I can feel the flathead zipping left and right through the water. Panicked. Lost. For a time he comes with me, follows the pull from the hook in his lip, like he’s had some divine message that that’s where he’s supposed to go, that the pilchard and the hook and the Bramble Bay tide this rainy day were the ultimate goal behind all that searching for survival along the ocean bed. But then he fights. He swims away hard and the Alvey reel finger-grips punch into the heel of my hand.
‘Fuck,’ I shriek.
‘Fight him,’ Slim wheezes.
I yank on the rod and rotate the reel at once. Long, deliberate reels. Rhythmic. Purposeful. Relentless. The monster is tiring but I’m tiring too. Slim’s voice from behind me.
‘Keep fighting,’ he says softly, coughing again.
I reel and I reel and I reel and the rain slams my face and the world seems close to me now, every piece of it, every molecule. The wind. The fish. The sea. And Slim.
The monster eases. I reel him hard and I see him approaching the top of the sea, surfacing like a Russian submarine.
‘Slim, here he comes! Here he comes!’ I howl, euphoric. He might be eighty centimetres long. He’s closer to fifteen pounds than ten. An alien monster fish, all muscle and spine and olive green flatheaded stealth. ‘Look at him, Slim!’ I scream, ecstatic. I reel the Alvey so fast that I could start a fire to barbecue the monster, then wrap him in tinfoil and bake him for Slim and me by the muddy mangrove banks on the Redcliffe side of the bridge, and follow him up with some toasted marshmallows dipped in Milo. The flathead rises into the air and my rod and line are a crane hauling some priceless cargo up to a skyscraper, my monster flying through the black sky, the ocean-bed dweller feeling rain on its back for the first time, glimpsing the universe above the sea, glimpsing my gasping face, wide-eyed and joyous.
‘Slim! Slim! I got him, Slim!’
But I don’t hear Slim at all. The sea and the blood. The sea and the blood.
I turn from the fish back to Slim. He’s lying flat on his back, his head turned to the side. Blood still on his lips. Eyes closed.
‘Slim.’
The flathead whips its spiny, powerful frame in the air, snaps the fishing line cleanly.
I will remember this through the weeping. I will remember this through the way my cheek rubs against the rough bristles of his unshaved face. The way I sit so awkwardly because I don’t think about sitting, I just think about him. The way I can’t tell if he breathes in the rain. The blood on his lips, spilling to his chin. The smell of White Ox tobacco. The small rocks from the bridge gravel biting into my kneecaps.
‘Slim,’ I sob. ‘Slim,’ I shout. The way I bob back and forth in pitiful confusion. ‘No, Slim. No, Slim. No, Slim.’
The sound of my stupid teary breathless mumbling. ‘I’m sorry I said what I said. I’m sorry I said what I said. I’m sorry I said what I said.’
And the way the monster fish plunges into the brown-green sea, down deep into the high tide, having seen the universe up here.
He wanted to see it only for a second. He didn’t like what he saw. He didn’t like the rain.
Boy Parts Sea
Our Christmas tree is an indoor plant named Henry Bath. Henry Bath is an Australian weeping fig. Henry Bath is five feet tall when he sits in the terracotta pot Dad keeps him in. Dad likes trees and he likes Henry Bath, with all his cluttered green leaves shaped like canoes and a grey fig trunk like a frozen carpet snake. He likes to personalise his plants because if he doesn’t personalise them – picture them possessing human needs and wants in some tiny and whimsical part of a mind I am only beginning to realise operates with as much order and predictability as the insides of our lounge room vinyl beanbag – then he is less inclined to water them and the plant is more likely to succumb to the endless assault of Dad’s stubbed-out rollies. He named Henry after Henry Miller and the bath he was lying back in reading Tropic of Cancer when he thought of naming the weeping fig.
‘Why does Henry weep?’ I ask Dad as we slide the tree over to the centre of the living room where the ironing board