‘You right?’ Bob shook his head a little, stepped up and took the beer from Frank. Neither spoke as they opened their bottles. Bob drank deeply, breathing out through his open mouth afterwards. The hand holding the bottle shook and Bob lowered the arm to his side. A plume of smoke appeared on the horizon from the sugar factory and dispersed greyly into the sky.
‘They found Ian’s girl.’
‘She’s all right?’
‘Nup.’
He drank again.
‘Oh.’
A currawong flew blackly across the clearing. The sound of sheets snapping in the wind.
‘Jawbone. Up at Redcliff.’
‘Fuck’s sake.’ Frank pressed his fingers into his hairline. ‘Fuck’s sake.’
Bob nodded. ‘Just a jawbone. The teeth in there as well. They counted her fillings.’
He closed his eyes. When he opened them again, Bob pointed to his eye. ‘It’s Vick. If you were wondering. She went a cock-a-hoop.’ He touched his face, which peeled open in a smile and a forced laugh that looked dry and painful.
‘She okay?’
‘Nah. But that’s just the fuckin’ way sometimes. Sometimes people aren’t all right and that’s just how it is.’ Bob squinted into the sun, avoiding his eyes.
A long silence.
The Mackelly girl. Her jawbone.
‘Any ideas?’
‘Dud hitchhiker most likely. Probably just passing through. Usual.’
Frank let his head nod, squinted up at the sun with Bob. There was more silence, then more beer. They drank and when their bottles were empty they got more, and when it was all gone they just sat and waited for the end of the day.
He’d dreamt he was back in Canberra. It was dull. In the dream he woke up, got dressed, ate breakfast and left the flat for work. He walked along the street and it was hot. He thought about the things he had to do when he got in to work. He looked both ways before crossing the road. Then a bird singing shrilly in the night woke him, so that he jolted out of deep sleep and felt the air shooting hotly out of his nose.
The bird queried once more and was quiet.
Eucalyptus blanketed the room. He had the feeling that the trees were peering in through the windows, that they had uprooted and crept over to take a peek. The leaves of the banana tree on the roof were a gentle tap tap tap let me in.
The wind in the cane sounded as if grasses and roots were growing, cradling the shack like a bird’s nest, hugging the soft old wood of the place, creaking and splintering the walls. He thought about the feel of loose dirt on his shoulder blades, of the lick of breezes that could reach right up under the backs of his ears. He stretched out his feet and thought he could feel them take root, thought he could feel his toenails’ growth speed up; the hair on his head tangling and moving as it grew, lifting tiny bits of scalp and taking them with it.
When the sky lightened he tested his limbs to see if they could move and swung himself out of bed. He pissed long and hard out through the door, his eyes fixed on the scribble gums that looked calmly back.
Juice ran down his chin when he bit into a tomato. Wiping his face, he was surprised by the amount of beard hair he was carrying around. He put a can of tea on to steep and sat on the steps reading the day. A yellow cloud in the north signalled work at the sugar plant had begun. A dog barked distantly and Kirk gobbled as Mary took a bath in the dust. There was nothing for it but to go fishing. He wet his lips with tea, pulled on some dirty shorts and an oil-stained T-shirt with the words DETTOL CLEANS across the back. He threw the remains of last night’s meal to the chickens and slotted his reel into the holder on the nose of the truck. He took a pack of frozen green prawns from the cold box and put them in an ice-cream tub of cold water. ‘Prawn net,’ he said out loud. ‘Prawn net prawn net prawn net.’
On the way out to the point, the air was thick with dust. He passed a big white cockatoo standing at the side of the road, looking as if it was waiting for a bus. The creases of its wings were lined with red dust. It watched him pass, feathers ruffled by the breeze, but not in the least bit worried about the truck. In the rear-view mirror the bird shook its head and continued looking up the road in the direction he’d come from. It could be hurt; he’d try to remember to check on it on his way home.
There was no one out at the point and the sea looked soupy. Maybe underneath its surface a dust blew too. He baited up and cast out into the waveless water, the bait plopping like a stone, taking itself down to the bottom with a thud he could feel through the line. There he felt through the pads of his fingers as the prawn rolled in the sand, as it lumbered across small rocks and seaweed. He imagined the sexy-mouthed fish watching it, shaking their heads, rolling their eyes. But he fished on, determined that one of the wrangled tugs on his line would be a fish, not a snag, and that the next cast would be the one. When the sun had melted through the yellow zinc on the tops of his ears he gave himself five more throws.
One, the bait fell off mid-air, slung out on a too hard cast, and he was sure as it hit the water he saw a belly flash, something gobble it as soon as it hit the surface. The next prawn was tightly weaved, aimed at the spot the fish had flashed itself, and the cast was executed, he thought, with minute accuracy. But nothing so much as nosed it. The third throw, when the sun was really hurting his ears and starting on the lower lids of his eyes, was more exciting: a sudden rip of life on the other end of the line, but then nothing, it took just the bait not the hook. Four, nothing at all and he found his interest waning. Normally there was the possibility, endless as the water in the sea, the millions upon millions of chances — what else happened to a dead prawn in the water other than it was eaten by fish? But now he wanted someone to talk to. He wondered if Sal was as keen a fisherwoman as she was a gardener. The backs of his hands burnt on his final throw and he decided just to drag her in, see if something would chase, but when, not far from the shore, he felt a bite, he didn’t do anything other than give it a sharp tug, then whatever had bitten was gone. He unhooked the sucked bait and threw it out — something inhaled it, breaking the surface of the water with silver. Sod it, they were playing silly buggers with him anyway.
In the shade of the bait shop he was blind for the first few minutes. He stared hard at a wall of jelly lures, waiting for the sunspots to go from his eyes. The place smelt like rubber and glue, and it was a good smell, like diesel or chalk dust, the kind you could smell too much. He squeezed the red gummy body of a squid lure and heard the man at the counter behind him shift with annoyance. He gave himself another few seconds to straighten out his sight and turned to him. ‘Got any prawn nets in?’
Without looking, the man, who was younger than Frank had first imagined and who wore sunglasses inside, pointed above his head. ‘Got yer basic, yer midi and yer reinforced.’
‘Reinforced?’
‘Get ’em done meself — weave in a bit of leather round the edge. Keep her going for good.’
‘Sweet. I’ll take one,’ said Frank, knowing he had to buy the reinforced net or risk a long uncomfortable stare from behind those glasses.
The man softened a little and he allowed a small smile. ‘What you after?’
‘Uh, prawns.’
‘Know a good place, do ya?’
‘I’ve seen a few up round the sands at Mulaburry.’
‘Ah. ’S good fishing place. Easiest bet on catching a few bream just off the rocks there — real girl fishing hole, but she’s good if it’s a feed you’re after and not so much the sport. Know the place I mean?’
Frank nodded.
Back in the sun of the main street he sat himself outside the bakery at one of the aluminium tables. He ordered a black coffee and a currant bun, and when the bun came it was the size of his face. He watched the street, not sure what he was looking for — something recognisable in the few people walking by, or someone who might stop and talk. He wished he’d leant up against the counter in the bait shop, quizzed the guy on where to find a jewfish, asked about sharking, as if he knew something on the subject himself. He could have told the guy how he lived on that land, could even have explained that his mother was in that bream hole, could have got the upper hand on the conversation, maybe enough that leaning on the counter could have turned into a few drinks later on, a pub quiz, a joint on the beach. It felt strange to be wishing these things on himself, of someone who didn’t seem the sort of person he would have liked anyway.