The True Colour of the Sea Page 15

  This arduous labour of water-gathering was only for two more days, Nash told himself next day, as he lugged the bucket back to the spring. He’d brought his sketch book this time, and sat by the swamp all morning drawing the bubbling spring and the eucalypt rainforest around it and wading birds and the purple dragonflies darting over the water for mosquito larvae and a pair of red goshawks watching him from a stringybark.

  This was where the island’s creatures lived. Their oasis. Widdle tore about, harassing a family of finches and some lorikeets rustling in the swamp reeds. When a long-beaked heron faced him down, Widdle backed off. And Nash drew all this, too.

  *

  By noon on his third day on the island, he’d painted two small seascapes from various cliff-top vantage points, made about twenty satisfactory sketches for later finishing, including – from a safe distance uphill, with Widdle tethered to a tree – two drawings of the mangrove forest and mudflats, and man and dog had finished all the canned food.

  As he opened the last can – some sort of anonymous and gelatinous pale meat – he was struck momentarily with the reckless finality of this action, but then, What does it matter? He’d be back aboard the schooner by tonight.

  In an amused mood he spent half an hour sketching the hut in all its decrepit, weather-beaten glory (titling it Farewell to the Official Residence, Veni Island, Arafura Sea, 1899) and then took his paintbox to the cliff top to await the Eileen.

  His thinking was that he’d attempt a sort of island triptych. First panel: the bright midday appearance of a schooner over the horizon; next panel: mid-afternoon, the schooner is anchored midway and a dinghy rows towards the island; finally: the dinghy rows back to the schooner with its passengers – man and dog – against a brilliant sunset. Call it Arafura Visitors.

  But this artistic tableau did not play out in real time. Of course timetables were capricious at sea. When the ocean was still empty on the fourth morning, his thought was that the Eileen had been slowed down by weather. But the weather is fine. Then an accident had delayed it. Of course, that was it. Pearling was a perilous tropical endeavour. Forget polite city schedules. At sea, disaster always threatened.

  Be patient. It’ll be here soon.

  Strange how much further away the horizon seemed when you awaited an overdue boat. How much vaster the ocean and overbearing the sky. How stark the sudden change from disappointment to despair.

  How much emptier the larder now, too. And how much hungrier the artist-exile. Though Widdle had changed his mind about eating rats and now also hunted successfully at night for marsupials, Nash had nothing to eat. It began to rain, a small mercy on this sleepless night. A tentative drizzle at first then a three-hour downpour, and at least Nash was sensible enough to put out the bucket.

  *

  For two days he sat on the cliff staring at the sea or lying mournfully on the rat-fouled sacks, eating small, easily collected shrimplike creatures he had no name for and that made him sick. But the dog whined so irritatingly at his helplessness that the next day he began to face the reality of his situation.

  With the bucket baited with rat guts he learned to catch crabs and prawns in the rock pools overnight and some mornings he managed to scoop up a stranded fish or octopus from a tidal pool.

  He chopped up the octopus with the tomahawk. Not a swimmer, he plucked up courage to jump into the shallows at low tide, duck underwater, hold his breath and pluck crayfish from the reef. With his palette knife he prised small oysters off the rocks. He survived on one daily meal of sea life that he cooked on a rock fireplace. And in nine days he’d used all the matches and kerosene.

  For another day he struggled to keep down raw crabs and octopus before he remembered the artist’s magnifier in his paintbox and thereafter ate his daily meal at noon when the sun allowed him to concentrate the rays and make a cooking fire. And a smoky signal fire of dry kelp on the cliff top every afternoon.

  Six months passed on Veni Island. In summer, high winds and heavy rain lashed the island but at least during the Wet there was no need for the daily trip to the spring. In the sea he washed away the smell of rat piss from his bedding of sacks, but rain poured inside the hut and now it smelled of mould.

