Blueback

VI

Before the summer holidays Abel’s mother wrote to tell him that a new abalone diver would be working their part of the coast this season. She was worried because she’d heard bad things about him. People said he was a reef stripper. But she had good news as well. Mad Macka’s family had decided to give his boat to Abel. Boat, trailer, the lot. All his. Abel counted the days.

On the first day of the summer holidays, Abel’s mother met the bus out on the highway. He saw her waiting in the truck on the gravel and he ran to her with his bags flying.

The moment he saw the green sea again his skin prickled. As they came out of the forest and onto Jackson land he hooted and crowed. The pair of them laughed all the way to the house. That night he stood on the jetty and breathed the salt air.

Next morning they dived for abalone off Robbers Head and Blueback flitted around them, insistent as a dog at the dinner table. Abel chucked him under the chin and felt the current the old fish made in the water.

That afternoon Abel stood on the beach beside Macka’s big abalone boat. It was a five-metre catamaran, wide and stable as a house.

‘I did some work on the motors,’ said his mother. ‘Four-stroke fifties. They’re good outboards.’

Abel climbed up and stood on the deck. He tried not to think about the last time he was in this boat. The dive flag hung limp.

‘You can clean it up yourself,’ said his mother. ‘We’ll take the compressor off it today. We won’t be needing the hookah.’

‘What a boat,’ said Abel.

‘Let’s get to work, then. Empty that icebox.’

Abel took it slowly with the boat. His mother showed him how to handle it, how to use the echo sounder and the radios. He learnt how to trim the outboards in different sea conditions. For a few days they stayed in the bay. Then they moved out to Robbers Head and finally they took it out onto the dark, open sea. Abel steered them out across the sloping backs of oceanic swells as the land shrank to a long smudge behind them.

All afternoon they drifted for snapper, trailing heavy handlines with baits of squid. The snapper and morwong came up, flashing from the deep. Abel laid them in ice and felt the wind in his hair.

About three o’clock a huge, terrifying snort went up beside their boat. Then another across the bow and two more off the stern. A foul mist rose over them and Abel saw the glistening backs of right whales all around.

‘Look at that,’ said his mother. ‘We used to hunt them. Your father’s family, the Jacksons, came here as whalers. Used to sit up on the ridge in a lookout and when they saw a pod of whales come by they’d row out in longboats and harpoon them.’

‘I wonder if they remember, the whales.’

‘Who knows. I hope not.’

Abel and his mother stopped fishing and just watched the whales.

‘I used to feel bad about it,’ said his mother, ‘even though it was before our time. But the sea has taken its fair share of us. I think we must be even by now.’

Abel thought of all the crosses up behind the orchard.

A whale cruised past with its mouth wide. It strained water through its baleen, rolling as it fed.

Abel laughed. ‘Glad I’m not plankton, that’s all I can say.’