The Coral Bones, page 9
Hey, Mum.
Hana! About time. What are you up to? I want to hear all your news.
Oh, work and stuff, you know.
No, I don’t know. How’s Tess going?
She’s fine.
Is she looking after herself? You can get vitamins, you know, things for women trying—
She’s fine, Mum. She’s well. We’ll try the next cycle soon. We’re optimistic.
All right, well keep me up to date. You can always text, you know. And how about work? I saw something on the news about your corals. It said they’re going fluorescent.
That happens sometimes, before they bleach. It’s not a good sign. It means there’s a high chance of mortality.
Mmm. It is pretty, though, isn’t it? The colours.
Why don’t you tell me what you’ve been up to, Mum?
She obliged me happily enough. I half listened. Sat in the car in that quiet residential street, I found myself winding back. There I was at twenty-one, packing my gear into Dad’s ute the day I moved to Townsville for my Masters degree. At eighteen I was enrolling at Queensland, having learned to ignore, if not dismiss, the quick second glances at my features that had become a wearying facet of existence. Before then, the earlier years of teenage entrapment, where everything was extremes and confusion, wanting only to get out, get away. Further back: the solemn-faced, deeply cherished only child whose packed lunches alternated between Dad’s peanut butter sandwiches and my white British-Australian mother’s valiant attempts at a bento box, a rota she deployed rigidly despite my entreaties for the former (What would your grandparents say?), and a given name invariably spelled ‘Hannah’ in school reports. Only one other child with East Asian heritage attended my school: Laura Chen, whose family hailed from Hong Kong. Laura and I were constantly mistaken for one another.
I never told Tess that I was afraid of water, but the truth is her daring kappa was once a pitiful landlubber. Picture a three-year-old child growing up in a Brisbane suburb. Uncomfortably visible in a lime-green swimsuit and matching scrunchie, she stands at the side of the neighbour’s pool. Her arms are tensile rods encased by pink armbands. Her toes clench until they curl under themselves. It’s a Saturday, and five or six kids are already in the water, splashing about. Spray reaches the child and she steps backwards, so rigidly that she loses balance and almost falls. All this tension makes her muscles ache, but she has only one concern: she shall not be made to enter that artificially aquamarine mass of water. Her father, a trim, clean-shaven man wearing board shorts and aviators and a wide, seemingly permanent smile, crouches beside her. He encourages her forward, first with words of reassurance, then a guiding hand on the shoulder. The child begins to scream.
Why did I conceal such a story from the woman I loved most in the world? Precisely because I loved her that much. Once we have presented ourselves in a certain light, it becomes difficult, sometimes impossible, to reverse the impression; we will undergo the most extreme contortions to avoid discovery. This is especially true for those we hold closest, in whose gaze we most dearly wish to see ourselves reflected. Tess had met a water sprite. That was who I was, how I defined myself. How I wanted her to define me. In any case (I told myself, when the topic of our childhoods came up), it would have been farfetched for Tess to believe that terrified sprat bore any relation to the woman she knew. By the time we met I was a qualified PADI instructor with over two hundred dives under my belt.
Three decades on, I still struggle to explain what it was about water that caused me such distress. At that time there were no laws about fences around pools, and the neighbourhood kids were in and out of each other’s gardens all summer. Dad tried coaxing, he tried bribery, he tried fooling about in the water pulling stupid faces, he tried promises of peanut butter straight from the jar. Nothing worked. His greatest achievement was getting me to sit on the edge of the pool and dangle my feet in the water, and even then I was a sobbing, snotty mess. Was it the fear of going under? A horror of immersion in a substrate with no toehold, no solid surface beneath me? Whatever the reason, the pool was a source of unimaginable terror.
