by Di Morrissey
‘Me too. You’re easy to talk to, Jen. I’ve never been one to share personal stuff. I’m going to have a beer.’
‘See you over at Gideon’s in the morning,’ said Jennifer. ‘I’ll bring my notebook.’
The next morning Jennifer was surprised at the crowd gathered by the lagoon outside Gideon’s Shark Bar. Everyone from the research station was there, the documentary film crew, and standing by on one of the resort’s launches were Lloyd and Carmel with Tony, who had his camera out with a long lens attached. Doyley and Rosie were also watching. Blair, Jennifer had heard, was over on Sooty Isle. With Susie, no doubt. Rudi joined her.
‘It’s going to be interesting to see the video footage,’ Rudi said.
‘I don’t understand how it works,’ said Jennifer. ‘And who’s the Japanese scientist?’
‘Mr Ikigawa. They’ve put up a lot of money for some of Isobel’s experiments over the years. Japan is really the leader in deep-ocean technology.’
‘Nice to see they’re collaborating,’ commented Jennifer, jotting in her notebook.
Isobel had a small group around her for a final briefing. Jennifer watched her talking, her expressive hands fluttering as she made a point, her dark eyes intense and excited. Even though she was short, her dynamic personality commanded everyone’s rapt attention. She spoke rapidly, and ended by saying, ‘If, as has happened in the past, we find an unexpected occurrence or creature, we shall pursue it, within limits.’
‘Do you expect to find anything particularly unusual?’ asked the reporter with the film crew.
‘We are in alien territory, we still don’t know what exists in the deep ocean beyond the outer reef,’ said Isobel simply. ‘Sometimes things swim up to meet us, or we stumble into difficult or unusual natural phenomena.’ She smiled disarmingly. ‘It is an adventure – yes? Which is why we are drawn there. Some people ask, “Why climb mountains?” Because they are there. The bottom of the ocean is the last frontier. We go because it is there. And because it is the last hope for this planet.’
‘Everything in order, Gideon?’ asked Jennifer, walking to the edge of the lagoon.
‘Ready as I’ll ever be. Question is, are they ready for us?’ He jabbed a finger downwards. ‘We’ll be the unexpected visitors. I always hope to find answers to what is down there. Isobel looks at water as molecules of hydrogen and oxygen that share their energy to create water – the hydrogen bond that fuses the world together.’
‘And you look at it more poetically,’ smiled Jennifer.
He nodded. ‘Do you know “Kubla Khan”? Samuel Coleridge’s poem: Where Alph, the sacred river, ran through caverns measureless to man, down to a sunless sea . . .’
‘Do you get scared . . . down there?’ Jennifer was remembering her own fears.
‘Can’t think about that. There have been some grand pioneers before us. What do you suppose Wilbur and Orville thought when they went flying? Mr Beebe dived in his bathysphere in the 1930s to more than three thousand feet. In 1960 the bathyscaphe Trieste went to the bottom of the deepest part of the Mariana Trench, thirty-six thousand, one hundred and ninety-seven feet down. It’s time we followed in their footsteps. Forget the moon, the sea is the last great frontier.’ He raised his arm. ‘And one day I will meet that mysterious fish. Then we’ll know if we indeed walked from the sea.’
Jennifer took his arm, sensing the old man was looking for something other than the creature he believed existed somewhere in the depths of the ocean.
‘I hope you find it,’ she said softly.
‘It’s there. It’ll make its presence felt when the time is right.’
‘What are you talking about, Gideon?’ Rosie appeared beside Jennifer. ‘I couldn’t miss this.’
‘Ah, an old fisherman’s tale, is all. I have to get Isobel, don’t go away, Miss Jennifer.’
They watched him walk towards the cluster around Isobel.
‘Gideon told me he once saw a wonderful unknown creature, a fish like our lung fish, with protuberances like legs. A bit like the coelacanth – the last living fossil linking humans to amphibians,’ Jennifer explained to Rosie.
‘Is that why he keeps devising ways to go deeper into the sea?’ mused Rosie.
‘It does sound intriguing. A place where maybe anything is possible, where you can start again, do it right.’ Jennifer stared thoughtfully at the shining surface of the sea and Rosie glanced at her curiously, then walked back to the Shark Bar where the group waited the hours until the shark mobile returned.
