David sits beside me on the deck of his house in Bronte, facing out at treetop height within sound and smell of the sea. Our nostrils flare as we inhale the balmy air. There has been a confidential out-of-court settlement with the Commonwealth of Australia thanks to David’s legal expertise and finesse. I will get compensation and all that is my due as Jake Treweek’s widow. My husband’s service has been officially recognised as distinguished after all. He was placed under unacceptable pressure. What happened was not his fault. Mistakes were made. He has been exonerated entirely and in the assessment of those who understand and care about such things his reputation has been restored. Colonel Jacob Treweek is remembered as a hero.
So it unfolded over many months. There proved to be a legal case that could have been prosecuted successfully, so David judged, but the government lawyers resisted strenuously and sought to have much of the evidence rendered inadmissible on national interest grounds. The Minister’s deckle-edged thank you note, the three blind mice in a matchbox, the alleged involvement of the Kookaburra, and all Jake’s writings when he was not of sound mind. In the narrative that David assembled with my help the third cigarette butt meant that Kooka had returned to the garage the next night through the unlocked door from the street, found Jake dead or dying and fled the scene. Those who were implicated wanted all the relevant information suppressed. In the end instructions were given to the government lawyers to settle. It’s unclear who made the decision. An undisclosed negotiated payment proved preferable to a legal hearing from the government’s perspective. That kept it out of the public domain, which is why you will find little or nothing on the record about any of this. Maybe it’s for the best. The surface remains largely unruffled. Our country’s crimes continue to be concealed. Or if not crimes, then the bad faith of a few individuals. Yet are we not all complicit? It is only with this last act that we can dimly know.
The sorry business has brought David and me closer. There’s a current of feeling that runs between us, intimate and a bit awkward. Tentatively we give it free rein. We go riding together. My marriage to Jake proved to be more complicated than I realised, and something in it, present in it, missing from it, contributed to the situation in which I find myself now. David is of necessity the only person in a position to understand. Has he earned this? That is for me to decide. I love him in a different way from how he loves me. Our emotions are differently distributed, you could say, triangulated. We’re not lovers yet.
Nicole calls from inside the house. We’ve let her sleep late in the guest room with the curtains closed. She is rubbing sleep from her eyes when she comes out to the deck to find me. She’s forgotten that David is there too. She feels like the baby bear in her fleecy pyjamas and the sun is blinding.
‘I need my sunglasses,’ she says with alarm.
‘Pull up a seat, darling,’ I say. ‘It’s lovely out here.’ I contemplate my right to be there. I evaluate it. I’m getting used to being in David’s house.
Nicole will soon be fourteen. She’s changing shape, filling out. She has her father’s slightly hooded eyes.
She parks her chair against the wall of the house, warm in the sun, and gets David on to the subject of horses. His mare is set to become a dressage champion. The new foal is doing well. He fetches the latest photos to show Nicole. We smile at each other and say nothing.
—
Pylons sink into darkness where the water is deep enough for ships to dock at the long pier that extends from the shore. The shark seldom surfaces from those depths. She lives in the dark and knows how to hide. Unseen, unknown, she can swim vast distances. She returns to the black waters under the pier where prey is plentiful and she can breed and then disappear again for months or years. She is only sighted when she attacks a human and flesh thrashes in the foam, blood in the water, blood on her mouth. Some die, others survive, scarred, missing a limb. She has welts from being slashed when something came after her.
The attacks happen close to home. In Dili. At Bronte. They can happen all around the coast when shark meets human. Our sensors lead us to each other. A diver jumps off the rocks and she comes up after him like a missile. As her teeth tear his flesh the fight breaks the surface into the light of mid-afternoon. A young man is gone and fear possesses us.
The old nurse shark is rumoured more than seen. As ships increase their loading and unloading at the dock – tankers, warships, coast patrols, container transports – and ropes and chains multiply beneath the pier where once she fed on human remains, she tangles in those nets. A boy and girl out together on the end of the jetty see that she is caught and call their friends to help haul her in. The fishermen know her. She’s more than three metres long, lying heavy and bruised on the worn timbers, the ropes cutting into her. They watch the struggle as her eyes die.
When she is gutted and flushed clean, they make a fire on the beach. They slice up her flesh, oiled and seasoned for a feast. Around the fire the boy and girl drool as the old shark grills. After so many casualties and narrow escapes, so many stories that only grow in the telling, this is an end. The communion of the shark.
Viva Timor Leste! Independent nation at last.
—
Looking through the black branches of trees at the reflection of sunlight on the surface of the ocean I see fragments of shattered mirror pieced together in a mosaic in a wrought iron frame. A sudden gust of wind flings seagulls screeching across the sky. It is late and we are still sitting here. A shadow passes as the day wanes. It is Jake’s shadow, visible on the sun-baked wall, passing over the possible happiness we owe him. There is the land and there is the sea. There is always the sea and the line that divides fresh water from salt to make life.