by Judy Nunn
No longer did the islands appear insignificant to Mike. The islands of the Abrolhos were to be respected. They were a timeless and impressively powerful force in the landscape: pristine, primitive and untameable.
'We're coming in nor'-east on the original course of the Batavia. That's the reef up ahead, a bit to port.'
As Tubby's voice broke into his thoughts, Mike looked to where the man was pointing. The only giveaway sign of the reef was a ripple of white frills playing teasingly across the ocean's surface.
'We picked a good day for it,' Tubby said, cutting back the speed until they were idling. 'You can get ripped to pieces out here – in crook weather the place is like a bloody cauldron. Let her go,' he called to Fats who was standing by ready to drop anchor. They were barely a hundred yards from the reef.
When the Maria Nina was securely at anchor, Tubby cut the engine. 'We'll hang back fine in this breeze,' he said. 'Grab us a beer, will ya, Einstein?'
Mike lifted out an icy cold bottle. Fats was already handing around three grimy plastic beakers. 'Not for me thanks, Fats,' he said, stripping down to his Speedos.
The brothers swigged on their beers while they baited up – two hooks on each handline. They had no intention of sitting idly by while the kid explored the wreck.
'She should be about dead ahead of us,' Tubby said as Mike donned his flippers. 'Take your time, we'll be jake, there's good fishin' here.' He couldn't resist adding, 'And where there's good fishin', there's sharks.'
'You wouldn't get me down there,' Fats said, slinging his line over the side and watching it spiral from its reel down into the depths. The fact that their baits might well be an added attraction to sharks was of little concern to either Tubby or Fats. If the kid was mad enough to go swimming in shark-infested waters then that was his problem.
'No worries.' Mike grinned at the brothers' dire warnings. They didn't alarm him, he'd dived many a time with sharks.
He slid over the side and trod water while he rinsed his facemask and snorkel. When he was ready to take off, he gave the brothers the thumbs up.
'Good luck, Einstein,' Tubby called, chucking his own line into the water and holding his beaker out to Fats for a refill. He watched the kid's easy style as he swam towards the reef, sliding through the water as if he was born to it. Just like Murray Rose, he thought. The kid was pretty to watch.
As Mike swam, a slow energy-conserving freestyle, his powerful flippers barely moving, he relished the sensation of the water and his sense of oneness with it. He always did. It wasn't something he analysed, but neither was it something he took for granted. He was always aware that in the water he felt as if he were in his element, as if he and the sea shared something special.
Through the surface swirl he could see the reef below, and he made a shallow dive, just about seven or eight feet, to get a clearer view.
Then that exhilarating moment when sound ceased to exist and everything stopped, even time itself. It was what he loved most about free diving. There was no echo of laboured breathing through scuba equipment, there was just him and the world under the sea. A world where colour and action abounded and drama unfolded all in breathtaking silence.
Beneath the dappled silver canopy of sun and sea, the visibility was perfect and the colours vivid. The blues and greens of the corals, the fiery reds of the sponges, the delicately wavering mauves of the anemones, all were as riotously colourful as a spring garden in full blossom. He pressurised and swam a little deeper, following the reef's terrain, through castle-like turrets where gaudily painted fish disappeared like magic, past ledges from which crayfish watched, their protruding feelers the only giveaway of their presence, down canyons where silver schools of skipjack and kingfish maintained their restless patrol.
He'd be around twenty feet now, he guessed, but no sign of the wreck. Time to go up. He stopped swimming and allowed himself to slowly drift upwards, just a gentle flick of the flippers now and then, watching the dappled silver above grow closer and closer.
When he broke surface, he heaved in a lungful of air and looked back at the Maria Nina. She was a good two hundred yards or so away. He must have drifted with the current. He circled back with slow, easy strokes, regaining his breath, studying the reef beneath him, conserving his energy. Perhaps, even from the surface, he'd be able to see the wreck. Given the calm conditions and the fact that she was lying at only twenty feet, surely it was possible. But try as he might, he could see no sign. Perhaps the brothers had got it wrong, he thought. He dived again, allowing himself more distance this time, he'd go with the flow of the current.
He was down about fifteen feet, once again lost in a world of silence and colour, and his attention was so focused on a vivid blue cluster of staghorn coral that he failed to notice the sinister grey shape that had appeared out of nowhere. It was the disturbed reaction of a school of silver bream that caught his attention, and he turned to see the shark gliding towards him effortlessly with no apparent movement of its body, like a robot on automatic pilot, majestic and omnipotent.
He anchored himself against the reef and watched, prepared to lunge forward in attack should the creature show any interest in him – attack was always the best form of defence. The shark was around ten feet in length. Barrel-shaped, yellow-eyed, with long gill slits and a high tail fin, it was a whaler, a dangerous species. But it paid him no attention as it passed by barely four feet away; he could have reached out and touched it.
