Pescador's Wake (10 page)

Now, as Dave closes his eyes, he can smell Margie's familiar scent and feel the softness of her skin against his. Sleep advances like a gentle wave and washes over him.

The waves here are immense, larger than any I have ever seen. Dizzying walls of water, thirty metres high, build behind us, lifting the
Pescador
as if it is a toy, and throwing us to the gaping sea below. I think the ocean is angry, fuming at us for stealing what it holds dear.

The
Pescador
surfs in the following seas, which chase it with the ferocious force of rearing, wild-eyed horses. The waves pedal their rising hooves against the stern of the boat, beating it in a storm of rage for straying into their territory. Carlos checks the GPS, watching the boat's speed climb feverishly on the descent of a wave: ten, twelve, fourteen knots. Water engulfs the stern in a barrage of heavy attacks and, with the weight of ice on the port side, it's an effort to keep the vessel from broaching. The wave lets go, its fingers torn and ragged from holding on too tight. Carlos relaxes his grip on the wheel.

Eduardo enters the wheelhouse, wrenching on his sea jacket. He speaks hurriedly to Carlos. ‘We have to get that ice off—now!' He runs the heavy zip up almost the full length of his face, so that only his eyes are showing beneath the jacket's hood. Perhaps it's because they've been friends since childhood, or perhaps it's because Eduardo's eyes are indeed the windows to his soul, that Carlos believes he can read his friend's state of mind from just this narrow strip of exposed face—Eduardo appears without fear, focused and determined. Carlos doubts his own eyes are as reassuring.

‘Make sure you use safety lines. No heroics,' Carlos says.

‘You think I'm a fool?' Eduardo asks, feigning offence.

‘
Loco
,' Carlos teases, twirling a finger at the side of his temple.

Eduardo laughs. ‘I've already spoken to them down below. The crew will meet me out there.' He studies the vast amount of water washing over the deck. If he is at all nervous, Carlos cannot tell. Eduardo makes a brief study of the instruments, processing what he needs to know of the boat and wind speeds.

‘You don't have to go too, you know,' Carlos says. ‘I could do with the help here, to be honest. And I promised Virginia I'd bring you back in one piece.'

‘I can't ask them to go out there if I'm not prepared to go myself.'

‘All right,' Carlos concedes. He knows the crew will waste no time in assisting their first mate on deck, and wonders if Eduardo would have made the better master. They revere him like a god.

Dmitri enters the wheelhouse, and says something in Russian to Eduardo. Carlos thinks he hears the word ‘Mauritius' before the engineer leaves again.

‘Why does he do that? Speak in Russian when I'm here?' Carlos asks.

‘He's a good engineer. I didn't say he had good manners,' Eduardo says, his eyes smiling.

‘What was he saying about Mauritius?'

‘He's still harping on about offloading there, the stubborn idiot. He says we're stupid fools.'

‘Well, he's probably right about the second part.'

Eduardo laughs again and, continuing his earlier joke, bends forward, pretending to hold a walking stick. He hobbles towards the door, takes the hammer from a side hatch, tips an imaginary hat and goes outside. The gusting wind crashes the door shut behind him and Carlos watches his friend make his way down the metal stairs and onto the deck.

In his wet-weathers, Eduardo is a small orange blur as he braces himself against the full power of a wave. Water crashes over the stern, thrusting the bow skyward. Eduardo rides the wet rising deck, which rears now like a harpooned whale. He clips his safety line to the portside rail, holds his footing and, between waves, takes short firm steps through falling water towards the bow of the boat.

Carlos searches the radar screen, which is green with wave scatter. On the outer reaches he makes out another vessel. It has been drifting on and off the radar for a few days and appears to be tracking his course. ‘
¡Maldito
!' he mutters. He's surprised the Australians have stood it out. It's difficult to imagine there's enough in it for them.

He watches the men on deck and sees Manuel, one of the Spaniards on board, hauling himself along the rails. Like Eduardo, Manuel has made sure that he is identifiable from
the wheelhouse when working on deck. The word ‘
Padre
' is painted in black on the back of his jacket, helping those in the wheelhouse to know where their most experienced crew member is at any one time. It's Manuel's idea of a joke. He likes to think of himself as father to them all.

