Chapter 34
The room smells like sweat and cigarettes. I sit with a painfully straight back, cross my legs at the ankles, lay my palms flat on my thighs, and wait.
God, it’s silent in here. No clock. No TV. No windows. Nothing but a bare lightbulb hanging from the ceiling, two metal chairs, and a shitty foldable table bolted to the floor.
It’s far too bright in here. I find myself squinting in the harsh light, listening to the distant bustle outside the closed door.
Muted voices, soft laughter, doors banging shut.
The longer I’m alone, waiting in the silence, the more I want to surrender to it.
The words I long to spit out are beginning to retreat.
They’re stomping to the back of my throat, heavy and defiant.
They don’t have to know.
You don’t have to say a word.
You can take Jessie and go anywhere. Anywhere at all.
I exhale shakily, my knee bobbing up and down in the torturous wait. I look desperately over my shoulder to the closed door. Hurry up, I urge silently, I don’t know if I can do this.
I gasp when the door bursts open.
“Sorry ’bout that,” the sergeant says, but he doesn’t look sorry. He looks impatient and a bit irritated. “Coke, yeah?”
I nod. He places the red Coke can on the folding table, slaps down a notebook, and eases into the metal chair opposite me, sighing heavily like he hasn’t sat down all day.
He’s tall, thin-lipped, hairline receding to the crown.
The only interesting feature is his ears.
They’re slightly sharp at the top, pointed even. I can’t stop looking at them.
He uncaps a pen and commands, “What’s your date of birth?”
“September 13, 1989.”
“Spell your last name for me.”
I reach for the Coke can, grasping it tight in my right palm. “Greenwood,” I say, clearing my throat. “Spelled like how it sounds.”
He looks up frowning. “Spell it anyway.”
I do. I listen to the scratch of his pen on the paper, wondering if it’s too late to flee.
They don’t have to know.
You don’t have to say a word…
He finishes writing and catches me staring at the door. “Can you tell me what brought you in here today?” he asks, pausing to glance at his notepad. “Minnow?”
I place the Coke can on my knee and grip it tight as my throat begins to close up. I can’t get any words out. I nod instead, once. My throat is so painfully tight it hurts to breathe. I crack open the Coke can and force myself to drink.
He waits, rotating the pen in his fingers. “They said you had some information about abalone poaching and illegal shark fishing?” he prompts, leaning forward. “It’s in Kangaroo Bay, you said?”
His eyes are eager, his patience thinning. Cops have always been suspicious of my town. They came in every few years, different uniforms, same questions. Always left with nothing because no one was talking.
Until now.
I drink again, struggling to swallow as my throat constricts. It feels like someone is choking me. I push the can back onto the table and clasp the base of my neck.
“Miss Greenwood,” he says directly, “are you able to talk?”
“Yeah, I’ll talk,” I finally say, my voice a whisper. “…I don’t know where to start.”
“Start at the beginning.”
That makes it easier. I sit silently, wondering how to begin. In telling my story, I’m also telling my father’s. And his before him. All of our sins and stories, tangled together like fishing line.
“I came back home last month and…” I begin.
But no…I close my mouth and stare intently at the floor. It’s not right to start the story there. Go back further. Where does my story begin? I wait in the hot silence, deaf to the bustle outside the door.
I see only my memories spinning slowly through my head. For the first time since I can remember, I allow myself to inspect them all. One after the other.
And then I see it.
I’m watching TV, cross-legged on the floor while Dad sharpens the knife behind me. I keep looking over my shoulder at him, terrified he’ll catch me looking.
I straighten up, my eyes drifting to the police officer’s. He taps his pen on the notepad, eyes narrowing.
“I can never think of my father without a knife in his hand.”
The policeman scribbles furiously, nose an inch from the paper. He can’t keep up with me as I pour out memory after memory.
“…Fish can tell a storm is coming days in advance. Can sense a change in the pressure system long before there’s any sign of rain. We were like that.
“…I keep my eyes fixed on that sliver of moon as my father draws near. He crouches in front of us, eye level to Heath but towering over me. ‘Look at me, Minnow,’ he says…”
Sometimes I have to pause because my voice is shaking too badly to continue. Sometimes I stare at the floor, and it becomes the rolling black ocean. Sometimes I’m standing on the hot beach, watching my brother reel in fish after fish.
But I keep talking. Keep telling the story.
I speak until my throat aches. Until I drain the Coke can, and the cop has taken pages of notes. Finally, he glances up like he’s waking from a trance. “I’ll get you another drink.”
