by Tim Winton
Between semesters he came home and sat on the verandah at Longboat Bay and knew he was no closer to knowing what fish think. He saw whales spouting and dolphins surfing. With his mother he netted salmon and smoked herring. He painted the house and patched the driveway. In autumn he scraped out the water tanks and pruned the vines. One year he brought home some solar panels so they didn’t need the noisy generator any more. That was the year he fell in love.
Abel Jackson met a girl who loved the sea. She was sleek as a seal and funny. Her hair was black and shiny. She grew up in the desert and didn’t see the ocean until she was twelve years old. Her name was Stella. That summer Abel brought Stella to Longboat Bay.
When he climbed out of his car and introduced Stella to his mother, Abel was surprised at how lined his mother’s face was. With a young woman standing beside her, Dora Jackson looked old. There were lines like gulls’ feet all over her face. To him she’d always been young, but now, standing beside Stella, her skin seemed dry and papery. She was an old woman. I’m away too much, he thought. I’m missing things.
Abel was nervous that first day, worried that the two women would not like each other. He saw that his mother knew it. Her smile said it all.
‘Stella,’ she said, ‘you know that you’ll have to share Abel, don’t you?’
‘Of course,’ said Stella. ‘You’re his mother.’
Dora Jackson laughed. ‘Actually, I was thinking of somebody else. Abel, let’s show her who we mean.’
So the three of them went out to Robbers Head and swam with Blueback. The old groper flirted with them and ate crabs out of their hands. Stella shrieked in her snorkel when he nuzzled up to her. The fish’s eyes twitched and his gills heaved. He looked as fat as an opera singer.
When they swam back to the boat Abel saw that his mother had trouble climbing the ladder to get aboard. He floated up behind and boosted her up. She laughed, suddenly embarrassed. Blueback swirled deep below them, just a blur.
That evening they had a feast on the cool verandah. The table bristled with crayfish and abalone. They ate squid and urchin eggs, apricots, grapes and melons. Cold champagne frosted their glasses and sweated on the driftwood table. Stella watched Abel and his mother.
‘You two,’ she said. ‘You seem to be able to talk to each other without saying anything.’
‘Practice,’ said Abel.
‘It’s the fish in us,’ said Dora Jackson. ‘We don’t always need words.’
Out on the moonlit bay, dolphins jumped and hooted. It was like a celebration. Abel remembered the dolphins as a good omen because that was the night he asked Stella to marry him.
Abel Jackson became a marine biologist married to another marine biologist. With Stella he travelled and studied, diving in all the oceans and seas of the world. In time he became an expert, someone foreign governments invited for lectures and study tours, but inside he still felt like a boy with a snorkel staring at the strange world underwater, wishing he knew how it worked. Blueback still swam through his dreams.
He was diving in the Greek islands one day, looking at the great underwater desert that dynamite fishing and pollution had created when he realised that he was older than his father. It came as a cold shock. His father would always be a young man; he never grew older than the moment that tiger shark loomed out of the murk and broke him in two.
That very day he got back to his hotel and found a diving magazine on his bed. On the front cover Blueback and two divers circled each other like dancers.
There was a letter from his mother.
Lots of people came this year, Abel. Boat after boat full of divers wanting to swim with that fat old fish.
Some days I have fifteen boats in the bay. Not all of them are welcome, I must say. People come spearing in groups. I’m worried about the bay.
A month later an oil tanker cracked in two off the coast of Longboat Bay. Abel watched it on TV from halfway across the world. In another city, and another hotel room, he saw video pictures of the oil slick spreading. In an airport lounge the next day he passed a TV and watched the same ship catch fire and the slick burn up as foul weather drove the mess away and broke it up. The stricken ship drifted far out to sea until the weather improved enough for it to be towed back to port. No oil ever reached the shore. Abel Jackson knew how close the whole coast had come to disaster. He called his mother and let her know that he had seen the drama. She cried when she heard his voice. It’s a warning, she told him.
As he travelled with Stella, going where their work took them, to coral atolls, to estuaries choking on pollutants, to strange countries and new oceans, Abel thought about his home all year long and felt the big blue fish pressing against him in his sleep.
Dora Jackson had been worrying for years when the storm came. Each year the weather grew more fierce and erratic. Strange things happened every season. One year a leopard seal arrived on the beach all the way from Antarctica. Another year the salmon didn’t show at all. She found five dead dolphins snagged in the cliffs at Robbers Head. Abel and Stella wrote letters and called but they were too busy with work to come home much anymore and Dora had trouble keeping everything going on her own now. The orchard was getting away from her. Rabbits got into the vegetables at night and foxes to the hens. Her fingers were stiff with arthritis and engines defeated her.
She took Abel’s old boat out some days to fish or she walked with her thoughts along the beach and through the karri trees. In winter the bay was quiet, the way it used to be. No boats came. The place could be itself.
When it came, the storm was like a cyclone. It blew down her fences and took the roof off her freezer shed. The sea grew tormented. It buckled and swelled and bunted against the cliffs and headlands. Surf hammered the shore and chewed it away. The air was thick with foam and sand and spray. Wind gusts screamed till she covered her ears. The old house rattled and rocked like an old lugger at sea. Dora Jackson lay in bed until it was all over.