Behind Manuel are another fifteen crew members, lining up behind their first mate like ants, swinging their clubs at the ice on the rails and returning it to the sea. Carlos feels the boat lift abruptly and turns his head to see a wall of water gaining behind them. Eduardo sees it too, a giant wave, gathering the
Pescador
up and carrying her forward with such momentum that the bow of the boat is out of the water, soaring. The men on deck check safety lines and hold the rails, which suddenly seem to belong to a skyscraper, such is the gape of air beneath them.

When they hit the trough, gulping water swallows the crew, surging across the deck. Carlos maintains the boat's course and, when the bow of the
Pescador
finally resurfaces, he counts his men. To his horror, two are missing.

Eduardo gets to his feet and is hauling at a line stretched tight over the side. Carlos can't see Manuel. Eduardo slips on the wet deck, but manages to catch himself against the rails. The bow lifts higher out of the water and more of the crew get to their feet to haul at the straps that dangle two of their own over the ocean's open mouth. Flashes of white foam fly onto the deck, the spittle of a rabid sea gnashing its jaws below them. Finally, the jacket with the painted word
‘Padre'
reappears as
Eduardo and another crewman haul Manuel back on deck. Carlos sees the old Spaniard raise an arm to let him know he is okay. Within seconds, the other seaman is also landed, slapped on board like an exhausted fish. He isn't moving.

One of the crew puts an arm around Manuel and hauls him to his feet, guiding him back along the rails to the door that leads down to the cabins. Another crewman, who Carlos recognises from his size to be the Peruvian they call El Animal, carries the limp crewman in his arms. It could be a war zone, El Animal pausing only when the battleground receives another assault from behind. Eduardo and the remaining crew continue on the front lines, hammering off ice, finishing only when the job is complete.

It's half an hour before Eduardo reports back to the wheelhouse. He has changed into dry clothes: a fleece and pants. Carlos notices that he has even combed his hair, perhaps in an effort to reassert a sense of normality on the extreme situation.

‘They're both okay,' Eduardo says, rubbing his gloved hands together to improve their circulation.

‘Thank God.' Carlos looks back at the sea and corrects the boat's course. ‘I recognised Manuel, but I didn't make out the other one. He seemed in a bad way.'

‘It was the young Peruvian—José. I'm surprised he wasn't washed off long ago, to be honest.' Eduardo chuckles. ‘Flyweight that he is.'

‘For a minute there, I thought you were going over, too.' Carlos slaps Eduardo on the back. ‘
Jesús,
don't scare me like that again. What would I say to Virginia? Or to Julia for that matter? They'd both kill me. Life wouldn't be worth living!'

‘Looks like you're stuck with me.'

Carlos grins and finds himself thinking back to the long summers he spent with Eduardo, Julia and Virginia all those years ago. Happier, simpler times. ‘Remember when we all used to hang out together at La Paloma. Those holidays seemed to go on forever.'

‘They were never long enough.'

‘It took me years to pluck up the courage to ask Julia out. I still can't believe you didn't beat me to it. You two always got along so well.' Carlos reaches over and messes up Eduardo's hair. ‘It wasn't like you to be slow off the mark.'

‘I guess not.' Eduardo's smile is wistful. Carlos imagines that his friend is also reminiscing about better days, wishing he was back there.

‘God I hate being away from her. I just want to hold her again, to curl up beside her and know that she is safe. To know that María and our baby are safe.'

‘We'll be home soon,' Eduardo says, putting a hand on Carlos's shoulder. ‘Anyway, I'm going below. I'm exhausted.'

Carlos winks, ‘Dream of that lovely wife of yours.'

Margie's fingers play in the warm velvet of Bonnie's ears. The newly washed golden retriever gleams in the morning sun. Margie's engagement ring, polished from the combination of dog shampoo and Bonnie's fur, glints, too, in the honey-coloured light streaming onto the back veranda. She studies the ring, its small, sparkling diamond set simply in a wavelike curve of white gold. It sits neatly against her matching wedding ring, reminding her, as it has always done, of spooning lovers. Of David.

