by Jenni Ogden
Pat was a mine of information about the birds, and we were on our way to becoming firm friends. We had begun to meet up for morning walks. Pat would stop every few minutes to watch birds through her binoculars, and although I wasn’t devoted enough to follow suit, I was content to stand quietly until she was ready to move a little farther. Sometimes our walks took up to two hours at this pace, and by the time we got back to the wharf we were both ravenous. Often we would go to one or other of our places and brew up some coffee to enjoy with bowls of muesli and slices of toast. If Pat had spotted an unusual bird she would get out her bird books and study them intently, pointing out the color patterns that distinguished her discovery from other similar-looking birds. We’d talk about other things as well: her life before she retired, and mine before I lost my grant. One morning, as we were sitting on her deck relishing our second cup of coffee, she asked me again why I didn’t swim or snorkel, and this time I told her.
“When I was a kid I was a good swimmer, and I even tried scuba diving a few times. My father was an experienced diver and spent every summer somewhere in the tropics where he could explore new reefs. He took me on snorkeling trips to Egypt and the Bahamas, and when I was twelve we went to Belize.”
I pulled myself out of my chair and walked to the edge of the deck. The sea sparkled through the trees. Pat didn’t speak. I swallowed, and felt the unfamiliar prick of tears at the back of my eyes. I could feel the hot sun of Belize on my hatless head, and the smell of sea and birds. “It was early afternoon when we got to this little island where Dad had booked a cabin for two weeks. Louise—his girlfriend—was with us. We’d had a long trip, and Dad thought we should take it easy that afternoon and have our first snorkel the next day. But there was a local there who had a dinghy and was going out for a fish, so Dad decided he’d go for a quick dive just to check it out. Two hours later they weren’t back and it was beginning to get dark. Then the dinghy came back and the man was by himself. He couldn’t speak much English and he was in a state. Louise was shouting and screaming and then other people from the resort were there.
“I kept expecting Dad to swim up to the beach, but he didn’t, of course. It wasn’t until much later, when the local police came over and we found someone who could speak reasonable English, that we managed to piece it together. Apparently Dad hadn’t come back an hour after he’d left the boat for a dive. The boatman had been fishing and after another half hour he’d gone in himself—he just had snorkeling gear—and couldn’t find Dad, so in the end he came back. They took a motorboat with big lights out to look around but it was hopeless. It was dark by then. At dawn next day they started a proper search but didn’t find him. They never found him. All anyone could come up with was that he must have got caught somehow and used his air up before he could free himself. It wouldn’t take long for the sharks to find him.”
“My god,” I heard Pat say. Then I felt her hands on my shoulders and I turned around and buried my face in her neck as she held me.
SIX
Pat was standing on my deck festooned with snorkels and masks and flippers. It was a new day, and to my surprise I had slept well. No nightmares, no night sweats. Perhaps I’d wept every last drop of water out of my body yesterday.
“I thought we’d begin in the shallow part of the lagoon,” Pat said. “The tide is perfect for beginners—about a meter over the top of the reef. In just a few flips you can be over sand and standing up without harming the coral.”
“I’m not sure. I think perhaps I need a day or two resting, to get over yesterday.”
“Trust me, this will be better than days of rest.”
“I haven’t got a swimsuit.” The banal words came out of my mouth and I waited for Pat to laugh.
“I have heaps of swim suits, and bikinis too. I never throw them out. Some sort of fantasy about miraculously waking one day to find that my body is thirty years old again—or even fifty would be good. But some of them would fit you; we’re about the same height, and you’re as slim as a reed.” She thrust the snorkeling stuff at me. “Come on. We’ll go to my place first and you can select one.”
Not a hint of a smile. I didn’t think Pat had a sarcastic bone in her body. I was already following her as she turned and strode down the track. She glanced back over her shoulder. “I’ve got spare wetsuits too—a short one will be perfect. You don’t need it in the lagoon but it will make you feel safer.”
