Drowned Sprat and Other Stories (4 page)

There was thunder in the air. I used to smell it when Mom and Dad were going to fight. Best thing is to tie Pinkie’s paws back round your neck and heave off someplace else.

‘See ya,’ I said.

I went to the pickup and lay down on Pinkie for a pillow and turned the tuckie over and over in the light. At the edges the green plastic was thin and glowing and tasty-looking. I put it in my mouth and sucked it like a candy.

After a while Chuck came out and tried all the doors but I’d locked them, of course. I only needed to wake up with him slobbering all over me once to learn that lesson.

‘You go out there at night, you lock all the doors,’ Candy told me afterwards.

Chuck mouthed bad words at me through the glass but I
just ignored him. Pinkie put his head up, though, and danced rudely around, back and forth. He allus does that until Chuck shuts up and goes away. Then Pinkie did a terrible fart on account of having had a whole mini-sak of Dunkin’ Donuts for supper and I had to wind the window down a crack. I’m mighty glad I did, because otherwise I wouldn’t have heard the Nyu Zillunites.

‘So she was lying?’ Kathy was saying, her voice all trembly.

‘Like a pro,’ said Ray. ‘Her father told me all about it in the men’s room. Mother died two years ago of cancer. Lot of it round here and the locals think it’s because of the power plant. Leaks, apparently.’ There was a pause then. I could hear their car keys jangling.

‘And?’ said Kathy.

‘So the kud lives with her father. He drinks a lot — but I think he loves her.’ The car doors opened. ‘Doesn’t send her to school, though.’

‘I’ll ring them from Wisconsin,’ said Kathy.

‘Ring who? It’s none of your business!’

‘Ring whoever it is who takes care of cases like this —’ and maybe she kept talking then, but I couldn’t hear her, because the doors shut. They drove away.

I never got a pretty card from her and so far Welfare haven’t been on our case any more than normal. Might be because I never told her my name. I’ve still got the tuckie — I did what she said and tied it round my neck. Now and then I worry about those real tuckies and wonder if Kathy looks after them too. They can’t have much of a life, lying round with their useless legs and being shot at by the Mardis. This little guy has a much better time, right here in Zion, with me.

Some nights I can hear him calling from out in the bay, from beyond the Big Rock. If I said that to anyone, like old Valmai down the beach; if I told her that after a few gins, or at least after she’d had enough gins to shut up and listen to me, she’d say, ‘It’s just the wind.’

Some nights when I hear him it is windy, but some nights it’s as still as the swamp, black, the sky showing starry in the sea. Besides, the call isn’t ‘Woo–ooo’ like in Pommy fairy stories or Yank cartoons; it’s not like a mermaid or a ghost or something; it’s more like a bark — a harsh, deep, double-shot ‘Au Au!’ I hear it like that, the first time anyway. The second time it might be clearer: ‘Oy Oy’. If it goes on after that he goes the extra mile and puts in the J: ‘Oy Joy!’

He used to call me a lot when he was alive — call me from down the beach if he wanted a knife or something, if he was gutting the fish, or if he wanted the sharpening stone. Or if he’d
forgotten the scaler, or needed a clean bucket to bring the fish up to the house. He’d call me from down on the beach, below the pohutukawas, under the cliffs, ‘Oy Joy!’ He was a big man with a loud voice — not particularly deep, but the sort of voice that could carry through reinforced concrete or a strong offshore westerly, if he wanted it to. Penetrating is what you’d call it.

‘Joy!’ And I’d slap on my hat double-quick so’s not to annoy him, tie it on under my chin for the wind and hurry down to see what he wanted. He’d have all the catch in the bottom of the boat, pulled up on the hard sand, thirty-pound schnappers sometimes. He was a good fisherman, though I wouldn’t say he had a feel for it. When you have a feel for something you have a bit of compassion — you know, the fishermen who have a feel for it always knock a struggling fish on the head to put it out of its misery. The only time I ever saw Barry put something out of its misery it was an octopus he’d got in the net. By the time I got down to the beach he had it laid out on the hard sand and was bashing it with the gaffer. It didn’t wriggle around; it just lay there while he bashed its poor, heavy, shining, purple head, bloody on the sand.

‘Why’re you killing that, Barry?’ I asked him. We weren’t going to eat it — no need to, with all that schnapper. Besides, Barry thought octopus was wog food.

He’d looked up at me then — I’d broken his murderous concentration — and it was so pathetic, really, what the octopus did. It reached up with one of its clammy legs, reached up and softly curled around the hand that held the gaffer, like it was pleading for mercy. It was as if the octopus and I were thinking the same thing as we looked at Barry. He gave up then: stood and kicked the thing back into the waves. Don’t suppose it lived — they’ve got soft heads, octopuses, and he’d been at it a while
before I came down.