My fourth birthday came and went, and I remained the one child in the neighbourhood who couldn’t swim. It was Mum’s turn to step in. I can imagine how my failure must have stung: here I was, the product of not just one but three island nations, and I couldn’t even manage a doggy paddle! Both sides of my family were excellent swimmers – salt ran in their blood. My great-grandfather, Haru Ishikawa, first came to Australia in 1931, at a time when the White Australia Policy restricted immigration, but so reliant was the pearl industry upon expendable foreigners that an exemption was granted for some workers, including Japanese. Haru, a talented abalone diver, followed the call of the oysters from his home prefecture of Wakayama to Singapore to the pearling port of Broome. He worked seasonally on the luggers, enduring months at a time at sea, and then he caused a great scandal in his second home by falling in love with a girl considerably above his humble status: my great-grandmother Chiasa, the doctor’s daughter. They married and settled in Broome. Their union would weather first the scandal, then the cyclone of ’35, then years of separation in internment camps halfway across the continent, where Japanese workers were incarcerated during World War Two. After the war they were forced to move back to Japan. They reprised their life in Broome at the earliest opportunity, returning in 1953. Their two sons would take up the family trade – my grandfather, whom I called Jiiji, and his younger brother, who drowned in the quest for the oysters’ treasure when his diving suit failed at age twenty-two.
Even this tragedy could not sever the link with the oysters. The Ishikawas were sea people through and through. Now they were Broome people too, their blood saturated with its vast open skies, the deep red sands that got into the grooves of your palms. When Haru retired, my grandfather began the transition from diving to husbandry, eventually becoming a pioneer of new oyster cultivation techniques which reinvigorated the industry during the 1970s.
But not everyone heeded the oysters’ call. Dad became the first Ishikawa to renounce those red sands, taking advantage of the free tuition years to study engineering at university in Darwin. There he met my mother, Erin Barlow, an ambitious young woman reading mathematics, who believed she could find something more beautiful in numbers than columns of profit and loss. The Barlows had emigrated to Darwin (then Palmerston) in the 1870s, hot on the heels of that most colonial of missions: a gold discovery. Fast-forward a century, the promised fortune remained elusive. Mum’s parents – my grandma and gramps – worked seven days a week managing a busy seafood restaurant on the waterfront, and Mum was drafted in for waitressing on weekends and helping out with the books. It was not the future she had envisioned.
Within twelve months of meeting, my parents had married. Dad told Jiiji he would not be returning to Broome and broke his father’s heart. Mum informed her parents she was done serving shrimp platters. The young lovers were united in their desire to escape the towns of their birth for more progressive climes, although they retained a committed distrust of southern politicians. (They know absolutely nothing about the real world, Hana!) After graduation, they embarked upon an ambition to live in every major city in Australia, and got as far as Brisbane, where Mum realised she was pregnant. Thus the great peregrination came to an early end. Dad found work locally, discovered the sailing scene, and was rapidly converted to east coast life. Mum, who abandoned her plans for a PhD and became an accountant, always felt cheated. She’d hoped to end up in Melbourne.
I did not enjoy my earliest visits to Broome. Conversations between Dad and Jiiji were cautious, sometimes fraught. Dad and his parents would revert to speaking Japanese, and Mum would hover anxiously while Baaba taught me to draw the three kanji that formed my name – Hana, ‘flower’; Ishi, ‘rock’; and Kawa, ‘river’ – all the time growing paranoid that they were bemoaning me and my lack of vocabulary. Once again the oysters played their part. I was five years old when my grandfather showed me the farms. I remember the ridged shells lifted in their mesh, each larger than Jiiji’s hand. I remember the care he took prising open the shell to reveal the soft, fleshy mantle within, and the delicate operation to introduce the irritant. It was my first lesson in manipulation of another species. Enthralled and intrigued, I pestered Jiiji with questions. I was too young to understand the conflicting emotions I must have raised: pride at my interest in the oysters where his son had rejected them, long-held grief over my great-uncle’s death in their pursuit. Jiiji loved to talk about the sea, but where there was love there were wounds, too.
But all this was to come. Aged four, I was aware of none of my family history. I knew only one thing: Mum would never accept a daughter who couldn’t swim.
