‘Mum, you’re not that old. Don’t talk like that.’
‘Like what? I don’t intend to die tomorrow. I plan to kick the bucket as a very old lady. But I want to do it here, not in some awful town away from the sea.’
Abel laughed. ‘Well, that’s okay then.’
He got up and went to the window. The jet boat had worked along the bay a few hundred metres. Abel picked up the binoculars and saw a diver hoisting up a huge bag of abalone. Another bag came up. Then a string of bleeding fish wired to a red buoy. Abel began to sweat.
‘Costello’s giving the bay a real hammering,’ he said. ‘He’ll be at Robbers Head by lunchtime the way he’s going. There won’t be anything left on the reef at all. It’s wrong, Mum.’
His mother said nothing.
‘Mum?’ he pleaded.
‘Costello’s a hard case, Abel. He’s a vicious man. You’re thirteen years old.’
Abel put the binoculars down and kicked the wall.
After breakfast they pulled weeds in the vegetable garden. It was boring work in the hard sun. The soil was full of tiny bones that cut their fingertips. Abel saw that his hands had gone soft at school. His mother hummed a tune. As the morning wore on he grew more agitated. He kept an eye on the bay, saw bag after bag of abalone hauled up and it was like being pricked by fishbones all over.
‘Mum,’ he said. ‘I can’t stand it.’
‘We don’t have any choice.’
‘Well, I’m making my choice.’
He ran downhill to the house and grabbed his wetsuit off the verandah rail.
‘Abel, don’t!’
He stumped along the jetty. As he leapt into his boat he heard his mother thudding along the timbers. He checked his fuel and started his outboards. His mother’s wetsuit dropped onto the deck. He looked up. She was casting off the lines.
‘This is stupid and dangerous,’ she said.
‘So why come?’
‘Because if you went on your own it would be twice as stupid and twice as dangerous.’
Abel throttled up and they swerved out, thumping across the bay with the wind streaming in their hair.
When they got to the anchored boat at Robbers Head Abel eased the boat down to dead slow then cut his motors so they could drift up alongside. Costello’s compressor roared and his flags snapped in the breeze.
The deck of Costello’s boat was awash with blood. Abel had speared fish nearly every day but he had never seen such slaughter as this. Fish lay in huge slippery mounds and so many of them were under-size. Abel saw blue morwong, trevally, sweep, boarfish, harlequins, breaksea cod, groper, jewfish and samsons stiffening in the sun or quivering slowly to death. Behind the steering console stood crates of writhing abalone and a box of illegal crayfish.
‘We should chuck the abs back over the side,’ Abel said. ‘They might survive.’
‘You step on that boat, son, and you’ll get horribly hurt. I won’t have it.’
Abel sighed and pushed his boat clear. They drifted back in the breeze away from the dive zone.
‘Now what?’ asked Abel.
Abel’s mother was snapping on a weight-belt and wetting her mask.
‘I want you to stay with the boat, you understand? It’s important.’
‘But Mum!’
She went over the side before he could argue any further. He watched her fins flash away into the distance. Abel had no intention of staying dry. He anchored the boat, pulled on his gear and rolled out into the clear, cool water.
He swam across to the red boat, climbed up the ladder and began emptying crates of abalone over the side. Then he dived back in and followed the bright, trailing hoses down to the blossom of bubbles that marked where the divers worked. Once he found them he swam back to the surface and watched from there. In a scattered mass behind them, falling like snow, abalone were finding their way back onto the reef. Some were dead and knots of little fish picked at them. But the divers didn’t look back. They lay on the rugged bottom with spearguns.
One diver pointed something out to the other. Bubbles smoked back from his head so that he looked like a dragon. There was a blue flash ahead of them. Abel’s heart sank. He knew exactly what it would be. He took a breath and dived.
He was only halfway to the bottom when he saw Blueback dart out from behind a boulder. He was as big as a barrel; he made a big target. A spear flashed silver. It flew by Blueback’s head and whanged into hard rock. The fish shuddered for a moment, staring at the divers and then retreated a little way.
Abel knew why. It was all the abalone he’d tipped into the water. Blueback was wary but he couldn’t resist all that food. Behind the divers, swarms of smaller fish were feasting and Blueback wanted to be in on it. Only the two men lay in his way. He flicked back and forward, excited, blinded by his appetite.
Abel ran out of air. He shot back to the surface. Blueback was doomed now, he knew it. In a moment or two a spear would hit him in the gills and the water would go pink with his blood.
Then suddenly Abel’s mother appeared between the divers and the fish. She surged out from behind a rock and put her body in the way. Blueback swirled around her playfully. No, Abel thought, you stupid fish. Don’t be friendly! Hole up, rack off, go away!
One diver reloaded. Then the both of them crept forward, billowing bubbles. Their spearguns glinted like shiny stings. Abel could see his mother was short of breath now. Her strength was going. The fish kept circling her, exposing its side to the spearguns. Abel began to panic. His mother would drown down there. The fish would die. These men would beat him to mush.
Then, in a blur, the fish was gone and Abel’s mother came pumping and kicking hard for the surface. He swam over to where she punched up into the air. He dragged her mask off and let her heave and blow. She felt limp in his arms as he swam her to the boat.
‘Stupid fish,’ she wheezed, hanging weakly off the ladder.
‘What happened?’
‘I told you to stay out of the water. And what about that idiotic business with the abalone? Abel, you —’
‘Mum, what happened? He was fooling around and then — whoosh — he was off.’
‘He wanted to play. I didn’t have any air left. Those fellas were determined to get him.’
‘So he got smart, eh?’
‘Not likely.’
‘Well?’
‘I biffed him one. I punched him in the head.’
‘Costello?’
‘No, Abel. The fish. I thumped him one. To scare him off.’
Abel laughed. ‘Man alive! And it worked.’
‘Took off like a rocket. He won’t like me anymore, that’s for sure. Probably got a black eye.’
‘Well, it’s better than ending up as fish fingers.’
‘Let’s go, Abel. Those blokes will be a little hot under the collar. They’ll need to decompress a while before they come up, so let’s be off while we can.’
‘Will there be trouble?’
‘Probably. We’ve done it now.’
Abel helped her aboard and took her home. It was true, she wasn’t your average mother. Abel decided he didn’t care about average. Out here average didn’t seem worth bothering with.
VIII
Abel and his mother went ashore to wait for trouble. But trouble never came. Once or twice they saw the mirror flash of binoculars upon them, but fairly soon the compressor started up again and Costello and his offsider went back to stripping the reef bare, as though nothing could keep them from business. Plenty of abalone came to the surface but no speared fish, and, to Abel’s great relief, no huge blue groper. Old Blueback stayed holed up, nursing his sore head, safe from spears.