Silver Bay (3 page)

‘
Blue Horizon
to
Moby One
. Big old sea, Lance. Plenty of room for everyone.’

I gripped the wooden rim of the chart table so tightly that my knuckles turned white as I watched the scrubby headland grow. I wondered whether the whale would slow there, allow us to come closer. Perhaps it would lift its head and eye us. Perhaps it would swim up to the side of the boat and reveal its calf.

‘Two minutes,’ said Lance. ‘We’ll be round the head in about two minutes. Hopefully get up close.’

‘Come on, girlie. Give us a good show.’ Yoshi was talking to herself, binoculars still raised.

Whale
, I told it silently,
wait for us, whale
. I wondered whether it would notice me. Whether it could sense that I, of all the people on the boat, had a special empathy with sea creatures. I was pretty sure I did.

‘I don’t – bloody – believe – it.’ Lance had taken off his peaked cap, and was scowling out of the window.

‘What?’ Yoshi leant towards him.

‘
Look.
’

I followed their gaze. As
Moby One
came round the headland, all of us fell silent. A short distance from the scrub-covered landmass, half a mile out to sea in aquamarine waters, the stationary
Ishmael
sat, its newly painted sides glinting under the midday sun.

At the helm stood my mother, leaning over the rail, her hair whipping round her face under the bleached cap she insisted on wearing out to sea. She had her weight on one leg and Milly, our dog, lay apparently asleep across the wheel. She looked as if she had been there, waiting for this whale, for years.

‘How the bloody hell did she do that?’ Lance caught Yoshi’s warning glare and shrugged an apology at me. ‘Nothing personal, but – Jeez . . .’

‘She’s always there first.’ Yoshi’s response was half amused, half resigned. ‘Every year I’ve been here. She’s always first.’

‘Beaten by a bloody Pom. It’s as bad as the cricket.’ Lance lit a cigarette, then tossed away the match in disgust.

I stepped out on to the deck.

At that moment the whale emerged. As we gasped, it lobtailed, sending a huge spray of water towards
Ishmael
. The tourists on
Moby One
’s top deck cheered. It was enormous, close enough that we could see the barnacled growths along its body, the corrugated white belly; near enough that I could look briefly into its eye. But ridiculously swift – something of that bulk had no right to be so agile.

My breath had stalled in my throat. One hand clutching the lifelines, I lifted the binoculars with the other and gazed through them, not at the whale but at my mother, hardly hearing the exclamations about the creature’s size, the swell it sent before the smaller boat, forgetting briefly that I should not allow myself to be seen. Even from that distance I could make out that Liza McCullen was smiling, her eyes creased upwards. It was an expression she rarely, if ever, wore on dry land.

Aunt Kathleen walked to the end of the veranda to put a large bowl of prawns and some lemon slices on the bleached wooden table with a large basket of bread. She’s actually my great-aunt but she says that makes her feel like an antique, so most of the time I call her Auntie K. Behind her the white weatherboard of the hotel’s frontage glowed softly in the evening sun, eight fiery red peaches sliding down the windows. The wind had picked up a little, and the hotel sign whined as it swung back and forth.

‘What’s this for?’ Greg lifted his head from the bottle of beer he’d been nursing. He had finally taken off his dark glasses, and the shadows under his eyes betrayed the events of the previous evening.

‘I heard you needed your stomach lined,’ she said, thwacking a napkin in front of him.

‘He tell you four of his passengers asked for their money back when they caught sight of his hull?’ Lance laughed. ‘Sorry, Greg mate, but what a damn fool thing to do. Of all the things to write.’

‘You’re a gent, Kathleen.’ Greg, ignoring him, reached for the bread.

My aunt gave him one of her looks. ‘And I’ll be something else entirely if you write those words where young Hannah can see them again.’

‘Shark Lady’s still got teeth.’ Lance mimed a snapping motion at Greg.

Aunt Kathleen ignored him. ‘Hannah, you dig in now. I’ll bet you never had a bite to eat for lunch. I’m going to fetch the salad.’

‘She ate the biscuits,’ said Yoshi, expertly undressing a prawn.

‘Biscuits.’ Aunt Kathleen snorted.

We were gathered, as the Whale Jetty crews were most evenings, outside the hotel kitchens. There were few days when the crews wouldn’t share a beer or two before they headed home. Some of the younger members, my aunt often said, shared so many that they barely made it home at all.

