The Bat (18 page)

Harry laughed.

“I’m just quoting Andrew,” Toowoomba said. “Unbelievably, he got in despite his record and advanced age—maybe because the authorities wanted more Aboriginal police officers. So Andrew had his hair cut, removed the ring from his ear, dropped the chemicals, and you know the rest. Of
course, he’s a no-hoper as far as climbing up the career ladder is concerned, but he’s reckoned to be one of the best detectives in the Sydney force nevertheless.”

“Still quoting Andrew?”

Toowoomba laughed. “Naturally.”

From the stage bar they could hear the finale of the evening’s drag show and “Y.M.C.A.,” the Village People version, a surefire winner.

“You know a lot about Andrew,” Harry said.

“He’s a bit like a father to me,” Toowoomba said. “When I moved to Sydney I had no plans, other than to get as far away from home as possible. I was literally picked up off the street by Andrew who started training me and a couple of other boys who had also lost their way. It was Andrew who made me apply to university as well.”

“Wow, another university-qualified boxer.”

“English and History. My dream is to teach my own people one day.” He said that with pride and conviction.

“And in the meantime you knock the shit out of drunken seamen and country bumpkins?”

Toowoomba smiled. “You need capital to make your way in this world, and I have no illusions about earning anything as a teacher. But I don’t just box amateurs; I’ve put my name forward for the Australian championships this year.”

“To get the title Andrew didn’t?”

Toowoomba raised his glass to a toast. “Maybe.”

After the show the bar began to thin out. Birgitta had said she had a surprise for Harry, and he was impatiently waiting for closing time.

Toowoomba was still sitting at the table. He had paid, and was now twirling his beer glass. Harry had an indefinable feeling that Toowoomba wanted something; he didn’t only want to tell old stories.

“Have you got any further with the case you’re here for, Harry?”

“I don’t know,” Harry answered. “Now and then you feel like you’re searching with a telescope and the solution’s so close to you it’s no more than a blur on the lens.”

“Or you’re standing upside down.”

Harry watched him drain his glass.

“I have to go, but let me tell you a story first which might help to redress your ignorance of our culture. Have you heard about the black snake?”

Harry nodded. Before he’d left for Australia he’d read something about reptiles you should be wary of. “If memory serves the black snake is not very impressive in size, but all the more venomous for that.”

“That’s right, but according to the fable it wasn’t always like that. A long time ago, in the Dreamtime, the black snake was innocuous. However, the iguana was poisonous and much bigger than it is today. It ate humans and animals, and one day the kangaroo called all the animals to a meeting to find a way to overcome the ferocious killer—Mungoongali, the great chief of the iguanas. Ouyouboolooey—the black snake—the fearless, little snake immediately accepted the task.”

He continued in a low, calm voice while keeping his eyes fixed on Harry.

“The other animals laughed at the little snake and said they would need someone bigger and stronger to fight Mungoongali. ‘Just you wait and see,’ said Ouyouboolooey, and slithered off to the iguana chief’s camp. When he got there he greeted the huge brute and said he was only a little snake, not particularly good to eat, just searching for a place where he could be left in peace, away from the other animals that teased and tormented him. ‘Make sure you’re not in my way or it will be the worse for you,’ Mungoongali said, not appearing to pay much attention to the black snake.

“The next morning Mungoongali went hunting, and Ouyouboolooey slithered after him. There was a man sitting
by a campfire. He had hardly blinked before Mungoongali had run at him and smashed his head with one powerful, well-aimed blow. Then the iguana put the man onto its back and carried him to its camp, where it unloaded the poison sac and started to consume the fresh human meat. As quick as lightning, Ouyouboolooey jumped out, took the poison sac and disappeared into the bushes. Mungoongali chased after the little snake, but couldn’t find him. The other animals were still in the meeting when Ouyouboolooey returned.

“ ‘Look at this,’ he screamed and opened his jaws for all to see the poison sac. All the animals flocked around him and congratulated him on saving them from Mungoongali. After the others had gone home, the kangaroo went over to Ouyouboolooey and said he should spit the poison into the river so that they could sleep safe and sound in the future. But Ouyouboolooey answered by biting the kangaroo, who fell to the ground, paralyzed.