Late in the morning she got up to see the mess. She walked down to the shore to see a strange jumble of white stumps on the beach. As she got close she saw they were whale bones, thousands and thousands of them all along the bay. They stood like posts and broken teeth and tombstones where the storm had exposed them. Dora Jackson stepped over and under and around them. It was like walking through a graveyard. These bones had lain here under the sand of Longboat Bay for a century or more. She’d walked over them for forty years without knowing. It was a terrible feeling having history unearth itself so suddenly.
She sat all day with bones around her, bones the Jacksons had left here in their whaling days. It was whaling and sealing that brought the Jacksons here in wooden ships last century. Blubber oil and baleen, seal fur and fish had paid for this land over time. The Jacksons were all dead now, generations of men, women and children and only Abel and her were left. It had come down to them. They had lived from the sea all this time. Dora saw what must be done. Now it was time to help the sea live. She must protect the bay for all time.
That night in the wreckage of her house, Dora Jackson began writing letters. She wrote till dawn and the next night she went at it again. She wrote hundreds of them. They were like a coral spawn, those letters, tiny white messages that drifted out from Longboat Bay into the offices of people all over the country. Politicians, bosses, scientists all ignored her, but they had no idea how stubborn she could be. Month after month the letters went out, over and over, back and forward. Photos of Blueback landed on the desks of newspaper editors. There was something about that fat blue face with its moony eye which seemed to look right into you. Abel’s mother was patient. She outlasted them all.
Abel and Stella were diving in the warm everclear water of a rare lagoon when the fax came through on the expedition boat. Abel read it before he had towelled himself dry. He read it aloud to Stella as she peeled out of her suit. The message said that Longboat Bay had been declared a sanctuary, a marine park where everything that grew and swam there was protected by
law. Stella went straight up the companionway to the bridge and called in a chopper. Abel went below to pack.
On the plane home, high over the Pacific Ocean, Abel Jackson had a dream. In the dream his mother was dead. She floated in Longboat Bay like seaweed as he swam from shore to reach her. Gulls and terns whirled above her, wailing. As he reached her he touched her face, her old, beautiful face, and she sank beneath the surface. She tilted over and wheeled like a starfish into the blackest deep. Out of the blur came a dark shape. Blueback. The old fish followed her down into the darkness, his tail swinging like a gate as they both disappeared.
‘You’re crying,’ said Stella when he woke.
‘Yes.’
‘Was it a bad dream?’
‘No, not bad. Sad, I suppose. All these years I just wanted to know about the sea. I’ve been everywhere, I’ve studied, I’ve given lectures, become a bigshot. But you know, my mother is still the one who understands it. She doesn’t go anywhere at all. She grows vegetables and eats fish. And she’s saved a place. I’m a scientist, a big cheese, but I’ve never saved a place. She learnt by staying put, by watching and listening. Feeling things. She didn’t need a computer and two degrees and a frequent flyer program. She’s part of the bay. That’s how she knows it.’
The jet rumbled beneath them. Stella squeezed his hand.
‘But you had to leave, Abel. You had school and work to think of.’
He shrugged. ‘But all I ever wanted to do was figure out what keeps it all together. When I was a boy I just wanted to know what Blueback thought about things. I wanted to learn the language of the sea.’
‘Like Dora says, maybe you don’t need words.’
The plane rumbled on, taking him home.
The night Abel returned, there was a little party on the verandah at Longboat Bay. The sea murmured against the shore and humpbacks sang somewhere out in the dark beyond Robbers Head. It was a hot, still night and the salt air hung upon them. Dora Jackson told them stories of waterspouts and lightning balls and manta rays and schools of salmon so thick you could climb out of your boat and walk across them. All the wonders of the ocean, the things she’d seen. She held the papers from the government that protected the bay as a sanctuary. The pages flashed yellow in the light of the lantern. Her face glowed with pride and relief. The three of them laughed and sang until it was late, celebrating the news, happy to be together again.
They were all going to bed when Abel’s mother fell. She stumbled against the rail and toppled down the verandah steps to the hard dirt below. She cried out, her voice small as a girl’s.
Abel rushed to her and saw that her hip was broken. Stella called an ambulance and they wrapped her in blankets for the long wait.
‘I’m old, Abel,’ she sobbed. ‘I’m sorry, but I’m old.’
He held her and cried with her under the warm, starry sky. She was too old to stay on here alone. Sooner or later she would have to leave and that was why she was crying. It hurt her more than the pain itself and Abel understood why.
During the long weeks his mother was in hospital, Abel began to clean the old Jackson place up. He was appalled and ashamed at how run-down the house and gardens had become. The jetty timbers were rotting. Fences and sheds were falling over and the orchard had begun to go wild.
The telephone rang day and night with calls from cities and beaches all over the world. A crisis here, some emergency there, but Abel kept at the job of fixing his family place.
