Nice Day For It

It was midweek and mid-afternoon and the living, just like in the song, was easy. I had finished a late lunch of falafels and salad washed down with Kombucha when I remembered I hadn’t hung out the washing. Justin Townes Earle was on Spotify so I turned the volume up, went down the back stairs and emptied the washing machine. The clothesline was in the direct sun on the house’s west wall and with the blustery offshore breeze the clothes dried as fast as I could hang them up.

 I finished and was looking at the weeds along the block wall that separated my property from the empty holiday rental next door when I remembered that my wetsuit and towel was still in the car where I had left them after the morning’s excellent surf.  So I grabbed them, gave the wetsuit a good rinse of fresh water and then hung them up as well. After all that housework I formed the opinion that a nap would be nice when I heard footsteps upstairs. Someone was in my lounge room. At that time of day it could be any one of three or four fellow travellers; men with time on their hands, a need to chat and fill an afternoon before night shift or happy hour at the club. I wasn’t really in the mood but the choice had already been taken away so I kicked the clothesbasket against the wall, rationalised with no difficulty that the weeding could wait until the swell dropped, and went back up the stairs.

Mitch Mitchell sat at my dining room table staring out the windows at an ocean groomed smooth except for the lines of swell marching in to break on the right hand point break two hundred metres away. He had stopped the music streaming. Mitch was more a heavy metal man than a country gentleman. I thought that was presumptuous, rude even but Mitch would have just looked at me had I said anything. On the table in front of him was an old plastic shopping bag. Sticking out the opening was the tail of a large fish; the body filled the rest of the bag. It looked like Mitch had come to repay a favour.

Mitch was tall and naturally muscular, permanently tanned and always squinting. His salt and pepper hair was self-trimmed and the older he got the more he looked like a cross between Neil Young and a rugby forward. On land he was ok as a carpenter but no Neil Young as a guitarist. On the ocean was where he excelled. Mitch was a solid courageous surfer and a willing sailor for those who needed an extra hand but it was with a fishing line in his hand that he became really special.

“Hi Mitch,” I said and put the kettle on. Mitch probably couldn’t spell Kombucha let alone swallow it and he would have been offended if a mug of tea wasn’t offered.

“That fish for me?” I asked.

He came alive.

“Yeah Dave, fair size Snapper this one. Some good fishing on the Inner this morning.”

The Inner was the offshore reef about two kilometres straight out from my living room windows. In a cyclone or a monster east swell a big right hand peak will break on the reef and run for fifty metres till it peters out. Too much for me now days but when it does break I am happy to scratch my bum and drink a coffee with the older crew in the car park while we watch with binoculars the young ones cop a flogging or cover themselves in glory. On a morning like today though, with the point waves head high The Inner wouldn’t have been near breaking. If I hadn’t been surfing, using binoculars I could have picked Mitch’s boat out from the pack as they moved around and above the reef watching for a shimmer on their depth sounders.

“Some good waves too mate. I reckon this one makes us square.” I grabbed the bag and put it in the fridge. A decade or so ago Mitch had gotten slack with his tax returns. So I helped him work something out that kept all interested parties happy. My negotiated payment had been in the form of the ocean’s bounty and some home maintenance.

“Fair enough, I scaled it for you cause you are crap at that but the rest is up to you.”

We sat for a while looking at the ocean. I went for a piss and came back. Mitch flicked through the morning’s newspaper only pausing to look at the weather map, useless, superfluous information for him, like showing Jimi Hendrix sheet music.

The kettle boiled so I put a mug filled with boiling water and a tea bag in front of Mitch. It was quiet for the beginning of school holidays. I heard the ocean and the squawking of passing gulls through the open windows. Somewhere distant a power tool whined and then fell silent. The light faded in the living room as the sun sank behind the house and I stifled a yawn.

Mitch mucked around with the tea bag, took it out and put it on my dirty lunch plate. He tried not to grimace when he looked at the left over rocket leaves but it was hard for him. I guess he was warming up to say something because he hadn’t gone home. Like fishing, with Mitch sometimes you just have to wait a while.