“ ‘You’ve always despised me, but now it’s my turn,’ said Ouyouboolooey to the dying kangaroo. ‘As long as I have this poison you will never be able to come near me again. None of the other animals will know I still have the poison. They will think that I, Ouyouboolooey, am their savior and protector while I avenge myself on them one by one in my own good time.’ With that he pushed the kangaroo into the river and it sank from view. He himself slithered back into the bushes. And that’s where you’ll find him today. In the bushes.”

Toowoomba put his lips to his glass, but it was empty and he got up.

“It’s late.”

Harry got up, too. “Thanks for the story, Toowoomba. I’ll be heading back soon, so if I don’t see you, good luck at the championships. And with your future plans.”

Toowoomba held out his hand, and Harry wondered if
he was ever going to learn. His hand felt like a piece of battered steak afterward.

“Hope you find out what the blur on the lens is,” Toowoomba said. He had already gone by the time Harry realized what he was talking about.

The watchman gave Birgitta a torch.

“You know where to find me, Birgitta. Make sure you don’t get eaten,” he said, limping back into his office with a smile.

Birgitta and Harry walked along the dark, winding corridors of the large building that is Sydney Aquarium. It was almost two o’clock in the morning, and Ben, the night-watchman, had let them in.

A casual question from Harry—why all the lights were off—had led to a detailed explanation from the old watchman.

“Of course it saves electricity, but that’s not the most important reason—the most important reason is that we’re telling the fish it’s night. I think so, anyhow. Before, we used to turn off the lights with a standard switch, and you could hear the shock when all of a sudden everything went pitch black. A whoosh went through the whole aquarium as hundreds of fish dashed to hide or swam off in blind panic.”

Ben hushed his voice to a stage-like whisper and imitated the fish with zigzag hand movements.

“There was a lot of splashing and waves, and some fish, mackerel for example, went stir-crazy and smacked into
the glass and killed themselves. So we started using dimmers, which gradually reduce the light in line with daylight hours, aping nature. After that there was a lot less illness among the fish as well. The light tells your body when it’s day and night, and personally I feel the fish need a natural daily rhythm to avoid stress. They have a biological clock the same way we do, and you shouldn’t mess about with it. I know that some barramundi breeders in Tasmania, for example, give the fish extra light in the autumn. Trick them into thinking it’s still summer to make them spawn more.”

“Ben likes to talk a lot when he’s warmed to a topic,” Birgitta explained. “He’s almost as happy talking to people as he is to his fish.” She had worked for the last two summers as a spare hand at the aquarium and had become good friends with the watchman, who claimed he had been working at the aquarium ever since it opened.

“It’s so peaceful here at night,” Birgitta said. “So quiet. Look!” She shone the torch on the glass wall where a black-and-yellow moray fish glided out of its cave revealing a row of small, sharp teeth. Further down the corridor she lit up two speckled stingrays slipping through the water behind the green glass with slow-motion winglike movements. “Isn’t that beautiful?” she whispered with gleaming eyes. “It’s like ballet without the music.”

Harry felt as though he were tiptoeing through a dormitory. The only sounds were their steps and a faint but regular gurgle from the aquariums.

Birgitta stopped by one high glass wall. “This is the aquarium’s saltie, Matilda from Queensland,” she said, directing the cone of light at the glass. There was a dried-out tree trunk lying on a reconstructed riverbank inside. And in the pool a floating piece of wood.

“What’s a saltie?” Harry asked, trying to catch sight of
something living. At that moment the piece of wood opened two shimmering, green eyes. They lit up in the dark like reflectors.

“It’s a crocodile that lives in salt water, in contrast to the freshie. Freshies live off fish and you don’t need to be afraid of them.”

“And salties?”

“You should definitely be afraid of them. Many so-called dangerous predators attack humans only when they feel threatened, are afraid or you’ve encroached on their territory. A saltie, however, is a simple, uncomplicated soul. It just wants your body. Several Australians are killed every year in the swamplands to the north.”

Harry leaned against the glass. “Doesn’t that lead to … a … er, certain antipathy? In some parts of India they wiped out the tiger under the pretext it was eating babies. Why have these man-eaters not been exterminated?”

