TODAY, WALKING ON THE BEACH, I said my five thousandth Tara mantra. Gesang ist Dasein.
Rain all night and all day, and a green-grey water blur at rattling windows. The honey-gold wooden ceiling in here is leaking – drop after drop goes splashing behind me. One of the wooden struts supporting the gable just blew down past this window. The lowest branch of the huge sheoak next door has split off from the trunk – a great head of grey needles is bowed over their lawn. At the lighthouse they keep blowing the foghorn.
The power having finally gone off for the afternoon – the lamps I had left on flickered on, off, on like a lighthouse lantern for an hour first – I read Jessica Anderson’s Tirra Lirra by the River again for the first time in years, and was thunderstruck, this time, at its brilliance. Its fearful symmetry and sureness of touch! (‘The shadow of the mango tree absorbs everything within its margin but the white iron seat, which stands glimmering all night, its arms held ready, like the ghost of a seat in a city park…’) Everything is interwoven (that city park bench is a significant one in London). By the last chapter, where Nora is old in Grace’s glass room, spinning her ‘globe of memory’ over and over until she recalls at last (after a blank lifetime of not recalling) why ‘the step of a horse, the nod of a plume’, her dreams of bold Sir Lancelot, had always been ‘accompanied for a second by a choking chaos of grief ’ – I was in tears of admiration.
The first time I read ‘The Lady of Shalott’ (I remember it was in a classroom, idly reading ahead in the Eighth Book, when I was twelve) I recognised myself in her:
Like some bold seër in a trance,
Seeing all his own mischance…
I was in love, for one thing: in love already in vain and from afar with a boy in another form, who was new to the school and had coal-black curls and was even from France the same as Sir Lancelot. I think I spoke to him once, a few choked words in rehearsed French in the fenced no-man’s-land between the girls’ playground and the boys’, or am I remembering a daydream? He gave a lordly shrug and turned away. (Abruptly with puberty I had become not a pretty girl. Now a greasy faceful of pimples cringed from behind round glasses.) We all left that school the following year; I saw him once again, I was almost sure, from a tram window. Even at that age, reading the poem, I knew that I lived and would always live a tangential, vicarious life: the web on her loom (for me) was fiction and disabling daydream. I was in thrall to the mirror between me and the real. Not that I could have spelt it out in those terms: just that I felt a shock, a clawing of dread; as if I had idly looked up mild symptoms I had in a medical book, only to find them identified with some fatal disease.
Franziska disengaged herself, looked towards the woman, and said, ‘Loneliness is a source of loathsome ice-cold suffering, the suffering of unreality. At such times we need people to teach us that we’re not so far gone.’
Peter Handke: The Left-Handed Woman
Wer jetzt allein ist, wird es lange bleiben,
Wird wachen, lesen, lange Briefe schreiben…
Rainer Maria Rilke: ‘Herbstag’
(Whoever is alone now will go on being alone,
will stay up late, read, write long letters…)
The sun is out today, but for sudden squalls. The southerly is still wild and the waves are high and white, crashing wave on wave. Storm clouds, wheeling, obscure now Queenscliff, now Point Nepean. A Lloyd Triestino container boat (the name painted in large letters) rounded the Point this afternoon, low in the water, close enough for me on the clifftop to have seen people on deck, had there been any; the little orange pilot boat came pitching along behind. With the tide out so far, there were bare rocks out past the end of the jetty. I walked along it into the ice of the wind. Some of the rocks were weedy rocks; others only rootless heaving clumps of golden weed.
Rubbery chains of brown-podded weed grow thick on those rocks. I walked on raisins to the edge of the Rip.
The last outcrop of rock looking west to the surf beach is bracketed by two narrow clear pools that must be good to lie in on a hot day: two cusps of deep water. I found cuttlefish bones on the sand, and by a pool with a white mantle of froth (‘and a froth, a lip of sea drift’ ) one dead black grey-breasted bird. (They are muttonbirds. I checked in What Bird is That?)
