Flames

by Robbie Arnott

  Three months later a sharp-cut diamond was bouncing light off her finger, paid for by the first Oneblood that Karl and his seal caught.

  After the kill Karl had lain prone in the boat, sucking in gulps of air, rubbing the ruff of his seal as it dozed against his leg. The hunt had gone more or less the way it was meant to: a smooth shepherd, a tight breath, a true strike. Steel met blood in a jagged rupture, and Karl had just held on to the shaft as his bones were jiggled by their writhing, dying prey. When the seal had crunched into the spine and the fish went limp Karl was so surprised he almost forgot what they were meant to do next. Pushing, heaving and winching the Oneblood into the boat had drained all the strength they had left.

  Now he floated under a pale sun. The sky was half wiped with the fluff and cream of clouds, but enough yolky heat was leaking down onto his tired limbs to keep him from shivering. His other half lay sleeping beside him. Their victim lay glassy-eyed and still-gilled. Thoughts were flicking through Karl’s mind, not holding, running away from him before coherence caught up. He dropped one hand into his partner’s ruff and lifted the other upwards. A warm breeze brushed against this risen hand, a breeze carrying tang and salt and the clearing scent of eucalyptus as he clenched his fingers around wet, warm fur.

  He sold the Oneblood meat to a Japanese wholesaler named Oshikawa for an amount of money that made his head swim in ways that no fish or seal ever could. Oshikawa had wanted the whole animal, guts and head and all, but Karl had laughed—those parts belonged to the seal, and everyone in the fish industry knew it (including the seal, who wolfed down his share on the dock in front of a troop of delighted schoolchildren). With the money he had bought Louise’s ring; and a month later they caught another Oneblood, selling it to the same wholesaler for an even higher price. After their third catch he quit his job on the charter boat and dedicated every working day of the season to the tuna grounds.

  In the next year they caught four fish, and the season after they brought in six. This proved to be their average number over the next decade: six fat, fierce, fighting Oneblood tuna, sometimes as few as three, occasionally as many as ten. The seal stopped growing at one hundred and sixty kilograms, but he didn’t lose any of his zip, and at his full weight and strength he could herd up the largest Onebloods going around, giving Karl—whose spear arm had become reliably accurate—the unenviable task of holding on to the violent death throes of a furious six-hundred-kilo fish.

  Their victories in the water were matched by Louise’s success on land. The tourism industry around the north coast thrived, and after a couple of years she was able to rent an office in town, allowing them to turn her home office into a nursery, which was soon occupied by their first daughter. Eighteen months later another daughter appeared, and amid all this swimming and spearing, earning and child-rearing, Karl noticed that they were getting older, all of them, and he didn’t mind anywhere near as much as he thought he would have.

  Eventually he retired—much sooner than he had planned to. But he retired, nonetheless; why else would he now be trudging along a windy beach, carrying tiny, line-caught fish that a Oneblood wouldn’t even bother to nibble? It wasn’t his choice; it wasn’t his idea; but the salt and waves held other plans for him.

  It came about on a clear day, with a hard blue smear of sky shining above his boat, a perfect day for being in the water. A normal start: half an hour of floating until the tuna began to bullet upwards after the pilchard swarms, then a few false chases before his seal ran a ring around a big male. The corral was seamless, and Karl’s spear had shot true. The shake and bite and blood cloud had all been uncomplicated, and the kill was completed in a routine manner. It was only as they were hauling the fish towards the moored dinghy that Karl felt something go wrong. It was not a mental feeling, no gut twinge or rumbly sense of fear—it was physical, a feeling of something huge and powerful bumping into his hip as it slid past him through the water.

  His first thought: shark. But he knew, even before he turned around, that this wasn’t a shark; the bumping weight had been wrapped in smooth, rubbery skin, not the rasping cartilage of shark hide. Swivelling in the water, still not seeing the creature, his ears were filled with a rapid rhythm of clicks and high-pitched squeaks. And finally, after a full three-hundred-and-sixty-degree turn, he saw it, in all its fins and flukes and black-and-white immensity: an orca.

