Wildlight (11 page)

Dad was seated at the table, dressed in a good shirt. ‘Where were you?’ he said quietly. ‘We were worried sick. I went down to the lighthouse. You’ve been gone for hours.’

‘Walking,’ she said. ‘Just away.’

‘Please tell us next time you’re going to disappear like that.’ His disappointment was worse than if he’d been angry. ‘I did the weather.’

‘Thanks.’ She felt meek.

‘And you missed your radio session with the tutor. I apologised on your behalf.’

Her mother set a casserole dish upon a mat and turned to go. She wrinkled her nose. ‘Go and wash your hands please, change your clothes. You reek of mutton-bird.’

Dad looked defeated and old. Steph felt overwhelmed. She hugged her father. ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Dad.’

‘Oh, Steph.’ Her father studied her, his halting voice, his eyes slate grey. ‘We’re all sorry. More than you can know.’

The sou’-westerly doused the wheelhouse with spray. The engine farted and spluttered, ready to stall on them again. ‘
Slut
,’ Frank snapped. As if fearful of his temper the motor surged into a roar. ‘That’s my darlin’.’

Dirty fuel, Frank had claimed last week. Now it was air in the fuel line, but bleeding the lines before they’d left the shelter of Rocky Bay hadn’t fixed the problem. Too cheap to have the engine looked at in Hobart before they’d started out. Tom knew some of the short cuts Frank took at the end of a season, arrangements he made with certain mechanics and boat engineers. In kind, the preferred form of payment: a sack of undersize crays, fish from someone else’s pots. Worst of all a catch of berried females, the platelets beneath their tails clustered with eggs. Why fork out ten grand to the boatyard when your papers could be signed for less?

Maatsuyker’s light blinked. Tom saw the lights of the house. He’d never get the dinghy ashore to visit Stephanie. In the morning he’d call her on the radio. To the west, broken threads of scarlet had deepened into night. Sheet lightning scored the underbellies of thunderheads bullying their way across the sky, puffed up for fight. The caps of waves tore off into scraps streaked white across the water. The
Perlita Lee
struggled for control as she crabbed up a wave. Frank gripped the wheel as she skittered down the other side and plunged into a trough. The swell was running five metres. ‘It’s not worth ten pots,’ he said to Frank.
Gale eater
, Bluey MacIntyre once called Frank.
Your brother’s got a death wish.
All week in Hobart Tom had wanted to get back down here. Now he wished they’d stayed in town. ‘Let’s come back for them when the engine’s sorted.’ Tom didn’t care that he was pleading before his brother and Habib.

‘Not at forty bucks a kilo.’

Frank swung the wheel hard to round the Needles. The water turned into a maelstrom of waves fit to knock each other out. The ocean felt wrong. Frank swore. The
Perlita Lee
charged over a crest and smacked hard onto the belly of a trough—the slam jolted Tom’s spine. The boat came to a stop. A wave bucketed toward them, a surge that looked taller than the boat. Tom watched in a trance. The roll of water caught them on their hind, punched them sideways, the curl of the wave breaking over the gunnel and dumping a ton of water across the back deck. The vessel lurched, the stern shunted down beneath the extra weight of water. The back half of the boat looked like a swimming pool of bubble bath, the scuppers not equipped to drain such volume before a new wave pushed them under. The corner of the gunnel was flush with ocean. Too much water to even get to the tank boards to open the well. They were gone. They were dead. Tom looked at craypots and orange buoys, a tangle of ropes: everything afloat behind the wheelhouse.

He heard the engine splutter. He held his breath. Habib gripped the railing. Tom looked out at a swell that raced toward them. Part of him wanted it. All his imaginings that soured his dreams and left him drowning in the ocean, nightmares from which he struggled to wake. This was escape. The engine coughed and heaved. The world turned slow. He pictured bronze-skinned women in rolled bark canoes. Tom was amongst them, diving for shellfish, kicking down and down, lungs starved of breath and bursting for air and how could any human, no matter how good they were, ever make it back up to the surface? He saw his brother’s forehead beaded in sweat. In Frank’s blanched face, Tom imagined his father at the end, lungs choked of air. Frank caught his look. His brother swore and jammed his hand hard against the throttle. Habib stood owl-eyed. The engine chugged with life and the boat inched forward, dragging itself like a clubbed seal, the back half rendered useless.
Come on.
Tom’s heart pounded. He gripped the handhold, willing the boat to move. Even laden with water the vessel lifted on the swell. Behind them two waves collided; water rained down on the wheelhouse roof. The
Perlita Lee
slid away, the water held in the stern cascading down toward the bow. A wall of water pushed against the wheelhouse door, ran in beneath, across Tom’s feet and down the steps into the galley. The bulk of it poured by outside.

