Something Fishy (20 page)

No evidence, no admission, a lunatic witness.

I rummaged in my pockets as if they might possibly contain some means of proving my story. Or some means of getting off that damned rock. An inflatable life-raft, a signed confession, a map of the Otways with X marking the spot.

I found $125 in notes. Waterproof polymer banknotes, thanks to the cutting-edge washing-machine-proof technology of the Australian Mint. A half-full pack of Tic-Tacs. And Tony Melina's little gold crucifix.

It was circumstantial at best, but it was the only hook on which I could hang my credibility. Rita would be able to identify it. She could also attest that he was missing, whereabouts unknown. And the fact that I possessed an item of Tony's personal jewellery might persuade the police at least to investigate.

Poor Tony. He slept with the fishes tonight. At least he was getting some rest, which was more than could be said for me. I slipped his little Jesus back into my change pocket and gave it a reassuring pat. Then I ate the Tic-Tacs.

An hour passed, making no effort to hurry. My shirt began to dry out, the accumulated heat of the day radiating from the nearby landmass. The air was balmy, the ambient temperature still in the high teens. Little by little, the water level receded. My plinth became a pyramid. Add a deckchair and a daiquiri, I could have sold tickets.

Time crawled. I flexed my knees and windmilled my arms, shag-aerobics to keep myself from cramping up.

An archipelago slowly emerged from the sea, a path of stepping stones leading to the tide-exposed shore. Problem was, it fell far short of my perch. Walking ashore dry-shod was off the agenda. Apart from the fact that my shoes were soaked, the nearest visible outcrop was a good hundred metres away.

At 3:40 a.m., I climbed down from my shag-roost and lowered myself into the water. A hundred metres was nothing, after all. Four lengths of the pool at the City Baths. A mere bagatelle.

Small beer but big trouble. A powerful current was surging through the channel. For every metre I advanced towards the shore, I was swept five sideways, a cork in a stormwater drain. I tried to fight my way back to Whelan Island but soon lost the battle. Again, I was being swept out to sea.

I pounded for the land, relentless, determined. Kick, stroke, breathe. Kick, stroke, breathe. Thirty strokes, fifty, a hundred. My arms turned to lead and still I kept clawing at the water. My thighs were red-raw but still I waggled them. I shucked off my shoes, hoping it would help.

It didn't. I was going nowhere fast. Nowhere I wanted to go, at least. The current was running parallel to the shore, dragging me with it. The land remained in view, contours rising and falling as it rushed past, but I couldn't reach it, try as I might.

You're finished, Murray Whelan, I told myself. This is it. You are going to die. And for nothing. By the time your body washes ashore, if there's anything left to be washed up, Syce will be long gone.

The sea wanted me bad and I no longer had the strength to resist. Water filled my mouth and visions flooded my mind. Deeds regretted, hopes unfulfilled, a terrible sense of waste. All the usual shit. And worst of all, the gut-wrenching, aching realisation that I would never see my little boy again.

I shuddered, gasped and groaned. Then, marshalling my strength, I made one last effort to reach the land. If I was going down, I'd go down fighting.

I went down.

Jesus, it was dark down there. My lungs were burning. My arms were flailing. My hand struck something slimy and ropy. A slimy rope. I grabbed it and hauled with the last of my strength.

Blood raged in my ears and a glowing ball of white rushed towards me out of the darkness. It grew larger and larger until it filled my entire field of vision. The mystery of life and death was revealing itself to me.

It struck my head with a hollow
bonk
. I broke the surface gulping for air and discovered that the secret of the universe was a basketball-sized polystyrene sphere. I grabbed it and clutched it to my chest.

Christ alone knew how long I hung there, and He wasn't telling. A bamboo cane extended from the centre of the bobbing white ball. A limp scrap of orange plastic hung at its far extremity. I was clinging to the marker buoy for a crayfish trap.

I grabbed the cane mast, wrapped my legs around the buoy and mounted it. It sank beneath my buttocks. Instead of being chin-deep in the water, I was now midriff-deep.