After the celebration of the big dive came the sobering conclusion that the threat to the reef was real, continuing, and climate change was only part of the problem. It wasn’t until the video footage was set up and played in the canteen, which was converted to a viewing room with a big TV screen, that Jennifer truly understood Isobel’s world and her addiction. Gideon’s too.
The lights dimmed. From Lloyd and Carmel’s boat the camera crew caught the shark mobile’s bow wave as the submersible bounced slightly in the resort boat’s wake. The knot of people on the beach outside the Shark Bar began to dissipate. Gideon’s instructions could be heard above the engine as Isobel flipped through a clipboard covered in calculations and graphs.
‘The island looks so lost, fragile, lonely out on its own,’ Jennifer whispered to Mac beside her. ‘I wonder how it’s anchored there, what massive eruptions thrust that tiny dot out into the world of sunlight. No wonder I felt so isolated, so impermanent when I first arrived.’
‘Each island is unique in its creation and development of its nature and fauna. An island has few enemies, perhaps the sea and wind,’ he answered softly.
‘It makes me feel that we’re interlopers in a living museum. And wherever humanity goes, we destroy what is beautiful and special. And it makes me wonder, should we go down into that last frontier? I rather like the idea of it being unknown, undisturbed.’
When the boat and the submersible reached the outer reef it looked to Jennifer as if Isobel and Gideon had landed on some marine moon. The camera panned over the atlas of light and richly coloured reef channels and outcrops where the shallower water was pale and clear, to the inky indigo of the depths beyond the continental shelf. Jennifer imagined chasms deeper than the Grand Canyon, into which you could drop Mount Everest and never see its peak.
The camera zoomed in, shortening the distance between the boat and a spurt of seawater from a whale blow. In the next few seconds the dark back of the whale rose from the water to slide back into the sea with a silent gush of white water and shake of its tail flukes. There were three in the stray pod heading to their annual breeding grounds in the warm northern waters of the reef.
On screen Gideon, in the shark mobile, and Lloyd, on the resort boat, were studying the GPS sonar depth finder. Lloyd slowed the engines, then turned and called to Isobel, ‘Anywhere in the next few metres will take you down to Plateau One.’
‘Great. Let’s do it.’
The acoustics were strange, not just from the sound-recording. Jennifer knew sound penetrated water more readily than air, some frequencies travelling hundreds or thousands of kilometres. No wonder whales could sing to each other across long distances. She glanced at Mac beside her, recalling his telling her that acoustic technology used for mapping the sea floor, and locating objects, animals and natural resources was also used for military purposes and for studies beneath the polar cap. It could detect if the ocean was cooling or warming. Or discover ancient undersea rivers.
There were three cameras, underwater and internal, which captured from various angles the sharkmobile’s descent past brilliant coral hills, dazzling, jewelled fish and an occasional bombora pillar of ancient dead coral where shadowy large fish lurked. Jennifer had the sense that the submersible was swathed in soft blue velvet that had creased as if it had been slept upon. Shafts of sunlight sliced through the blue, making fishscales shimmer. Diaphanous jellyfish pulsed past and small creatures like spangled shrimp shot in jerky leaps, then froze,
waving enormous tendril antennae before shooting off again.
Even viewing the footage, Jennifer lost her sense of vertical and horizontal. There was no horizon, just the rainbow sea all around. It was crystal bright and brilliant, the visibility strikingly clear. Occasionally the camera zoomed in on the brightly coloured soft corals, like incandescent organs, pulsing and throbbing in their quest for food particles. In the cockpit, Isobel and Gideon spoke quietly, respectfully, making notes, recording data, watching instruments and the small screens below the wraparound, clear nose cone. They hovered over a shelf of dead coral where a few remaining spiky crown of thorns starfish clung, sucking the last of the living polyps. While these periodic infestations of the predatory creature were blamed for destroying the Great Barrier Reef, Mac and other scientists believed that the blame really belonged to humans on the mainland. Jennifer felt and heard Mac’s intake of breath as he watched.