  The seal had swum to his side and was watching the whale double back. Karl wasn’t worried, not initially. Orcas don’t attack humans, and a single one won’t go after a full-grown fur seal—twisting agility and sharp teeth make it too risky a meal. It probably just wanted their tuna. Karl pushed the dead fish towards it and started back-paddling towards the boat. But the orca ignored the carcass, pushing it aside with a nudge of its tail—and then a second clicking song thrummed through the water. The seal flipped around faster than Karl could move, as a second orca wafted past them on the left. A third approached them from the right and a fourth—dark, fast, its click song a jittering swarm of sound—swam directly beneath them. They peeled off to join the circling movements of their pod mates. Now the orcas were whirlpooling around them, and the seal was spinning around Karl even faster, trying to keep eyes on them all. Karl clutched his spear. His pulse tripped staccato.

  And then: relentless and inevitable, it began. Each orca took turns barrelling towards the seal from a different direction, breaking off its charge at the last minute as the seal turned and showed its teeth. Karl followed the orcas with the point of his spear, keeping it outstretched towards them, but they started charging in weaves; he couldn’t keep up. The seal couldn’t run—they would catch it over a straight line—but it wasn’t trying to escape. With each aborted charge it moved closer to Karl, spinning around him, and Karl realised he was being protected, even though the orcas were not hunting him.

  And then, in his right periphery, he saw the rushing gape of a glossy pink maw. He lurched in the cold wet and aimed his spear forward, as his seal bobbed in front of him, lips bared, muscles coiled. He thrust the spear and missed by metres, miles, oceans, as the orca baulked, and the tiny bounce of relief that hung in his stomach was overtaken by a vast swell that rushed him backwards, followed by an even bigger thwack of rubber and muscle. He was tossing now, overturning and disoriented, only just seeing the fluke of a different orca that had risen beneath him and sent him somersaulting through the water.

  After two full revolutions his body stopped flipping. He regained his bearing and cracked his head through the surface, sucking in air before diving back below. He couldn’t see his seal. He couldn’t see the orcas either, but he could still hear their clicking songs. He swivelled and spun and swam in every direction, left right up down north south, but there was nothing but bubbles and navy and clicks.

  But then another noise intruded—a harsh slap that sounded like it had come from above the water, not through it. Karl surfaced. First he saw nothing; but from behind his head he heard the slap again, so he turned, and there he saw it. He saw it happening through his waterlogged, salt-reddened eyes. He saw it sped up and slowed down. He saw his seal’s body being slammed against the water by the orcas. They took turns gripping its tail in their teeth and flinging their heads left to right, over and over again, using the hard lid of the ocean to break Karl’s seal into ragged chunks of brown-red meat.

  In the months between the orca attack and his walk down the beach, clenching his teeth against the grit blowing into his shins, Karl tried to forget that clicking sound. But it was lodged in a hole between his ears, a backdrop to his days that he feared and hated but could not escape. He was reminded of it constantly: when a light switch was flicked, when Louise clicked her fingers, when his leaping daughters clicked their heels, when Sharon at the fish-and-chip shop clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth as she waited for the oil in the deep fryer to heat up. All these humdrum sounds and more stirred up the bouncing echolocation of the orcas, and with them came the images, and the memory of the war
m salt breeze, and the slapping crack of his seal as its body was broken against the ocean’s face.

  He didn’t find another seal; he didn’t even try. He knew of other hunters who had successfully re-partnered, but he didn’t have the energy or appetite to start the training process all over again. And the idea of seeking out a fresh pup raised bile in his throat—it made his own seal swim up through his memories, resting its young face against his palm. And then the clicks would return, haunting snaps that floated through the water endlessly towards him, and Karl would mash thumbs into his ears or take a chainsaw to a bluegum or gargle rum until one of his daughters found him hacking dry sobs at the bay.

