Alone on a Wide Wide Sea Read online

  I was out there burying him in the paddock when I heard a car coming down the farm track. The man in the suit said he was a solicitor from Sydney. He was perfectly polite and proper. He simply told me that I’d have to move out. There wasn’t any great hurry, he said. I could stay a couple more months. Then he told me something that shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did nonetheless. Aunty Megs had had a son (the boy in the photo I’d seen all those years before, the boy she wouldn’t ever talk about). There’d been a falling out years and years ago, the solicitor said, and they hadn’t spoken since. Aunty Megs hadn’t left a will, so everything she owned, the house and the farm and the furniture, it all went to her son. That was the law. The son it seemed wanted nothing to do with the property. He just wanted to sell it. Of course I could stay if I bought it. I told him I didn’t have the money for that. Then I asked him what would happen about all the animals. He said they belonged to the son as well, everything did.

  I didn’t stay two months. I didn’t stay two weeks. I stayed just a few days. That’s all it took. I gave the nanny goat to the next-door farmer, and walked out into the bush every day with an ever-decreasing cavalcade of little animals following me. The last one to go was a joey. I’ve always wondered if I rushed him, whether he was quite ready. He was very small, but very independent minded. When he hopped off behind a bush, I turned and walked away quickly. I looked around once only, and he was gone. I hope he was all right.

  I left the next morning, passed by the hill, Marty’s hill, Aunty Megs’ hill, to say my last goodbyes. I promised Marty I would go looking for Kitty one day, and I told Aunty Megs that all her family of animals were back in the wild now, where they belonged. Then I went on my way. I had a small suitcase, with a few clothes in it and one photo of us all together. And I had my lucky key round my neck. I did not look back.

  I went to Sydney again because I had only one thought in my mind now: to go to sea. I got lucky – or so it seemed at the time anyway. I found a job straightaway on a fishing trawler. I didn’t think twice. I just signed on. We’d be fishing the Southern Ocean, for tuna mostly. I didn’t care what it was for. I was just so happy to be out there again, to feel the heaving seas about me, to watch the birds sailing the wind above me, to see the stars. You can see them better at sea than anywhere.

  Then we began fishing. Most people have never seen a tuna that wasn’t in a tin. I certainly hadn’t, not before I went fishing for them. If they had, if they’d seen what I saw during the months and years that followed, they could never take the tin off the supermarket shelf, let alone eat the fish inside. A tuna is a beautiful shining creature, for me the most magnificent of all fish, and huge too. Day after day out on that trawler, I’d watch them lying there on the deck, suffocating to death, bleeding to death, thrashing about in their pain. And they weren’t alone in their suffering: albatross, turtles, dolphins, sharks – they were all dragged up out of the ocean, and caught up in the slaughter.

  No one seemed to mind what we were doing, just so long as we brought enough tuna back to port. And I didn’t just stand by and watch. I was as guilty as everyone else. Massacre, murder, call it what you will, I was part of it. I played my part. But it paid well, and I was at sea where I wanted to be. I took the money. I stayed at sea. But I wasn’t proud of myself, and the longer I stayed the more troubled I became by what I was doing. None of the others seemed bothered about it. On the contrary, the more we caught, the happier they were. They weren’t bad blokes. They were just trying to earn a living like me.

  We all got on well enough. When we weren’t fishing or sleeping or eating, we were gambling. I liked gambling. I liked it a lot. I liked it too much. It made me feel like I was one of them. I was good at it too. And besides, it was totally absorbing. It took my mind off everything else. But each game was only a brief respite. Soon enough I was back up on that deck doing my killing.

  I stuck it out as long as I could, but after a few years I’d had enough. Just the sight of another dying tuna made me feel physically sick. One night, on the way back to port, I was lying in my bunk unable to sleep. Every time I closed my eyes I could see a tuna thrashing about on the deck in its death agony. I knew I couldn’t do another trip. I clutched my lucky key and swore to myself that as soon as I got back to Sydney, I’d do what I should have done years before, what I’d promised Marty I’d do. I’d go to England and look for my sister, Kitty. I had every intention of doing it too, but the others wanted a night out on the town, and I went along. By the time I left the casino in the early hours of the morning, every dollar I had earned was gone. There was no way I could pay the plane fare to England.

