Dad knee-deep in the water, fishing rod gripped in his right hand.
Jesus,his mind screams out,Jesus. Help me.
He never could explain it. But a moment later, he’s at the surface like someone’s reached down through the water, grabbed his shoulders, and pulled him out. He looks around. But there’s no one there.
On wobbly legs, he half bends over, vomits so hard his vision goes black. The salt water burns as it pours out. Feels like scraping teeth.He empties his stomach, waits for the rest to come out, because he still feels it, coating his stomach, soaking his lungs. The water.
For days after, he avoids the ocean. Tries to forget. Can’t.
He bums a smoke in the school toilets, a morning ritual, but when he brings the cigarette to his lips, he hears himself crying out in the water,Help me, Jesus.
He inhales, feels guilty as hell about it. Wonders if Jesus is watching him, disapproving.
But he can’t avoid the bloody ocean. His dad makes a living from it, and his dad before him. They don’t feel it. They don’t understand the ocean and its legacy of violence. But he does. Now.
Look at the ripples on the surface: There’s a struggle below. Life and death. Mainly death. Look at the southern calamari squid, humble and wary and hiding in the reeds.
But are they hiding from you? Or hiding in ambush? He’s seen them snatch baby herrings into their beaklike mouths, stripping them to the spine. Given the chance, they’ll even eat each other. You’ve got to watch anything that pretends it’s prey.
They’re usually the predator.
—
The next time Dad takeshim fishing, he hovers anxiously at the edge of the water, eyes shifting over the flat surface. There’s violence in the calm, he knows that now. What else is in that dark abyss, waiting?
Dad hauls out a sparkling mullet, reaches immediately for the knife, and for the first time in his life, he can’t look.
“Open ya eyes,” Dad commands. “It’s just the way of things, son.”
But it’s not. Not this stretch of beach, not this ocean. This ocean is violent and restless. This ocean is so hungry, ithurts.
For years after, he’s jittery and sick around it. Even at home he bolts awake from nightmares, vomiting in his bedsheets, salt water on his lips.
One night, he’s lying awake on his pillow, and he swears he can hear the ocean rumbling inside.
The water. The violence. It keeps calling him back. The more he ignores it, the louder it calls. The only time he feels still is when he’s sharpening his fishing knife. But inside, his pulse and thoughts are racing. Inside, there’s a hum. A tight coil of anticipation that never unwinds.
And that call, that maddening call, looping through his brain until he can’t hear anything else. Not the cartoons Minnow watches on Saturday mornings or Heath chopping kangaroo meat in the kitchen while their mother weeps in their bedroom.
He can’t hear his own family, but when he does, there’s hell to pay. When he does, he becomes the ocean. It throbs in his ears, spews out his mouth, raging, violent, endless. On those days, he can’t tell where he begins and the sea ends. Doesn’t care, either. In his mind, they’re just one, salt and skin, breath and tide. On those days, he loves it. But lately, the call is louder, rattling in his teeth. More, it roars. More, more, more!
One day it’ll stop, he tells himself. One day ithasto.
But it doesn’t.
All the days of his life, he hears the ocean.
Calling.
Chapter 9
The red-gold dirt snakes through the woods and the pale trunks of the ghost gums look like they’re drowning in a river of gold-red blood. The woods have a thin, muddy smell like wet bark and something else. Something animal.
We called them the Wicked Woods because they’re shadowy and endless, and everything in this town was wicked anyway. Including us.
Especially us.
The worst thing that ever happened to me, happened right here.