On the first hot day of our first December at the restaurant in Lorne we took Taki to the rock pools at the end of the beach, stripped off his jumpsuit and nappy and each of us in turn immersed him in the sun-warm water. He lay lightly back on our arms, his head cupped, eyes closed – he had his first taste of the sea at six months old. His dome of belly was marbled blue-green and white under bubbles and leaning shadows.
I too but signify at the utmost a little wash’d up drift,
A few sands and dead leaves to gather,
Gather, and merge myself as part of the sands and drift.
Walt Whitman: Sea-Drift
Chris’s old red ship, the Nella Dan, has run aground on rocks off Macquarie Island. Everyone was saved, but not the ship, which is stuck fast and expected to wash off and sink at high tide. Twenty-two years since Chris sailed down on the Nella, to Macquarie and then to the three Antarctic bases: the first Greek, very likely, ever to set foot in Antarctica. And it was the first summer of our marriage, but the chance of a lifetime: if I couldn’t go myself, I wanted him to. He came home black-bearded, with slides of penguins and seals, shadows on icebergs from closer and closer up, the shadow of the crow’s nest; and midnight sunrises and sunsets, gold ice and water. To have seen the midnight sun in the south! Even now not many people have.
His job was to cook food that the Australian passengers would eat – scientists and other personnel bound for a year at the bases, and on the return voyage, the ones coming home. The only Greek in a crew of brawny roistering Danes, he must have stood up for himself well enough once he got over his seasickness: his Lauritzen Line papers have him classified Greek gangster kok.
Such a burly little ship as the Nella, a battle-axe icebreaker, scarred and worn. After all these years, to have come to a bad end.
In Carlton there were night shrieks that by daybreak were the whistles of the construction site. The cranes and the high walls have moved in closer. But the Virginia creepers have embraced their walls with great long green arms: the one against the warehouse has strung loops of itself up, seven-branched, like a menorah.
I bought rum babas for H, who loves them, so spongy and glossy, oozing syrup, mushroom-headed: lacking only a grooved lip to be phallic. I thought the baba came from North Africa or Lebanon or even Greece into French cooking, but the dictionary says ‘Polish’. None of my old cookery books mentions them at all – Chris’s Pellaprat or Escoffier probably would. The pleasure of cookery books – Patience Gray has a new one just out with an irresistible name: Honey from a Weed: Fasting and Feasting in Tuscany, Catalonia, the Cyclades and Apulia. I still have her old Penguin Plats du Jour or Foreign Food from 1960, one of the first cookery books I ever bought, at least as much for its quaint virtuous names as for the recipes (too hard for me in those days): Patience Gray, Primrose Boyd, illustrations by David Gentleman…
No moon, though it’s still almost full, so it had set or not risen yet, leaving the sky to all the great dropping stars and one low drift of still cloud over Queenscliff. Rods of light dipping in the bay. The lighthouse with its head in the stars, its top spinning red, white, red, had Orion over one shoulder (and Aldebaran). The steps were in darkness, lumpy with sand, the rails wet, the beach all in shadow and starlight, only dimly reddened in patches where light fell from the pair of tide lanterns, both with their three red rods alight, perched one above the other on balconies under the main lantern. Black shoals sank groping into the surf; from time to time a thunder growl came out of the west. Under the pier the shallow lamplight barely moved, and a star, a red or white glitter of mirrored lighthouse in a pool.
The bay was so still that the only sound was a trickle of waves, a warm clammy breeze, one surprised chirp out of a mass of dark seaweed. Frog calls carried all the way from the swamp, and they are such an enclosed sound too, those chirps and hiccups and small deep bells, as if they were made in one great bubble. Bolobble bolobble. Bonk. I picked my way by the shapes of shadows between rocks, over sand. On this inner beach the cliff hides the lighthouse until you reach the metal staircase, when you see its mask rise up in the distance and open and close slowly – once, twice – two round yellow eyes.
William Hart-Smith, from ‘Lighthouses’:
A lighthouse stands and looks at the sea.
If I tap it on the shoulder
it doesn’t turn round.