The flippers banged against my leg, and the sun glinted off the mask, the snorkel dangling from its strap. How hard can it be? My mouth was dry, and I concentrated on keeping up.
KITTED OUT LIKE A DEEP SEA DIVER, I STOOD AT THE edge of the lagoon and let the warm sea lap my feet. The beach was deserted. Thank goodness. I squinted over the blue to the white fringe farther out, where the sea was breaking over the edge of the reef. I closed my eyes but the picture in my head of the reef edge dropping away into the deep blackness wouldn’t budge.
“All we’re going to do today is play around in the shallow water. The corals and little fish in the lagoon are enough to keep us content for hours.” Pat splashed water over her face and spat in her mask. She already had her flippers on.
I sat on the sand and wriggled my feet into my flippers, wincing as the muscles in my right foot cramped, contorting my toes. Standing up awkwardly, I weighted my foot until the cramp lost its grip, then I turned around and began to back into the water—one step, two steps. Now for the mask. I wet my face and the mask with seawater, and spat on the glass. My mouth was still dry and the small bubble of saliva I managed to produce was barely enough to smear over the glass. I swilled it out and eased the mask over my face. It was a tight fit. Good, I didn’t want any chance of a leak.
“You haven’t forgotten,” Pat said. “Snorkeling’s like riding a bike; once you learn you never forget.” She stuck her snorkel in her mouth, twisted around, and floated off, her flippers barely moving.
I could see the white sand under my feet. A little group of slender white fish swam by. About twenty meters farther out were the dark shapes of the coral. Pat was out there, lying motionless, facedown, in the still water. I saw her mask flash as she looked up and then with two flips stood at the edge of the coral, the water coming up to her breasts. “It’s only this deep,” she called out, her voice clear in the still air.
I looked around, thankful that there was not another soul in sight. I stuck the snorkel mouthpiece between my teeth and took a few experimental breaths. Kneeling down, I gingerly laid my face on the water, keeping my eyes wide open. The mask had steamed up a bit but I wasn’t about to fix it. All I could see was the white sand. Then I let go and I was floating, the short wetsuit giving me buoyancy. I told myself to breathe. Some brightly colored fish flashed below me, and I moved my flippers. Don’t splash. Move your legs smoothly from your hips. I heard Dad’s voice and I was ten years old again.
A funny little brown-splotched fish looked up at me from a hole in the sand and then disappeared backwards into its lair. I raised my head and saw Pat waving. A few more flips and there were her legs. I stood up, gasping.
“Okay?”
I nodded, grinning around my snorkel mouthpiece.
“Follow me. We’ll stay within a few meters of the sand.”
Then she was ahead of me, flippering along. I heard my own flippers splashing as I went after her. She stopped and I stopped, looking down. We were over a ring of corals—red, orange, white, and fluorescent blue—and immediately below me was a large anemone with two clownfish backing in and out of the poisonous tentacles, warning me off. A shoal of black-and-white-striped fish floated by, and their name floated through my head from all those years ago—moorish idols. Nipping at the corals were myriads of other small fish: silver, blue, striped, yellow, orange, red. I focused on a white-and-yellow fish and tried to remember the pattern of black stripes crisscrossing its side so I could look it up later. One of those impossible butterfly fish. Dad’s voice again.
I looked sideways under
the water surface at Pat. She was pointing farther out. She flippered off and I followed, my eyes glued to the kaleidoscope beneath me. Water slopped about in the bottom of my mask, and spying a small patch of sand I stood up and pulled the lower rim of the mask away from my face, letting the water escape. I breathed in again and clamped the mask back on my face before sinking back into the water to follow Pat. She was circling a large round coral—a bommie—the name came back to me. She pointed down and I realized we were in much deeper water. I felt myself breathing faster and forced myself to slow it down. Around the bommie crowded much bigger fish—green, orange, and pink parrotfish busily rasping at the surface of the coral, the funny little scratchy noise they made with their beaks magnified under the water.
