The Best Australian Yarn regional prize winner: Flutter by Sam Carmody

WARNING: Explicit Language It had seemed like the ocean had opened up when Rob Grimes, 54 and built like a boxer, disappeared into it. A second before, he’d been bobbing about amongst the pack of weekend surfers, talking shit, loud in a way an older surfer is at a spot they know well. He gave reports on the number of ‘cunts’ in the water he didn’t recognise, said an honest man had to lock his car in the carpark cause none of the clowns out there could be trusted. He wondered if someone amongst them had already had their way with the contents of his car, had stashed his trackies, had gleefully nicked his old jocks. Dirty jock stealers. Weird, perverted pricks they all were. All of this said at a thespian’s volume, reaching anyone in the water, even those on the fringes of the pack. The rest of the surfers, two dozen, mostly men, were quiet. Grimesy’s monologued about his own origin story. How skinny a runt he had been decades ago when he first surfed this place, about “as much muscle as a sea horse”. Could have the waves to yourself, he said, back then. His large round face went hard and leering once more, scanned the pack as if daring someone to look him in the eye. Then the ocean inhaled and for what was maybe a second at most, Rob Grimes disappeared under water. The whole of him. Grimesy and his board. Maybe someone had yelled “shark”. Later many who had been out there would struggle to remember if they had even seen it. But the pack had turned in a moment, rolled away like a flock of birds, the water churning underneath them as they made for shore. Only two surfers hadn’t moved. Bec Baker, English teacher at Stark High and volunteer at the surf club. And Ry Stone, 17 years old, bleary-eyed from his night-fill shift at the supermarket. When Grimesy re-emerged, sliding back on to what was left of his surfboard, he looked younger. A second before he’d been crusty, rueful, cantankerous, like an old lion skulking around the pack. Now there was youthful alertness and humility. Hair in his eyes. Sharp intakes of breath like the very concept of breathing was new and important to him again. “Fuck”, he’d muttered. His right leg, below the knee, was gone. A weird sharp point, the bone all pointed in different directions like a star picket. Bec and Ry had looked at each other, then to the large, fast-moving shadow that hooked away towards deep water, out to sea. But it turned again. ‘Fuck off!’ the man had yelled, the words sounding more tired and resigned than pleading. And then he was gone once more. A broad dark tail lifted above the water, its white underside with round blotches of dark-grey, like oil paint. When Grimesy surfaced again, more of him was gone. To Bec it was like her mind was playing tricks. Below the waist, again on his right side, was now a blurred absence, as if he’d been erased. Rob pulled himself back on to his board. Gave two hard paddles. Then slumped. Bec and Ry reached him then. ‘Leg rope,’ she said. Ry slid off his surfboard into the blood-darkened sea, undoing the strap at his ankle, then turning the surfboard around in the water to undo the velcro at its end. Bec fixed the cord to what she could, wrapped it high up around what was left of his thigh. Then they paddled on either side of Grimesy, a hand each on the middle of his large back. Their progress was slow, the tide that carried them unhurried, as they made their way towards the quiet crowd now gathered on the beach. *** Bec had felt the shark in the instant before Grimesy got hit. It hadn’t touched her, but she’d sensed a shift in the water, the seismic flutter of it passing beneath. Stuart, her husband, had also been sitting there on his surfboard. He was right beside her when it happened. She wanted to ask him if he felt it, too. Now, Stuart lay in the dark beside her. Bec had held him for a time when he first came to bed, as she did. And as usual, he was turned on his side, toward the windows. His back to hers. He hadn’t spoken about any of it since they got home. Stuart had known Rob Grimes since he was in his teens, though Grimesy was about ten years older. They surfed together most weekends, worked the same builds, drank together. That friendship had always puzzled Bec, even concerned her; the hold that an unpleasant man seemed to have over her husband. She wondered if Stuart, too, was mulling all that over now. Bec rolled onto her back. Heard the sea breeze in the old peppermint in the side yard. Some