Quota (15 page)

Still Patrick's fins receded ahead and the darkness grew below. With the weak sunlight angling in from in front of his right shoulder, Charlie knew Patrick was headed for the near edge of Gawleys. At some stage, the rocks had to come into view again when the reef appeared. His bone-deep connection to dry land kept promising him this. He'd thought there'd be a bond between land and reef: that the outcrops would be more or less a continuation underwater of the tumbledown rocks at the foot of the cliff. But right at the deepest point of the crossing, Patrick suddenly plummeted vertically down, kicking hard but otherwise relaxed, hands resting near each hip. He stopped just at the point when the depth had stripped the colour out of him, and grabbed momentarily at his mask. Then he continued downwards, until he became another bluish shadow at the limit of vision.

He was gone for long enough that Charlie decided to follow. He drew an oversize breath down the snorkel and began to swim down. Once his fins had penetrated the surface and he was fully inverted, his ears began to hurt. Something about water pressure, he knew, and it involved his nose. As he continued kicking downwards, he reached up to the facemask and pressed hard at the point where he thought his nose was. It broke the seal against his skin, and the mask instantly flooded. He lashed out with both hands, disoriented, blinking frantically—panicked by the instant and total loss of control over his environment. The snorkel came loose. The bubbles that were his breath tickled their way over his ears, around the sides of head, away to the surface. He wanted them back. His brain tried to tell him he could blink the blindness clear. He knew his legs were running now, and he grabbed at the mask, trying to free himself of the unseen enemy. His lungs began convulsing. In a final surge of fear, he got the mask off and let it go, the world around him a contiguous blur as he fought his way back up towards the light. When he finally broke the surface, he tore the ragged air into his lungs too soon, taking flecks of seawater down and sending him into spasms of coughing. The coughing subsided and he was alone on the surface, far enough from shore that the exposed rocks of Gawleys were the nearer landfall. He waited there, feeling his legs gently paddling to keep him upright. The light changed over the shore, and the sea lost the last energy of the day, gently reflecting the sky. His mind gradually slowed down and wandered. He was Nolan's black square Ned Kelly, suspended in an alien world. His companion had enough physical grace to fit in here. Charlie's body was as dumb and foreign as driftwood.

When he broke the surface beside Charlie, Patrick wore a look of exasperation. He had Charlie's mask in his hand. ‘Found a cray,' he croaked in the middle of a deep inhalation, then disappeared again.

Charlie put the mask back on his face and watched him descend, once more disappearing from view. He reappeared with hands by his hips again, this time with a bright spark of orange in one hand. The creature was heavy, prehistoric, armoured. Marked with bright splotches of gold and vermillion like a treasure of some kind.

ONCE HE'D DRIED and changed, Charlie felt a great wave of drowsiness come over him. He lay on a warm boulder near the back of the car, and watched Patrick watching the cray. He picked it up from the rock where he'd left it and ran a finger over its carapace.

‘See the way all the spikes point forwards? The legs are hinged forwards as well. All the crap you can't eat is up the front—the good stuff's down the back. So the defences point out from its hidey hole. They're useless at runnin, especially forwards. But they can snap backwards real fast. And they've got a mean grip. If you get a finger in there'—he pointed at a long conical spur in the joint of the cray's front leg—‘it'll push that spike straight through it. Saw that happen to a guy once.' He flipped it over, the legs treadmilling blindly. ‘See those leaves along the underside? The way they cross over, it's a female. She keeps her eggs under em. On the males, they don't meet in the middle like that. The females have got little pincers here'—he brushed at the ends of the hind legs—‘so they can hang on when they get a root.'

Charlie was watching the eyes—bright black beads suspended on the ends of stalks. They seemed alert and, to Charlie's mind, distressed.

‘How old is it?' Charlie wasn't sure why it mattered.

‘Dunno. Few years I s'pose. She might be ten.' Patrick fell into silence, occupying himself with the kindling.

Once he'd got a fire going, he produced a blackened iron pot from the back of the wagon and filled it with water from a plastic drum. He took the cray and held it up for a moment, glowing orange in the last of the sun. Then he flipped its tail upwards from beneath and dropped it neatly into the pot. It pulsed violently once or twice as the fresh water flooded into its body, and then it was still, the graceful whip-like antennae protruding from the pot.