  He was very thin. He had bleeding gums, leg sores and flaky skin. He thought this might be scurvy. If so, vinegar’s reputation as a preventative proved wrong. He thought it strange at his young age to be in such a situation that the smell and clamminess of his own deteriorating body embarrassed him.

  Now his days were strictly scheduled and based entirely around food, water and the sunset. Every dawn he clambered down to the tidal ledge to see what sustenance the night tide and stormy seas had entrapped. These mornings the catch was mostly inedible and venomous: chiefly washed-up sea snakes and jellyfish. The beauty of the sea snakes eluded him now. On the rare days of no rain he spent the morning fetching water from the spring and encouraging Widdle, only occasionally successfully, to catch swamp birds.

  His ongoing hunger for the big mangrove crabs on the mud banks was frustrated by the constant presence there of the saltwater crocodile. Even when he couldn’t see it he suspected it was lurking or submerged in the mangroves. Thankfully, the abundant dugongs and turtles of the Arafura Sea must have been satisfying its appetite.

  If only a turtle or dugong would wash up on my tidal ledge, he said to himself. I could kill it with the tomahawk. In truth he doubted it.

  It was wonderful Widdle who led him to the boobies roosting on high ground beyond the spring. Hundreds of the seabirds clustered on a wide rocky outcrop to nest together that summer, and even in his sickly condition it wasn’t difficult to wade into the rookery and collect chicks and eggs, and one blow of the tomahawk easily dispatched an adult booby. The boobies’ fat was good for frying; their flesh was delicate and filling, but though a change from fish, it was only a slight difference. Boobies tasted of fish.

  For several weeks the boobies nested there and he ate wonderfully. Then one morning he arrived at the rookery to see them all take off together, all returning to the ocean to stock up again and feed hungrily, all gliding close to the ocean surface with languid wing beats, all skimming the waves and taking flying fish on the wing.

  Despite the torrid heat at midday, the fire-lighting and cooking process now took him several hours in the humid swirling winds of summer and was impossible on wet or overcast days.

  Late afternoon was both his best and worst time. Regardless of how weak he felt, he was always on the cliff top for what had become his only painting session of the day. Waiting for the sunset and trying to get the seascape right. Futilely trying to light a signal fire of kelp on the cliff top with his magnifying glass. Watching for the Eileen of course. Or any vessel at all.

  Then one morning the heavy monsoon clouds lifted momentarily and he needed to visit the spring again for water. As he bent to dip the bucket into the flow, Widdle’s barking suddenly had a shriller, more urgent note than the bluff tone the dog used for herons and lorikeets. They left in such a flurry that he spilled the water. The crocodile had moved residence to the swamp.

  *

  Back on the cliff top that afternoon he somehow convinced himself that thirst and the constant taste of blood in his mouth were not the problem. His physical condition, his shakes and loss of balance weren’t the problem either. Food wasn’t the problem. Anyway it hurt to chew with fewer teeth. He wasn’t even too hungry any more.

  The colour of the sea was still the problem. To be right, it depended on indigo. The amount of feeling he had for the potential of this painting was intensified by the constant lack of indigo. The whole predicament of his exile had narrowed down to the absence of indigo. An absence even more pressing with the extraordinary vividness of the summer sunsets, like Michelangelo’s visions of heaven.

  Sunsets in the Arafura Sea need a lot of indigo, he said to himself, aloud, yet again. He addressed himself aloud nowadays to ensure he heard and paid attention. Even then he sometimes didn’t take s
ufficient notice and he had to raise his voice to a shout, especially when the cyclonic winds shrieked across the island and tore the frail boards from his hut and the pelting rain sent him and Widdle crouching under sacks in a corner.

  When this habit of addressing himself had begun, the dog at first presumed he was talking to him. Now Widdle ignored every command except the whistle. The dog’s every waking moment was a search for food. By no means had Widdle rid himself of the hunger problem.

