by Tim Winton
‘But you’ll have to leave sooner or later. There’s a whole world out there. Believe me, Abel. You’ll leave.’
‘But not for good. And what about you? What would you be like away from the sea, Mum?’
She pushed her egg around the plate and chewed her lip. ‘I’d be okay.’
‘Tell the truth.’
‘Abel, I always tell the truth.’
‘Mum.’
‘Oh, all right then, I hate it inland. I can’t bear the towns and cities. Of course I want to be here. I’m close to everything in Longboat Bay. All our memories. Your father. This is my place.’
Abel poured the tea. ‘Are you lonely here on your own?’
‘I miss you,’ she murmured. ‘I miss you terribly. But no, I’m not lonely. Sometimes I feel I should be. But this place is a kind of friend to me. Maybe I’m a bit odd.’
Abel thought about that. It was true, she wasn’t like other people. She certainly wasn’t like his schoolmates’ mothers. Other mothers bought fashionable clothes and drove flash cars and chirped like birds. Abel’s mother was quiet and tough and sun-streaked. She did things differently. Her hands were lined and calloused. She looked like the land and sea had made her.
‘I want to stay here, Abel. I want to die here.’
‘Mum, you’re not that old. Don’t talk like that.’
‘Like what? I don’t intend to die tomorrow. I plan to kick the bucket as a very old lady. But I want to do it here, not in some awful town away from the sea.’
Abel laughed. ‘Well, that’s okay then.’
He got up and went to the window. The jet boat had worked along the bay a few hundred metres. Abel picked up the binoculars and saw a diver hoisting up a huge bag of abalone. Another bag came up. Then a string of bleeding fish wired to a red buoy. Abel began to sweat.
‘Costello’s giving the bay a real hammering,’ he said. ‘He’ll be at Robbers Head by lunchtime the way he’s going. There won’t be anything left on the reef at all. It’s wrong, Mum.’
His mother said nothing.
‘Mum?’ he pleaded.
‘Costello’s a hard case, Abel. He’s a vicious man. You’re thirteen years old.’
Abel put the binoculars down and kicked the wall.
After breakfast they pulled weeds in the vegetable garden. It was boring work in the hard sun. The soil was full of tiny bones that cut their fingertips. Abel saw that his hands had gone soft at school. His mother hummed a tune. As the morning wore on he grew more agitated. He kept an eye on the bay, saw bag after bag of abalone hauled up and it was like being pricked by fishbones all over.
‘Mum,’ he said. ‘I can’t stand it.’
‘We don’t have any choice.’
‘Well, I’m making my choice.’
He ran downhill to the house and grabbed his wetsuit off the verandah rail.
‘Abel, don’t!’
He stumped along the jetty. As he leapt into his boat he heard his mother thudding along the timbers. He checked his fuel and started his outboards. His mother’s wetsuit dropped onto the deck. He looked up. She was casting off the lines.
‘This is stupid and dangerous,’ she said.
‘So why come?’
‘Because if you went on your own it would be twice as stupid and twice as dangerous.’
Abel throttled up and they swerved out, thumping across the bay with the wind streaming in their hair.
When they got to the anchored boat at Robbers Head Abel eased the boat down to dead slow then cut his motors so they could drift up alongside. Costello’s compressor roared and his flags snapped in the breeze.
The deck of Costello’s boat was awash with blood. Abel had speared fish nearly every day but he had never seen such slaughter as this. Fish lay in huge slippery mounds and so many of them were under-size. Abel saw blue morwong, trevally, sweep, boarfish, harlequins, breaksea cod, groper, jewfish and samsons stiffening in the sun or quivering slowly to death. Behind the steering console stood crates of writhing abalone and a box of illegal crayfish.
‘We should chuck the abs back over the side,’ Abel said. ‘They might survive.’
‘You step on that boat, son, and you’ll get horribly hurt. I won’t have it.’
Abel sighed and pushed his boat clear. They drifted back in the breeze away from the dive zone.
‘Now what?’ asked Abel.