He watched as the shark cruised a little deeper, gliding through a shallow valley in the rocks below. Perhaps it was unaware of his presence, or perhaps it was merely uninterested. He continued to admire its shadowy form as it cleared the valley and disappeared into the misty beyond.
Then the glint of something caught his eye, drawing his attention to a shape resting amongst the valley's coral growth. It was a long, cylindrical shape at odds with its surrounds, far too regular to be fashioned by nature. And, as the sun's light played teasingly through the ocean's surface above, it glinted again.
His lungs told him he needed to resurface. He had no time to examine the shape, but he knew what it was. A cannon. He'd found the site. The wreck itself must be nearby.
When he broke surface, heaving in air, he looked towards the Maria Nina. In his excitement he wanted to shout to the brothers, 'It's here! I've found it!', but they were paying him no attention. Tubby was heaving a dhufish over the side and Fats, having also struck lucky, was hauling in his line.
He trod water for a minute or so, keeping himself stationary against the current, careful not to drift over the spot while he prepared himself. And when he was fully recovered, he dived again.
The moment he was beneath the surface, he spotted the telltale glint and saw the cannon nestled in its rocky valley below. But as he swam downwards, he realised that the valley wasn't a valley at all. It was the encrusted wreck of the Batavia.
There she was, a flattened-out skeleton moulded into her grave. The rocks had hollowed out a tomb over the years, protecting her in part from the destructive forces of tide and surf, and the stern and ribs of the vessel were in an extraordinary state of preservation. He was lost in awe, it was beyond his wildest expectations. He wasn't sure what his expectations had been, but certainly not this.
Briefly, he examined the cannon. It was covered in sea growth, and he assumed it to be bronze but couldn't be certain. It was the refraction of sunlight through relatively shallow water that had lent it the deceptively metallic glint. The giant anchor nestled nearby also seemed to glint from behind its thick encrustation of barnacles. It appeared to signal a life that belonged to its past glory.
But it was the skeletal remains of the Batavia that he found truly overwhelming. For centuries, the Abrolhos had kept her hidden, storing her here, preserving her like a trophy, as if in her amazingly recognisable condition she was proof of their own indestructibility.
He swam over what had been the belly of the ship, aware that he must resurface, that he must maintain en
ough breath in order to breathe out continuously on the way up and release the air pressure in his lungs. But he wanted to remain a part of it all for just one moment longer, to savour the image. It would never be the same on a second dive.
He locked himself between two of the mighty beams that formed the skeleton of the hull and stayed motionless, feeling himself a part of the vessel. Part of a vessel that was four hundred and thirty-six years old! The thought was staggering. And even more so as he recalled the tales the crew aboard the Pelsaert had told him. Names flashed through his brain. Pelsaert, the commander; Jacobsz, the skipper; Cornelisz, the wealthy merchant, the leader of the mutineers who'd tortured and murdered at random. And hundreds of nameless others, soldiers, sailors, passengers – over three hundred had been on board when she'd foundered. He pictured them as he looked about the wrecked hulk that was the Batavia. He felt their panic and heard their screams.
He must go up, he told himself, this was foolish. His lungs were at bursting point. But a voice within him whispered, no, wait, wait. Wait just a moment longer.
He could see them now, their faces tormented, their screams ringing in his ears. Which voice, which face, he wondered, belonged to Jeronimus Cornelisz? Which one amongst them was the torturer, murderer, killer of children?
He stared at the faces that now came at him from every gloomy corner of the wreck. Men, women, children, terrified and tortured every one of them. He searched amongst them for the face of evil.
It was strange, his lungs were no longer at bursting point. In fact, he felt peculiarly at ease, as if he could stay for as long as he wished. As if he could breathe under-water.
It was then that the last vestige of common sense told him he was hallucinating. He was on the verge of drowning. He kicked away from the wreck and made for the surface, the voices behind him screaming for him to come back, screaming for him to save them. But the silvery glint of the sun was now screaming at him to save himself.
Closer and closer he came to the light. The sun was his life, but it was teasing him. It was so close and yet he was unable to reach it, his lungs once again bursting, panic setting in, a fist of iron clamping around his heart telling him he wasn't going to make it.
Tubby was keeping a watch out for the kid. He hadn't seen him for a while and he was wondering whether he should start to worry. Then he saw him break surface and breathed a sigh of relief. Silly of him to worry, the kid could swim like a fish. But his relief was short-lived. Something was wrong. The kid was clutching at his chest, gasping, his face contorted.
'Einstein!' Tubby yelled. And, sharks or no sharks, he hurled himself into the sea.
BOOK ONE
CHAPTER ONE
Young Michael McAllister could swim before he could walk. At least that was his mother's claim. 'He just crawled into the river one day and started swimming,' Maggie would say. 'He was barely a year old.'
Three years later, Mike's baby sister, Julie, followed his lead. Literally. Baby Jools crawled across the sand into the river and dogpaddled out to her brother.
