Bloke, page 3
She crewed for me a few weeks later, when Bob was off crunching big business and she was in town for a long weekend.
‘Bob’s in Asia again,’ I told her. ‘Tricky business, those negotiations with the Triads.’
‘I’d be careful with jokes like that, James.’
At least I’d graduated from Jacques. ‘He seems an unlikely Mr Fixit, don’t you reckon?’
‘Crew never reckon, Jacques, crew just wait for the skipper to stop frigging around so they can cast off and get out to where the money is.’
There was a nasty south-east blowing. It was going to be an awful day but I was determined to go to sea if she’d crew. The chop on the bar was ugly; it was ripping at diagonals to the outgoing tide. The sea was a mess. I had to concentrate. We both had to hold on and flex our knees as we crossed four crunching breaks before we gained the relative sanctuary of the open sea.
It was at least twenty minutes before either of us could divert our attention from the management of the boat. ‘So what’s the great urgency to make money?’ I asked. May as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb.
‘I’m saving up.’
‘What for?’
‘Me.’
Backhand across court.
I brought in four nets of urchins before I got a chance to rest for a cup of tea. I glanced surreptitiously at her hand again as she passed me the cup. Fine, beautiful. What, a hand, Jim? Jesus, you’ve got it bad.
‘I’m not going to be a teacher all my life, James.’
‘Why not?’
‘I want to travel, buy a farm.’
‘What sort of farm?’
‘One with grass on it.’
‘And fences?’
‘Yeah, few fences would be good.’
‘So what do you teach?’
‘Year Five.’
‘But what sort of things do you teach?’
‘Everything. Year Five teachers teach the lot. English, maths, geography, phys ed, art, sex education.’
‘Bit early for Year Fives, isn’t it?’
‘Pays to be prepared.’
‘Suppose. So are you sick of it?’
‘Sex?’
The old tennis match again. With a baseliner. Bunt, bunt, back and forth. Parrying. But my conversational skills were pretty rudimentary. I was programmed to ask the questions I wanted to know the answers to, not ones to extend the conversation.
‘I meant teaching.’
She must have felt a bit sorry for me, because she decided to give me one straight answer. Sea rule number one: keep the skipper happy.
‘No, teaching’s all right, but I want to … see a bit of the world. Sounds dumb when you say it like that, but you’ve seen my aunt, I don’t want to end up like that.’
‘Well, don’t marry a Miraglia.’
‘Too late, I already did.’
‘A Miraglia? No one said anything. Dom would have —’
‘It wasn’t a real Miraglia, just like a Miraglia.’
‘It?’
‘Yeah, skip it. Bruno Baras. Now, get back in the water and earn me a ticket to La Paz.’
‘Weather’s shit in La Paz.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Aha, man of secrets.’ I pulled on my mask and slipped overboard in an attempt at emphatic inscrutability and realised as soon as I hit the water that I’d forgotten my fins.
She passed them down. ‘Here, international man of mystery, you forgot your slippers.’
It took an eternity to fit them while in the water.
‘And you’ll need these too, if I’m ever to experience the shit of La Paz.’ She handed me the diving bag, gloves and safety line.
Man of mystery, I cursed myself. Man of history, more like it. It was a relief to descend into the deep blue sanctuary where the only eyes were those appraising your suitability as food with a calm indifference. A quiet, considered relationship. I was getting more like Bob every day.
See, that’s what I’m like, I tell the truth. I can’t help it. I could have left the gloves and flippers out, descended to the depths with dignity intact, but life awards dignity grudgingly, and we, the fools who crave it, gamble all for one kind look from smoky eyes, or a cup of tea offered from a beautiful hand. It’s not just the truth I’m trying to honour, I’m not the Dalai Lama, it’s my way of working out what’s going on. And I’ve had to find my own way to do that, because no one ever cared enough to teach me.
Eventually I had to return to the surface to look into those eyes one more time, but I brought the calm of the sea floor with me, curious, vulnerable certainly, but fearless. And resolute as an anemone waving its —
Me an anemone? Delicate, pink. Tentative arms? You’re not going to believe that, are you? But it’s true, I had my antennae out, inspecting the temperature of the environment. I was falling in love. Unable to sip from a cup or inspect a sandwich without wondering what it would be like to lie beside her and stare into those eyes.