An oblong green fish outlined in brilliant blue with a bright yellow mouth and yellow tips to the fins streaming behind it swam below us. I pointed at it, and Pat stuck her head out of the water and I heard her say, “Angel fish.” Then she beckoned me farther and we glided over more gardens, over some beautiful brain corals—I had no trouble remembering what those were called—and then we were over a patch of sand covered in waving sea grass, and there it was below us. A turtle. It must have sensed us above it, because it floated gently off the sand where it was grazing and flippered calmly away. We flapped after it, but even though it seemed to be moving slowly, it soon lost us.
AFTER LUNCH AT PAT’S HOUSE—I COULD HARDLY EAT I was still so buzzy—I went home and spent hours poring over a large, well-thumbed book on the fishes of the Great Barrier Reef, one of the books in the small collection on the shelf under the bedside table in my cabin. The book was annotated with dates and places, presumably referring to Jeff’s sightings of the fish. The dates went back fifteen years.
Snorkeling in the lagoon at high tide became a daily ritual, sometimes with Pat but more often alone. Her idea of snorkeling was out over the reef edge. I wasn’t quite ready for that. In truth I wasn’t sure I ever would be, but I didn’t care. The treasures in the lagoon filled me with joy, day after day. What with my nightly wander around the island looking for laying turtles—more and more were coming up every night, and I lived in hope that Tom would make good on his promise to let me to join his tagging team—I barely had time to write my memoir, although I did manage to read a few of the novels that crowded my Kindle.
The campground was getting busy as well, and I enjoyed my twice-daily stroll around the tents to make sure the campers were behaving themselves. They were almost entirely university students—skinny, tanned girls with long, salt-infused hair, wearing very little, and muscular young men, hair in stiff spikes and often wearing wetsuits half on. Diving tanks leaned against the low wall of the barbecue shelter, and beach towels festooned the top. The bin for recycling beer cans seemed always full in spite of Basil’s now-daily visits to empty it and the rubbish bins. Most of the tents were small two-person affairs, with the occasional larger tent where everyone congregated in the evening for a shared meal cooked on the big barbecue. They were a friendly bunch, and I sometimes accepted their casual offer to join them for a beer. Their conversation was of diving and fish, giant manta rays and moray eels, and mind-blowing sightings of a pod of killer whales, hunting in a pack. I had little to offer—my toddles about the lagoon embarrassed me—but at least I was able to contribute a few bits of information about the turtles.
The girls were friendly and seemed unaware that I was old enough to be their mother as they swapped trivia while they threw salads together and turned sausages on the barbecue. All of them snorkeled and some were scuba divers, but they gravitated towards their own gender for light relief from dive-speak. I had a hard time sorting out who was with whom, and while there were a few set couples there, the overall impression was one of mix and match. Very different from my day, and probably a lot more fun.
One of the girls, Kirsty, was pregnant, and I was amazed that she was there at all. She had her own little tent and was on a working holiday, helping out Violet in the café and cleaning the holiday cabins over the summer. One afternoon she wandered past my cabin when I was reading on the deck, and I offered her a cold drink. We chatted about this and that, and I discovered she had no partner, was only nineteen, and had decided to take this job because she figured it would be her last chance for a bit of freedom. She intended to keep the baby, which wasn’t due until April. Her job finished in mid-March, when the summer season petered out. I cautiously expressed my concerns about the lack of health facilities on the island should she need them, but she brushed them off, saying that she’d be back on the mainland by her due date. The confidence of youth.
I asked her if the father would have any contact with the child once it was born, and she grimaced and rolled her eyes.
“I’m sorry,” I managed to say. “I hope he’s going to support you financially, at least.”
“Nope. He doesn’t want to know.”
“It’s his legal obligation, surely?”
“Only if I can prove he’s the father, and that’ll break up his marriage and stuff up his kids, so I’ve decided to count my blessings. The main one is that I never have to see the bastard again.”
