The True Colour of the Sea Read online

  And still Paul had taken no notice. Or had he? After years of parental nagging, Paul nowadays insisted he’d given up tobacco. His new job as an Uber driver forbade stinking vehicles so he’d taken up electronic cigarettes. A battery-powered device that heated liquid into an aerosol vapour that you inhaled into your lungs! A pretend cigarette! An e-cig! Vaping! His father was speechless.

  And this Christmas evening Paul arrived at the family dinner with a turducken and a bar attendant from the Seaview Hotel in a bikini top and extremely short denim shorts.

  ‘This is my friend Skye. And, tah-dah, this is a turkey that’s been stuffed with a duck, then the duck was stuffed with a chicken.’

  Skye planted a juicy kiss on David’s cheek. ‘Welcome,’ he murmured to this woman he’d never met before. He was bewildered on several fronts. A tur-what? And you might have mentioned you were bringing someone!

  Helena said, ‘Poultry gross-out! She was eyeing Skye’s shaved head and upper-breast tattoos of Hawaiian scenes. ‘I can’t believe you, Paul.’

  ‘Chill. Merry Christmas.’

  David rallied with a laugh. ‘Why stop at a turkey? Why not a goose?’

  ‘Or try an emu at the top end,’ said Helena. ‘And a budgie at the bottom.’

  ‘They don’t ram a whole chicken up the duck’s bum, and so forth,’ Paul said defensively. ‘They’re deboned.’

  ‘They’re a big thing in America,’ Skye offered. ‘For Thanksgiving.’

  Paul said, ‘And becoming popular here as well. I’ve been delivering them all over town for Uber Eats. You can get them with quails too, at the starting point, under the chicken. But they’d sold out of those.’

  ‘Turduckenquails?’ David wondered.

  ‘Four bird roast,’ corrected his son. ‘What are we drinking, Dad? Skye likes cocktails. I might make some daiquiris.’

  ‘Isn’t it time for presents yet?’ moaned Scarlett and Harrison together.

  *

  It was the senior Langs’ habit for their children to have Christmas lunch at Angela’s house and the evening meal with David. Minus the other parent on each occasion.

  David and Angela only communicated rarely and indirectly nowadays. Angela’s husband Warren Lutz, managing director of Lutz Toyota Osborne Park, discouraged it, which was fine with David after several uncomfortable family gatherings where conversation lapsed into indignant silence once he declared that he personally viewed cars as ‘just a means of getting from A to B’, and ‘a useful piece of machinery, like a fridge or a toaster’.

  The evening dinner necessitated weary adults and grizzling grandchildren staying up later and forcing down more Christmas fare than they needed, but the fact that he’d flown across the country to spend Christmas with them carried some emotional weight.

  So the habit continued this year, except for Tim’s absence. At the last moment he’d announced a skiing holiday in Aspen with ‘Taylor’, apparently another young Sydney barrister. The family had only learned of Taylor’s existence in the past fortnight, and no one had met Taylor, who was ‘just a friend’ and ‘a very private person’ and there was ‘no need at this stage for family stuff’.

  Disappointed more than he let on at Tim’s non-appearance, David tried unsuccessfully to imagine a shy Sydney barrister and kept thinking how Taylor was a unisex name.

  These days whenever he saw his children after an absence, especially as they grew older, he found himself searching their faces for his own features. Disappointingly, he recognised Angela’s in them more often than his own. Maybe he didn’t really know what he looked like. But not only was he now fascinated by genetics generally, he wanted his children to resemble him more.

  Tonight, with her new vegan gauntness, he saw versions of his nose and eye circles in Helena for the first time. But she still had Angela’s chin and mouth, her (originally) dark hair (they’d all inherited that), her propensity for hypochondria and hurt feelings (and the sulks that followed) and her way of presenting her wishes and opinion as an ultimatum. Her way or the highway. Except if it involved Nigel Chan. Nigel’s way overruled.

  And Paul? His head slick with hair product tonight, he looked like neither of his parents. Sipping his daiquiri, he looked like his grandfather, like Brylcreemed Rex Lang circa 1960. The devoted attention to his hair. The same roguish gap between the front teeth. (Clark Gable teeth, Rex used to insist, to his wife’s scoffing.) The same need to inhale drugs.