“Most people here have the same relaxed kind of attitude to crocodiles as they do to traffic accidents. Almost, anyway. If you want roads, you’ve got to accept deaths, right? Well, if you want crocodiles, it’s the same thing. These animals eat humans. That’s life.”

Harry shuddered. Matilda had closed her eyelids in a similar way to the headlamp covers on some models of Porsche. Not a ripple in the water betrayed the fact that the wood lying half a meter from him behind the glass was in reality more than a ton of muscle, teeth and ill temper.

“Let’s go on,” he suggested.

“Here we have Mr. Bean,” Birgitta said, shining the torch on a small, light brown, flounder-like fish. “This is a fiddler ray, it’s what we call Alex in the bar, the man Inger called Mr. Bean.”

“Why Fiddler Ray?”

“I don’t know. They called him that before I started there.”

“Funny name. It obviously likes lying still on the bottom.”

“Yes, and that’s why you’ve got to be careful when you’re in the water. It’s poisonous, you see, and it’ll sting you if you tread on it.”

They descended a staircase that wound down to one of the big tanks.

“The tanks aren’t actually aquariums in the true sense of the word, they’ve just enclosed a part of Sydney Harbour,” Birgitta said as they entered.

From the ceiling a greenish light fell over them in undulating stripes, and made Harry feel as if he were standing under a mirrorball. It was only when Birgitta pointed the torch upward that he saw they were surrounded by water on all sides. They were standing in a glass tunnel under the sea, and the light was coming from outside, filtered through the water. A huge shadow glided past them, and he instinctively recoiled.

“Mobulidae,” she said. “Devil rays.”

“My God, it’s enormous!” Harry breathed.

The whole skate was one single billowing movement, like a massive waterbed, and Harry felt sleepy just looking at it. Then it turned onto its side, waved to them and floated into the dark watery world like a black bedsheet spook.

They sat on the floor and from her rucksack Birgitta took a rug, two glasses, a candle, and an unlabeled bottle of red wine. Present from a friend working at a vineyard in Hunter Valley, she said, opening it. Then they lay side by side on the rug looking up into the water.

It was like lying in a world turned upside down, like seeing into an inverted sky full of fish all the colors of the rainbow and strange creatures invented by someone with an overactive imagination. A blue, shimmering fish with an inquiring moon-face and thin, quivering ventral fins hovered in the water above them.

“Isn’t it wonderful to see how much time they take, how apparently meaningless their activities are?” whispered Birgitta.
“Can you feel them slowing time down?” She placed a cold hand on Harry’s neck and squeezed softly. “Can you feel your pulse almost stopping?”

Harry swallowed. “I don’t mind time going slowly. Not right now,” he said. “Not for the next few days.”

Birgitta squeezed harder. “Don’t even talk about it,” she said.

“Sometimes I think, ‘Harry, you’re not so bloody stupid after all.’ I notice, for example, that Andrew always talks about the Aboriginal people as ‘them.’ That’s why I’d guessed a lot of Andrew’s story before Toowoomba told me specific details. I’d more or less surmised that Andrew hadn’t grown up with his own family, that he doesn’t belong anywhere but floats along on the surface and sees things from the outside. Like us here, observing a world which we cannot take part in. After the chat with Toowoomba I realized something else: at birth Andrew didn’t receive that gift of natural pride you have with being part of a people. That’s why he had to find his own. At first I thought he was ashamed of his brothers, but now I know he’s grappling with his own shame.”

Birgitta grunted. Harry went on.

“Sometimes I think I’ve got something, only in the next minute to be thrown into confusion once again. I don’t like being confused; I have no tolerance for it. That’s why I wish either I didn’t have this ability to capture details, or I had a greater ability to assemble them into a picture that made some sense.”

He turned to Birgitta and buried his face in her hair.

“It’s a bad job on God’s part to give a man with so little intelligence such a good eye for detail,” he said, trying to place something that had the same scent as Birgitta’s hair. But it was so long ago he had forgotten what it was.

“So what can you see?” she asked.

“Everyone’s trying to point my attention to something I don’t understand.”

“Like what?”