  Approaching sunset, Widdle was hungrily prowling the shore ledge below the cliff on rickety legs, scrabbling after tiny translucent ghost crabs, urgently and optimistically nosing stones and shells and ocean flotsam. When he eventually obeyed Nash’s faint whistle and laboured up the dune to the cliff top, Nash noticed the dog’s muzzle was stained a darkish blue.

  ‘What have you bitten?’ Nash said. Widdle still had a crushed shellfish in his mouth. One of thousands of the ovoid black molluscs that lay washed up in piles on the tidal ledge after the storms.

  Nash took the dog’s slobbery chin in his hands and removed the broken shell from his jaws. When Widdle licked him, he spread more blue dye on his wrist. More blue liquid, copious liquid, squirted from the shellfish meat.

  On the cliff top facing the ritual of the sunset in the Arafura Sea, Nash declared to himself that if any painter were to give this shellfish dye a colour, they would have to say, as he did now, shouting into the wind, that it was indigo. True indigo.

  For its support for this collection of stories I’m grateful to the Literature Program of the Australia Council. And to Nikki Christer, Rachel Scully, Fiona Inglis, Ben Ball, Alex Ross, Katie Purvis, Elizabeth Rich, and Brent Johnson.

  ‘Dr Pacific’ was first published in Sex & Death (Faber & Faber, London and New York), and PLUK magazine (Amsterdam); ‘Paleface and the Panther’ in Brothers & Sisters (Allen & Unwin, Sydney) and The Best Australian Stories 2010 (Black Inc., Melbourne); ‘Lavender Bay Noir’ as ‘The Razor’ in Sydney Noir (Akashic Books, New York); ‘A View of Mt Warning’ in Ten Stories You Must Read: Books Alive Guide (Australia Council, Sydney); and ‘Black Lake and Sugarcane Road’ in the Kenyon Review (Ohio).

  Some characters in ‘Black Lake and Sugarcane Road’ have appeared in previous fiction, while earlier versions of ‘Varadero’ were published in Westerly and Gourmet Traveller.

  The story ‘Imaginary Islands’ continues, a generation later, with characters from the Lang family in The Bodysurfers.

  Perhaps I should also acknowledge a favourite song, ‘Beyond the Sea’ (Jack Lawrence, 1945), a cover of ‘La Mer’, words and lyrics by Charles Trenet the same year, and recorded ever since by everyone from Bobby Darin to Robbie Williams.

  About the Author

  Robert Drewe is the author of seven novels, four books of short stories, two memoirs and two plays. His work has been widely translated, and adapted for film, television, theatre and radio.

  ALSO BY ROBERT DREWE

  Novels

  The Savage Crows

  A Cry in the Jungle Bar

  Fortune

  Our Sunshine

  The Drowner

  Grace

  Whipbird

  Short stories

  The Bodysurfers

  The Bay of Contented Men

  The Rip

  Memoir

  The Shark Net

  Montebello

  Plays

  The Bodysurfers: The Play

  South American Barbecue

  Sketches

  Walking Ella

  The Local Wildlife

  Swimming to the Moon

  The Beach: An Australian Passion

  Co-productions

  Sand (with John Kinsella)

  Perth (with Frances Andrijich)

  As editor

  The Penguin Book of the Beach

  The Penguin Book of the City

  The Best Australian Short Stories 2006

  The Best Australian Short Stories 2007

  The Best Australian Essays 2010

  HAMISH HAMILTON

  UK | USA | Canada | Ireland | Australia

  India | New Zealand | South Africa | China

  Penguin Books is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies

  whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.

  First published by Penguin Random House Australia Pty Ltd, 2018

  Text copyright © Robert Drewe, 2018

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  Cover design by Alex Ross © Penguin Random House Australia Pty Ltd

  Cover artwork from detail of ‘With the Tide’ linocut by Mariann Johansen-Ellis, www.mariannjohansen-ellis.com

  penguin.com.au

  ISBN: 978-1-760-14332-9