Patron Saint of Eels

by Gregory Day

  And then, just as we were all having a good chuckle at this, who should appear coming around the side of the bar and entering through the fireplace door but Nanette. She had a broad grin on her face and strode straight over to me and gave me a peck on the cheek. ‘Time I got out for a night. Do me good,’ she quickly whispered in my ear, and then immediately greeted the others.

  Everyone was surprised as hell to see her. Ron McCoy was particularly pleased. He’d known all of us since we were born, of course, and had a big soft spot for Nanette. He stood up and went straight over and gave her a big puckering kiss, looking just like a gasping mullet in profile.

  ‘Good to see you, young girl,’ he drawled. ‘I was just starting to get a bit weary of my drinking partners. Now we’ve got fresh legs we oughta go a bit longer, eh!’

  ‘Too right, Ron,’ said Nanette, and ordered herself a straight Tullamore Dew from Mango behind the bar.

  Nanette’s appearance did liven things up a bit, even though Ron had only been joking about his boring drinking mates, and it was obvious pretty quickly that she meant business. She knocked back her whiskey in a couple of gulps and ordered another one. Then she went straight over to the pool comp whiteboard and wrote her name up for the next round. Usually the rule is you have to start at the first round and play through in a knockout, but Nan had a certain way about her, and Micky and the others let her get in late.

  It was funny, but out of the forty or so people in the bar Nanette only knew about eight or nine. It was that long since she’d drunk there and that long since she’d had much to do with town. And her withdrawal of course coincided with the onslaught of blow-ins. Jane at the post office reckons that the permanent population of Mangowak has doubled in two years. Doubled! Anyway, I’m sure the younger people around the pool table could sense that Nanette was fair dinkum and not just anybody. I couldn’t help but think that night that she was like a modern-day Fred Ayling coming into town after a long stint in the bush. And I can’t tell you how proud that made me of Nanette. There was magic there. In that freckled face. An old unbottled magic that all of a sudden transformed the whole pub for me back to what it was and what I’d always like it to be. Back when I used to pour beers after stumps as an eight year old. I gave Nan the old wink as she hunched over the cue and got ready to break in her first game.

  She divided her time between the games she was playing in the comp and chatting to us at the bar nearby. Darren and Barb and Jim and her were catching up and talking farming and footy and fishing, and then off she’d go to play another shot. And all the while knocking back the Tullamore Dew. She made it through round after round until she got to the semi-final against Micky Been. They knew and liked each other, although Micky was a bit intimidated by Nan, and they had a great game which went down to them both being on the black. By this stage we were all getting pretty tanked and in her inimitably drunken style Nanette started joking with old Ron that her and him probably both needed some sex and that they should head to the caves under the lighthouse at stumps for a bit of howdo-you-do! That had everyone pissing themselves, Ron included.

  ‘And I tell you what, Ron,’ she said, flushed red in the face with the whiskey and the laughter and the fierce competition at the table, ‘I’ll be on top cos if ya think I’m lying down on the sodden floor of that bloody cave with all those sea-lice, you’ve got another think coming!’

  Ron couldn’t reply, he was chuckling that much. In his held-in, silent way he was rocking to and fro on his stool at the bar. As Nan went back to the table to play her shot Barb mouthed that Ron’d die from pneumonia if he had to lie on the bottom of the cave, and then Jim went out to his ute and brought in his old moth-eaten green tarp and put it on the bar next to Ron, which brought the house down. Even Micky and the younger mob were getting in on the act. They’d never seen Ron McCoy having so much fun. He usually sits pretty humourlessly at the bar for an hour or so at lunch and again at night, but Nanette had loosened him up no end, brought a bit of the old Fred Ayling touch to the place. It was priceless.

