Blueback (2 page)

Abel caught the bus into school next morning. He kept Blueback to himself, a secret from the rest of the world. The school bus rattled along the Longboat Bay road, spitting gravel and raising dust until it reached the highway.

‘Gettin' any fish out there?' called Merv the driver.

‘A few,' said Abel.

Merv laughed. ‘You Jacksons have been sayin' that for a century. Ha, ha, a few. You
always
get a few.'

They picked up kids from farms along the highway and the school day began.

All day Abel daydreamed about Blueback. He wondered how old that fish must be to have grown to such a size. Just imagine all the things he'd seen! All the creatures that had come and gone around him all those years, the boats and people and time that had passed out there at Robbers Head. Even the reef would have changed in that time.

Abel knew that if you cut down a karri tree you could see its age by the growth rings in the timber. You could even tell the changes in seasons, see the droughts and the good years written into its heart. People spoke to each other. They told stories and remembered. But a fish was different. All its years were secret, a mystery. He wondered if a fish even remembered. When a fish died, did all those years just vanish? Abel thought about it for hours. He got into trouble with the teacher for daydreaming again. He was given a hundred lines:

But after fifty lines or so he went back to thinking about Blueback and never actually finished. The teacher sent him home with a hundred more.

After school Abel collected the eggs and changed the ducks' water. The ducks swam in an old pink bathtub. Their water went greeny-black after a few days and stank to high heaven. Bailing it out was a messy job but he liked to hose the ducks down after the bath was refilled. They stood with their chests out as he drilled them with hosewater. They looked like silly fat businessmen in white suits. They shook their heads like bankers.

When his mother finished fuelling up the generator they climbed into their wetsuits and headed out to see Blueback.

The old fish scooted in circles as they dived into the clear deep. It was almost as though he was waiting for them. He came in close as they reached the bottom. Abel stretched out and touched him under the chin. Blueback's eyes rolled, watching him. His fins vibrated. Abel felt the enormous weight of the fish's body as it brushed him. His mother floated nearby, her hair like kelp above her.

Up and down they dived, stretching every lungful of air, while Blueback hovered around, checking them out. In the end, Abel found he could hold out a hand to Blueback's big blunt snout while the fish pushed him backwards through the water. It was nerve-wracking at first because Blueback was strong enough to crush him against the reef or even grab his arm and drag him over the dark drop-off where the water went all hazy, deep as deep. But the boy and the fish fooled about safely in silence, back and forward, familiar as old friends.

Abel rode home in the boat with his head buzzing.

By the open fire Abel did his homework. One day, he decided, I'll study fish until I know what they think. I'll become an expert.

He looked up at the mantelpiece and the old photo of his father. Abel didn't really remember him. He died when Abel was two years old but the bay and the garden and the house were like a memory of him. Abel saw his mother as a memory of him. Everything she did seemed to have something of his father about it – the way she was with boats and motors, her tough working hands.

Abel knew she remembered his father every day. Near the orchard there was an old peppermint tree with a deep fork in it. His mother kept a candle there and some pearl shells and a dolphin he once carved from driftwood. Some days she stayed up at that tree for hours. Crying sometimes, thinking, remembering.

Abel's father had been a pearl diver. Every year he went north for the pearling season. He came back with the year's money and swore he would never go back. It was boring work, he said. But he always went back. And then one year a tiger shark took him. The crew of the lugger pulled in his air hose to find no one at the end of it. They found his fins on the murky bottom of Roebuck Bay but his body was never recovered.

As well as wondering what fish thought, Abel also wondered what dead people thought. Both things were mysteries; they tied his mind up in knots but he never gave up wondering.

Every day he could, Abel swam with Blueback at Robbers Head. Some days the fish didn't show. Other days he was nervy and distant, but often he was simply bold, even mischievous. Abel kept him a secret but as spring became summer it wasn't safe to keep it to himself.

Every year boats came into Longboat Bay on their way around the coast. They were a long way from any harbour. Yachts pulled in to shelter from bad weather, sometimes, but mostly their visitors were tuna boats and sharkfishermen who anchored for a rest overnight and came ashore to say hello and trade supplies. Some skippers let their crews snorkel off the boats to spear fish or catch crays. And every year Mad Macka the abalone diver worked his licensed patch around the coast. Sooner or later someone was bound to run into Blueback and that someone might be quick enough to spear him. Groper were good food; they fetched a big price at the market. The old fish was wily, but a good spearfisher might put a shaft through him if he was patient.

