For what? she said defensively.
You know, things you’ve done in your past.
She hugged her knees. The southerly rattled in the cotton palms.
No, she lied.
Well, some of us do.
Jim, you don’t have anything to make up for. Not to me.
It’s not about you, he said in exasperation.
Then tell me what the hell it’s about!
Christ, he muttered. It wasn’t supposed to go like this. It was meant to be something gracious.
Georgie stood up and looked at him. In the light spilling from the doorway he was haggard but his eyes were wide open. He looked like a child struggling to swallow something too big for him. The sight of it dampened her anger. Such a long time since she’d seen that look of fear on his face. She believed him. It wasn’t about her. He was in the grip of something he could neither understand nor control and she found herself intrigued and repelled.
Go to bed, she said.
Yes, he said. I need to.
Georgie stayed out on the terrace in the chill evening air. Down the bay the pub was jumping. It made her feel old. She went to bed late but only slept fitfully in a profusion of dreams. Before she woke she was on a white shell beach. There were boabs under moonlight. The water was flat and laddered with reflections. Above the beach there was jungle and it smelled rich with decay. At the edge of the sea there appeared a silhouette. It billowed fabric like a Sunday school Christ. It beckoned with outstretched arms. When she reached it she found Mrs Jubail with her brain on her face, her breath a tropic foetor as she whispered, O Nurse, O Sister, and held her arm. Georgie pushed away. There was a steel spade glinting in the moonlight and she took it up and swung it. Mrs Jubail’s head opened like a sliced melon. She toppled into the shallows. There were people suddenly behind the trees. Georgie threw the spade but did not hear it land.
STILL NONE OF Georgie’s family returned her calls. The staff at Jude’s hospital said she couldn’t come to the phone. On Friday afternoon she took the little Mazda over to Beaver’s to ask whether he’d store it until she returned. He’d barely spoken to her all week. She parked in his wreckyard. He emerged from the back door beside the reeking toilets and they stood beside her yellow bubble.
I’ve figured it out, he said kicking the front tyre with a toecap. He’s got religion.
Well, something’s up him.
The fear of God, he said with a snagtoothed grin.
You really think so?
Somethin close to it, George.
Said he wants to make amends, she said handing him the keys.
What, havin your wife die not enough?
She shrugged. It’s something to do with her, isn’t it?
That’s my thinkin. That and you, George.
What the hell is he on about, though? He’s talking signs and omens, and I can’t tell if it’s luck he’s worried about or God Almighty.
Maybe it’s the same thing for him.
Well, it scares me, said Georgie. This kind of talk, the trip to Broome.
So why go?
Well, she murmured, there might be something in it for me.
Fox, said Beaver with a laugh. Now there’s a name to conjure with. Always made him jump, too.
Jesus, you know more than you let on, Beaver. I bet you know every bloody thing about him.
Nah. Still, I’ve got shit on him and he’s got shit on me.
And, let me guess, you won’t tell me the goods you’ve got on him.
Correct.
You his therapist or his priest?
Beaver laughed and nudged her little car with his hip, and his belly jounced around in syncopation with the vehicle’s suspension.
So, Beaver, as a friend. Tell me if people change.
As a friend? I don’t know. Tell you one thing, though. Things were simpler in the old days. Jim Buckridge included.
Afterwards she walked with Rachel along the lagoon and they stopped at the point to watch her son Sam drop down the face of a distant wave out on the reef. Rachel knew it was him by the colour of his board but to Georgie he was just a squiggling wake across the wave’s surface. When they walked on in a kind of fraught silence they came upon a small turtle on its back surrounded by pecking seabirds. They picked it up and washed it off in the shorebreak and saw that it was still alive, but it had a gross-looking stalk growing from its head at the end of which grew a mussel of some sort and as they rinsed it and felt a faint revival, a tiny crab fell from its arse. Georgie recognized the species of turtle. She’d seen hundreds of them in the tropics. It was a loggerhead, a thousand miles out of its way. She imagined it lying exhausted in the southbound Leeuwin Current with other creatures attaching themselves as though to a piece of flotsam.
