Wildlight

by Robyn Mundy

  ‘Jesus wept.’ Frank saw his Stormy Seas lifejacket worn by Habib. ‘The going gets tough, the rats abandon ship. That the way it is, Hab? Ready to rob the skipper of his last means of survival?’ Frank’s voice cracked. He reminded Tom of a wallaby spooked by the headlights. His brother was afraid and he was angry with the world at being made to feel so. ‘Might be the way things are where you come from, mate. You’re in a civilised country now.’ Frank was a beleaguered vessel in heavy seas, clawing up the back of a wave to regain control. It was attitude that got you through. ‘Who’s your employer, mate?’ Frank poked his finger at Habib’s chest. ‘Who’s your sponsor for your residency? Or maybe you don’t give a shit if you and your knocked-up missus get shipped back home?’ Frank gained vigour and strength in seeing Habib falter. He lunged ahead. ‘Two more years you’re on this boat, shithead.’ Tom hated his brother. He was the personification of every bully Tom had known. Frank raised his voice above the din, the wheelhouse roof thrumming with rain, the windows a pattern of watery pins ricocheting off glass. ‘Good thing you got your float coat zipped up, brother. The prick’d be eyeing that off as well.’

  Habib spoke evenly to Frank. ‘We passed beside life end.’ He gestured to the heavens. ‘We leave now. I ask you.’ It came as a command. Hab held Frank’s glower, he kept his head raised. Tom saw in Hab’s defiance a quiet dignity, a glimmer of a former self that Habib Yılmaz had been forced—by circumstance, by striving for a different life—to set aside. Your real self, it might be buried for a time but it couldn’t be completely quashed. Not even by Frank.

  Habib gave Tom gumption. He stood head to head with Frank. He wasn’t someone’s little brother any more. He was as physically strong, as broad across the shoulders from all the lifting. ‘You heard him, Frank. Give it away. We come back for ’em tomorrow.’

  Frank’s hands tightened on the wheel, pit bull terrier that he was. But then he swung the boat around. ‘Cowards, the pair of you. Midnight. Take it or leave it.’

  Hab held Tom’s eye. Tom caught the silent thanks.

  *

  Barely hours enough to find shelter and anchor, change out of wet clothes, mop up the worst of the water, heat a tin of soup before upping anchor and back out in it. But the worst had passed, the wind had shifted. The pots were now protected. Tom and Habib worked side by side. Tom threw out the grappling iron to snag the line between the double buoys. He wound the line around the turnstile and started up the pot hauler. The first pot tipped against the gunnel; seawater cascaded from the woven basket.

  The fishermen across Bass Strait and over in the west used plastic cages, throwaway things without a sense of history. Each of these pots had been crafted from tea-tree, most by Frank, the newer ones, the bark still on, by Tom himself. It was the single part of working on the boat that brought Tom peace—producing something tangible and good, holding its weight and strength within his hands. He could tell you which track he’d driven down, which tree among a stand of good trees he’d looked over and assessed. He knew now the effort in preparing and steaming the branches, the strength and skill it took to round them into shape. Once the bark peeled away, six months or so, the pots were seasoned, the better for catching crays. With good care they’d get seven years from Tom’s new pots. Frank looked after his gear, he’d give his brother that.

  Tom slid the pot, heavy with crays, onto the steel platen beside the hauler. Even the storm had played its part, the swirl and current enticing crays from darkened crevices in through the neck of the pot toward the promise of a feed. They crawled in and out as they pleased. If Frank had left the pots till morning as Tom had wanted, the bait would be gone, with it a bumper catch. Tonight’s haul was the reddest of red crays, the kind you only caught in shallow water: these fish were gold.

  Habib used callipers to measure borderline fish from the horn along the carapace. He sorted crays by size and sex. You were only meant to take the males. Hab switched out the bait in the pot then waited on the cue from Frank. His brother manoeuvred the boat to within a length from the cliff. There wasn’t a skipper behind the wheel, not even Bluey MacIntyre, as deft as Frank. He switched gears between idle and reverse, kept the revs up to nudge the boat in, drawing back to counteract the swell. Frank’s eye didn’t waver from the mark on the GPS yet he somehow tracked the depth sounder, positioning the boat precisely. Frank gave the signal and Habib released the baited pot. Their boat backed out before line and buoys had finished racing out.