Oy Joy. I’ve been hearing it a lot more lately, since my son bought me the remote for the TV, the thing you point at it to shut up the ads. Some nights I don’t bother with it. The TV’s around the corner from the kitchen, so I wouldn’t be able to hear the ads finish and I might miss a bit of my programme. That’s why I never put the mute on if I’m getting my tea. Tea usually takes two ad breaks if I put the kettle on in the first one. In the second one I have to move quickly, slap a bit of corned beef or luncheon sausage on a plate and a tomato or something. Never fish. I don’t eat fish any more and it’s a blessed relief. I was sick of the taste — all those ruddy schnapper and parore and kingis and flounder from over at the river. It wasn’t just the taste, though. There were other reasons for why I’d started to gag at the sight of it — the boat coming in laden, summer and winter, oh yes. I’d given it up before he died. Quite a while. Since the octopus. That’s why Barry had killed it, you see, because it had been eating his fish in the net. I decided it could have my fish, all the fish it wanted.

It’s when I’m sitting quiet, though, and using my new thing to shut off the ads, that’s when I hear it. Doesn’t matter which way the wind is, which side of the house the windows are open: ‘Oy!’ — impatient.

Barry, Barry! Sometimes I answer him, not out loud, just in my head, while the cleaning fluids and cars and kids in nappies flash on the telly. It’s better to answer him, I’ve found, then he shuts up for a bit. Otherwise he goes on and on, when I’m tucked up in bed at the other end of the big fibro house — ‘Oy Joy!’ I suppose I could ask him what he wants.

I’ve always been an anxious person, not the sort of person people are drawn to. The look of me gives it away — I
look
anxious: thin, pale, hunched over worse now the old bones have started to crumble. Always sickening for something. Drove Barry wild. I’ve been better since he died. Still not an ounce of flesh on me, though.

‘Christ, Joy,’ he said once, some time in the seventies, ‘you’ve got less flesh on you than a leatherjacket.’

Slept in the spare room after that, like I still do. Nothing would induce me to move back, even though he’s dead, though most would say the main room view’s a better one. It’s got the sea and Big Rock. From my room there’s a view of the brown hills, a line of pines and the front end of the farmer’s place, his boat and dogs, flash car. It’s the dry view I prefer. Besides, it stinks of fish in the main bedroom, like a bit of bait’s rolled out of his pocket, or a fish eye’s come unblobbed from his shirt and dropped under the duchess. Like it always used to smell, even though I scrubbed the room out after he died.

My son comes up here every few days from his place down on the beach, to mow the lawn on his little ride-on mower, and after he’s driven round and round on the lawn he comes inside and cleans his dad’s room. There’s nothing Rex likes more than cleaning a room that’s already clean, or mowing a lawn that’s already shaved nearly bare. He’s a good, clean boy, not afraid of soap and water, though he’s seeing too much of old Valmai and her gin bottle. I’ve seen him from up here, going into her place at eleven in the morning, staggering out after three to go home and sleep it off. Then he wakes up and makes his tea and watches telly, cleaning bits of his house during the ad breaks.

He’s come up today, Rex has, though I haven’t told him what happened on the beach this morning. He doesn’t even know I went down the beach when it was just light.

‘Oy Joy!’ It had been going on all night, so often that I stuffed
the new thing down the cushions and let the ads blare. Barry got quite frantic — never sounded any closer, though. You’d think, if it was his spirit or whatever, it’d come in, it’d cross the bay and zoom in like his tin dinghy used to, laden, low in the water. Tried to tell myself to be with Valmai on this one, what she said, that it’s probably the wind, whistling through a hole in Big Rock; that it’s a trick of the wind, the wind being a clever dick — it’s not something it does normally, not loud enough to hear it from the other side of the bay. And if it was Barry, wouldn’t he come up to the house, stand invisible behind my chair, before leaning forward to whisper ‘Oy Joy’? I might even get a warning he was there before he said anything — get a whiff of him, salt or grog. If it was him he’d come up here, wouldn’t he? If it was me he was calling.

Anyway, last night it kept up after I’d gone to bed, read a bit of my library book and turned out the light. Even though I told myself it was only the wind, it unsettled me. I was unsettled, tossed and turned, got up, went to the lav, went back to bed, turned on the light, read a bit more, listened out.

Oy Joy.

It was a thunderclap that woke me, between here and the hills, above the land, empty dry thunder. I went across the hall to the main bedroom to see if the weather was coming in from the sea. It wasn’t raining yet, but the sky had that heavy purple look like it might. It was more a night sky, more as if the sun was about to go down behind the hills in the west, rather than rise above Big Rock in the east; more like it was the end of the day than the beginning of one.

Barry’s gumboots were by the back door. After he popped them I wore them, usually with thick socks so they fit. Took me ages to get the fish smell out of them — baking soda, Chemico,
Jeyes fluid, the sun — never thought I would, then suddenly, one day, it had gone. Barefoot inside them I slipped about a bit. Got my raincoat on over my nightie and went out past the goat and the loo block to the beach, down the sandy slipway, along in front of the houses. High tide this morning, a storm tide, so I had to walk on the pebbles where they were thrown up in a cyclone in ’93 and never drawn down again. I looked in Valmai’s window — there she was still in her chair, mouth open, TV a blue-gleaming blob through the salt frost on her glazing.

