The Windy Season (8 page)

Back at the hostel he saw the backpacker who had woken him that morning sitting with others, shirtless, on the front steps, soccer ball gripped in one large hand. He straightened up to face Paul when he saw him, causing the group to turn and consider him too. They were all older. Mid-twenties, maybe thirties. A girl lay on a beach towel on the lawn in a green bikini, Brazilian flag printed on the rear of her bather bottoms, the starry blue dome over the scarp of her bum. Paul stepped around her. The group was silent as he took the steps to the front door. He heard their laughter through the hollow walls of the hostel. Listened to it as he lay back on the bunk, alone in the dorm.

Sometime later, when it was dark, a girl entered the room. Through a gap in the curtain he watched the outline of her, partially backlit by the lights on the hostel balcony. He was close enough to feel the shower-heat from her.

As he watched, she looped her underwear over her legs, pulled on jeans, a dark t-shirt. When she left he smelt her perfume.

The generals are brothers from the northern beaches in Sydney. Twin brothers each as ugly as the other. Like they are in some terrible contest at who might be the ugliest. They are even uglier with the bad looks they've always got. Those two are uneasy out here and you can tell they are dying for saltwater. Grumpy when they look on the desert like they are looking at their own coffins. I think about the sea while we go through the hot sand. Think about how I don't know if city people love the sea or just love looking at it. I know they spend all their money trying to get close to it and on it cos I've seen the boats and jetskis on the TV and I know about the holiday houses and the whole lot. It's all gazing out
to sea and it doesn't make much sense to me why anyone would want to be always looking at the horizon like something good is going to come over it. The whole country is crammed above the beaches like they are banging on a gate and I sometimes wonder if they are waiting for someone to come rescue them.

But the sea is where we are headed.

The President calls it a clean-up, this thing we're doing. There are big things happening on the west coast, developments that will make fellas like him and me more money than we'll know what to do with. We have opened up a vein bigger than anyone could ever imagine.

But there is cleaning up to do. Too many people know things they shouldn't and the President doesn't like that. He doesn't like anything that isn't clean. He says you watch the smartest fellas, they know how to keep things clean. Like surgeons. A surgeon is an expert at washing his hands and arms and tools and spraying down his operating table, and the President says if it is good enough for the smartest fellas then it is good enough for him.

Hidden

THEY WERE THE LAST OUT OF THE INLET
. Paul had waited an hour on the kerb and it was light by the time his cousin's ute turned into the street with the skiff on the trailer. Paul caught sight of his expression, unsmiling. When they arrived at the beach Jake didn't explain why he was late, and he said nothing at all as they crossed the inlet to
Arcadia
, the only cray boat still on its moorings. He looked like he hadn't slept and he had the powerful scent of alcohol on him. The skipper was up the bridge ladder even before Michael had climbed aboard.

Paul knew there were problems with Jake. Everyone in the family did. There wasn't much detail, or not that Paul knew anyway. But for as long he could remember he had been aware of the trouble on his mother's side of the family. He had sensed it, as kids do, noticing the adults exchanging looks whenever Jake's name came up, or the way his parents never really spoke
about him when they thought the children were in earshot. Paul had once overheard his father mention that Jake had been to jail. His parents had talked of it while they worked in the front yard, unaware that he could hear them as he lay on his bed. Paul had shared the news with Elliot, who seemed unimpressed and didn't want to participate in guessing what crime their older cousin had committed. Paul had always imagined some kind of robbery. Pictured his cousin's stormy glare through the eyes of a balaclava. Maybe Elliot had known what Jake did. If so, he never let on.

The swell had dropped from the previous days but a gusting wind still blew over the sea from the west. The water was a cloudy green, the surface speckled with kelp and cuttlebone and flecks of foam from shattered pot floats and other things that the storm had washed in and swept out from the beaches. They pulled the pots on the inside reefs, two and three miles out, always within sight of land. The sun was warm on Paul's skin and the swells that surged and foamed on the shoals no longer held the same threat, but there was still that dullness in his ears and his stomach still wrenched with each tilt of the deck. By mid-morning he was dizzy from purging.

You shall disappear if you keep that up, Michael said as he returned from the back of the boat to the cabin. You will look like a supermodel. Just teeth and knees, that is all.

Paul attempted a smile.

Michael watched him, as if waiting for him to speak, before returning his eyes to the sea.

You don't get seasick? Paul said.

Not me, Michael said, looking back at him. My mother, she was in the circus. She used to do trapeze when she was pregnant with me. This big tummy, flipping through the air.

Really?

Michael laughed.

Paul watched the older boy's face, trying to read him.

If you are hungry, I have some food. My girl Shivani made me lunch. You are welcome to it.

I don't think I could keep anything down.

Michael scoffed. With the lunches my Shivani makes that is the problem. Are you staying at the backpackers still?

