by Robert Drewe
The Whale Watchers
THE LAST TIME Tom ever saw his father, the humpbacks were migrating north from the Antarctic to spend the winter in warmer Queensland waters. Tom thought whale watching seemed a safe proposition – otherwise his father and Sonia were just self-consciously hanging around the house, exclaiming at the bird life and picking up magazines and putting them down again. The trouble with living on the north coast was that southerners felt bound to include you and your spare room in their holiday plans. Even their honeymoon plans, in the case of his father and his bride.
Until he received the wedding invitation Tom hadn’t even known his father had a girlfriend. His father was a quantity surveyor, widowed not quite two years, and hitting sixty; Sonia was a divorced allergy-products salesperson, forty-fiveish, Tom guessed. They’d met in Bali the year before while getting over their separate sorrows around the pool bar at The Oberoi. After three days’ in-house observation of the new couple, with four still to go, Tom found it hard to imagine his stepmother being depressed in Bali or anywhere else. Sonia was a vivacious and decorative person. Even her asthma and migraine hadn’t kept her down for long, and she’d smiled through both attacks those first two days.
The honeymoon was difficult for Tom to get his head around. He didn’t know if he and Chloe should be trying to entertain the older couple or allowing them complete privacy. In their presence he felt strangely impatient and crotchety, as if his and his father’s ages and roles had been reversed. At breakfast he feigned hostly heartiness, poured orange juice and didn’t know where to look, just as his father had behaved with him and his overnight girlfriends when he was twenty. At night he heard them murmuring as he was preparing for bed but, thankfully, the spare room was at the far end of the house and he was able to block out the possibility of any intimate noises with a series of closed doors. That side of things didn’t bear thinking about.
‘I think they’re cute,’ said Chloe.
‘He’s not your parent,’ Tom replied. Anyway, his father and Sonia were ‘just driving through’ on their way north to Port Douglas, heading for two weeks on the Great Barrier Reef and, presumably, as much privacy as they wanted.
Before whale watching, Tom suggested lunch at a beachside cafe, The Undertow. It was full of young backpackers sharing pasta in various accents, admiring their new tans and repeatedly counting out their money in heaps on the table. ‘Isn’t this younger generation growing much taller than us oldies?’ Sonia said loudly. ‘It doesn’t matter which country they’re from, even the Asians, they make me feel like a midget.’
‘What nonsense,’ said Chloe. ‘What are you – five-nine?’
‘Five-nine and a half,’ said Sonia. ‘The same as my hubby.’ She fondly patted his bald patch.
‘He’s five-eight,’ said Tom. ‘Unless he’s grown since I was a boy.’
‘Let’s order, shall we?’ his father said. He squinted at the name badge on the waitress’s breast. He’d left his glasses behind. ‘What do you recommend, Stephanie?’
‘Shoshani,’ said the waitress. ‘It’s all on the board. Calamari’s off.’
Over lunch, Sonia loudly admired the artwork on the cafe walls – amateur representations of sunsets, dawns and rainbows over Mount Warning – busily took note of the artists’ names on a napkin, and only nibbled at her prawn salad. Before Tom and Chloe had finished eating, his father already had his wallet out, waving away any opposition, but then landed in a credit-card disagreement. As Shoshani kept saying, the cafe accepted only Visa and Mastercard.
‘Shoeshine, I must say I find that unacceptable,’ said his father, waving his platinum Amex. ‘Is there anyone in authority I can speak to?’ Sipping the dregs of her mango smoothie, Chloe had a coughing fit then, and she and Tom avoided each other’s eyes. Tom ended up settling in cash.
His father was still seething when they reached the Cape and Tom parked the car. They hiked along the steep coastal path to a cliff below the lighthouse. His father and Sonia deliberately fell behind, and when they caught up, his father’s mouth was drawn tight and he was breathing heavily through his nose to cover his puffing. He looked a little flushed around the gills. Tom dimly remembered some paternal health warning-sign four or five years before. His mother had insisted on dietary, tobacco and alcohol changes. No one had dreamt she’d go first.
Chloe and he waited until the older couple caught up. Sonia had her arm hooked in his father’s. Outdoors, with her flying blonded hair and pink cheeks, she suddenly looked years younger, buoyant and allergy-free, and surprisingly at ease in the elements.