Along the beach it got louder — ‘Oy Joy!’ Couldn’t possibly be the wind, though it might be a noise come from waves forcing themselves between two rocks, slapping hard as planks of wood. Up the Maori end of the beach I stopped, by the cliffs. Thought I couldn’t get any further because of the tide. But I watched the surf and saw that the draw-back was so hard, it had a real suck to it, so I could time it, run across the wet sand in Barry’s boots, and climb the cliff rocks before the next wave came. That’s when I lost the boots, one after the other, coming off behind me. I couldn’t stop for them or it’d break over my head — I had to keep going. The wave loomed, grey as a kahawai curling above me, and I only just made it. The suck took the boots out.

Rex hasn’t noticed they’ve gone. He’s still out there going round and round on his little tractor on the lawn. There isn’t a tree or a shrub or a flower on this quarter acre — they wouldn’t stand a chance. With Rex and his mower I’d have to fence them in, like they were wild animals. Last spring I pushed some bulbs into the garden next door, a bach that belongs to some Aucklanders. I was a bit embarrassed when they came up — paper whites, jonquils and Earlicheer. Didn’t think they would come up, really; I’d just loosened the dirt under the ngaios on the border of our sections and shoved them in, hadn’t given them any
care at all. I wonder if the Aucklanders know who planted them — their grandchildren picked them all. I should tell Rex that, that it was me, to see if they’ve already mentioned it to him, if the man did during one of their fishing conversations.

Round and round goes Rex, the name on the side of his mower flashing in the sun — ‘John Deere’ — round and round, his cap on backwards like he’s a teenager, not a bachelor of forty.

Oy Joy.

He hasn’t noticed the boots are gone.

When I was up on the rock I had one of my nerve attacks. Froze rigid and had to sit down on a really knobbly bit, which dug into my backside even though I took my coat off, folded it up and stuck it under me. Got drenched from the spray. The surf creamed and boiled around me on three sides and I must have been there for at least ten minutes, quarter of an hour, before it was thrown up at me.

It landed at my feet, legs spread, eyes staring. It must’ve been hit on the head trying to swim through the breakers, or maybe it had been wounded at the mouth of the bay where the rollers start. There was such a gash in it, I thought it was dead. I poked it with my big toe. Then it rolled a bit — just its head — rolled over to look at me and I looked into its bulgy eyes. I think I screamed then, but nobody would have heard me because the surf was so loud. Just as well they didn’t hear me — I’d be embarrassed now and there was no reason to scream. That octopus looked at me with such love — there was love in its wet, grey eyes; it looked at me with the love of a child. And then I noticed it had a mouth, a small, round mouth with thin, black lips, full of sea-water. That octopus had been a fighter in its time — its head was covered in old scars, and it only had seven legs. I struggled up with it in my arms, waited for the next wave to suck out and
ran back along the beach. Its head was heavy, its long legs dangled, I worried a bit it might wrap itself around me and trip me up. But it didn’t. It must’ve known I was trying to help it.

Now all I’ve got to do is wait for the easterly to swing around and the surf to go down, then I can put it back in the sea. The river would be another place to take it — sometimes you see octopuses in the river — but I haven’t got anything big enough to transport it. Besides, if any of the people over there saw me they’d think I was cracked. So it’s in the bath. I carted up a couple of buckets of sea-water and tipped them over it. Don’t know what Rex’ll say if he sees it there. It’s still alive — it looks up at me when I go in to check it, looks up at me with its lovely eyes.

Rex has turned his mower off and he’s climbed up the water tank to check the level. There’s been no rain for ages, but it’s a big tank and I’m careful. Don’t know why he worries.

‘Mum!’ He’s calling me. ‘Mum!’

I put my head out the bathroom window.

‘What’re you doing in there?’ he asks. ‘You’ve been in there for ages. You feeling crook?’

I shake my head.

‘I’m going to have a drink with Valmai,’ he says. ‘See you later.’ And he’s climbing down the ladder quick-sticks, because I usually whine at him and suggest that a cup of tea with me would be better for his health.

In the kitchen I open a tin of sardines and feed them to the octopus one by one. While I’m doing it, perching on the lav and leaning over, dropping them in, I remember from one of Rex’s school books that octopuses don’t usually have mouths, they have a kind of beak. This must be a rare breed, maybe a new one none of the scientists know about. It opens its mouth obedient as a baby in a highchair, and swallows the sardines whole, because
it doesn’t have any teeth. When it’s finished its mouth keeps moving, as if it’s still hungry or trying to say something, the mouth pursing, pushing air in and out.

‘Oy Joy’ it says, but I’m not sure if that’s it; I’m not sure that’s what it’s trying to say, I’m not sure at all.