The Windy Season (25 page)

Deadman
sat low in the water. Engines off, or dead. There were a couple of figures standing at the rear of the deck, leaning over the stern railing. As
Arcadia
neared them, Paul could make out Anvil peering into the sea. Arthur, too. Thought of the fillet knife. It was in the cabin, inside his backpack.

Jake slowed, cut the engines. Paul heard him call out. Arthur waved him off, one hard swipe at the sky. Jake yelled again, asked if they were snagged, if they needed help.

It was then that Roo Dog stepped out from the cabin. He stood shirtless. A smiling corpse, so pale Paul had the impression he
could see through him. Sun catching the round edges of ribs, his collarbones. Long hair in his eyes, stiff like wheatgrass, twisting in the sea breeze. He reached behind him, into the cabin, and drew out a large gun, cradling it in his arms. Michael swore without moving his lips. Up on the bridge Jake said nothing. Roo Dog raised the gun towards them. Two barrels. Michael and Paul stood only a foot or two from each other on the deck but Paul knew the gun was trained on him, he was sure. Could almost feel it. And it was so quiet with no engine noise. Paul heard the flap of his t-shirt against his chest. Wash against
Arcadia
's hull, like a crowd shushing itself. Arthur called out to the deckhand. Roo Dog ignored him. Lowered the gun toward the sea. Gun blast, and then silence. He laughed, walked back into the cabin.

Arcadia
's engines growled and they turned shorewards.

Filthy ugg

WHEN KASIA FINISHED HER SHIFT SHE
wanted them to walk to the jetty. She was excited to see him, eager to talk.

In the dark of the path, as he listened to Kasia, he thought about what happened that afternoon as if it were on a loop, repeatedly playing out in his mind. Roo Dog drawing the rifle from behind the cabin door, pointing it towards him.

But even if Paul had wanted to he doubted he could have found the words to speak of it in a way that made any sense.

At the jetty two boys were fishing, twelve or thirteen years old. Both snapped wary looks over their shoulders at the sound of Paul and Kasia's feet on the boards. Paul recognised one of them as Jungle's boy, Zach. Had seen him at the inlet with Jungle during the storm, running about in it on the lawn.

Zach nodded at Paul when they neared, wearing the sharp expression of a boy who Jungle reckoned had prematurely aged him.

Paul peered into the bucket and saw whiting, most undersized, turning over on themselves, tails arched skywards.

Kasia screwed up her face. They need more water, she said.

They aren't going back, Zach scoffed, a look of disgust on his face. He walked over to them and inspected the bucket himself before squinting up at Kasia, as if trying to fathom the tortured look on her face. Zach looked much smarter than his dad.

Are they dying? Kasia said. The other boy wheezed a laugh from the jetty's edge, his back to them. Zach looked at Paul with eyebrows raised then turned and walked back to his friend.

Paul put his arms around Kasia while she stared into the bucket.

It is such a strange place, she said.

Paul breathed in the warm scent of her scalp and the soapy perfume of her hair. He thumbed the strip of bared skin between her singlet and her jeans. The skin rose in bumps under his touch.

Zach stepped away from the edge of the jetty, carrying his jumping line over towards the bucket. He dropped the blowfish from the hook and clamped the spiny fish under a filthy ugg boot. Kasia stiffened. Paul knew what was coming. Zach raised his boot above the bloated fish. They would have done this a hundred times before, but they seemed excited, as if aware of the girl watching them.

The executioner stomped his foot down hard on the fish. There was a cartoonish expulsion of air and clear fluid. Zach bellowed in delight. Kasia put her head in her hands.

They lay in the dune scrub, the wind whipping over them.

Would you ever come to Poland one time?

Of course.

I would like to take you there. You can meet my friends, and my crazy cat. Kasia made a wounded sound and clasped her hands to her chest. I miss my crazy cat.

What is crazy about it?

Kotku, she said. He is an unwell cat. He has a sickness in the head.

What kind of sickness?

Kasia groaned. Kotku likes vehicles, she said. He likes moving things. She began to laugh. He jumps on buses, or tries to jump into our neighbours' cars when they are leaving for work.

Your cat gets on buses? he asked, attempting to sound amused.

Paul! she cried, reading his mood as suspicion about her story. You have not met Kotku. I am so serious. My mother has had to pick him up from the station. She has had to get Kotku out of the bus herself. Once he gets in, he will not listen to anyone but my mother or me. Kotku is a very fat, very nasty cat.

Paul shook his head.

Why would I lie about this? She unravelled into laughter. It is true. My cat is really crazy. Fuck, I miss my cat.

Paul slid his hand underneath her singlet. He circled his palm on the warm, soft skin of her belly.

I think you would like Poland, Kasia said.

Paul noticed the breeze go quiet, finally giving up on its rage. It was near midnight, he guessed.

Paul kissed her mouth and rolled on top of her.

Have you done it like this before? he said. On a beach?

Not with you, she whispered. She held his face in her hands.

He felt a sort of restlessness. He wanted her touch and resented it.

When did you do it?

What?

Who did you do it with, on a beach? Who was it with?

Don't be silly, Paul, Kasia said. She sat up and he rolled off her.

What's wrong?

Where have you gone? she said, looking in his eyes. It is like you're not even here.

That doesn't make sense.

You don't talk, you're keeping things in. I can see it. And now these questions about someone I've slept with?

I was joking.

She sighed. It is late, Kasia said. I might go home, okay? I need sleep.

Falling through a building turned on its side

PAUL SAT ON MICHAEL'S COMPUTER
long after he and Shivani had gone to bed. In the still night he could hear surf breaking on the reefs. He read the feed of news stories, just skimming them. Atrocities and absurdities. A warlord posing with the bodies of three hundred dead men. A blue whale washed up on the beach of a Thai tourist resort. Quickly he felt himself dragged down by the weight of it all, the news like an undertow. But he knew if he slept there would be more dreams.

