Shark, p.2
Shark, page 2
When the easterlies blew and chopped up the ocean into vicious white peaks, Fox would take his grandson across the dunes and they’d walk the beach as far as they could before turning back in time for tea. They found nautilus shells, fishing buoys and miles of rope which they dragged back in a sled Fox had made from an old hatch cover.
The loose sand gave his crook leg curry but he enjoyed the company of the boy, the company of his colour especially, and it was always his natural impulse to get away from the town and its tiny street-corner conversations.
He hardly ever spoke, but then most sailors become silent as salt. The townspeople were used to mute old men and never bothered Fox with too much talk, assuming that he was just one more old sea-dog who’d devoted his life to ships and oceans and was now washed up in his last port.
But for his own part, the past weighed heavily on Fox. He had a duty to his daughter and grandson, or so he’d come to believe. Maree had expected it and so he’d returned to the country which he’d left as a young man a day or so in front of the law. But it was that past life he missed. Not because it was full of joy and leisure but because over there he’d meant something. He’d been useful to what he considered a just cause. Not for him the romance of jungle rebels, but the striving for the return of natural law. He felt the Papuans loss of land and liberty as keenly as he did that of the Kooris, Murris, Nyoongas, Nungas and Islanders of Australia.
The difference was that over there you could fight and over here you couldn’t. Not in the same direct way.
Trudging back along the beach with his grandson, they passed huge middens where rocky outcrops tongued into the sea. Two thousand, five thousand, 60 thousand, 100 thousand years of hearths. And all the people gone. Unless that mob in the swamp were descended from the people who cooked their crayfish, mussels and yams on these fires. But the days of fighting were over for Fox, no matter what land he inhabited.
He looked down at his grandson leaning into the rope to bring home the wrack sloughed off the fishing boats and tankers. Fox felt sure it wasn’t just the pocket money they got from selling the shells and returning the buoys, yet he couldn’t work out why he bothered with a grandfather who didn’t believe in lollies, football or conversation. The kid was a fair chatterbox at home where Lester had that rare ability of some fathers to really listen to their kids. It was Lester who taught the kid all about boats, fishing and football and yet he’d follow Fox up the beach every Sunday or stray day off school.
Fox couldn’t get used to this southern Bass Strait climate. It got into his bones. He always felt cold, even though he’d worked on boats down here as a young man. He wrapped his pillow in a nokem, one of the string bags from the Papuan highlands. It wasn’t comfortable, it was coarse and the weave pressed into his cheek, but it smelt of those smoky huts he’d lived in for a quarter of a century and all night he breathed in the smell of what had become as close to a home as he’d ever known. This grey fibro box set at the back of an oblong of couch grass was not what he thought of as home – too boxy, too echoey, too separate from the sounds of the bush.
You couldn’t say he was sad, because he’d never been happy. So in that respect he was no worse off, but his comforts amounted to small things like a bottle of beer, a cup of tea, a grilled chop, his pillow and, yes, walking with his grandson.
The two of them were still an hour from home when great vertical sheets of rain were flung in from the sou’east. They were soon drenched and freezing, Fox’s thinned blood icing up in his temples and the kid going purple. He was still just a kid, even if he could walk all day.
They took shelter behind the dunes and struck out for a system of rock caves a mile or so down the beach. Fox noticed a well-worn path leading back away from the sea but wasn’t inclined to follow, preferring to press on to the caves where they’d sheltered before.
‘Hey, hey you blokes.’ Fox looked up to see someone calling to them from a narrow vale between two corrugations of the dunes.
‘Get out of the bloody rain, you dills,’ the man called again. ‘Come on, have a sit by our fire.’ At the back of the vale, a grove of banksia crouched in front of the beginnings of a forest of tea-tree and casuarina before ascending rising ground as eucalypt and acacias. There was a small house on the sward of grass and wasn’t it shipshape. All the woodwork was irregularly fashioned out of driftwood planks but it was beautifully made.
