Submitted by Lachlan Plain on Sun, 02/07/2006 - 18:48.
This is not the way I understood cold. Not the biting morning frost, glasses steamed up, fingers fumbling from numbness and sharp shocks of sensation from the heat of the coffee cup, the mist and early morning sun, seagulls scream and the gentle clunk of boats nudging their moorings, a halo of cigarette smoke around where we work, untangling nets, raising sails or refuelling the outboard on those days when Joe’s managed to procure some fuel on the black market.
This is not that kind of cold. It’s not that fresh early morning cold shared in silence with the boy, the boy who throughout the day looks on the world with fearful eyes, but throughout those early morning rituals that fear leaves his eyes, and all that’s there then, in those eyes, in the cold and as the sun thaws the world, is a peacefulness, a contentedness.
This cold is different. It’s empty. Impervious. It’s not a cold that one feels on the tip of ones’ nose. It’s everywhere at once. All throughout this senseless, subaquatic limbo, this mindlessness. These thoughts, these words, drifting by like jetsam. These things I never thought before. These thoughts nudge up against me, some latching on, others drifting by, and others sit there, alien thoughts quickly assimilated.
And the faces. Parents, school, friends, wife, son, the other fisherman, weathered, beaten, but also as young men, in school uniform, in nappies, and the faces of their mothers and the nipples they suckled on. And others, one man I only ever saw once on a bus on the way to visit my dying mother, snot through his beard and sucking on a tinny. And faces with no memory attached, alien faces, foreign faces, races of people I never knew existed, gung-ho young soldiers and bearded guerrillas, charred corpses, men and buffalo in rice paddies, women at looms, fat men and fat cigars, screens with numbers scrolling across them, graphs, pie charts, babies disfigured by fist and machete, by scalpel, by nuclear fission and tidal wave, brothels and women raped against a backdrop of burning villages…
…these aren’t my memories, these aren’t my thoughts, I remember my thoughts, they were gentle, like rain, I want my thoughts, I want my body, I want to die like people always have, like the boy did when they put a bullet through his head. I’ve got to capture these memories, pin them down, like when you scramble across the deck struggling against a wicked wind to pull down the sails before they’re torn off and snatched away…
…after the spill, some of the boys and their wives got some city lawyers onboard and launched a class action, which the TNA crushed immediately, of course, no explanation, no compensation, nothing, silence, denial, just garden vegetables shrivelled from the refinery next door, a sour, sullen wife and a broken boy who buried his face in his mother’s apron like a baby…
...I’m not like the others here…I had a family to feed…
…sitting on the pier after a fight with the wife. Approached by a man carrying a potato sack. A thousand dollars to take this sack to a certain latitude. An unlit trawler waiting for me. Five hundred now, five hundred on my return. The boat’s in disrepair, and it wasn’t designed for that kind of depth anyway. But I nod. No questions.
Tell no-one. I told my wife and she just looked at me from the bed with slitted eyes, but didn’t disagree…
…it’s not a refreshing cold. It’s five am, me and the boy are preparing the boat. It’s a heavy, suffocating cold…
…Five days out from land and I open the sack. Five pink objects fall to the floor. And the boys there over my shoulder. A silent hulk. Starring at the brains too…
…Nine days out from land. Three fitful nights. The hull locked. The key fingered sweatily in my pocket. And those things lying on their own in the dark…
…silence. Just footsteps. I try to sit up…
Look at this sick bugger.
Too right, a fucking degenerate.
He had gentle yellow eyes. He patted me on the head before injecting me. I’d heard of censoring before.
…a woman speaking French, a figure in white, bright lights, an airflight, an a aquarium, a shark, an octopus, a beaker and a vile on the bench at head level, a thousand pinpricks of pain, then an infinite, senseless plateau.
…a visit in a cabin painted white. He was pouring sugary water into my mouth when I sputtered into consciousness. He said something about dolphins, or else I misheard him. He placed a hand on my forehead and smiled. You know you’re just a prawn. I smiled too. But I was thinking about my wife cooking prawns. About her curled up in bed like a prawn. About the baby boy curled up like a prawn. I smiled and he smiled too.