Southerly winds whipped the tussocky grass, buffeted their faces and made everyone’s eyes water. The surly Pacific lurched and rolled towards South America and crashed on the rocks below. In the distance a lone feral goat flicked into sight, skittered improbably up the cliff face and disappeared, a mere blink later, before Tom could point it out. He inhaled the misty wind, exhaled, inhaled again and sighed, less deeply this time.
OK, he thought. He touched his father’s shoulder. ‘What about this, Dad?’ he said. ‘Impressive or what?’
‘Most easterly point in Australia,’ his father read from a sign. His eyes sought another sign. ‘Do not climb on the railings,’ he read aloud. ‘Parents, watch your children.’
‘Darling, keep a look out for whales,’ said Sonia.
‘I am. I can’t see any,’ his father said.
‘You’ve got to keep looking,’ Chloe said. ‘Look towards the south. Suddenly one pops up unexpectedly. You’ll see it breaching or blowing.’
‘Possible rock falls. Keep inside the railings,’ his father read out in a louder voice. ‘As if you wouldn’t,’ he scoffed. ‘If you had a modicum of bloody sense.’
Tom told them to watch out for the rare white humpback known as Migaloo that appeared off the coast every year. ‘Wouldn’t you think he’d be called Moby Dick?’ he muttered into the wind, to no one in particular.
‘Who’d go outside the railings anyway?’ his father said. ‘Only the Jap tourists, taking their bloody snaps. You’d be asking for trouble. Slippage, rock-falls …’ He gripped a nearby railing and attempted to shake it. It moved perhaps a millimetre. ‘None of this looks too stable, if you want my professional opinion.’
‘Why would you name a whale after a restaurant?’ mused Sonia. She beamed. ‘Just asking. Have you been to Moby Dick’s? Nice seafood but fairly pricey.’
His father was shaking his head in wonderment. ‘Wouldn’t you think some bright spark would have cottoned on to printing the signs in Japanese?’
They all huddled together on the cliff as the southerly gusted into their faces. For a long moment no one spoke. ‘Brr!’ shivered Sonia. ‘Come on, you whales!’ she called brightly, like a soccer mother urging on her child’s team. She jogged on the spot for a moment to get warm, then reached out and smoothed Tom’s wind-ruffled hair with both hands. She patted his shoulder. ‘There you go, stepson.’
‘Thank you, wicked stepmother,’ he said.
‘Better keep your eyes on the sea, or we’ll miss them,’ said Chloe.
‘When you two have finished larking about, we might get on with the business at hand,’ his father said, pointing at a foamy chasm below. ‘I saw something big just then and you two missed it.’
‘They don’t come that close into shore,’ Tom said.
‘Probably a dolphin,’ said Chloe. ‘This is a popular spot for dolphins.’
‘I saw a dorsal fin. Could be a shark,’ his father said. ‘It’d make it worthwhile if it was a shark.’
Sonia asked then, ‘Darling, did you look like Tom when you were young? Dark-haired and wiry?’
‘What? I don’t know. Probably.’ He frowned, and jerked his coat collar around his chin. ‘Yes, I did. Back when I was six-foot-two. Why do you ask?’
‘Just wondering.’
‘They’re very alike,’ Chloe said. ‘Your chap and mine.’
‘Mum always used to say that,’ said Tom.
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His father pulled his collar higher against the wind. His jacket looked new, a fashion choice for a younger, hipper, perhaps bigger man. The shoulders slightly overhung his own. ‘I think we’d better head off a bit earlier than we thought,’ he said. ‘We’ll make tracks and hit the highway this afternoon. I’d like to make Brisbane before tonight.’
Sonia looked slightly surprised. ‘He doesn’t like driving at night anymore,’ she said.
‘Look!’ said Tom, suddenly pointing out into the bay. ‘There’s a whale!’
‘There’s whales where we’re going,’ said his father.
Stones Like Hearts
EVERYONE IMAGINES THE shore of Shelly Beach to be covered in, well, shells. There are plenty of shells but what strikes the visitor – especially after those savage winter storms off Cape Leeuwin, where the Indian and Southern oceans collide in a maelstrom of tides, spindrift and stinging winds – is the number of stones heaped in glistening, ever-shifting piles on the shore.
