On Cringila Hill (15 page)

Chapter Seventeen

From the time he went to bed he's known there wasn't going to be any sleeping. He lies still, not to disturb his mother, waits for the appointed time. To divert his thoughts, he tries to remember the look of his father's face. The images twist away from him now, won't hold in his brain. There's a thing he believes, but he tries to hold back from knowing what it is. It scratches away, eating its way into his knowledge.

When it's time he rolls out of bed. He's still dressed from the night before so it's only a matter of pulling on a jacket. Outside there's heavy cloud, a bit of westerly wind, no rain. It's dark and cold. The Hill is silent.

The Brougham waits on the street, an aluminium dinghy tethered to its rear. Jimmy leans down to the open window by the driver's seat, greets Jose Barradas. He lowers his head further, nods to the dark shape beside the further door, ‘Grandfather.' He walks around the car and gets into the back seat. He hears Lupce's raspy voice say, ‘Jimmy.'

They head up towards Flagstaff Road. Boat and trailer bounce along behind as they travel down to Warrawong, over the hill to Port Kembla. They turn right at a roundabout, drive between dark, giant, silent factories and warehouses. The Brougham slows to ease the coupled-up pair of vehicles over railway tracks. Jimmy sits hunched, watching the cold world beyond the car window. The little convoy sweeps around a traffic island, stops beside a building marked ‘Water Police'. Jose hangs his head out the window as he backs the trailer down a concrete ramp. Its wheels settle in the dark waters of Port Kembla outer harbour.

Jimmy's wearing canvas trousers that reach down to his calves, tennis shoes without any socks. He slips out of the Brougham, walks up to his thighs in cold water, untethers the boat from the trailer, guides it to float on the water surface, holds it there by a rope that is tied through its bow, as Jose reverses up the slope and parks the car.

Illuminated by a single fluorescent light on a pole, a jetty runs out into the harbour. Three old men stand upon it, silently manoeuvring fishing rods. When Lupce walks down from the parking spot they offer greetings. He walks onto the jetty, chats to them quietly. Jimmy ties the rope through a metal ring that is bolted to a wooden stanchion at the water's edge, walks up to where Jose sits in the Brougham.

Through the open window, Jose says, ‘You're actually gonna do this?'

‘Looks that way.'

‘You've heard him cough? You know how sick he is, what he's got? Get that cold air into his lungs out on the water, maybe it's gonna kill him.'

‘His call. Is what he wants to do. He's goin' out. I'll go with him.'

‘Yeah.' They look at the old men talking under cold lighting out on the jetty. Jose says, ‘There's everythin' in the boot. Bait. Best possible. Need a hand with it?'

‘Nah. I can handle it.'

‘How's things been?'

‘Oh. Strange.'

‘I can imagine. What are you gonna do next?'

‘No idea. He wants I should join the union, join the party. I don' want that. He wants I should be what he intended, fulfil some destiny. It's about his world, not mine.'

‘I understand.'

‘Yeah?'

‘They used to talk about that all the time, my dad, Lupce, Darko, that crew. About settin' something up for us, leave us a place in the world. It was where they got a lot of their meanin' to keep goin' when things were tough.'

‘Yeah. Still, you going down that path?'

‘No way. I mean, there
isn't any path. The steelworks is down to seven thousand jobs. Nearly thirty thousand in the glory days. That fallin' away, it's only gonna keep happenin'. Our folks were the cheap labour in their day. That's what our family had to offer, got us brought out here; we were cheap labour. We weren't invited along for our good looks. We could get things done for next to nothin'. Cheap labour's in Asia now. That's where the jobs are goin'. It isn't gonna change, you know.'

‘What? Make steel in Asia?'

‘Sure. Day come, we'll be making buildings in Port Kembla out of Chinese steel.'

Jimmy gives a scoffing laugh.

‘You listen to your Uncle Jose. I do these things he asks me, do the job he got me, which is a very good job, understand me, I'm very grateful, but it's just money for now, you know, there's no future in it. It's all windin' down. You see that, you're a bright kid. I'm still at uni, studying IT, then I'm gonna study law. Old ways are dyin'.'

