An Open Swimmer (19 page)

White feet in the water, he swilled the flippers and pulled them on. He left the flourbag with his clothes in the big brown sack. He wet the mask, spat on the glass, and washed it out. Leaning his head into the water, wetting his hair, feeling the cold fingers run down the back of his neck. He pulled the mask on, snug to his cheeks.

He pushed off into the icy green and it ran down his back inside the wetsuit, gripping him as he floated. The water was shallow with the ebb-tide. In about ten feet of water, Jerra saw the greenish shadow disappear behind a clump of rocks and weed. He dived steep, ears popping. As he neared the place a great tail, like a giant waving frond of weed, lashed out and was gone under a tight ledge. Jerra surfaced and dived again, but there were only a few small fish staring bubble-eyed. The ledge narrowed into darkness, too small to turn in, probably impossible to get out of. He followed the line of the fissure, gliding on the surface, to where it was obvious. A splattering of rain on the water. Drops perforated the glassy surface.

The crevice gaped in the side, shrouded with the palpitating weed that bristled around it. Jerra pushed down, weed brushing face and arms. Tiny cracks and holes in the encrusted walls shed spines of light into the twilight. On the bottom, the fanning blue-green tail. As Jerra sank closer, it moved into the darkness of a crack. Holding his nose through the mask, he cleared his ears and sank, settling on the bottom. Breath tight in his chest. He circled the flat, curving floor, pulling himself round with his free hand. The bottom moved under his hand. Peering carefully into the cracks, he saw small fish in most. In the biggest crack, under a sagging beam, was the big fish.

It pinned itself against the back of the hole, gills rising and falling, the eye staring roundly, lip glinting as Jerra came in. It stirred. Jerra lunged and slammed the spear into its broad side, but it was too far back from the head. Too far! The fish lurched, buckled, and sprang out of the crack, ramming Jerra up against the far wall, bludgeoning breath out of him. The wall moved, he heard it creak. Pieces of grit fell, and flakes of rotten ply came off as the fish whipped its tail, pectorals and mouth twitching. Scales rasped against him. Frantic, he took out the knife, almost dropping it, and sank it into the soft place behind the gills, and there was blood; thick, oily stuff. It curled in whorls before him as he dug the knife in more, twisting, feeling the blades of pressure turning inside himself.

The great thing went limp, arched its back, sagged, gills pumping. Jerra dragged it up by the gills, his vision pulsating with a galaxy of spots. Feeble kicks.

Surface. Gobs of blood, crimson. Jerra whooped in the air, coughing his own gobs, gasping, treading water hard to keep his head out. He got the head to the surface, flat teeth gleaming. The tail thumped his legs. It was like wrestling in the schoolyard, he heard himself think, crazy with gasping, breathless. The spear bent and the prongs were tearing flesh, barbs exposing white meat under the scales. He thrust a whole hand inside the gill to get a grip and to give the groper pain. The fish steadied. He found the embedded knife somewhere in the body and shoved it in more. It trembled and shuddered, rolling him on his back. He fought to the surface again, screaming with panic, dragging up through the spirals and clouds in the water. The spear broke off, barbs left sunk in the meat. Clubbing him with its tail. Jerra found his feet on the bottom and pinned it to the rocks. Rain falling lightly, ruffling the sack and clothes. As Jerra was dragging it up the flat granite, shaking the water out of his eyes, the fish gave a grunt, snorted up a gout of blood, and died.

Jerra laid it out on the rock, a bellowing in his ears. His nose was bleeding and his hands were cut. Thick streams gushed from the gills and gouges in the side, pooling on the rock. Jerra heard gulls, but didn't look up. The stub jutted from the flank, showing tattered white. He pulled the barbs out, ripping the meat as little as he could, and did his best to close the holes with his hands. He turned the fish over and smoothed the scales of the undamaged side with the back of his hand, feeling the little terraces settle into place. A little silver hook lodged in the upper lip.

He took the knife out and made a deep cut behind the head. He wished he had the old man's stub of a knife as he pushed through cartilage and bone, through the black cavity, and then the flesh of the other side. When the juices had run and gone, he cut around inside the head. He found nothing. Only the grey little brain and the black lining behind the eyes.

He sat back for a moment seeing the turrum of his childhood trembling in his arms, against his chest, and the fish's mate scything loyally through the water beside the boat – just ruffling the flat surface in which Jerra saw his reflected face – until the fish grunted and died and the mate became a shrinking black diamond silhouette diving deep, beyond the limits of breath, with an old fisherman's myth and something of Jerra Nilsam locked in its conical head.

Squabbling, the gulls settled on the rock as he made for the clearing, ignoring the figure moving up the beach.

Like water through sand, 

– Nothing.

‘Didn't have any choice, did I? It was bigger than me, almost. It wasn't easy, you know, it wasn't easy! I beat him!' he yelled at the old man, knowing different.

The old man clenched his fists that were black with dried blood as he paced by the fire.

‘Bad enough you hack the poor bastard up; but you just left it there for the bloody bastard seagulls! A beautiful blue thing like that with those sad-lookin' eyes pecked out.'

‘I was crook. Had water in me guts!' Jerra couldn't get close enough to the fire. He was freezing and his head pumped.

‘An' the fish? You left it with
no
guts!'

‘Arr.'

‘Eh?'

‘I said —'

‘So, you got 'im – big deal!'