  A night at the pub like that makes you realise you can’t overdo things. You can’t just reproduce good times by turning up every night – the really great nights come after hard work and a good spell. I’ve noticed that with my drawing too. The best things come when I haven’t been able to do it for a while because of working for dosh with Jim on a landscaping job, and my frustration builds quietly, I get niggly, and then I say stuff it and get up an hour or two earlier of a morning just so I can do some pictures. And I find the magic then. I’m a bit rusty at first but never that much, because I’m always doodling. After a few mornings I get in the swing and the pictures are good because I’ve realised how much I miss their company when I don’t do them.

  And that’s a bit what the bar was like that night. Nanette had been out on that farm of hers for too long, holed up in that fire tower with her tobacco and her embroidery – now she’d come in, there was a real release. I hate going on about it but it was like old times. Before the real estate boom and the rules and regs. Before the unexpected stopped happening and legends still walked around. And when I say legends I don’t mean TV sporting legends, I mean people who are legendary just because of their inimitable way. Their own unstandardised way. True types. Jagged and pure, like Nanette.

  She got beaten in her semi-final by a beautiful shot from Micky. They were both on the black and he potted it with a long diagonal shot from one end of the table to the other with the white and the black balls starting quite a way apart. They’re the hardest shots, I reckon, but Nan screamed with anguish as the ball went down. She had her eye on the prize. It slipped away.

  Micky played a bloke called Phil from Melbourne in the final and we watched with interest, singing a bit at the bar as we did so. Barb and Nan struck up a conversation about ex-husbands. Barb’s bloke had shot through after only six months a couple of years back. He was a charter tour operator who got her pregnant, married her and then took off to Narooma. At first we were told he had a family tragedy there and couldn’t avoid it but when he didn’t come home for the birth of Isabella it became apparent that it was all over. Barb had become pretty anti-men as a result, which is one thing Nanette had never had any time for. She reckoned men were easier to trust than women when it came to it, so, sure enough, that’s what they were talking about.

  Darren and Jim were talking about whether the coral in Bass Strait is better than anything up north because of the colder water, and Ron and I were slowly slipping into a drunken blur. Not long after, Ron got up to leave and the jokes started again about him and Nanette going to the cave, and she hugged him and hugged him and licked his ear before we all finally let him get out the door. He was walking home. Down across the new little estate on the main road and up to his place on the cliff.

  ‘He’ll be fishing at four,’ Darren said to me as we watched him disappear beyond the lights of the carpark outside.

  ‘Ah, I don’t know,’ Jim said, burping. ‘I reckon Ron might have a little sleep-in tomorrow morning. I reckon his mum’ll have to walk the dog.’

  We kicked on right until stumps at eleven but not beyond. The new publican, Con, is nice enough but he wouldn’t dare break a law by letting us stay longer. Nan got a bit fiery about us being kicked out and told him he was a bore, but Con just blinked and treated her like an old-time local drunk. Which was funny because I reckon he was a little attracted to her when she first arrived all freshened up and ordering whiskeys. But the night had taken its toll. Micky and I calmed her down a bit and Jim took off in his ute as we stood outside with Darren and Barb and I had a piss on the stumps of the old pines that used to grow there. Then the four of us, Nan and me, Darren and Barb, cut across the back paddock until we said goodbye at the gate.

  Nan came on down the hill with me, she said she couldn’t be bothered going back up home, and we agreed she should stay the night in town. We walked on under the starlight, on that night of the eels, with no idea what was going to take pl
ace, arm in arm, smoking our heads off, tripping on the uneven road, rolling down the hill from the pub as if it was our teenage years all over again.

  As we hit the old Dray Road and turned left, Nan was getting maudlin. The whiskey was certainly taking its toll. Before long we were standing stock-still by the ragged roadside and she was literally crying on my shoulder. All this was a bit uncomfortable but it was good for Nan, that much I knew. I thought, she’ll wake up tomorrow morning exhausted but with the lightened load that a cathartic night on the turps can give you. She’ll be more relaxed than she has been in months. That’s for sure, I thought, as we were standing there.

  And let’s face it, she had been having a hard time of it – it’s not every mother who has her kids taken away from her.

