Chapter 1: Flatheads and Economic Rationalism

Last night I dreamed that I was having sex with the Easter Bunny. After we had finished he lit a cigarette, turned to me and said, "do you think Santa can f**k like that?"

Bilinga Beach, The Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia: Easter 1998.

I'm going back down to Byron Bay, I don't care what they say.

I'll have to get an illness though, put a medical term to what I'm feeling. Otherwise the bureaucrats will never let me stay. At least if I want any pay.

The government knows that living is misery, and they'd prefer me here, in the sunshine state, with the spiky end of a pineapple shoved up my arse, learning that lesson.

I mean they don't want me down here, lazing on the fine beaches, fishing, enjoying life. Who am I kidding? They don't even know who I am.

I don't even know who I am.

I cast my line lazily into the ocean. The full moon rising on the eastern horizon - and the tide coming in.

I draw a cross in the sand with a circle around it and I draw something else, which I call a rabbit - and he's on his way to being crucified.

Today in the supermarket I looked down at my trolley's wonky wheel, going left to right, left to right, left to right, thinking how expensive lamb chops have got.

Down the seventh isle, past the shampoo and tampons, I stood by the face cream section, in front of the Nivea Visage, thinking of Corinne and the caress of her nose on my ear and her cheeks as smooth as a baby's butt cheeks.

And I felt my own face, dried and stretched from months spent on the sand watching the water go by.

My hand reached out and put the Nivea on top of chops - as though this would bring her back from the melting snow up there in those mountains with the wild fennel and the goats, and all the other Swiss with their smooth skin.

How long had it been since she left? I try counting back the weeks as I poke a jellyfish with my toe.

Jellyfish are complicated organisms, well they are actually a group of organisms living together in a translucent blue (in this case) shared house, all undertaking different tasks to keep the creature alive. It is a successful relationship that has lasted since the Jurassic period.

I read that in a book I got from the Coolangatta library.

The sky is turning orange and purple, I place my toes under the blob laying in the sand and flick it into the water. It gets some height then splashes into the water as a man and his dog walks by.

"Haven't seen the beach look like this for years", he says.

"No, it's more like a pool than a beach, aye?"

"Yeah."

And he throws a stick and the dog barks as he sends sea shells flying behind his little legs.

Sixteen weeks, yeah, sometime in January. Her round face and a tear in her eye, as the bus headed to the airport. Sixteen, maybe seventeen now.

The current had been cutting a gutter into the beach for the last few weeks. I'd observed it growing, every day, without fail ("Just observe", says the Buddha, "just observe"). It now stretched from Bilinga to Tugun, a good two kilometres.

At low tide the gutter became a pool with an exposed sandbank fifty or sixty metres from the shore protecting it from the surf.

This morning I'd dove down and chased the small whiting which darted along the sandy floor, making sure to avoid the gaps in the banks that led out to sea, where the water rushed into the mouths of sharks.

Sharks wouldn't come that close to shore during the day. I knew that. But why take the chance?

I swam out to the bank and stood where the water had parted, with the ocean to the left and right of me, thinking the Hebrews must have been pretty impressed with Moses.

The tide is coming in now and I smell the rain, the first for a while. It is the smell of a child, the smell of anticipation, of hope. It's Autumn rain.

I'd spent three disgusting summer months in my little flat by the beach. Surrounded by humidity, suffocated by the air.

At night the place became a playground for a thousand cockroaches of assorted sizes and shapes - Queensland: beautiful one day, infested the rest of the time.

I'd gathered photographic evidence of the bug's activities during my term there, hoping to create an exhibition entitled: Cockroaches and Blue Bottles. People wouldn't understand and I would waste a lot of easy-come easy-go money getting prints but nonetheless I'd get out the Olympus and sneak up on them at night and stun them with the flash.

Maybe I'd become famous, and she hear about me in Switzerland.

The tide continues to turn, there's a good metre and a half of water in the gutter now and the sandbank is submerged for another few hours, the sea joining again as the sun sets and the moon gets a little higher.