Fox, the loner, had this habit of creating perfect pictures of domesticity in his mind which he rarely found in the world and in which he’d never managed to live himself. This was one of them and he led young Rueben up the bone white steps across the verandah to where the man held the door open for them.
A wood stove was set in an alcove against one wall and the glow of coals beamed from its grate. The man urged them to stand with their backs to the stove where they began to steam gently.
‘My name’s Norm Hodson and this is my wife Ruby.’ He indicated a woman who was sitting at a bench built close to the window looking through the dunes to the rampant surf. She’d been reading, pressed into pillows against a corner of windows where the panes trembled to the wind. She sat up and nodded to Fox and smiled at the boy.
‘My name’s Jim and this is my grandson, Rueben Grange.’
‘Ah, the new fishing family,’ Norm said, fiddling around with the tea caddy and kettle. You were still ‘new’ after six years; you’d still be new after ten. Tired Sailor was like that, like most places where time is calculated in generations, floods, fires, wars and premierships.
They drank tea and ate biscuits and coconut ice while the rain thrashed at the iron roof and their breaths frosted the windows.
‘How come he’s black?’ Norm said at last. Ruby shuffled on her chair and fingered the pages of the book she’d unconsciously carried to the table.
‘Because I am,’ Fox replied, not having taken offence. Most people tried to act as if Rueben was as white as the Queen. ‘My mob’s part-Koori and this bloke’s turned out a bit more than part.’
It was a lie, but it was the lie they’d agreed on for two good reasons. One, to allow some cause for a black child to be created between Maree and Lester, and two, to give Fox some cause, some logic to be in this part of the world.
‘So your mob’s from around here then – like the Clark’s back in the swamp.’ Fox had never heard the name of the family. He’d only ever seen them once as they made a roundabout route from the wharf to the store and never took their eyes off the road except for one glance at where Rueben was playing on a swing hung from a tea-tree in front of his house. They glanced at Fox sitting on his lawn two doors up and went on their way to the store. An hour later Fox saw them pile into two aluminium boats and turn back up the lakes and head for the swamps where it was said they lived or camped.
‘No, no, my mob doesn’t come from round here.’
‘Whereabouts then?’ You could get a bit frustrated with old Norm, you could even begin to dislike him, but one glance into his eyes and Fox could read no insult. His wife was used to his bright-eyed magpie curiosity but became nervous in the company of strangers lest they take offence.
‘Around the Murray, so they say.’ Fox replied. The boy nodded upholding his part of the bargain, even though Maree and Lester had told him his father was a Thursday Islander.
‘Well, have a look at this then,’ Norm said and pulled a rolled map out of a pigeon hole in a chart locker which could only have come off a ship. Fox could see the wormy greyness of the wood and wondered if these people ever bought anything. Perhaps they resented him for getting in on their act of sea salvage. ‘See, now this is how things are.’ The teapot was clamped down on one corner and the sugar bowl and cups on the others. ‘Tired Sailor, here,’ he jabbed at the estuary with a spoon and then prescribed an arc taking in a hundred and fifty miles of beach and all the mountains and rivers behind them to the point where they reached the volcanic plains of Western Victoria.
‘This is where the Gunditjmara and Kerrupjmara held their ground. Over here’s Framlingham forest where there’s still a big community, but over here in the best country of all there’s nobody but that mob in the swamp. There were too many killings around here, see.’ Hodson looked up at the child. ‘Sorry to talk about that in front of you, son, but the settlers here, and their families are still here, were pretty efficient about getting rid of the opposition.’ He pointed to places on the map again. ‘Killing Flat, Red Swamp, Dead Finish, lot of people killed in all those places. That’s why I was surprised to see you two, most blacks won’t come within a bull’s roar of the place.’ He stood back from the map for a moment before leaning over it again and tracing his fingers across it as he spoke.