The sunlight began to fade as the submersible descended and the water became inky. It looked cold. From the video, and she imagined it would be the same if she were in the submersible, Jennifer had no sense of speed, of motion in a particular direction. The shadowy shape of the reef slope rippled in the distance and disappeared in nothingness. Jennifer found she was holding her breath, expectant. But nothing happened. The screen became darker than dark. And then pinpoints of light. Flashing, luminous colours that spun and darted. Signals?
Gideon switched on the searchlight and for a moment nothing could be seen. Then the ugliest fish imaginable cruised into the beam of light. A giant head, enormous turned-down mouth slackly open with jagged teeth, sharp sticks and hooks, like fishing rods, sticking out from its head. A spiny, knobbly body. It looked prehistoric, evil.
It was the first of an extraordinary parade. Creatures so beautiful, from a purple bat-winged flying trapeze artist, a fat fish of glowing red with sparkling lights along its side like a party boat, to a slithering silver serpent with deadly jaws and mean, pewter eyes. And, slowly watchful, lazily cruising, a huge shark the only thing that looked familiar. Jennifer recalled one of Mac’s graduate ichthyologists describing how sharks have changed little over their four-hundred-million-year evolution. And that, in addition to taste, touch, hearing, smell and good eyesight, sharks have a sixth sense, the ability to sense minute electrical fields that are generated by all living organisms.
Gideon turned off the light and even though the shark mobile was moving and the hum of the thrusters was steady, the darkness, even on the TV screen, appeared liquid. When Gideon turned the light back on, a school of fish, thousands of oddshaped striped ones, moved in a frenzied cloud that rippled in electric pulsing colours radiating fear. Isobel spoke to Gideon and the craft rose above the endless stream of running fish.
And then Jennifer saw the tip of the first long waving tendril, probing. Involuntarily she reached out, grasping Mac’s arm. More pale fleshy but bigger streamers followed and as the camera shot up through the startled fish, it caught in its viewfinder a blank, bulbous eye, the size of a football, the gaping cavern at the tip of a giant squid so massive the shark mobile could be vacuumed into its jellylike, transparent body.
The camera charted the little craft’s ascent, and by the time the first of the reef plateaus came into view the foundations of the ancient crater looked familiar even to Jennifer. The return to the surface, to sunshine, to friends, to a known world, was an odd transition. The lights went on and there was a scattering of applause.
Mac nudged her, ‘So, what do you think?’
‘It’s like a dream, a movie! Just incredible.’
‘They went to six hundred metres. I love the camera that’s mounted inside the dome above the nose cone. Like they did for those dolphin movies.’
‘I can’t believe Isobel has been scuba diving so deep down. She’s fearless,’ said Jennifer.
‘She’s determined, for sure,’ agreed Mac. ‘I suspect Isobel has always got what she wants from life.’
‘I doubt we’re supposed to get everything we want in life. She tells me to opt for the best compromise in difficult situations,’ said Jennifer, thinking of Blair.
‘And Gideon tells us to reach for the stars,’ added Mac.
‘And Gideon thinks the stars are at the bottom of the sea,’ Jennifer said, laughing.
It was hot in the middle of the day and the sandy paths were blindingly white. Mac and Sandy and Mick, the coral researchers, were intently studying two of the tanks outside the lab.
‘Hi Jennifer, got a minute? Come and look,’ called Mac.
‘I’m stretching my legs, been sitting at the laptop too long. What’s happening?’ She couldn’t see anything special in the tanks.
‘The corals have been busy making sex cells, so they’re going to spawn soon. It’s an amazing phenomenon you and Tony mustn’t miss.’
‘Their one night of the year right on cue, eh? What exactly triggers the polyps?’ asked Jennifer.
‘It’s triggered when the correct conditions of darkness, water temperature, moon and tide come together after the full moon. I reckon we’re two nights away.’
Even though the coral spawning was a major event for the coral researchers, everyone at the station was anxious to see how big the mass spawning would be. They gathered after dinner to watch the tanks outside, while Sandy and Mick were monitoring the reef flats covered by the full tide. Mac handed around torches covered in red cellophane so as not to disturb the corals with bright light. Tony had his camera ready and several people were videotaping the scene as people hung over the tanks shining their torches into the water. Isobel and Gideon had a film crew in the shark mobile filming the spawning at its source on the outer reef.
