The Fishermen

There comes trudging back across the home paddocks of the bay pushing its way waist-deep in the trembling seed-heads of the light the trawler, with flat roof and nets aloft, with its motor that thumps like an irrigation pump and a winch triangulate on the monolithic cloud. And this cloud is straining out the sunrise of a Bible tract that shows a few lumps of islands and just the one boat in the blazing sand-box of the sea, while close-up the edges of such a volatile kind of grit are being swept ashore. It's all noticed by a cyclist on the wet asphalt, who takes a corner above the banksia scrub, by someone in pyjama stripes and venetian slats of light among the occasional wide bungalows, by two early walkers going down a track onto the dunes, from where they will watch the baggy sea, that is practising its ju-jitsu on the kelp. Only the harsh approval of the gulls that the fishermen are back, the small boat swimming exhausted with nose up; back from a night far out on the weird phosphorescent plain, in the seething culture of the hatching snake eggs, or from deep in the icy slush of moonlight; the sea corrosive-smelling and raw like rust. Back from the cobra-flaring, gliding and striking sea, goaded it would seem by their being there, who tear up by the roots the nets and the lobster traps. Back from a sea sweaty with stars, or from one black and flowing like crepe. From a sea that erupts and falls on them so hugely that only the radio mast could have shown in the foam, if they'd had one. The fishermen have been taught, by each other, that if swept off in such a sea, without a jacket, which they don't wear in their work, to swim straight down and make an end of it, since they will never get back. They live inside a dream out there, everything they know about is in shadows, who sometimes see a liner, further off, that goes drifting past them like a town on the moon, and who see the ocean vomit a black whale like its own tongue. But you have come back, the pair of you, to a morning world of newspapers and washed cement, to swollen, damp milk cartons, and car fumes, to a train for the city, moving off again through the small town, with a stiff spine, to the old wooden tenements, with sand hung in their eyebrows, near the line, and a sky like bacon. One of you has a wife, and she is brusque, earth-bound, and unforgiving still. She loves you, you can tell, by her sullen glances. Her humid-smelling nightgown, and the smoky curlicues of hair about her ears, in the streaming light - ‘Don't empty those boots there!' ‘Mum Mum Mum Mum Mum Mum !' ‘Why must you always have this bloody soup for your breakfast? Look, I'm burning it again. Do something: watch it. No, that toast is for the children!' Who can know how strange the land is for you, the place where you come to sleep? You have watched the single mass of the mountains slowly worked loose, that goes down aslant into the Underworld, and alone then in the bows have seen the bear-paws of the ocean idly claw at you. You see now, half asleep, the children eating - the grains come undone in their mouths; you don't speak, and you watch your hands, you once slapped one like a wave. And then you wake, and all is silent. You stagger, scratching at your underwear. The little cells of the screendoor, in the afternoon sun, are sealed with dust. Those big lemons, breast-tipped, are new for this young tree, out alone in the concrete yard. On the table the shopping lies agape like a mouth of grief - the cans of tomatoes, red molars; the pot-scourer; the foamy bread. You give up, quite soon, tinkering with the bath heater and write on the back of a note a note, with a pen that half works. You walk through the glare like someone taking a sick day, to the pub, and again you share the dark waters there; you and they launch out from the Pier Hotel, travelling together glass by glass. The school kids come out shrieking in the sun; such animals, you see, as you have released from your body, in the hope of a little comfort, a home. What mad delusion was that? Children were to keep a woman busy until you got back. In the pub, you stagger before you can walk again on the water. It is time to go out with this bastard, your old mate. You look up at him, where he comes to get you - that face might have been some woman's nightmare; a breath of sour acids, and never a tender intonation to his voice. You take your mate's hand, that is hard as a damp stone, reached to you on the floor, in the gutter, in the sea. Through his broken teeth he tells you to hold on, you'll be all right. He pulls you into the boat or he'll come out himself. It can never be said, but you think, Where have you found a love like this? In the morning you'll part from him again with a curt word, at the jetty. You will turn and walk inland and give life another chance.