Wildlight Read online

  He checked the empty deck. He leaned over the side and stared down at blackness—God help them if one of those sacks chose to float. A fist of light punched his back. Tom shielded his eyes, willed the bags down and pictured them thudding to the bottom, hitting reef and seabed in an upwelling of sand. Some of the bags would break on impact, the walking wounded given a reprieve. For most there’d be no second chance, crays too tightly packed, the bags too well lashed for the fish to work their way out in time. Hunters and the hunted. First would be a swarm of sea lice, burrowing in through open weave and bodily orifices, bedding down beneath the membranes of shell to feast on living flesh. Octopus next, suctioning on and drilling carapace with their jackhammer beaks.

  Tom faced an assault of light. He caught the silhouette of Frank crouched down out of sight, slinking back around the corner of the wheelhouse. Tom tried to slow his chest from panting. He was hot, cold, his crotch and underarms chilled with ocean water and clammy with panic. He stood caught in a blinding spear. Fox, feral cat, take your pick of vermin—he and Frank so ignoble a beast there’d be no qualm in finishing them off.

  The police boat bumped against their fenders. Someone threw a line to Tom to secure, a second spotlight scouring the surface of the water. They knew. Everyone knew. The game, claimed Frank, was in not getting caught in the act.

  The police would come aboard—Tom had seen it once before—they’d check Frank’s papers, storm the two of them with questions, inspect the tanks and measure every borderline fish until they found one undersized to hang a fine on. The slap on Frank’s hand would be sharp enough to sting but way too paltry to warrant the effort and expense of such a stake-out. Pissed-off cops. No payout for Frank. Smashed crayfish. Who knew the fate of the transfer boat? A night where nobody had won.

  Frank emerged from the bunkhouse in his tracksuit and sheepskin boots, scratching his bum and squinting at the light. Turn it into a pantomime, Frank, rub it in their faces.

  Frank put on his best indignant. ‘You pricks got nothing better to do than hassle me and my deckie?’

  The fisheries officer stepped aboard. ‘Happy New Year to you, too, Mr Forrest.’

  *

  Her foot found a rung. The wind moaned like a ghost. Another step. She heard a ripping sound, felt the ladder part. She reeled, everything slow motion, she couldn’t free her arms, her body on the brink of plunging. She woke to her whimpering, to a throng of plaintive cries. She was twisted in her sleeping bag, the tent fly flapping in the wind. The dream state faded. It wasn’t night, wasn’t day. Three fifty-five.

  Mutton-birds coursed down the pathway in a stampede of fretful cries and scuffles of dust. They skittled like dragsters round the bend and burst across the helipad. The view from the tent was charcoal wings and spindly legs, ungainly webs of feet that ran across the grass. Clots of birds—twenty, thirty, forty at a time—jostled for space, urged on by the need for speed. Birds scooted past Steph’s tent. An endless cluster, a rocking gait of waddle and scramble. Steph lay in her sleeping bag, close enough to smell the birds’ musky odour, to watch their wings unfold, heads craned to the sky as if sheer will would send them airborne. She grimaced as the birds careened toward the fortress of bush. They were running out of launching pad. But these birds knew better, the breeze scooping them up at the last moment in a mad beating of wings, their feet grazing the bracken in riddance to earthly stricture.

  All around her the sky was crowded with weightless acrobats, veering out to sea to forage for the day. The procession eased, the sky lightened to a new year. A new millennium. In dawn’s prewash the crescent moon looked tissue thin. Rain clouds marched toward the east.

  The air felt thick and damp with misty rain. A black thread of leech advanced across the ground sheet. Steph flicked it away. She was chilled to her core. She didn’t want to walk back to the house. It was hours too early for the weather. She dressed and laced her boots, made her way down the track toward the Gulch, past branches of trees and thickets of bushes trilling with birdsong.

  The track opened out to where she could see the old wooden sleepers of the haulage way. She looked down to the honeycombed foundations of a cement landing where fur seals stretched out. Gulls stood as a flock in a flutter of breeze, their beaks tucked beneath their wings. Beyond the protection of the Gulch the ocean was empty of boats. No Tom; Steph knew that now. Just ocean and white caps and a girl at the brink of an uncertain beginning, shivering against the whistling rise of wind.