Paul nodded.

Michael groaned. Hot girls, yeah? The German sighed at the thought, almost mournful. Paul didn't know how to respond.

I thought you would be staying with the skipper, Michael said.

What? Jake?

He and Ruth, they are not family?

They are, Paul said. But I don't really know them. They've always lived up here. We never really had much to do with them. And I guess all that stuff with Jake . . .

He left the words suspended and glanced at Michael. If he knew any more than Paul did, he hid it well. The smile on his face was as inscrutable as ever.

Ruth hates me, anyway, Paul said.

Michael leant down to the deck and picked up one of the crystal crabs he'd earlier removed from a pot, the animal pale from its life at depth without sunlight, twice as big as a lobster. The German held it by its rear legs, away from its pincers, and dropped it overboard.

So, how long you been doing this? Paul asked.

Two months. I found the job in September. Jake needed a deckhand. You know.

Paul nodded.

I was on the east coast before this. I have not seen Stuttgart in four years, Michael said with a proud smile.

Four years is a long time, Paul replied.

It is a long time if you are not moving, if you are just still, in the one place. I have been elsewhere too, not just here. Did the traveller thing, you know.

You like it here?

Working on a boat? Michael shrugged. I could make more money in a mine, he mused. But I would not want that. Life is too short to go digging around in some billionaire's sandpit, you know? And what a way to die, buried in a mine. Take me to the sea bottom any day. Feed me to the fishes.

Ruth told me the season isn't going well.

Shit this year, they say.

Why?

Michael reached for the rollie papers in the pocket of his cargo shorts. They are calling this year the windy season. Something about the wind doing strange things. Winter storms still blowing in summer. I don't know. No fucking fish, anyway. They do not allow many pots. He took off a glove and looked at it, turned it over in his hands. Maybe that is why I enjoy this, he said. The way I see all of this, we will not be doing it forever. People, I mean. One day there will not be this. We will wake up from our dream and there will be no fishing boats in the sea.

Michael rolled a cigarette, turned towards the cabin wall, out of the wind. He lit it, then held the bag of tobacco out. Paul shook his head.

Is Jake worried? Paul asked.

The German let the smoke go from his lips and frowned at the sea, like Paul imagined an old man might frown at the sea. Maybe, he said. But, you know, every man is worried about something.

Paul looked at him, again trying to figure out if the deckhand was being serious or not.

So, Michael said, eyes widening again. You getting pussy?

Paul smiled and shook his head.

My god. The girls that come and stay in that place. I would live there myself.

Don't you have a girlfriend?

Girlfriend? Michael replied.

Shivani? Who made you lunch?

Shivani? Michael repeated, and paused to think on it. Well, yes. I guess I do.

Paul scoffed. Michael grinned.

She is always packing me lunches, Michael said mournfully. Every day. It is hell.

Why is that hell?

Shivani is Sri Lankan, Michael said. Her parents, they run that Tamil place. You understand? He looked at Paul sternly. They run a fucking restaurant. But Shivani? When Shivani is in a kitchen she is lost. She always has a cookbook like this. Michael held a palm close in front of his eyes. It is like watching a tourist, Michael said. Her head in a map, totally lost. Like one of those tourists in a big city who gets confused and steps out in front of a bus. They do not know which way the traffic runs, which way to look, and everything goes to shit. That is what it is like. I see her in a kitchen and I just want to shout, Shivani, get the fuck out of there before you kill yourself!

Paul listened for Jake, concerned about Michael's volume.

And she is always packing me lunches, Michael said. I mean, what are the possibilities of that? How is my luck? I find myself a Sri Lankan in this tiny place and she speaks more Aussie than the rest of you, and she cooks like an old man who has lost his mind. Fuck me.

Paul grimaced to hide his smile.

Amazing butt, though, he said, and gave Paul a serious look. My goodness.

Paul laughed at the earnestness in his eyes, couldn't help it.

Michael smiled. No, no, he said. I love that girl. Very much. Michael stretched. I need coffee, he declared. You?

Don't think I should risk it, Paul said. It had been almost an hour since he had last been sick.

Michael walked away up the deck, pausing to take his gloves off. You know, he said over his shoulder, we have got a spare room, me and Shivani. Piece of shit, our place, but cheaper than that backpacker joint. No good you wasting all your money there, even if it is full of girls.

Paul opened his mouth to thank him, but the deckhand had already entered the cabin.

There were long hours during which the deckhands said nothing to each other, when there wasn't a word said anywhere on the boat. Michael smiling into the breeze; Jake lurking on the bridge, like Quasimodo in his tower, unseen. It was something like calm. You could retreat into yourself and it was acceptable. Expected. The work was good for that, Paul thought. Still had your thoughts to deal with, but at least you didn't have to share them, or hide them. You didn't have to communicate at all.