‘What a place it must have been. Still is. But just look. Lakes, rivers, springs, mountains, jungles, reefs, swamps, grass plains, heaths – everything you need. There are middens in these dunes so deep and wide there must have been thousands of people here for thousands of years.’ He continued to look down at the map engrossed in his image of the past.
‘I didn’t know anyone lived so far up the beach,’ Fox said.
‘It’s pretty quiet. We’ve got a track out to the highway. We like it here don’t we, Rube?’ The woman smiled and murmured ascent.
By the time they left the Hodson’s sea wrack doll’s house, the tide was out and they were able to tow their sled along the hard sand nearest to the water.
Fox began thinking about the locality for the first time. He’d come to the place because that’s where his daughter and grandson were and it always seemed as if it was only a temporary arrangement and that he had no obligation to the place and could not expect it to be obliged to him.
But he began to think about the black cousins back in the high reaches of the swamp and determined to take Rueben fishing up there with no more firm idea in his head than that he might meet the Clarks and share a beer or pot of tea or whatever that mob did.
He’s not that old, Em Frazer thought as she watched him unloading the fish crates, and he hardly says a word. He wasn’t Jesus or a Rawleigh salesman, he was the one, the stranger who would know about early sunrises and the hills and valleys they could warm.
So, one morning, early, Jim Fox found Em Frazer at his back door holding out a plate of prawns sealed over with gladwrap. It’s still bloody dawn, he thought, but she’d gone in to the kitchen and taken off her coat. She settled the shoulders of the coat on the curved back of a chair and stared at him. It was astonishing.
‘Thank you for the prawns, Miss Frazer,’ he said putting them on the sink and fiddling with the kettle and matches.
‘I’m a virgin,’ she said. The match broke against the side of the box.
‘Ah, well,’ he said, ‘a cup of tea then.’
‘No thanks.’ Jim Fox turned off the gas, realising that twenty-five years of guerilla warfare didn’t prepare you for everything.
She spread herself on his bed like a contour map of Tired Sailor’s lakes, swamps, hills and valleys and waited for the sun to overhaul the eastern range and soak the lakes in gold.
The visitation was not repeated immediately but it was loosely understood between them that on some future dawn she would return. And Fox hoped she would. Her body was as flat, hard and blondly furred as one of those oregon planks that get washed up after months of salt and sun exposure and abrasion by rock and sand. It wasn’t that she was beautiful in the magazine sense. Her shoulders were broad and bony, her face was long and pinched by the severe set of her mind and eyes, but there was strength in her body and the skin was taut across it and the fine blonde hairs of her skin were almost invisible until you touched the goose pimples of her flesh. And there was lightning there. Time had coiled her limbs so that when released by the touch of his hand her whole body sprung and clasped him.
Her silence matched his own and his insularity was printed in his soul and face as the grain in wood. In this regard, he was beyond the hope of companionship. But he looked forward to her return. He enjoyed the abrupt collision of their bodies and their peculiar brolga dance of tact and wariness afterwards.
He’d walled in part of his garden from the prevailing westerlies and had built a small table in a corner that trapped the early sun. On her second visit, they enjoyed a cup of tea there, hidden from the street. The conversation was sparse and murmurous but with the birds finding their voices it was not awkward and there was a suggestion that they would become friends as well as their other association of colliding comets.
Maree survived the omnipresence of the nappy bucket, half-chewed rusks in her underwear drawer and even the high chair with its greasy rime of mashed everything. The boy grew up to be continent and socially independent.
She found the shock of always having a man in the house more difficult to bear. The idea of following Lester south in the pursuit of orange roughy had not been the thing she would have chosen to do but at the time she was in the thrall of nappy pins, mouli mills, croup syrups and sleepless nights – it hardly mattered where you did it.