As I bit into a juicy tiger prawn, I noticed that the burners were outside; few guests at the Silver Bay Hotel wanted to sit out in June, but in winter the whale-watching crews congregated here to discuss events on the water, no matter the weather. Their members changed from year to year, as people moved on to different jobs or went to uni, but Lance, Greg, Yoshi and the others had been a constant in my life for as long as I had lived there. Aunt Kathleen usually lit the burners at the start of the month and they stayed on most evenings until September.

‘Did you have many out?’ She had returned with the salad. She tossed it with brisk, expert fingers, then put some on to my plate before I could protest. ‘I’ve had no one at the museum.’

‘
Moby One
was pretty full. Lot of Koreans.’ Yoshi shrugged. ‘Greg nearly lost half of his over the side.’

‘They got a good sight of the whale.’ Greg reached for another piece of bread. ‘No complaints. No refunds necessary. Got any more beers, Miss M?’

‘You know where the bar is. You see it, Hannah?’

‘It was enormous. I could see its barnacles.’ For some reason I’d expected it to be smooth, but the skin had been lined, ridged, studded with fellow sea creatures, as if it were a living island.

‘It was close. I’ve told her we wouldn’t normally get that close,’ said Yoshi.

Greg narrowed his eyes. ‘If she’d been out on her mother’s boat she could have brushed its teeth.’

‘Yes, well, the least said about that . . .’ Aunt Kathleen shook her head. ‘Not a word,’ she mouthed at me. ‘That was a one-off.’

I nodded dutifully. It was the third one-off that month.

‘That Mitchell turn up? You want to watch him. I’ve heard he’s joining those Sydney-siders with the big boats.’

They all looked up.

‘Thought the National Parks and Wildlife Service had frightened them off,’ said Lance.

‘When I went to the fish market,’ Aunt Kathleen said, ‘they told me they’d seen one all the way out by the heads. Music at top volume, people dancing on the decks. Like a discothèque. Ruined the night’s fishing. But by the time the Parks and Wildlife people got out there they were long gone. Impossible to prove a thing.’

The balance in Silver Bay was delicate: too few whale-watching tourists and the business would be unsustainable; too many, and it would disturb the creatures it wanted to display.

Lance and Greg had come up against the triple-decker catamarans from round the bay, often blaring loud music, decks heaving with passengers, and were of similar opinion. ‘They’ll be the death of us all, that lot,’ Lance said. ‘Irresponsible. Money-mad. Should suit Mitchell down to the ground.’

I hadn’t realised how hungry I was. I ate six of the huge prawns in quick succession, chasing Greg’s fingers around the empty bowl. He grinned and waved a prawn head at me. I stuck out my tongue at him. I think I’m a little bit in love with Greg, not that I’d ever tell anybody.

‘Aye aye, here she is. Princess of Whales.’

‘Very funny.’ My mother dumped her keys on the table and gestured to Yoshi to move down so that she could squeeze in next to me. She dropped a kiss on to my head. ‘Good day, lovey?’ She smelt of suncream and salt air.

I shot a look at my aunt. ‘Fine.’ I bent to fondle Milly’s ears, grateful that my mother could not see the pinking in my face. My head still sang with the sight of that whale. I thought it must radiate out of me, but she was reaching for a glass and pouring herself some water.

‘What have you been doing?’ my mother asked.

‘Yeah. What have you been doing, Hannah?’ Greg winked at me.

‘She helped me with the beds this morning.’ Aunt Kathleen glared at him. ‘Heard
you
had a good afternoon.’

‘Not bad.’ My mother downed the water. ‘God, I’m thirsty. Did you drink enough today, Hannah? Did she drink enough, Kathleen?’ Her English accent was still pronounced, even after so many years in Australia.

‘She’s had plenty. How many did you see?’

‘She never drinks enough. Just the one. Big girl. Lobtailed half a bath of water into my bag. Look.’ She held up her cheque book, its edges frilled and warped.

‘Well, there’s an amateur’s mistake.’ Aunt Kathleen sighed in disgust. ‘Didn’t you have anyone out with you?’

My mother shook her head. ‘I wanted to try out that new rudder, see how well it worked in choppier waters. The boatyard warned me it might stick.’