Another Draft
This is not the way I understood cold. Not the biting morning frost, glasses steamed up, fingers fumbling from numbness and sharp shocks of sensation from the heat of the coffee cup, the mist and early morning sun, seagulls scream and the gentle clunk of boats nudging their moorings, a halo of cigarette smoke around where we work, untangling nets, raising sails or refuelling the outboard on those days when Joe’s managed to procure some fuel on the black market.
This is not that kind of cold. It’s not that fresh early morning cold shared in silence with the boy, the boy who throughout the day looks on the world with fearful eyes, but throughout those early morning rituals that fear leaves his eyes, and all that’s there then, in those eyes, in the cold and as the sun thaws the world, is a peacefulness, a contentedness.
This cold is different. It’s empty. Impervious. It’s not a cold that one feels on the tip of ones’ nose. It’s everywhere at once. All throughout this senseless, subaquatic limbo, this mindlessness. These thoughts, these words, drifting by like jetsam. These things I never thought before. These thoughts nudge up against me, some latching on, others drifting by, and others sit there, alien thoughts quickly assimilated.
And the faces. Parents, school, friends, wife, son, the other fisherman, weathered, beaten, but also as young men, in school uniform, in nappies, and the faces of their mothers and the nipples they suckled on. And others, one man I only ever saw once on a bus on the way to visit my dying mother, snot through his beard and sucking on a tinny. And faces with no memory attached, alien faces, foreign faces, races of people I never knew existed, gung-ho young soldiers and bearded guerrillas, charred corpses, men and buffalo in rice paddies, women at looms, fat men and fat cigars, screens with numbers scrolling across them, graphs, pie charts, babies disfigured by fist and machete, by scalpel, by nuclear fission and tidal wave, brothels and women raped against a backdrop of burning villages…
…these aren’t my memories, these aren’t my thoughts, I remember my thoughts, they were gentle, like rain, I want my thoughts, I want my body, I want to die like people always have, like the boy did when they put a bullet through his head. I’ve got to capture these memories, pin them down, like when you scramble across the deck struggling against a wicked wind to pull down the sails before they’re torn off and snatched away…
…after the spill, some of the boys and their wives got some city lawyers onboard and launched a class action, which the TNA crushed immediately, of course, no explanation, no compensation, nothing, silence, denial, just garden vegetables shrivelled from the refinery next door, a sour, sullen wife and a broken boy who buried his face in his mother’s apron like a baby…
...I’m not like the others here…I had a family to feed…
…sitting on the pier after a fight with the wife. Approached by a man carrying a potato sack. A thousand dollars to take this sack to a certain latitude. An unlit trawler waiting for me. Five hundred now, five hundred on my return. The boat’s in disrepair, and it wasn’t designed for that kind of depth anyway. But I nod. No questions.
Tell no-one. I told my wife and she just looked at me from the bed with slitted eyes, but didn’t disagree…
…it’s not a refreshing cold. It’s five am, me and the boy are preparing the boat. It’s a heavy, suffocating cold…
…Five days out from land and I open the sack. Five pink objects fall to the floor. And the boys there over my shoulder. A silent hulk. Starring at the brains too…
…Nine days out from land. Three fitful nights. The hull locked. The key fingered sweatily in my pocket. And those things lying on their own in the dark…
…silence. Just footsteps. I try to sit up…
Look at this sick bugger.
Too right, a fucking degenerate.
He had gentle yellow eyes. He patted me on the head before injecting me. I’d heard of censoring before.
…a woman speaking French, a figure in white, bright lights, an airflight, an a aquarium, a shark, an octopus, a beaker and a vile on the bench at head level, a thousand pinpricks of pain, then an infinite, senseless plateau.
…a visit in a cabin painted white. He was pouring sugary water into my mouth when I sputtered into consciousness. He said something about dolphins, or else I misheard him. He placed a hand on my forehead and smiled. You know you’re just a prawn. I smiled too. But I was thinking about my wife cooking prawns. About her curled up in bed like a prawn. About the baby boy curled up like a prawn. I smiled and he smiled too.