Wildlight (20 page)

Let the woman think what she wanted.
Just tell her they’re from Tom
.

Frank was stirring down below. It would be the two of them working through the night, fuelled on Rice A Riso, mugs of tea and a charge of adrenalin pumped by recklessness and risk. They should have done the decent thing and motored up to Little Deadman’s Bay, celebrate New Year’s Eve with others from the fleet. Insurance, Tom’s first thought when Bluey MacIntyre radioed to include them in the New Year invitation. Tom had looked to Frank, already gauging his resistance, Frank a hardened junkie for the clandestine rush of robbing pots and offloading illegal cargo in the thick of night—the sweeter knowing every other boat would be away. Tom wished Habib were here to fill the void. Hab was still back in Hobart waiting for the baby, his smiling wife as enormous as a try-pot. They’d induce her this week if nothing happened on its own.

Next round Hab would be back. Two weeks. Tom could stomach anything till then.

*

The night sky had cleared, the wind petered out. The Milky Way a spangled sweep of graffiti. Orion. Pleiades. The Southern Cross low down in the sky, her pointers not yet showing. If Tom could name one thing he’d miss when he was gone it would be a starry sky at sea. Their running lights were off, the air thick as pitch, the waning crescent moon a no-show for at least another hour. Frank’s timing was honed to perfection. Only one hitch: the transfer boat hadn’t shown.

Frank took up the radio and transmitted another run of clicks. ‘They should have been here half an hour ago.’ They waited fifteen, twenty minutes, the only light Maatsuyker’s beam cutting through the night.

‘There she is.’ Tom pointed, a running light rounding the Needles a kilometre away, a pinpoint of promise twinkling through the night.

Frank moved inside to blink the running lights that echoed as a chequerboard before Tom’s eyes. The transfer boat responded.

‘Get them ready, quick smart.’

Tom hauled the first sack across the deck, twenty-five kilograms of stolen crays, snapping tails, feelers poking through the open weave of hessian and snagging on his shirt. Frank dropped the fenders along the starboard side. The transfer boat was bearing down, the throaty rumble of its engine rollicking across the water. Frank and Tom heaved the sacks into position. His brother halted, his ear cocked, intuiting his surrounds in a way that brought to mind a creature on the prowl.

Frank’s grunt exploded. ‘Not our boat. Not our boat. Christ. Chuck ’em over.’

‘What?’

‘Police boat. Get ’em overboard. Now!’

Tom took the neck of the first bag. Frank grabbed the tails of hessian and together they hauled the sack up and over the gunnel, contents smashing on steel in a carnage of legs and shell.
Shplosh
into the ocean. Frank grabbed the second bag by the neck, Tom the tails, thousands of dollars’ worth of live crayfish scuttled to the deep. Four, five, six bags—four more to go as the police boat bore down like a steam train, engines racing in a whine. A minute more and its spotlight would ensnare them in the act. Tom saw it in a wounded flash: Bluey MacIntyre had tipped the police. Seven bags, eight. Wet hessian snagged on something steel and tore. Tom pulled it free, hauled it up and got it to his chest, his shirt soaked through. Bluey making out that he and Frank were welcome to join the celebration when all the while it was an orchestrated plan to do them in. Counting on the fact they wouldn’t come. Nine. That they’d use this night to do what they were best at. Pirating. Bluey, who’d be first on the radio to help out in a jam, had excised the Forrest brothers like a tumour. Tom burned with the sting of betrayal. With shame. Ten.

He checked the empty deck. He leaned over the side and stared down at blackness—God help them if one of those sacks chose to float. A fist of light punched his back. Tom shielded his eyes, willed the bags down and pictured them thudding to the bottom, hitting reef and seabed in an upwelling of sand. Some of the bags would break on impact, the walking wounded given a reprieve. For most there’d be no second chance, crays too tightly packed, the bags too well lashed for the fish to work their way out in time. Hunters and the hunted. First would be a swarm of sea lice, burrowing in through open weave and bodily orifices, bedding down beneath the membranes of shell to feast on living flesh. Octopus next, suctioning on and drilling carapace with their jackhammer beaks.

Tom faced an assault of light. He caught the silhouette of Frank crouched down out of sight, slinking back around the corner of the wheelhouse. Tom tried to slow his chest from panting. He was hot, cold, his crotch and underarms chilled with ocean water and clammy with panic. He stood caught in a blinding spear. Fox, feral cat, take your pick of vermin—he and Frank so ignoble a beast there’d be no qualm in finishing them off.