  I find it difficult to explain to myself all these years later why I did what I did next. I think I must have had just three things on my mind – I needed money, and I still wanted more than anything to be at sea. And I didn’t ever want to go fishing again. I remember walking down a street in Sydney, my suitcase in my hand. I happened to look up and saw a face smiling down at me from a poster. The man was in uniform, a naval uniform, and he looked just like Mick in that photo of him back at the Ark. He wore the same uniform too, the same peaked cap, the same Royal Australian Navy badge. The sailor inside the recruiting office – that’s what it was – beckoned me in. It was as simple as that. And as usual, I thought my lucky key had done it again. I’d join the navy, I’d have regular money in my pocket, I’d be at sea. Perfect. I signed on the dotted line, and within a couple of months I was back on board ship, a very different kind of ship, a destroyer.

  I never read newspapers much, hardly ever watched television either. I didn’t pay much attention to the world outside, not in those days. If I had, maybe I would have seen it coming. A couple of years later and we were sailing off to war – the Vietnam war. Another kind of murder, but people this time, not fish.

  The Centre Will Not Hold

  Most of the world is now too young to remember the war in Vietnam. Wars become history all too soon and are forgotten all too soon as well, before the lessons can be learned. Which is why we have more wars, and always more wars. But they are not forgotten by those who fought in them. I don’t forget the anger of our guns, the shudder that went through the ship when she was hit, the silence that followed and the cries of wounded men. They called it “friendly fire” afterwards. We were bombarded by our own side, an “unfortunate” mistake they told us. It felt a little more than unfortunate at the time. Good men died for nothing that day, and I was lucky not to be one of them.

  These were times I do remember, only too well, but don’t want to have to think about. I don’t want to write about them either, but I can’t pass by Vietnam as if it never happened, as if I’d never been there, been part of it. Not because I’m proud of it. On the contrary.

  There were long months of boredom at sea, long nights sweating below deck. I can still remember how excitement turned to fear in my stomach when the guns first fired. I can still see Dickie Donnelly from Adelaide – we only just celebrated his eighteenth birthday – lying there on the deck, his eyes looking up at the sky above him and not seeing. There wasn’t a mark on him. It must have been the blast that killed him. I was holding his hand when I felt the last breath of life go out of him.

  But, apart from Dickie Donnelly, most of the dying in that war was done far away, on the shore. I discovered it’s a whole lot easier to do your killing when you’re miles away from your target. You’re in your ship, way out at sea, and you just fire the guns. You don’t see where the shells land.

  So you don’t think about it, because you don’t have to, at least not to start with, not until you come face to face with it. After Dickie Donnelly, I couldn’t put it out of my mind. This was what our shells were doing to the enemy, to the Vietcong, to the North Vietnamese. They’d be young lads, just like Dickie, with mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, an enemy I’d never even seen. And I was firing the guns that did it. All I’d ever done while I’d been at sea, it seemed to me, was killing.

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; I couldn’t wait for the war to end, to get out of the navy. Sickened and sad I turned my back on the sea, for ever I hoped. I had come to hate the sea, the place I’d always loved, where I’d always longed to be. For me the sea had become a place of blood.

  I went inland after the navy, bummed my way around, picking up any work I could find. I went gold mining in Western Australia, worked on a cattle station in the Northern Territories, spent most of my time branding cattle. I did seasonal work picking grapes in vineyards outside Adelaide, in the Clare Valley it was. And after that, I was a jackaroo for a while on a sheep station near Armidale in New South Wales. After that I never wanted to look at another sheep in my life. Back-breaking work,smelly work. At times I felt like I was back on Cooper’s Station.

