The Windy Season (32 page)

At the door of the cottage he doesn't say much but just looks at me seriously as I tell him that there are fellas out there who will never stop looking for him. I tell him that he should head east, right through the heart of everything, till he hits the border. I tell him it's his best chance. Avoid the highways and the towns. The girl will be okay but he won't be. If he wants to survive this, he shouldn't tell anyone where he is going. He has to disappear completely and wait till it all dies down.

I drive back to the farmhouse. I can't think of anywhere else to go.

They all look at me strangely when they see me returning alone. I tell them I killed the boy from the city. Shot him dead, just like they wanted. But they want to know what happened to the President, and I don't know why I say it, but I tell them I shot him too.

Abatement

THE WHALERS STALKED THE BOAT
. There must have been a dozen of them, at the fish heads like yard dogs. Hard, shining snouts and saggy jowls. The German stood at the gunwale, beer in one hand, his camera in the other. The deckhand glanced over, gave a mad smile. Paul didn't get the same thrill out of seeing the sharks as Michael did, but he noticed he no longer felt the same dread when they gathered by the boat. Even the bigger sharks that emerged nearby whenever the boat slowed, the tiger sharks and the occasional white pointer, he didn't fear them like he once had. There was a polite desperation about them; it was like being approached by a beggar. Their perpetual need, the twitchiness of their hunger, was more than greed. It was survival.

It was late afternoon but the wind hadn't come. The sea was smooth and clear, as blue as Paul had seen it in three months.
There were fingers of cloud on the horizon; a storm front moving up from the south. Paul baited the last pot. The engines juddered.

They were on their way in when Paul heard the engines drop and then idle. The big boat sank into the sea. Jake stepped down into the cabin with his sunglasses still on, swearing about the broken radio. Muttering. Paul caught the word mayday. Michael must have too. He dropped his cigarette onto the deck and pressed on it with his boot. The deckhands watched the skipper from the cabin door, listened to the operator from Geraldton.

We had a mayday. Bloke gave his position and that was it. Over.

What's the issue? Jake said, running a hand through sweaty hair.

Didn't say. Sounded distressed. But no call sign, no description.

The operator gave the position. Jake tried to write it down but the pen wouldn't work.

Fuck! he screamed, so loud the metal walls of the cabin continued ringing with the word. Paul, get up there and fetch a fucking pen that fucking works.

Paul leapt up the bridge ladder. It was the first time he had ever been up there. He searched the dash, heart beating. Found a stash of lidless pens in the centre console. He grabbed them all. It was then that he saw the photo taped above the speedometer. A boy, not much younger than Paul. He knew it was him, the boy from the harbour. And it made sense, then, that Jake had strapped himself in every day to stare at that photograph, punish himself.

Back in the cabin Jake took down the coordinates on the front page of a newspaper. Instant weariness fell across his face. He signed off and then pushed past them with the newspaper in hand and was up the bridge ladder in two steps. Paul and
Michael looked at each other. The engines cried out underneath their boots. Jake turned the boat to the horizon.

The deckhands peered west. Just boiling reefs, storm clouds above in atomic blooms. Jake yelled again. Paul strained his eyes and then he saw it, dark against the fluorescence of broken water. It was
Deadman
. A wave struck
Deadman
's bow, a huge, unhurried blow, casting a cloud of spray that hung in the air like cannon smoke. The boat reared, its chest out, indignant. Another large wave moved in from deeper water. They're caught! Jake yelled down. They're going under.

A hundred metres inside of Arthur's boat the white water ran fast over the coral, fanning out and backwashing against water drawn from the deep channel on the lee side of the reef. From a distance the action appeared to happen in a vortex, energy turning over itself, swarming and combusting across the shelf like a nebula. The surrounding ocean was depthless and dark and quiet. Miles of clear ocean and Arthur had steered them into the centre of hell.