The boy, however, shed his dependence very quickly and became as taciturn and resourceful as his father, stepfather and grandfather. Maree began to wonder if that was the sum of men, a silent, not quite joyless, competence. But looking in the mirror on the first morning when Rueben had woken and got himself dressed and gone out into the yard before coming to her to wheedle his way into bed, she asked herself whether that was not the sum of people. She was hardly a giggle palace herself.
Anyway, the boy assumed his own life without any great histrionics of separation. He just went out into the yard one morning and played trucks. Maree got up, splashed cold water into her eyes, looked in the mirror, contemplated life its very self and made her first private cup of tea in three years. She sat at the kitchen bench and watched her baby through the window as he manipulated a miniature world.
The fact that Lester had converted the lovely old Tea Gardens into a fishing boat hadn’t quite obscured the beauty and tropic lassitude of the craft. She remained an exotic indulgence in the port. And the fact that Lester was out at sea with her father for days at a time was one of the elements which allowed her to survive in the remote coastal backwater of Tired Sailor.
Lester was one of those men who stuck to his word. Insinuation in the town that Rueben couldn’t be his son, as any drover’s dog could see, was like water off an oblivious duck’s back. When Fox arrived with his fawnish Kooriness the town was relieved. It suited them to believe that genetically it could now be possible. The basic instinct of any town is to find a pattern. That is why you have benches outside the butcher shop and back tables in Veronica’s Tearooms, so that people can ravel the thread of gossip into a very solid garment – not a fashion garment but a serviceable covering to keep the body corporate warm.
‘Well, geez, he’s black as a wombat’s bum, but it can happen can’t it, you know throwbacks an’ that. Look at Fryer’s lambs last year. Three blackuns and not a black ram within a hundred miles.’
‘Maybe there’s a touch of the tar brush in Fryer. You know what they say about him and his sheep.’
‘Yeah, but only the pretty ones.’
That, of course, was butcher’s bench talk, outside Neville’s Knackery. The women usually got together in Veronica’s.
‘Well, look at little Jenny Collins, you’d swear there was Italian or something in her.’
‘Maybe there was an Italian or something in Vicki Collins.’
‘Steady on Katie, it’s not so long since the Brunswick Soccer Club were down here on their footy trip.’
‘Mmm, didn’t mind that macaroni, neither.’
Veronica had to flick a tea towel at them then, all that shrieking and knocking over of cups. Besides, that’s when Vicki Collins’ old man came in for his pie and sauce and you couldn’t let on. But that’s how the stale bread got buttered and became bread and butter pudding – something useful you see.
Anyway, they got on with it. No one fully believed that Rueben and Lester were father and son but the town had found a reason for accepting that it was so, because that’s all gossip is, find out the worst, hope it doesn’t happen to you and then get on with it, some uncanny balance between titillated excitement and the stolid necessity for happy homes. Your enemy’s husband might root some high school flibbertigibbet stupid and there’ll be some glee in the comeuppance but in the end they’ll sigh at Veronica’s and wordlessly agree that enough’s enough, even if the bitch had it coming to her, and there’s the kids to think of, and the sooner that Rachel finishes her VCE and takes her hot pants up to Sydney the better. If it wasn’t for Veronica’s and Neville’s Knackery nothing would ever get done in Tired Sailor.
So, Rueben became six and increasingly conscious that he was black, but an accommodation had been worked out and he was left to grow up in the town without harassment. He was part of the legend and like it or lump it he was theirs. They, the Tired Sailors might be able to have the odd sotto voce conversation about genetics, but one word from opposition supporters at the junior football and there’d be a blue under the big gum tree for sure. He’s ours. We can say what we like, but you bastards keep a civil tongue or we’ll knock yer teeth so far down yer throat yer’ll have to swaller before ya chew.
Democracy, you see.
Maree was able to get on with her things. The political work she’d been involved in with Aboriginal Land Rights up north had all foundered. The promises, the Barunga Bark, Mabo, all those things which had pointed to a treaty of reconciliation were referred to an endless line of committees and commissions and anyway the Liberals got in.
