Sound (4 page)

“Jesus,” shouted Smidmore. “Don't let her get around. Fuck, Jimmy. Get an oar.”

Jimmy held his head, dazed. Blood ran through the webbing of his fingers.

“Let go of your useless fucking head and get an oar.”

Jimmy, shaking blood from his eyes, felt around for an oar. He closed his hand on the waddy, felt its weight and threw it down again. The sea rose under the boat and hefted her sideways onto the rocks. Sal screamed something. Twenty-four foot of men, woman, dog, seal and clinkered wood lay suspended for what felt an age, the oars writhing in the air.

Billhook was on his back and scrambling for his seat when he saw The Eyes again. The boat crunched down as the swell sucked away. They clambered to the windward side of the boat ready for the next wave. Nobody spoke. It was silent but for the wash of water and the second crash of the boat against the rocks. They all knew the next wave would flip the boat and crush them against the rocks. Billhook saw there would be a time when he would dive over to save himself but it wasn't yet. It wasn't yet. The others looked the same. Keep her off. We can get away yet. All of us.

“Alright,” said Smidmore. The sealskin slid off the gunwale and into the sea. “When she comes in next, we row like fuck. We row her out, yes? Are you ready?”

After a month working the western islands for seal, Boss Davidson left Jimmy the Nail's crew and a whaleboat on Fairy Island, on the far fringes of the Recherche Archipelago. Pigeon, Hamilton, Black Simon, Mary and several others including Kirby as boatsteerer were left on another island to the east. Boss Davidson was taking the schooner on a trade run north to Batavia, a British outpost Billhook had not heard of before, to sell the skins and pick up spice and linen for the Sydney market. After making rough copies of his charts onto canvas for the two boatsteerers, Boss Davidson instructed them to meet him in King George Sound in six months' time.

There was plenty of seal about Fairy Island for a good moon or so. The crew put the boat in on the north shore every morning, rowing the boat around to one of the outcrops and shooting seal while they still had gunpowder. It was good, to shoot seal and not wade around through their barking and snarling and crying, belting them with waddies and watching out for their stinking teeth. Billhook and Bailey swam to the rocks, fast if the blood was running into the sea, looking around them for fins with their knives between their teeth. They hauled the bodies and flensed them until the rocks ran with blood, mixing into streaks of algae and lime from the bush above. Maybe ten seal on a good day. Ten skins and half a barrel of oil. The pups left behind mewled for milk.

Jimmy and Smidmore went into the forest in the centre of the island with axes and returned dragging peppermint branches to fuel the try-pot. They needed plenty of wood to try out the oil, and plenty of salt for the skins. They lit a fire beneath the iron pot and boiled the blubber for hours, skimming off the scum, gaffing out any meat or bones and then ladling the oil into barrels. It would be a long day to try out ten seal but Boss Davidson would be happy.

Billhook set up the drying racks on the beach and watched as the women scraped skins on the long slope of granite above the shoreline. Dancer and Sal sang as they scraped. Although they could have used knives, Sal told him her stone knives were better because they didn't break the hide. The furry ring of hair around Dancer's head bobbed when she nodded at Sal and stopped work to correct Sal's song. She looked to Sal, paused and then sang the same bit again. Sal knew none of her songs and Mary, Dancer's clanswoman, lived on another island now. Dancer repeated the last verse, Sal picked it up, and they began scraping again.

The women wore their wallaby smocks even in the heat of late summer. Salt stained white their feet and calves. On the rocks, scrubbing at the skins, they seemed almost seal-like, lolling about on the rocks. Two seals, slow and brown, crouched over their kin. But he had seen them dancing at night and he had seen them emerge sleek and shining from the water, holding aloft a cray or a New Holland paua. Gleaming and black they were, shining women, alight with the sea or the fire.

He watched Dancer often. Sal would talk to him and tell him things but Dancer refused to speak to the sealers. He didn't even know if she spoke to Jimmy the Nail in the night.

“That Dancer, she knows what she's doing with seal.” Jimmy tied off one of the racks and cut the ropey vine with his knife.
His feet squeaked in the fine, white sand. “She's been with the Straitsmen for years now.”

“Where is her country?”