Today is sunny! I lay reading too long – Katherine Mansfield’s Letters and Journals – in my old black bikini beside the little fig tree. (It has twenty leaves now, patterned with the shadows of other leaves and the solid shapes of other ones touching them, blocking the sun. An Escher fig tree.) Now I’m scorched all over, because of not wanting to stop and go inside. Alone here, but today I’m replete – golden inside with sleep and sun and apricots and luxuriant sorrow. Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle; she died young…Her face is on the cover: the Anne Estelle Rice portrait – or the black-eyed Japanese-bobbed head-and-shoulders bit of it – and the square-yoked dress is tomato, or pomegranate, but never persimmon. If it stayed too long in the sun and faded, well yes, maybe then…(On the cover of The Aloe in the Virago edition the dress is bright cherry, and the background stewed cherry.) The dress is poppy red and frail, and what am I missing, never ever wearing a dress to flaunt in the sun…? They were at Looe on the Cornwall coast in May to July 1918, gorging on sun and strawberries. And on Boxing Day in 1920 she wrote to Anne Estelle Rice from Menton:
I salute you in tangerines and the curved petals of roses-thé and the crocus colour of the sea and in the moonlight on the poire sauvage.
A story: ‘The Black Ships’: from Walt Whitman – ‘City of ships! / (O the black ships! O the fierce ships…)’ – the time fractured, two (three?) distinct periods intersecting. The past. A silent ship. Rere regardant.
The past, her past before they met (in the kitchens at Mount Buffalo Chalet): the nights at North Wharf, bike rides to Appleton Dock to take time exposures of the dripping lights, the ships. He is Greek. He came on the Patris. In Melbourne now, they go to Station Pier whenever a ship is leaving; one day they will be the ones on board. They see the film Never on Sunday and he teaches her the original Greek theme-song, the heroine’s love-song to the port of Piraeus by night, and to the boys of Piraeus.
In the present (1960s): they are at the name-day party of a friend of his from Greece. (She is meeting his friends one by one – has none of her own.) Being a professional cook, he has agreed to do the catering, with help from her – not Greek dishes for once but something new that he hopes they’ll like, something different – Chicken Maryland. (Some of the guests are querulous about this apostasy, some see her as the force behind it.) After the meal the men all in one room roar and jeer, clapping – one is doing a striptease on the table top – the women can hear it all in the saloni while they mind the children and make patient conversation about families. (Her inadequate Greek.)
After dark the friend whose name-day it is gives them a lift back into the city, where they are going to a Greek film in the Melbourne Town Hall. On the way through Footscray she interrupts the men’s talk to say, ‘Oh look! There’s the turn-off to where I used to go on my bike! Appleton Dock!’ She had told him about Appleton Dock before, but now in the silence he turns on her a grey face of outraged rebuke, a murderous face. Awkwardly, the drive continues in silence.
At the Town Hall – where as a schoolgirl she heard David Oistrakh play, and Victoria de los Angeles sing Canto a Sevilla – the film is a grainy black-and-white inaudible farce. Not far into it he grabs her arm and pulls her out into the street. He won’t say where they are going. In a dark coffee shop he unleashes a stream of abuse, the gist being that she has proclaimed herself to his friend as a whore – who but a hore goes to the docks alone? – while she sits numb, unable to swallow the coffee, wooden in her own defence.
She is in the black wool jersey dress she made herself, with the long-stemmed scarlet and gold hibiscus embroidered on it in satin stitch.
I went to take photos. I told you. You’ve seen those photos! Why didn’t you just say that?
Oh, yairs, he believe thet, you think…
His last distraught shot: If I staying with you, do I hev to losing all my friends?
Silence. Perhaps she overhears what lamp-shadowed people at nearby tables are saying. They walk to the station. In the train back to their suburb (he rents a room in a Greek household in the house opposite her parents’ house) they are shaken, nauseated by the violence of their anger, the magnitude of their estrangement, looking away from each other and from the shuddering reflections their eyes meet in the dusty panes. Alone in her room at her parents’ house (which is where they furtively, hurriedly fuck now and then, having nowhere else) she puts Canto a Sevilla on the gramophone, with the volume low because the walls are thin. The sepulchral first flute passage – she picks up Ulysses and reads:
He turned his face over a shoulder, rere regardant. Moving through the air high spars of a threemaster, her sails brailed up on the crosstrees, homing, upstream, silently moving, a silent ship.
