Pescador's Wake (4 page)

‘I know it's only two hours away, but I miss them.'

‘Of course. I used to see a lot of your father. He sold my fish out of his shop at Puerto del Buceo. You remember?'

María comes back with most of the bread still in her hand. ‘They weren't very hungry,' she says.

Rubén laughs. ‘For another day then,' he says, taking the bread and packing it back into the plastic bag.

‘Can we keep walking,
Mamá
?'

‘Si,
for a little while, then it's bedtime for you,' Julia says smiling at her daughter. ‘Take care, Rubén. We'd better keep going.'

The old man gives Julia's hand a squeeze and tips his hat. As Julia walks away, she thinks about what he said. If the stocks are so overfished, perhaps Carlos won't have the choice of going to sea for much longer, anyway. She whispers a small prayer for this trip to provide them with enough financial security for her husband to dry his feet and learn another trade. She could resume teaching, which she had reluctantly given up after María was born. With Carlos spending so long away, it had been impossible to balance work and motherhood.

Julia puts her hands on her stomach and rests for a moment. If this baby is also a girl, perhaps Carlos will have another reason to stay home. Maybe he won't feel the obligation to pass on the family tradition of fishing. Heaven knows there's nothing traditional about it any more. She thinks of Eduardo's wife and how different she is from herself. After two daughters, Virginia is hoping that, should she fall pregnant again, their next child will be a boy. A fisherman. ‘It's Eduardo's dream, to have a son,' she had said in a rare moment of candour when they were last together. ‘He longs to be able to pass on all that he knows. He just worries that there won't be enough fish left.'

Julia considers telephoning Virginia when she gets back to the apartment, but decides against it just as quickly. With few exceptions, their conversations are forced and short, as if most of the words are being held back. It occurs to Julia that she is no closer to Virginia now than when they first met as teenagers, Virginia already round with Eduardo's baby. It occurs to her, too, that most of the blame for their distance rests with herself: her inability to forgive Virginia for a crime she never even knew she had committed. No, she'll call Eduardo's wife only when she has news of the boat.

‘
Mamá,
can Sofía sleep over tomorrow night?' María says, interrupting Julia's thoughts.

‘We had her here just two nights ago,' Julia answers, resentful at the thought of having to share the precious
ensopado.
‘I'm sure Sofía's
mamá
will ask us to look after her again soon, anyway.'

Julia thinks of Francisco Molteni, Sofía's father and a senior fisheries manager at Uruguay's Department of Fisheries. He has called in so many times on his way home from work to collect his daughter that she almost regards him as a friend. It's something she could never say about his wife, Cecilia, who, Julia suspects, is wary—perhaps even jealous – of her more natural beauty. Cecilia has remained as cold and unyielding as a dead fish from the day they met outside their daughters' ballet school, which María no longer attends because of the expense. Perhaps, Julia considers, if this trip south goes well, María could re-enrol.

Francisco might know where Carlos is, it occurs to Julia. But for him to confess to her the
Pescador
's whereabouts, he would have to admit knowledge of its illegal operations. She suspects it's better to let him keep turning a blind eye, if that's what he's doing. For all Julia knows, Cecilia—who must overhear countless conversations between fisheries officials at her frequent dinner parties—might also know the truth about the
Pescador.
Perhaps she is taking advantage of the situation every time she brings Sofía over ‘to play' while she wines and dines or plays tennis with friends. If Julia refused to mind Sofia, she is sure that Cecilia would only have to ‘accidentally' tell one of her many media acquaintances what Carlos is up to and the government would have no choice but to prosecute.

‘Please,
Mamá.
Let me ask Sofía over.'

‘No, María. Come on, it's getting dark. See how the boats are turning their lights on?'

‘
Si.
Do you think
Papá
's boat has its lights on now?'

‘I'm sure it does,' Julia says, shivering at the thought of such small lights on a large dark ocean.

Margie Bates places the sable brush on the wet page and lets the watercolour work its magic. An ultramarine sky bleeds forth, driving clouds and specks of white that could be seabirds, perhaps albatrosses, over the Southern Ocean. She loves the way the paint does the job for her. She may will it to behave a certain way, or even tilt the page slightly, but she resists the urge to fuss. The best results are always when the colour runs free.