  21

  They retrieved the pots they could get to, but the last, set amongst bull kelp at the base of the cliffs, even Frank wouldn’t take the risk in weather as foul as this.

  The heave of ocean spewed water and spray metres in the air. They motored through mounting seas around the headland to New Harbour. The engine smelled hot. Frank tucked the Perlita Lee in as far as he dared to ride out the storm without being washed up on rocks should her anchor chain snap. Only another fisherman would credit the worst storm of the season waiting for mid-summer. Even here, in relative shelter, the wind shrilled through the rigging and caught so hard against the wheelhouse that Tom expected the windows to stave in with each new squall.

  By midnight the whine altered pitch—squalls upping seventy knots. Tom and Frank switched between standing at the galley bench, both fighting seasickness, to keeping watch through the wheelhouse windows, the spotlight angled on the anchor. They both wore full gear. They needed to be ready.

  By two in the morning the anemometer stopped working and the squealing began. Frank estimated the wind had risen over eighty knots. Squalls funnelled around the headland and laid down the Perlita Lee. They had out a full length of chain, the motor idling, each watching the GPS, their eyes shifting to the bow. Each was waiting for the anchor to drag or the chain to part, for the untethered vessel to be wrecked against the shore.

  With each new gust the pots tied down behind the wheelhouse lifted with the loosening ropes and hovered weightless above the deck. They crashed back down like a percussion of cymbals. Already, some would be smashed. Tom zipped his red float coat and clipped on a harness. He felt his gut retch—seasickness laced with fear. He swallowed it down.

  He left the wheelhouse to be knocked from his feet by a slam of air. He stayed down on his knees and crawled toward the stern. There was something mildly comforting about staying low, hidden from view of the ocean. The boat jolted; Tom felt himself thrown against the boat’s steel rib. Rain fell as a sheet, poured out of the scuppers, the noise of the storm tremendous. Tom wedged himself against the side, wiped water from his eyes. He forced himself to focus. Rivulets ran inside his collar and down his spine. He braced himself against the lurching of the boat. He managed to grab the end of rope, looped it through and yanked it hard. By the time he’d tied it fast, his fingers were wooden from cold. Tom swallowed ocean salt, tried to stem the rise of bile. He gagged and spat a mouthful, let the wind wipe it away. The boat lurched, yanking on its chain.

  Frank waited until he got inside and slid the door shut. ‘Good job, Tom. Well done.’ His brother cranked the engine into forward and manoeuvred their position to push the Perlita up into the wind to ease pressure on the chain. They had nowhere else to go. Even if there were a better place, you’d smash a hole through the boat upping the anchor. Or risk your engine letting you down.

  Tom and Frank worked together in the wheelhouse—there wasn’t need for talk—Frank used all his skills to keep the boat from parting from its chain. The power of the storm made Tom and Frank equals, dependent on the boat, on luck, on how long such a force of nature could endure. Through those hours, Tom loved his brother. It felt like he and Frank were one. Tom lost track of time. It wasn’t until the squalls and rain subsided that he looked out to see New Harbour edged by a silhouette of light. Come daylight they’d see that beach strewn with torn-off buoys and tea-tree ribs from shattered craypots. Tom could make out lines of surf. He pictured them flinging ashore their night-time offerings of sand-crusted weed, bowel
-like loops of tangled line.

  *

  Tom spooned extra sugar in his morning tea to keep himself awake. Frank was having the first hour of shut-eye. Tom turned up the VHF at the sound of fishing talk: a swell of ten metres, two squalls peaking ninety knots.

  Bluey MacIntyre: his voice sounded thin. Old. She was a long night over this way. Eight pots lost. Below deck looks like a bomb’s gone off. How’d you get on?

  Just. We’re all fucking rooted. May as well pack up and go home for good, way I feel at the moment.

  It wasn’t the usual banter. Tom felt the same fragility, the aftermath of shock—the hollowness in knowing how close they’d all come. He listened in to Bluey. You have to wonder how many chances you get before you run out of lives. I’m sixty-six next month. Must of used up my share.

  Few more left in you yet, Bluey.

