Salt Story (3 page)

It rained all day until people began to realise that it would flood. The main street of town turned into a river and the concrete stairs on Stirling Terrace were rubbled by the deluge. The publican at the White Star kicked out the drinkers early and started sandbagging. I saw a matronly patron dancing in the street. The taxi drivers watched her as slurry swirled around the axles of their cars.

I'd managed to stay on land, but far from dry, the night the southern spring hammered down five inches. I have to remind Salt often that I am a fairweather fisherwoman but these reminders rarely carry much authority. (About as much authority as a fisherwoman has in the Microsoft spellcheck universe it seems. Word has it that I am not a
fisherwoman
but a
washerwoman.
) Of course the weather was always my main concern with going fishing that night of the big rain. The red dress and the visiting minstrels at the White Star had absolutely nothing to do with anything.

On the morning before the flood, I talked with Snow and some other friends at the cafe about the nature of work and how we go about it. ‘I know all these people who have bosses and are so unhappy,' he said. ‘For others it is the perfect set-up. No responsibility. Go home at the end of the day ... I couldn't stand it though. I've always worked for myself. It's the only way I can do it.' Then he told me that one of his jobs had been as a droog extra on the movie
A Clockwork Orange.

We all stared at him. Snow was a droog? Far out!

My fishing income has eclipsed that of my other jobs and I
reckon that makes me a fisherwoman instead of someone who just goes fishing. Salt has been suggesting that I get some bins in my name. His reasoning is that when fishers present their wares at the city's fresh fish auctions, they get the best price with their first bin of fish and it degenerates from there. So, if we send up two names, we make more money per bin. That's Salt's logic. I just like the idea of sending bins of fish to Perth with my name on them. Fisherwoman. Yes.

I also like the Hemingwayesque element of my work, that beautiful interplay of art and labour, the cerebral marrying the physical. Writing about my other jobs as courier driver or kitchen hand never conjure up the same kind of whimsy. I find it hard to wax lyrical about consignment notes or the number of potatoes I've boiled in one afternoon. But to head out to the wine dark evening sea, to hear whales singing and see their phosphorescent meanderings and experience those occasions like the Night of the Flathead, when the boat threatened to sink under the freakish amount of fish we'd caught – that is a storyteller's paradise.

But this night the pot-belly clicked with heat and began to glow red. Lightning spread across the skies. There was a bottle of schnapps beside me. I knew Salt wanted to go fishing. My wet-weather gear was still wet and it looked like it was going to get even wetter. We hadn't made much money that week but looking outside at the skies made me feel quite flaky. I'm just not that tough. In fact, I was feeling decidedly girly in the best sense of the word – I had my red dress hanging by the fire to dry and I was trying to work out which pair of heels I liked best.

Salt rang again. ‘The weather's easing up.'

‘It is not.'
I looked out the window to the south. Dammit. I liked this red dress and all its potential. Dammit. ‘It's a dog's breakfast over this side of town,' I told him. ‘There is no way I'm getting wet tonight.'

Speaking of dogs, there is Digger. He is learning the art of sea-doggery.

He first came to live with me when his owner went up north for a ‘few weeks', one year ago now. I was a dogsitter I suppose, and should have been paid lots and lots of money. It was generally after trips to the dentist that I came home to find he had pulled down a veranda post, utterly destroyed my favourite chair or rolled in some of the disgusting things that fisherwomen tend to bury in their gardens. Then it was time for the long-distance phone call, folding expletives around anaesthetised lips, ‘Come and get this bloody dog! I do love him but my life is falling apart! My house is falling apart! ... what? Well put him on the plane then.
He's not my dog.
'

It became my refrain.
‘He's not my dog.'

People said, ‘Oh, he's so lovable and cuddly.'

‘He's not my dog.'

The fact that he is a seventy-kilo bull-mastiff slowed them down a bit, when I asked for their phone number and if they enjoyed dogsitting.

But when Digger started coming fishing with me and Salt, the perfect fishing dog was born. The myriad stinking things he could find on a small boat probably helped. He would sprawl over the nets, his puppy guts bulging with fish frames, rotten starfish and crab claws. He grew. And grew. He was putting on ten kilos a month. I trained him to sit quietly on the thwart while we played out net and how not to get tangled up in the mesh.