“Oyster Bay area? Dunno. Maybe Bruny Island. Johnny got her first. He grabbed her and then later he sold her to that bloke Cooper, after he shot his own woman. Shot her through the stomach, Cooper did, when she was standing in the doorway of his hut one day. Shot her in front of all the other Worthies.”

“Why?”

“Make an example of her to the Worthies. This is what happens when you don't work, ladies. That's what Cooper told me. Then he got Dancer and sold her to the Policeman a year or so ago. Cooper's on Kangaroo now. He's got another woman. Onkaparinga woman. I told him he was stupid. Killin' a Worthie. They're worth more alive than they are dead. Some men just don't know how to handle them. When they make trouble fighting, or not working or looking like they gonna mutiny, I just give them a gun. I give them the gun and send them off into the bush. They come back a while later with possums or parrots or pigeons. Happy. Everyone is happy. That's how you handle them. You don't need to shoot them. Dancer's good anyway. Known her for a long time.”

Jimmy wrinkled his nose in distaste. “She kills all her babies, is all. Stuffs grass in their mouths the moment they are born. No white man's been able to keep his children with Dancer.”

On the first of their days on Fairy Island, they found the cave. Sal's dogs killed and ate the clutch of fairy penguins sleeping in its deepest recesses. Within hours their trident footprints were gone from the white sand as the crew flattened out the floor and built a fireplace at the entrance.

In the evenings they retreated from the constant easterly winds to the limestone cave gaping to the north sky. Their path
from the beach to the cave soon wore into a track from their feet and the dragging of barrels. Bushes that Billhook stepped warily around in the first week, remembering the barking barillas from Robbins Island, wore away to sand to give him a clear view for the dreaded snakes. The path widened halfway up the hill and became stony, lined with bright green shrubs sprouting tasty red berries. Here was the cave, made by edges of limestone, the sandy floor falling away down the hill. Here was the cave where they lived, for the moment.

Two moons of working Fairy and the islands clustered nearby brought several barrels of oil, plenty of skins rolled tight and dried with salt, and a sudden silence of live seals. As they had seen no other vessels in the area, Billhook reckoned that his own crew had cleaned them out. Only the bones of their previous kills populated the regular ledges and outcrops they visited.

“West … Investigator, the Doubtfuls, then King George Sound,” said Jimmy the Nail one night. Billhook's shoulders still ached from the day's rowing but the crew were relaxed. They hadn't been skinning or trying out oil for a week or more now and fruitless days were days easy on the body. “We'll pack up tomorrow and ship out the day after.”

The next day, after stashing the skins and oil in a remote cave, Billhook stopped to stroke one of the skins, one of the plushest he'd tanned. The ashen tips of the hairs were white against the deep pile of black. Underneath the hair lay the felty soft fur, dense and warming. He held it against his cheek. It bristled slightly before yielding to the warmth beneath. The big female had taken several blows from his whalebone club before she stilled.

Being one of the few who could write, Bailey scratched
Gov. Brisbane
into one of the barrels. “Not that it will stop any bastard,” he muttered. He looked up in the dim light of the cave to Billhook silhouetted against the opening, stroking the skin.

“Fuck, you're hard up, you knob. We gotta find you a wife.”

“I am keeping this one for my bed,” answered Billhook, rolling up the skin.

At dawn Billhook, Bailey, Sal, Neddy, Dancer, Jimmy, Smidmore and the two dogs piled into the boat. They sat on thwarts or piles of nets and canvas. Sal stood at the bow, as she always did when she wasn't on the oars, hanging onto the rope. Billhook had lashed down the heavy iron try-pot in the centre of the boat, beside the masthead, so that it didn't roll about. They tied lengths of canvas to the gunwales, lacing them with rope and tensioning them to make a soft deck, to keep out the sea.

Currents moved at a few knots as the tide swelled around Fairy Island and they let it carry the boat away. There was no wind in the early morning. The men rowed until they were in the open ocean, until the land was only a flat strip overhung with a thin cloud to their north and the island a speck to the east. Dancer huddled her body into the mess of canvas and gear and held tight Sal's big lurcher, moving only to vomit over the side. The piebald terrier dashed about, searching for sea spray to tussle with. In the water, cuttlefish bones dotted with teeth marks bobbed like strange faces in the glittery morning sea, merging into the little colonies of green and yellow weed.