Rattling like castanets in the waves, the stones have a powerful appeal to shoreline browsers. They beg to be handled, stroked like worry beads, even souvenired, although the beachcombers who take them home soon discover that the stones lose their startling green, black or sepia sheen once away from the sea.
One Sunday morning in autumn a woman and her young daughter were at Shelly Beach, ostensibly to look for stones of a particular shape. The little girl, Imogen, collected stones that looked like hearts. Over the millennia most stones on this rugged bay that faces Antarctica in the south and Africa in the west have been weathered into round or ovoid shapes. Heart-shaped stones are a rare find.
To stand a chance of resembling hearts the stones need to have been fractured relatively recently (perhaps only 1000 years ago) and then smoothed by the friction between the waves and the millions of other stones. Nevertheless, at home Imogen already had a collection of sixteen stones that, with a little imagination, could be seen to resemble hearts – either hearts or Mickey Mouse’s head. But the real reason her mother, Brigid, had suggested visiting this beach at the bottom edge of the world on a blustery Sunday morning was not to collect unusual stones but to throw her wedding ring into the sea.
The incentive for this drastic plan was that Brigid had found her husband’s astrological chart in his bedside drawer. Max paying such avid attention to his horoscope? That wasn’t like him. Max was a pragmatic, conservative man: a real estate agent, a keen fisherman, surfer, golfer and earnest weekend beer-drinker. On the few occasions she’d heard him even mention astrology, he called it ‘mumbo jumbo’. At the golf club he sometimes sounded off about the ‘astral travellers’ and ‘gurus’ and ‘hippie charlatans’ who had bought up cheap land on the sheer, rocky escarpment of the Cape (land whose potential he’d missed) and built ecologically sensitive houses, powered by sun and wind. Brigid was surprised he even knew his own star sign.
But there in her hands was the evidence: a ten-page personal astrological chart that began with the time and place of his birth, and was full of such arcane detail about his character and habits (even the sleepwalking!) and his romantic and sexual proclivities that she had to lie back on the bed – the marital bed, the imprint of his head still on his pillow – to get her breath back.
The chart was printed and bound in an aquamarine folder and inside the cover, in a wispy New Age font resembling underwater calligraphy, a message said: To my own Ram, lover of lovers, from your Aquarian mermaid. Max was an Aries. Lover of lovers? A blunt Cancer herself, Brigid was soon on the phone to him at work.
He admitted it – shamefacedly at first, then, over the following days, self-consciously defiant. He’d been having an affair for nine months, all the way through Brigid’s birthday, and Christmas, and their twenty-second wedding anniversary. The Aquarian mermaid, Aurora (née Tracy), was a Reiki masseuse and astrologer, not unusual jobs in this part of the south-west coast, where ‘alternative’ occupations were no more remarked upon than being a hairdresser or a school teacher elsewhere.
‘She and I are on the same journey,’ he told his wife, with tears in his eyes. ‘She’s opened my mind to deeper things. She’s made me grow as a person.’
‘Bully for you,’ said Brigid. ‘About time.’ When Max announced he was moving in temporarily with his mother in Busselton ‘to take a breather and sort things out’, but continued to see the mermaid, Brigid decided after a month that she had no choice but to declare their marriage over. And so this blustery Sunday morning, salt mist in their tangled hair, she was at Shelly Beach with Imogen, their youngest daughter, the same beach where Max had gratefully proposed to her after they’d made gritty love in the dunes twenty-three years before.
It had been a warm summer evening, one of those long West Australian dusks redolent of pungent coastal plants, dried kelp and sun-baked limestone, with an occasional faint whiff from some small dead reptile somewhere back in the dunes.
While their skin dried off, they’d lain there watching the sun set, a red whale sinking in the part of the sea that was the Indian Ocean. An offshore breeze dusted them with sand as fine and clinging as talc, grains that still turned up in all sorts of crevices days later. The easterly picked up and blew spidery tumbleweeds into the other part of the sea that was the Southern Ocean. Afterwards he’d been almost speechless, except to propose to her. It was the first time she’d seen him teary-eyed. And then of course they did it again.