‘Isn't the water supposed to be boiling?' ventured Charlie.

‘I'm drowning it. Cos it's not salty it sorta puts em to sleep. I don't agree with boiling em alive. You want a drink?' Patrick returned to the back of the car and produced two plain beer bottles, longnecks with no labels. He jammed them both in the back bumper of the wagon to prise the lids and handed one to Charlie.

‘What's this?' he asked, sniffing the top.

‘I think it's a Newcastle Brown. Les's mate Bernie Harris brews em. He's a stickler for sterilisation, so don't worry about the muck on the outside. Also makes a whisky outta barley, boils it all up in an old hot water tank, but it's not very, um…' he looked out over the water with a smile. ‘Not very sociable stuff.'

The beer was fizzing over the top of the bottle. When it had stopped, Charlie slurped the froth off it and was struck by how real it tasted, something he couldn't describe, but which immediately had him thinking he'd drunk too much commercial beer until now. It was warm, but it didn't seem to matter. His hand gripping the bottle had dried salty and rough from the seawater, with the exception of the two fingertips where the beer had run.

They drank for a moment in silence. Flies buzzed around the catch bag where the cray had expelled some sort of slime. The shallow bay in front of them had finished its dealings with the sky, and now lay like darkened glass. Charlie watched Patrick carefully for a moment: he was content, or maybe just distracted. His movements were slow and his eyes fixed on some point in front of him. He produced a snaplock bag from his coat pocket and started rolling a smoke.

‘Is that grass?' asked Charlie.

‘No, mister prosecutor, straight baccy. No more of young Dale's hydro for you.'

‘It's just that it didn't come from a packet as far as I could see.'

‘That's cos it's chop chop,' returned Patrick, raising the finished item to his tongue to seal it.

Charlie smiled. ‘The beer, the cray, the smoke…Does anybody actually pay retail around here?'

Patrick had the smoke in the coals at the edge of the fire.

‘Depends if you can afford it.'

Leaving it there would leave the afternoon untrammelled, Charlie thought. Pressing ahead was bound to end in trouble. It always did. ‘What happened to your parents?'

Patrick looked at him quietly for a while, considering.

‘Who cares?'

‘Just interested.'

Patrick took in a deep breath and released it slowly.

‘Well, Dad was a drinker. He'd been warned by the doctor enough times. He had trouble, I think it was his pancreas. He'd take himself away for a few days at a time, just go off his head out in the bush. He'd drive over to the Otways, park the car deep in the scrub somewhere. I don't know what was botherin him, but something was just eating him up. He wasn't a bad drunk. Just went quiet, and we all stayed away from him. It wasn't that we were scared of him. Just felt like he was deep in the middle of somethin and you knew you couldn't, um, intrude. Does that sound strange? Anyway, that was how it felt. It was his private stuff, and we didn't know any different so we all worked around 'im.

‘He had plenty to be angry about, I s'pose. He was always broke, even though everyone thought fishing was a job where you could make as much as you wanted. He just wasn't good with the money. He paid too much for things, he wasn't ruthless. He had bad luck, did bad deals. Couple of the boats over the years turned out to be dogs. There was somethin wrong with his neck. He got…he got hit by a hatch cover in a big sou'westerly one night. He had a few stitches and he got over the concussion all right, but it did somethin weird to his neck. He didn't have any kind of insurance, like an idiot, so he couldn't go and see specialists about it. Never discussed it with us, but you could see it in his face when he'd lift things. It's one of the things I remember real sharp from my childhood, every time he reached for his seatbelt he'd make this grunting sound. I don't think he even knew he was doin it.

‘So if you'd asked Mags, he'd have said that Dad never got on top of the pain. Just drank to take the edge off it. But I don't know if I bought that—I mean, that'd explain the steady drinkin of a night—he'd have the three or four before dinner, and then he'd hit the cask over his food, and then back on the beers afterwards till he fucken passed out in his chair. But the big sessions by himself out in the bush, they were like somethin else. As far as I know, he never went out in the boat pissed. He must've had some shockin hangovers, and the funny thing about Dad, he used to get really seasick. You'd think a bloke who'd spent his life on the boats woulda got over it, but he'd throw up for hours out there. An his bloody pancreas'd fire up again, and round we'd go. Same cycle all over again.'