She booked me in for lessons. Each week, she sat stony-faced overlooking the pool, watching as the instructor tried and failed to replicate the aquatic success of my relatives. By my third lesson, she was at the poolside herself. She enticed me to the ladder, where I clung to the top rung, calf-deep and shivering with fear. When I refused to descend any further, she pushed me in. I fell like a board, too shocked to prepare for the enveloping water. Bobbing in my armbands, spluttering with indignation, I saw my mother standing with her arms folded, glaring down at me. The instructor, both shocked and relieved by this abrupt baptism, made enthusiastic noises, and under their carrot-and-stick alliance I embarked upon my first crossing of the pool.
I’d like to tell you that after the Great Shove my swimming improved, but it didn’t. Saturdays remained a source of dread. While other children were learning front crawl and mushroom floats, I was doggy-paddling with a float. I struggled on, afraid to leave the side of the pool, always fearing the invisible tug that would drag me beneath the surface. I held back my tears until the shower after the lesson, so no one could see me crying.
Who can say how long this might have continued, but developments were on the horizon in the unlikely form of our new neighbours from Perth, Shelley and Bob Haynes, and their menacing offspring, Alison and Alex. My mother, who fully intended to think favourably of everybody, professed to like Shelley, but in reality rather despised her, and more than once was heard to use the word bogan with a notable air of triumph. Shelley was loud and opinionated, a woman for whom no topic was off-limits, including menstruation and the shortcomings of other people’s relatives. Mum had been further antagonised by an early deployment of the ‘Your hubby, though – where’s he really from?’ grenade across the picket fence. (To which my mother responded, at volume and with a sarcasm unmistakeable to anyone except Shelley: He’s from Western Australia. Maybe you’ve heard of it?)
There came a day when my mother had to surrender me to the care of Shelley and Bob. I had a secret fascination with Shelley, who could be a source of intriguing and often taboo information, but her children were a different story. Alison and Alex presented to the world the blank faces of closet sadists. I had observed them through chinks in the fence, dismembering beetles and burying lizards alive. Nor were their activities limited to the animal kingdom: more than once the shrill cry of some unfortunate on our street had caused me to beat a strategic retreat indoors.
The stage for the fateful weekend was set. Dad had to fly to Broome to visit an awfully crook Baaba. Mum had a business conference she couldn’t get out of. With foresight, she had not told me I would be joining the Hayneses until it was too late to protest. I was bundled into the back seat of their ute along with my swimsuit, towel and deflated armbands. As we drove away, my mother waving frenziedly, the dreadful realisation dawned. The demon kids did not yet know I couldn’t swim. When they found out, they would try to drown me. They sat on either side of me, quiet as the plague, Alison plucking threads from her denim dungarees with an adroitness that suggested practice on human hair.
Bob smoked out of the window, one hand on the wheel, and Shelley fired out questions about schools.
How’re you getting on there, Han?
Fine, I suppose.
The teachers good? Ali and Alex’ll need to register soon.
My heart plummeted.
Not really, I said. I remembered a phrase I had heard my father use, in relation to another institution. It’s a sink school.
Shelley twisted in her seat.
That so?
I nodded.
I’ll say! You hear that, Bob?
I hear you, Shelley.
Han, your mum tells me you like science.
Yeah.
What kind of science?
I like doing experiments and finding out stuff.
Behind my back, the demon kids exchanged a look.
We like experiments, said Alex.
Alison giggled.
Yeah, we do.
Maybe you can do science at school together, Shelley said.
Well, there we are then, Bob said amiably, and chucked his cigarette butt out of the window. The topic of school receded. I was convinced that I had hours left to live.
In the version of this story I gave to Tess, I was a natural in the water, instinctive as a newly hatched turtle. In reality, I spent the first hour on the beach taking evasive action against the maleficent duo, a hatchling desperately avoiding death by heron. I made a sandcastle, which they kicked down. I collected shells in a bucket, which Alison hurled into the sea. (Bob looked up from his newspaper and cigarette and said: Kids playing together, what a nice sight. Bob was not a man disturbed by the world’s indignities, small or large.)
There was some respite when Shelley dragged the pair of them out to the rocks with a new snorkel. I watched, ankle-deep in foam, trying to give the impression that I was entirely comfortable in the water. I heard splashing and shouting, but it didn’t last for long. Alison and Alex grew bored. They deserted Shelley and the snorkel and headed ashore in search of new prey.