  Genes will out, David thought. For the first time in his life he was curious about his ancestors, too, as well as his descendants. A sign of advancing age, he supposed, like thinking of religion for the first time and seeing the point of church. When he was young and had the chance to inquire about his forebears, easily done when his parents and grandparents were alive, he’d never once asked them. He couldn’t care less where they came from. He lived in the now. He lived for the beach and the surf. As attested by the suspect scars on his face and hands and legs: the six-monthly whittling away of his ears and nose. Bad skin genes for an Australian. Sorry, children. Wear a sunhat.

  But he had something to tell Paul and Helena tonight, something he thought might interest or at least amuse them. He’d recently had his ethnicity laboratory-tested by a new online company that specialised in researching ancestry. It was all the rage. They’d sent him a kit with two swabs to dab inside his cheeks, seal in the tubes provided, and return. Two months later they’d sent him his personal DNA news. It had arrived just before Christmas.

  ‘Guess what?’ he said now. ‘I’m thirty-eight per cent English, thirty-six per cent Irish, eighteen per cent French and German and eight per cent Finnish.’

  ‘And?’ said Helena.

  ‘So that’s your background, too – or half of it.’

  ‘It’s only half yours, actually,’ Helena said. ‘Because they can only test mitochondrial DNA from the mother’s side.’

  ‘It sounds pretty dull except for the Finnish,’ Paul said. ‘Are we talking vodka lovers and Vikings?’

  ‘I used to go with a Swedish boy,’ said Skye. ‘Blond hair and beard, six-foot-six. Thor really had the whole Viking thing going on.’

  Helena laughed. ‘Thor? You’re kidding.’

  ‘Did you know him too?’

  David broke in. ‘So, Paul. What’s been happening with you lately?’ Something involving Skye, obviously. ‘Apart from giving up smoking at last?’

  Skye answered for him. ‘Not just the smoking. I’ve got him on a great health and relaxation kick. Tai chi and float tanks. Notice how serene your son is.’

  ‘Until last Thursday anyway,’ said Paul.

  ‘Oh, I forgot.’ Skye shook her head. ‘Don’t say it.’

  ‘So there I am on Thursday,’ he went on regardless. ‘Floating naked in the pitch dark, in a warm-water tank of Epsom salts.’

  ‘More like a tomb,’ Helena butted in. ‘I’ve seen them.’

  ‘Anyway,’ said Paul, ‘soft music’s playing. It’s my fourth or fifth time floating, and I’m used to it now. It’s not claustrophobic any more, it’s very relaxing, and when I get out, there’ll be a cup of calming herbal tea waiting.’

  ‘Uh-huh,’ Skye muttered.

  ‘And I’m floating away, totally peaceful, half-asleep and hassle-free, and I feel something bump against my thigh in the dark. And bump again. For a second I think I’m floating in the sea and it’s a fish.’

  Skye had her head in her hands.

  ‘But it wasn’t a fish.’ Paul was relishing the story now. ‘It was a turd!’

  The reaction was as expected: disgust and shocked laughter.

  Paul sipped his drink, oddly debonair, Rex to a tee. ‘It just proved how relaxed the person floating before me must have been.’

  *

  David rose on a fine Boxing Day to the smell of frying ham and coffee and clattering in the kitchen. Paul and Skye had stayed the night to avoid the booze bus, and they were cooking breakfast.

  ‘The best part of Christmas is the ham for bre
akfast for days afterwards,’ said David.

  Paul said, ‘And the before-breakfast swim to cure the hangover. Ready to go, Dad?’

  Father and son crossed the road to the beach. How long had it been since he and Paul had swum or surfed together, David wondered. Five or six years? Always a real enjoyment to him ever since the boy was four or five and he’d carry him, shrieking with pleasure, on his back into shore, his ‘Daddy surfboard’. Then there were the competitive teen years when Paul gradually overcame him as a surfer and swimmer (the huge effort he put into beating his father!) and David hardly begrudged this happening.

  Already there was activity on the shore – people bobbing in the waves, men on surf skis, and racing children trying out their Christmas beach toys.

  David saw it as soon as they set foot on the sand. The blue striped towel. But was it hers? It looked to be in the same spot she’d left it the night before, but he couldn’t quite remember because of course the tide had since come in and out.

  She must be having a morning swim today. He looked out to sea. The windless ocean was glassy all the way to Rottnest and the horizon. There was no sign of the yellow cap.

