True Country by Kim Scott

Author:Kim Scott
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction/General
ISBN: True Country
Publisher: Fremantle Press
Published: 2009-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

Visitors in Great White Boats

Milton and Billy went fishing in Billy’s dinghy. ‘This way.’ Milton’s arm pointed across the smooth ocean toward some land, vague in the distance. He sat at the bow, his shape dark against the milky turquoise sea and the traces of mist which remained above it, as yet untouched by this day’s breeze.

They skimmed across the ocean. The outboard’s roar was left behind them, and the aluminium hull amplified the skip and tap of the sea. A lone dolphin flashed across their bow, dark and swift, and flew, once, for a blinking time only, clear of the water, splashing them, before looping away into its own blue silence.

Milton knew a place around the headland. He was returning there, to that place, the one quite close to the rocks and red beach, but where the water is very deep. The old people used to walk there. Milton and Billy motored slowly to and fro across it, dragging silver lures. Occasionally the lures broke the surface. Great fish sprang from the deep, and silver arcs flashed past the boat. Sometimes a lure was hit clear of the water.

The sudden singing of a line as it tautened. The queenfish Milton brought in; it shot into the air shaking itself to free the lure from its mouth. Milton kept the line taut. The line cut the water as the fish swam deep, and it burned in his hand. Billy had silenced the motor. A tension, a singing line. The fish leapt again, it seemed in slow motion, and hung in the air for a moment, a template held against the blue hues of sea and sky with a crowd of silver droplets feeing it.

Milton hauled it in, and the gaff pierced its armour of scales. Red blood spurted over the floor of the dinghy, and over their bare feet as the big fish thrashed among the stiff corpses of its fellows. They cursed each fish with joy, and with a tiny whispering fear as they saw the sun fade in each great, glassy, dying eye.

There were little suns all around them. They bounced from the knife blade, the aluminium of the dinghy, the ocean’s surface as the sea exhaled. Little suns sparkling thorns. The sea breeze began.

Returning around the headland they saw the catamaran which brought the rich tourists. It was moored out from where they’d left the car. They circled it in the dinghy, not having seen it up close before. The few staff remaining on board came out and called down to them as they tossed around in the echo of their motor and the chop bouncing off the large hull.

Someone invited them aboard, so they tied the dinghy to the catamaran and were led through small upholstered rooms, treading the carpets in their blood-caked feet. They sat at the bar with the crew and shared a beer with them, and spoke in embarrassed belches. It was small and muffled after being in the spread of the sea,

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