He bolts out of the chair so quickly that he collides with the corner of the desk. He yanks the door open, and for a moment, there’s a sea of noise. A phone ringing. Someone calling out, “McPherson? Where’s McPherson?”
Then the door shuts. And it’s just me and the silence.
I slump in my seat. I’ve been speaking a long time, and the quiet is so loud, my ears begin to ring.
But I did it. I told the whole story. I told him about Chris and Hannah and Rachel. About Luke and the family business. About the abalone facility on Neptune Road. The illegal shark fishing. About what Dad did to Mum.
But there’s a few things I keep to myself. That Heath was involved in the poaching and shark fishing. What I really did to Amy Anderson.
And the other thing…
The one thing I will never tell anyone.
I fold my hands over my knee. I thought the story was over, but a voice is missing. And then the voice speaks. I swear I hear my father’s voice echoing in the room. I lift my head and listen.
He speaks of the sea.
He says, I hate the ocean. I hate myself for loving it once.
He spews out his hate for it, bitterness clogging his voice. It’s violent and restless. So hungry it hurts.
But I hear something else, a pulse behind that anger.
Then I’m standing on the shore as a child sprints past, eyes full and bright as the sun.
He flings his schoolbag off his shoulder and dives straight into the water.
And it’s so beautiful. All of it. Watching my father as a child, splashing about like a young dolphin.
Until the wave comes.
I don’t see it take him. I just feel the heavy dread, something that makes my chest burn, makes me want to leap to my feet and scream and scream and scream.
Then,
Nothing. Only darkness, like the scene has been wrenched out of the film. Like it’s so painful, he erased it entirely. But it’s not gone. Not really. I sense that he carried it with him everywhere.
Then I’m standing in my father’s bedroom doorway, watching. He’s in my brother’s arms, shaking like a child. The room smells like salt water and the floor feels like the ocean. I feel disoriented, seasick, like I’m pinned underwater, not sure which way is up.
And I know without him telling me, that he spent every day like this. That for my father, there is only Before the wave. And After.
The water gives and the water takes, my father told me in a bitter voice I knew well. But hasn’t it taken enough already?
Yes, it did. It took that boy with the bright eyes. The boy who loved the ocean so much, his own father had to drag him out by the ankles. That boy never came back.
But I’m wrong.
Because right here in the room, the boy speaks.
He says, Have you ever crouched beside a rock pool on a cloud-soaked morning? Watched the raindrops fall down like feathers?
He says, Have you ever waited in the water and watched a summer storm come rolling in?
Have you ever fished on a dark beach at night while a fire crackles at your feet? Chugged down a cup of noodles, salty and hot, while the waves crashed on the shore?
I have.
I hear it in his young voice. Before all the rage and fury, there was love. Oceans of it. The sea was the great love of my father’s life. But the day the wave came for him, that love drowned. And in its place, hate rose up, setting off a chain of events that led us straight to this moment.
Because the ocean doesn’t give a shit if you drown in it. Waves crash, tides pull, rip currents steal you away. And sharks wait in the shallows, silent and patient.
Sharks have been around as long as the dinosaurs, and there’s a reason for that. You’re the predator or the prey. My dad taught me this. Kill or be killed. Eat or be eaten.
He wasn’t wrong. In this town, the men were sharks, the women and children, the food. We spent our lives at the mercy of their hunger until we were pushed out, hunted, or consumed.
You can feel it, can’t you, Min? The ocean? Calling and calling?
Yes, I felt it. Still do.
My father sits beside me, broken.
He tells me the ocean was his greatest wound.
And I tell him he was mine.
“…Minnow?”
The sergeant slips back into his seat. “We have your statement. You’re free to go. But…”
I look up, jaw tightening.
“There’s something I still don’t understand,” he begins, leaning back. “The coroner examined Luke. His coronary artery was severed. But we can’t find the knife.”
“It wasn’t on the boat?”
“No. We searched it thoroughly.” He taps his pen once against the notepad. “Luke was a fisherman. He woulda known not to remove the knife.”
“The boat was getting bumped around a lot,” I remember. “The sharks were coming in. At one point, we both went flying. I smacked my head against the hull. Luke got knocked off his feet. It was violent.”
“When you climbed back on board,” he says, “did you see the knife?”
I think for a moment. “No. I don’t think I did.”
“What kind of knife was it?”
“Fishing knife.”
“Describe it.”
“Steel blade. About twelve centimeters long.”
“Yours?”
“…Yes.”