Abel’s mother was snapping on a weight-belt and wetting her mask.
‘I want you to stay with the boat, you understand? It’s important.’
‘But Mum!’
She went over the side before he could argue any further. He watched her fins flash away into the distance. Abel had no intention of staying dry. He anchored the boat, pulled on his gear and rolled out into the clear, cool water.
He swam across to the red boat, climbed up the ladder and began emptying crates of abalone over the side. Then he dived back in and followed the bright, trailing hoses down to the blossom of bubbles that marked where the divers worked. Once he found them he swam back to the surface and watched from there. In a scattered mass behind them, falling like snow, abalone were finding their way back onto the reef. Some were dead and knots of little fish picked at them. But the divers didn’t look back. They lay on the rugged bottom with spearguns.
One diver pointed something out to the other. Bubbles smoked back from his head so that he looked like a dragon. There was a blue flash ahead of them. Abel’s heart sank. He knew exactly what it would be. He took a breath and dived.
He was only halfway to the bottom when he saw Blueback dart out from behind a boulder. He was as big as a barrel; he made a big target. A spear flashed silver. It flew by Blueback’s head and whanged into hard rock. The fish shuddered for a moment, staring at the divers and then retreated a little way.
Abel knew why. It was all the abalone he’d tipped into the water. Blueback was wary but he couldn’t resist all that food. Behind the divers, swarms of smaller fish were feasting and Blueback wanted to be in on it. Only the two men lay in his way. He flicked back and forward, excited, blinded by his appetite.
Abel ran out of air. He shot back to the surface. Blueback was doomed now, he knew it. In a moment or two a spear would hit him in the gills and the water would go pink with his blood.
Then suddenly Abel’s mother appeared between the divers and the fish. She surged out from behind a rock and put her body in the way. Blueback swirled around her playfully. No, Abel thought, you stupid fish. Don’t be friendly! Hole up, rack off, go away!
One diver reloaded. Then the both of them crept forward, billowing bubbles. Their spearguns glinted like shiny stings. Abel could see his mother was short of breath now. Her strength was going. The fish kept circling her, exposing its side to the spearguns. Abel began to panic. His mother would drown down there. The fish would die. These men would beat him to mush.
Then, in a blur, the fish was gone and Abel’s mother came pumping and kicking hard for the surface. He swam over to where she punched up into the air. He dragged her mask off and let her heave and blow. She felt limp in his arms as he swam her to the boat.
‘Stupid fish,’ she wheezed, hanging weakly off the ladder.
‘What happened?’
‘I told you to stay out of the water. And what about that idiotic business with the abalone? Abel, you —’
‘Mum, what happened? He was fooling around and then – whoosh – he was off.’
‘He wanted to play. I didn’t have any air left. Those fellas were determined to get him.’
‘So he got smart, eh?’
‘Not likely.’
‘Well?’
‘I biffed him one. I punched him in the head.’
‘Costello?’
‘No, Abel. The fish. I thumped him one. To scare him off.’
Abel laughed. ‘Man alive! And it worked.’
‘Took off like a rocket. He won’t like me anymore, that’s for sure. Probably got a black eye.’
‘Well, it�
�s better than ending up as fish fingers.’
‘Let’s go, Abel. Those blokes will be a little hot under the collar. They’ll need to decompress a while before they come up, so let’s be off while we can.’
‘Will there be trouble?’
‘Probably. We’ve done it now.’
Abel helped her aboard and took her home. It was true, she wasn’t your average mother. Abel decided he didn’t care about average. Out here average didn’t seem worth bothering with.
Abel and his mother went ashore to wait for trouble. But trouble never came. Once or twice they saw the mirror flash of binoculars upon them, but fairly soon the compressor started up again and Costello and his offsider went back to stripping the reef bare, as though nothing could keep them from business. Plenty of abalone came to the surface but no speared fish, and, to Abel’s great relief, no huge blue groper. Old Blueback stayed holed up, nursing his sore head, safe from spears.