So that season as boats came and went, Abel's mother told each skipper that there was a big blue off Robbers Head, a monster fish they should leave alone. Fishing people respected Dora Jackson. They talked about her with a kind of awe. They took notice of what she said. When she told Mad Macka he smiled and said he knew all about it. They needn't worry, he said, old Blueback was safe with him.

‘That fish!' said Macka. ‘Cheekiest fish I ever saw. Steals everything. Eat the wetsuit offa ya if ya stayed still long enough.'

So Blueback stayed on at Robbers Head without being hassled. Skippers talked about him now and then and stories grew about the kid and the fish. Abel took sailors and deckhands out to see him. He figured his secret was safer out in the open but he wondered if one day Blueback might be so well-known that some deadhead would come out there just to kill him and make themselves famous for five minutes. Abel knew all about fishing for food but he couldn't understand people who wanted photos of themselves beside huge dead fish, fish killed for fun. One season grew into another and Abel grew old enough to take the dinghy out on his own. He swam with Blueback whenever work and the weather permitted. Some days he collected rock crabs on shore and fed them to the gluttonous old fish. Crabs were clearly his favourite. Just the hint of crab in the water sent Blueback into a darting, shivering frenzy.

Some afternoons Abel sat on the jetty to watch Macka work his way across the bay. His yellow boat throbbed with the sound of the air compressor. From the compressor the orange hose coiling out into the water took air down to the seabed where Macka worked out of sight, pulling abalone, taking a few from each seam, leaving plenty behind for next year.

‘It's not safe out there alone,' said Abel's mother. ‘Not like that, using a hookah on your own with all that abalone meat in the water. He should have an offsider. He's crazy.'

‘Guess that's why they call him Mad Macka,' said Abel.

It was a lonely sight, that was for sure. An empty boat drifting, tugged along by an invisible diver at the end of an airhose. Nothing moving on deck except that flapping blue and white diver's flag. A few years ago an abalone diver had been bitten in half by a great white shark further along the coast. Divers usually worked in pairs for safety. But Macka didn't want an offsider; he liked it on his own. Every season Macka came, Dora Jackson made the diver welcome in the bay, but Abel often saw his mother shudder apprehensively at the sight of that lonely yellow boat on the bay.

One season, the year Abel turned twelve, he came out of the vegetable garden with an armful of sweet corn and, looking out across the bay, he realised that Macka's boat was silent. It had been thrumming all morning and now it hung there quiet on the still sea. The orange hose was out, Macka was underwater but the compressor had stopped. Abel knew it meant something terrible. He dropped his bundle of corn.

‘Mum!'

The pair of them raced to their dinghy and tore across the bay. They tied up alongside the abalone boat. Abel's mother stripped off her jeans and jumped aboard. She snatched up Macka's spear gun and opened his toolbox.

Abel watched anxiously as she fitted a power head to the spear. Her hands shook a little.

‘Toss me my fins and mask,' she said.

Abel threw them across. Macka's boat was eerie. The only sound was the crackle and flap of the flag.

‘He's out of fuel,' said his mother.

That could only mean two or three things and none of them meant Macka would be coming up alive. Abel looked at the powerhead his mother screwed onto the spear. One of those could blow a hole in the side of a boat. But could it stop a great white?

‘Stay in the boat,' said his mother. ‘Do
not
get in the water, Abel.'

She plunged into the water and Abel watched her follow Macka's airhose down into the steely deep. Her red fins flashed like a siren light. Abel's heart beat so hard it hurt. He'd never seen someone dead before. Oh God, he thought, don't let a shark take
her
too. Abel couldn't imagine life without his mother.

A few seconds later Dora Jackson spouted beside the boat. She unscrewed the powerhead and passed the speargun up. She pulled off her fins and climbed the ladder into Macka's boat.

‘Was it a shark?'

His mother began to pull on the hose. ‘No. There isn't a mark on him. I think he's had a heart attack. Maybe he just couldn't swim back to the surface. Poor man probably just lay on the bottom helpless until his compressor ran out of fuel. Get a grapple, love.'

‘So he's dead?'

She heaved on the hose and it coiled behind her. ‘Yeah, mate. He's drowned. He's gone.'

Abel jumped across and helped her haul poor Macka in. A cloud of gulls hung over the two boats. The sky was wide and blue above them and the bay was quiet, so quiet.