An ocean, rough hewn and dark, fans up into the sky with abandon and, in places, runs back down like rain. A small red flash of alizarin crimson disappears behind a watered-down stroke of Payne's gray that resembles a wave. It's her husband's boat, the
Australis.
‘Stop,' she tells herself. ‘Don't do any more.' The painting is finished. Anything else and the drama and freshness, best captured by a minimal use of paint, will be lost.

She peers into the wet surface as though it is the real scene. Her information on Dave is limited to what she hears on the radio and via the occasional satellite call from the ship, so she feels justified in conjuring up her own version of reality. Imagining it into being. She could phone Customs in Canberra but has decided to save those calls for a time when
she really needs them. At the moment, according to the media reports, the Australian vessel is safe.

Margie curses. Damn Dave for agreeing to a chase in seas that are even less hospitable than the darkest corners of her mind. Corners blackened by the death of her twenty-four-year-old son nearly two years ago in a car crash only a kilometre from their Hobart home. Dave was at sea when Sam borrowed his car. It was to have been a short drive into town with his best friend, William, to take advantage of a sale at an adventure-sports shop, but a P-plate driver ran a red light and ploughed into the driver-side door.

Margie attended the scene after receiving a mobile phone call from William. He had escaped with a broken collar bone, while Sam's life was teetering on the edge of freshly sheared metal that once belonged to his father's Ford Falcon. Margie was there, holding one of Sam's bloodied hands, when he died. She has pushed that memory away as much as she can. Compressed it into oblivion.

Finally, after many long, dark months, she is again allowing tiny beams of light to enter the windows of her mind, creating fleeting moments of illumination and acceptance. On a good day, she may even feel that Sam is still with her in the night sky or in a sunset, as corny as she knows that sounds. Times when she can convince herself that all living, or once living, things are still connected, and that everything is, in a sense, all right.

But she still cries herself to sleep at night, more often than she admits. When Dave is away, she holds the urn containing Sam's ashes, still unscattered, to her, sometimes under her shirt like an unborn baby, and lets herself weep. The grief is somehow easier to bear when her eyes have bled their salty water, and her body has heaved itself free of its deluge of sobs.

It takes a long time to grieve. A long time to forget the horrors of a death and remember all that you can of a life. To realise there is no going back, no flesh in the shape of that person any more. No last kiss or hug or word. A life is simply over, and it's this finality that is so hard to accept, or escape.

That's where painting helps. Margie keeps a small bottle of water, her favourite field brush and a watercolour pad in an old daypack of Sam's, to lose herself when the need arises. She walks along the cliff tracks that begin just metres from her house. There have been times when the cliffs have summoned her, and teased her with the ultimate release they offer. Occasions when her feet have travelled too close to the edge and the sky has promised to lift her like a bird. But she could never do that. Not to Dave. Not after seeing grief in his eyes once already.

Instead, she paints. Something will catch her eye, two eucalypt branches touching with the ease of lovers, or a yellow flower rooted lightly at the edge of a cliff, waving in the breeze despite its vulnerability. Signs of life. She might do a rough painted sketch and perhaps take a photograph, to be followed
by more detailed drawings at home, in the warmth of her study-cum-sewing room, with a cup of tea. But the field sketches often capture something that her studio paintings don't. A feeling that she can't describe in words is conveyed in a few spontaneous brush strokes. Some moments can't be improved upon.

It seems her best paintings are those she doesn't care too much about and just lets happen. For Margie, it's a bit like looking at the stars at night. The moment she focuses too closely on a star, it vanishes. She remembers the same thing happening when she played the piano in high school. Whenever she concentrated too hard on the music and the placement of her fingers, she made mistakes. When she removes herself slightly, her creative efforts are rewarded.

It's not that she doesn't get absorbed by her paintings – quite the opposite. She becomes spellbound. And it's a magic to which she surrenders happily. When she is painting, everything else ceases to exist.

She takes a sip of her tea and wonders if she has accidentally used it to wash her brush in. On a particularly intense painting day, she has been known to drink straight from the rinsing water itself. Only when she sees herself in the mirror later and observes the trace of pigment on her lips does she realise her mistake.

She tucks her sable brush behind her ear, unconcerned by the likely smear of colour through her salt-and-pepper hair.
She makes her hands into a tunnel and holds them up to her hazel eyes. By closing one eye and peering down the darkened corridor with the other, she can better see her art. The painting comes alive. It's a little trick she does when she wants to transport herself into the world she has created.