These days, Digger jumps down as the last buoy is thrown into the water and noses around the deck for last week's remnant trumpeters. When it is time to pick up, he leans over the gunwale and watches every fish that comes up. He knows the silver bellies are for him. He thinks we catch all fish just for him. He is so robust in his motivation for food that he sees off anything threatening his feed. Pelicans can make him quite hysterical when they crowd the boat, pulling black bream and mullet out of the net. He's gone over the side after them a few times, dived in headfirst and surfaced like an ungainly seal, spouting brine, circled by smirking birds.

Digger finally grew out of chewing up my furniture and attempting to dismantle the house, not long after my last failed attempt to send him north on the plane. He seems to have finished teething and is evolving from a disaster puppy into a great solid rock of a mastiff mate. But
he's not my dog.

Recently, his owner flew into town and picked him up for a few days. I arrived home to a strange stillness and keenly felt the absence of that joyful wriggling lump of sea-doggery. ‘Welcome home Sarah! I'm so happy you are back! When are we going fishing?' He's made himself indispensable, it seems.

The lee of Point Possession, a thermos of coffee, an orange and the talking music of water against the sides of the boat: all these things make the brutal southerly almost bearable. We wait for fish to mesh in nets spread across the sandy bottom where there still lies the remains of another net: made from thick cables to thwart wartime submarine interlopers.

I can hear a two-stroke flogging at top revs and see, way off beyond the wreck of the whale chaser, the speck of another boat.

Salt hears it too. ‘Hope they don't run out of fuel before they get wherever they're going.'

We drink some coffee and I smoke a rollie. Salt throws his orange peel into the green water and looks around for the boat. The dinghy doesn't seem to be getting any closer.

‘Are they fishermen?'

‘Nah,' I say. I can see them now. ‘They're both sitting down.' There's only one local commercial fisher who sits at the tiller.

‘They're not fishermen anyway. I can hear them talking to each other,' Salt laughs. ‘Fishermen know every other bastard can hear them across the water.'

I have to laugh when they finally motor by. Two men singing their hearts into the gathering dusk. Their boat is the size of my twelve-foot Lightburn and, like the
Selkie,
the motor is a brave little six. Full throttle, she is wallowing like a beetle through honey, weighed down to her gunwales by the happy drunken sailors.

‘That's just like my
Selkie!
'

‘Maybe it
is
your boat.'

For a moment I feed that thought corn-chips and chilliphilly in the scenario-party that is my head. ‘Now wouldn't that be fun?'

They cross the channel and head for the abandoned frozen-food factory. Salt and I watch them in mounting consternation.

‘They're gonna run into our net!' It's getting dark. I don't want to peel them off the rocks when their prop fouls.

Their motor stops and so does the singing. One man gets up and stumbles to the stern.

‘Oh shit.'

‘All right.' Salt starts his motor and we head towards them. But just before we get to them, their outboard arcs up again and they continue on to the factory. They pull the little boat up onto the rocks and drag it to their ute. We swing away with a wave and head back to our spot to see out the sunset.

The
Southern Champion
blew a con rod five days out of Mauritius and then laid up at sea for weeks, the crew borrowing each other's DVDs and getting bored out of their brains. They limped into town recently for running repairs and have been setting hearts on fire ever since.

I pedalled my bicycle off to the metropolis to attend an exhibition opening. Trousersnake boys mingled and shared canapés and a brilliant local whisky with the Glamazons. It was a glamorous affair. Lots of great shoes. But this story is more pressing than the international deep-sea fishing trade and the art scene. This is the sordid tale of how I fell off my bicycle that night. Twice.

An artist at the exhibition criticised my new life as a deckie, plundering the ocean's resources for cash. He took a pin to my ballooning ego right when I was being greased up as an oceangoing hero by everyone else – an intrepid fisher-she with a fisherwoman's biceps. I went outside to sit and think quietly about this.

The kind of fishing Salt and I do is small-scale when compared to the toothfish industry. The Patagonian toothfish have been discovered relatively recently in the deepest of Antarctic waters. They can grow to the size and weight of a big man. They are an oily, ice-water fish, so their omega-3 count is obscene. They are probably the ugliest fish you will ever see. And that is about the extent of humanity's knowledge of the
Patagonian toothfish. And the fact that people will pay lots of money for dead ones.