Then, quite abruptly, at four o’clock, a Fisheries patrol boat swung in around the headland and skated across Longboat Bay. It ran alongside Costello’s boat and three officers boarded her. Half an hour later the abalone boat left Robbers Head at the end of a tow rope with a cloud of gulls off her stern. As it steamed out onto the open sea, the patrol boat let off a blast of its horn that echoed all the way into the forest.
For the rest of that summer, Blueback kept clear of Abel’s mother. Costello’s fines cost him his licence and put him out of business. Abel was a little disappointed that he had never met the man. It would have been thrilling to come face to face with a real life villain.
But a couple of weeks after the Costello business, Abel got to know enough about the man to know he never wanted to meet him after all.
A huge tiger shark swam into the bay. Abel took his boat out to see the thing swimming sluggishly up and down the beach. His mother stayed ashore; she said she never wanted to see a tiger shark again as long as she lived. Abel couldn’t blame her but his curiosity got the better of him.
The shark looked wrinkled and flabby when it should have been thick and powerful as a tree. It wasn’t hard to see why. Everywhere it went it towed a big red buoy on a length of chain. It had a stainless steel meat hook in its jaws and it swam like a ghost of itself. The shark couldn’t dive without being defeated by the buoy and dragged painfully back to the surface. The day it was hooked it would have dragged it underwater for hours but now its strength was gone and every turn of its head, every kick of the tail was agony. The buoy dragged behind like a ball on a chain. The tiger shark was starving to death and dying of exhaustion. It was a pitiful sight and it sickened Abel. If he’d had a gun he would have pulled alongside and shot it through the head to end its suffering. There was no way he could save the shark now, even if he could cut it free.
So Abel watched the shark all afternoon. In the end he came ashore and watched it from the jetty. It swam feebly up and down, restless with its terrible agony. That night he sat on the verandah and saw moonlight flash on the dragging buoy which made a miserable sparkling wake on the still water.
In the morning the tiger shark was dead. The tide left it stiff and leathery on the beach and Abel turned the red buoy over in his hands to see the name stencilled on the side. COSTELLO.
He towed the shark out to sea, replaced the buoy with some lead weights and cut it free. It sailed down into the black deep like a torpedoed ship.
Abel went back to school in the new year feeling older, different. That summer he learnt that there was nothing in nature as cruel and savage as a greedy human being.
In his high school years, Abel Jackson felt like he was holding his breath. It was like diving, only not nearly as much fun. From the moment he left Longboat Bay at the beginning of every semester, something inside him took a deep breath and held on until he got back. Like a good diver he taught himself to relax, to resist panic, to believe he had the strength to do what he needed to do.
During those years he wondered if his mother would marry again. It didn’t seem right that she should live out on the coast alone. She was still beautiful and strong. Men liked her and looked up to her but she seemed to fend them off like friendly puppies. Secretly, Abel knew that he wouldn’t like to go home to find someone else, a strange man, in his life. Still, he did want her to be happy. But Dora Jackson, his mother, never married again.
It was during these years that the developers came to Longboat Bay. They were businessmen and councillors in suits and BMWs who wanted to build a resort in the bay. All the land around the Jackson place was national park and could never be touched. But a hotel and golf course and swimming pool and a marina could all fit on Jackson land. When these men saw Longboat Bay they saw money, piles of it. Rich tourists, they thought, could moor their yachts and sit out on resort balconies here and watch kangaroos grazing at the edge of the forest. International entrepreneurs could play golf and make deals. Helicopters could bring people in daily for whalewatching tours. Charter boats could take fishermen out every morning. And scuba lovers could meet that big old groper the Jackson kid played with every day. To them it was a goldmine, a fortune waiting to be made.
But Dora Jackson didn’t want to sell. The businessmen were friendly at first. Their fat red faces were splitting with grins. They brought flowers and chocolates and bottles of champagne. Little gifts were followed by bigger gifts: a new outboard motor, a wind generator. This is no place for a woman on her own, they said. They offered her good money, but she didn’t sell. They brought experts, tax men, lawyers, agents, but still she told them politely that she didn’t want to sell. The smiles faded. The gifts stopped coming.