The boat moves, a wave falls, she feels the frosted wind and spray and is deafened by the barrage of ocean noise. Small slices of white paper break through the crimson paint of the
Australis
and the effect is like ice forming on the rails. She is pleased with the happy accident.

A jagged piece of white lunges off to the right of the boat, piercing its hull on the port side. It moves again, jutting out at her. Margie steps backward, dropping her hand-tunnel from her eyes. An iceberg.

‘Jesus!' Dave Bates slams the boat forward even harder and starts swinging the bow to starboard and away from what a moment ago in the fading, sodden light he took for a wave, but now realises is frozen water. A growler.

The ice appears to lunge for a gulp of air before diving beneath the ocean's ragged surface. To complicate matters, a spiralling low has descended, with gale-force southwesterly winds pushing up mountains of water that have travelled thousands of nautical miles with nothing in their way but the occasional iceberg and fishing boat.

Dave knows how perilous his position is. Hitting a growler in these conditions is every sea captain's worst fear. The
Australis,
while ice-strengthened, is no icebreaker. If the growler strikes the boat hard enough, it could puncture the hull and sink them before nightfall.

‘Where the hell did that come from?' Dave yells, but on a frigid sea it's a stupid question. He knows that with the approach of summer, the vast expanse of pack ice—the ring of solid sea around Antarctica—will have begun to melt. The edge will have started its retreat towards the cold comfort of the continent, and icebergs that had been frozen into the pack
will finally be let loose. Some bergs, he has heard, are so large that they form their own clouds as they exhale the air that was trapped inside them hundreds of thousands of years ago. Others, smaller and slyer, will be lying in wait under the waves, rising up only occasionally like submarines to survey their surrounds. Meeting one now is a sure sign the edge of the pack is only half a day away.

Dave veers the boat harder to starboard but it refuses to move against the storm. The winds gust up to eighty knots and knock the boat sideways into seas rising to more than twelve metres. ‘Christ!' This is as close as he has come to survival sailing. He tries to keep the boat headed into the weather to prevent it from broaching, but the waves push it back towards the indifferent mass of the growler. The sunken iceberg, having already made it this far from its glacial home, is in no hurry. It will take many months to leach its ancient freshwater into the surrounding salty soup.

Cactus appears at the wheelhouse door with a sleep crease down his left cheek and a thin smear of blood on his mouth.

‘Bit of a gale, Davo?' Cactus shouts over the back of his hand, as he applies pressure to his mouth. ‘Fuckin' knocked me out of me bunk.'

‘Thought you'd got into your make-up again,' Dave jokes without taking his eyes off the sea. ‘Dressing up for the growler.'

‘Shit. Where?'

‘Portside. Barely.'

Harry is at the door for the second time in half an hour. ‘What've we got?' The first mate is focusing hard on the radar but in these conditions there's no way to separate ice from the green field of wave scatter.

‘Growler,' Dave says through clenched teeth. ‘We're practically on top of it.'

The boat lifts on the starboard side with the force of a wave and is tipped towards the sunken berg.

‘Bloody hell, Dave, move 'er forward!' Cactus bellows.

A blow to the hull towards the stern throws Dave against the wheel. A coffee, which he'd placed hurriedly on the instrument table twenty minutes ago, spills across the back of his hand. It scalds, thanks to the wonders of insulated mugs. The boat swivels slightly, before slipping off the submerged iceberg.

‘Jesus Christ!' Cactus yells. ‘You tryin' to get us killed down 'ere. Go, go, go!'

In a break between waves, Dave pushes the boat into full throttle, before another gust hits. The
Australis
grinds forward and they're clear.

Dave grimaces at Cactus. ‘Go and check if we did any damage. As soon as this storm eases up, we'll head north and track the buggers from up there.'

‘And what d'you want me to do if we have sprung a leak? Stick me finger in the friggin' hole?' Cactus, not waiting for an
answer, leaves the wheelhouse with a grunt, and Dave looks back at the radar. Almost unbelievably, the foreign boat, which they had been gaining on, is moving further towards the pack ice and then disappears out of range, apparently on a death wish.

‘Stupid bloody fools,' Dave spits, cursing their brazenness. He knows that, legally, the chase has now been broken and the
Pescador
cannot be prosecuted. Surely he can make a case for not following them blindly into the ice. He didn't sign up for suicide. But he's not giving up without a fight, either. ‘Where do they think they're headed?'