The police boat bumped against their fenders. Someone threw a line to Tom to secure, a second spotlight scouring the surface of the water. They knew. Everyone knew. The game, claimed Frank, was in not getting caught in the act.

The police would come aboard—Tom had seen it once before—they’d check Frank’s papers, storm the two of them with questions, inspect the tanks and measure every borderline fish until they found one undersized to hang a fine on. The slap on Frank’s hand would be sharp enough to sting but way too paltry to warrant the effort and expense of such a stake-out. Pissed-off cops. No payout for Frank. Smashed crayfish. Who knew the fate of the transfer boat? A night where nobody had won.

Frank emerged from the bunkhouse in his tracksuit and sheepskin boots, scratching his bum and squinting at the light. Turn it into a pantomime, Frank, rub it in their faces.

Frank put on his best indignant. ‘You pricks got nothing better to do than hassle me and my deckie?’

The fisheries officer stepped aboard. ‘Happy New Year to you, too, Mr Forrest.’

*

Her foot found a rung. The wind moaned like a ghost. Another step. She heard a ripping sound, felt the ladder part. She reeled, everything slow motion, she couldn’t free her arms, her body on the brink of plunging. She woke to her whimpering, to a throng of plaintive cries. She was twisted in her sleeping bag, the tent fly flapping in the wind. The dream state faded. It wasn’t night, wasn’t day. Three fifty-five.

Mutton-birds coursed down the pathway in a stampede of fretful cries and scuffles of dust. They skittled like dragsters round the bend and burst across the helipad. The view from the tent was charcoal wings and spindly legs, ungainly webs of feet that ran across the grass. Clots of birds—twenty, thirty, forty at a time—jostled for space, urged on by the need for speed. Birds scooted past Steph’s tent. An endless cluster, a rocking gait of waddle and scramble. Steph lay in her sleeping bag, close enough to smell the birds’ musky odour, to watch their wings unfold, heads craned to the sky as if sheer will would send them airborne. She grimaced as the birds careened toward the fortress of bush. They were running out of launching pad. But these birds knew better, the breeze scooping them up at the last moment in a mad beating of wings, their feet grazing the bracken in riddance to earthly stricture.

All around her the sky was crowded with weightless acrobats, veering out to sea to forage for the day. The procession eased, the sky lightened to a new year. A new millennium. In dawn’s prewash the crescent moon looked tissue thin. Rain clouds marched toward the east.

The air felt thick and damp with misty rain. A black thread of leech advanced across the ground sheet. Steph flicked it away. She was chilled to her core. She didn’t want to walk back to the house. It was hours too early for the weather. She dressed and laced her boots, made her way down the track toward the Gulch, past branches of trees and thickets of bushes trilling with birdsong.

The track opened out to where she could see the old wooden sleepers of the haulage way. She looked down to the honeycombed foundations of a cement landing where fur seals stretched out. Gulls stood as a flock in a flutter of breeze, their beaks tucked beneath their wings. Beyond the protection of the Gulch the ocean was empty of boats. No Tom; Steph knew that now. Just ocean and white caps and a girl at the brink of an uncertain beginning, shivering against the whistling rise of wind.

They retrieved the pots they could get to, but the last, set amongst bull kelp at the base of the cliffs, even Frank wouldn’t take the risk in weather as foul as this.

The heave of ocean spewed water and spray metres in the air. They motored through mounting seas around the headland to New Harbour. The engine smelled hot. Frank tucked the
Perlita Lee
in as far as he dared to ride out the storm without being washed up on rocks should her anchor chain snap. Only another fisherman would credit the worst storm of the season waiting for mid-summer. Even here, in relative shelter, the wind shrilled through the rigging and caught so hard against the wheelhouse that Tom expected the windows to stave in with each new squall.

By midnight the whine altered pitch—squalls upping seventy knots. Tom and Frank switched between standing at the galley bench, both fighting seasickness, to keeping watch through the wheelhouse windows, the spotlight angled on the anchor. They both wore full gear. They needed to be ready.

By two in the morning the anemometer stopped working and the squealing began. Frank estimated the wind had risen over eighty knots. Squalls funnelled around the headland and laid down the
Perlita Lee
. They had out a full length of chain, the motor idling, each watching the GPS, their eyes shifting to the bow. Each was waiting for the anchor to drag or the chain to part, for the untethered vessel to be wrecked against the shore.