So he sat there, skimming. Searching.

He found an email from the University of Oxford's Admissions office confirming Michael's re-enrolment in the following semester. Paul caught his own face in the computer screen, how strangely alert he looked. There was that feeling that came with the discovery of something he wasn't meant to know, the excitement and a sort of sadness, too, like grief or maybe even
guilt. But he already felt too far gone to pull back or turn the computer off.

Soon he was looking at the breasts of an English actress he'd never heard of, a girl not much older than him. She stood alone at a sink in a cramped London bathroom, peering into the reflected image of the phone in her hand with an expression on her face that Paul recognised. Kasia had looked at him in that way before. He wondered whether she had ever taken a photo of herself, and if she had, who might have it. He wondered whether, if he spent long enough searching, if he dug deep enough into the digital silt, he might uncover an image of her, wearing the same tender, trustful expression, unaware that she was gazing into the abyss, a hundred million eyes watching without care or affection. His eyes, too.

Another click and Paul was watching the low-definition sex tape of a US college student, surrounded by the naked arses of older men, dangling their limp cocks desperately towards her busy mouth, and he thought of wilting plants leaning towards water. There was another video, this time with some sort of production values, garish stage lighting and multiple cameras. A man was throttling a girl with such conviction that Paul wondered if the fear in her eyes might be real. He examined the sheen of tears on her cheeks.

It was a feeling like plummeting, being in the grip of information. Like falling through a building turned on its side, descending through windows, doors and passageways, portal through portal.

He watched as a drugged Mexican girl had her throat cut by a man in a balaclava, the executioner wearing a Nike t-shirt, struggling to remove her head with the studied attention of a carpenter working through the rough grain of cheap timber.
Paul spent a moment trying to decipher the feeling it gave him, simultaneously adrenalised and fatigued. At once heavy and empty.

He pulled himself away from the computer, stood in the kitchen like a stranger to himself. He heard the sea, breathing in the dark.

The sea. It struck him then.

He sat back in the chair and in seconds he had brought up a report. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. Transnational organised crime. Bulk carriers and fishing vessels.

Drugs found stuffed in twenty frozen shark carcasses. A tonne of cocaine. Intercepted by Mexican naval officers in the port of Yucatan.

He read of payloads of methamphetamine dropped from bulk carriers in the Bahamas, GPS attached, later collected by fishing boats. The United Kingdom navy found two hundred and forty million pounds' worth in the hull of a forty-two-metre fishing boat. The floor had to be broken and unbolted to uncover the methamphetamine, then the boat was sunk.

In each case study or news item he imagined Elliot. Involved in each story, implicated somehow. A mule, a runner. Pulling up cargo from the sea. The feeling it gave him, the feeling like an excision, a filleting knife through the softness of his belly and up to his neckline, and taking everything with it, hollowing him out.

He turned the computer off, sat back. Pinkish light in the windows. Fred would soon be at the station.

Scavengers

THE EASTERLY OFF THE DESERT WAS
colder than he'd anticipated. He'd wished he'd put on trackies. The town was monochrome in the low light.

When he reached the station, Fred's four-wheel drive was not out front. The boat was gone too.

Paul ran to the harbour and when he got to the end of the jetty Fred was still there, standing in her boat.

You look like hell, she said, cheerful.

I haven't slept.

She gave him a puzzled look, shrugged.

Where are you going? he said.

Fred crouched towards the compartment underneath the centre console. Fishing, she replied, voice echoing in the hull. You know, Paul, we need the tonic of wildness. Fred looked up at him. Thoreau.
We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor
.

I think you're right, he said.

She groaned, head down again towards the floor of the boat. Not you, too. I thought it was just the old and the dying who bought all that bullshit. Yearning for the meadow. You're just like my husband.

You said a town like Stark is waiting to be picked clean.

I did? Her voice was muffled.

Bacteria and all that. You said crystal meth, it was like the bacteria that raids a corpse.

Yes, Fred replied. She stood up and looked at him. I did say that.

And then there would be the larger scavengers, too, right? I don't know. Sharks?

What are you saying?

How do you know there's not something bigger out there? Paul looked beyond the inlet. Fred's eyes followed.

Like what? she said, her eyes sharp at the horizon.

Arthur's boat.
Deadman
. We saw them, west of the banks. In two hundred metres of water. Roo Dog had a gun.

She sighed. I could check his permit.

He shook his head. No, it was like they were looking for something.

Might have snagged a pot.

Not that deep. And there was no line in. They're not fishing, there's no way. They never offload nothing from the jetty.

But they go out so deep?

Paul nodded his head. Further, maybe. A lot further. No one sees them for three or four days at a time. And then there's nothing in their crates when they come in.

Smuggling, she said.

He nodded.

Not hard to turn fishermen to smuggling the President says. Not hard when all they are pulling up are empty traps. Staring into the water wondering how they are going to pay mortgages. Get worrying about their kids and the car and the doubtful look on the faces of their women. Worrying long enough that a fisherman gets thinking about creative opportunities on the open sea. Gets thinking about treasure. Beyond imagining.

And that big bloody Indian Ocean, the President says. Coral heads that could tear the heart out of boats. Swells that step up out of the southern ocean like they've come straight from a hell. Hardest thing to control that line between land and sea, the President says. Impossible. Ten thousand kilometres of deadly coast. Most of it unpatrolled, of course. Because you can police the internet. Spy on every word written. Lock down airports and have a camera on every street. But the sea? No one controls it. No one owns it. Always been that way and always will.