Give em shit, boys! the cook yelled as they left the mess hut.
Sam got down to the boat with a full belly and waited for his partner Nobby. Keep the day ahead of you, that’s what the old man used to say. Nobby rolled up to the wheelhouse and belched. He was a fat brand of man, balding, with bleached earhair and a great capacity for hatred. He had an ongoing grievance with everybody, all forms of life. As he came in, he made a sturdy beginning to the morning.
That fucken Wilson, I tellya—
Sam pushed past him and went astern to cast off the line.
A man’d be hardly blamed for murderin that barsted in is sleep—
He started the winch to draw an empty barge alongside.
It was Nobby who made the work hard. The sound of his voice was like something grinding away without oil or maintenance, and Sam had learnt to think across the top of it, to look into the water and think of coral trout, jewfish, baldchin, plan another night’s fishing, conjure up the sight of himself with a beer by the fire and a drumful of boiling crays. That’s what he was thinking of when the cable caught his glove and his hand was taken from him. His fingers were between the cogs before he could draw breath, and he felt his knuckles break in a second. Madness rose behind his eyes as Nobby fumbled with the gears, cursing him, cursing the winch, till he got him free and Sam tore the glove off, squealing, as four fingers fell to the deck and danced like half a pound of live prawns.
Sam was aloft. His body vibrated. Two men in flying suits played cards on his chest. His hand was in a block of ice. The airmen were playing gin rummy.
Orright, mate? We’ll land in a few minutes, doan worry.
I’m not worried, he shouted back over the sound of the engines. So this was what a Catalina looked like on the inside.
He thought he’d tell them a cautionary thing or two on the subject of luck, but one of them slapped down a card so hard that Sam felt the reverberations right down his arm and he fainted fair away.
From up here, with hindsight, you can see into every room in the town of Geraldton, through roof and fence and curtain, down alley and beach, along bars and breakwaters, and if you look hard enough you’ll see a schoolgirl hurrying home early to the back of the old pub to fetch her mother to the hospital. She clangs up the fire escape, pigeontoed but athletic. The rear of the pub looks like the back of a movie set but from the front, the place looks the real business.
Rose Pickles hammers along the corridor past numbered rooms till she reaches 36. It’s locked. She calls out to her mother but there is no reply, though she detects an intake of breath from behind the door.
Now that it’s all in the past, anyone can see the woman astride the bed with her dress up. The sweat on her skin. The Catalina pilot with his belt undone and his hat on the table. You can smell the beer on their breaths, you get so close. So close, you hear the blood in their fattened hearts. And out in the corridor you witness the terrible boiling dark in the schoolgirl’s head, the confusion, the feeling, the colour she can’t put a name to.
Her two brothers will be here soon. She goes out and waits on the fire escape. Afternoon sun cuts it way down from the reservoir of blue. Rose’s plaits tug the back of her head. She feels tough all of a sudden, and grown up. The boys can find their own way, she thinks, they can all find their own way. She batters down the fire escape. The metal tolls after she’s gone.
Dolly Pickles was a damn goodlooking woman. Anyone in town would tell you so. In some pubs they would know you so, and send a wave of winks down the bar that would always wash up at the far reaches of the Ladies’ Lounge. As she headed down to the hospital, she turned a few heads in the street and took in the salt breeze. When this town didn’t smell of salt it smelt of phosphate and wheat and rotting crayfish. She liked the stink of salt. Right now, with the rime of sex on her, she smelt of salt herself. Oh, those Yanks are somethin, she thought; Jesus Christ, they’re somethin.
Kids were bombing off the jetty as she passed under the Norfolk pines. The water was a flat bed of sunlight and the brownslick bodies of children bashed through into its blue underbelly. Leaning against a fence, a man shelled prawns and eyed her off. He wiped vinegar from his chin and smiled. She gave him a piss-off-useless flick of her hips and went on to the hospital.
Rose and the boys were there. The boys left off whispering by the window and stood straight. They were rangy, sundark kids. Rose was by the bed. She didn’t look up. Sam was asleep with his white fist bound up in a salute or a warning — she didn’t know which. A private room in the new wing. Government money, she thought. We couldn’t afford this.
Four fingers and the top of his thumb, Rose said.
Christ.
Dolly saw it was his right hand. His bloody working hand. A man could hardly pick his nose with a thumb and half a pointer. They were done for; stuffed, cactus. Thank you, Lady Luck, you rotten slut. It was probably time now to pack a bag and buy a ticket, but hell, there was the kids and everything. The whole town knowing. How would she live?
He bin awake?
Nup.
The boys, Ted and Chub, scratched themselves and pulled at their shorts.
We go down the jetty? He’s not gunna wake up.
S’posed to be in school, youse.
We’ll be back dreckly. Dad might be awake, eh.
Oh, ya mays well.
Don’t drown from cryin, Rose said, from the bedside.
Dolly stood in the room with her daughter. You had to watch this kid. She was getting to be a clever little miss. And she was Sam’s through and through. She was hot in the face like she was holding something back. Dolly wandered what she knew. She’s a kid. I’m a woman. The only thing we’ve got in common these days is a useless man. Dolly’d always gone for useless ones. But this was the living end.
The room smelt of new paint and phenyle. Dolly tried to spot a mirror but there was none.
The woman and the daughter do not speak. The crippled man does not stir. The breeze comes in the window and stops the scene from turning into a painting.
After her mother left, Rose sat by the bedside and watched him sleep. She hated him sometimes, he was so hopeless. At times she wanted to hit him, to pick up a lump of four-be-two and snot him with it. He was a grown man and yet he didn’t have a pinch of sense in him. But he wasn’t mean, like the old girl was turning mean. She had to put up with all these catastrophes, so maybe she had a right, but the old man still made you love him. They’d had good times together, all of them, but something sour was coming into everything, and it’d been happening all year. Everything was falling to bits. When the old man was home they fought and swore. The old girl hammered him night and day and he went out and lost money. Even now she didn’t know whether to put a cool hand on his brow or shake him by the throat. He looked so pale and busted. Oh, he’d made her laugh so many times, making a dill of himself to make her happy. He remembered what she liked, he told her adult things sometimes, and stories from his stockriding days. Rose saw through him; she knew he was always going to be useless, but she loved him. Hell, he was her father.
Sam began to snore. Rose pressed her lips together and waited.
No one in the pub had a conversation that night that didn’t somehow wander into the territory of the Pickles family and their doomed run of luck. They had to do it when the publican wasn’t about because he was a loyal relation. They wondered aloud about Sam’s future, and the evening was kept alive with conjecture. Luck was something close to any drinker’s heart here at the Eurythmic. The place was built and bought on it, named after the great horse that brought it. A photo hung above the bar of the dark gleaming horse with its white diamond brow staring out at them, as if reminding them of his beneficence. The brash, hearty talk rose into the residential rooms at the top of the broad banistered staircase. Rose and the boys listened to it until the closing swill got under way, and when the place was quiet they slipped downstairs to the big dining room and its smells of steak and cabbage.