  You start thinking about what you’re doing, what it’s all for, the wife at home worried if you’re all right every time she hears the forecast, the grandkids you’re missing out on seeing because you’re always bloody working. It’s not about the money any more. The money’s not worth your life.

  How about Julesie? He over your way?

  *

  You got on with it. Except for those who’d lost too many pots or damaged their boats, everyone went back to fishing. You had no choice. The same routine of baiting pots, shooting pots, pulling pots. Dawn, dusk, night.

  Tom watched the rope curl around the turnstile. The pot banged against the boat with a shake-out of water. He dragged the pot across, pulled out two good sized crays. The third fish caught on the pot wire and when Tom yanked at it he felt its gristle tear. Careless fuck, Frank would say when he saw the leg hang limp. Tom placed it in the holding tank and walked the empty pot to the stack across the bow. Frank swung the boat alongside the next set of buoys. Tom threw the grappling hook, snagged the line. He hauled it in, wound the rope around the turnstile. His mind-numbing lot. Tom couldn’t still his mind. It was like sea lice crawling inside his skull; his flesh jittery, innards peristaltic, ready to gag or shit or spew out a turmoil of contents. Maybe this was how it went, not depression but an unbearable soup of ferment that drove you to consider the unthinkable. Nah, he wasn’t up for any of that. He stopped the winch and pulled out a cray: a storm survivor three legs short.

  Late afternoon and the light felt off. It smelled off; an ammonia stink from strands of kelp torn loose in the storm and left to rot on the surface. The ocean had withdrawn, stretches of eerie calm interrupted by sets of long slow rollers that rose out of nowhere and lifted the boat. Fog drifted in and out and the damp air and physical effort made Tom rub at his face with his sleeve.

  Beyond the diesel fumes and burring of the engine, the otherworldliness of the surrounds came from a yawning silence. It would forever be this cycle of storm and wind and calm, long after he and Frank were gone. Tom fancied the ocean murmuring: Get out while you can, mate. Out before your boat gets heaved on rocks, out before a rogue wave catches you unawares and flips you overboard. The standard joke amongst the fleet: always the deckie, never the skipper, that takes the wave.

  Frank was back to harping about being one hand short, all the time Hab was having off when Frank hadn’t had a decent break in years. ‘His missus picks the busiest part of the season to squeeze out her sprog.’ Frank with a mouthful of foulness you couldn’t switch off. Tom emptied the final pot and stacked it at the front.

  They were moving across the ocean, through patches of semi-clear then back into fog, veering off course to Bluey MacIntyre’s pots. ‘No.’ Tom shook his head at Frank. He’d had enough of stealing.

  I’m in charge Frank’s face said. On deck and get yourself ready.

  Frank pulled up the boat at Bluey’s buoys. Tom threw out the grappling hook and missed. Frank cursed at him and brought the boat around again. Tom looked at the thing in his hands and couldn’t recall its name. Grail . . . Cradle. To do with struggle. Gravelling . . . Grappling.

  He felt it slip, he let it drop, the hook tumbling and bouncing against the lip of gunnel. It wasn’t only his brain refusing to work, he was unable to physically move. Tom wondered if it was conceivable at nineteen to suffer a stroke—his limbs felt leaden. And there came Frank marching from the wheelhouse and shoving Tom off balance and hurling the hook and scooping up the buoy and cutting the pot free without even taking Bluey’s catch. Just to make a point. Show Tom who was boss. The whole thing. He and Frank. Worthless pieces of waste.

  ‘You’re a girl.’ Frank turned back inside.

  They used the GPS to navigate through fog, back to New Harbour—the promise of another evening meal of defrosted chops and instant potato, peas from a tin, a nothingness night.

  The days were long—dusk didn’t fall until late. At times the fog lifted enough for Tom to sense that somewhere up there out of reach beckoned clear air and blue sky. Then it closed in and you couldn’t see beyond the bow. Frank rolled out the anchor chain himself; he couldn’t trust his halfwit brother to get it right.

  The occasional set rolled in, then the ocean lay as lifeless and flat as a drowned man’s lungs.

  Both sat silent through dinner, just the gabble on the VHF sucking air from the galley, the sound of Frank chewing. Tom pushed his plate away, his food uneaten. Frank wiped his mouth on the tea towel and killed the VHF. ‘What’s this about?’