  The location marks were recorded in the book and saved in the GPS. Those marks were a measure of your time at sea. Frank could sketch a map of submarine ledges and bomboras as clearly as the rocks above the water. Frank, Bluey, any of the good skippers: they knew where a ridge began and where it dropped away. According to the Law of Frank, the ocean wasn’t everyone’s to use. Frank had come to think of certain patches as his and his alone.

  Tom held the crayfish by its head and horns, careful not to bend or snap the feelers. A damaged fish paid a fraction of its worth. Grab the fish too far down the carapace and its tail would snap against your fingers until you dropped it on the deck. Take it by the legs and chances were one would snap right off—Tom had seen them drop at will.

  A cray could shed its shell and regenerate another, legs and all. It has to, he’d explained when Hab first started on the boat. It has to change its shell to grow. He’d shown Hab the soft new shell—barely more than membrane—formed beneath the toughened carapace. Language with Hab had been a challenge then but Hab had understood when they’d caught a cray whose old shell slid away in his hands. Tom had plunged the cray into water and they’d watched it swell before their eyes, the exposed flesh absorbing water and expanding a fifth again in size. The new shellers are too fragile for export, he’d answered Hab’s questions. We sell them on the local market. They’re our bread and butter. Tom had held out the fish for Hab to touch the flimsy shell. Two or three months and it’ll toughen up.

  Every year, a new skin? Hab had asked.

  Many times a year when they’re small. Right through till they’re mature. Those huge ones you’ll sometimes see, the old men of the sea, they’re dozens of years old. They reckon they moult every three, four years.

  Tom opened the stern hatch and placed each legal cray down into the well where ocean water circulated. The fish would cling to the grates, fed and monitored until they reached Hobart’s wharf. Some were flown in tanks to Asia, others packed in straw and chilled. They’d live three days like that, enough to reach some swanky restaurant in London or be set on display at a Tokyo sashimi bar. Live export. From pot to plate, the slogan went. That’s where the money was.

  Tom stacked the females and undersized in a separate plastic bin, ready for Frank to deal with. The smallest he chucked back into the ocean. Live another day.

  For ten pots it was a haul they’d talk about for weeks—premium crays, illegal extras that all up would fetch enough to make the month’s repayment on the loan and keep Frank wife’s Cheryl, who managed the books, entertained and clothed. Tom and Hab would get their percentage of the catch, no arguments with Frank over extra cash for keeping hush.

  The vessel-to-vessel transfers happened in the dead of night, arranged by Frank or Cheryl back in town ahead of time. They’d choose some secluded cove away from other boats. Tom would creep up in the thick of night to drop the fenders and wait. He felt like a wary nocturnal animal crouched there on the deck. He hardly caught sight of a face or voice before the exchange took place and the boat retracted into night. We’re not plundering the ocean, Frank said. It doesn’t make a shit of difference when it’s just a few fish undersized. Once Tom had believed his brother, chucking away Association newsletters, disputing falling numbers; like climate change, scaremongering by the greenies and politicians to make life harder for the working man.

  A year ago Tom had thought himself too young, powerless to take a stand. This was Frank’s domain, all of it his brother’s call. But for every undersize fish Tom stacked in
that bin, for every berried female whose harvest of eggs he scoured from her tail and hosed overboard, for every note of ill-gotten cash he shoved into his wallet or added to his savings in the bank, he felt burdened with unease. He slid the bin of undersized into the concealed compartment. He was as culpable as Frank. They were pirates and thieves wreaking havoc on the future. They took and took and never gave back. Perlita Lee—even the boat was a desecration of their parents’ good names.

  Tom saw their escape from the storm as a warning. Every fisherman knelt to the sorcery of the ocean, the witch who kept watch and would bide her time for the moment to take back.

  Come dawn they’d be out shooting pots again. This foreboding, his hatred of Frank, would dissipate like any passing storm. Yet something had been set in motion. Something visceral, winding like a clock key quarter turn by quarter turn, tightening Tom’s ribs at the base of his chest. Tom had seen Frank scared. His tough-as-steel brother. Hab, whose life before Australia Tom had never much considered, had countered Frank’s abuse with quiet resilience. Tom remembered what Hab had said about that first new sheller casting off its shell. Brother, him. Hab had prodded the soft new membrane then stepped back and put his hand to his heart in a way that endeared him to Tom. New country. New big work. Habib New Shell Yılmaz.