  As she sobbed she talked about all that but the surprising thing to me was that she said she still loved Myles, despite everything that’d happened. And that was half her held-in grief. She loved the man and wanted him back in her life but knew her temperament wouldn’t allow it. As intimidating and tough as some people are, alcohol can definitely loosen the sluicegate on their torrent of self-doubt. She cried that hard, dry cry of the fiercely independent. As if there was a drought in her tear ducts, or they’d got out of practice at doing the thing they were designed to do. She said she felt ugly and weird and that Myles was so good and reasonable. She said she didn’t blame him for taking the kids away. And that she was glad she never went to court about it, like some people had advised. She said she was fighting something in life but she didn’t quite know what. Her father’s daughter, was all I could think. And all I could do was pat her head and coo like a bush pigeon. Poor Nanette. But she’d be better for all this, she’d be better in the morning.

  Finally, after I don’t know how long, the crying tapered off and she began to sigh with relief. Already she felt she’d got rid of some load. She fumbled in the front pocket of her jeans for her smokes and we lit up and sat down on the Owens’ stone fence to have one. We had a bit of a giggle then. I told her that when she first started crying I thought it was because she didn’t get to go to the cave with Ron. And then, looking towards my home, I saw a white owl sitting still as anything on the one power line that crossed the road.

  ‘I’ve never seen that before,’ I said to Nan. ‘Not out on that wire like that.’ Little did I know what else I would see in the following few hours, events which now seem to have somehow been alluded to by that owl.

  Nan and I shared my bed in the loft as we had done many times before, although not for years. She had fun climbing the ironbark ladder, pissed as she was. I managed it all right – sometimes the consoling role can sober you up. We got into bed and as soon as we were lying still all I could hear was the thrashing of the ditches. Nan looked momentarily fascinated, but she was too drunk and spent to really care. In what seemed less than a minute she was sound asleep there next to me.

  V

  THE WIND WASN’T AS LOUD as the previous night so the ditches seemed louder. The sound had become a bit macabre to me now, its pressure was building. I couldn’t really think of much else other than the torment of the eels. It was as if they were humans stuck in a lift with the water rising. In my mind’s eye I saw scenes from a movie I’d watched a week before where the main characters were trying to escape from a rapidly sinking ship.

  There was nothing I could do for the creatures, though, short of shooting them all, and I couldn’t do that. I’d never been very good with a gun, let alone shooting into water. So I lay there, trying to get used to the raucous, boiling noise and thinking back over what a great night we’d had. I don’t know how long I lay there, going over what people had said in the pub, laughing at the jokes again, thinking about the pain that Nanette had shown me, and all the while with the slushy cacophony of the eels in the background.

  Strangely, after a time I thought I noticed the sound in the ditches decreasing. And it seemed to be a gradual decrease, as if someone was slowly turning down the volume on an amplifier. I lay dead still and arranged my head on the pillow so as to hear better. Yes, the thrashing was definitely decreasing, ever so slowly. I felt a mixture of relief and excitement but, more than that, an overwhelming curiosity. What could be the reason, all of a sudden, for the eels to quieten? Then, of course, I had the horrible thought that they may well be dying, one by one, two by two, and that this gradual attrition would account for the slow decrease in sound. But before that gruesome thought could really grip my heart, I noticed another sound that filled the absence left by the decreasing eels. I was up on my elbow by this time and could just pick up what sounded like the low murmuring of a human voice. But it wasn’t a normal voice, there was a different rhythm to it, and I couldn’t distinguish any particular words because the volume was too low.

  I took the rope off the nail, opened my bedside shutter onto the night and peered out, making sure I didn’t entirely drag the bedclothes off the sleeping Nanette. The night was semi-clouded. In the south I could see some constellations but there was not much of a moon, so visibility was low. I could make out a figure, on the track near the ditch at the front of the house, moving along, back and forth beside the ditch and in and out of the large clumps of trident reeds that grow alongside it at its lowest points, and wearing what looked like a beanie, and a robe or something, with bright white shoes on his feet. The shoes virtually glowed in the dark. The figure kept moving along the ditch, and in and out of the reeds. As the sound of the eels decreased further, I could hear in its place that this murmuring had the rhythm of a chant, almost as if the figure was singing.