He blurted, “There was a fucking big Great White out there this morning. Biggest I’ve ever seen, like a bloody submarine. It was hanging around, just getting a free feed when you reeled in; I saw its shape now and then. The tourists were oohing and ahhing and complaining too but they didn’t see it properly like I did. Fucking thing came up right beside me as I was catching that one. He pointed towards the fish in the fridge. “The dorsal fin was the size of a boogie board, no kidding I could have reached out and touched it. Reckon the thing was five metres if it was an inch.”

Mitch actually looked a little shaken.

“Every winter there are more whales going by and more sharks following behind them,” he mused.

“C’mon mate,” I said, giving him a bit of a stir, “Tourists love it, whale watching is good for the local economy, you know the spiel.”

“Yeah they are all happy on the boats, drinking champagne waiting for the whales to breach. Just wait till a great white takes their kid off the beach instead of a surfer getting a nudge. It will be a different tune then.”

He had a point. Two weeks ago Jack Benson’s boy had come in, wide eyed and trembling, after a post school surf about fifty yards north of the surf club. Said something big and dark swam right beside him .He just caught sight of it out of the corner of his eye as he paddled for a wave. Fortunately he caught the wave and rode it all the way to the beach. It wasn’t the first time of course but for some reason the sightings are now more frequent.

Mitch stood.

“Got to go and see the Doc. He wants to cut something else out of my back.”

Mitch didn’t have pale skin or red hair, didn’t look like a candidate for skin cancer at all but his doctor had, for the last few years, taken slices off Mitch like he was a wheel of cheese.

“Shit again? Well, good luck. Thanks for the snapper.”

Just like any former boarding school boy, Mitch rinsed his mug and left it in the sink on his way out, then scuffed his way down the steps and out of sight. I checked the time, there was not enough sun or energy left in me for what would have been chilly sunset surf. Mitch’s shark tale and a wet wetsuit didn’t help to raise the enthusiasm level. I had another cup of tea, sat in the last of the sun and read a few Carver short stories before I turned on the oven to bake the fish.

The next day began like the last. The dawn air and water were cool and clear. The swell was still up and the point was offering long walled waves. A few more blokes were out, maybe a dozen in all but mostly it was us old crew as the point was apparently a bit soft for the local young blokes. They also say if asked, that we old farts monopolise the place and give off an unwelcoming vibe. There was an element of truth in both assertions but there are plenty of other spots if you don’t like this one.

It was a weekday so there was plenty for all no matter who you were, as long as you were patient.

And you had to be patient for the swell was beginning to drop. The lulls between the regular sets of waves were gradually growing longer. At one point all of us were sitting out the back waiting for the next set of waves with no individual surfer still paddling back out. I sat on my board with Mitch on my right. He fiddled constantly with the collar of his old worn out wetsuit. There were holes in the suit’s seams under his arm and I could see white skin and armpit hair.

On my left was a stranger. He was stocky, deeply tanned and his board was a Mark Richards Retro twin Fin with a pale blue spray. I hadn’t seen him catch a wave but he seemed capable. He felt my gaze and turned his face from the sea to me and we nodded to each other.

“Nice day for it,” he said.

 It came to me that we were all sitting closer together than we normally would and I wondered if it was an unconscious reaction to the shark sightings. Perhaps a safety in numbers feeling was overwhelming our desire to jockey for advantageous positioning. I shivered in my wetsuit and was happy for the company.

A set of waves came through and our tableau broke up.

By 9.00 I was hungry, a bit cold and ready for coffee so I went to catch a wave in. The first wave of the set was small and had no other takers so I began paddling for it. Then I saw a big dark shadow beside me. At first I thought it was a rock on the bottom but I was too far over. Then the wave reared up underneath me and in an automatic movement I had repeated a many thousands of times before I sprung up and rode the wave. Once up and riding I looked around the ocean in front of me but could see no shape or fin and eventually just let the wave take me all the way to the shallow water almost in front of the surf club.

After getting out I stood on the beach for five minutes and scanned the ocean’s surface from way out where the shark net buoys bobbed to the gutter than ran immediately in front of me. It was a beautiful sight, the morning sun still low in a cloudless sky and the sea’s surface smooth as glass. Further north and about 80 metres out an area of the sea’s surface the size of a house rippled as bait fish came to the surface fleeing bigger fish and the diving terns and cormorants. I didn’t see anything I did not like. Didn’t mean it wasn’t there though.