I'm hoping for a shoal of tailor to swim in - a vicious bunch of pelagic fish who like to rip apart pilchards.

It's something I do to avoid getting high.

I concentrate on my line. It lies on the bottom of the gutter, baited with a set of three ganged hooks (three hooks linked as a chain) attached to a large West Australian pilchard.

A few drops of rain touch my hair. The wind picks up and sand sticks to my face, gluing to the Nivea Visage.

"God I hate economic rationalists." I think. People running around talking about figures, growth, matters of utmost consequence.

Surely everything, if you view it rationally, is of no consequence at all! In the right circumstances a fish could very well be worth as much as a million dollars. I mean, if you're really hungry - and probably if you are a blue-fin tuna lying on ice in Tokyo in the year 2050.

The madness of the rationalists doesn't let him see this folly however, and you still seem to get more respect if you're in a nice car with a good suit and a platinum Visa card in your pocket starving to death, than you do in a pair of shorts chewing on a mouthful of bream.

Something fishy is going on, maybe I'm the only one who knows about it. It might not even be paranoid either, as I haven't smoked for months.

A few weeks ago Sacha called me from Melbourne, chatted nervously for a few seconds, then got to the point: Sally's dead, overdose. Two weeks or so later, another call from Sacha's housemate, Sacha's disappeared. Here today, gone tomorrow.

My line tenses, I watch the full moon's reflection in the water. Something is going for my bait. Something is having a go - why not? It's Australian, and that's what it's all about. I wait, like a porpoise preparing to jump through a flamin' hoop. "Come to papa, honey".

I lift my rod and snare the hooks into the creature. I feel its tail flipping from side to side, pulling like a little bull.

Fuck, the rod bends right over like an Indian contortionist, my line twangs with tension, threatening to break. I release it a little, "play" with it a bit.

These aren't games though - it's not football here, it's life and death.

As Sky's daughter says (and Sky's obviously from around Byron Bay if you didn't pick that up from the name), "fish wants to live".

Yeah, fish wants to live all right. I know that. This one's telling me loud and clear. I hold the line, trying to abate its retreat. I can't blame it for struggling; I suspect it figures that something's up. It's primal instinct. And, of course, it is totally correct.

I hear its primitive mind down there going:

"Something's going wrong, this little fish is attached to my top lip, and it hurts, and..."

"I don't know what the fuck's going on here, but I'm heading back out into the ocean. These gutters have sticky fish! Sticky, pricking, altogether annoying little pain-in-arse fish! It's pulling me back to shore! What, is it possessed? Oh my fucking god I've got a possessed fish attached to my lip!"

Eventually it tires and decides to bunker down in the middle of the gutter, as the tide begins to reach its peak, rippling the moon's image, refusing to budge.

I hold my ground. It must be a sand shark. I'd been catching a few of them recently. They are generally a metre to metre and a half, in length and are more of a ray than a shark. I hate touching them and always look like a sissy when I have to do so. They have a large, diamond-shaped head and these big eyes that look at you helplessly when you get them on the shore.

Like a Buddhist monk...no, more like a little aquatic puppy.

"Okay I'm ready to die, I've fought valiantly..." says the fish, adding dramatically, "I have no fear any more, I see the light, the bright white light, calling me. So eat my flesh, take it from my body, let my bones decay, my life is now of no consequence".

The fish begins to move again. I carefully edge it towards the shore, feeling the life draining from it's body. Then it sits steadfast on the sandy floor, looking up at the moon through the water, one last time before meeting the "Maker".

As cruel as it is - you forget about it. Conscious as you are to its will to live, you don't want to let it go either.

It would be even crueller to let it go at this point anyway. If I wasn't patient, if I tried too hard and snapped the line, whatever was out there will die anyway. Having three hooks attached to your mouth is a distinct disadvantage in an environment where just about everything that is bigger than you views you as a potential meal.