  I couldn’t settle anywhere, not for long. I kept moving on, moving on. I wasn’t leaving anywhere. I wasn’t going anywhere. I was just drifting. I still wore Kitty’s key around my neck, never took it off, not once. But I’d long since stopped believing it was lucky. I wore it, mostly out of habit, and maybe because I still thought that I might one day be able to go back to England and find Kitty, find out if she’d ever existed even, find out what the key was for.

  But I never did it, and I know why. I was frightened, frightened of discovering the worst – that she never had existed, that I’d made her up so as not to feel entirely alone in this world. I still thought about the key, though, when I caught sight of it in the mirror as I was shaving. I thought about it every time I touched it. But any real hope I had harboured of actually ever doing anything about it was fast fading, along with my sanity. My centre would not hold.

  I don’t know why it happened when it did. None of it really makes much sense to me even now. If there was a physical cause that triggered my troubles – and when it comes to health, I don’t think body and mind can be separated – then it might well have been lack of sleep. No matter how exhausted I was after a day’s work, I couldn’t get to sleep. I’d lie there, not tossing and turning, just thinking. And no matter how hard I tried, my mind kept coming back to it. It was always the killing. It was the shining tuna lying on the deck bleeding, fighting for life, Dickie Donnelly’s last breath warm on my hand.

  But there was another picture there that haunted me, that would not go away every time I closed my eyes. I’d seen it first as a black and white photo in a magazine, I think, then in a film on the television. It was an image of a young girl in Vietnam, running down the road away from her village. She had been burned by napalm bombing, dreadfully burned. She needed help. She was coming towards me. She was naked and she was crying. And she kept coming towards me, holding out her arms to me, and suddenly her face would be Kitty’s face. I knew I’d been part of the war that had done that to her, to a girl just like Kitty and to thousands and thousands of others too. Every night she was there, and every night I couldn’t sleep.

  I’d be late for work in the morning, or I’d fall asleep on the job. I’d get the sack. Time and again I got the sack. Any money I did earn I’d gamble away the same day I got it. I’d hitch a ride anywhere and had no idea where I was when I arrived nor why I’d gone there. I felt myself slipping into a deep dark hole of despair. I couldn’t find any way of stopping myself, and in the end I didn’t even want to stop myself. It seemed a lot easier just to give up and let go. So I did.

  I woke up in hospital. They told me I’d drunk a bottle of whisky, and taken a lot of pills. The doctor said I was lucky. Someone had found me in time. I didn’t think I was lucky at all. He wanted to keep me in hospital, for my own safety, he told me. I’d had a breakdown, he said. It was an illness like any other, and I’d have to be hospitalised until the treatment was over. I gathered pretty soon that it was the kind of hospital you could leave only when the doctor said you could. I looked out of the hospital window and saw the sea. I asked where I was. “Hobart, Tasmania,” he said. When he went out he locked the door behind him, just as Mr Piggy had at Cooper’s Station. I was a prisoner again.

  So there I was, over forty-five years old by now, rock bottom, suicidal and losing my mind in some hospital in Hobart, and I don’t remember to this day even how I got to Hobart. But I still had Kitty’s key around my neck. The doctor asked me a lot about my childhood. I showed him my key, and told him about Kitty too. He asked if I hadn’t made Kitty up entirely. Hadn’t I invented her because I so much wanted her to exist, wanted to have a family?

  He was a strange man, my doctor. He never smiled, not once. But to be fair to him he didn’t get angry either. And I gave him enough cause to get angry. Thinking back, I treated the poor man a bit like a punch bag. He didn’t seem to mind, just let me rant on. Nothing rattled his professional calm. I had the strong impression he didn’t believe a word I told him. And I don’t think he cared much either. So after a while, I didn’t tell him anything more. We’d sit there having long silences together, and I’d gaze out of the window at the sea and watch the boats.

  It was during one of those silent sessions that I felt the stirrings of a new longing. I wanted to build boats again, and to sail them. I’d sit in my room and recite The Ancient Mariner aloud over and over again. It made me feel I was out there at sea, and it reminded me of Marty and Aunty Megs. And I remember too that I’d sing London Bridge is Falling Down very loudly in the shower. I loved my showers, and singing made them even better. I was sad and alone, very alone, grieving for everyone I had loved, everyone I had lost.