You believe in signs, Rachel?
Nope, said the other woman testing the root of the mussel.
I figured you New Agers saw them everywhere.
What’s this New Age stuff? I rub your back and I’m a bloody crystal-gazer. Mate, the only sign I associate with the New Age is the dollar sign.
You old cynic.
You got me.
What’ll we do with this?
Sam and Jerra’ll nurse it. Someone’s bound to take it north come winter.
It’s a long swim to land on the beach right at our feet.
Rachel laughed.
You think I’m mad, said Georgie. About this. About going with Jim.
The other woman held the loggerhead and scooped some water over its shell.
You know, said Georgie, usually when I do something stupid it’s impulsive. Frenzied even. I don’t feel like that. I feel calm. Almost resigned. It’s just a few days. And then I’ll be back. He doesn’t know about me moving to the farm yet. Will you drop by when I’m settled in?
Of course, said Rachel, as the turtle tried feebly to swim from her grasp.
As they walked on beyond the lagoon the creature stirred itself now and then to scull the air. They walked the whole beach and never saw a soul.
seven
FOX MAKES a fine camp beneath an overhang at the base of the island’s mesa bluff. There’s a long ledge here powdered with rosy dirt and a little way along it is a freshwater pool that forms where rain spills down the cliff in the afternoons. He sets his swag beneath the sandstone awning and makes a fireplace out on the open ledge. From this position he can see across the treetops down to the belt of boabs and then the beach. From here the whole gulf spreads out in the direction whence he came. In the distance the vast plateau lies in its variegated layers of red and black and green and in the afternoons the monsoon rains spangle it with waterfalls that look no bigger than sequins. He chooses his camp primarily for its proximity to drinking water but he recognizes its defensive virtues. After he’s built the bough shelter across the mouth of the overhang you can’t see it from the beach at all. It blends beautifully with the fringing fig and vine tendrils.
In time he beats a discreet track through the remnant belt of rainforest to the beach, where he chips oysters and casts lures for fish. One end of the white cove ends in boulders and rocky scree. The other is thinly belted with mangroves through which he passes at low tide to the stony edge beyond that gives out onto a sandspit. From the spit you can see the mainland not half a mile away. Even in the monsoon season it looks dry over there. The ranges inland look rough and treeless.
His days are lived according to the tide. From the spit he casts for queenfish and trevally and now and then he takes a spanish mackerel. Amongst the rocks he jigs for mangrove jacks, fingermark, bluebone and pikey bream. He gathers driftwood as he goes and he carries it strapped to his back when he returns to camp. He grills fish whole in the coals or makes soup in the billycan. Early on, out of excitement, he catches too many and is forced to smoke them on green-wood racks. Some days it’s just too damn hot to cook so he eats fish raw by the water and saves himself the trouble of carrying anything back but rod and reel.
He learns to eat green an
ts for the lemony fizz on the tongue and the way they spice a chowder along with a bit of chilli. He proceeds cautiously with mangrove snails whose blue flesh alarms him and he tries figs and berries with his mouth puckered anxiously. The pandanus nuts are almost tasteless. He has no luck with the pith from boab gourds but he likes to walk through the shadows of the trees where the shellgrit crunches underfoot. He spends entire days satisfying himself that he has the best camp on the island. He clambers his way around until it’s impassable and he labours all one morning to make the mesa’s summit and traverse its windblown gutters to look out oceanward and see the archipelago backed up like a jack-knifed train in the gulf below.
For some days he suffers a kind of restless disbelief that you could find a place like this. But in time he settles to the comfort of a routine. He tries to forage in the cool of the morning or evening. In the torpid, rainy midafternoon he retreats to the cave to weave pandanus leaves for his shelter or just lie there panting in the timeless heat.
The nights are sticky and mostly calm. Quolls rustle about on the rock ledges. Bats flit from crags and the stars roll by on their wheels. Strange cracking noises reverberate in the rainforest and birds chime chaotically up in the bluffs, but the most constant sounds are those of the tides ebbing and flowing in a nearly incessant murmur.