As Brigid deliberated over flinging her ring into the ocean, her nerves were zinging. To follow through or not? What a huge step, she thought. She felt like a character in a book or film, the sort of story that in happier days would have irritated her. It would be an overly dramatic cliché, but part of her felt right about it. This was no phony gesture.
Where was the most suitable spot? It was important to find the right place. She was strangely exhilarated: simultaneously sad, bitter and crazy, and her heart was beating faster at the boldness of it. What a satisfying way of reclaiming pride and self. To hurl your wedding ring into the waves would bring – that word she heard all the time lately – ‘closure’.
Wild-haired mother and daughter paddled along the gusty beach, Imogen reaching down into the jangling wet stones, examining and discarding and chattering, Brigid pretending to listen while ceaselessly twisting the ring round her finger. She knew this shoreline, but the winter tides and the ever-moving heaps of stones, humped and quivering like beached sea lions in a nature documentary, had altered its aspect. She was searching for a particular pool in a deep rock crevice; she didn’t want the ring to be washed ashore or for anyone to ever find it. This was crucial for its burial. She wanted it to sink under water and stones, for anemones to absorb it into their weed-flesh, for shellfish to envelop it. The ring had to be concreted into the timeless seascape of Shelly Beach.
The south end of the beach ended in a natural barrier of elephantine rocks and here they came across a huddle of weekend strollers and rock fishermen. These people looked morosely agitated, all hunched and muttering around a sodden mound on the shore. Some of the women were leaning on each other for support, their faces turned obliquely away. Someone gave a choking cough, like a retch, and turned aside to spit.
The mound looked like a lump of ambergris, but as they approached it, a piece of rag drifted from it in the ebbing of a wave and a bearded man with a fishing rod shouted roughly at Brigid, ‘Keep that kid away!’
The mound was a human body lying face down in the sand and it had been in the sea a long time. The hair was long and matted and trailing weed. The skin was frayed, and pitted like pumice. Bits were missing. From what was left of the clothing, shreds of khaki trousers and one sneaker, and the appearance of the other hugely swollen bare foot, it was a man. His race, age, even his build, were impossible to guess. As she attempted to shield Imogen, Brigid heard someone murmur ‘they’re usually men, aren’t they?’ and ‘tidal drift’ and ‘they’ll be here in a minute’, and just then a police car and an ambulance pulled into th
e parking area above the beach.
Only with the promise of a treat did Brigid manage to hurry Imogen, agog and protesting, from the beach. In the car she turned on the radio and drove to town with all the windows open so they were too blasted by sound and wind to talk.
At McDonald’s an hour later, waiting for her daughter to finish her Happy Meal chicken nuggets (she couldn’t face food herself), she glanced absently at her watch and noticed the ring was still on her finger. She was twirling it unconsciously, possessively, rolling it back and forth, back and forth, seeking it with an urgency that surprised her.
The Aquarium at Night
AT NIGHT IN his prison cell he tried to write down the way the sunlight struck their gum trees at dawn. The first rays turned the angophoras’ trunks gold or orange, Dyson recalled, then pink a few minutes later. Where the trees had shed branches they formed stumps like amputated limbs, and parrots had gnawed out little caves in the wounded and bleeding wood. As the sun rose over the ridge, the rosellas, lorikeets and parakeets peeped out from their nest holes, like suburban householders cautiously facing the fresh day. These sunlit trees were on a sandstone ridge 17 000 kilometres away and twenty years ago.
He put this down on paper. He remembered the first light on the rock-oyster leases across the bay. The shadow of the escarpment fell in a dark sheen on the surface and from his bedroom window he’d spot the oyster farmer setting out from the mangroves and then disappearing into the shadow as he punted out to his beds. Some mornings the oysterman had a radio with him, and commercial jingles and the insistent babble of the breakfast announcer carried across the black water.
How old was he back then – twelve, thirteen? Already shedding his boring first name – Preston – for the more exotically sportive Pablo. Scribbling Pablo Dyson – Association of Surfing Professionals World Champion all over his schoolbooks, alongside countless doodles of extreme waves and reckless riders based on himself. A skinny, mop-headed grommet leaning out the window to check the morning’s wind and weather for the day’s surf potential and dreaming of legendary breaks. By 6.15 he’d be on his bike, board under his arm. By 6.30 he’d be over the ridge and in the ocean.