  Perhaps this abandonment of the hunt was a good thing. He started hearing rumours that the Oneblood stocks were declining. At first he thought the other fishermen were lying, trying to drag his spirits up from the seabed, but then a story appeared in the paper that was headlined ‘Worst Tuna Season in Decade’.

  He spoke to his old wholesaler, the fastidious Oshikawa, who confirmed the report. Bad year, he told Karl over a pint of stout. Not many fish, and the fish I have seen are small. Karl lapped at the creamy tide of his dinner and Oshikawa, fingering a coaster, said: Maybe a disease we haven’t picked up. Maybe a monsoon somewhere messed up the food chain. Maybe the water is getting warmer. He tore the coaster into white flecks. Maybe just a bad season. Karl sipped, fiddled with his own coaster and was about to ask a question, but as he opened his mouth someone closed the pub door, and the latch shouted out a loud, clear click that forced Karl to change the subject.

  Money was no problem. Years of catching and killing Onebloods had left him with what many people would call a small fortune, certainly enough to pay for the groceries, insurance, even to send his daughters to a private boarding school in Launceston. Louise was still pulling in a decent income, so there was no need for him to go back to work on the charter boats. He knew he needed to do something to keep himself occupied, but all he knew was swell and spear and seal.

  So: the family went on holidays, up and down the rocky peaks and dipping valleys of the island. They spent a long weekend in a former hydro factory in the highlands. For five days they wandered up and down the frosty crags of Cradle Mountain, sleeping in a roomy stone cabin owned by Oshikawa. They ate abalone, hammered tender before their eyes, on a wharf at Stanley. Louise took them to the glistening greenness of Notley Fern Gorge, west to the dark moonland of the Queenstown hills, and to the wren-blue tide of Boat Harbour, where Karl dragged his toes through the surf but didn’t wade past the depth of his knees. They went south, almost as far south as they could, down to the wide wilds of Melaleuca. Their younger daughter grew bored and sullen, but the older one—Nicola, recently turned eighteen, soon to begin studying at veterinary school—became so wide-eyed and enamoured with the place that she didn’t want to leave. Karl tried to match her enthusiasm, but he couldn’t feel what his daughter’s soul was touching. He hiked white quartzite mountains and watched wombats stumble and stared out at the green buttongrass plains at this southern end of the world, and though he smiled at Louise and the girls (and even occasionally laughed) all he saw through the grass was a seal hitting the sea, and all he heard in this high empty sky was a pulsing rhythm of underwater clicks.

  Back at home the girls showed no interest in hunting Onebloods. Instead, he taught them to push hooks through frozen squid and hurl them out into the water, which they loved as much as he found it boring. And through sharing this banal activity with his daughters he somehow developed an affection for the activity itself, and found himself angling off the rocks even when the girls were away in Devonport, casting and catching and occasionally crying, but only when the mist was clear and he could see past the heads towards the tall spires where the seals still hauled out, or so he assumed.

  This was how angling put Karl on the beach on that windy evening, feeling the whipped sand feast on his shins. Soon he would figure out what to do next. Soon the clicks would stop, and he would stop hearing his seal hit the sea, and an idea or direction or purpose would swim up at him. The wind hammered. He kept trudging into the sand.

  As he neared his cottage he saw a young man riffling through a clump of driftwood. He was not quite six feet tall, with milky skin and sharply dark hair. Underfed angles jutted out from his chin, cheeks, collarbone. He held a long white-grey branch in his hands, lifting it with difficulty to his eyes, which bored deep into the pattern of the barkless wood. His arms looked even more malnourished than his face.

  Evening, Karl mumbled as he passed. The young man said nothing but turned around, transferring the intensity of his stare from the branch to Karl’s face. Karl stopped. Nice branch.