In the daylight he feels safe in a way he hasn’t felt since early childhood. There are perils, of course. He climbs rocks and wades through mud at low tide with ponderous slow-mo caution for fear of cuts and falls, and he never swims, never even takes his morning and evening douches on the same piece of beach for fear of crocodiles, whose log-like passes he sees offshore now and then. Yes, there are simple dangers but he has nothing personal to protect himself from.
On the island there are so many unexpected pleasures, like the hot warm boles of the young boab trees he brushes with his fingertips in passing. The shapes of those trees delight him. Leaners, swooners, flashers, fat and thin. At the edge of them all is one huge ancient tree, festooned with vines and creepers, whose bark is elephantine. There’s a glorious asymmetrical splendour about it; it makes him smile just to catch a glimpse as he passes. When he climbs it he finds an ossuary on its outspread limbs where some hefty seabird has hauled mudcrabs aloft to feed on. The broken hulls are thick and white as china plates.
He finds that if you sit still long enough the bush or the sea will produce an event. You wait with trancelike patience until manta rays begin to roll in the shallows or baitfish form like stormclouds along the spit. A beetle big as a golfball will fall from the woven pandanus. A turtle ups periscope in the stillness. A sheet of lightning scours the brainpan.
Fox begins to grow expansive. There’s no one to keep your thoughts from so he begins to think aloud. He utters observations in the direction of the sea eagle that has its eyrie in the bluffs above. Every morning he greets the beautiful brahminy kite when it hunts abroad from its mangrove nest. As he shits ankle deep and facing seaward at the water’s edge, he mutters Not today Mister Crocodile, not today, not today.
But as he walks on the shell beach he becomes acutely aware of the sound he’s making. There’s a curious reverberative lag, an overlap, as though someone else is walking too, someone behind him. Now and then, unable to help himself, he spins around to check that he’s alone. Even the slop of his waterbag does it to him. Sometimes the sound of his breathing. The sensation is more potent than the usual tiny gap between his being there and the sound of him being there.
Shells and rocks turn the soles of his feet milky with calluses. He saves his boots for hard treks. His shorts and shirts bleach with sun and salt and his cloth hat has concentric sweatlines like the growth rings of a tree. His new beard itches but it gives him some protection from the sun. In the mornings he wakes with raw patches of skin on his chest and shoulders from it. The humidity irritates the beard-burn into a broken rash. It adds to the discomfort of the gouges and stakings he sustains from fishing and from generally living by his hands. In the steamy rain one afternoon he slips on vine-strewn rocks and plunges down a sandstone slope to land in a bed of leaf mould. He knows he’s lucky not to have broken an arm or a leg but his polaroids are shattered and his leg is grazed from knee to ankle. He limps down to the water’s edge and rinses it absentmindedly in saltwater. The next few days he wades through mud in search of crabs. He fishes in the shallows and searches for relief from the heat in rockpools and his graze begins to ulcerate. He keeps the worst of the festering at bay with his precious tube of Betadine and is careful from then on to wash his wounds only in freshwater. Even though the regular monsoon overcast spares him some of the glare, he feels the loss of his glasses. He often climbs into his swag at night with headaches and the feeling that his eyes have been scorched.
At rare low moments he takes comfort in sharpening his knife, in the simple, useful repetition of the stroke and the rhythm of blade on steel.
Now and then Fox feels agitated for reasons unknown. It causes him to throw stones or break tree limbs to no purpose. He runs along the beach to kick up sprays of shell like a mischievous child and he yells until his throat is sore. He still can’t believe that he’s managed to arrive here without a single book. He revisits every opportunity on the road, considers the poetry volumes crammed into old Bess’s caravan. He thinks wistfully of every novel he’s ever turned his nose up at or given up on, every hyphenated Englishman and triple-barrelled American who’s ever put him to sleep. Come home Gertrude Stein and Jean-Paul Sartre—all is forgiven. Fox would content himself with a phone book, a shopping list.
