Fishing for a new life

JIM Bloke finds himself fetched up in a Victorian fishing town, where he gets a job diving for abalone. Only problem is, the industry is crooked.

In this extract from Bruce Pascoe's Bloke, we meet Jim as he starts out in the town.

This is the truth.

When people tell a story they'll change it so they're more heroic or smarter, but for me, I like to keep it in my head the way it happened.

The little accidents that buggered up the most devious planning, the tiny surges of ego that left a trail.

I like to relive it in my mind and get it exactly right, because often you think you're in one story while in fact you're in someone else's play.

One thing happens, then another, a bit of a mishap leads to a fluke, and suddenly you're living in a town and with people you hardly know.

There're a lot of people like that in the fishing industry.

One accident short of the Salvo hostel or prison.

Like me, except I didn't know it yet.

You start driving down the highway because ... well, often there is no because, just a little sidestep and here you are in an unfamiliar town as dark falls, the only lights coming from the takeaway and the pub.

There's always a lot of beetroot and egg in country hamburgers, but light on lettuce so as not to spoil the appearance or test the patience of those who eat with one hand, and laced with salt like a pig's carcass.

Makes you thirsty.

So you buy a beer in the pub.

Two.

And before you've got the foam off the top of the third you've been offered a spot on the half-back flank, a day's work plastering, and a lifetime career as an oyster harvester.

I took the oysters, I'd had a gut full of plastering.

And I pulled the jumper over my head for the footy team.

I was adequate.

They'd picked me on sight because I was tall enough, not too fat, not too old to embarrass the town.

When I woke up that first morning in Nullakarn I was in someone's holiday house that was beyond holidays.

The stumps at the back were trying to lie down, they were sick of it, eighty years of kids and dogs, just sick of it.

They rested, sighed, reclined so that you walked uphill from the back of the house to the front.

The walls had been painted in a green someone five decades ago thought was sea-green, but which now, aged and with damp rising from where the floor kissed the earth, looked like the vomit of a dog who'd been eating grass.

Deliberately.

To achieve this very effect.

But (and there're going to be a few buts in this story) the window above the sink looked between the pub sheds and a house, which appeared uncertain whether it had been positioned within the boundary of the title, but importantly for me, I could see the lagoon.

I picked up the kettle and something sloshed.

So I emptied it and noticed a hint of rust and a few blubby bits that could have been anything - corpse particles, mouse s---.
I let the tap run and watched with a practised eye until it ran clear, rinsed the kettle, lit the gas, put the kettle on the ring and looked across the lagoon, feeling too tired to meet the disappointment if there was no tea.

There was a glimpse of oyster frames peeping out from one side of the view, a few boats dragged up on the mud, some with the idea that they'd be patched or caulked.

One day.

It was Friday.

Tomorrow I'd have to put up with the dressing room banter, listen to the desperate, hair-raising threats of a coach who thought he was Kevin Sheedy.

You couldn't escape it, all coaches did.

I'd have to pretend to be inspired, make enough of an effort so he wouldn't climb all over my reticent ego to fertilise his own.

Or maybe he'd notice that my ego didn't cower, that what was left of it could look after itself, didn't care enough to be intimidated by an electrician's apprentice with dodgy knees.

There was a dumb ritual to most of it, but it was something you had to do in a small town - insurance from ridicule, guaranteed employment, a little nudge of company when the tedium of shucking oysters got too much.

Vince Miraglia was a drunk.

He'd been pissed when he offered me the job, and only did it to make a hero of himself in front of the others.

I knew he'd be a fractious boss and I doubted he'd remember my wages.

I'd seen faces like his before.

Bags under the eyes, puffed with resentment and bruised pride, suspicious of the conspiracies that had cramped his opportunities and thwarted his brilliance.

The eyes of a man who's taken a few blows to the face, still aggrieved years after those blows had landed.

I'd seen those faces.

Seen them sneer at the kids, taunt the wife, intimidate the oyster shuckers.

"What's ya name?"

"Bloke."

"I know that, seen it on the team sheet, I meant ya real name."

"That is my real name."

"Fair enough, no skin off my nose.

"What's ya first name?"

"Jim."

"Righto, Jim, take that punt over there with the Mercury on it and go out to the barge and load those oyster frames.

"Me nephew'll be out there already.

"Somewhere. If he's not, start on 'em and when ya finished bring the barge into the shed, that one there with the red roof, and we'll start shellin."

He walked up the rise to a house where hate had disallowed even one bed of geraniums.

The punt was a disgrace.

Foul oyster meat, mud, rope ends and crap everywhere.

The motor casing was held down with wire, the throttle attached to the carbie with a twist from a bread bag.

I knew it wouldn't start straight away.

I looked at the casing and wondered if it was too risky to remove, but it came off all right and revealed a mess of oil and dirt clogging the spark port.

Any chance of a plug spanner? Yes, there it was, doubling as a wedge to fasten the rowlock.

Oh, I hated boats like this.

Maybe they just pulled the starter cord again and again, cursing their luck and the odds stacked so deliberately against their happiness and fortune.

I'm no genius but I've always preferred to try and fix the problem.