White gold, Dave has said, is also what fishermen call the lucrative flesh of toothfish. Who would have thought such an ugly creature, caught in the deep, dark waters off Antarctica, would cause so much fuss? Margie shakes her head at the nonsense of it all at the same time as she watches, through the large Tasmanian-oak kitchen windows, her two pet goldfish in a bowl on the kitchen bench. They are swimming around and around, as if trying to find a way out, their shadows flitting across the white wall behind the bowl—there one moment, gone the next.

She has just heard from Customs that they have lost contact with Dave's boat ‘for the moment'. She had called
Roger Wentworth in a moment of anxiety, and now wishes to God she hadn't.

She wishes, too, that she had more self-control when panic strikes. She shouldn't blindly follow her feet to the phone, and speak after her fingers have dialled the number. She wonders if her anxiety is obvious to the person at the other end, or if she manages to hide it behind a sufficient number of light-hearted jokes. Not that she cares a hoot what Roger Wentworth thinks. He had managed to piss her off royally, as Dave would say.

Wentworth has told her that Dave's decision to break the chase hadn't pleased the Fisheries Minister ‘one iota'. ‘Losing sight of the illegals has seriously compromised our chances of a prosecution,' he had said.

‘Well, it's better than being seriously dead,' Margie had snapped back. ‘I, for one, am pleased that Dave stuck to his guns. Surely you can appreciate he's responsible for more than twenty lives down there. He isn't going to follow some minister's orders if it means endangering his crew. Believe me, if it was safe to continue, he would have done so. With bells on!'

‘Yes, Mrs Bates. Of course.' Roger Wentworth had backed off like a chastised schoolboy.

The phone call has left Margie sick with concern. She knows conditions must have been pretty rank down there for Dave to have pulled the pin. She flicks through a newspaper to distract herself, and to fool her anxiety into focusing its attentions
elsewhere. In her current frame of mind, she knows that keeping busy is the best way to keep her own head above water.

She comes across a full-page advertisement for a private health fund. It seems to have been written for her. There's a picture of a road sign that reads STOP, and in small letters under it, WORRYING. The implication, of course, is that if you sign up to the health fund now you can say goodbye to your anxieties forever. It's an attractive promise. If Dave was here, he'd cut out the page and pin it up somewhere for her to see. Perhaps it's not a bad idea, she thinks, going to work with the kitchen scissors and securing the advertisement to the fridge door with a set of kitsch fish-shaped magnets that Sam bought for her as a joke. She makes a mental note to take the ad down when visitors call in.

Margie looks across the lawn to the eucalypt-fringed Derwent River. She watches a sailboat dance on frilly waves whipped up by the spring winds. Turbulent Tasmanian spring, she thinks. Yesterday was stiflingly hot, the air so dry that vapours from eucalypts had sparked bushfires across the State, yet a heavy frost this morning had damaged fruit trees and destroyed half the expected summer harvest of apples, pears and cherries. Today, there's snow on Mount Wellington and more snow is forecast for tonight, right down to sea level. Spring in Tasmania is a bit like grief, she decides. Just when you think the worst of winter is over and that summer has arrived, a sudden storm will strike from an unexpected angle
with such ferocity that the only option is to drop the sails and ride it out.

She phones Joan, a woman she has known since Sam was born, twenty-six years ago. Joan was in the bed beside her at the maternity hospital. Their children had been born five hours, and a whole world, apart.

Joan's daughter, Beth, has Down's syndrome. Margie remembers feeling for the new mother beside her, watching her determination to celebrate the birth of her first child, while mourning the loss of the one she'd imagined.

Most visitors to Joan's bedside didn't acknowledge the baby cradled in her arms. Margie could hear the older, hard-of-hearing, ones talking conspiratorially outside, their voices echoing carelessly in the corridor louder than intended. They told each other how it would have been easier if the mother and child had never met. How the baby would have been better off in a home. Like they knew.

