Blue-grey dark before sunrise in Tempest Bay. The washing hum of the Pacific. Smell of briny barnacles on the breeze. The opening of wooden latched windows. Sounds of the milk run. Early morning souls doing last night’s dishes and drinking bleary-eyed coffee.
You get up, Mrs Donohue nudges her lover Dorothy Panbridge. You get up and make sure he’s got crumpets ready and hot. Otherwise he’ll complain all day.
Arthur Simmons comes down the stairs of his two storey nestled below the western cliffs. Singlet only. Scratches himself then spoons two generous dollops of Whiskas cat food out for his cat, Mitzi, who has outlived both his marriages and also the hope that he might one day be a painter in Berlin. Mitzi sniffs the cat food. Tries to lick the sweat off his fingers.
Dawn in Tempest Bay. Orange fire over the ocean.
Down on the beach, something left behind on the wet sand by the retreating tide. Something large, larger than a small child, its tentacles splayed along the seashells. Surrounded by a carpet of blue jellyfish that’ve beached also in sympathy or, perhaps more likely, were pursuing their own savage feast and got caught up in frenzy.
Struggling dying sea-creatures, arriving here for a billion years.
First sighting is from cottage number six by Dunnie Houser, who woke with a red wine hangover but that’s quickly forgotten. Dunnie’s Great-Great-Granda got his foot blown off in World War 1 and the family’s had use of the cottage ever since. Dunnie knows the old ways. She picks her way across the sand to investigate. Hurries back to the cottage, in her excitement slicing her foot on the cockle shells, but without even stopping the bleeding she gets on the phone tree.
Calls. Whispers. A humming network of excitement and news cracking through the town.
Now here they come, the walkers. As a fine misty rain begins to fall. Figures moving onto the beach. Mostly one by one, though there are couples and even bed-rousted families among them. Scuttling across the flat sands in front of those cottages like crabs or hopping seagulls.
Carrying knives. Carrying little clay pots and tupperware containers. Ready to hack and slice and gather at the sea’s offering, the jellyfish yes of course but really the other thing, the creature that’s larger than a small child, that you won’t catch in a fishing boat, the thing from the far-off deep now landed on shore.
They huddle and jostle and do their business. Stewpots and drying racks will be busy today. There’ll be a menu item or two at the Doris cafe. The particular qualities of this food, nothing to do with taste although you can make a decent go of it with some chilli paste or mustard, will be the first or second or sometimes third or fourth experience people have ever had of it in their lives.
And even as the knives slice into still-quivering flesh on that wet sand, the electric thrill starts to go through the town, because some people know and many people don’t but it’s still there down in the memory of the geography itself: when the strange fish lands, a storm is close. Perhaps, given the year and the feeling everywhere, one of the really big ones.
It’s all gone soon after dawn, the last remnants left on the beach like the splattered remnants of a dog bowl.
A few of those who joined in take care, on their way back, to find a driftwood stick and weave a little something in the sand. Shapes of no permanence that’ll be gone with the next tide. Shapes that get passed down in your family or other ways, just something you do like so much of life here is just something you do, you do it because that’s what we do. But those shapes are hard to look at, harder to follow, they hurt your brain if you look at them wrong, and it’s probably a good thing that this snippet of conversation between the land and the deep is so short and quick, relatively speaking.
Morning in Tempest Bay. Nearly time.