Jake moved
Arcadia
in as close as he could and Paul couldn't believe the noise. Slow collapsing of water, like acres of earth giving way, grey hillsides unravelling in a perverse slowness.
Deadman
reared once more. The deckhands scanned the boat for Arthur, Roo Dog. But no one stood at the bridge, nor at the deck.

We've got to do this, Paul yelled. Don't we?

Michael didn't respond.

Paul pulled his t-shirt over his head. He could see terror in Michael's eyes and for a second it transformed his face.

After a pause the German nodded. He slung his thumbs under the band of his tracksuit pants and jerked them down to his ankles. His tired blue underpants feathered in the easterly.

Take them off, Michael shouted, looking down at Paul's jeans.

I'm not wearing jocks, Paul screamed back at him.

Get rid of those pants or you will drown. I swear it.

Paul screamed a loud curse and yanked down his jeans. His skin was luminous in the low light. The engines shuddered through him, wind in his ears, the percussion of surf through his chest. He shivered with the heightened sense of everything, so aware of his limbs, the lightness of himself. Felt already like a ghost, giddy, as if he had full knowledge and bearing of his silhouette within the sound and vibrations of the world, knew the fragility of a human body and how easily it could be erased. Wondered if this was how everyone felt before they died.

Michael placed a bare foot on the wall of the boat, swore, and pin-dropped over the gunwale. Paul followed him with a messy jump and cried out as the heavy sea took his limbs. Michael swam in front of him, wearing a crown of foaming water, his limbs coated in bubbles. Around them the sea hissed, giving up the air that had been pressed into it. And above, or below, it all was a sonorous rumbling that dizzied his thoughts and ravaged his pulse. The water suddenly drew taut and he was being pulled away from Arthur's boat, out to sea. There was the brief scream of air and water. And then he was deep underwater, gazing at the
Deadman
's ribbed hull, the shadow of reef below. He kicked to the surface.

Michael was halfway up the transom ladder when the boat bucked him off. Paul swam over and found the submerged bottom rung. The steel was slick with grime. The sea clawed at his shoulders, reluctant to give him up. He managed to get a foot onto the bottom rung and pushed himself up. Another swell kicked the stern upwards and Paul tumbled over the gunwale on to the deck. He reached overboard for Michael's wrist and pulled him up the transom ladder, both of them groaning with the effort, and the German dived on board.

Michael climbed to the bridge. Paul headed for the cabin in search of the crew.

Inside it was dark and he could hardly see through the smoke. He coughed hard. A small fire burnt on the wall of the cabin. When Paul stepped inside he felt the broken glass under his bare feet, and then the delayed burn and he knew he was bleeding. He peered at the floor and saw the glass pipes and blister packs on the carpet. Paul found the fire extinguisher and lifted it from the wall. He held it towards the fire but the lever wouldn't budge. He grappled with it like a blind man, squinting with the smoke in his eyes. Paul felt the locking pin with his fingers and ripped it free from the lever. The boat rolled with a swell and he stood with his legs apart to counter it, oddly aware of his nakedness, the slight swing of his genitals underneath him. The nudist superhero. If only Elliot could see him now. He held the extinguisher towards the wall. The foam spluttered inaccurately but it was enough.

It was then he noticed the crew around him, sprawled about the dark cabin, as still as mannequins. Anvil sat slumped against the wall, belly spilling over the waist of his pants, his swollen frame awkward when inanimate, gravity rendering his bulk almost comical, like a rotting shark sinking into a beach. Paul put his fingers to the man's neck, wedging them underneath Anvil's jowls and felt the cold of the man run through him. Tea Cup frowned, haunted by whatever he had last seen. He clutched the satellite phone in both hands. And there was Arthur, the ringmaster. Paul knelt next to him. The skipper looked old and infantile at once, lying there on the floor, body curled like a freakish foetus. Roo Dog's emaciated body was shrunken further in the smoky gloom, sat against the cupboard. His neck was greasy with blood. There was a ragged cavity under his jaw. Paul picked up Roo Dog's bony wrist and felt the beat of a pulse against his fingers. He grabbed
the man's face, saw his lips rippling with each exhalation. He was alive.