And then little things, annoying things, began to happen. The Longboat Bay road began to get rougher and more potholed because the council grader never seemed to come. The mail was always late or wet or it never came at all. Deliveries of diesel fuel and petrol had water in them so that Dora Jackson’s outboards and generators and truck engine began to stall. There were mysterious bushfires in the forest in the middle of winter.
Abel read about it in his mother’s letters angry that he could not be there to help out. At night he lay awake thinking of her and the bay. He knew she would hold out against whatever the money men did. She was stubborn as a tree and just as strong. But he hated how it wore her down, wasted her time, pinched at her nerves. Those men didn’t understand that a place isn’t just a property. They didn’t see that Longboat Bay was a life to his mother, a friend. And maybe a husband to her as well.
Every day at that peppermint tree there she was, thinking about Abel’s father. It puzzled him how a person could do that year after year. But as he grew older, Abel could see how strong her love was for all these things: the sea, the bush, the house, her husband’s memory. It was love that stopped her from being lonely, that made her strong. It was like food to her. Abel knew that it was his mother’s love that kept him going all those dull high school years while he was stuck inland, holding his breath until he was blue in the face.
Abel Jackson’s mother beat the sneaky businessmen. She simply outlasted them. Her calm patience wore them out. They got bored and fed up, and after five years they left her alone.
Abel had graduated from high school and was home on the holidays when all the pilchards died. There was no storm, no warning, no oil spill, no explanation. One morning he stumped down to the jetty to see the whole beach blackened with dead fish. The air roared with flies. Gulls hovered uncertainly over the stinking mess. Abel walked along the beach trying to understand it. He helped his mother load the truck with mushy piles of the fish and for hours they spread them on the soil of the orchard and the gardens.
‘Something’s wrong with the sea,’ said his mother. ‘This isn’t right. It’s not normal.’
Late that day, Abel took his boat out and dived in the bay, along the point and out at Robbers Head. The abalone had recovered from the season that Costello had come. Trevally and tarwhine and garfish twitched along in healthy schools. Everything look
ed normal. The kelp and the coral were alive. He fooled around with Blueback and biffed him a couple of times with his hip as he passed close by. All of it seemed ordinary, usual.
He thought about Blueback that evening. If only fish could talk. Maybe then Blueback could tell him how the water felt, whether something was wrong somewhere along the coast or in the deeps. Abel sat on the verandah with his feet on the rail, thinking about it. Imagine that, he thought, knowing what the old fish knew. Blueback was probably old enough to have known Abel’s mother as a girl. Hadn’t she come out here as a teenager, staying summers with his father’s family? Did he see them swimming together, his parents? Two young lovers. Had his father dived down to look at a small greenish groper out at Robbers Head one day? People said his father swam like a fish. They said sometimes he thought he was a fish. If Blueback could speak, thought Abel, he could tell him about his father. All the secrets of the sea would be there waiting for him.
When Abel went inside that night his mother caught him staring at the photo on the mantelpiece.
‘You look like him, you know.’
Abel shook his head. But then he looked again and saw that it was true. He had his father’s face.
Later that month, tuna skippers told the Jacksons that pilchards were floating dead all along the coast. No one had a clue what it was about.
‘The ocean is sick,’ said Abel’s mother. ‘Something’s wrong.’
It was a mystery. And the more he thought about it the more the whole sea seemed to be a puzzle. Abel wanted to figure it out.
Abel Jackson went to university to figure out the sea. His mother smiled about that. He’d lived half his life underwater, his best friend was a fish and now he was leaving Longboat Bay to learn about the sea. It seemed a bit mad to her but she shrugged her shoulders and let him go.
Abel moved to the city. The university was like a small town inside the city itself. It was ugly and dreary and full of talk. In his university years, Abel pretended to be a scientist. He explored the sea with computer modelling, with books and specimens in jars, with photos and films. Now and then he went on field trips with other students. He dived in new places, from new islands and boats and beaches, but he felt the same old sea on his body, through his hair, in his ears.