Rere regardant, she says aloud, the lush soprano voice soaring now over hers.
(Or it could be that she puts on the record of the mirologi she is teaching herself to sing, a traditional song of mourning from Ipiros, sung over the corpse by old women, professionals: called on like midwives to attend the dead. On the record one contralto voice, Dora Stratou’s, sings:
San ilios eva – san ilios evasilepses
Kai sa fengari ehathis
Kai san kloni va – kai san kloni vasiliko
Marathis
Paidaki mou.
Like the sun you have set
Like the moon you are lost
And like a sprig of basil
You have withered
My little child
Hollow and nasal, the long notes of the mirologi waver. Mira, moira, means fate. At moments an instrument gongs in.)
She has a map he drew for her of the village along its river, the family houses labelled with names, and the school, the church; and a photo of him leading the black horse, Marko, through a field of flowers – poppies, chamomile? (A black-and-white photo.) Both are creased; she sleeps with them under her pillow.
There is a story in it, if only another mirror story. To work, it might need to be a comedy of misunderstandings: wry switches and juxtapositions of points of view (what Mavis Gallant does in ‘Luc and His Father’ in Overhead in a Balloon).
Chris’s aunt, his father’s only sister, died alone this year in her stone house on the hill overlooking the village at Yerakona, and was found rotting in her black clothes. She had an affliction: moon-sickness, seleniasmos – epilepsy’s folk name (the full moon brings on attacks); and a greed, for photos, any photos of the family, to put up on her wall.
I carry home stiff black rags of seaweed for the garden, and tassels of bubble weed, hollow blond grapeskins to lay on the fox-pelt of the pine needles with the curls of the lemon gum bark, a triple incense. Under the lighthouse a boy from the children’s camp called out, ‘Do you like seaweed?’ I said it was good for the garden and he nodded: it keeps the sand cool for the roots.
At the hotel until after midnight last night: the candle burning near us in a thick glass vase the size of a brandy barrel was a mound of creamy lace by then. Not just a few hours but days ago, it seemed, the black garden window was a wall of green light beside us.
For me 1987 has been (to take stock) the year (or another of the years) of living blindfoldedly; the year of performing the shadow play, the year of looking for meanings, like some old kafedzou peering at the dregs of other people’s cups. I may be a slow learner, but what a good shadow I seem to have made.
How much longer can I go on living in this solitude in this house built on sand?
I hardly slept. At about sunrise I woke and gave myself five orgasms. After the first one, as happens often now, I melted into hot tears: this slow trickle across my cheeks down into my ears was so like a tongue, two tongues, that the lust kept welling up again and was exhausted by the end rather than assuaged. This deep wound between my legs: why does it still refuse to stay closed? – dry lips sealed in the husk of hair.
I bought myself a Buddha at last, after the long Lama Tsong Khapa puja in Melbourne the other night (soft chanting, candles in the dark wind): a small slender coppery Buddha with a secret smile, sitting back in the lotus position with one hand under his bowl of nectar and the fingertips of the other hand touching the earth. The base is engraved with lotus petals – a single row, not the double row which symbolises the mirror image in the water. He is quite heavy, though he is hollow: upside down, inside out, the statue is a mouth or a bell-skirt; the hole boring into the head is a throat, a vagina. When the red candle is lit, a large long-eared Buddha shadow flickers over the gold planks of the wall.
Peter Matthiessen, in The Snow Leopard, on the ‘body of profound intuitive knowledge that antedates all known religions of man’s history’:
It stirs me that this primordial intuition has been perpetuated by voice and act across countless horizons and for centuries on end, illuminating the dream-life of primitives, the early Indo-European civilisations of the Sumerians and Hittites, the ancient Greeks and the Egyptians, guarded by hidden cults in the Dark ages, emerging in Christian, Hasidic, and Muslim mysticism (Sufism) as well as in all the splendorous religions of the East. And it is a profound consolation, perhaps the only one, to this haunted animal that wastes most of a long and ghostly life wandering the future and the past on its hind legs, looking for meanings, only to see in the eyes of others of its kind that it must die.