I wanted to say something but say what to who. Everybody in the water was aware of the increase in shark sightings. When we surfed we were in their world. It’s not like they were lurking in the shadows outside the pub or chasing people home from the supermarket.

I dried off then drove down the esplanade the five blocks to Milo’s. Milo’s coffee is the reason why I take the car for the early morning surf check. I could walk to the beach but Milo’s coffee called me in the morning. Tea is for afternoons.

Milo was there, dapper in a pink polo shirt, the fabric straining to contain his chunky torso and the rug of grey chest hair. As usual his grin was on high beam as he drove the espresso machine. His daughter Julie alternated between taking the orders and manning the toaster. The usual 70s playlist was on the sound system and my timing was bad. I walked in to Billy Joel’s worst moment, his song about a cocktail bar pianist. My grimace was noted but Julia just laughed. We had been through this before.

I ordered poached eggs and baked beans on toast, a mug of latte and started browsing a newspaper filled with the usual stories of footballer’s wives and criminal activity by politicians and bikies alike.

I was staring into space wondering whether, given the song’s lyrics any record company would release “My Sharona” today when the Doppler effect of a siren begun and grew louder and louder. I looked out the open windows of the café and saw the ambulance from the station over the hill barrel past the shop. A cold feeling of dread settled in my guts.

I stood and paid, wincing at the concern on Milo and Julia’s faces. Julia’s boyfriend Bernie was out at the point. There were other customers, one or two still with damp hair from the ocean, some I knew enough to nod and say Hi. We all had the same look on our faces.

                                                            ***

It wasn’t a local but that didn’t make the fact that the poor bastard bled out and died in the shallows before the ambulance arrived any easier to take. His left leg was stripped from just above the knee. There was a crowd and most of the morning crew sat with the paramedics and police or huddled around the back of Bernie’s Ute. They were wide-eyed and silent with shock.

I saw Mitch in the group and walked over. I walked past a surfboard on the ground. It was the stranger’s blue Twin Fin and where his thigh would have been if he were lying on the board and paddling there was no board. A jagged half circle of fibreglass almost a foot across was missing. I stopped midstride when I saw the red stain in the fibreglass foam that makes up a board’s core.

Mitch couldn’t sit still. His way of dealing with the morning was to just keep moving. He stood up then sat down. He had pulled his wetsuit half off so the empty sleeves and top half hung from his waist. He looked like he was shedding his skin. Someone had bought coffees from the servo up the road and Mitch gulped the coffee without thought as he bobbed up and down.  

He looked at me for a few seconds before he spoke.

“I thought that I would know what to do, you know, if something like this happened. Not like we aren’t all a bit jumpy. But it took me ages to work out what was going on. I just thought some guy gave a bit of hoot as he pulled off a good wave you know. I was out the back with Bernie, heard this yell and took no notice and then after a few seconds everyone further in started yelling.” Mitch took a breath. “There had been a big lull and Bernie and I were talking about a job, that reno on the Earnshaw house on Second Avenue and I guess it took a while to sink in. We were still sitting there when this huge shark swam past us and out to sea. It was just a few metres away. It just slowly swam past. Bernie could have reached out and touched the fucking fin. Dave the fin, the shark it was the same one. Christ it is big, really big. We just turned and paddled straight up on to the rocks.”

Apparently the victim was paddling back out just past the gutter that runs the incoming water down away from the point when the shark launched and took his leg. Everyone heard the scream, saw the splash and then the silence. Then just the awful sight of his empty board, still attached to the victim’s other leg being towed around for a few seconds by the shark as the poor bastard was in its jaws. Then as some started to frantically paddle in and some started to paddle over, the guy came up gently flailing his arms, already pale and shuddering, gasping air with the ocean turning crimson around him.

Randall and Steve, brothers born and bred within shouting distance of the point went to him, pulled him up on their boards and with a few others brought him to shore, while trying to stop with a leg rope tourniquet and their fingers the pulses of blood from the mangled stump. I could imagine that journey, paddling in the blood stained water, hearing the guy’s breathing slow and falter and all the while wondering where the shark was.

In the shallows, just when the rescuers slid off their boards and stood up, the blood stopped pumping and the brothers and their helpers were left hip deep in the red stained water under a bright sun with a dead man and a lifetime of bad memories.

Photo by Karen Neri on Unsplash