An Open Swimmer (10 page)

The handwriting improved and deteriorated with each entry. Days were often missed. It resumed, usually in poor writing, and got better with successive entries.

Great gaps of months appeared in the rest of the entries, the last being in December 1939.

The rest of that diary was empty yellow pages. Jerra tossed it aside and picked up the notebook. Pages were stained and gritty with dust. Many pages were folded back and torn. There was a brown stain on the cover. It could have been ink or bootpolish. Most of the erratic entries, starting from 1940, contained troop movements, rumours, and descriptions of mates. Jerra flicked through '41.

A few old photos of men drinking in a café, pinned to the page, blurry shots of buildings and women.

The last volume, though incomplete, was better preserved, neater. The little crab scuttled under the table.

The spine of the book had worn, or, as it looked, had been torn in half, and with it went the rest of the sentence. Jerra slipped it back into its envelope and closed the box. Nothing of any interest there. A drink of water was what he needed. It was the dust.

For tea they ate some tailor and whiting fillets, fried in butter. Rain fell on the roof. His father looked across in the light of the Tilley lamp.

‘I've got another one,' he said.

‘Another what?'

‘Diary.'

‘Oh?'

‘One of the later ones. When he used to live here, after Gran. Best bit is – never forget it – “So-and-so date: Tom married May. Met her family. Queer mob. 4 Eggs.”'

‘So this shack's all you've got?'

‘And what's in the Nedlands house. We own a lot of the furniture and things.'

‘Not much, is it?'

‘Oh, I can do this up. For when we retire. No, it's not much.'

He brought a small cloth-bound book from a cupboard.

‘He threw the others out,' he said, putting it on the table. ‘Do the dishes, will yer? I'm knackered. Think I'll pat the mat.'

The writing was neat and compressed. Almost every day had an entry. Jerra read one of the last.

Jerra sat back in the chair. His chest. He must have swallowed a bone. He closed the book.

‘Spring song,' he muttered. ‘“A Spring Song”':

The world 'as got me snouted jist a treat;

Crool Forchin's dirty left 'as smote me soul;

An' all them joys o' life I 'eld so sweet

Is up the pole.

Fer, as the poit sez, me 'eart 'as got

The pip wiv yearnin' fer – I dunno wot.

Why doesn't anyone tell me anything, he asked himself. Why do they just let you go on and then give you a letter or something or write it down in a poem instead of telling you?

He went to bed, comfortable in the pretence that he didn't know.

‘We're late for the sea tide,' said his father in the bow.

‘Didn't hurt to sleep in.'

The boat cut the brownish river. The pickets in the channel were rotting stumps of teeth. In the cut, the water was still, the anchor rope slack as the boat turned on itself. Sun burnt through the film
of cloud, lighting up the water. It hurt their eyes. Plip! Whitebait being chased, they both knew. Jerra clicked his tongue. His father nodded, not lifting his lids.

The bird croaked. The long boat slid over the shallow banks, the Hat punting with an oar, watching the bird's shadow on the water. It wafted around in a loose curve, without moving a feather, beak flat against the sky.

Jerra saw swirling spectrums of whale oil in the water, purple and yellow, even when the sun was sucked back into the clouds. He heard the slop of the net on the water.

The line tightened, singing, Jerra had a fish, struggling off at an angle, going deep. He swung it up out of the water and into the boat. It beat itself against the boards. Then another, and another. His father shifted. The Hat was poling the boat away from the net. Corks jostled on the surface.

‘Must've seen something in those shallows,' said his father.

‘Him or the bird?'

Jerra smiled. His father glanced across. Inside the perimeter of shimmying corks, the water was coming to the boil. A tail slapped the water. The Hat beat the water with an oar.

The bird-shadow flickered across. Jerra pulled in another tailor, the oar beating and slapping as he baited up. The pelican croaked playfully. He hoped it wouldn't scare the fish off. He saw it settle just outside the perimeter of the net. Fish boiled the water. The pelican was becoming excited.

It rained, heavy.

‘Not going too good?' he smiled.

He looked up. It was hard to see. He saw feathers and the oar coming down on the water driving the fish into the net. Feathers ruffling, excited. Something tearing? Jerra couldn't make out the sound. Beak skyward; pink webs of feet. The bird was inside the net, churning about in the living mass. Churning. Then, the oar not hitting water. Blemishes appeared on the water outside the net from a volume of escaping fish. It was caught up in the net; a bumper catch fleeing. Shouts. Rain fell harder. Frightened croaks. Where? The rain was blinding. The bag-throat appeared again, quivering. For a moment he saw nothing again and looked away. He looked again to see the bird-rag on the surface and flagellant rain and the spreading feathers.

All around their boat, fish were jumping, flattening themselves on the water. Jerra pulled in another as the anchor chain cleared the water.

Out of the brown river the tide was oozing into the estuary towards the sea. Brown pickets. Jerra sat in the bow, wishing they had a bigger motor.

T
OWN WAS
gritty with the dry powder of leaves rasping along the footpaths. Windows offered, reflected, but he was reluctant to look. Horns and tinny music. From the railway bridge he watched the trains slither and jolt, their roofs dusty below. Often he wondered how far down they were. Since a child, he had wanted to drop something, a peppermint or a stone, onto the carriages as they passed. He wondered whether anyone had jumped. They had from other places. And made the papers.

Across the railway, he wandered through the sleazier streets, past dead neon, the tight restaurants, clubs, bars. A man opened the door of a wine bar, pinning it back with his broom. Bearded and weary, he nodded as Jerra passed, but got no response.

He completed the circle; crossed at the western bridge.

‘Granpa's teachin' me C. J. Dennis.'

‘Oh? Is he?'

‘Yep.'

‘Gone off love poems?'

‘Oh, no,' he said, pulling at a sock. ‘Love's orright.'

‘Orright, eh?'

‘That's how people get married.'

She smiled, long legs shining in the sun.

‘Yes.'

‘I'd marry you, Auntie Jewel. You're orright.'

‘Don't worry, Jem, I'd take you up. You're the only man for me. You and your old man are okay. Your Mum's got a good deal.'

‘Yeah, she's orright, too.'

He went home.

In his room, he sat with his head against the marked wall. What a bunch of cripples, he thought. To resort to writing diaries and letters . . . and bloody books; he looked up at hopeless, drunken Malcolm Lowry whose spine still protruded from the tightly packed shelf.

He sniffed his hands. They smelt of buses and handrails and dust, not fish; they didn't even smell of
him.

He sighed and got on his knees beside the bed and pulled the bottom drawer from the desk. Feeling in the space behind it, he worried out a long manila envelope. He put it on his bed and was about to open it when he remembered the door and got up and locked it.

He shuffled through the letters, reading excerpts.

A letter from Rome. There was a trip after the first ‘breakdown'.

Then, something from hospital marked August '76. Not the mental hospital; a private hospital by the river.