It’s always been the same. I’m hopeless. Anemones might have delicate, flesh-toned palps but they frequently get their intestines ripped out by a child’s inquisitive finger.
I’d developed a habit of talking to myself during all that silence under the sea. Refined a habit, rather – I’d always been up for a bit of intrapersonal chat. I found it calmed me, sorted out my feelings, conditioned me to accept whatever turned up. And she turned up. Another beautiful and intelligent woman. Ruin.
We said almost nothing for the rest of the day as I tried to subjugate my natural inclination to invest her every movement and glance with tragic import. Whenever I came back on board after hitching a bag of urchins to the winch, I slumped in the stern while she poured me a cup of tea. I wrenched my eyes five centimetres from the angle that would have revealed her hand. Heroic. You don’t know the physical effort involved. But I was strong, I thought of the trouble I’d got into before, snapping at the lure of desire.
three
I prayed for Dominic to make one of his regular amatory visits just to distract me from my thoughts. But he stayed away, for whatever reason, leaving me to my contemplation of every building in the town and the possibility of her presence in it.
But she was gone again, and all my previous collisions and collateral damage warned against the naked chase. One of my rules, see, try not to look ridiculous. Try not to beg. If only an urchin had pricked her hand so I’d been able to hold it, prise the spine from her flesh. But she was too deft for that, had handled far too many prickly sea creatures to allow mere spines and thorns to catch.
Anyway, we were busy. Bob’s invisible business acumen had acquired new contracts, which meant we dived nonstop when conditions were suitable and quite often when they weren’t. Stoker Stevens was up to his neck in abalone orders and his entire business was frenetic. I fell into bed every night as soon as I got home. My body needed at least eight hours’ sleep to recover from the exposure to depth and the build-up of nitrogen. Some nights Dom and one of his brides had to cook their own tea. I’d wake to find they’d been and gone.
The exhaustion was bliss, the best possible antidote to torturing myself with her lustrous, mysterious eyes, her elegant, long-tapered hands, and those lips pressed slightly forward. Some might say she was pouting, but she was too intelligent, too diffident to pout, she … God, I was a mess. A mess only made bearable by fatigue.
We had a few days to go before we’d filled our contracts. One morning Bob lay stranded against the bulkhead, trying to control his breathing after a gut-wrenching dive while I, having dived for less than half the time and made less than half the catch, was still collapsed like a seal carcass in the stern.
‘Did you see them cowfish on the reef?’ he said.
‘Little boxy one with bumps and horns all over it? Red, green and blue?’
‘Bit of yellow too. Shaw’s cowfish. Quite rare.’
‘Beautiful lookin things, aren’t they?’
‘Yeah.’ Even though I was buggered I was alerted by Bob’s unusual eloquence.
‘Another thing,’ he added, as if he’d been prattling on like a married magpie, ‘Stoker wants you to come to Singapore with me next time. We gotta bring back a new boat to Darwin. Across the strait. I’ll need a crew. Okay?’
Fly to Singapore, three days’ sailing in the Arafura Sea – where was the hardship?
‘Yeah, mate, yeah. No worries, what do I do?’
‘Just steer it, mate, crew the boat. Bit of freight, few jobs to make her ready for the voyage. Not much. Pay like you were diving.’
No, I didn’t mind my new life at all. Money wherever I turned. Overseas junkets. Lovelorn, of course, but I was used to that, like other men get used to a wooden leg. Bear up, stump along as best you can.
There wasn’t much to do in Singapore. I watched blokes scooping single frangipani leaves out of the swimming pool. Fascinating. From what I could see, there wasn’t much to Bobby’s wheeling and dealing. Some natty Asian gentlemen came to the hotel, all opaque smiles and decorum, signed a few papers, shook a few hands, exchanged an envelope or two, and that was it. There might have been more to it behind the scenes, but I didn’t get the sense that Bob was racing around after dark practising his Warren Buffet technique.