  I caught myself leaning out the window and lay back suddenly. It was so odd. There was a man out there, dressed very strangely, and seemingly he was chanting to the eels. In the middle of the night. I thought of waking Nanette but for some reason or other I couldn’t, or was too afraid to. I just couldn’t quite believe it was real enough to bother her with. And yet, looking again out the window of my loft, there he was, coming back into view along the ditch, about eighty or so yards from where I was, and, listen – there was his chanting, his strange high and low murmuring that now seemed unmistakeably connected to the eels.

  I sat up for twenty minutes or so, captivated and a little scared by these strange goings-on, what with the low moon, the weird staccato swish and thrashing of the ditches that I’d been listening to for twenty-four hours, and the return of a bit of old Mangowak magic to the pub. At one point I thought I just had to be dreaming, and that I was inside the dream viewing myself. But no, I’d shake my head and knock gently on the jamb of the window to hear the sound of waking life. And yes, that was the sound, of flesh on wood. But listen to that chant in the night. I was pretty sure it wasn’t even in English, and now I thought I could hear something like the tinkling of a bell along with it.

  Eventually I couldn’t resist it any longer. I gently clambered over a snoring Nanette and climbed down the ironbark ladder to the ground. Tripping over a saddle I’d been mending, I finally made it to the door without waking her and, having thrown some trousers on and a scarf and jumper, stepped out into the yard.

  It was cold. I didn’t have any shoes on and the ground was freezing. I stood still and listened again. I could no longer see him because I didn’t have the vantage point of the loft, but I could hear him still. And the eels were almost completely quiet now.

  I walked around the barrier of the vegetable patch and towards the voice. Along the side of the main house I went, my murals on its walls barely visible in the dim night, past the water tank and my father’s old weather station, and then, standing amidst the pelargoniums, I saw him clearly, barely twenty feet away. Over on the other side of the hedge and across the track. Just as quickly, though, he disappeared into the reeds, which grow right there as tall as a man, and I could only hear him again. From within the rustling of the reedy dip as he moved, his voice was unmistakeable.

  I stood still and waited. I remember I was cold but full of adrenalin, and that the scent of
the pelargoniums beside me was thick and familiar amidst the weirdness of the situation. For a time he seemed to have stopped still within the reeds, and although his chanting hadn’t quietened, the little bell-like sound I’d been hearing had. Then his voice fell silent as well. I began to wonder whether the whole thing had been some kind of apparition but before I could turn around and make my way back to the barn, the bell started to ring again from within the clump of reeds and, suddenly, he reappeared.

  He stood beside the ditch and looked into the southern sky as he continued his murmuring. I could see now that it was a beanie he wore, and that what I thought was a robe of sorts was actually a monk’s habit, roped at the waist with a cord from which hung the little tinkling bell. And, yes, on his feet were a pair of glaringly white skate shoes, with the brand name GLOBE on the heels in an almost iridescent pink that stood out in the night like phosphor.

  He walked slowly along the ditch, disappearing in and out of the reed cluster, his left hand on the waist cord just above the little bell and his right hand gesturing, palm open, to the ditch. And, yes, he was chanting a soft chant, like a prayer, and he seemed to be offering it to the ditch, to the eels. Back and forth he went, his volume never wavering, his voice rasping but comforting, not smooth but unmistakeably kind. His intention was clear. He was here to calm the eels.

  For a moment I didn’t know where to look. I thought of running back and getting Nanette but as the moments passed I became mesmerised by the chant myself, so that my heart quietened and my breath stilled. The chant had an ebb and flow, a swelling motion, a bit like the tide.

  He disappeared into the reeds once again and his voice grew stronger in its rhythm, and even more consoling. And then I heard my name used and an invitation spoken in a thick Italian accent.

  ‘Noel, why don’t you come closer now and see how peaceful they’ve become.’