  Nineteen wasn’t old-old. There were other things Tom could do. It wasn’t too late to cast off the old, start life anew. He’d tried explaining something to Habib but had given up, the point lost in language. He’d tried telling Hab it was the crayfish’s struggle to free itself of its old shell, the energy required, that triggered the crayfish to take up water and expand to something new. Tom couldn’t explain the physics of that weird osmotic process, but he knew it to be true. Couple of months, he’d said to Hab, that new shell will harden up and fit you right.

  13

  Steph was out of bed in a flash. She raced for the phone, ignoring the small voice that said it was way too early to be any of her friends. Steph grabbed the receiver and winced at the shrill fax tone.

  She propped herself at the kitchen bench, yawning and barefoot in pyjamas. Pages stuttered from the fax machine, grinding through rollers impregnated with years’ worth of compressed lint. At the top of the second page: For Weather Girl. Gran’s new name for Steph. Gran. In motor drive before anyone was awake. A handwritten page for each of them. Steph switched on the kettle and found her mug.

  How’s life in the wilds, Weather Girl? What a treat to have a fax from you. We’ve had a week of late frosts here. More like July weather than November.

  You sound fed up with your studies. It must be hard keeping up the motivation, especially when you’re away from your friends. Try not to worry, love. I know you’ll succeed in whatever you choose to do. (Gran’s wise words.)

  All well at this end. Yoga, Probus, Library morning. Busy, as always. On Friday Helen and I went to the Open Day at the ANU Glass Workshop. Helen brought her granddaughter, Lucy – did you meet her last time? Lovely girl, arty like you. I’ve popped the catalogue in your Christmas parcel, with a few bits and bobs you might find of interest.

  The whole world’s in a panic over gearing up for the millennium bug. I don’t think anybody really knows what’s going to happen.

  Love and hugs. Gran x

  PS: Casper’s laid out by the heater commanding me to give him his morning cuddle. ‘Dogs have masters, cats have staff.’

  The sky was already bright when Steph began the weather observations. Dawn was earlier, the days growing longer. At home they’d be preparing for exams, talking about the holidays, about Christmas, about plans for next year. Normally Steph’s friends were away on her New Year’s Eve birthday. This birthday she was being robbed of the most important celebration of her life. Turning seventeen on the eve of the new millennium. Her friends, everyone from school, all of Sydney would be congregating in the city to watch the fireworks, hear live music, dance and party through the night.

  Beyond the Mewstone the morning sky looked petal pink. Steph stood at the cliff top. The paddock was edged by a perimeter of soil undermined by burrows. Steph always woke too late to see the mutton-birds fly out to forage for the day.

  A pair of unfamiliar motor launches chugged back and forth below. Yellow, red, white and orange buoys dotted the water below the cliffs. Steph drew in the scent of the bush, the smell of mutton-bird, the sweetness of freshly cut grass. The mowing never stopped. Endless lines back and forth, her father stopping only to wrestle with the lawnmower. Give it a pep talk. Come on, Buster. Nearly there, boy.

  Already the soft dawn colours were being bleached by the day, the light turning crisp. The ocean barely drew a breath. Out there was a shimmering lake that melted into sky. For every stretch of howling wind and rain, Maatsuyker delivered a day of perfect weather—two if they were lucky. A reward, Steph thought, that could lull you into thinking this place was special, something you might not easily forget. She wished her cousin Lydia could be here for a day. Not Tessa. Not Sammie. Those two would have made faces at one another to show that they were bored.

  Today Steph refused to lock herself inside a perpetually cold house, wrapped in a blanket and hunched over dreary studies while an army of blowflies buzzed at the window or dropped dead along the sill.

  The ocean sparkled. Down at the Needles, a small white launch motored in close. Steph’s only contact with Tom, a week ago now, had been a brief, disjointed conversation. He was different on the radio, stilted, more conscious than she of others listening in. It left Steph disappointed. It made her unsure. Really, she hardly knew a thing about him. Or his brother Frank. It was weeks since she’d seen their boat working on the water.

  Steph logged off the weather computer. A pair of green rosellas squawked and flew off from the outside railing. They’d be inside the weather office in a flash if she forgot to shut the door. She angled down the paddock. At the top of the lighthouse, a currawong surveyed its domain, perched on the prongs of the lightning rod.

