When Abel went inside that night his mother caught him staring at the photo on the mantelpiece.
‘You look like him, you know.’
Abel shook his head. But then he looked again and saw that it was true. He had his father’s face.
Later that month, tuna skippers told the Jacksons that pilchards were floating dead all along the coast. No one had a clue what it was about.
‘The ocean is sick,’ said Abel’s mother. ‘Something’s wrong.’
It was a mystery. And the more he thought about it the more the whole sea seemed to be a puzzle. Abel wanted to figure it out.
XI
Abel Jackson went to university to figure out the sea. His mother smiled about that. He’d lived half his life underwater, his best friend was a fish and now he was leaving Longboat Bay to learn about the sea. It seemed a bit mad to her but she shrugged her shoulders and let him go.
Abel moved to the city. The university was like a small town inside the city itself. It was ugly and dreary and full of talk. In his university years, Abel pretended to be a scientist. He explored the sea with computer modelling, with books and specimens in jars, with photos and films. Now and then he went on field trips with other students. He dived in new places, from new islands and boats and beaches, but he felt the same old sea on his body, through his hair, in his ears.
Between semesters he came home and sat on the verandah at Longboat Bay and knew he was no closer to knowing what fish think. He saw whales spouting and dolphins surfing. With his mother he netted salmon and smoked herring. He painted the house and patched the driveway. In autumn he scraped out the water tanks and pruned the vines. One year he brought home some solar panels so they didn’t need the noisy generator any more. That was the year he fell in love.
Abel Jackson met a girl who loved the sea. She was sleek as a seal and funny. Her hair was black and shiny. She grew up in the desert and didn’t see the ocean until she was twelve years old. Her name was Stella. That summer Abel brought Stella to Longboat Bay.
When he climbed out of his car and introduced Stella to his mother, Abel was surprised at how lined his mother’s face was. With a young woman standing beside her, Dora Jackson looked old. There were lines like gulls’ feet all over her face. To him she’d always been young, but now, standing beside Stella, her skin seemed dry and papery. She was an old woman. I’m away too much, he thought. I’m missing things.
Abel was nervous that first day, worried that the two women would not like each other. He saw that his mother knew it. Her smile said it all.
‘Stella,’ she said, ‘you know that you’ll have to share Abel, don’t you?’
‘Of course,’ said Stella. ‘You’re his mother.’
Dora Jackson laughed. ‘Actually, I was thinking of somebody else. Abel, let’s show her who we mean.’
So the three of them went out to Robbers Head and swam with Blueback. The old groper flirted with them and ate crabs out of their hands. Stella shrieked in her snorkel when he nuzzled up to her. The fish’s eyes twitched and his gills heaved. He looked as fat as an opera singer.
When they swam back to the boat Abel saw that his mother had trouble climbing the ladder to get aboard. He floated up behind and boosted her up. She laughed, suddenly embarrassed. Blueback swirled deep below them, just a blur.
That evening they had a feast on the cool verandah. The table bristled with crayfish and abalone. They ate squid and urchin eggs, apricots, grapes and melons. Cold champagne frosted their glasses and sweated on the driftwood table. Stella watched Abel and his mother.
‘You two,’ she said. ‘You seem to be able to talk to each other without saying anything.’
‘Practice,’ said Abel.
‘It’s the fish in us,’ said Dora Jackson. ‘We don’t always need words.’
Out on the moonlit bay, dolphins jumped and hooted. It was like a celebration. Abel remembered the dolphins as a good omen because that was the night he asked Stella to marry him.
XII
Abel Jackson became a marine biologist married to another marine biologist. With Stella he travelled and studied, diving in all the oceans and seas of the world. In time he became an expert, someone foreign governments invited for lectures and study tours, but inside he still felt like a boy with a snorkel staring at the strange world underwater, wishing he knew how it worked. Blueback still swam through his dreams.
He was diving in the Greek islands one day, looking at the great underwater desert that dynamite fishing and pollution had created when he realised that he was older than his father. It came as a cold shock. His father would always be a young man; he never grew older than the moment that tiger shark loomed out of the murk and broke him in two.
That very day he got back to his hotel and found a diving magazine on his bed. On the front cover Blueback and two divers circled each other like dancers.
There was a letter from his mother.
Lots of people came this year, Abel. Boat after boat full of divers wanting to swim with that fat old fish.
Some days I have fifteen boats in the bay. Not all of them are welcome, I must say. People come spearing in groups. I’m worried about the bay.
A month later an oil tanker cracked in two off the coast of Longboat Bay. Abel watched it on TV from halfway across the world. In another city, and another hotel room, he saw video pictures of the oil slick spreading. In an airport lounge the next day he passed a TV and watched the same ship catch fire and the slick burn up as foul weather drove the mess away and broke it up. The stricken ship drifted far out to sea until the weather improved enough for it to be towed back to port. No oil ever reached the shore. Abel Jackson knew how close the whole coast had come to disaster. He called his mother and let her know that he had seen the drama. She cried when she heard his voice. It’s a warning, she told him.
As he travelled with Stella, going where their work took them, to coral atolls, to estuaries choking on pollutants, to strange countries and new oceans, Abel thought about his home all year long and felt the big blue fish pressing against him in his sleep.
XIII
Dora Jackson had been worrying for years when the storm came. Each year the weather grew more fierce and erratic. Strange things happened every season. One year a leopard seal arrived on the beach all the way from Antarctica. Another year the salmon didn’t show at all. She found five dead dolphins snagged in the cliffs at Robbers Head. Abel and Stella wrote letters and called but they were too busy with work to come home much anymore and Dora had trouble keeping everything going on her own now. The orchard was getting away from her. Rabbits got into the vegetables at night and foxes to the hens. Her fingers were stiff with arthritis and engines defeated her.