Shelley called over to me.
Hey chook, you want to see some little fish?
She was waist-deep in water.
Alison and Alex were advancing with intent. Alison had got hold of a net. Unseen by Shelley, Alex drew a slow finger across his throat.
I began wading towards Shelley. The water hissed around my calves. Opposing currents dragged at my feet as the waves washed up and back. The water reached my knees, then my waist. An incoming wave breached my shoulders. I was trembling all over. Only the thought of Alison and Alex spurred me on. I took another step and the floor dropped away. I flailed for a few terrifying seconds before I got a foot down. The sand was there again. By the time I reached Shelley, I was on my tiptoes.
Here we are, chook.
Shelley helped me get the mask on and showed me how to breathe through the mouthpiece.
Breathe and float, that’s all there is to it!
With the mask narrowing the contours of my vision, I felt a rising panic.
I can’t, I whispered.
What’s that?
I can’t float!
I expected instant condemnation, but Shelley was unfazed. She placed one firm hand on my stomach, the other on my back.
Come on, arms wide, let your legs float up. I got you. That’s it. Now put your head down and stop kicking, or you won’t see a thing!
Cautiously, I lowered my face into the water. In my immediate vision were bubbles, the sandy floor, a shadowy mass of rocks to my left, the twin sunburned pillars of Shelley’s thighs with a fuzz of pubic hair escaping from her swimsuit. And I saw my first fish.
That was the moment I stopped kicking. In fact, I went so limp that in a minute’s time Shelley would wrench me back out of the water, fearing I’d drowned. (You want to give me a bloody heart attack, kid?) I did not know the word metamorphosis, but that was what occurred in those moments of immersion. For the first time I saw the ocean surface not as a skin that would split and suck me in, but as a gateway. I saw the way light striated the water as if through the windows of Grandma Barlow’s church. I saw how water intensified the colours of everything below: the sand, the shell fragments and the rocks, the fuchsia nail polish on Shelley’s toes, the algae and seagrass and small crustaceans and molluscs. And most of all, the fish. I saw them beat through the water, mosaic scales encasing torsional bodies. They turned on a whim, quick as rain. There was life down here, and so much of it. Above it all, I floated. I was invincible. Supported by Shelley and by my body’s innate, unsuspected buoyancy, my fear dissolved and left me for good.
When Shelley pulled me up to check that I was breathing, I could barely speak. The waves rushed around my neck and the sun’s reflection off the surface dazzled me. The ocean was a magician, I saw that now. These waves, their rippling crests and troughs, were an illusory trick, a veneer for everything that existed beneath. I had glimpsed that other world, and the one I had been born into was transformed forever.
Sitting in the car that day on Donna Kelly’s street, Mum’s voice a steady stream in my ear, I stopped wondering how Jake had died. Instead, I wondered what he had felt, the first time he saw a reef.
›•‹
Are you still with me? It’s Sunday, and The Shore is quieter this morning. Now there is only one of us here, our little house is more sea than land these days, but I could never deny its name. We always argued over who came up with that one. I have graduated from the bed to writing in your study – your ex-study, I should say, for it is barren without your belongings. Topsoil washed away, the sand moved in. Desertification on a microscopic scale. The word desert, of course, comes from the verb to desert. Not that I mean to imply it was you who deserted me. We both know it was the other way around. What I’m trying to say is that I miss the clutter of this room, the things you loved, the things you bought on a whim, the things you forgot you ever had, tucked away on a shelf or behind a cupboard door. I had to bring in one of the kitchen stools, as your chair with its marigold cushion is now in storage. But that’s fine. It’s a suitably neutral space, my desert.
You said to me once that not everything is about the fucking reef. How right and how wrong you were. It’s true, I am far from the first person to become intoxicated with the alchemies of the ocean, nor will I be the last. This country has certainly attracted its share of would-be explorers. But here’s the thing I can’t escape, no matter how many words I spin: never have we had so much knowledge about the wonders of our planet, and never have we been so close to losing it all.