They watch as Lupce clasps the jetty railing to support himself through a coughing spasm. He spits into the water.

‘Like him,' Jose says, gesturing towards the old man.

Jimmy watches bleakly as Lupce recovers. ‘I'll get the stuff,' he says, and gathers up the fishing creel, a polythene box that holds green prawns on ice. He opens the lid of a white bucket and sees the dark, shelled animals struggle on sand, groping about themselves with their tiny claws.

‘Where'd he get the nippers?' he asks Jose.

‘Vlatko had a job in Gerringong. He took lunch beside the Minnamurra, towed the boat down, pumped for nippers while the tide was low.'

‘Geez, he got some.'

‘Knows what he's doing about fishin', Vlatko.'

Jimmy carries the gear down to the water's edge. Lupce has composed himself, left his companions, come down to the boat. He ladles salt water into holding tanks that are in the dinghy. Jimmy settles his burden towards the bow of the boat.

‘Come on,' Lupce says.

Jimmy and Lupce turn the bow towards the dark water, clamber in. One gentle tug and Lupce has the outboard purring. He's seated at the stern, Jimmy on the bench seat in the middle of the dinghy facing his grandfather. Their knees nearly touch. Lupce throttles up and swings the boat in an arc away from the jetty. Great white-painted rocks make two long seawalls that retain the mouth of the harbour. Beyond those jaws lies a dark mass of the sea. They can hear it hit up against the stones. Lupce turns the little boat in a curve that puts the ocean behind them, and steers back towards the western bank. A long way ahead a row of electric lamps bolted atop tall stanchions light a massive wooden pier that pushes out from the dockland. Twisted around from the waist, Jimmy stares at the floodlit pier. He can see a giant freighter tied to bulwarks on the pier's northern side. That's where they're heading.

It's a large harbour and it takes some time for them to make their way across its smooth surface. They don't speak. Apart from the low murmur of the motor and the little bubble of the wake created by their passage there is no sound. While Lupce steers, Jimmy draws handlines from a basket, frees hooks out from the corks the lines are wound around. By the light of a torch he opens a bait bucket, fetches up some of the little, wriggling clawed creatures, lifts the shells on their backs a little so that their guts will ooze in the dark water and create a smell-line for hunting fish. He then impales them on hooks, testing with his thumb that the barbs stay just inside the carapace, like his grandfather has taught him, so that the hooks will bite into the jaw of a striking fish.

Lupce brings the boat up beside the seasoned wooden pylons supporting the decking of the pier, slows the engine almost to stalling, weaves the path of the dinghy leaving behind a little frothy trail. As they travel he scoops from a plastic tub handfuls of a vile-smelling concoction made of chook pellets, chook guts, fish oil. He throws these across the side, to make a burley trail. He cleans his hands in the water, dries them on a scrap of towel he's brought for the purpose, accepts the baited line that Jimmy hands him. He throttles up the engine, takes the boat back to pick up the start of their burley track, then slows the engine again and the two men ease their struggling bait into the water.

They hunt along the fishing field Lupce has created, looking for bream and, when they can get them close up against the pier pylons, john dory. The leatherjacket that plague them, the occasional surface fish that pick off the bait they return to the current as quickly as they can. When they reach the end of the hunting beat they draw up their lines, secure them and Lupce repeats their sweep.

Soon they are doing well, feeling the heavy tug of a good hit, drawing struggling fish up through water into the air. Before long the holding boxes are heavy with flapping fish. It's hard work, dragging up creatures fighting for their lives. There's a wind up, and their hands grow numb from the cold air and contact with water. Little nicks are cut into their hands by the fishing lines drawn tight by a catch. They're wounded by the gills and fins as they concentrate to unhook the struggling fish and deliver them to the holding boxes, stabbed by an occasional piercing from a fish hook. Their fingers smart at the tug of their lines, the sting of salt water over fresh cuts. After two passes across their defined territory, Lupce replaces the burley trail and they fish it again.