A few years ago, toothfish poachers led the Australian Navy on a merry chase through the Antarctic. The poachers, those age-old chancers with one eye on the horizon, were portrayed in the media as mercenary thieves in their rusting hulk. The Feds' issue with the toothfish poachers was not territory or ethics, but money – serious money. At least that is my take on it. If the Australian Government cared about territory or conservation then perhaps we would see the same action from the navy when the Japanese ‘scientists' cruise through the Australian Whale Sanctuary to slaughter minkes.

The fleet of Australian-owned toothfish boats (read Australian, i.e. non-poachers) heads down to the grounds of Heard Island for a bracing three months' hunting. They used to return to Albany for the boat unload, an employment bonanza for strong young men who didn't mind a touch of frostbite hurling one-hundred-kilo fish from one freezer to another. These days the boats unload closer to the market action in Mauritius, Star and Key of the Indian Ocean.

As I justified my own fishing habits to myself, I was snapped out of my reverie by a bunch of sturdy young men, one of whom I'd met a few days earlier. What an assortment – Mauritian, Maori, South African – the United Nations of toothfishermen stood before me.

‘Hey Sarah! Do you know where we can get some ... you know, some hootie?'

(I thought: it's the curly hair that makes me look like a shaggy stoner. That's why I get asked this all the time. Hang on, he said ‘hootie' not ‘hooch'. What the hell? O-oh. Ewwg!)

‘I'm kind of out of the loop with that sort of thing,' I explained apologetically. Why was this nice young man asking me to pimp for him? I got all flustered. His Mauritian mate smiled at me with carnivorous intent and took my photo with his mobile phone.

Mr Mauritius took another couple of hours (roughly till closing time) to decide he was definitely following me home. There was no changing his mind. He was on a quest all of his own idea to uncover the sensual gifts of a true Albanian. He would not consider ‘fuck off' as a reasonable obstacle. Unfortunately for him, at that stage of the night, he was dealing with Sarah the Warrior Princess and she possessed a bicycle.

I fled into the deep, dark night. He was fleet of foot but I was so much fleeter by wheel. I could hear his footsteps thudding behind me and his throaty, anguished cry, ‘Sarah, Sarah!' I rode that bicycle like a demon. My heart thumped with whisky and hubris. Took the corner at the town hall and gunned it home.

Well. Sounds good. I took the corner and gunned it, like, I ramped the throttle on an iron charger throbbing between my thighs and performed an attention-seeking rumble-streak down the highway. The truth is, I came to grief quietly and in slow motion when I hit the curb outside the kindergarten.

The whole Christmas party crashed with me; a half-empty bottle of wine (not half-full by this point), my handbag, mobile phone and my beautiful grey coat, which I still haven't found. (If you have found it, please give it back. You will never be able to wear it in this town and anyway, it's itchy.)

My body hurt a bit but my whiskyed adrenalin helped me out of the gutter and I rose to travel the road once more. I'd forgotten all about my bereft toothfisherman and was alternately giggling and nursing a rapidly swelling elbow. If you fall off, then you gotta get back on again, was my reasoning. Yes?

The second crash really hurt.

Salt thought he would give me training in some more nefarious activities. In the middle of the night, he took the boat straight to the buoy roped to a skeletal, submerged tree. Silken clouds strained the frugal moonlight across the water.

‘No lights. No talking – voices carry across the water,' the ancient mariner growled at me. The net, with extra-heavy lead line, was sunk below the surface. An hour later we pulled up fat black bream that gleamed golden like dollars in the murky waters, eight inches apart. We hauled in that net in fifteen minutes flat, dumping it fish and all onto a hasty tarp, leaving the unmeshing till later.

Salt was jollier than I've ever seen him. He was back on the game, faithful to his ancestral roots and he belted out ‘The Lincolnshire Poacher', forgetting all about his own earlier cautions.

Over water darkened by paperbarks lining the banks, I handled the boat and was guided back to shore by Salt's gravelly rhyme and song, the decks smelling of clean, fresh river fish. Well, he's trolleyed, I thought. He's been drinking cask wine. We'll be bush-bashing for hours to find our camp again. How will he find our launching spot in this melancholy maze of strange groves and rivulets? Every landing looked the same to me in the sulky midnight gloom.

He guided me straight to the tree that my elastic-sided boots lay beneath. I pulled the boots onto my bare feet and then backed the four-wheel drive down to the water in the dark. Salt, that canny old sea-dog, had just presented me another tutorial on the practical theory on one of the finer arts – and how fine it is only the initiated know.