One afternoon he walked up past the orchard to the peppermint tree and stood there a long time. He thought about his father and felt close to his memory there. He put his cheek against the rough bark the way he had as a boy and hugged the thick trunk.
At sunset he stood on the jetty and watched a big blue shadow circle beneath him and peel off into the golden light. The wind luffed at his hair. Cicadas in the dry grass clicked their tongues. Crabs bubbled and clattered across the rocks. Whalebones made a chain all the way along the beach, yellow in the sunset. Abel felt the place was calling him; it made him dizzy.
His wife joined him on the jetty.
‘How will she live somewhere else?’ he asked her. ‘My mother’ll die in a town.’
‘I know,’ said Stella. ‘She should stay here.’
‘She can’t do it alone.’
‘That’s why we’re staying,’ said Stella.
Abel laughed. ‘Really?’
‘Abel, do you want to talk about the sea or be in it?’
He shuffled his feet.
‘Do you want to be homesick or be home?’
He looked out at the water, purpling towards night. ‘It’s a hard life here, Stella.’
‘So why do you lie awake every night wishing you were here?’
‘Because it’s what I want,’ he said. ‘It’s what I always wanted.’
‘I rang the Foundation a few minutes ago and told them we quit.’
Abel brought his mother home to a freshly painted house. She was surprised at the yards and the fixed sheds and newly planted gardens. They made a special bed on the shady verandah and nursed her back to health. Dora stood with the aid of a walking frame the day the officials came to declare the bay a marine reserve. She pointed out the politicians who used to be businessmen, the same ones who wanted to build hotels here. With great satisfaction she watched them set the marker buoys that showed the boundaries of the sanctuary. It stretched all the way out to Robbers Head, a safe place at last. She wanted more of them, other havens along the coast, but for now she was content.
In time Abel’s mother was walking again, but she never went far without help. Some days she took a chair down to the jetty. When she was strong she made the climb up to the peppermint tree to be alone with her memories.
The three of them mended nets and bottled fruit and smoked fish and told long, ludicrous stories as they worked. Abel and Stella supervised the bay and kept an eye on the summer visitors. They wrote papers on the breeding habits of abalone. They walked in the forest and sat up high on the ridge to watch the migrating whales pass. Some days they took divers to see Blueback gobble crabs and swim grumpily round his reef.
One cold winter night a baby was born at Longboat Bay. They called her Dora after her grandmother. Her fists were like pink sea shells and she cried like a bird.
After a few years Abel’s mother could no longer walk along the beach she loved. She was too frail to dive any more and too stiff to pick fruit or dig vegetables. In the end she lay in her bed and listened to the sea. On fine days Abel carried her to the verandah so she could watch the tide and see the life of the ocean. Her hair was white as the sand on the shore and little Dora liked to feel it silky between her fingers. Old Dora Jackson slept a lot but when she woke she told stories.
‘When Abel was born,’ she said, ‘his father thought we should let him meet the sea straight away so he wouldn’t get homesick. After all, he’d been swimming inside me all that time. He was always a swimmer. So we took him down while the water was warm. We knelt in the shallows and lowered him gently into the sea. For a moment he went stiff as coral and then he kicked like a fish about to be set free. He wanted to swim off right there and then. He cried when I took him back to the house. He was always like that. Just like his father. Couldn’t get him out of the water.’
The day before Dora Jackson died, Abel carried her gingerly down from the verandah and took her to the shore. Her nightie flapped and her hair became a tumbleweed in the breeze. He walked out a little way as whiting darted past his feet. He cradled her in his arms, laid her back and let her float against him in the clear, still water.
‘We come from water,’ she whispered. ‘We belong to it, Abel.’
She lay back smiling, her arms and legs bobbing lightly. She weighed nothing at all. A long, blue shadow swerved into the shallows and swam around them once, stirring up the sand like confetti against them.
The next afternoon she died in her sleep and Abel made a new cross for the little graveyard behin
d the orchard.
Abel Jackson never regretted staying on at Longboat Bay. He lived the life of his boyhood every day and he was happy. The bay grew rich with life as fish came into it for sanctuary. They seemed to know that, just past Robbers Head, hooks and nets awaited them. They bred in their haven and swelled the stocks of the coast beyond. Seagrass, coral and sponges thrived. Abalone grew like snails in a garden. Dolphins and sharks came in. Sea lions returned to Robbers Head after being gone a hundred years. People dived into this teeming world and saw how the ocean could be itself.
Abel and Stella went back to being scientists. People came to visit them from all over the world and they continued to watch and listen and read. But they never discovered the secret of the sea. Abel figured his mother knew all the secrets by now and his father before her. He guessed that Mad Macka might have a few ideas too and that his own time would come eventually. In the meantime he let the sea be itself.
On little Dora Jackson’s third birthday, three divers drifted in clear water off Robbers Head. The smallest diver hung like a sail between the grownups as they flew down to the rubbly bottom.
Out of the shadows, from a crack in the reef, a huge blue creature came swirling at them. The little girl’s eyes grew big in her mask and she chirped in her snorkel.