hours later she woke again, her thoughts drawn back to the movement of water against her leg. Breeze-like, not the violent rush of water one might have figured for something so huge passing beneath. Bec marvelled at her mind, too; why it paused on this detail in particular, of all the things she’d seen and heard and felt the previous afternoon. It was the ghostly sensation of the shark moving by, unseen, that she had been brought back to. “You awake?” Stuart had said. “Yeah darling.” “You think less of me.” “Stu.” “You do.” “Why would I?” “I don’t know. You’re in your head about it.” “Everyone’s in their head about it.” “What are you thinking?” “What do you mean, Stu?” she said, trying to restrain the annoyance she detected in her voice. “I watched a man die.” “I did too.” Though their bodies weren’t touching, she sensed the tension in his. “I thought he was gone. I thought there was no point sticking around.” Bec was unsure what to say. There was a long silence. “No one has control over how they are going to react,” she said. “Right.” “I read about it. It’s not a conscious reaction.” “So you’re reading about it?” Bec didn’t respond. In the face of his mood she started to wonder if maybe she did feel self-righteous. The fact she had stayed out there. It was true it hadn’t been a conscious decision. She had felt calm. Beyond herself in some way, the body and mind in automation, a functional mode that took her over completely. And, perhaps, it had taken over the boy, too. It had felt like they were under the same spell, almost. She’d looked for Ry, after Grimesy had been taken away in the helicopter to Perth, but he was gone. It was then she’d found the leg rope in the carpark. Lying in the scraggly grass just off the bitumen near a crumpled blue rubber glove. She rinsed the cord and straps under a hose outside the surf club and took it home. Bec heard Stu’s breathing slow. She willed herself to feel her old compassion for him. It was what she did when he lost it at the kids, or her. Or when he went around to Grimesy’s place on Fridays and would overdo it to the point he’d be useless for days into the next week, unable to leave his bed. People were frightened of Stuart but they could never have imagined what he carried with him. Most knew about the accident years ago. The ten-year-old on his BMX, rushing out onto the road in the dark. Bec had known this before she’d ever met Stuart. She’d known, too, like everyone else did, that he had stood with the family around the kid’s bed, the boy lying on it, beyond saving. But what they didn’t understand was how it stuck with him two decades on. And you couldn’t blame them for not seeing his torment. Stuart, like Grimesy, wasn’t a good advertisement for himself. But she was sure there was a depth of feeling, of thought, about that moment of his life that maintained its grip on him. Grief is what she’d come to understand it as. Hours later, he spoke again, the heat in his voice gone: “Fucking Rob. Of all people.” The wind had quietened outside. “He didn’t stand a chance, did he?” Stuart said. “No. He didn’t.” “But you think I should of stayed.” “I don’t know what I think, Stu.” “I hate you thinking I abandoned him. And you.” Bec hesitated, but continued. “You did go in. I don’t blame you but it is what happened.” She expected something to come then, a scream. For Stuart to hit the wall or up and charge out of the room. But he didn’t move. She turned on her side and closed her eyes, her thoughts shifting to the boy. Off his board, treading water to pull off his leg rope, face pale against the darkening sea around him. Stu set off at five. He had taken his work boots but his wetsuit was no longer on the line. Bec knew he’d probably just taken off up the coast. In the autumn dark, she had got the boys breakfast and into the car, dropped them at the primary school library and then walked across the oval to the college, carrying her backpack and a green plastic bag. She pulled one of the half dozen unmarked assignments in front of her. A year ten essay on Macbeth and the question of agency. The student, as usual, was drawn to the witches and their apparent power over the man, Macbeth guided like a figurine towards murder. Bec looked out her window, at the sun now splintering through fast-moving clouds and the oval puddled with the night’s rain. She regretted saying what she had said. But less for fear of hurting him. It was the predictability of what was to come, the dark weather of his mood. Bec scribbled a note in the