Blueback

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Abel had graduated from high school and was home on the holidays when all the pilchards died. There was no storm, no warning, no oil spill, no explanation. One morning he stumped down to the jetty to see the whole beach blackened with dead fish. The air roared with flies. Gulls hovered uncertainly over the stinking mess. Abel walked along the beach trying to understand it. He helped his mother load the truck with mushy piles of the fish and for hours they spread them on the soil of the orchard and the gardens.

‘Something’s wrong with the sea,’ said his mother. ‘This isn’t right. It’s not normal.’

Late that day, Abel took his boat out and dived in the bay, along the point and out at Robbers Head. The abalone had recovered from the season that Costello had come. Trevally and tarwhine and garfish twitched along in healthy schools. Everything looked normal. The kelp and the coral were alive. He fooled around with Blueback and biffed him a couple of times with his hip as he passed close by. All of it seemed ordinary, usual.

He thought about Blueback that evening. If only fish could talk. Maybe then Blueback could tell him how the water felt, whether something was wrong somewhere along the coast or in the deeps. Abel sat on the verandah with his feet on the rail, thinking about it. Imagine that, he thought, knowing what the old fish knew. Blueback was probably old enough to have known Abel’s mother as a girl. Hadn’t she come out here as a teenager, staying summers with his father’s family? Did he see them swimming together, his parents? Two young lovers. Had his father dived down to look at a small greenish groper out at Robbers Head one day? People said his father swam like a fish. They said sometimes he thought he was a fish. If Blueback could speak, thought Abel, he could tell him about his father. All the secrets of the sea would be there waiting for him.

When Abel went inside that night his mother caught him staring at the photo on the mantelpiece.

‘You look like him, you know.’

Abel shook his head. But then he looked again and saw that it was true. He had his father’s face.

Later that month, tuna skippers told the Jacksons that pilchards were floating dead all along the coast. No one had a clue what it was about.

‘The ocean is sick,’ said Abel’s mother. ‘Something’s wrong.’

It was a mystery. And the more he thought about it the more the whole sea seemed to be a puzzle. Abel wanted to figure it out.