  I thought so, the young man said, but no. It’s not right. Karl looked up at the light he could see blinking from his deck and thought about walking straight there, getting out of the wind and away from this odd stranger, but small-town courtesy compelled him to pause. Not right for what?

  The young man swivelled the branch in his hand and ran his free fingers up and down its knobbly length. For a coffin.

  Karl felt surprise creep into his brow, but kept it out of his voice. Not gonna make much of a coffin with driftwood, mate.

  No. The man sighed. I suppose not. He underarmed the branch onto the sand and bent over to resume picking through its siblings.

  Again Karl glanced up at his cottage, its light, its promise of warmth and food and Louise. Mate, do you need any help?

  Pardon? He didn’t look up.

  I mean. I dunno. Karl exhaled. Is everything okay? The young man straightened up with a quizzical expression on his face, as if Karl was the one behaving strangely. Karl extended a hand. I’m Karl.

  He accepted Karl’s palm in his own. Levi. And then, as if his surname was an afterthought: McAllister. He let go and ran his hand through his hair. Everything’s fine.

  Righto. The name bumped around between Karl’s ears where the clicks usually lived. I’m sorry.

  The quizzical expression reappeared on the young man’s face. What about?

  This coffin. Your loss.

  Now a smile spread across the sunken, youthful cheeks. Oh. No. Nobody has died. Well, not recently. He waved at the pile of wood as if that explained something. I’m just getting things ready for my sister.

  Is she sick?

  No.

  Karl’s bouncing thoughts snagged—the name: McAllister. His eyebrows came together; he knew how things went. He’d seen one of them climb from the water, beshelled and undead, back when he was young and his seal was half-grown. He knew about the flames, and he knew what happened next, and he heard himself ask: How old is she?

  The wind died, as if blown out like a candle, and the stinging sand fell to the beach as Levi McAllister peered into Karl’s bucket to stare at the still gills of the dry, head-stabbed fish. She’s twenty-three.

  SKY

  Charlotte is running. She is a jangle of loose limbs and hitting heels as she sprints down the driveway, gravel spitting from her steps, the dusk darkening above her. Her breaths are jagged; her shoes are biting; her eyes are clouded.

  Charlotte is running because a few hours earlier she was reading, in the dim light of their lounge, a book her brother had left on the coffee table: The Wooden Jacket, by Thurston Hough. A book about tree care, she had thought, or cabinetry, or even fashion, until she peeled back the cover and saw the pictures: pictures of coffins. Simple coffins with straight blond slats; wide coffins that blinked with gloss; enormous sarcophagi with ornate detailing and velvet interiors. Odd, she thought, until she found the notepad next to the book. This notepad—yellow, blue-lined, covered with the neat marks of Levi’s hand—contained a series of measurements.

  172 cm

  58 – 62 kg

  Size 8 (dress)

  Familiar numbers, but she wasn’t sure where from. But then—a flicker of intuition. She ran her hands up and down her forearms. She pulled at the part of her jumper that cinched in against her waist
. She remembered her mother reaching up to scratch a notch into the hallway above her head when she was seventeen. She looked from the measurements to the book, back to the measurements, and then back to the coffins upon coffins that filled her brother’s book. And then Charlotte was wobbling on her feet, her blood was pounding against her wrists, her mother was burning behind her eyes, and she was throwing only her favourite and most necessary clothes and possessions into a backpack before reeling out the front door and into the dusk.

  Charlotte is gasping, dragging in air as fast and deep as she can. She’s reached the end of the driveway and thrown a thumb in the air. She hasn’t thought hard about what she’s doing, but the need to run is clear and huge. Even if he doesn’t mean her any harm. Even if he is only doing some research. Even if he’s just curious—she will not stay in a house, not even her mother’s house, with a brother who wants to bury her. All she has left of her mother are photos and memories and a family tradition of flames, and she won’t let him take them from her. Charlotte will burn, tomorrow or in half a century, but she will burn. And she might return. Though that isn’t the point.