Nam Le - The Boat

His mum slapped her palm against his dad's cheek as he was leaving, pulled it in for a kiss. "Of course he is," she said.

At first she kept it to herself. There may have been minor episodes but Jamie and Michael were both at school, their dad out on the trawler all day. She worked alone. Her city life a lifting impression. By that time she was beginning to make a name for herself painting with big steel spatulas, smearing and scraping her compositions over broad canvases. She mixed her own paint. The house and studio and yard were cluttered with the junk of her labor: glass panes and book dust jackets used as makeshift palettes, improvised seashell slabs as mullers. Every window she passed was thrown open — for ages afterward she'd come across sketches and enigmatic notes to herself crammed between books, weighted down under tins of pigment powder, turps and binding oils. Even before the diagnosis, her work — and it was heavy work-seemed driven by mania.

As if she knew. As if before it all, she already understood how it would happen: one moment you were bunching up the full strength of your body for a throw and the next you lost your purchase on everything, you'd slipped on squid guts and woke up drowning in paint, your body a hurt, disobedient in paper-thin sleeves. After all, what was to say it shouldn't hurt? — to feel, or move; to push a hand or eye across a plane? If your body endured for no real reason, what was to say you should feel anything at all?

***

SEAGULLS, HUNDREDS OF THEM, wheeled and skirled overhead. Jamie lay down on his back and followed the light-dark specks against the sunlight, tuning out Cale's voice.

"Easy, big man," Cale was saying. "Easy." He was talking to Michael, his speech already slurry with pot.

"The backpackers too."

"Nah, big man, they're not the enemy," said Cale. "Them and the blackfellas, they just mind their own business. They're all right by me. It's the holiday-homers, those rich wankers. And the local bogans."

"Yeah."

"And the Asians, hey," Cale added.

The line tweaked under Jamie's fingertips. He sat upright, fumbled with the rod, but already he could tell the tension had slipped out of it. Seaweed, probably. He sucked down a couple of deep breaths to ease the head rush.

"Some of them are okay," mumbled Michael. "At school." He was playing with a scuffed cricket ball, sending it into elaborate spins from right hand to left.

Cale turned his attention to Jamie. "Monster bite, hey?"

Jamie couldn't remember how they'd become mates. Cale had blown into town a couple of terms ago and started hanging around the beach. Just another shaggy-blond layabout in his twenties. One day he ran up the jetty and helped Jamie gaff a big banjo. They clubbed it dead and Cale held it up under the gills, both of them gape-mouthed, then introduced himself: he was from out west, a surf-chaser: he'd surfed off the coast of Tassie, in Hawaii, around the Horn in South Africa. That leather topaz-studded necklace had been souvenired from his girlfriend's body, wiped out in Europe. He'd glazed his eyes, letting that sink in. Sure, he'd teach Jamie to longboard.

"You're stoned."

Cale nodded, almost shyly, then his face sank into its usual easy, thick-lipped smile. "Those Israelis, man. Always farkin stashed." He teetered up in his red boardshorts and reeled in his line. After prolonged examination, he set a fresh worm on the hook.

"You seen them?" he asked Jamie. "Out near the heads?"

"The Israelis?"

"The Asians, you dimwit."

"What about them?"

"The reef. That's where they poach now."

He had, of course, from a distance. Everyone had. Sliding in and out of rubber dinghies, slick-faced — indistinct even about town where they banded together, laughing in low lilts. An impudence in their laughter. And why not? thought Jamie. They pretty much ran the fishing racket in town now — they'd bought out the fish plant when it was going belly-up years ago. He vaguely recalled being dragged to those rowdy town meetings- all the tirades against those money-grubbing Chinks — his parents arguing on the way home.

"Makes sense," Jamie said. "Hundred bucks a kilo."

Michael looked up. "A hundred bucks?"

"That's right, big man. Flog it off to posh restaurants, don't they? And those restaurants, they flog it off to posh wankers — for ten times that much."

"Ten times easy," said Jamie.

"Farkin abalone." Cale grinned. "A month's pay, hey?"

Jamie's parents, finally, had agreed to his getting a job over the break. He'd have cash of his own. He'd be able to buy things. He was starting at the fish plant, where Cale worked as well, but secretly he hoped to get a spot on a commercial boat before too long. He was his dad's son, after all.

Michael started whistling, then stopped. Jamie lay down on his back. The wooden planks seared his skin for a second, then eased their heat throughout his body. He closed his eyes: a dark orange glow, shadowed fitfully by gulls. He felt, in his bones, the slap of Michael's cricket ball against his palm. Muzzy with warmth, he allowed himself to relive that morning's assembly: the gale of applause… Alison… but each time, at that point, his mind looped back around. He found himself thinking about Dory. That huge, mean body-the man's face on top of it. He'd been held back a couple of years. He'd been full forward for Halflead four years running. From the sudden silence, the irregular scuffing of feet, Jamie could tell Michael had tossed the ball high into the air. He pictured it arcing slowly up, out — over the water. The dangerous thought came; he brushed around it, then he let it in: What if they — Alison and Dory — weren't together anymore? When was the last time, anyway, anyone had seen them together? Michael caught the ball. Then, against the planking. . thump. . thump . . each bounce a mottling shape in the sunglow.

"Cut it out," Jamie murmured.

The bouncing stopped. Cale wet his lips loudly. Water lapped against the pylons.

"So," said Cale. "What the fark." Jamie remained quietly on his back.

"Look who's in a good mood lately."

He said it accusingly. "Alison Fischer. She got anything to do with it?"

"What?"

"Yeah yeah." His mouth made more slopping noises. "What a shifty cunt. You, I mean."

Jamie sat up, opened his eyes-the world bursting yellow and vivid-and gestured his head toward Michael. His brother's shape crouched over the tackle box.

"Sorry." Cale lowered his voice. "He's always around so I forget."

"What'd you hear?"

"Nothing." He smirked. "She's a bit alright-that's all." He licked two fingers and held them curled upward, then glanced dramatically at Michael. "Remember Stevo. . Stefan? That Danish show pony? He reckons he got a finger in — you know. After that school play in April."

Jamie rolled over onto his stomach. He hadn't expected word to come round so quickly. Who was where, with who, how far they got — a town like this spread gossip like the clap. Cale, despite being older, hung out a lot with high-schoolers — couldn't hack being out of the loop. He was looser-lipped than any girl. But it'd only been a couple of hours since Alison had come up to Jamie. . and — he kept reminding himself — nothing had happened.

Cale paused. " 'Course Dory never found out… that time."

"Shut up."

Of course what Cale meant was: Remember those other times? Jamie remembered. The whole town remembered. There was an element of community ritual in remembering all the things Dory was known or suspected to have done. The worst, of course, being the to — do with the Chinese poacher. Never cleared up. He was only twenty but he stood in as the town's hard man. And Alison — the girl with the silver spoon, the girl with the reputation — was known to give him plenty of reason for it.