‘God knows, but you're right not to follow them south,' Harry says calmly, squinting through the wheelhouse windows in the direction of the foreign boat. ‘Those bloody bureaucrats in Canberra wouldn't have a clue what we're dealing with here. Check out the size of this mongrel!'

Dave cranes his neck to see the headless wave towering above them, much of it out of view. He grips the wheel as the boat climbs, pivots and then drops through mid-air before pounding into the seas below. Over his shoulder, through the windows along the back wall, he watches the mountain of water recede. Metal heaves and groans, and somehow holds together.

There are another half-dozen such waves before Cactus is back in the wheelhouse. ‘Christ all fuckin' mighty! Enough's a bloody 'nough!'

‘Any damage?' Dave asks.

‘No, but buggered if I know how we avoided it!' Cactus's ruddy face, which Dave has long suspected is a product of his love affair with bourbon, bleaches with panic. ‘Just get us the hell out of here!'

Dave grunts as the
Australis
hits another trough. The coffee mug rolls against his feet, having emptied its guts on the floor, greasing the linoleum with its thin brown slick. Dave kicks the mug away.

‘Hell of a time to get yourself a hot drink, wasn't it? With that growler under us.'

‘Harry brought me the coffee ages ago. I didn't take my eyes off the bloody radar. What do you take me for?' Dave heads the boat straight into the guts of a wave. The
Australis
climbs and the men fall silent until they have made it over.

‘Shit!' Cactus shouts, as they bottom out in the trough.

‘We'd have been lucky to see that growler on the radar even in good conditions,' Dave continues. ‘You know that as well as I do.'

Cactus says nothing, and Dave recognises fear in his eyes. Come nightfall, the icebergs will be as good as invisible, until they're caught—too late—in the ship's lights.
It's some hours before conditions start to ease, and Dave can finally inch the boat northwest, away from the low-pressure system that created the southerly gale. It's a reprieve, but he knows there'll be another low soon enough. The vortexes of foul weather circle the continent like vultures. The trick is to stay either north or south of them. Harry indicates with a slight backward flick of his head that they have company. William, their youngest crew member, is at the wheelhouse door, his eyes wide as he surveys the sea, trying to read its complex language. Dave wonders if he did the right thing putting in a good word for Sam's best mate as trainee crew. He thinks back to how young William went off the rails after Sam's death. How, after gaining a reputation as a fine jackaroo on properties all over Australia, he threw it all away by getting drunk one night and trashing a farm. Dave had seen this trip as a chance to straighten the young bloke out. ‘What better classroom is there than the sea?' he'd said to Trish, William's mother. But Cactus has never thought it a good idea having a novice on board.

‘What was that God almighty bang a while back?' William asks.

‘What d'you bloody think?' Cactus's veins stick out of his neck like fingers under his skin. He is angrier than Dave has ever seen him. ‘We just had a cuddle with the coldest bloody mermaid this side of Antarctica. Her left tit's probably still pokin' up through your bunk. Why don't you go back to bed and feast on that till it's all over?'

William, visibly startled by the outburst, turns to leave the wheelhouse. Dave catches his eye and gives him a wink.

‘That was a bit rough,' Dave tells Cactus as he passes the searchlight over the ocean. The winds may have eased, but nightfall hasn't waited for the huge seas to subside. With the relentless hammering of the waves, the boat lurches from side to side.

‘Well, it doesn't take too many neurons to work out we've hit a berg!'

‘Give the boy a break,' Harry says. ‘It could've been a whale, or a sunken hull—'

‘Or a bloody mermaid,' Cactus jeers in Dave's direction. ‘We never should've taken him on. He's a friggin' liability, your surrogate son.'

It's typical of the man, Dave thinks, to launch a personal attack when he's feeling threatened. To fire hostile words ahead of any attempt at good judgment. He ignores him.

‘Any sightings of our foreign friends on the radar?' Harry asks.

Dave knows what he's up to. He and the first mate know that when tempers flare at sea, the best strategy is to get everyone focused back on the job at hand. If there's to be a fight, it can wait until they're on dry land. Right now you could cut the air with a knife.