It wasn't really that extraordinary. Their father, Jim, was a boating man and a prodigious swimmer himself. His children, like many youngsters brought up by the banks of the river, were born to the water, and throughout the years of their childhood the river would continue to serve as a never-ending playground.
For hours, Mike and Jools and their mates would chuck bombies off the end of the jetty, or hurl tennis balls with all their might out into the river and try to reach them before Baxter, the McAllisters' two-year-old black Labrador, beat them to it. It was some time before they met with success – Baxter was an obsessive ball-chaser and a powerful swimmer. There were also the repeated attempts to break the record of eight aboard the inflated tractor-tyre inner tube, an exercise that met with no success at all. But as the children grew older, Baxter would concede defeat, the tractor tube would be replaced by dinghies and sailing boats, and the competition would begin in earnest.
The McAllister home, a rambling old colonial house, fronted on to Victoria Avenue and sloped down the hill to Freshwater Bay, with Claremont jetty to its right and, further along the beach, the old Claremont swimming baths to its left.
Built in the latter part of the nineteenth century, during the early development of the area, the house had seen better days, but it had a ramshackle elegance. Deceptive in design, it appeared from the street to be a single-storey bungalow with surrounding verandahs, but steps at the rear led from the balcony, which overlooked the river, to a below-stairs area that had once been the 'batman's quarters'. The original owner had been a military man. The 'batman's quarters' now housed mainly storage space along with a large playroom, Jim's extensive workshop and a laundry.
The house's sprawling back garden was abundant with fruit trees and grape vines, and a large vegetable plot yielded corn, tomatoes, beans or peas according to the season. Beyond the garden was a flat grassy area with an open boatshed where the dinghy and tackle was stored, and beyond the boatshed was the Swan River where, fifty yards from shore, Jim's modest twenty-four-foot yacht, Alana, named after his mother, rested peacefully on her mooring.
It was a comfortable home that offered a comfortable lifestyle. Perth was a sleepy town in the fifties, and there were many such homes along the banks of the river, providing an idyllic childhood for those like Mike and Jools.
On hot summer nights Mike and his best mate, Spud Farrell, who was in the same class at school, would trawl for prawns. They wore old sandshoes to protect them-selves from cobbler stings, and Spud's brother Billy, two years younger, carried a hurricane lamp. Wooden poles over their shoulders, Mike and Spud would drag the twenty-foot funnel of netting behind them, while Billy led the way, the lamplight attracting the prawns to the net and warning the boys of snags up ahead. Relentlessly, they trawled between the jetty and the baths; it was hard work but rewarding. Each time they returned to the beach Jools would be jumping up and down excitedly, Baxter by her side letting out the odd bark, both of them eager for the thrilling moment when the contents would be spilled from the net's pocket onto the sand and the prawns would jump and glitter, pink-eyed, in the light of the lamp.
Jools was always allocated 'guard duty'. She wasn't strong enough to haul the net and too young to be trusted with the lamp, but Mike had assured her of the importance of her role. 'Someone could come along and nick our catch,' he told her, and so, during their absence, she paraded the beach like a diminutive pig-tailed sergeant major. Upon the boys' return, she and Baxter had a tendency to get over-excited and Mike had to constantly warn her, as they sifted through the weed and gobbleguts and other small fish, to keep Baxter away and to be wary of cobblers. The stings of even the smallest cobblers occasionally caught in the net were shockingly painful.
The boys would boil up the prawns in the laundry's old copper, and after they'd feasted there was always an ample supply for both the McAllister and Farrell households. Mike invariably gave Spud the lion's share though – there were five Farrell kids so it seemed only fair.
The old copper came in for a great deal of use. The blue manna crabs that Mike and Jools caught at dusk in their witch's-hat drop nets off the end of Claremont jetty ended up in the copper. So did the mussels they dived for during the baking hot afternoons of midsummer, when others were indoors beside fans praying for the arrival of the Fremantle Doctor – the welcome afternoon breeze that came in from the sea.
The mussels, which grew in abundant clusters on the pylons of the jetty, were Jim McAllister's personal favourite. When the children returned with their catch, he'd pour himself a glass of beer and join them, hauling a bucketload of steaming mussels from the copper and emptying them out in a heap onto the old wrought-iron table that lived in the back garden and served the specific and ingenious purpose of mussel strainer.
Jim always made his own contribution to the exercise, mixing the vinegar and mussel juice in the pickling jars, and concocting a hot dipping sauce which the kids avoided like the plague
. They'd sit around the table, each with a pickling jar, and Mike and Jim would do their best to ignore Jools who always insisted on chanting 'One for me, one for the pot', and was quick to catch her father out if he ate two in a row without contributing to his pickling jar. Not that it mattered. By the time they'd pickled and eaten their way through the first lot they were bloated, and the second bucketload from the copper was purely for pickling.