Margie would sometimes catch Joan staring at Sam in his hospital cradle, peering over the glossy white crib when she thought Margie was asleep. She remembers feeling guilty about her perfect bundle. At his potential. Life had dealt them such contrasting hands.

Heads or tails. Light or dark.

It occurred to Margie at the time that nothing else in life placed you so much in the lap of the gods as having a child – carrying it, bearing it and raising it through the early months.

She remembers panicking that the two babies might have been mistakenly given to the wrong mothers. Sleep deprived and hormonal, Margie had been terrified that the nurse could one day breeze in, fluff up her pillow and say: ‘I'm terribly sorry, Mrs Bates, but that little girl is actually yours. Silly me. Let me bring her over to you.' It bothers her, to this day, that she doesn't know what she would have done. Does that make her a bad person?

Margie recalls the expression on Joan's face when someone finally did ask her if she was keeping ‘the baby'. Joan later told her she could have been kicked in the chest, the impact was so great. On the day they both left the hospital, Joan told Margie there was never a doubt in her mind that she would keep her child. The trauma was in completely redesigning her life. Forgetting the future she had wished for. Margie promised herself silently then and there that she would spend a morning a week at her new friend's house looking after Beth. It would give Joan the chance for a break, to do something for herself.

Margie's still not sure if the promise stemmed from her own guilt at having had a perfect baby, or her fear that life can so easily turn on you, and that perhaps good deeds, in some way, provide a degree of immunity against misfortune.

Today, Margie parks outside Joan's white fibro house in Moonah, on Hobart's outskirts, ashamed that she has not honoured her commitment of late. It has been a month since
she last visited, and she makes another pact with herself to reinstate the weekly relief care. She hasn't been at all reliable since Sam's death. But it goes deeper than that. It's ironic, but she feels jealous now when she visits Joan and Beth. Jealous because Joan still has a child. It's as though the hands dealt to them have indeed been switched.

Heads or tails. Light or dark.

Joan and Beth are closer than most adult mothers and daughters and still enjoy an enviable level of physical affection. Margie has been left with just the memory of Sam – nothing warm that she can touch. Resentment sneaks up on her, and in her darkest moments Margie is distressed by black thoughts about why it had to be Sam that died in the car crash and not someone else's child. She elbows the thoughts aside as she pushes open the car door and crosses the small square of mown front lawn stabbed with a white, rusted wrought-iron letterbox. Number 42. It's the same old fibro house that Joan had brought Beth home to all those years before. The same house in which her husband, Charlie, had died from a stroke ten years ago while they had all slept.

Margie sees Beth at the aluminium-framed window, her pale skin fringed by the fleshy pink camellias that grow near the front steps hiding the tired paintwork. Margie hears her shout excitedly to her mother, and pictures her running down the well-worn carpet of the hallway before she appears at the front door, which yawns precariously on its loose hinges.
Flushed and gasping, Beth fills the doorway, and Joan moves her sideways to greet Margie with a kiss and a quick, oven-mitted hug.

‘Come in. I just have to get a cake out of the oven.' Joan jogs quickly towards the kitchen. ‘It's a new recipe. Orange cake. Hope it's okay,' she calls behind her.

Margie inhales the warm, citrus aroma that greets her. ‘If it tastes half as good as it smells, it'll be fabulous!'

There's a new flush of art on the walls, and an Indian yellow beaded throw strewn across the couch in the lounge room. A purple ikat tablecloth covers the dining table, clashing awfully, and wonderfully, with the couch cover.

There's a sense of life here, Margie thinks. A pushing of the boundaries, and a celebration of difference. Survival against the odds. Despite caring for her handicapped daughter within these same walls for more than two decades, Joan has rejected the temptation to become resigned and bitter. She has played the hand dealt to her and, if anything, has become positively defiant. Always exploring new horizons, trying new things. Challenging others out of their conservative cocoons. It occurs to Margie that the ever-changing, life-affirming décor in this house is an outward expression of Joan's resilient soul.

‘How's Dave, Marg?' Joan asks, placing the sliced cake on the table between them and sinking into her 1970s lounge chair. ‘I've read in the paper that he's caught up in a bit of drama down south.'