From my marginally improved position, however, I could see the shore. A faint light flickered on the beach, a fire perhaps. A sound came across the water. It was almost human.

‘Tonight's the night,' wailed the voice. ‘Gonna be all right.'

I didn't believe a word of it. Party noises joined the music, well-oiled revelry.

‘Help,' I bleated. Help me if you can. I'm feeling drowned. But help was beyond earshot. My strangulated plea was a reedy vibration.

After Rod Stewart came Dire Straits. As if things weren't bad enough already.

My body heat was being leached away. My skin had turned to gooseflesh and my teeth were castanets striking up the overture to hypothermia. I had, at most, another two hours. By the time the music faded, half an hour later, my respiration rate was so high that I couldn't get enough air in my lungs to raise a decent shout.

I hugged the thin sliver of bamboo, jiggled up and down, braced for imminent shark attack and tried to distract myself with hot thoughts. The blazing sands of the Sahara. A steaming mug of cocoa. Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise in bed. When that didn't work I pissed my pants, luxuriating in the brief suffusion of warmth.

But the cold was unendurable. I slid off the polystyrene ball and examined the orange nylon rope that moored it to the pot on the floor of the sea. Somewhere far below me, a trapped lobster was facing an identical problem, racking its crustacean brain for a means of escape.

The rope was spliced, tighter than a preference swap in a leadership spill. Impossible to untie. I bit a chunk from the polystyrene, then another. Gnawing with my teeth and tearing with my nails, I worked at the ball.

Water flooded my mouth. My fingers were numb. My jaw jack-hammered. After an eternity, I managed to break the buoy in half. The bamboo mast toppled into the water. The rope sank without trace. I'd done what I could for my incarcerated crustacean companion. He was on his own now.

All that remained of the buoy was two irregular hemispheres of polystyrene and a scattering of little white pellets. I stuffed the two lumps of foam up the front of my shirt and began to breaststroke, high in the water.

This time, I didn't fight the current. I let it carry me along, steering across it at an oblique angle, working my way gradually shoreward, alternating between backstroke and breaststroke. Gradually, the land moved closer. But Christ on a bike, I was fucking freezing.

It was nearly five o'clock. I was hyperventilating, numb and shivering. Rolling onto my back, I twitched and gave up the ghost.

High above me, the firmament faded to a blur. One by one, the stars went out. Through the water came the grind of icebergs. The sands of time turned to crystals of ice. A pale radiance was all that I could see. Faces looked down at me. Curious, not unkind.

It came to me that I was passing between rows of columns like those of a temple. And that the faces staring down at me were those of ancient Greeks.

My shoulder struck something hard. Thought flickered in my sluggish brain. The current had carried me all the way to Lorne. I was passing beneath the pier. The faces belonged to old Greek men, jigging for squid. Was there some law, I wondered, some clause in the Fisheries Act which required that at least one male of Hellenic origin with a squid rig be permanently present on every pier or jetty in Australian territorial waters?

I rolled over and the swell surged beneath me. It hefted me forward as the current pivoted like a hinge around the point at the end of the bay. Beyond it, rimming the curve of Loutitt Bay, the town glowed. The shore was just a few metres away. I clawed at the water and felt the grainy drag of the bottom against my toes. Another surge of the swell and I was flopping through the shallows, Robinson Crusoe crawling up the beach.

You're alive, I told myself. Hallelujah. Praise be to Whatsisname. That little guy in your pocket. The one on the thingamabob.

My brain was frozen. My thoughts moved at the speed of glaciers. Fingers trembling, I fished the cross from my pocket. It was important, that much I remembered. But why?

A gaggle of youths materialised, staring down at a barefoot man with bloodshot eyes, his clothes sodden, two foam hemispheres bulging in his shirt like skewiff falsies. Unable to speak, I held up the cross.

‘You're too late, mate,' slurred one of the juveniles, a pimply half-wit with his hat on backwards, his shirt tied around his waist and a can of rum and lolly water in his hand. ‘We've already sold our souls to Satan.'

He snatched the cross from my hand and flung it into the sea.