Last night was a turbulent high tide, no sand, just the sea wall glinting wet. The great pine in the curve of the bay – a landmark shown on navigation charts – is a cone of red lights for Christmas, with a gold star.
‘Among Pigeons’ has come out in print. I added a paragraph to ‘Goldfish’ today, something that belongs in it. It’s what I felt was still missing: she leaves their bed and walks on the shore at night alone.
New moon this cold night. TV reports keep coming from Macquarie Island. Yesterday at midnight on the flood tide they tried to float the Nella Dan off the rocks, having patched up the hole in her hull and pumped the water out of her, but all they managed to do was turn her round. Tonight they have to succeed or wait a month for another tide high enough.
First light, the first birds. The lovers sleep in each other’s arms. I sleep alone. A ship’s throbbing in the Rip, like a cat’s purring, woke me.
H’s trees are heavy with small red pears, nectarines, almonds in suede cases. His two black-brown cats are lying intertwined, one darker, one lighter, each with an eye showing. Princes of darkness. They make the Tao symbol, Yin-Yang: simple happiness. Sufficient happiness.
In the middle of the night I stole a furtive glance.
The two ingredients were in affable embrace.
Their attitude was most unexpected,
They were locked together in the posture of man and wife,
Intertwined as dragons, coil on coil.
Po-Chu-i (Translation by Arthur Waley)
The Nella Dan is free! On her way to Denmark, they say. Tonight at 8:46 is the Summer Solstice. Every day here has been ice-bright with a fierce wind off the sea, but the red buds on the oleanders (those tough Greek bushes, poison-bushes) have been opening up their peach-fleshed ruffles.
A Christmas card from Kalamata: ‘There is no olive harvest this year, because of the late snow in March…’
At Carlton two more pot plants have been stolen, this time from the backyard: an ivy and a red geranium.
The grey cement wall under the cranes is higher now than the two-storey restaurant round the corner. (From my yard I see walls on all sides now – only, through a gap, the black shape on the sky of one of the squatting stone kangaroo gargoyles on the restaurant roof.)
Tullamarine airport is a desolate place to be on Christmas Eve – cleaners, a handful of people waiting half asleep for late planes, television sets in all the lighted departure lounges switched on to spruikers and choirs, Carols by Candlelight. The bedraggled midnight parade of luggage around the carousel in a flat glare of light.
(Are you the new person drawn toward me?
To begin with take warning, I am surely far different from what you suppose;
Do you suppose you will find in me your ideal?
Do you think it is easy to have me become your lover?…
Walt Whitman: Calamus)
Christmas day, and the beach under the lighthouse awash under drizzle and spray; a hissing southerly tossed sand and water in the grey air all along the surf beach. No one was there, and no birds – two gulls wheeled out to sea.
At the boat harbour in Queenscliff where we sat on the sun-sodden wood with our legs over the edge, a moored boat behind us nudged, jolted the jetty. Slivers of whitebait showed white, green – des aiguillettes – underneath the whirlpools of light breaking on the piles. The last lines of ‘Marine’ in Rimbaud’s Les Illuminations: ‘les fûts de la jetée, / Dont l’angle est heurté par des tourbillons de lumière.’
The Buddhist masters are always saying that being human is more precious, a higher incarnation, than being an animal. We humans know more. What do we know? Death. Am I superior to the cats, the whitebait and the mutton birds, and am I better off, for knowing death? If science were to force or graft this knowledge into animal brains (assuming, as we do assume, that they lack it), what would we then be giving them that made up for what we had taken away?
Boxing Day, grey haze in the morning, then sultry sun. A salt smell in these dim rooms. And rancour, veiled with affable punctiliousness: swollen with wine at evening; still there at morning.