The wind came up midmorning and changed the sea from deep blue to turquoise. Investigator Island was a long sail west from Fairy. They'd lost sight of the mainland by midday and Jimmy the Nail kept checking his compass, saying, “Keep her over, over to port. Thirty miles offshore.” Albatrosses and gannets were gathering, attracted by the boat and the lure Billhook dragged in its wake.

As the sun fell, the island lay like a seal on the horizon. Two peaks at either end.

“Is that the island? It's too far north!” Jimmy pulled the canvas map that Boss had given him from his belt and glared at it. He
looked up to the island and then to his compass. “Must be it. Not the mainland. That's not the Barrens. That's Investigator Island.”

“The Barrens,” muttered Bailey. “Jimmy's losing his bearings. That's another day away.”

It took three hours after they saw the island to be within its reaches. Reefs spumed and sprayed to their starboard and the sun left only a yellow glow on the horizon. They rounded the nose of the island in the dark, the roar of the swell bashing against the rocks and the flash of white foam their only reckoning. The wind ceased in the island's lee. A quiet little atoll with a black hill to each side embraced them. The sail whispered, whipped and stilled.

Jimmy nosed the whaleboat into the breath whistling over the saddle of the island. He trimmed the sail and tied it off. Smidmore stood at the bow with an anchor.

“Keep her ahead.”

Billhook could just see the jagged boulders and the water lapping against them.

“Keep her ahead, another length … one more length …”

The rocks were closer, until Billhook could smell the covering of green weed and the earthy funk of the island. The crew, even the dogs, were silent as Jimmy edged the boat towards the rocks.

“Let her off!”

The sail flapped madly and Billhook rushed to furl it, grabbing armfuls of canvas. The anchor splashed. Chain rushed, clanked over the side. As the anchor took, the boat blew off the rocks and held firm against its rope.

In the night, the boat rocked and lulled Billhook's flesh about his bones. He heard waterfall-tinkling against the hull.

“What is that sound? Are we gaining water?” he asked Jimmy the Nail.

Jimmy lurched over the gear to find the bailer. He pulled the coiled rope away from the stern and felt the planks. “No.”

“Then, what?”

Jimmy shrugged. “Naiads. Sea lice. Mr Thistle's doomsayer. Go to sleep Billhook.”

The bristly sealskin tickled his neck. The anchor chain thudded against its bridle. Jimmy snored, one arm around Dancer's neck, and Neddy whimpered like a dreaming dog.

Billhook slept. Water wraiths played against the hull, thrumming their fingers up and down the planks. Undersea songs trilled in the dark, singing and humming. Little feet clattered on the foredeck. The water wraiths climbed over the sides, small creatures with cat eyes, raking their long fingernails in shining lines of phosphorescence down his neck, over his nubbly nipples and twirled around his stomach.

The quarter moon and naiads slid away when Bailey shook him. “Get up, Billhook.”

“Wāhine taipari.”

“What? Speak the King's.”

“Huh?” Billhook sat up to see a brown gull staring at him from the deck.

“The wind's changed. We gotta put another anchor out.” Billhook sat upright. He could see the spray of onshore waves just to the starboard. Smidmore and Sal looked up from their shared sleeping skin. The boat had swung on its anchor and was blowing onto the rocks. He could feel the anchor loosening its hold on the bottom through every buck of the carvel.

“Get an oar,” he shouted. “Let's get her out!”

“Boss said it happens a lot here,” Jimmy the Nail murmured, as the boat tugged at two picks east and west. “Anchor up in a sou'-easter at Investigator and the wind goes around to the north in the night.” He took a swig from his flask and passed it to Bailey. “Him – he's the only man woke up when she blew around.”

Billhook watched Bailey's starlit face wrinkle into a grimace as he swallowed the rum. The weeks on the islands without a razor had produced a beard the colour of kowhai flowers that climbed his cheeks towards his eyes.

Before dawn, Billhook awoke on the pile of skins, nets and canvas and looked around him at the mess of bodies; people and dogs crammed against each other in the clinker boat. The young Pacific gull was still holding place on the deck, clattering its feet on wood. As Billhook wriggled away from the sleeping bodies, the bird eyed him, alarmed, and rose into the air to hover above.