  He hadn’t been on the balcony last night to oversee her return. Guiltily, he walked up to the towel and nudged it with his foot. Sand had blown onto it and weighed it down. It was slightly damp. Rolled into a corner of the towel was a set of car keys.

  David had a brief swim to clear his head. He needed to think, but he felt breathless in the surf. Paul caught a couple of waves and came ashore, too.

  ‘That’s better,’ Paul said. ‘Let’s go, Dad. Skye’s holding breakfast.’

  David sat down by the blue striped towel, his eyes fixed on the wide ocean and the island beyond. ‘I need to wait here,’ he said.

  Long before he’d put brush to canvas he had a title for the painting. Searching the Horizon at Sunset in the Hope of Seeing a Vessel in the Arafura Sea. He was on the cliff every afternoon and into the evening, watching the sun sinking like a crimson whale, the sky streaking mauve and orange, the vast empty ocean darkening all around. How could he call it anything else?

  Before the painting was half done he finished his last block of indigo. Of course he’d brought his paintbox of watercolours with him, with enough indigo for the three days, he’d reasoned. Even for several seascapes. But as it turned out, sunsets in the Arafura Sea required a lot of indigo, and layering the paint, or mixing cobalt and violet, didn’t work at all. Add a spot of black for the ocean, the merest drop, and you ended up with sludge like the colour of the mangrove mudflats.

  Rather than a seascape, this painting was turning into a bad self-portrait. Not since the Royal Academy ten years before had he been his own subject. In a flurry of despair he imagined the critics’ judgement: Zachary Nash’s first self-portrait since his student days is a dubious study in solitude. How saddening it is to recall that first brilliant exhibition at the age of fifteen. Alas, early promise seems unfulfilled.

  Well, that’s what they’d say if there were any critics here to pass artistic sentence. Or any back in mainland Australia, for that matter.

  Of course he was his own harshest critic and his thoughts were all over the place. He wasn’t himself, whatever that was these days. Surely nothing more ridiculous existed in art or life than this half-finished stick figure reclining on a rock and staring mournfully out at an uncertain sea.

  Even worse than a suspect study in solitude was a study of extreme self-pity. A better title would be Pathetic Artist Cringing Against a Sullen Backdrop. God, he was twenty-five and the figure he’d painted looked like a London street urchin! Better still, Starving Dickensian Orphan with Dog Overlooking Murky Ocean.

  Without a mirror he’d drawn himself from memory, taking into account his present condition (but eliminating the beard). Of course his clothes hung looser on him now. His body was clammy in the humidity. His gums bled. His legs had weeping sores. He always smelled of fish.

  ‘I’m pathetic,’ Zachary Nash muttered into the breeze from the western ocean. ‘And I’ve got the bloody sea wrong!’ The dog looked up worriedly for a second, then slumped down again, its muzzle buried in its paws. When a breaking wave and sudden wind gust sprayed man, animal and canvas, Nash shouted, ‘Widdle! Listen to me! I’m bloody pathetic!’

  Widdle stood up, stiffly and abjectly, and in four slow and rickety stages shook himself dry.

  In the fading light the ocean was assuming its dominant evening shade of indigo once more. But the underwater reefs and tonight’s cloud arrangements and a confluence of breezes and tides made the sea a dark and choppy patchwork. Grimmer than by day. Not for the first time, Nash considered tossing it in. Throwing everything over the cliff. But he slowly packed up his paintbox and whistled for Widdle.

  Another gaudy sunset anticlimax concluded in the Arafura Sea, another vast indigo ocean uncaptured for posterity, and still no sign of the Eileen.

  *

  The Eileen’s departure from Broome had been determined by the tides. On the north-west coast the tidal range could be as much as thirty feet, and he drank brandy on the verandah of the Roebuck Hotel with the pearling master and the mate while they waited for the night’s spring tide to turn.

  Nash remembered that tropical September night as fine and clear. He recalled the breeze parting the mangroves below the pub as precisely as a comb through oiled hair. Someone was playing a piano accordion over the bar hubbub downstairs. The full moon rose over the exposed mud flats of Roebuck Bay in the reflective phenomenon the pearlers called Staircase to the Moon. A natural lightshow, like a ladder to heaven.

  ‘Definitely worth painting one day,’ he’d said confidently, as he showed Captain Henry Byrd his well-worn letter of introduction.