  Steph pulled back the lighthouse door to air the tower. She scaled the stairs and tied back the top door that opened to the balcony. The tower wasn’t singing. It wasn’t even humming. Among the palette of greens below was a dusting of white: the first tea-tree flowers. Steph raced back down the spiral staircase, giddy by the time she reached the bottom.

  An overgrown path led her down toward the headland. She was wary of her footing where the path meandered near the edge. She was forbidden to come down here in the wind. She wound beneath branches, past the dainty violet flowers of dianella, past stalks of Christmas bells that rose toward the dappled light, the first red flowers as shiny as glass.

  Steph felt a freedom in knowing that a rustle in the scrub belonged not to a snake but to a small bird or skink. The foliage opened out to waist-high shrub and the pungent scent of flowers. Flies droned around newly opened daisy flowers. Steph paced downhill through a carpet of pigface.

  She stood on a platform of rock within reach of the ocean. Bull kelp rose and fell in tangles. Skirmishes and growls reverberated from the colony of fur seals sprawled across Seal Rock. The rock was painted white with excrement.

  She heard the hum of a compressor from the motor launch anchored close in to the rocks. A Hookah line trailed across the water. A person worked on deck. Somewhere below would be an abalone diver. It was from these rocks that her mother would pick abalone when the weather was calm. Grandfather would throw in a crayfish ring. He had to pull it up quick fast. Dad was very skilled. One time, her mother said, she and her father had almost been washed off. Steph could see how. She had become so accustomed to looking down upon the ocean that standing here, staring out, it was as if the surface of the ocean was above her. A big roller, her mother said, that kept coming up and up and up. Finally it slid away, combing back the kelp and taking Dad’s cray rings with it. Steph’s eyes followed the flank of the island. This was how Maatsuyker looked from a boat: scoured rocks and cliff faces, a moat of kelp, jagged skerries as impenetrable as razor
wire.

  Steph climbed back onto the headland and chose a place to lie down among the pigface. She sunk into the spongy green, her fingers brushing fine pleated petals. The more time she spent at Maatsuyker, the more she got to see her mother idealise the past. Callam. Her mother’s parents. Steph felt to be at the eye of a cyclone holding all the world’s secrets. She hadn’t spoken to Mum of the phone call from the woman. How to broach the subject of the name scratched across her grandfather’s plaque? Was something going on between Grandfather and someone else’s wife? Instead she’d asked her mother: What made them leave here?

  They didn’t have a say in it. You worked on the lights. You came and went as you were told. It killed my father, it literally did, being shipped back to town. He lived for the lights. Mum told her how the men took shifts in the tower: four hours on, eight hours off. Fifteen minutes before dusk the light went on, and it burned through to dawn. Mornings they worked together painting, mowing, polishing, servicing all the equipment. I remember having to tiptoe around the house when Dad was sleeping.

  Steph tried to visualise her grandfather pumping kerosene bottles every half-hour to keep the light going, winding heavy weights each and every hour of his shift. The keepers kept logs for everything, a log for all the passing ships. Weather observations six times a day. I’d hear Dad on the radio send a string of numbers back to Hobart. Then there’d be a crackly voice you could barely understand talking back at him. Dad had bread to bake, beer to brew. In summer the men kept fire watch along the mainland coast. Their work never ended.

  Steph pressed her mother. Was there some kind of trouble between the families?

  Trouble? Why would you say that?

  Steph backpedalled. I just wondered why he had to leave when he didn’t want to. She’d seen her mother flinch. Chill out, Mum. You’re paranoid.

  Steph shielded her eyes from the glare. The flannel of her sleeve felt warm and stiff and smelled of sun-dried laundry—not aloe-scented from the dryer. Steph drifted in and out to the rhythmic drone of the Hookah compressor. The cry of gulls. Seals groaning and squabbling. Far away she heard her name. She felt Callam beside her, keeping pace, the two of them swimming out from the beach, turning and rolling like dolphins. Steph slowed—she didn’t like the deep, the patches of weed below—but Callam kept swimming, out and out. Her brother turned and she thought he was coming back. Stephanie, he shouted. Stephanie, he beckoned. Callam never called her Stephanie. He shouted something else across the water, Mongrels, the pair of them. Steph woke to a whistle. She searched around. She heard her name. She looked to the lighthouse. Up on the balcony. Tom!