Misery on a stick, I discarded my primitive flotation device and lumbered along the beach. Blue with cold, teeth hammering out the Rach 9. Heat, I needed heat.

A downy light suffused the scene with the pearl grey of pre-dawn. Empty cans and crumpled food wrappers littered the trampled sand, the detritus of a massive communal booze-up. A faint whiff of cordite hung in the air, a reminder of the fireworks five hours earlier. Figures shifted obscurely at the periphery of my vision, hunkered down in the boulders and vegetation at the edge of the beach.

‘Not here,' whispered a female voice. ‘I'll get sand in it.'

Lights were still blazing at the surf lifesaving club. I lurched towards it, shorts clinging, bow-legged as a crotch-kicked cowpoke. Two and a half hours deep-sea marination had done wonders for my twisted ankle. My hobble was now merely a limp. My jaw, however, was snapping so violently that I feared for my tongue. Goosebumps covered my flesh like a relief map of the Hindu Kush. Get to the lifesaving club, I urged myself, to people who know the art of defrosting. That's why it's called the lifesaving club.

I reached a door, yanked it open, found a concrete-floored corridor. I wobbled inside, tottered, careened off a wall, felt a door handle, smelled disinfectant. A light switch found my hand. The changing rooms. Metal lockers, slatted benches, a row of showers.

The water ran tepid. Tepid was encouraging. I cranked up the volume and stood beneath the stream, clothes and all. Miracle of miracles, it grew warmer and warmer, until it was so hot that I was reaching for the cold tap.

I don't know how long I stood there, turning from pale blue to pale pink, stripping off my clothes to find a penis so puckered and brine-bleached that it looked like an albino axolotl. I slumped to the floor and let hot water cascade over me, sobbing and retching and pissing down the plughole. Me, not the hot water.

Just as my inner permafrost was beginning to melt, a man appeared in the doorway. He was about seventy years old. Leather face, leather arms, leather legs, immaculate white tee-shirt, shorts, socks and trainers. He blazed with irritation and rapped at the sign on the door with his knuckles.

‘Can't you read, bloody idiot?' barked the surfside ancient. ‘This is the Ladies. Gawn, out you get.'

His steely gaze brooked no contradiction. I climbed back into my sodden clothes and beat a retreat, finger-combing my hair as I went.

The foreshore was deserted, its swathe of couch-grass mashed and litter-strewn. At its centre sat the skeleton of a cuboid whale, the scaffolding of the deserted concert stage. I thought again about Red, wondered what kind of a night he'd had up at the Falls.

Lorne was a hangover waiting to happen. Streetlights shone down on empty asphalt, their sodium glow bleeding into the grey wash of the imminent day. A girl in a bikini-top and denim mini tottered down the middle of Mountjoy Parade in absurdly-high platform sandals, her mascara smeared, a bottle of Malibu in one hand. Drunken shouts reverberated in the far distance, punctuated by the honking of plastic party horns. The mating call of the shitfaced dickhead. In the foreshore carpark, the flashing light of a stationary ambulance showed the limbs of crashed-out party animals protruding from car windows and the tail-gates of station wagons.

The police temporary command centre was gone, along with the reinforcements bussed from Melbourne for the revels. The only sign of the law enforcement community was a scattering of horse-shit and a few piles of orange plastic crowd barrier in the gutter.

It was almost six o'clock. Magpies were carolling and kookaburras cackling. Where the sky met the sea, the nicotine-stained fingers of dawn were already at work, levering open the first day of the new year. Even in my half-thawed state, I could tell that it was going to be a hot one, a real stinker.

The police station was up the hill behind the pub, a weatherboard building in a residential street, a small cellblock out the back. I took a deep breath, wiped my nose on my shoulder and pushed open the front door.

The counter was unattended. A ragged chorus of ‘Born in the USA' was coming from the direction of the lock-up. I pushed the buzzer. After a couple of minutes, the racket out the back subsided and a beefy young rozzer appeared. He had damp patches at the armpits and the demeanour of a man at the fag-end of a long shift. The tag on his shirt pocket identified him as Constable Leeuwyn. He gave me the once-over, unimpressed, and suppressed a yawn.