We Mills & Ware girls would often walk down to South Beach to eat our bread and apples. I would stand barefoot on the sand, my skirt hiked up in my hands, the cool green water rushing up to my toes, all fizzy with bubbles. How soft the sand, fine and white like baker’s flour. How light the bleached shells that the sea threw up each night to dry in the sun next day. I had been born a sea child, spent all my early years with my feet wet or salted dry, but the Indian Ocean reminded me every day it was not the same sea.

One day I stood squinting into the horizon, the green of that crease between sea and sky, trying to fathom how many miles to land, and what land, whose land. Enzia ran past me into the shallows, where I never liked to go, and lost her footing. She landed on her bottom with a squelchy splash.

Ooowwww!

Lois helped her up and she twisted round to see the back of her dress.

Oh! Now look like I wee my selv. Embarrass!

No, no, ye canna hardly notice with that colour, I said.

Comforting murmurs from the others.

It’ll be dry by the time we get back, pet, Lois assured her.

Enzia looked doubtful but flounced the skirt of her dress in both hands. Flap, flap, like a scarlet bird, up and down the beach.

The rest of us staggered up through sand and pigface to the lifesavers’ shed near Marine Terrace, where we’d left our shoes. We flopped onto the stubble of grass.

Vi squinted at a puckered thread on her dress, easing it with her thumb.

Wonder what they’ll look like in uniform? she said, all dreamy.

Who?

Our boys—who do ya think! Jack and Clarrie in Baking, Micky and Bob. They’re all talking about enlisting when the time comes. Even Bruce and Mr Prentice, and they’d be in their forties if they’re a day, I reckon.

Don’t say such things! There’s not a war yet, an’ some are saying there will never be one. All that trouble in Europe—that’s nothing to do with us here.

Vi looked at me, scandalised. Of course it’s to do with us! If England steps in, then we’re in too. We’re with the Mother Country.

YOUR country, Lois added pointedly.

Your husband will be going?

Course he will. Ollie spoke for Magnus without so much as a glance at me. Every good man will be going as soon as the call is out.

I pulled on my shoes, quiet.

Vi sighed. It was the kind of sigh she usually reserved for chocolate sponge. Well, I think Clarrie will cut quite the dash as a soldier.

Ollie and Lois glanced at each other and giggled.

The dinner break was nearly over. I stood and brushed myself down, desperate to think about something other than the thing no-one could stop thinking about.

Enzia flew past, kicking up sand. Come, hurry, or we late!

~

Magnus was already home by the time I pushed open the door. His bicycle leaned against the wall, the leather seat still warm with the yeasty, malty smell that was on his clothes, his skin, his hair, even after he lathered it away in the tub. I never minded it, that smell.

Sometimes I recognised something like it on his breath, but it was sour, like rotten beet. The stale remains of Penguin Stout. That I never liked.

Inside he was sitting at the table, scaling a fish. His large hands worked quickly, scraping my old gipper against the grain, showering scales left and right onto sheets of newspaper. The skin of the fish gleamed red and silver-white, and I looked down at my hands. I could almost feel the salt gritty in the bitter syrup of guts and blood, my fingers closing around the shape of a herring in my palm, the diamond back as dark as wet slate, the white belly glittering.

Scales spat and flicked from the gipper as Magnus Tulloch worked.

He hadn’t heard me. His eyes squinted in concentration and his lips were moving, as though trying out words he might later say aloud. Practising them on a fish that didn’t have a lot to say.

Late afternoon light warms through the slatted windows. I have been given a new pair of eyes, or younger ones have been given back to me. He is beautiful, Magnus Tulloch, he has always been. Strong, and beautiful, and kind. The knife pauses; he pushes back with one elbow that long sweep forever falling in his eyes.

Look at you, the man you have become, the boy you still are. Do you love me like you did when I was your Fish Meggie? Do you love me now that I am a biscuit factory girl who works because she is too frightened of more loss to risk more love? Do you love me when I cry at night for a home I could not wait to leave, that no longer exists because everything that made it home has gone?

Yes, says the boy, his eyes never leaving the knife, yes and yes. The man is silent, has too many questions of his own.

I let the door close behind me and he looked up, and the history between us rushed in to seal all the little cracks.

I folded my apron and hung it over the back of a chair. Cup of tea?

Aye, he said, brushing scales from his hands and shaking them onto the newspaper. He held up the fish by the tail, and grinned.

Just look at this beauty!

The Greeks?

Aye. An’ cheap!

I wondered what would be best: light the oven and bake the fish whole, or do a fillet and fry. But Magnus Tulloch had a better idea.

I could hang it in the chimney ta smoke?

Ooh, imagine! The taste of a smokie! Or Cullen Skink, the milky soup made with mashed potato and smoked haddock. I nodded, hungry for cold-water fish, fish from my mother’s creel.

While he was splitting the snapper in two along either side of the backbone, I sat at the table, waiting for the kettle to boil, chin in the cup of my hands. I watched as he cut along the gills and scoured out the guts with my gipper.

So ye’re a gutter now, are ye, Magnus Tulloch?

He clowned, bowing deeply and spinning the gipper in one hand, and for a moment the boy was all there was, and the two of us were laughing like nothing could possibly trouble us in this clear, bright moment in South Fremantle in June 1914.

The white flesh of the snapper was thicker than any haddock, and he threaded the two halves, one below the other, with thin wire, old style. As I watched his careful work, the sober face of the man came back.

Letter from Merredin on the bed, he said.

I raced to fetch it and returned with a sealed envelope.

What, ye haven’t read it?

A shadow passed across his eyes and he shook his head. It’s Clementina’s writing an’ your name on the front.

There was something about the way he spoke that made me think he knew already what it was I was about to read.

I scanned the letter quickly. The same story, but now, something new. Desperation. In every line. If the crop failed this time, all would be lost.

Magnus strung up the wire frame in the chimney. Things are bad, he said. A statement, not a question.

Mmm, aye. I put the letter aside, pressing my palm on it for a second.

We discussed what to use in place of fir and oak to smoke the fish as I lit the fire with spindly kindling. The knobbly, nutty banksia cones were the best we could think of.

Soon Magnus was fanning the fire and piling on the cones and we were hoping for the best, hoping for smoked haddock from a fish that looked and felt and tasted nothing like it.

I glanced back at Clementina’s letter. Things were bad, aye, but her worry over the state of the farm was as nothing compared to her fear of what Stivvy might do if they were forced to walk off the land, in debt.

War is coming and you know what he’ll do, he’ll be gone for a soldier, that’s what, the great daftie loon will be gone for the five shillings a day and to make himself a man again.

What had Stivvy told Magnus? They didn’t write, the two of them, but sometimes Paulie Garrioch would bring news from the Wheatbelt after his runs from the ironmonger’s store. He and Magnus would talk for hours down at The Anchor.

I would not ask him outright, would not talk about the war. I didn’t want to hear him say it.

~

The next day Mrs Laskon came to the door, a pinched look on her face.

There’s a … smell, Mrs Tulloch. A distinct odour of … something. Fish?

She looked faint when I told her about the snapper in the chimney. As though we are beyond the pale, I said to Magnus when she’d gone.

It really is too much, Mrs Tulloch, he mimicked.

Barbarians.