Tim Winton - Blueback

A few seconds later Dora Jackson spouted beside the boat. She unscrewed the powerhead and passed the speargun up. She pulled off her fins and climbed the ladder into Macka’s boat.

‘Was it a shark?’

His mother began to pull on the hose. ‘No. There isn’t a mark on him. I think he’s had a heart attack. Maybe he just couldn’t swim back to the surface. Poor man probably just lay on the bottom helpless until his compressor ran out of fuel. Get a grapple, love.’

‘So he’s dead?’

She heaved on the hose and it coiled behind her. ‘Yeah, mate. He’s drowned. He’s gone.’

Abel jumped across and helped her haul poor Macka in. A cloud of gulls hung over the two boats. The sky was wide and blue above them and the bay was quiet, so quiet.

The year he turned thirteen Abel Jackson went away to school. Longboat Bay was a long way from towns big enough for their own high school so he had to live in a hostel in a big town inland.

On his last day home he planned to swim with Blueback. He wanted to find a few juicy crabs and feed the old fish and fool around with him a good long while. But the sea was up, huge, jagged swells thundered against the coast, and it was impossible to go out on the bay. So he spent his last morning chopping wood glumly for his mother. He split karri blocks for two hours and stacked them in the woodshed. When he was finished he walked up through the grapevines and the orchard and into the national park that surrounded the bay.

Birds chattered and flashed from tree to tree. The ground was heavy with bark and leaf litter. High above him the wind groused in the crowns of the karris. The flaky trunks swallowed him up like a noisy mob. From high on the ridge he looked down at the bay. Out at Robbers Head the sea heaved itself at the cliffs. Towers of white-water lifted in the air. Inside the bay was a rash of foamy whitecaps and wind-streaks. Waves smashed against the jetty. The dinghy was hauled up on the beach and Macka’s abalone boat still stood neglected on its trailer.

At the house he saw the flap of poultry, splashes of colour on the washing line and smoke angling from the house chimney. His whole life lay down there; everything he knew. He didn’t want to leave it but there was no way around the fact — he had to go. He’d just have to count the weeks till the holidays.

On his way back down, Abel stopped at the peppermint tree his mother used as a kind of shrine to his father. The tree was stout and sinewy and its thin leaves were fragrant. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a piece of craggy white coral. He laid it in the tree fork with all the other bits and pieces, pressed his cheek against the rough bark of the trunk and went down to where his mother was beginning to pack the truck.

I’ll wither up and die away from this place, he thought as they bumped off down the gravel road. This is my place. This is where I belong.

Abel didn’t wither and die but he didn’t care much for the big town he moved to. It was a long way inland and surrounded by wheat as far as the eye could see. The land was flat. All the trees were long gone, bulldozed and burnt to make way for croplands, and nothing seemed to move out there now except the endless paddocks of wheat-ears. Abel felt hemmed in. Everyone bunched up together in town as though they felt it too. Abel never seemed to be alone. He went to school in a crowd and he came back to the hostel in a crowd. Everywhere he went there were doors slamming and shoes clacking and a competing roar of voices. Even in his bed at night his dormitory was full of coughs and cries and the clanking of pipes.

Abel felt surrounded. He did his best to cope. He worked hard at school and made friends. New things and fresh faces came his way but here, where everyone seemed to move faster and bustle along, time passed more slowly than it ever did back at Longboat Bay. Home throbbed in him like a headache.

Only in his sleep did Abel feel free. In his dreams Blueback loomed up at him out of the blurry dark. The old fish’s eye was like a turning moon. In his sleep Abel swam and remembered and saw things he needed, things he wanted to see, and some things he didn’t expect.

Once in his dreams, Abel swam with Blueback down into a deep crevice where the water was cold and lit palest blue. He held onto the fish’s fins and let himself be taken. At the bottom of the rock shaft was a great gathering. Abel saw men in uniform, dead sailors floating in the current. Their eyes were open and their brass buttons gleamed. They hung there like starfish. Blueback led him past them to more drowned people. He saw little girls with lace dresses and drifting hair. He saw young men in sea boots with puffy white hands. And right at the end he found Mad Macka in his wetsuit beside the ragged body of Abel’s father.

Blueback hovered over them. Abel looked down on his father, at the ragged hole in his side, at the grey skin of his cheeks. He was a young man still. No matter how old Abel grew, his father would always be thirty-two. His eyelids were pearly. He looked peaceful, asleep. Abel reached down to touch. He wanted to take his father back with him but Blueback finned upwards, keeping him out of reach. Abel lunged but the fish drew away and the boy saw his father’s body grow small as they swam up through plankton and currents to the warmer, safer water of the surface.

Abel woke from that dream crying. The dormitory was dim. There was no one he could go to, no one to tell.

His mother wrote him letters and sent coral and shells. She mailed him a dried seahorse and a starfish. Now and then Abel picked up a turban shell from his bedside locker and held it to his ear. He knew it wasn’t really the sea he heard, but he listened and let himself believe. He closed his eyes to school and the smell of dirty socks and the sight of the wide, flat land outside his window, and saw the ocean.

Before the summer holidays Abel’s mother wrote to tell him that a new abalone diver would be working their part of the coast this season. She was worried because she’d heard bad things about him. People said he was a reef stripper. But she had good news as well. Mad Macka’s family had decided to give his boat to Abel. Boat, trailer, the lot. All his. Abel counted the days.

On the first day of the summer holidays, Abel’s mother met the bus out on the highway. He saw her waiting in the truck on the gravel and he ran to her with his bags flying.

The moment he saw the green sea again his skin prickled. As they came out of the forest and onto Jackson land he hooted and crowed. The pair of them laughed all the way to the house. That night he stood on the jetty and breathed the salt air.

Next morning they dived for abalone off Robbers Head and Blueback flitted around them, insistent as a dog at the dinner table. Abel chucked him under the chin and felt the current the old fish made in the water.

That afternoon Abel stood on the beach beside Macka’s big abalone boat. It was a five-metre catamaran, wide and stable as a house.

‘I did some work on the motors,’ said his mother. ‘Four-stroke fifties. They’re good outboards.’

Abel climbed up and stood on the deck. He tried not to think about the last time he was in this boat. The dive flag hung limp.

‘You can clean it up yourself,’ said his mother. ‘We’ll take the compressor off it today. We won’t be needing the hookah.’