She greeted him with a smile. “Good morning, Joe.”
He was more abrupt. “Good morning. Your deckie said you’re leaving next week.”
“Yes, with the fishing season finishing, I’ve filled my quota. At the end of the season, it’s time to return home, until next year,” she told him gently. “Skipper plans to leave not long after I do. He’s had a good season, too.”
He seemed to have difficulty speaking. “But I thought you’d stay until the end of the season, at least until the end of next week, when I go back to the mining camps…”
“I’d like to stay longer, but I must go home,” she said softly. Her hand dropped to her stomach, which now had a slight curve to it that I had not noticed before.
Did the human food make her swell in the middle? Surely not. She did not eat a great deal.
At first, I dismissed the other possible reason. She had joined with the human only a few days ago, it was too soon for her to be changing if she were carrying the human’s child. It was far too early to tell, unless…
Unless she joined with him the night we rescued him from the rock? That night was four weeks in the past, sufficient time for her to know if she carried a child. A child would explain why she was so willing to return with us, to ensure she was in the deeps as the child grew within her until it was time to birth her at the Nursery Grounds.
“Come in and have some breakfast. The girls brought some eggs and I’ve been dying for some scrambled eggs…” Vanessa took the human’s hand and led him into her house.
Strong preferences for certain foods and strong emotional responses, both tell-tale signs of carrying a child. My suspicions grew.
60. Joe
I talked her into going to the community club on Little Rat for a drink with the rest of us. It was her last night for the season, and she’d never been.
“I have been to the club, plenty of times before you arrived,” she responded, stung.
I’d forgotten that she’d been here before I arrived. It was hard to believe she was more a part of this place than I was. It had grown on me, like some horrible fungal disease.
“I’m sorry. It’s just that I’ve never seen you there.” I hesitated, not sure what else to say. I chose honesty. “It’s the last chance I’ll get to have a drink with you in the club, before you leave in a few days. I’m only here for the season and I’ll probably be back at the mines soon. Just one evening and I’ll buy you a drink.”
Her expression softened. “Okay, I’ll come and you can buy me a farewell drink, but we’re taking my dinghy and I’m driving it.”
Shit. She’d noticed the dents in my dinghy, too.
“Sure,” I replied. Yes!
“Let me get a clean shirt on, then I’ll be ready to go.” She vanished into her house.
I should probably get some clean clothes on, too. I ducked back into my shack.
I put on my least stained pair of shorts and the polo shirt that seemed destined to be The Last Clean Shirt. I’d worn this on her boat more than a week ago, when we went fishing up in the Wallabis, and not worn it since. I shoved some condoms in my pocket, praying that I’d get to use one tonight.
It took her twenty minutes longer than me to find a clean shirt. The one she chose was more low-cut than her usual t-shirts. This would have looked appropriate in a Perth nightclub, especially combined with her little shorts. Different shades of blue against blue – she’d blend in with the water if she fell in.
I think she’d used the twenty minutes to put on some makeup, too, though it was hard to tell. Her lips glistened more and appeared pinker than usual, at least. She smelled good, too.
I offered her a hand to get into the dinghy, but she just laughed and leaped in, ignoring it. “Hop in,” she called.
She cruised around to the side of her boat, where her deckies stood on deck, looking disgruntled.
“Joe and I are going over for a drink at the club on Little Rat,” she told them. “Keep an eye on things, please.”
The dark-haired one looked grumpy and didn’t say anything.
Frosty Belinda nodded. “We will.” She waved as we headed off, not even cracking a smile.
“They really don’t like me,” I told Vanessa, as soon as we were out of earshot.
She shook her head, her eyes on the water. “No, it’s not that,” she said slowly, steering us around a submerged rock. “They’re sick of fishing out here. They want to go home.”
The opposite of me. As long as Vanessa’s here, I don’t want to go anywhere else. I’ll be happy to stay on these isolated rocks, as long as I have her.
We beached the dinghy on the northern end of Little Rat, digging the anchor in between the row of other dinghies.
It looked like a party was well under way when we walked into the club together. It turned out that someone’s son was getting married, and he’d brought a bunch of mates over from Perth and Geraldton for a buck’s party and fishing expedition on the islands. The mates stuck out like bent teeth on a comb. Like I must have when I first arrived. Vanessa wasn’t the only woman there, but she stood out. Or maybe it was just my eyes that were drawn to her.
One of the Perth guys had brought over a karaoke machine and, after a few drinks, we all proceeded to demonstrate how badly we could sing. Vanessa abstained, laughingly telling me that if she sang we’d all go home.
I went to get Vanessa another drink. Skipper picked up the microphone as and surprised us all with his rendition of some old KISS song, I was made for lovin’ you. He sang, he danced and he pulled pouty, kissy faces at everyone until even I wondered whether he was gay or straight, and I knew he had a wife and kids on the mainland. When Skipper’s performance was done, we all clapped and cheered, then fell silent for a moment. None of us wanted to be the next one up.
In the momentary lull, the voice of one of the Perth visitors piped up, slurred with beer. “So, you’re the stripper. When do we get to see you with your gear off?” The idiot was looking at Vanessa.
