He bolts out of the chair so quickly that he collides with the corner of the desk. He yanks the door open, and for a moment, there’sa sea of noise. A phone ringing. Someone calling out, “McPherson? Where’s McPherson?”
Then the door shuts. And it’s just me and the silence.
I slump in my seat. I’ve been speaking a long time, and the quiet is so loud, my ears begin to ring.
But I did it. I told the whole story. I told him about Chris and Hannah and Rachel. About Luke and the family business. About the abalone facility on Neptune Road. The illegal shark fishing. About what Dad did to Mum.
But there’s a few things I keep to myself. That Heath was involved in the poaching and shark fishing. What I really did to Amy Anderson.
And the other thing…
The one thing I will never tell anyone.
I fold my hands over my knee. I thought the story was over, but a voice is missing. And then the voice speaks. I swear I hear my father’s voice echoing in the room. I lift my head and listen.
He speaks of the sea.
He says,I hate the ocean. I hate myself for loving it once.
He spews out his hate for it, bitterness clogging his voice.It’s violent and restless. So hungry it hurts.
But I hear something else, a pulse behind that anger. Then I’m standing on the shore as a child sprints past, eyes full and bright as the sun. He flings his schoolbag off his shoulder and dives straight into the water. And it’s so beautiful. All of it. Watching my father as a child, splashing about like a young dolphin.
Until the wave comes.
I don’t see it take him. I just feel the heavy dread, something that makes my chest burn, makes me want to leap to my feet and scream and scream and scream.
Then,
Nothing. Only darkness, like the scene has been wrenched out of the film. Like it’s so painful, he erased it entirely. But it’s not gone. Not really. I sense that he carried it with him everywhere.
Then I’m standing in my father’s bedroom doorway, watching.He’s in my brother’s arms, shaking like a child. The room smells like salt water and the floor feels like the ocean. I feel disoriented, seasick, like I’m pinned underwater, not sure which way is up.
And I know without him telling me, that he spent every day like this. That for my father, there is only Before the wave. And After.
The water gives and the water takes,my father told me in a bitter voice I knew well. But hasn’t it taken enough already?
Yes, it did. It took that boy with the bright eyes. The boy who loved the ocean so much, his own father had to drag him out by the ankles. That boy never came back.
But I’m wrong.
Because right here in the room, the boy speaks.
He says,Have you ever crouched beside a rock pool on a cloud-soaked morning? Watched the raindrops fall down like feathers?
He says,Have you ever waited in the water and watched a summer storm come rolling in?
Have you ever fished on a dark beach at night while a fire crackles at your feet? Chugged down a cup of noodles, salty and hot, while the waves crashed on the shore?
I have.
I hear it in his young voice. Before all the rage and fury, there was love. Oceans of it. The sea was the great love of my father’s life. But the day the wave came for him, that love drowned. And in its place, hate rose up, setting off a chain of events that led us straight to this moment.
Because the ocean doesn’t give a shit if you drown in it. Waves crash, tides pull, rip currents steal you away. And sharks wait in the shallows, silent and patient.
Sharks have been around as long as the dinosaurs, and there’s a reason for that. You’re the predator or the prey. My dad taught me this. Kill or be killed. Eat or be eaten.
He wasn’t wrong. In this town, the men were sharks, the women and children, the food. We spent our lives at the mercy of their hunger until we were pushed out, hunted, or consumed.
