He squinted his blue eyes, and looked away. Turning from the heat and the electric white on the water, he faced the shadow of landfall, closed his eyes, and smelled the dilute tidal salt and the decaying foliage of mangroves. As his sight recovered, he saw the lines of stakes that protruded from the still water, marking off oyster-beds.
Looking into the green water, he watched his quarry move about amongst the weeds. But seeing them, and getting them to bite, well, they were two different things. Leatherjacket are a greenish grey, and diamond-shaped. Without real teeth they still required careful handling, because of their long, venomed barb on the spine at the base of their skull. With the barb aloft as they swam through weed and water, they looked comical, resembling tiny, toy trams.
Harry Minter had changed his name, adopting his wife's, a week after she died in fever. To many of his old mates this was an act of genuine madness. But now, along Birch Street at Pearl Beach, and at the jetties of the Hawkesbury, no-one knew about his little piece of lunacy. Which was just as well: they thought he was mad enough as it was, fishing only for leatherjacket. A rubbishy little fish really. But what could he say? He liked the way their mouths were puckered in a permanent kiss. And the threat of danger from their septic spine gave him a sense of excitement, without any real risk.
Harry liked the place, this eddy in the suburban current - the open waters of Broken Bay to the east; to the west, a tangle of mangrove and estuary.
With the fishing line in one loop over his index finger, he worked at untangling some light gauge stuff from the bottom of his tackle box. He was lucky today, so did not get far into that chaos. The sharp line tightened over his finger. With his feet, Harry dragged a hessian sack closer to him. He would use this to fold away the fish's venomed spine.
The fish flapped and twisted inside the hand-net, and Harry set his foot onto it to keep it still. It must have really attacked the bait. The hook had passed deep into its gullet, and the tip of the barb had popped out through one of its yellow eyes. One of Harry's blue eyes watered in sympathy as he twisted the hook and tugged it free.
Softer, lower, and worse
Recovering her poise, Annabel grabbed in her jaws her bundle of knotted twine, leaping through the open door and out into the little back yard.
The phone rang again. Christine snatched up the receiver, and was surprised to hear Diana's voice on the line. She was moving to a new place, she had phoned Jonathan, did he tell her? No? She thought he would forget. He didn't mention the dinner invitation either, she supposed. Wednesday. Macquarie Villa, Watsons Bay. Is Bruno all right? He should look after himself better, slow down. Jonathan? No, she said, no, he was fine when they said goodnight. Did he? Then perhaps he should look after himself better, too. Saturday night then.
Christine returned to the kitchen to tidy the herb shelf. Next she walked next to the bathroom, staring without purpose into the mirror. The hump on her back raised her right shoulder and tended to push her neck a little to the left. She had to do exercises to stop her muscles from stiffening. She stretched left, and right, breathing in, and tried to settle herself. Gradually she identified a sound coming from outside, with the feeling that it had been going on for some time. The sound was not quite, but almost, human. Like a tom-cat's howl of hormonal anguish, there could almost have been words inside that sound: but this was softer, and lower, and worse.
She followed the sound through the back door into the uneven light of her small backyard. The sound was low and general, hard to locate. Christine tried the sunny spot beneath the trellis, she looked in the shade behind the old dunny. She found the little ball of nylon that Annabel had been playing with lying on the damp bricks beneath the shirts and trousers that were dangling from the line. She followed the trail of one long thread. From between the vegetable pots that lined the grey back fence, she heard her cat's rasping breath and low growl. Annabel looked fine. She picked her up, and the cat hardly moved, pre-occupied with the effort simply to breathe. In Christine's arms, Annabel felt strangely heavy, like a drunkard, like a sleeping child. Her breathing was shallow and painful. Christine looked closer: no wound, nothing in her mouth or throat; she began to feel for a lump - a spider bite, or a tick. Then, hidden within the fur, she found that a length of the hard nylon line had tangled, coiled and tightened around her cat's neck. She inspected the line with her fingers and found the knots and tangles tight and hard. With Annabel in her arms she snatched up the ball of hard thread and ran inside for the scissors. They belonged in the cupboard above the fridge, but sometimes she got lazy and stashed them in the cutlery drawer or the drawer with the big knives. She found the scissors in the third place she looked. Careful not to cut the flesh, she snipped the thread and pulled it free, but the cat was still choking. Her little coughs were short and hoarse. Christine felt closely with her finger-tips, but there was nothing. She felt again, with her nails, and the cat fidgeted. There at last was the final thread, cutting tight and deep, and Christine could not help taking some hair and skin with it as the scissors cut through. Annabel twisted from her grasp, landing on her feet, and shot through the back door, leaping the fence.
