by Robert Drewe
Dan felt squeamish at first, but he remembered the harm they were doing to the environment. Picking them off with the spray-gun to the sound of intermittent gunshots next door gave toad hunting a mock-military feel. Mango Ken was right. It was a startlingly effective method of execution. One squirt and the enemy instantly imploded, mustering just enough strength to drag itself into the shrubbery, considerately dig its own grave and inter itself.
Pacing around the dew-drenched lawn, half-full of wine, juggling the spray-gun and torch, strafing the grass, the driveway, the near paddocks, he’d shoot forty, fifty, sixty of the knobbly bastards a night. Like fish in a barrel, really. And why not? The greedy feral trespassers were on the march, south, north and west across the country, gobbling up or poisoning everything – lizards, snakes, rare frogs, birds, insects, fish. The nice, normal Australian wildlife.
No matter how tired, downhearted and confused, no matter how drunk, before facing the spare bedroom each night he had a duty to patrol his territory and kill as many of the invaders as possible.
It was an overcast March morning with sputtering showers greasing the highway when Dan went for the bread and paper and saw four police cars, three State Emergency Service vehicles and a fire truck pulled up outside Cliff Porteous’s store. Radios crackled and personnel were hunched by one of the patrol cars, writing on clipboards, comparing information and sipping takeaway coffee.
Inside the store, the mood was sombre. Local people gathered in small murmuring groups by the magazine racks, eyes glittering with news. Porteous, unsmiling for once, filled Dan in. ‘He was on his way here two hours ago as usual,’ he said. ‘Old Ken Riddell, I’m talking about.’ Making a right turn off the Pacific Highway, Mango Ken’s car had been broadsided by a tanker carrying milk up to Brisbane. ‘Drove right over him. Killed him instantly.’
There was some headshaking about Mango Ken’s bad hearing, questions about his eyesight, too; even suggestions that he was too old to be driving. A danger to himself and others. Then again, that section of the highway was a known deathtrap, and it was raining. What had intrigued the police at the crash scene, however, was all the busted shotgun cartridges and loose shot in Mango Ken’s car.
That night Dan stayed up even later than usual, killing toads. The earlier rain had softened the soil, moistened the undergrowth and brought toads out in big numbers. When he was prowling about on execution patrol the toads always fell quiet at the approach of his torch, but their sudden stillness tonight didn’t explain the wider, deeper silence across the damp lawn and weedy paddocks and surrounding orchards.
As midnight approached, the property was more than merely quiet; there was an eerie absence of noise. A sound vacuum. Of course, he realised, for the first night since they’d moved here, there were no shotgun blasts. And hence no screeching bats, or lead shot clattering on the roof. Without the distraction of noise, the night seemed darker, too, the stars more numerous.
He quickly dispatched twenty-four toads (he always kept a tally). But his pants were drenched and muddy and the night felt uncomfortably humid. Standing alone on the dewy lawn with his spray-gun, the thin beam of his torch seeking the telltale lumps that were distant toads, Dan had a sudden sharp picture of himself as country-dwelling, toad-hunting man. This was the way this dismal creature spent his evenings. Toad Man. The image struck him as too pathetic for words.
And then the air was shattered by a shotgun blast. And another. A salvo. Pellets tinkled on the roof and pattered on the leaves of the trees and on to his water tank, and fell around him like hail. Another blast sounded, and another. All the fruit bats of the tropics appeared to be whirling and flapping and shrieking over his head. He ran for the shelter of the veranda, deafened and dazed by noise.
Even with earplugs Janine must have been woken by the din because she came out on the veranda, too, and stood on the steps in her nightdress, her arms folded across her breasts, staring into the dark. She was counting the blasts, and continued counting them off aloud. Finally they stopped. ‘Twenty-one,’ she said.
Self-consciously, he put down the torch and spray-gun. ‘What was that all about?’ Bats still flapped by them, wheeling and screeching into the sky.
‘Looks like Elaine got his guns and gave Ken a twenty-one gun salute,’ she said. ‘Commemorating him.’
A few stragglers were returning indignantly to the mango orchard. After some territorial squabbling and rustling they settled back in the trees. There was a last protesting squeal and then the bats were silent.