FINALLY. ONE NIGHT I SAW TOM ON THE BEACH AND plucked up the courage to ask him if I could help.
“Sure, that would be good,” he said, just like that.
Why didn’t I ask him sooner?
I spent the rest of the turtle watch with him as he explained how to record the tag number if the turtle was already tagged, measure the carapace—the proper name for the shell—and note any damage to it or the flippers, and mark it on the turtle outline on the data sheet. About half the turtles were untagged, and fitting the nasty metal tags into the pinchers and maneuvering them over the edge of the turtle’s front left flipper without disturbing her laying was surprisingly easy, but squeezing the pinchers shut so that the sharp points of the tag pierced the flipper and locked together took quite a lot of strength and both hands, and I thought it must hurt her. I winced every time, feeling it biting through.
My third turtle had completed her egg laying and had almost finished filling in her pit when we came upon her high up on the beach under the trees. She had no tag and Tom told me to tag her quickly and try and measure her before she began her journey back to the sea. She ignored me until I managed to get the tag over her flailing flipper—by then I was covered in sand from her efforts—but as I squeezed the pinchers shut, she turned, reared up on all four flippers, and almost ran down the sand to the sea with me running—almost dragged—along beside her. All at once the beach was littered with dead branches with sharp bits. As she reached the water’s edge and with a loud sigh slithered into her own world, I at last managed to pull the pinchers from her flipper, hopefully leaving the tag firmly attached. I ended up on my butt in the shallows as she glided out over the reef flats. And there I sat, catching my breath, until Tom appeared beside me, laughing his head off.
“Good one, Anna. Did you get the tag number down?”
“Oh, shit.”
“Well, I suppose you remember it?”
“Very funny. Sorry. What will happen now? You’ll have no record of her next time she comes up.”
“Luckily for you, I wrote it down on the form when I gave you the tag.”
I was on my feet by now, my shorts clinging to my scratched legs and dripping onto the sand. “I’ll tag you if you don’t wipe that satisfied grin off your face.” I thrust the pinchers at him and he caught my wrist, still grinning his Cheshire grin.
“The lady has balls after all,” he said. “Welcome to the team.”
The next night, and every night after that, I did my turtle patrol alone. Kitted out with a head torch and my very own wide leather paraphernalia belt, and clutching my clipboard with the data forms, I took on the stretch of beach from the wharf to just past the campground, while Bill, Ben and Tom did the rest of the beach. Sometimes I was joined by a couple of the campers, and as the owners of the few holiday houses on the island arriv
ed, kids would silently appear to watch the show. I didn’t mind the company as long as I got some time alone. When the last turtle on my stretch had returned to the sea with the outgoing tide, I went back to my cabin. Sometimes it was still dark and sometimes it was dawn, but it always took a while to fall asleep in the unbearably hot room, the pillow over my head to muffle the whooo-hooos of thousands of ghost shearwaters.
When I woke, I’d be famished, and more often than not had a massive breakfast. In the afternoon I would walk across the island to Tom’s place to hand in my completed data forms and get more tags if I needed them. Sometimes he was there and sometimes he wasn’t. But when he was I usually stayed a while. We talked mainly about turtles—Tom’s knowledge of the research literature was impressive—but apart from discovering that Tom was thirty-nine, came from Sydney, where his parents still lived, and had a younger married sister with two kids who lived in Melbourne, I found out nothing about him. He was about as forthcoming about his past life as I was.
CHRISTMAS LOOMED, AND IT WAS GETTING HOTTER BY the day. Official temperatures hovered around 32 degrees, but it was a bloody sight hotter in the sun, and nights were steamy and sticky. With a sea almost as warm as the air, I no longer bothered with Pat’s wetsuit when I went snorkeling. I was becoming an expert at identifying the small fish in the lagoon, although the cryptic patterns of the different varieties of black-striped yellow butterfly fish continued to defeat my visuospatial memory powers.