The plug was crusted with carbon, leaving a minute firing gap, and the difficulty they experienced in starting the motor was not an indication of their isolation from life's riches, but proof of God's generosity that they ultimately experienced success.

If it was him who saw sparrows fall and sparkplugs fire.

I'm not God but I fixed the plug and it fired first go.

No, second or third.

I'm the one who insists on the truth, after all.

I don't know whether he'd been waiting to see if I got the motor going, but just as it coughed into life, a young, dozy-looking fella scared the life out of me.

"What're ya doin?"

"Getting the motor started." I didn't even ask who he was.

It had to be the nephew.

He had the big, eagle beak of the Italian, broad forehead, and eyes as dark and glistening as resin.

"You workin for the old p---k, are ya?"

"Yeah, he gave me a job last night."

"Playin footy tomorra?"

"Yeah. You?"

"Yeah, full forward."

That'd be right. Bone lazy.

Too good to train. Slots a few goals, becomes indispensable.

Bit like me.

He didn't ask my name either.

Just propped himself in the bow, more than happy for me to skipper the ugly craft.

The blunt prow carved a glassy ribbon as we slid out to the oyster beds.

The nephew was lost in reverie, mooning, dreaming.

Girls.

Pelicans were sailing about the lagoon in austere formation, herding mullet, with their retinue of little black cormorants, avid and golden-eyed.

Boats were drawn up on the bank, or tied to rickety little jetties limed with cormorant s--- and protected by a white-faced heron, lord of the stink ports.

There was the usual jumble of corrugated iron boat sheds, and a fish works with a brace of seagulls dreaming and preening by the outfall.

Their own little cargo cult.

Pleasant enough.

A channel wound away from the lagoon and opened into a bigger estuary and eventually the sea.

The nephew took the opportunity to promote me to boss oyster hand.

Gave him more time to contemplate his killer amatory manoeuvres.

He deferred to every decision I made and only came to life in the bakery at lunchtime when he ordered two pies, a coffee scroll and a litre of chocolate milk.

He might let his eyes roam the range of the baker's plump daughter now, but in ten years, if he kept at the pies, Casanova would look more like Les Murray.

Poet, not footballer.

We made two trips out to the oyster frames and barged the mature fish back to shore, then hauled the frames up a railway into the shed, where we chipped and scrubbed the shells ready for icing and transport.

Not much could be achieved without Miraglia cursing and throwing things about, abusing a woman I presumed was his wife; she looked scared and bitter enough.

The nephew didn't seem aware of any of it.

He'd probably seen enough to last a lifetime.

He had a one-track mind, but it was his track, he enjoyed it and was sticking to it, every rut and furrow.

After work I bought some groceries and a few stubbies and went back to the sloping house and cooked up some baked beans and an egg, washed it down with a cup of tea followed by a few beers.

It was the best I could do until I found out where the butcher was hiding and what people did about vegetables.

At the side of the house there was a bit of a veranda.

One post had gone, so the roof sagged in the middle and would probably spew water when it rained.

But it had that narrow view of the estuary framed by the back of the pub.

The pub yard was a shambles but the estuary was nice, and the beer softened my reflections so I was able to forget the Miraglias for a while.

My hands were swollen from oyster-shell cuts and I wondered about football the next day.

For that reason I didn't go to the pub, where there'd be talk of little else.

The football was predictable.

The coach stalked about trying to eyeball the players and impress them with his intensity.

The players were oblivious but he needed to convince the committee they'd spent their eight grand well.

Of all those in the club it was the players who had the most realistic expectations of themselves and their coach - none.

Old players and committee-men looked on, their eyes swimming with nostalgia and the sting of liniment, hoping this mob of ratbags could bring home the flag, win the granny, make something of a town whose biggest building was a fish factory.

Plumbers, plumbers' apprentices, friends of plumbers' apprentices, fish filleters, school teachers, bakers, barmen and cooks began chucking around a footy, pretending to fulfil the coach's demand to switch on, switch on, but really just trying to catch someone unguarded so they could kick the footy into his balls.

Miraglia's nephew was the great hope.

They called him the Dominator, more in hope than confidence, but the name seemed wasted on someone with such sleepy eyes and long curled lover's lashes.

But Dominic could play - well, not so much play as drift lazily into a pack and take a mark to the complete consternation of more muscular and passionate blokes who felt sure they knew where the ball was going to land and seemed perplexed to find it in the Dominator's sensual grasp.

He didn't worry too much about chasing the ball, or tackling and shepherding, and by the end of the game his socks were still up, there wasn't a mark on his shorts or a hint of sweat anywhere on his body, and he had a lazy eight goals in the bag.

Toast of the town.

I ran into a few blokes, tackled, spoiled, chased.

Won the cans for most determined.

I got involved in a shout of cans with the entire backline as they were singing along to the Baffled Kings.

The Kings were an acoustic band but the narcotic drips hanging out of their arms convinced many they were electric.

Committee-men beamed at me.

Strangers bought me beers.

I was an asset, not an embarrassment.

I'd never be out of work in this town.

It was a simple town and the simple things I could do were always in demand in the country.

I crept into life there as easily as a rabbit into a burrow.

• This is an extract from Bloke, by Bruce Pascoe. Penguin, rrp $32.95