‘She probably had a few scotches, and who’d blame her,’ he said.
Following the fusillade, the night seemed quieter than ever. Moonlight streaked across the lawn and paddocks. Not quite strangers, more like hesitant recent acquaintances, they stood awkwardly on the veranda, unsure of their next movements. Soon, as if at a given signal, the toads started croaking again, their dissonance quickly swelling to fill the void. Inappropriately, as wrong as a field of outboard motors, an ocean of tractors, they took over the night.
The Rip
THE AFTERNOON AFTER the shark attack, a Saturday in early autumn, a father named John Bingham and his young daughter, Sophie, were strolling south along the Indian Ocean shore. Smoke from an inland bushfire met a humid mist rolling in from the ocean in a haze of muted light across the beach. In the low snapping waves, seashells rattled and chinked like coins. The shells attracted the girl’s attention and when she saw a small beached jellyfish amongst them, so perfectly round it could have been drawn with a compass, she gingerly prodded it with a toe.
It was like a translucent saucer from a toy tea set, the tentacles retracted and harmless. ‘Will it sting me?’ she asked. ‘It’s OK,’ her father said, picking up the jellyfish and placing it in her hand. Just to make sure, Sophie held it at arm’s length and the pink of her palm showed through the jellyfish in a diffused way her father found endearing. He hadn’t mentioned the shark. Sophie was only five and since the separation she stored up worrying things in her mind.
Although the television crews in their helicopters had come and gone thirty hours before, people still gathered near the point break where the surfer had been pulled from his board. Most of them looked like tourists, their beach-wear more seriously casual, their manners louder and edgier than those of the usual whale watchers or deadpan local surfers. A few lone beach-goers stood motionlessly on the headland, as silently expectant as voyeurs. Others hovered noisily on the sand, frowning and chattering, adjusting the brims of their caps and straw hats in the breeze, pointing out to the glassy swells, testing the water temperature, tasting the salt on their lips and inhaling the ozone, as if these actions could help them commit this place and incident to memory and future anecdotes.
How the sightseers wished at this moment for a dorsal fin to slice through the water and satisfactorily cap their mood – even a humdrum dolphin would be better than nothing. Their imaginations pictured ferocious creatures seething beneath the surface but the only visible sign of marine life was a flock of crested terns rising into the mist and spearing into the slate-coloured sea over and over.
The terns’ relentless diving signified a shoal of surface bait-fish, thought Bingham, and the bait-fish meant bigger fish nearby. Many of the people on the beach had come to the same food-chain conclusion. Amid the pointing and murmuring, some of the women shuddered dramatically and unconvincingly, their eyes darting around guiltily in case their enjoyment was too apparent. A couple of teenage boys cackled self-consciously and threw sand and pushed and tripped each other. In several family groups you could make out three generations with similar hair colour and body shapes. The same nervous laughs.
One large matronly-looking woman was even acting the newshound, wading ankle-deep into the ocean, even though fully dressed, while a man on shore, presumably her husband, filmed her describing the attack of the day before. As if she were on the six p.m. news, the woman was delivering a commentary while she gestured out to sea to indicate the tragic poin
t of contact.
A rip was running south near the point; here, there were occasional submerged rocks and muddy corrugations, and once or twice the woman stumbled in the small waves. But urged on by the man with the camcorder she gamely pressed on. A bigger wave broke against her thighs, and then another. Perhaps getting soaked added to the desired intrepid effect because encouraged by the cameraman, and despite her drenched clothes, she adjusted her skirt and continued.
Giggling, Sophie flipped the jellyfish at her father. He threw it back and they made a game of tossing it back and forth. When the jellyfish broke into pieces she fearlessly picked up another and the battle went on until they reached the point and turned back along the beach. But even as they were skylarking, Bingham was thinking how malign the ocean looked, more so than he’d ever seen it. Those gunmetal clouds, now streaked with parrot-coloured flashes of sunset, appeared unnaturally ominous.