  Then one morning there was this new nurse on the ward who smiled at me, not because she was trying to be kind but because she was kind. She treated me like a person not a patient. My whole world lit up every time I saw her. I was mesmerised, and not just by her gentle beauty and her shining black hair. It was the sound of her laughter, her sheer exuberance that lifted my spirits and made me feel lonely without her. When I told her about Kitty’s key, about Cooper’s Station and Marty, and Aunty Megs and Vietnam, she listened, and she wanted to know more. When I recited The Ancient Mariner to her, she listened. Bit by bit, every time I saw her, I felt myself coming together again. I made a model boat for her, a liner with three red funnels. I was beginning to see a way out of my darkness. And once I could see the light, then I knew I could climb up towards it.

  So that’s what I did, and when I walked out of that hospital a couple of months later, my nurse was waiting for me. Zita, she was called. And I knew as she drove me away that morning that she was all I’d been looking for all these years. I found more than happiness with Zita. I found myself again, then a home too, and an entire family. Best of all, I now had a reason for living.

  Oh Lucky Man!

  What Zita had done was to restore my faith, and not just my faith in myself, but in the wider world around me too. When you’re down and out you get to thinking only how bleak and brutal the world is. The more you believe it, the more you expect things to be like that, and the more they prove to be like that. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. That’s the spiral I was in. What Zita has shown me since the day I first met her is that the world is not like that, most people are not like that, I’m not like that. She didn’t do it by telling me, by preaching to me, but just by being who she is. Genuinely good people are like that. The sun shines out of them. They warm you right through. Zita’s like that. As the song goes – and songs do get it right sometimes – when she smiles, the whole world smiles too. She was half my age and she chose me to love. If she hadn’t told me first, I’d never have dared to tell her back. Oh lucky man!

  She came from a family of smiling people. That’s where she took me the day we drove away from the hospital, to her family home down by the seashore in Hobart. There was a whole tribe of them, the most extended family I’d ever met, Greeks all of them, Cretans, dozens of them and loud with laughter – when they weren’t crying that is. They are people of extremes, wonderful people. They welcomed me at once as one of their own, and that meant everything to me. I was Zita’s man, so I was part of the family, no questions asked. They were all open-he
arted and whole-hearted. The children climbed on my knees that first lunchtime. They tugged me by my fingers towards the sandpit or the swing or the beach. They’d found a new great big puppy to play with. I laughed with them in the sunshine, just as I’d laughed with Marty at the Ark all those years before.

  From that day on I knew I had a proper home and a proper family of my own. And I danced, for the first time in my life I danced. Cretan dancing. Zita taught me, tutored me through the awkward stage where my feet simply refused to step to the music, told me to feel the music, to let the music do it. It worked. But I’ll never dance like a Cretan, like Zita. You can see the music floating through her. She’s a wonder to watch.

  But there was more. Zita hadn’t mentioned it before. Maybe she left her father to tell me himself. “Zita she say you likes boats, Arthur,” the old man said after lunch as we walked together by the seashore. He had a truly wonderful white moustache which he stroked often, not out of affectation but rather out of affection, I think. There was a glint in his eye that demanded and expected an answer. You didn’t have conversations with Zita’s father. He talked, you listened.

  “Me too,” he went on. “I likes boats. I grow up with boats when I was little boy on Crete. Now I have my own boatyard. Stavros Boats. Now I build my own boats – big ones, little ones, fat ones, thin ones, anything that sell. And I build good boats too, the best boats. We all build boats, the whole family. You can help us, yes?” He didn’t wait for a reply. “That’s good, that’s good.” He stopped then and turned to me. “I want Zita to marry a good Cretan boy, young and strong. But she say she want to marry you. Zita, she like her mother – you don’t argue with her. So you’re not Cretan boy – that’s not your fault. And you’re not young – that not your fault either. She like you and you likes boats – that’s good enough for me.”