He watched it spew out through scuppers like a strainer. He watched their colander of boat purge itself of water. He felt her pull away.

Tom blinked to make sense of it. A second chance. The last wave should have sunk them.

‘Jesus fuck.’ Frank’s relief sounded girlish.

Tom couldn’t talk. He sat with his gut in spasm, his limbs trembling, his mind in vivid replay. Tom had welcomed death, a convoluted logic that meant he’d never have to work for Frank again. Tom was an idiot. He didn’t want to die. Out there in the ocean he wouldn’t stand a chance.

A deep guttural rumble—thunder right above them—put Tom’s skin on edge. He pulled his eyes away from saturated carpet, his brother’s sodden shoes. Beside him Habib stood in a kind of trance.

‘Jesus wept.’ Frank saw his Stormy Seas lifejacket worn by Habib. ‘The going gets tough, the rats abandon ship. That the way it is, Hab? Ready to rob the skipper of his last means of survival?’ Frank’s voice cracked. He reminded Tom of a wallaby spooked by the headlights. His brother was afraid and he was angry with the world at being made to feel so. ‘Might be the way things are where you come from, mate. You’re in a civilised country now.’ Frank was a beleaguered vessel in heavy seas, clawing up the back of a wave to regain control. It was attitude that got you through. ‘Who’s your employer, mate?’ Frank poked his finger at Habib’s chest. ‘Who’s your sponsor for your residency? Or maybe you don’t give a shit if you and your knocked-up missus get shipped back home?’ Frank gained vigour and strength in seeing Habib falter. He lunged ahead. ‘Two more years you’re on this boat, shithead.’ Tom hated his brother. He was the personification of every bully Tom had known. Frank raised his voice above the din, the wheelhouse roof thrumming with rain, the windows a pattern of watery pins ricocheting off glass. ‘Good thing you got your float coat zipped up, brother. The prick’d be eyeing that off as well.’

Habib spoke evenly to Frank. ‘We passed beside life end.’ He gestured to the heavens. ‘We leave now. I ask you.’ It came as a command. Hab held Frank’s glower, he kept his head raised. Tom saw in Hab’s defiance a quiet dignity, a glimmer of a former self that Habib Yılmaz had been forced—by circumstance, by striving for a different life—to set aside. Your real self, it might be buried for a time but it couldn’t be completely quashed. Not even by Frank.

Habib gave Tom gumption. He stood head to head with Frank. He wasn’t someone’s little brother any more. He was as physically strong, as broad across the shoulders from all the lifting. ‘You heard him, Frank. Give it away. We come back for ’em tomorrow.’

Frank’s hands tightened on the wheel, pit bull terrier that he was. But then he swung the boat around. ‘Cowards, the pair of you. Midnight. Take it or leave it.’

Hab held Tom’s eye. Tom caught the silent thanks.

*

Barely hours enough to find shelter and anchor, change out of wet clothes, mop up the worst of the water, heat a tin of soup before upping anchor and back out in it. But the worst had passed, the wind had shifted. The pots were now protected. Tom and Habib worked side by side. Tom threw out the grappling iron to snag the line between the double buoys. He wound the line around the turnstile and started up the pot hauler. The first pot tipped against the gunnel; seawater cascaded from the woven basket.

The fishermen across Bass Strait and over in the west used plastic cages, throwaway things without a sense of history. Each of these pots had been crafted from tea-tree, most by Frank, the newer ones, the bark still on, by Tom himself. It was the single part of working on the boat that brought Tom peace—producing something tangible and good, holding its weight and strength within his hands. He could tell you which track he’d driven down, which tree among a stand of good trees he’d looked over and assessed. He knew now the effort in preparing and steaming the branches, the strength and skill it took to round them into shape. Once the bark peeled away, six months or so, the pots were seasoned, the better for catching crays. With good care they’d get seven years from Tom’s new pots. Frank looked after his gear, he’d give his brother that.

Tom slid the pot, heavy with crays, onto the steel platen beside the hauler. Even the storm had played its part, the swirl and current enticing crays from darkened crevices in through the neck of the pot toward the promise of a feed. They crawled in and out as they pleased. If Frank had left the pots till morning as Tom had wanted, the bait would be gone, with it a bumper catch. Tonight’s haul was the reddest of red crays, the kind you only caught in shallow water: these fish were gold.