Patrick was prodding at the fire with a thin length of steel, his eyes fixed somewhere among the burning driftwood. A delicate spiral of embers rose from the disturbed coals.

‘Anyway, I was about thirteen I think. In year seven. How's that, fucken year seven. Anyway, Dad'd been gone three days, and I was crook at 'im because he wasn't there to take me to footy but nobody'd ever say anything when that stuff happened. Someone'd turn up and give you a lift and it wasn't discussed. And he turned up at his mate Wal's place in Lavers Hill, was the word we got back. Wal reckons he come tearin up the drive and pretty much crashed into the carport. He got out and he was smashed, falling all over the place, but the way he was roarin and grabbin at his guts, Wal thought he'd been shot. They took him in to the hospital and there'd been some kind of rupture, they said, and we all got marched in there to see him and I'll never forget it. I'll never forget it. Mum was pregnant with the twins at the time. She'd tried to pick a day when they all thought he looked okay, even though he was half dead, and we were all taken out of school and we kinda filed in there, and there he was on the bed, and he was just grey, and there were the tubes, you know. He was sleeping with his eyes a bit open and I thought he was gone, I thought he was dead. There was a box, I remember this, there was a box of those man-size tissues on the side table, the red and black box with the train on it. I've never seen those fucking things anywhere except beside a hospital bed. And then he started sorta coughing and he jerked up in the bed and he was throwin his arms around and this blood just started gushing out of him, just pouring down his front. And he was grabbin at the tubes and Mum had a hold of him but he was thrashing away at her and we were all just standin there starin, you know how kids when they're watching something really bad, they just stare.

‘Someone must've marched us out eventually, but the last I saw of him was just the blood and the sheets were going everywhere, and the last thing I caught as I turned away was his eyes, and it's the bit that's stuck with me because they were just bulging, just popping out of his head and he looked so fucking scared. It was more than the pain, you know, you could look right through it, and he wasn't bad with pain, he'd been hurting for years, but this was somethin else. He was petrified, the poor bastard.

‘So that was it, and he died six or eight hours after that, and they told us in the mornin. We were all sittin along the kitchen table, this big long table, and we used to make walls with all the cereal boxes, you'd kind of pen yourself in there. And Mum come out and she didn't need to say much. No one had spoken anyway that morning. And I remember after a long time I looked around the side of one of the cereal boxes and I could see Mags, and he was just sobbing away to himself. I s'pose he was that little bit older and he knew Dad like the rest of us didn't. Later on, it was the thing he had over us. He could always trump everyone else with a Dad story, or you'd say somethin about Dad and he'd correct you. And he'd give us the shits because he'd put on these airs about being the man of the house, and I used to think it was pathetic and we had a couple of ripper punchups over that, but it's funny as the years go on and I think I understand what he was on about now. I reckon he acted that way because it kept Dad alive for him, like he saw himself as Dad the Sequel or something. You know how that stuff goes. You got brothers Charlie?'

Charlie looked at the fire. ‘I had a brother.'

A pause.

‘Well, you know then. Like, Mags was right in a way with all that carry-on. I didn't really know Dad as well as he did, but I used to think about him out there in his car. I wondered whether he got any kind of peace doing that. You know, these days, you'd do that if you could, wouldn' ya?'

Patrick turned his head from the fire and looked straight at Charlie. Receiving no response, he continued.

‘But the thing that still gets me about Dad dyin was that it was so um, it was rough, you know? It was fucken gruesome. I always thought hospitals, I mean this was only nine years ago, and I thought hospitals were places where everythin could be managed, and if someone was in strife they'd come in in their white coats and just bump up the drugs, or they'd knock em out or something, but people weren't flailin around with their eyes hangin out of their heads. It was a bit of a wake-up to find that you could die real… real
violently
, right there in a modern hospital bed, while the guy in the room next door watches telly, and there's mums down the street doin the shoppin, and here's this guy with all this medical care and he's drowning in all this blood and spraying the shit everywhere and throwin punches and stuff while his family watches. I still don't get that. We put all this spin on it, but it's primitive isn't it? It's still guesswork. I think back to that, and in a lot of ways I don't reckon Mags suffered that much compared to the old boy.