‘Yeah, I —'

‘Jus' left 'im out there.'

‘Well, what —'

‘No
head
!'

‘Don't be so bloody —'

‘With those bastard birds!'

‘Shit!' Jerra shivered.

‘What are you? Gotta mutilate fish to find out what you want? Why don't you hack yourself open?'

‘And what —' He spat in the fire. ‘What the hell sort of animal are
you
?
Talk about mutilation! Like burning women! And with what she was carryin'!' He shouted with triumph and dread.

The old man stopped dead and turned to Jerra, eyes wide.

‘Yes.' His eyes shrank, withdrawing into his head. ‘Yer got a fish, boy.' He kicked a black lump of dirt into the fire and left. Jerra didn't watch him go down to the beach.

He heard the seagulls screeching until well after dark. He would have jumped into the fire, but he was too cold to burn.

The fire almost out, Jerra brought from the van the bundle of letters he had brought with him. He flicked through the envelopes addressed to him without opening any of them, least of all the last in the bundle, the one about the Guy Fawkes night he now knew so well he might have lived it himself. He had been on a fishing boat six hundred miles away from her. By then the letters were not love letters, nor insane poetical screams, but long, sad, friendly letters – kindly, almost – full of her hopeless advice and explanations and reassurances. He read some of it:

Jerra did not read on. He knew it well enough. He saw her, heavy and turgid on the deck of the brilliant white vessel and felt for himself the grinding, shrieking collision with the reef, the settling, the jarring rattling her as if to make her spill her burden onto the boards. It was as if he was there. He saw the red lights in the sky, fizzers and rockets cartwheeling red, red, red up into the vast blackness with their spent, smoking carcasses hitting the water with quiet smacks. And Jim calling ‘Ohgodogodogod!' as if he believed in one other than himself. Jerra felt her breaking up from within, short razors of pain shredding her as she watched the house lights on the beach. The hull shuddering with her. And the screaming. He saw her stricken, pulling on the long bottle shoved in her face for the pain and to shut her up. Eating on the glass . . . The tide rose, edging them off the reef and into the deep, sinking quickly as Jim fired flares up into the sky with all the other gay lights, and was, for once in his life, perfectly ineffectual. Hurrahs and hoots on the beach . . .

Jerra had lived those scenes in his imagination innumerable times. How they reached the beach was beyond imagination and, apparently, beyond her recall.

Jerra rebound the envelopes with the elastic band.

With all her silly talk, all the stupid advice, he thought, all the insane things she dreamt, I'll believe that part for ever. Jerra hated. And he would not forgive – not even her – that grinning slit that cleaved open the skin of her throat which was cracked, black and green, with her seaweed clump of a head half-buried in the sand that the storm had heaved up. On the same beach.

‘Didn't they know she would?' he called out to the darkness. ‘She was gonna go back all the time!'

Green plastic peeled back to show her grins.

‘Been in the water a long time,' said the man next to him.

Jim, up the beach in front of the summer house, wept into Jerra's old man's duffel coat. A crowd gathered on the sandhills, perched on the horizon, waiting for the news.

Jerra looked down at the naked legs and scarred, slack belly. A jade tinge to the blown fingers.

‘Slit herself and went for a swim,' said the man beside him, adjusting his coat in the drizzle. ‘Crazy.'

‘Yes,' said Jerra. ‘They reckon.'

‘Know her?'

‘No,' said Jerra.

Gulls hovered. The other man cocked his head at him.

‘Not personally, no,' said Jerra at the man. He kept talking after the man went further up the beach where seagulls flagged in the breeze. ‘No,' Jerra said, more than once.

He dropped the bundle onto the smoking coals, and until – at length – it ignited, he did not regret it.

R
AIN FELL
all night. Out over the ocean, a thunderstorm cracked and clashed. Lightning lit the inside of the van as Jerra lay awake, shivering under the blankets. The leaves were still chattering at dawn when the sky was dark as wet soil. His hands were fishy, and blood had dried brown under his fingernails. He lay under the blankets all day, getting up only once to leak in the fireplace. The stinking steam rose and made him sick. He wondered again for the first time in a while, why? Was it Jimbo? The booze? Sean? Or was it him? ‘No,' he said once, listening to it in the dark. ‘She was crazy.' And he knew someone else who was crazy. The old man was, he just knew it.

Just before dark, the rain cleared and he cooked a damper in the coals he rekindled. The damper was doughy and burnt on the outside, but it was hot and it cleared the taste from his mouth.

He slept in bits, chased down into the pale depths by schools of roe, wriggling mucus, green and leering, calling verses he didn't remember.

Dawn, another grey. More damper in the slow fire. The wet ground was almost frozen in places. Still hungry, he put sandshoes on and walked up the track to where the prints of rabbits were most obvious, droppings showing in the damp. He veered into the bush for a warren. If that old fool can do it, he thought . . .

Gathering his snares, he made his way back to camp, holding the rabbit by its ears as he and his father had, letting the stuff run out as he walked. There was sand in its eyes.

With the brown-stained diving knife, he slit the rabbit up from the anus and pulled back the skin, trying to ignore the putrid steam. He drained off some blood, cut the head and paws off, and hung it with a cord from the fork of a tree where the ringbolt hung. Then he collected some firewood and shoved it under the VW to dry. He sat by the fire all morning, drinking tea and pussy-looking soup from a packet, looking up occasionally to the slow drip from the carcass.