Our most important task was to sail the new boat across the strait. She was a nice boat. Beautifully fitted out, gutsy Volvo inboard, a perfect boat for dolphin tours, or whatever Stoker had in mind.
Bob was vague about its purpose, like he wasn’t party to all the information – or was so involved he knew when to shut up. I’d had half a season watching Stoker maim under-17 footballers called up to fill a spot in the seniors. I’d seen him dole out the grog afterwards, cash for the best players. When his eye glinted it was such a raw shock. I imagined it squinting too, like a shark’s. Football was part of some kind of lever he applied to the town.
I watched and waited, trying to work it out. My questions to Bob were guarded but he still wasn’t interested in discussing it. Surprise, surprise. It required talking.
Stoker claimed to have played for Carlton’s under-18s before he did his knee – watching him play made you think even Carlton didn’t deserve that. But the town postmaster, who had a copy of the VFL compendium, couldn’t find Stoker’s name in it.
I asked Bob if he knew Stoker from his football days. He shrugged, with a show of little interest, but I thought his lips betrayed a brief grimace of distaste. He might just have been sick of talking, we’d been at it hammer and tongs for two minutes or more.
If there was nothing for me to do in Singapore there was even less on the boat. She was all GPS and autopilot and just followed the coordinates Bob keyed in.
We anchored off an island every now and then to have a dive, but it was purely tourism. I speared a small trout, not sure if it’d turn out to be a personal friend of Bob’s. We ate it in silence. Not bad, I thought. Bit of ginger and wasabi.
I cooked, I polished, I analysed the albatross’s eye. There was nothing to do except find somewhere to stash my pay. I was unnerved by the opacity of the whole thing. An idiot might have thought it was too good to be true but I hadn’t ascended to that level of idiocy.
I hooked a mackerel and it cooked up a treat. Bob polished it off without comment. The fillets came off in thick slabs of white aromatic flesh. The trick with fish is not to use too many tricks. That’s my opinion. You can go to flash places and they’ll broil it in coconut milk, or stew it in wine and shallots. Waste of time. Fish doesn’t need mucking around with. Just a quick fry, bit of seasoning – lemon and salt, touch of soy – chips and salad.
Chips? All the chefs faint. But yes, the potato and the fish were meant for each other. And the galley on Stoker’s new toy had the lot, even a deep-fryer. All the herbs, spices, sauces you could think of, plus beer and wine.
‘Who sets all this up?’ I asked Bob.
‘The Thais who make the boats. They know what Stoker likes.’
‘But this is a Kaycruiser. I thought they were American.’
‘Made in Thailand for the Yanks.’
I opened my mouth to press for more information, but thought better of it and filled it with fried fish instead. I knew Bob’s limits in the conversation stakes.
We shared a bottle of wine and half a dozen stubbies as we sat on the flybridge overlooking an island lagoon you’d paint if you had paradise in mind. We were suffused with sunset: wine bottle, cutlery, faces, hands, water, coconut trees, all tinted by a rose of embarrassing tenderness. Only the really rich or the very poor could afford to live within sight of such beauty. Or the very lucky. I raised a glass to my own fortune. But even in my bliss I was troubled by the improbable nature of it.
When we drove back into town my eyes searched restlessly for her car. And there it was, outside Miraglia’s. Visiting one of the aunties. Must be school holidays.
‘You diving tomorrow, Bob?’ I asked as we drove past. I knew the answer.
‘Stoker’s coming down. Two days of bullshit.’
‘Better let me out here then, mate. I’ll have to tee up a deckie. Want to get straight back into it.’ Bob slid me a sideways look like a sceptical wrasse. Said nothing. Wrasse don’t.
I’d never been inside Miraglia’s house, never even stood on the verandah, but it was just as I expected. Only the most persistent and ugly plants had defied his inattention and the lawnmower, and his wife’s spirit clearly wasn’t up to gardening. Unpruned hydrangeas clung to the edge of the verandah, a knot of dusty morning glory strangled the side fence. Those awful bloody cacti were jammed into any crack of brick or concrete, like sulphur-tolerant plants on the lip of a volcano.