One afternoon he’s filleting fish and throwing the heads and backbones into the water when a pack of sharks glides in across the shallows. The tide is high and the water a little murky but he sees them clearly enough as they swim figure-eights at the shoreline, their double dorsal fins and high tails out of the water. He picks them as tawny nurses; their shovel-like heads are bronze and ochre and the way they swim is a kind of dance, a fluid movement from nose to tail. Out beyond them two sleeker sharks make passes. Lemon sharks. Skittish, aggressive, more the whaler type with all that lunging paranoia.
Fox throws out a few morsels and the sharks roll in a welter of spray to get at them. He drops hanks of skin and guts closer to shore and the lemon sharks bullock their way in so fast they wet him. The sight of it makes his heart thump. He drops his meal almost onshore and the sharks rush it in a wild scrum of fins and tails. Two sharks find themselves beached in all the mayhem and Fox gets down on his haunches and laughs as they writhe back into the water. He feeds them, applauds and taunts them until dark when he heads up to his camp facing a hungry night.
Next day the sharks return with the tide and the sight of them cheers him. They come back every day after that and he looks forward to their arrival. Despite his croc anxiety he cuts tidbits for them and teases them in closer until they’re snatching meat from his hands. They stand on their pectoral fins, heads clear of the water, and he strokes their bony, flat pates as they lunge forward. From camp he brings down his coil of rope and ties plate-sized fish heads to it to play tug-of-war. The bigger sharks haul him off his feet or drag him heels-first to the water’s edge before snaffling the prize or gnawing through the rope. Emboldened, they chase treats right up onto dry land and roll and writhe their way back down to water, and the games escalate until Fox is manhandling them and they’re bumping and passing him in the shallows. He loves the sport of it, the mad, reckless play, but it’s the bodily presence of them that he treasures most, the weight of them in his arms, against his legs, the holiness of their power, the carnal sociability of the buggers. Every day they come like a bouncing, bickering pack of dogs, and after they’re sated with food they tug on an empty vine until Fox laughs so hard he gets hiccups.
THE CYCLONE catches him by surprise. Preoccupied with shark play, he barely registers the two dark days of solid overcast which precede it. The afternoon of the third day is black but it feels no different from the usual diurnal build
-up until he notices fish jumping madly amongst the flooded mangroves and when he looks down the gulf he sees the irritable state of the water beyond the island’s lee. The air smells suddenly electric and his ears pop. A chill wind comes ripping through the treetops.
Fox carries the kayak higher up into the vegetation beyond the boabs. By the time he’s up on the ledge, securing what he can at camp, the air is deliciously cool. Huge black toadstool clouds bank up across the water and thunder rolls in. He moves his gear back in under the overhang and lashes his bough shelter down with the sorry remains of his rope. Lightning bleaches the trees and a waterspout rises like an angry white root from the dirt-coloured sea; it comes hissing and spitting across the water sucking small dark objects into the air. It bears down on him but then veers suddenly toward the mainland and is lost from view.
Before dark the wind comes from the sea and the island’s bluffs protect him from the worst of it, but as the light fades he feels it begin to angle in more from the west and waves begin to pound the beach. He doesn’t like the feel of the storm. Anxious about the precious kayak being washed or even blown away, he scrambles down to haul it all the way through the trees and up the rock terraces to camp. He shoves it back into the confines of the overhang as water begins to fall in sheets from the bluffs above.
In the early evening the bough shelter begins to break up. The wind screams in the vines and the fig tree seems to strain at its very roots. The rock face becomes a waterfall and during the night the rock above his head begins to seep. By morning there is a stream running through his little cave. It issues from the base of the bluff behind him and forces him up onto narrow niches where he crouches with his gear, unable to keep a candle alight.
The storm continues to intensify. The shriek of the trees terrifies him. The kayak butts against the rocks beneath his feet. Fox wraps himself in his sodden swag and tries not to think of his mother. He begins to hum to block out the sound. He blocks his ears with his fingers.