We all froze in silence. I was willing to bet that every man in the room had fantasised about her naked, but not a single one of us would have been stupid enough to say it.
Vanessa’s knuckles went white around the neck of her empty stubby, her expression as angry as her brunette deckie normally looked. Her eyes were fixed on the table nearest to her and I could almost see the thought process. In a few seconds, she’ll smash the end off that bottle on the edge of the table and gut the idiot like a fish...
My God, she took out a four-metre tiger shark with a filleting knife. This idiot won’t stand a chance. My empty beer bottle slipped from my fingers and smashed on the tiles behind the bar. I couldn’t take my eyes off her to pick it up.
Someone pressed a button on the karaoke machine to break the silence. Pink loudly told the room they didn’t want to mess with her tonight. Fuck. What idiot picked a song that was only going to make this worse?
One of the older skippers laughed. It sounded forced and unnatural. He pounded the idiot so hard on the back he almost knocked him over, not entirely by accident, driving him away from Vanessa. “Ha! Bucks’ parties at the Abrolhos don’t have strippers. The last stripper we had out here wore huge high heels and wanted to know where the roads and the hotel were...”
A few of the others joined in, helping to tell the story as loudly as possible, to be heard over the music. I knelt down and swept up the broken glass as quickly as I could.
The buck, clearly visible in his newspaper admiral’s hat, was apologising profusely for his mate by the time I reached Vanessa. “I’ll get him up as soon as he’s sober tomorrow, no matter how hungover, and he’ll tell you how sorry he is. Or we’ll ship him back to Perth...”
Wordlessly, I handed her a fresh beer and pried the empty bottle from her fingers. I tossed the empty into the bin, out of her reach.
Vanessa tipped the beer up, taking a big drink. She stopped to take a breath, then drank deeply again.
Admiral Buck headed off, distr
acted by something.
I moved closer to her. “Would you like to head off soon?”
She emptied the beer, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, and threw the empty into the bin. She opened her mouth to reply and let rip with the mother of all belches.
Well, she drained that beer in less than a minute. No wonder.
A few blokes stared. She covered her mouth with her hand. “Please, excuse me.”
She stepped carefully around the table and headed out the door. I started to follow her out, but one of the experienced fishers grabbed my arm.
“Don’t,” he muttered.
I pulled my arm out of his grasp. “Why the hell not?”
He kept his voice low. “The last bloke who followed her out of the club when she was upset ended up with a broken jaw, before he fell off the cliff and broke a few more bones. Skipper doesn’t need to lose another deckie to stupidity.”
It took a minute for the details to click in my head. “You mean Vanessa pushed Skipper’s last deckie off a cliff?”
The old-timer shrugged. “He said he fell. But half an hour before he fell, he told her she should start a whorehouse in her place and she’d earn more on her back than she did fishing. She left here in a hurry, he followed her, and not long after we found him at the bottom of the cliffs. She said she went home to Rat and didn’t see him. He says he fell. But if she decked him, he probably deserved it.”
I backed away from him, stammering some kind of goodbye, and headed into the darkness outside, switching on my torch. I’m not stupid enough to insult her. She won’t push me off a cliff.
Instead of following the track to the beach, she’d stumbled through the low scrub to the cliff. She was faster than I would have thought possible and I struggled to catch up to her. When she reached the edge, she stopped, looking out over the dark waves, less than a metre below her feet.
“Hey, the boat’s back this way,” I called softly. “Or were you thinking of throwing yourself off the cliff?”
I shone my torch at her, so I saw her half turn to give me a look. We both knew that if she jumped off the little cliff, she’d probably just get cold and wet and have to climb back up again.
Unless she landed wrong, like the stupid deckie, or someone pushed her off.
“No.” She sniffled. “I want to swim.” She sounded fierce.
I got close enough to her to see the tears streaking her cheeks in the torchlight. She swiped at them with her hands.
“You want to swim back to Rat? In the dark, with the waves and the sharks?” I asked gently.
If she meets up with a shark in her current temper, my money is on her. The shark will be supper for sure. Even a big wave with any sense will only help to carry her home. God help anything that crosses her right now.
“No,” she said through gritted teeth. “I want to go home.”
I was near enough to touch her. “Shh, it’s okay. I’ll take you home.” I held out my arms to her.
She gave a strangled sob and threw her arms around me, literally crying on my shoulder as I clasped my arms around her back. We just stood there for a while, until she was still and the tears stopped coming.
“C’mon,” I whispered. “Let’s go find that dinghy.”
She held my hand as we walked together down the track to the beach. The dinghy hadn’t moved. I stowed the anchor and we both pushed the tinny out into the water. She got in first and I followed. I reached over and started the motor, which purred like mine never did.
She curled up in the bow seat. Her knees were bent on the seat beside her, her feet hanging off the back of the seat. She leaned forward over the bow into the wind, looking like the figurehead on some old ship. I blinked, wondering if I’d had too much beer, to be imagining stuff like this.
“I should drive,” she said half-heartedly, making no move to get closer to the motor.
“The dents in my dinghy are from when the engine got flooded by a big wave and I drifted onto a rock,” I told her. “Unless you think the same thing’s gonna happen tonight, I’m fine to drive.”