margins, a question of whether the witches had truly decided Macbeth’s fate or if it was ultimately in his own hands. Inside the plastic bag at her feet was the leg rope that had been used as a tourniquet. It was strange to keep, perhaps stranger to give it back, the object changed by what it had been used for. But she found the boy’s number through the supermarket, told the manager, Kev, that she had something she needed to return. *** Bec sat at the kitchen table with her marking while Stuart lay on the couch in front of the television. She was unsure if he was asleep or watching the YouTube video that was on mute, a step-by-step of a man restoring a WWII pistol, when Ry messaged. Sorry for the late one. Yeah that would be good *** When she pulled up Ry was standing under the fuzzy lamp glow in his hoodie. Sand flicking through the empty beach carpark. She pulled up, turned off the engine. “Here you go.” “Thanks,” he said. He looked down at the cord in his hand. “It’s had a good wash,” she said. Ry nodded. “How are you?” Bec said. “Oh yeah.” They stood there silent for a moment. “It was pretty wild,” the boy said, “wasn’t it.” She nodded. “You feel like a walk?” “Yeah,” he said. “I was going to have a choof. You mind?” Away from the lights of the carpark the path to the beach was black with darkness. Bec reached for Ry’s shoulder. “Did you feel it, before?” “Feel it?” he replied. “I felt it, you know, go by me and Stu. A moment before Grimesy went under. At least I think I did.” They set down at the foot of the dune. Ry lit his joint. Then he said: “He tried to punch me once.” “Who? Grimesy?” “Yeah. When I was like 11 or something.” “God. Why?” He shook his head. “A wave or something. I got in his way. Dunno. I didn’t even have pubes yet.” Bec laughed. He smiled. “Want a smoke?” After a pause, “Yeah,” she said. It wasn’t lost on her that it was irresponsible. A married woman, a teacher, flat-back on the beach with a teen. But she propped herself up and took the joint, inhaled, and lay back down. Bec figured she had been about the same age as Ry when she met Stuart, a couple months shy of 18. It wouldn’t have passed today, the way they met. She was just out of high school. He was 30. They were married, had the boys, all before she was 22. She saw now that Stuart’s pain had been the fuel of her love. A reliable source when things got hard. From their first night together she sensed that she had held him together. At 17 that duty made her feel older. It gave her a vocation, tending to a broken man. But she wondered what she’d tell that girl now. “Well, what are you going to do with your life, young man?” He scoffed. “Uni, maybe. Dad reckons I should piss off, Perth or over east or something. But I can study online. You know, stay.” “Oh, get out of here.” “Hmm?” he murmured, the joint at his lips. “Serious, Ry. One thing I regret.” After a pause he said, “You’re not too old?” Bec snorted sleepily. “S’pose.” She felt it then, the sweeping heaviness in her body. Anchored to the earth, limbs locked to the dune at her back. She let out a long sigh. Beside her but somehow far off, the boy laughed. Bec closed her eyes and smiled at the twitchiness of the world, how loud it was. Even the quietest sounds. Like it was trying to communicate something. *** Did you feel the flutter? You’d always felt it. You’d never told Bec that it was how you always felt. That it was always coming in. Felt that shark on its way for years. At night she tried to hold you and you’d turn away as usual. Sleep arriving quick and heavy, like an ocean opening up. And you were back at that street corner. Grimesy already out the passenger door, racing off into the dark. “I’d saved ya arse,” he’d say one night years later when he was all huge-mouthed and stiffened on the gear and you’d both nearly come to blows. “So much weed in me pockets, they would have known you were high, Stuey. You would have been fucked.” Then there was dust like fog beyond the windscreen. The moon on a spinning bike wheel. You’d seen lights flick on in the houses, through the trees. You’d tried to start the car again. A couple times. The clapped-out starter almost turning. You would have driven away from it all. Could you have lived with that? But the thing was dead anyway, wouldn’t drive again, as if it had completed its mission. Delivered you to that shadowed street corner you’d never really leave.

The Best Australian Yarn regional prize winner: Flutter by Sam Carmody

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