‘Nope. They're well and truly gone,' Dave says. He imagines the pack to the south of them—vast chunks of ice
rallying for supremacy like feuding tectonic plates. Only last year a German freighter, experienced in Southern Ocean transport, was crushed in the pack, all lives lost.

‘It's no bloody wonder a couple of pirate boats go missing every season.' Harry shakes his head.

Dave thinks of the crew aboard the
Pescador,
no doubt hired as little more than slave labour by some foreign owner with his feet up in a comfy pad somewhere nice and warm, maybe Spain; all the owners seem to come from there. He imagines the crew's fatigue, their hunger, their smell. ‘It'll be on my head if we push the poor buggers to their deaths.'

‘And what about us?' Cactus pipes up. ‘The suits up there in Canberra-land wouldn't 'ave a clue what an iceberg was if they had one stuck up their proverbials! And
if
the rotten illegals do reappear, d'you reckon Canberra'll call the naval frigate back from Timor for the boarding?'

Dave remains silent as Cactus's derisive snort hangs in the air like a sick joke. Finally, he responds. ‘Like I said before, we'll see what back-up's on offer, but for now we pursue the boat for as long as we can.' Dave hopes he has managed to conceal his own cynicism. ‘They'll have to head north at some point, and we'll be here when they decide to reappear.'

‘A wild goose chase! Our lucky day,' Cactus sneers. ‘It's not as though it's the first bloody boat to take somethin' for nothin' down 'ere. There'll be another ten pirate boats rippin' the guts out of what's left of the fishery while we've got our
backs turned playin' politics. It's just not…substainable what they're doing.'

Dave, quietly amused by Cactus's attempt at ‘sustainable', maintains his focus. For now he's just relieved the wind has dropped, its monstrous howl having paused to catch its unholy breath.

‘Righto, Cactus. Pull your prickles in and grab the helm, mate. I'm going down for a kip while things are relatively calm.' Dave pats Cactus on the back a little too hard and notices the acrid smell of nervous sweat. ‘Harry, you right to stay here for a bit?'

The first mate agrees.

‘You're worth your weight in hot cocky poo,' Dave jests before climbing down the stairs from the wheelhouse. He passes the officers' deck where his cabin is located, and descends another flight of stairs to the crew's accommodation. There are twenty-one men on board, but only half are in their bunks. The others are out on deck removing polar ice from the rails. It's a constant job, but critical. Boats can capsize under the weight of frozen water.

Dave steps into William's shared cabin, which welcomes him with the stench of stale wet-weather gear and a recently used toilet. William emerges from the adjoining bathroom and makes his way warily to his bunk, not a mermaid's tit in sight. The smell in the room suggests he has probably just had a bout of diarrhoea, the kind that strikes when raw nerves
turn bowels to water. William shivers as he lifts the bed clothes up over his face.

‘It'll all have blown over by morning, kiddo,' Dave says.

‘I hope so,' William's voice groans. ‘I don't think my stomach can take much more of this. There's nothing left to vomit up or shit out.' He sticks out his head and Dave sees how pale he has turned.

‘Well, I wasn't going to say anything, but I'm not sure how much more we can take of your stomach, either!' Dave laughs, trying to lighten the mood. ‘Nobody light a match.'

William's roommates chuckle quietly to themselves. ‘I thought we'd sprung a gas leak,' one of them guffaws.

‘That's enough now,' Dave says before continuing quietly to William. ‘Actually, when I said it'd all blow over, I meant that nonsense before with Cactus. He's a stupid old coot. Can't help himself. Unfortunately I can't promise we won't strike more bad weather, but we're not going any further south, so I reckon we've seen the worst of it. It's just that the seas take a while to get the message the storm's over.'

‘Okay,' William says, again covering his head. ‘Thanks.'

Dave reaches his cabin and crawls into his bed. As soon as he closes his eyes, Sam is there, laughing and joking. ‘Come on, Dad, nothing a hot bath won't fix.' It's one of Margie's lines. Her version of a hot tea to fix all ills. Sam and Dave had used it on many occasions, normally with a tinge of black humour and associated with some grisly injury—a slipped screwdriver,
once even a saw, when working on the boat or on one of the investment properties in need of a makeover—or to cheer themselves up when catches were poor the few times Sam accompanied his father to sea. It occurs to Dave that he hasn't heard Margie say it for a while. She's still not herself—hasn't been since Sam died.