Wednesday 7 August - Waning crescentLittle stalactites of clotted dust
Like a child's play-pen, the high bed was bordered by an aluminium rail. This safety feature could be raised to prevent the helpless from falling. It could be lowered to set them free. Christine let her hand rest on the cold metal as she leant forward: "How do you feel?"
"Baby, I hate it here. I feel like shit. They won't let me smoke."
Bruno was in for tests. Kidney stones maybe, or some kind of poisoning. He looked silly and pathetic, lying on the hard, high bed with his pyjamas on. No-one ever lay 'in' a hospital bed, Christine observed, you always lay 'on' it - something about the height and the hard sheets. Bruno's lower lip was protruding slightly. His aura was that same dirty yellow, against the mound of white pillows stacked behind him.
Hospitals are unhealthy places. Christine could feel the sickness in the air, a cocktail of bacillus and bacteria, feeding through channels in the ceilings and walls, and exhaled, heavy and cool, from air-conditioning grids. The grid on the wall, close to the ceiling, dripped little stalactites of clotted dust. A tiny moth landed on one, hanging upside down.
Christine sat in a straight-backed chair pulled up close to the bed. In a vase on the bedside table stood her gift of flowers. With Bruno sitting up, the lower end of the bed was oblong and flat as a graveyard slab. The smell of the flowers reached her, strong and sweet. She leant back in her chair, away from their heavy perfume. Bruno's hand lying on the hard linen carried stains of nicotine-yellow. His nails were still long, but clean, and cut neatly into smooth crescents. "The Wets are recording our song in a couple of weeks. With any luck they'll use it on the album. They might even choose it for the single."
"Yeah baby, great," he said, sulking.
"Come on you big sook, it's your song too. We couldn't have done the demo tape without you."
Bruno shifted uncomfortably on the bed. His knees bumped the cross tray that carried the remains of his glass of water and his cold toast. He looked at it and muttered, "Bread and water."
A nurse, dressed in white and blue, swept in to clear the trays. She leant over Bruno to take the jug from his bedside table. She asked him how he felt: he made no answer, and she did not wait for one. In this way, she cleared the other five beds in the ward.
Bruno followed the nurse with his eyes, and his voice was right behind her as she left: "They say I cannot smoke, but they all smoke themselves, they all stink of cigarettes." He transfered his attention to Christine, grinning vindictively: "Menthol."
She laughed, and touched his bony hand. "I've got to leave soon, so you'd better cheer-up, okay? I don't want you to make me miserable for the rest of the night." Leaning forward, she found herself again in the line of fire of the altered scent of the flowers. Now she regretted bringing them.
"No smoke they say, no drink. They say I have got to stop everything. I tell them I am broken so, shit: fix me! They cannot. They are stupid."
"You'll be out of here in a little while, you'll see."
"Erh!" It was a kind of grunt.
"Now Bruno. You get better. Who're we gonna bludge demos off if you don't get better, eh?" This raised a slow, reluctant smile.
"Where you going?"
"Diana's."
His smile fell. "Her." And he said this with a growl, almost, of hatred. He may have spoken in this way just because he was upset and afraid, but Christine did not think so.
"What's wrong with Diana?"
"She is stuck up."
"How can you tell? You've hardly said two words to her."
"I can tell. She thinks she is better than us."
"Come on, she's perfectly fine." Although, Christine thought, this was not quite the right description.
"The only good thing about her, baby, is that she is not English."
Christine rocked back in her chair, folding her arms. "She's invited Jonathan and me over for dinner, and I am going, and I intend to have a good time." Bruno squirmed and tugged at the pillows behind him. There was a pause, then he pulled himself towards Christine, clutching at the side of his mattress, then reaching to her hand by the bed. He squeezed her, just at the wrist, but his grip was weak. Christine saw this register in his face. Bruno did not say what he intended to say.
"You want to fuck with her, baby?"
"Yeah," she replied, "I reckon I could be convinced."
"And Jonathan?"
"He's not my type," she joked, but continued: "I don't know what he has in mind for her. But then I don't know what she has in mind for him, either. We're friends. We're having dinner together. Forget it."
"Forget it," Bruno countered. He was in a rotten mood; he was hungry and sick and depressed; he hung on to this, tightly.
Christine heaved a door open with her shoulder; the next opened by itself.
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