They hear the hum of the outboard, the slap of water against the pylons when they're nearby, the screech of seagulls, which have found them out and hover in the dark air behind their passage and cry out in hope of discarded flesh. They smell the petrol their engine is using, and the diesel oil from the freighter on the far side of the pier, soot and coaldust from the steelworks and the sharp, salt tang of the sea.

Jimmy hunches, watching his grandfather's face become visible and then vanish as they move through little pools of light that spill down onto the dark water from the freighter and pier, or flashes of deep orange reflecting the belches of flame from the smokestacks of the steelworks. Then there's darkness when the boat weaves away into deep, unbroken night.

‘We try get something big,' Lupce says, and takes the dinghy around the eastern end of the pier, sets off beside the giant metal side of the freighter.

Jimmy sits, feeling the vast size of the ship near and above him, watching his grandfather when they slide through pools of light that the freighter has created. Jimmy feels what he's about to say. He can't prevent his words, or change them. It's like vomiting.

‘Grandfather.'

‘Yeah?'

‘Lupce.'

‘What you call me?'

‘
Lupce
.'

‘Lupce! Yeah? Yeah, what you want, kid?'

‘Lupce Valeski.'

‘Yeah, I know my name!'

Orange glow hangs in the air from the furnaces of the steelworks. Tongues of flame lick up into the sky and stain Lupce for a moment in a scarlet light. Jimmy can see how intently his grandfather is now watching him.

‘You murdered my father.'

‘What? Wa's this shit?'

‘Don't lie to me. Enough lies. Time for truth now. Time for truth between us. You murdered my father.'

The dinghy pulls west of the freighter. Lupce must change tack or run aground. He turns its path north, away from the lights of pier, freighter, steelworks. He says ‘What you talkin?'

‘I remember.' Jimmy has tears on his cheeks but there's no sobbing and his voice remains unbroken. ‘There was a night. Worst ever. He hit her and hit her and I had his leg and he kicked me against the cupboards and split my ear and she was screamin' at him, angry …'

Jimmy waits a moment, remembering, but his voice is calm and steady. ‘Then it was quiet. Quiet. An' he was still. An' I knew you had come, someone musta heard, run for you, an' there you was, in the doorway to the kitchen, an' you walked to my father, put your hand on his shoulder like he was a child, an' you said, “My man … this no good. You not happy. Best you come with me, spend the night with me, settle down,” you said that so quiet, gentle, an' you led him away, an' he went away, quiet. Then nex' mornin' he come back, quiet, 'shamed, way he always was day after the bad times, an' got ready, went to work. Come home that night, no drinkin', then you come see him, took him out on the verandah, talkin' to him, jus' a little while, an' I went an' sat near the doorway, but you talk too quiet, couldn' hear.'

‘You couldn' hear, couldn' you?'

‘What did you say to him?'

‘What difference now, what I said.'

Jimmy screams, leans forward, ‘
What did you say to him?
' He takes between fingers the flesh just below one of his grandfather's knees, digs with all of his young power into that flesh. He says, ‘I'm his son! What you done to him you done to me! I got the right to know! What did you say to him?'

There's enough light for Jimmy to see the swing aloft of Lupce's left arm, sees the speed of its fall, feels the smash onto his wrist, and he must release his hold because, at once, his wrist and hand have lost all feeling. But he stays leaning forward, watching the dark shape of his grandfather.

‘You wanna know. You the big man, try hurt me with your fingers, you wanna know!'

‘Yeah.'

‘You wanna know what I said? Then I'm gonna tell ya big man. Gonna
tell
ya. I said, “You get drunk, hit my daughter, hit my grandson. Wanna do that, shoulda married someone
else's
daughter, have someone
else's
grandson. Get drunk again, you a dead man.”'

‘Tha's what you said.'

‘Is what I said.'

‘An' he did, didn't he. He
did
get drunk again.'

‘Yeah. In a pub. People come tell me, “You son-in-law's drinkin.
”
'

‘So you got him good an' drunk.'

‘Sure. People puttin' brandy in with his beer.'

Lupce has turned the boat back and they cut across the water. They pass the steelworks furnaces and Jimmy can see his grand­father bathed in the glow, see the high cheekbones, the steady gaze, the darkness of the eyes.