Sentiment bubbled to the surface so easily since the break-up. Suddenly his daughter’s existence had never seemed more precarious, their relationship more precious, his love for her more intense. Before the split, the family had swum and played at this beach all the time. On many gentle summer days she’d bobbed in this same parallel tide, teasing him with stabs of fright as her fingers deliberately slipped free of his grasp (his grip, as in a nightmare, still slick from applying her sunscreen) and she allowed herself to be swept up by the rip. Nightmare material again: sweeping along the coast and dragged out to sea, Sophie was a reckless little cork.
Oh no! he’d cry, sharing the delicious mock-fear for maybe five seconds until he’d grab her up, unable to bear it any longer. Now he and Sophie came here only on her visiting weekends. The old familiarity had turned into novelty.
Yesterday’s was the fourth beach tragedy this season. The first couple of deaths, simple drownings, hadn’t really registered in Bingham’s mind but in March a Japanese tourist had been caught in a rip and swept out. He remembered this one because of the unsuccessful two-day helicopter search; a week later, a human femur had washed up in Fraser’s Creek, half-an-hour north.
Suddenly his imagination was uncomfortably vivid. The unnatural green and bronze sunset, the perpetual threat of nature and the abruptness of savage chance engulfed the beach in a sombre mood, isolating them from the normality of the coast-road traffic and the bland suburban roofs of the hinterland. The sea had turned sepia. Dusk enhanced the crack of the waves and the aggressive clatter of shells on the sand. Even the hazy air was odd, as if they were peering through smeared glass. The horizon had vanished and it was hard to tell if they were breathing sea mist or bushfire smoke.
Bingham was clutching his daughter’s hand when they passed the home movie-makers again. The man with the camcorder was becoming frustrated trying to position the woman correctly. At the same time he was urging more reportorial emotion from her – a louder voice, more expansive gestures – while she was hard-pressed trying to hear his directions and keep her balance in the current. Now she looked self-conscious as her clothes clung revealingly to her bulky body and the rip kept snatching at her legs and shuffling her sideways out of frame.
The cameraman was becoming exasperated. ‘Beverley, for Christ’s sake, all you have to do is stand still for ten seconds and point to where the shark got him.’
Sophie snatched her father’s hand. ‘Shark! What shark?’
The woman stumbled again just then, exclaimed an embarrassed little ‘Ooh!’ and sat down in the sea. As her skirt billowed around her, she began sailing south in the rip. Both she and her husband looked mystified at this sudden turn of events. The man kept peering at his camera, and then back at her. Meanwhile she continued to sail south. He walked, then trotted, a few steps along the shore after her. Then he seemed to reconsider, slowed again and began shooting this new action.
The woman was picking up pace in the current. Sophie gripped her father’s hand. ‘Is the lady all right?’ The woman was beginning to panic but her husband remained strangely phlegmatic and indecisive. He’d stopped following her along the beach and was still peering through the lens. ‘OK, stand up, Beverley!’ he called. He sounded irritated. ‘You better stand up!’
Bingham kicked off his shoes and moved towards the water. ‘No!’ Sophie screamed, and threw herself at his legs. ‘Don’t go in there!’
‘I have to,’ he said. ‘It’s OK, darling, it’s not deep.’ He prised off her fingers, but she followed him, sobbing, towards the ocean. He had to grab her by the shoulders and sit her down on the sand. ‘Don’t move!’ he said. ‘Don’t you dare move!’ His sudden fierceness was overwhelming and as he left her on the sand she was shrieking.
The two men entered the water together, Bingham heading for the floating woman while the husband followed him, holding the camera above his head to avoid the waves. At that moment the current tumbled the woman to a flat sandbank where, after a couple of attempts, she struggled to her feet. Smoothing down her clothes as best she could, she managed to defy the tide long enough to stagger towards the shore.
‘Yes!’ called her husband, triumphantly, as if he were responsible for this sudden helpful turn in topography and tides. ‘Keep coming in this direction.’ He was filming her again. As he did so, he recorded his voice saying, ‘And here’s intrepid Beverley after her big adventure.’
As she got to shore, the woman didn’t say anything, beyond angrily dashing her hair out of her eyes. Then, as she splashed up to him, she struck the camera from his hand into the sea.