‘And you just happened on a whale,’ said Lance.

She took another swig of water. ‘Something like that.’ Her face had closed.
She
had closed. It was as if the whale thing had never happened.

For a few minutes we ate in silence, as the sun sank slowly towards the horizon. Two fishermen walked past, and raised their arms in greeting. I recognised one as Lara’s dad, but I’m not sure he saw me.

My mother ate a piece of bread and a tiny plateful of salad, less even than I eat and I don’t like salad. Then she glanced up at Greg. ‘I heard about
Suzanne
.’

‘Half of Port Stephens has heard about
Suzanne
.’ Greg’s eyes were tired and he looked as if he hadn’t shaved for a week.

‘Yes. Well. I’m sorry.’

‘Sorry enough to come out with me Friday?’

‘Nope.’ She stood up, checked her watch, stuffed her sodden cheque book back into her bag and made for the kitchen door. ‘That rudder’s still not right. I’ve got to ring the yard before they head off. Don’t stay out without your sweater, Hannah. The wind’s getting up.’

I watched as she strode away, pursued by the dog.

We were silent until we heard the slam of the screen door. Then Lance leant back in his chair to gaze out at the darkening bay, where a cruiser was just visible on the far horizon. ‘Our first whale of the season, Greg’s first knockback of the season. Got a nice kind of symmetry to it, don’t you think?’

He ducked as a piece of bread bounced off the chair behind him.

Two

Kathleen

The Whalechasers Museum had been housed in the old processing plant, a few hundred yards from the Silver Bay Hotel, since commercial whaling was abandoned off Port Stephens in the early 1960s. It didn’t have much to recommend it as a modern tourist attraction: the building was a great barn of a place, the floor a suspiciously darkened red-brown, wooden walls still leaching the salt that had been used on the catch. There was a shed dunny out at the back, and a fresh jug of lemon squash made up daily for the thirsty. Food, a sign observed, was available in the hotel. I’d say that the ‘facilities’, as they’re now known, are probably twice what they were when my father was alive.

Our centrepiece was a section of the hull of
Maui II
, a commercial whalechaser, a hunting vessel that had broken clean in two in 1935 when a minke had taken exception to it, and had risen beneath the boat, lifting it on its tail until it flipped and snapped. Mercifully a fishing trawler had been nearby and had saved the hands and verified their story. For years local people had come to see the evidence of what nature could wreak on man when it felt man had harvested enough.

I had kept the museum open since my father died in 1970, and had always allowed visitors to climb over the remains of the hull, to run their fingers over the splintered wood, their faces coming alive as they imagined what it must have been like to ride on the back of a whale. Long ago I had posed for pictures, when the sharp-eyed recognised me as the Shark Girl of the framed newspaper reports, and talked them through the stuffed game fish that adorned the glass cases on the walls.

But there weren’t too many people interested now. The tourists who came to stay at the hotel might pass a polite fifteen minutes walking round the museum’s dusty interior, spend a few cents on some whale postcards, perhaps sign a petition against the resumption of commercial whaling. But it was usually because they were waiting for a taxi, or because the wind was up and it was raining and there was nothing doing out on the water.

That day, behind the counter, I thought perhaps I couldn’t blame them.
Maui II
was more and more like a heap of driftwood, while there were only so many times people could handle a whalebone or a bit of baleen – the strange plasticky filter from a humpback’s mouth – before the delights of mini-golf or the gaming machines at the surf club became more inviting. For years people had been telling me to modernise, but I hadn’t paid much heed. What was the point? Half the people who walked round the museum looked a little uncomfortable to be celebrating something that is now illegal. Sometimes even I didn’t know why I stayed open, other than that whaling was part of Silver Bay’s history, and history is what it is, no matter how unpalatable.

I adjusted
Maui II
’s old harpoon, known for reasons I can’t recall as Old Harry, on its hooks on the wall. Then, from below it, I took a rod, ran my duster up its length and wound the reel, to confirm that it still worked. Not that it mattered any more, but I liked to know things were shipshape. I hesitated. Then, perhaps seduced by the familiar feel of it in my hand, I tilted it backwards, as if I were about to cast a line.

‘Won’t catch much in here.’

I spun round, lifting a hand to my chest. ‘Nino Gaines! You nearly made me drop my rod.’