On the other hand it might survive. If the piercing was right, it could probably live out its days terrorising other fish, ripping them apart with its extra steal teeth. The likelihood though, is limited.

I pull in the final few metres of line, totally doped out with adrenalin. Droplets form on my eyelids, water drips down my long hair and salt air fills my lungs and dries my lips. The nylon noose is at its end. I step closer to the water's edge, the clouds float over and cover the moon, but I can still make out this long shape in the shallows. I walk backwards, dragging it onto the beach. No one is here, just the whisper of the ocean waves and the sound of this huge flathead's tail sweeping the sand.

It is a dark, muddy-coloured, brown "lizard". I'd seen some guy walking along near Shellharbour, south of Sydney, with one last year. It had stretched from the bottom of his rib cage to his feet. He had to lift his arm to keep its tail from brushing on the ground. I couldn't touch it. It was probably pretty pissed off now and prone to irrational acts of retaliation, which I feel it is fully entitled too.

And these flatheads have these spikes, behind their heads, that can cause quite some pain.

Jesus, you could feed a fair few Israelites on this one.

I bend down to try and extract the hooks. It swipes its tail and whips its head around in defiance. I jump back, then look around into the darkness, making sure that no one saw my cowardice.

I wave my hands at the fish, hoping it might jump off by itself...

And then the lord comes, in the form of some old bastard walking along the beach, clutching surf rod and creel.

He displays the normal politeness, "did you get anything, etc."

I cannot speak, I just point. I've pulled out a monster and now that monster has me bailed up in my own territory.

He turns on his torch, The Light shines. "That's the biggest flathead I've seen caught around here for years." He smiles smoking a cigarette.

I feel like I've just had a baby and am meant to pick it up and start cuddling it. But I feel more like Rosemary in Rosemary's Baby. The Roman Polanski film where Rosemary's husband lets the devil sleep with his wife and then they have a devil child with ugly brown claws and a funny looking head.

This is my devil child - I try to love it, I just can't.

The old man steps in and with one little twist the hooks are gone.

Then he goes, leaving me alone - again...

I can't look it in its eye, murder bloody murder, and I've been caught.

"It's big," I look away, then turn again to confirm, "it's big". It must have lived for over ten years to get this big - twenty maybe. Swimming around in a shoal that is constantly decreasing. Watching brothers and sisters getting knocked off one by one by stingrays, squid, fishermen, eels. Somehow managing to avoid them all, to this point...

And that is the point.

Too bad there's no retirement plan for fish. Maybe they could build a place for them here on the Gold Coast. They've got all the other old battlers up here from WWII, Korea and Sydney and Melbourne. Maybe they could build a new exhibition for them at Sea World called, "the ones that got away."

Sea World is too pretentious for that now though. Not like the 70s when your old man could hang you over an open tank to pat a grey nurse shark fin that swam around in circles for hours and hours.

No, they got rid of the giant concrete fish tank years ago and started bringing in rides and safety rules.

Safety? What about fun?

No one, to my knowledge, had ever even had his or her arms ripped off during that era. Admittedly that would have probably been due to pure Australian luck triumphing over stupidity. But so! This country was born of a risky, and at times blood thirsty, pioneering spirit. And there were always our mothers, who'd suddenly look up and see their darling boy or girl hanging appetisingly over this very menacing looking creature with really sharp teeth and yell, "what the hell are you doing with that child?!"

That was normally enough to keep the menfolk in check.

Though most of our fathers didn't seem to know why they were being yelled at, oddly enough. Those were the days.

I bait up and cast my line back into the surf. Immediately I get another strike. Another flathead! Jesus Christ. I prepare myself for another long wait. The line tenses up again.

Then it snaps.

I reel in the broken line - it twists around in the wind - pack up and go home, holding the fish by its tail, it's head dragging in the sand.

Five hours, standing.

The moon, she's gone.

Going mad without her help,

Shivering, tired. The rain a mist,

entering my body with every breath.

I am not happy here. The doctor would see that.

Give me my certificate, make it official: my mind swims with fishes.