As Bingham waded ashore he could just make out his daughter standing stiffly on the beach, a small shadowy stick figure. She was silent now. He tried to draw her to him, but he was soaked and dripping. Sophie pulled away then, and ran up the beach towards the dunes. She sprinted as if from great danger, the sand squeaking sharply under her racing feet.
He reasoned she was running to their car. He wasn’t too worried. ‘Sophie!’ he called after her. ‘Stop!’ But she kept on, reached the dunes, clambered up the slope and disappeared over the top.
He began running too now, jogging in her footprints, irritated with her, but in his soggy clothes he had no chance of catching up. The dunes were soft, the sand too loose to retain her imprints, especially in the dim light, and surprisingly cold on his feet, cold enough to numb them. The cold spread up his wet limbs to his hips and stiffened his lower back. Eventually he reached the top of the dunes.
Where the sand merged into the loose gravel of the car park, thick coastal scrub – tea-tree and tuart – grasped the hilltop, and in the trees’ crowns birds were squabbling and nesting for the night. Sophie was not at their car. The last few sightseers’ cars were starting up, turning on their headlights into the haze, and streaming into the highway traffic.
The roots buttressing the trees reached out like fat fingers. Between the root-fingers some tourist-litterers had carefully inserted their old drink bottles and ice-cream sticks. Bingham spun around, circling the trees, the empty car park, the dank puddles around the change rooms and toilet block, his eyes searching. He heard himself calling her name and repeating into the last smoky streaks of sunset, ‘It’s all right! Nothing happened!’
The Life Alignment of the Coffee Grower
MY COFFEE DEALER Eric Callahan was contemplating murder. It occurred to me that if he was telling me this, he mightn’t be totally serious. But as we sat on his veranda in the pale sun of a winter’s morning, drinking the buyer’s sample cup of his Arabica coffee, he did have a killer’s glint in his eye. ‘If I could get away with it scot-free, I’d do it, no problem,’ he said quietly.
Over and around us settled the usual sharp, hot aroma of burnt toast, which gradually intensified into the smell of overheated brake linings. I used to think it came from the long-distance trucks hurtling through the murderously sharp curves and steep hills of the Pacific Highway a couple of kilometres away. Eric’s farm sometimes smells like the highway at Easter, especially when holidaymakers’ cars are competing with interstate truck-transport s
chedules. But nowadays I know it’s just his beans roasting in the processing shed.
Despite the burnt-rubber smell, I’d dropped in to buy a bag of his organic coffee beans. I like the idea of consuming local produce and supporting neighbourhood farmers. We’ve been friends since I designed the website for his business, The Coastal Coffee Company, with links to Callahan Plantations and Callahan’s Rainforest Fruits. Because I work from home my hours are flexible and I need an occasional break from the computer and the solitude. Anyway, I wanted to see how he was bearing up.
The volcanic soil starts at the ridge line near Eric’s plantations. In this rich red dirt he’s always experimenting with some interesting fruit or crop. As well as marketing his produce, he has a little stall out the front to attract the passing drivers to his pecan and macadamia nuts, nuggety avocados, breadfruit, mangoes, custard apples, mysterious knobbly-looking citrus, and Cavendish and ladyfinger bananas at pre-Cyclone Anna prices. His stall works on the honour system. You drop coins into a slot in a metal pipe he’s cemented to the ground, and on Friday evenings he collects the coins (arriving at the pub with heavy jangling pockets) and he’s got his weekend beer money.
As a matter of geographical interest, our region falls into a unique and bewildering zone varying between Pacific maritime and dry hinterland (running east–west), and between tropical and temperate (running north–south). This also depends, of course, on the prevailing winds being southerly or northerly, or variations on these. Because this is the most easterly point of the continent, sometimes we have several climates at once. We experience electrical storms that, without warning, send telephone conversationalists flying backwards across their lounge rooms. This year we had a tornado that selectively razed the church and the school, and an abrupt spring storm with hailstones like oranges that concussed several competitors in the local bowling club’s championship mixed pairs. All this means that imaginative farmers like Eric are never quite sure whether a particular new crop will succeed.