‘That's putting it mildly,' Margie says, rolling her eyes. ‘It's a stupid situation they've got themselves into.' Margie sees Beth through the window, running her plump hands over the red tulips that border the lawn. The flowers are planted thickly alongside daffodils in a bed of black, well-watered soil. Margie begins to weep from nowhere. Raw emotion that finds acceptance in Joan's home.

‘Margie, love…' Joan holds out a tissue as Margie succumbs to her fears for the first time since the beginning of the sea chase.

‘What right does the illegal boat have to risk another crew?' Margie holds the tissue under her dripping nose. ‘Selfish bastards. And what about
their
families? Don't they care about them, either?' Margie blows her nose on the sodden tissue and Joan passes her the whole box. ‘I phoned Customs and they had the hide to tell me that Dave was in trouble with the Minister for not having followed the illegal boat further south. He's been chasing them for two weeks, for Christ's sake! Those bureaucrats need a bucket of iced water tipped over their heads.'

‘And down their pants,' Joan chortles, obviously trying to lighten the mood. ‘Too much testosterone, that's the problem. Bloody men!' Joan focuses on the gaily painted teacup in her hand, studying the scene of Dutch windmills, flowers and children in traditional dress. ‘All this over some dead fish!' She attempts a laugh, and then grows more earnest. ‘Why don't you contact the foreign master's family? Can't be that
hard to track them down. Where did I hear the boat was from…Uruguay, wasn't it?'

‘Yes, but…' Margie raises her eyebrows at her friend, disarmed and confused by the naïve comment. Joan's advice is normally so sensible and well considered. She looks at the clock on the wall.

‘I know what you're thinking,' Joan says. ‘How could I ask such a damned stupid question? But why not contact the other family? Give me one good reason.'

‘I wish it were that simple. But, chances are the boat's flag state has nothing to do with where the master and crew are from. It's just a convenience thing. A Get Out of Jail Free card. Illegal boats like to register with countries that either haven't signed up to, or choose not to honour, the international fishing agreements. The master can be from anywhere, and the poor old crews are a melting pot of desperadoes from all around the world.'

‘You could google the Uruguayan Fisheries office. They'll have an email address on the web. It'd be a start.'

Margie is surprised at her friend's persistence. ‘Joan…'

‘Look, life is simpler than we sometimes choose to believe. The other master's wife will want her husband home, too. Your agendas are the same. If you lived across the road from each other and your husbands were at each other's throats, wouldn't you invite her over for a cuppa to see if you could help sort out the mess?'

‘Even if I did get a contact address for the illegal guy's wife, what would I write? “Dear Mrs Illegal Guy's Wife, I'm the wife of the man who's chasing your husband halfway around the world. Please tell him to surrender so we can fine him to within an inch of his life and confiscate his catch, and the boat. Oh, and he'll probably be held in detention in Australia until the trial is over, and if found guilty, could be put in jail. Sincerely, Margie Sticking-Her-Nose-In-Where-It's-Not-Welcome Bates.”'

Joan appears somewhat put off, but carries on. ‘Don't be like that. Just tell her that nothing is worth dying over and that you'd like to work with her to come up with a solution to resolve the situation. Maybe you could suggest that the Uruguayan boat docks in neutral waters. Somewhere where the case could be heard independently.'

Margie opens her mind fractionally to the idea just as Beth throws open the flyscreen door and charges inside, crying in big snorts. The door crashes tinnily behind her and Margie feels a spray of moisture across her arm. Beth, clawing at her face, lands heavily on her mother's lap.

‘For heaven's sake, Bethie! What's wrong?' Joan shouts, the air pressed out of her.

Beth points to her left nostril and Joan, holding the right side shut, asks her to blow out. Margie hands over a fresh tissue just in time to catch the fresh onslaught of spray and a small, shiny Christmas beetle, which lands dazed and glistening
upside-down on the Kleenex. Its wet wings are glued together and its back legs inscribe circles in the air above it. Beth's mood changes dramatically. She is mesmerised by what she has produced. The beetle, presumably no less startled, rights itself, and spreads its wings to dry.