The boat reared again, and Paul went low to the floor, holding Roo Dog by his right shoulder to keep him upright. The deck levelled out. Roo Dog choked briefly with his neck hung forward. Paul propped the deckhand's head up with his right hand, gripping the top of the cupboard for balance with his left as the boat climbed another swell and pitched downwards once more. He looked at the face leaning on his grip, bony cheek resting almost tenderly against the upper ridge of his palm. It was like holding a skeleton. He felt the pushing out of Roo Dog's windpipe with each breath. Paul could end him so easily. Just lean on him till he stopped. But he turned the deckhand on his side, like he remembered from the swimming classes at school, straightened Roo Dog's right arm out at ninety degrees, head arched back so his airway was open. And Paul stared at the deckhand a moment, dumbfounded by the fact that he was relieved he might live.

Pots swirled on the deck, their lines snapping about in shin-deep water, snake-like. A rifle was laid out on the marine carpet, the foaming surf passing over it.

Paul yelled out, involuntarily, when he heard the engines come to life. The boat leapt over a giant swell and Paul gripped the doorframe. The engines roared as though joyful, sensing salvation.

It was the last thing Paul heard. He felt the grip of the rope over his foot, and was aware that no one screamed his name after him as the pot line wrenched him over the gunwale, oddly conscious in that instant that there was no witness. At first it all could have been happening to someone else; that was how
disconnected he felt to everything. It happened so quickly. A glimpse of sky and then the scream of bubbles. Paul watched as the squared rear of the hull shrank, growing further away as he glided feet first down into the sea. He was something like twenty metres deep before his body seemed to understand the trouble it was in, before fear rushed his veins and he roared all the air out of his lungs. It was only then that he realised he was about to die. In those peculiar seconds he had the recognition that this was an experience that others had known, sailing into depths, led into oblivion by a wooden trap, the cray pot on its kamikaze dive, captained by putrid fish. A fisherman's burial. How damn fucking stupid.

He pictured his parents and felt guilt. He saw Jake, the judgement on his face, like disappointment. He saw Father Mobu and the ramshackle church and could hear the echo of a homily. He thought of Kasia, heard once more the miraculous sound of her laughter. He imagined Circus watching, curious in the darkness. And he sensed Elliot in the water, somewhere. But each thought left Paul as quickly as it came, or perhaps he left each thought, plummeting through information as though passing through rooms, window through window, doors and passageways, like falling through a building turned on its side. Water cried in his ears. The weight on him so immense, so unreal.

And he was let go, flung to a stop. A half-cartwheel, a sudden deceleration. And then just water all around him. Heavy, almost gentle. Silent. An astronaut through a wormhole, snapped into a different universe and left to drift. He looked down at the grubbiness of his feet, naked and pale. Beyond was a misting darkness, huge shadows of rock shrouded in sediment.

Paul reclined in the water, arms out. Pale light in huge rings. Far above a whaler shark swam, backlit, swirling at the brilliant surface like a great bird.

And then a figure on fire. Strong arms reaching, kicks long and even. A grip on his wrist. Elliot. How good it was to be with him again.

He opened his eyes to see Jake watching him. The skipper had a wrenched look, beyond anger. The storm clouds all sunlit and fiery above his cousin. Paul felt the engines in the deck against his back, shuddering through his spine, screaming like they could explode. He had never felt more cold and he closed his eyes. Darkness took him mercifully. On the drive back to the inlet he fell in and out of sleep. Saw an osprey turning above the deck in a darkening sky. Wondered if it thought he was dead, or nearly. When he woke again on the jetty it was night. Lights in his eyes. Jungle's arms around him. He was wrapped in silver foil. Someone talked to him in a grim voice, demanded answers to questions that were dumb-headed and he would've laughed if he could stay awake but he couldn't and it was so fucking cold.