  Tom shook his head. It was about every dead-end moment of his life. ‘This,’ he finally said.

  ‘This, what?’

  Tom stemmed the urge to shout at Frank. ‘What we do. This.’

  ‘Bluey?’

  ‘Everything. Fishing, the boat, the crap—wrecking gear.’ You, he almost added. ‘I’ve had a gutful.’

  ‘A gutful.’ Frank scratched at his head. ‘What are you now, Tom, getting on twenty? How much money you got stashed away since the boat?’

  ‘It’s about having a purpose. Something that counts.’

  ‘You know what I was doing at nineteen? What my purpose was?’

  Tom made a weary face. Frank reached across the table and grabbed the neck of his shirt. ‘Don’t gimme that attitude, you little prick.’ Tom pulled free. ‘Working my guts out, that’s what I was doing. Two jobs, payments on Mum’s house so the bank wouldn’t take it; school uniforms and sports shoes and schoolbooks and Christmas and all your fucking birthdays. You think Mum did all that on her own?’

  It always came to this. Tom stared at the chop bones chewed clean beside Frank’s fist.

  ‘She been putting ideas in your head?’

  ‘Mum?’

  He nodded out to sea. ‘Her on Maatsuyker with the silver spoon up her bum. You think she’ll hang around waiting for you when she gets back to Sydney? You’re not even in her league.’

  ‘This isn’t about Stephanie.’

  Frank laughed. ‘She’s just a root, Tom. Take what you can and move on.’

  ‘This isn’t who I want to be.’

  Frank chucked the tea towel at the sink. ‘Who are you, then? What could you do without someone to bail you out? Go back to uni? You didn’t even last a semester. You’re unskilled. You don’t have a trade. You don’t have anything. We’ve been through all this crap.’

  ‘You’re right,’ he said to Frank. ‘I’m unskilled. Maybe I don’t know what I’m going to do. I know this much: when we get back to Hobart I’m getting off the boat. The day Hab comes back.’

  Frank’s eyes flickered. He looked pitiful.

  ‘I won’t leave you short,’ Tom said.

  ‘You serious?’

  Tom felt sick, heroic, exalted. Alone. It was cutting your own lifeline before you knew if you could float.

  ‘I’ve slaved my guts for you. Christ.’ Frank’s voice high and strange. ‘You can go now.’ He rose from the table. ‘Get your shit together.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m taking you in.’

  ‘What are you on about?’ Tom’s own voice sounded odd.

  But Frank was gone,
at the dinghy hooking up the hoist with that same fixed expression Tom remembered from years ago when all he’d wanted was for Frank to stop the car at a roadhouse—Tom had had his own money, he’d just wanted something to eat. Back then Frank had thumped the steering wheel and shouted For Christ sake, and pulled the car over in the middle of the night to yank Tom from the seat and swing him out on the road like a bag of bait. I’ve had a gutful of your whining.

  Tom gathered up socks, beanie, his Blundstones, he pulled his Gore-Tex jacket off the bulkhead and punched it in on top. He grabbed a box of matches, crammed the pockets of his backpack with chocolate bars and instant pastas from the cupboard. He picked up his toothbrush and put it back down. He wasn’t good at thinking on the run. He grabbed his wallet and pocketknife from the hatch above his bunk.

  The dinghy rose on the shoulders of a wave, another and another before the set rolled by. They crept through fog, the throttle of the outboard held back, Frank’s eyes fixed ahead. His brother was giving Tom time to change his mind. For all their differences, they were enough the same that a conversation could be exchanged without a spoken word:

  You can’t do this, Frank. You can’t just dump me. You know it isn’t right.

  Watch me.

  The rocks of New Harbour bay materialised, a skirt of kelp, then slipped from view. Frank slowed the engine.

  Give the word and we go back to the boat. We get on with the day and put this all behind us.

  They were close. Tom still couldn’t see the beach for fog but he heard water sucking back on sand. Frank swung the boat parallel to the shore and headed left, not this side but the far side of New River that split the beach in two.

  You’re a bastard to the finish, Frank.

  ‘You won’t be taking that.’ Frank motioned to Tom’s red float coat. ‘Property of the boat.’