’
‘For you, Abel. Wouldn’t you like more money? If I sold this place you’d have more chance to have things. We wouldn’t have to work so hard fishing, planting, mending. Aren’t you tired of being hard-up for money?’
‘Mum, I don’t care about money. And I love the fishing and growing stuff. This is what I want, the house, the land, the water. This is my life. I never want to leave.’