The year he turned thirteen Abel Jackson went away to school. Longboat Bay was a long way from towns big enough for their own high school so he had to live in a hostel in a big town inland.

On his last day home he planned to swim with Blueback. He wanted to find a few juicy crabs and feed the old fish and fool around with him a good long while. But the sea was up, huge, jagged swells thundered against the coast, and it was impossible to go out on the bay. So he spent his last morning chopping wood glumly for his mother. He split karri blocks for two hours and stacked them in the woodshed. When he was finished he walked up through the grapevines and the orchard and into the national park that surrounded the bay.

Birds chattered and flashed from tree to tree. The ground was heavy with bark and leaf litter. High above him the wind groused in the crowns of the karris. The flaky trunks swallowed him up like a noisy mob. From high on the ridge he looked down at the bay. Out at Robbers Head the sea heaved itself at the cliffs. Towers of white-water lifted in the air. Inside the bay was a rash of foamy whitecaps and wind-streaks. Waves smashed against the jetty. The dinghy was hauled up on the beach and Macka's abalone boat still stood neglected on its trailer.

At the house he saw the flap of poultry, splashes of colour on the washing line and smoke angling from the house chimney. His whole life lay down there; everything he knew. He didn't want to leave it but there was no way around the fact – he had to go. He'd just have to count the weeks till the holidays.

On his way back down, Abel stopped at the peppermint tree his mother used as a kind of shrine to his father. The tree was stout and sinewy and its thin leaves were fragrant. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a piece of craggy white coral. He laid it in the tree fork with all the other bits and pieces, pressed his cheek against the rough bark of the trunk and went down to where his mother was beginning to pack the truck.

I'll wither up and die away from this place, he thought as they bumped off down the gravel road. This is my place. This is where I belong.

Abel didn't wither and die but he didn't care much for the big town he moved to. It was a long way inland and surrounded by wheat as far as the eye could see. The land was flat. All the trees were long gone, bulldozed and burnt to make way for croplands, and nothing seemed to move out there now except the endless paddocks of wheat-ears. Abel felt hemmed in. Everyone bunched up together in town as though they felt it too. Abel never seemed to be alone. He went to school in a crowd and he came back to the hostel in a crowd. Everywhere he went there were doors slamming and shoes clacking and a competing roar of voices. Even in his bed at night his dormitory was full of coughs and cries and the clanking of pipes.

Abel felt surrounded. He did his best to cope. He worked hard at school and made friends. New things and fresh faces came his way but here, where everyone seemed to move faster and bustle along, time passed more slowly than it ever did back at Longboat Bay. Home throbbed in him like a headache.

Only in his sleep did Abel feel free. In his dreams Blueback loomed up at him out of the blurry dark. The old fish's eye was like a turning moon. In his sleep Abel swam and remembered and saw things he needed, things he wanted to see, and some things he didn't expect.

Once in his dreams, Abel swam with Blueback down into a deep crevice where the water was cold and lit palest blue. He held onto the fish's fins and let himself be taken. At the bottom of the rock shaft was a great gathering. Abel saw men in uniform, dead sailors floating in the current. Their eyes were open and their brass buttons gleamed. They hung there like starfish. Blueback led him past them to more drowned people. He saw little girls with lace dresses and drifting hair. He saw young men in sea boots with puffy white hands. And right at the end he found Mad Macka in his wetsuit beside the ragged body of Abel's father.

Blueback hovered over them. Abel looked down on his father, at the ragged hole in his side, at the grey skin of his cheeks. He was a young man still. No matter how old Abel grew, his father would always be thirty-two. His eyelids were pearly. He looked peaceful, asleep. Abel reached down to touch. He wanted to take his father back with him but Blueback finned upwards, keeping him out of reach. Abel lunged but the fish drew away and the boy saw his father's body grow small as they swam up through plankton and currents to the warmer, safer water of the surface.

Abel woke from that dream crying. The dormitory was dim. There was no one he could go to, no one to tell.

His mother wrote him letters and sent coral and shells. She mailed him a dried seahorse and a starfish. Now and then Abel picked up a turban shell from his bedside locker and held it to his ear. He knew it wasn't really the sea he heard, but he listened and let himself believe. He closed his eyes to school and the smell of dirty socks and the sight of the wide, flat land outside his window, and saw the ocean.