The morning papers had the story of how the Nella Dan sank. Once they floated her they knew she was holed worse than they thought, was in fact beyond salvage. Before they could finish stripping her and scuttle her, she listed; so they towed her out to sea, where she exploded in a tower of flame, ‘like a Persian Gulf oil rig’, one report said, and burned wildly all day, a Viking funeral ship, sinking stern-first at evening. The Age’s headline:
Nella Dan goes out in blaze of Viking glory
And the reporter began by quoting Dylan Thomas – Old age should burn and rave at close of day…
He has three pieces of jewellery from Tibet: two bracelets, and a necklace of tiny irregular glossy pearls, and coral, and black-laced turquoise, the strands strung through two engraved rods carved out of yak bone. The bracelets are heavy silver, engraved, with their translucent stones set in holes in the silver, not on it – so that you look through an amethyst, a ruby, at a garden broken into countless tiny facets, as a fly might see it.
At high tide in the afternoon, with the beach shrunk in under the cliff, he cleared a space for us to lie down in the sand. He tossed away a piece of brown broken glass, a detergent bottle, a glassy plastic bag like a jellyfish, half sand-swamped (turtles, mistaking plastic bags for jellyfish, swallow them in the oceans, and die). He was about to close his hand over a puffed dead porcupine fish when he realised and sprang back in horror. I hadn’t noticed what it was, half-buried in the sand; but he was not quite sure of that, I saw. We lay flat on our towels, red eyelids closed to the sun, and had nothing to say.
Flushed, he refused to talk. I went in to work on my book review. Alone in the sun he drank white wine, brooding. After dinner came the attack. He left first thing in the morning. (‘I spit on your mentality.’) When he looks back on these two days, the porcupine fish will stand for me in his mind. A puffed-up skin, long spines over a hollow vault – half-buried in the sand. And when I…? A bull ant rampant, rage-red.
Have you no thought O dreamer that it may be all maya, illusion?
A, looking with me at the book of the Family of Man Exhibition – we had been to see it together, though we were at odds already by then, and wandered in a tight mirror-maze of images of people and their shadows – Look, she said. Behold, this dreamer cometh: that’s what I think when I see you.
‘If wanting to be what I am is dreaming, then I want to be a dreamer.’ Peter Handke: The Left-Handed Woman
I remember A saying once (it was a line from a song, she said): I am myself, my own fever and pain. And another time, another song: It’s easier to die by water.
I took a calendar of Tibetan tankas round this grey morning to E’s house in the tea-tree. E has lived alone here for years; she is in her mid-seventies now. We went and sat beside her stiff tapa curtains in the window shaded by a fig with a great grey elephant-trunk, a green umbrella of leaves and large soft green pouches that the birds will eat; the demon in her swirling tanka followed us with bulging eyes made of deep glass. (Her fig, she said, is twenty years old: will I see my Black Genoa become a great green umbrella?) She has tree ferns and a tall gingko (or ginkgo) with leaves that are fan-striped like seaweed, not branched, with fine veins – scalloped leaves, two-leafed-clovers. In the centre of the garden is a glass studio with the washed-up bones and shells she collects sun-blanching on the sills; sea-urchins; three seahorses riding on a stone.
Gingkos, someone told me in Tasmania, are archaic plants, relics of a once-great race; no wild ones survive, only the descendants of those that were planted round Buddhist temples in China and then in Japan.
I took on yet another book review this week; even before the book arrived I regretted it. When will I write ‘The Black Ships’ at this rate? I wanted to have it at least in draft by the end of January, and with one week out for the Zen sesshins with Master Hogen (I have made up my mind), and a week with Taki here or in Melbourne, if he wants to visit the Tall Ships…The only way is to take a deep breath, lock myself in with a bottle of cold riesling and blitz ‘The Black Ships’ one day, one night.