With each new gust the pots tied down behind the wheelhouse lifted with the loosening ropes and hovered weightless above the deck. They crashed back down like a percussion of cymbals. Already, some would be smashed. Tom zipped his red float coat and clipped on a harness. He felt his gut retch—seasickness laced with fear. He swallowed it down.

He left the wheelhouse to be knocked from his feet by a slam of air. He stayed down on his knees and crawled toward the stern. There was something mildly comforting about staying low, hidden from view of the ocean. The boat jolted; Tom felt himself thrown against the boat’s steel rib. Rain fell as a sheet, poured out of the scuppers, the noise of the storm tremendous. Tom wedged himself against the side, wiped water from his eyes. He forced himself to focus. Rivulets ran inside his collar and down his spine. He braced himself against the lurching of the boat. He managed to grab the end of rope, looped it through and yanked it hard. By the time he’d tied it fast, his fingers were wooden from cold. Tom swallowed ocean salt, tried to stem the rise of bile. He gagged and spat a mouthful, let the wind wipe it away. The boat lurched, yanking on its chain.

Frank waited until he got inside and slid the door shut. ‘Good job, Tom. Well done.’ His brother cranked the engine into forward and manoeuvred their position to push the
Perlita
up into the wind to ease pressure on the chain. They had nowhere else to go. Even if there were a better place, you’d smash a hole through the boat upping the anchor. Or risk your engine letting you down.

Tom and Frank worked together in the wheelhouse—there wasn’t need for talk—Frank used all his skills to keep the boat from parting from its chain. The power of the storm made Tom and Frank equals, dependent on the boat, on luck, on how long such a force of nature could endure. Through those hours, Tom loved his brother. It felt like he and Frank were one. Tom lost track of time. It wasn’t until the squalls and rain subsided that he looked out to see New Harbour edged by a silhouette of light. Come daylight they’d see that beach strewn with torn-off buoys and tea-tree ribs from shattered craypots. Tom could make out lines of surf. He pictured them flinging ashore their night-time offerings of sand-crusted weed, bowel-like loops of tangled line.

*

Tom spooned extra sugar in his morning tea to keep himself awake. Frank was having the first hour of shut-eye. Tom turned up the VHF at the sound of fishing talk: a swell of ten metres, two squalls peaking ninety knots.

Bluey MacIntyre: his voice sounded thin. Old.
She was a long night over this way. Eight pots lost. Below deck looks like a bomb’s gone off. How’d you get on?

Just. We’re all fucking rooted. May as well pack up and go home for good, way I feel at the moment.

It wasn’t the usual banter. Tom felt the same fragility, the aftermath of shock—the hollowness in knowing how close they’d all come. He listened in to Bluey.
You have to wonder how many chances you get before you run out of lives. I’m sixty-six next month. Must of used up my share.

Few more left in you yet, Bluey.

You start thinking about what you’re doing, what it’s all for, the wife at home worried if you’re all right every time she hears the forecast, the grandkids you’re missing out on seeing because you’re always bloody working. It’s not about the money any more. The money’s not worth your life.

How about Julesie? He over your way?

*

You got on with it. Except for those who’d lost too many pots or damaged their boats, everyone went back to fishing. You had no choice. The same routine of baiting pots, shooting pots, pulling pots. Dawn, dusk, night.

Tom watched the rope curl around the turnstile. The pot banged against the boat with a shake-out of water. He dragged the pot across, pulled out two good sized crays. The third fish caught on the pot wire and when Tom yanked at it he felt its gristle tear.
Careless fuck
, Frank would say when he saw the leg hang limp. Tom placed it in the holding tank and walked the empty pot to the stack across the bow. Frank swung the boat alongside the next set of buoys. Tom threw the grappling hook, snagged the line. He hauled it in, wound the rope around the turnstile. His mind-numbing lot. Tom couldn’t still his mind. It was like sea lice crawling inside his skull; his flesh jittery, innards peristaltic, ready to gag or shit or spew out a turmoil of contents. Maybe this was how it went, not depression but an unbearable soup of ferment that drove you to consider the unthinkable. Nah, he wasn’t up for any of that. He stopped the winch and pulled out a cray: a storm survivor three legs short.