“They wouldn’t dare,” she muttered.
Shit, I bet every wave will behave tonight, speeding her home so as not to incur her wrath. Even she thinks so.
I gunned the engine, heading back to Rat.
61. Belinda
I sat on deck, watching for dolphins, but Maria soon tired of this and went inside the cabin.
I heard her turn the television on. It sounded like a programme about whales going on land to die. This was not something I wanted to see or hear, so I closed the cabin door quietly and remained outside. I sat on the deck and watched the stars and the water.
The only sounds were the waves sweeping through the anchorage, and the generators on the island. There were no humans outside the buildings. Like us, they planned to wake before the sun had risen, or they were on Little Rat with Vanessa.
I watched a large shark cruise through the anchorage, perhaps looking for sea lions or fish. He turned his head and I saw it was a hammerhead, perhaps the largest I had yet seen. His presence would explain why the dolphins had not come to swim with us yet.
I decided to tell Maria about him, once her whale-death programme was finished.
I stretched out on the deck again. I wanted to be in the water swimming, but even Vanessa’s arbitrary orders were to be obeyed. Instead, I watched for rocks burning up in the dark sky high above my head. I had counted six before Maria slammed the cabin door open.
“Sister, the humans know of us. They have heard us sing, they have found bodies of our kind and they are studying them!”
I had never seen her so pale. She would not joke about such a serious matter. I rolled to my feet. “How do you know this? Have you heard humans discussing us? I have not heard any voices bar yours.”
She gestured frantically with her hand. “The humans have broadcast a programme detailing the results of their research. Come and see!”
I followed her doubtfully into the cabin. Maria pointed at the television screen. “Look. They have even filmed us swimming!”
I looked, but the figures in the water were not clear. I checked the channel, and found it to be something called Animal Planet, which purported to show programmes on animal behaviour, as opposed to fictional entertainment. I settled down to watch Maria’s alarming programme, hoping that whale carcasses would not be shown.
When I saw what the humans considered evidence of mermaids, I couldn’t stop laughing. The mermaids they showed had tails like a dugong, webbed fingers and no hair. Also, they were ugly and completely blue. “Those aren’t people of the ocean’s gift. Those are humans wearing cosmetics and clothing.”
Maria was still worried. “Perhaps the humans had to do this to demonstrate what they thought we looked like, based on their evidence. Still, they know we are here. Look, the body they found was in South Africa!”
I raised my eyebrows. “The body the humans claim to have found was a few years ago in South Africa. Have you heard of any deaths among our kind in the last ten years? They would have sent Vanessa with Nafula to take care of a lost body. Vanessa has not visited Africa in many years. If the humans have a body they have investigated, it is not one of ours.”
The programme ended with humans venturing out in a small vessel to search for mermaids, by using a recording of mermaid voices to call them. I watched this carefully.
“If they had a real recording of our kind, they and their vessel would have been destroyed by our people. This is evidence that the humans know nothing of us. Come, I will show you on Vanessa’s machine in the house.” I crossed the deck and leaped lightly onto the jetty. I led the way back to Vanessa’s blue house. There was no light in the house, so I switched it on. I pressed the button on the little computer machine and the screen glowed in a semblance of life.
A little apprehensive, as I had only seen Vanessa do this and not used the machine myself, I used the device she called a mouse to connect to the internet. I carefully
typed out, “mermaid” in the search box that appeared when I clicked the blue letter “e”.
I laughed again when I read on the screen a question asking if I had been “fooled” by the Animal Planet “program”.
I pointed it out to Maria. “You see? This is entertainment, as is all you see on that television screen. Here, would you like to know if humans consider mermaids to be real?”
I carefully typed in, “Are mermaids real” and was rewarded with a statement from a human government department. “Look. This human agency says that no aquatic humanoids have ever been found.”
Maria looked thoughtfully at the screen. She read more slowly than I did. “I think that human government department has one of our kind working in it. Our Pacific sisters must have a powerful singer as skilled as Vanessa, who passes for human.”
I considered this. “Perhaps. Or maybe humans are just not observant, and those who are do not survive long enough to make their observations widely known.”
We both heard the sound of a small motor approaching.
“She is returning. Quick, we must return to the vessel and maintain our watch.”
We hurried along the jetty and sat on the deck. We waved as she went past. She acknowledged us with a nod, but the human she permitted to drive her small boat did not see us.
Maria chose to report on what she had seen. “We have learned nothing but that humans are gullible and sometimes stupid.”
Out of respect for my sister, I did not voice my thoughts, but I reflected that Maria had more in common with humans than she acknowledged.
62. Joe
I tied Vanessa’s dinghy up at her jetty, then jumped out to offer her my hand. This time, she took it without really noticing, stepping slowly onto the jetty. She kept a hold on my hand as she trudged listlessly back to her house.
As she opened her front door, golden light spilling out onto the decking at her feet, I let go of her and wished her a good night. I started back to my house.
“Please stay,” she said quietly.
I turned to look back. She stood in the doorway, haloed in light, but her face was in shadow as she was facing me in the dark.
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