There was no love in this house, for people, things or animals. No chewed shoe, no ball, no trike to betray the slightest glint of joy. Surly, truculent survival lived here.
Sirena Miraglia opened the door and stared up at me. Without a word she opened the flywire screen and let it clap behind me. I followed her down a hallway like a tunnel in a coalmine to a kitchen awash with the light of an interrogator’s fluorescent strip. The cupboards were painted sequentially in orange, green, yellow and black. Headache. The table was green basket-weave laminex with a chrome trim. The era when that was considered beautiful was probably responsible for the Eurovision Song Contest and hotpants.
But there was her face. The table was set for five, the Miraglias, my deckhand and two adolescents I hadn’t seen before. Miraglia gulped from a glass but didn’t speak, didn’t move his eyes to look at me. I was a smartarse traitor.
I turned toward her. In the harsh light her hair glowed like the radiant nimbus of saints, individual filaments lit by a dangerous iridescence. My jaw seized on the few words I’d practised while looking at tortured cacti. I was transfixed by her lips, how her jaw jutted as if to … They all sat waiting.
At last I chipped the words from my teeth. ‘Tomorrow. I’m diving south. Need a deckie.’
‘That a proposition?’
‘It’s a job. Bob’s gotta see Stoker.’
Miraglia snorted, but she stood, lifted my elbow like you’d change gear on a dodgy FJ, and ushered me down the hallway and onto the verandah.
‘Perfect,’ she said. ‘Good timing. I didn’t know how I was going to get out of there.’
‘There didn’t seem to be a lot of chatter.’
‘A dead kitten would’ve been more of a cheer-up.’
‘So, tomorrow?’
‘Darn tootin, Jacques. See you at the wharf. But I’ll just say goodbye to my aunt.’
‘But … I don’t know your name.’ Stupid thing to say, stupider time to say it.
‘That’s right, Jacques, you don’t. See you tomorrow.’
Another of the little promises I’d made to myself was never to become the toy in someone else’s game. Not to be shifted about from one square to another, to relieve a woman’s boredom or to convince her she was irresistible.
But I was a sucker for beauty. I could stare at a woman’s shoulder for an hour. The way it scooped below the collarbone, and how the muscles swept in a curve to the elbow. My mind murmured a purr of desire. If anyone heard it they’d think I needed my adenoids out. I could catch a glimpse of where a thumb met the wrist and spend a wonderful hour in contemplation of holding that wrist, stroking the skin where three little gussets marked the flexing point. Or I might linger on the clavicle recess, imagine my lips there, shut my eyes and dream of the curve of breasts, imagine how they snoozed beneath a crude fisherman’s jumper, say, how they might loll or roll, how they might plump lazily against my cheek, tempt my tongue to the nipple.
Such thoughts are not useful at a depth of fifteen metres, so on our next day of fishing I surged onto the transom and clambered into the boat, trying to make my dying seal impersonation look more victorious athlete than mangled sea creature.
She handed me a cup of tea. Could I look away from the hand and out to sea, speculatively, like any good sailor? No bloody way. I was a goner.
‘I asked you your name last night.’
‘No you didn’t, you just said you didn’t know it.’
This time I did look away. ‘That’s semantics.’ I remembered the word for it just in time. ‘You’re working for me, we’re out at sea off the most beautiful coast in the world and you’re treating me like a child – like one of your students.’
‘Listen, James, I’m not treating you at all, right? Men always think they’re in love, and in my experience that doesn’t work, especially out at sea.’
‘Is that what I am? In love? What if I said I just wanted to know who’s supposed to be keeping me alive while I work below?’
‘If that’s what you wanted you wouldn’t ask it with eyes like a cow.’
‘Thanks. So what’s your name then?’
‘Gladys.’
‘Come on, I’m sick of this. I could ask in town.’
‘Why didn’t you?’
‘I wanted you to tell me.’
‘Okay, it’s Doreen.’
‘Doreen Romano? What a lot of bull.’
‘Giovanna.’
‘Giovanna. That’s lovely. Giovanna Romano.’
‘If I’m telling the truth. You just don’t want to believe that a beautiful girl like me could be called Doreen.’