  This is to introduce the important young English artist Zachary Nash R.A. whose unique body of work at home and abroad since 1889, especially paintings arising from his imaginative voyages of exploration, already comprises one of the most significant records of European contact with foreign and faraway places this century.

  Nash’s friendly nature, good humour and easy mode of address stand him in good stead in his travels. He mixes easily in different types of society, not only with Her Majesty’s representatives in the colonies he visits, but just as readily with the tattooed Maoris of New Zealand, the gruff whaling captains of Boston or the cheerful seabird-eating inhabitants of Tasmania.

  Any assistance you could provide during his travels in the colonies would be greatly appreciated.

  Yours sincerely,

  Gloucester.

  ‘That’s the Duke of Gloucester,’ he told the captain. ‘Nobility sign their names like that. Just the one word.’

  ‘Is that so?’ Byrd said.

  ‘The duke’s a good chum of yours?’ wondered the mate.

  ‘An art patron.’ Nash slapped at a mosquito. ‘An enthusiast.’

  ‘He certainly sounds enthusiastic about you,’ the mate said, and winked.

  From the bar below came the sounds of breaking glass and laughter, and the accordion music came to a wheezing halt. Nash peered out over the verandah rail and beyond the mangroves to the mudflats where the tide was beginning to rush in. The incoming waves and spindrift were backlit by the moon’s rays. He turned to Byrd.

  ‘To explain myself,’ he said, ‘in the past few years, art has taken me to the Americas, the Caribbean, India, Mauritius, St Helena, the Pacific, New Zealand, Tasmania, New South Wales and now here to Western Australia.’

  This announcement lay there for a time while the captain examined the level of brandy in his glass and the mate perused his pocket watch. Nash slapped another mosquito and the mate said, ‘They love English flesh.’

  ‘Quite a seafarer,’ the captain said eventually, and sipped his brandy. Downstairs in the bar there were ironic cheers as the accordion started up again. Someone began stamping to the music. Someone picked up the tune by tapping something metal on a glass. Maybe a pearling knife.

  Nash
raised his voice over the clamour. ‘I’d appreciate a passage with you to the Arafura Sea. I’m interested in visiting islands hitherto unseen by an artist. I’ve heard you sail there regularly.’

  The captain shrugged. ‘Islands hitherto unseen? What do you reckon, Cribb?’

  The seamen looked at each other. ‘We’re always visiting hitherto unseen islands,’ the mate said. ‘Less often in the cyclone season.’

  ‘My work was recently well received in Perth,’ Nash said earnestly. When he got no reaction, he went on, ‘In particular a portrait of the governor’s wife, Lady Robinson, picnicking in the Darling Range. He let the subject sink in. He slapped another mosquito on his arm. ‘And a portrait of a Noongar chief, “King Tommy” on Mt Eliza.’

  ‘More important friends of yours!’ said Byrd, and he winked at the mate. ‘Well, if you’re as upstanding as everyone says, I suppose it’s all right by me.’

  They sailed out of the bay around eleven p.m., bound for Captain Byrd’s farthest pearling grounds, 800 miles to the north-east. As well as the mate, Joseph Cribb, who doubled as ship’s carpenter, and Nash and his Airedale terrier, the Eileen carried fresh stores and twelve backup pearl divers for Byrd’s lugger fleet presently working its way up the coast.

  Byrd ran twenty-two luggers, one of the biggest fleets out of Broome. Though his boats used the new canvas suits, copper helmets, heavy boots and air hoses, he still employed bare-skin Aboriginal divers where necessary. The Eileen was a 200-ton, 100-foot schooner that operated as a mothership to provision his fleet and transport replacement divers when his crewmen had burst their eardrums or drowned or died from decompression sickness – the ‘bends’ – or from shark attacks. Or from cyclones. Especially cyclones. A single storm in February 1889 had sunk three schooners and eighty luggers and drowned four hundred men.

  Still, these were unsurprising, even sporadically anticipated disasters. What most offended Captain Byrd was having to replace divers because of fights and stabbings. He had no patience for any misbehaviour, insubordination or racial disharmony on board or ashore. He forbade his crews of Japanese, Malay, Dyak, Koepanger, Filipino, Chinese and Aboriginal divers from carrying pearling knives with sharp points. Indeed, when he spotted one he snapped off the point.