Habib used callipers to measure borderline fish from the horn along the carapace. He sorted crays by size and sex. You were only meant to take the males. Hab switched out the bait in the pot then waited on the cue from Frank. His brother manoeuvred the boat to within a length from the cliff. There wasn’t a skipper behind the wheel, not even Bluey MacIntyre, as deft as Frank. He switched gears between idle and reverse, kept the revs up to nudge the boat in, drawing back to counteract the swell. Frank’s eye didn’t waver from the mark on the GPS yet he somehow tracked the depth sounder, positioning the boat precisely. Frank gave the signal and Habib released the baited pot. Their boat backed out before line and buoys had finished racing out.

The location marks were recorded in the book and saved in the GPS. Those marks were a measure of your time at sea. Frank could sketch a map of submarine ledges and bomboras as clearly as the rocks above the water. Frank, Bluey, any of the good skippers: they knew where a ridge began and where it dropped away. According to the Law of Frank, the ocean wasn’t everyone’s to use. Frank had come to think of certain patches as his and his alone.

Tom held the crayfish by its head and horns, careful not to bend or snap the feelers. A damaged fish paid a fraction of its worth. Grab the fish too far down the carapace and its tail would snap against your fingers until you dropped it on the deck. Take it by the legs and chances were one would snap right off—Tom had seen them drop at will.

A cray could shed its shell and regenerate another, legs and all.
It has to
, he’d explained when Hab first started on the boat.
It has to change its shell to grow
. He’d shown Hab the soft new shell—barely more than membrane—formed beneath the toughened carapace. Language with Hab had been a challenge then but Hab had understood when they’d caught a cray whose old shell slid away in his hands. Tom had plunged the cray into water and they’d watched it swell before their eyes, the exposed flesh absorbing water and expanding a fifth again in size.
The new shellers are too fragile for export
, he’d answered Hab’s questions.
We sell them on the local market. They’re our bread and butter.
Tom had held out the fish for Hab to touch the flimsy shell.
Two or three months and it’ll toughen up.

Every year, a new skin?
Hab had asked.

Many times a year when they’re small
.
Right through till they’re mature. Those huge ones you’ll sometimes see, the old men of the sea, they’re dozens of years old. They reckon they moult every three, four years.

Tom opened the stern hatch and placed each legal cray down into the well where ocean water circulated. The fish would cling to the grates, fed and monitored until they reached Hobart’s wharf. Some were flown in tanks to Asia, others packed in straw and chilled. They’d live three days like that, enough to reach some swanky restaurant in London or be set on display at a Tokyo sashimi bar. Live export.
From pot to plate
, the slogan went. That’s where the money was.

Tom stacked the females and undersized in a separate plastic bin, ready for Frank to deal with. The smallest he chucked back into the ocean.
Live another day.

For ten pots it was a haul they’d talk about for weeks—premium crays, illegal extras that all up would fetch enough to make the month’s repayment on the loan and keep Frank wife’s Cheryl, who managed the books, entertained and clothed. Tom and Hab would get their percentage of the catch, no arguments with Frank over extra cash for keeping hush.

The vessel-to-vessel transfers happened in the dead of night, arranged by Frank or Cheryl back in town ahead of time. They’d choose some secluded cove away from other boats. Tom would creep up in the thick of night to drop the fenders and wait. He felt like a wary nocturnal animal crouched there on the deck. He hardly caught sight of a face or voice before the exchange took place and the boat retracted into night.
We’re not plundering the ocean
, Frank said.
It doesn’t make a shit of difference when it’s just a few fish undersized.
Once Tom had believed his brother, chucking away Association newsletters, disputing falling numbers;
like climate change, scaremongering by the greenies and politicians to make life harder for the working man.

A year ago Tom had thought himself too young, powerless to take a stand. This was Frank’s domain, all of it his brother’s call. But for every undersize fish Tom stacked in that bin, for every berried female whose harvest of eggs he scoured from her tail and hosed overboard, for every note of ill-gotten cash he shoved into his wallet or added to his savings in the bank, he felt burdened with unease. He slid the bin of undersized into the concealed compartment. He was as culpable as Frank. They were pirates and thieves wreaking havoc on the future. They took and took and never gave back.
Perlita Lee
—even the boat was a desecration of their parents’ good names.