This is the day of the arrival of the Tall Ships. Hordes of people camped overnight to beat the roadblock, more have been pouring in all morning (J and the kids are due soon after midday); everywhere around the Point and the cliff someone is perched in the sun with a picnic basket. This is the first fine day for a couple of weeks: a low-tide warm blue and white morning, with the light breeze over the water not strong enough to stir the dunes: a few yachts hovering out in the Rip. No one seems sure how many ships will come now; the Indian barquentine, Varuna, for one, broke both masts in the Bight; and others have suffered damage. (Varuna is a Vedic god whose seed-syllable, according to Joseph Campbell, is ‘the water syllable vam’.) They will gather west of the lighthouse to take on a pilot each, and sail through between four and five o’clock.
My old Oxford French dictionary has labelled diagrams of the parts of ships, which helped me a lot when reading Pierre Loti. (How odd, that Van Gogh loved Pierre Loti’s books! Is it odd? Which ones? The Japanese voyages? Madame Chrysanthème? About one of his self-portraits with his head shaven he wrote that he looked like a bonze, a Buddhist monk.) Some sails have bird names: petit cacatois, grand cacatois, petit perroquet, grand perroquet, perruche, cacatois de perruche…
At 2:30 when we reached the lighthouse the crowds were assembled, on high points and in the rock pools all the way out to the edge of the rock shelf. A Russian tramp steamer chugged past first, through all the skidding yachts. Already two sailed ships shone white through the haze that had formed since the morning, and four others soon came into sight. One, riding in on a thick line of white water, seemed to be skimming above the haze. Their plump sails were like pillows tied on poles. Orange pilot-boats surged out. A smoky navy frigate came in, old biplanes flew in formation, helicopters dodged goggling. At about 5:30 the ships came through with yachts all around them, into a headwind, on the flood tide: the first one with its sails furled and the crew sitting on the yards; then four more, one with grey-smudged sails, and a small green-hulled one pulling a large flag behind, the Irish brigantine…With J’s father’s binoculars we could even see the creases and seams in their sails. (The binoculars are wonderful. I even saw the Cape Schanck lighthouse high on the last of the pale hills beyond Point Nepean.) The ships with their sails furled were skeletal, ghost ships, all shrouds and spars. Outside Queenscliff they merged together, dwindling on into the grey haze over towards Sorrento.
From over the Rip near Sorrento tiny points of coloured light burst, fireworks, I suppose, in honour of the ships. Someone had lit a bonfire in the cliff-face here, wind-whipped – it must have been visible over there.
To try with very fresh whole schnapper, nannygai, flathead, bream, mullet, red mullet:
Daurade au gros sel (Provence): the fish – sea bream – is baked inside a thick paste of salt and flour, taking a kilo of salt and 180 ml flour to cover a fish weighing one kilo.
Loup à la vapeur d’algues marines (Provence again): drizzle olive oil over the fish (sea bass) and steam it over well-washed seaweed, or you could use fennel stalks, and wine and double cream are added to the cooking juices for the sauce.
Shioyaki (Japan): the fish is salted lightly on both sides, left thirty minutes at room temperature, then grilled golden. The salt melts the fat away under the crust of the skin.
To think of the Nella Dan now. Chris’s little wooden cabin. Ashes on the sea floor.
New Year’s Eve: sun and a strong cold wind along the sand, a good morning for lying in a rock pool with the tide on the way out; no one else on this beach where thousands were crowded yesterday – in all the bay, one windsurfer and a yacht. And silence except for the waves and the sizzles, clicks and twitches of insects in the cliff-face.
All afternoon a storm was brewing, which broke soon after ten with clean drenching rain, and a power failure, so it looked for a while as though the year would be going out by candlelight. I knew I should be drafting ‘The Black Ships’ while I had the chance, and why not now, at least for as long as the candles lasted? For the whole of last year I have four stories to show, a meagre crop; two of them are in print; and there’s this one, still in embryo and at risk. But my heart wasn’t in it, not tonight. Instead I read Stories from the Warm Zone and Sydney Stories, Jessica Anderson’s new book, perfect for seeing a New Year in with; and, still by candlelight, put up the new calendars and the glossy 1988 Moon Chart – a new pattern of navy blue and white scales trickling down the wall.