It wasn’t until eleven p.m. that Mac gave a signal. ‘Look, this one is going.’
Everyone crowded around and at first Jennifer couldn’t see anything.
‘Here, look through the camera, where Mac’s shining the light,’ said Tony, taking his eye away from the viewfinder.
From one of the living coral polyps she saw a tiny pink bundle of eggs and sperm released. It was swiftly followed by others, which became a stream floating towards the surface.
‘It’s like pink caviar,’ she exclaimed as she handed Tony his camera.
‘Over here, look at this one,’ called Kirsty. A pink snowstorm was erupting in the large tank.
‘Amazing. Imagine that multiplied a million times or more in the reef out there. It’d be fantastic to see it from inside the submersible,’ said Tony.
‘Even more amazing to scuba dive in it,’ said Mac. ‘Let’s hope the larvae develop. We’ll know later tomorrow morning how it’s going.’
Tony and Jennifer walked down to the sea but even in the bright moonlight they couldn’t make out much until they shone their torches into rock pools and saw the pink foam bundles on the surface. Further out, Sandy and Mick’s dim red lights bobbed in the rubber duckie.
‘I bet you never thought you’d be doing this,’ said Tony.
‘Never. I just find this whole reef experience fascinating,’ agreed Jennifer.
In the morning Tony tapped on her door. ‘Hey, come for a walk and look at the sea. I’m taking some photos.’
They walked around the beach and waded through the shallows for a closer look at the dusty pink slick spread like a cloud across the ocean.
‘Synchronised sex in a soup,’ said Tony. ‘Let’s hope all those baby coral larvae start building a new reef. The fish must be pigging out. Do they just settle on top of each other on another bit of reef?’
‘It’s the coral skeletons and cementing algae – the reef mortar – that Mac says is the key to holding all the limestone structures together,’ said Jennifer.
‘Apparently you can see the Great Barrier Reef from space,’ said Tony. ‘And all because of tiny coral polyps only a few millimetres long.’
‘I’d like to come back and see this again next year,’ Jennifer said.
‘Maybe we could do a night dive with them.’
‘Maybe,’ said Jennifer. She was doubtful she’d ever do that, but she liked Tony suggesting the idea.
Most of the students had left. Rudi had flown to Canberra at the invitation of the Department of Defence. Isobel was packed up and Jennifer had taken over Tony’s downstairs apartment with the bigger kitchen and closer access to the bathroom. She kept her upstairs space as a work area, but she was finding running up and down the stairs a chore now. She was feeling heavy and cumbersome, being over six months pregnant. As she packed a small bag for her visit to Headland to see her mother and the doctor, Isobel called in.
‘Can I have a coffee, my darling? I want to explain something to you.’ She sat at the small table as Jennifer poured the milky coffee. ‘Now, this is how you must handle the matter of your future and your baby. I don’t mean how you and Blair arrange visiting and such. I’m talking about practical things, Jenny. Money. You must do this now and finish it quickly.’
‘Oh Isobel, it’ll be all right. Blair will sort things out and look after us.’
‘Do it now, darling. I have seen people draw these things out and then you get nothing. Or little. Say what you want and stick to it. Now – while he’s feeling guilty.’ She smiled.
‘Isobel, I’m shocked. I can’t be like that.’
‘Be like it. Be fair but be firm. Ask him, “Now, what are you going to do, financially, for me and our baby?” And when he says he hasn’t thought about it yet, then you say, “I have.” And give it to him in writing. You see a solicitor this trip.’
‘I hate that sort of stuff.’
‘Shall I do it with you? I spend two days in Headland before I go to Brisbane and fly out.’
‘Would you? I mean, really? I don’t know that my mother would be very good at that kind of thing.’
‘Then I shall be your watchdog. It’s done. It is good to have things tidy and then you can enjoy the baby with no worries.’
‘My mother says she doesn’t believe in taking money from men. Though she did want Blair to put his house in both our names. I’m sure she’ll be happy to know I’ll be looked after. It’s just till I get on my feet. Though it seems a long way off.’ Jennifer sighed, thinking of the pile of work she had to read and analyse for Mac.