Another Night in Mullet Town Read online

  Steven Herrick was born in Brisbane, the youngest of seven children. At school his favourite subject was soccer, and he dreamed of football glory while he worked at various jobs. For the past thirty years he’s been a full-time writer and regularly performs his work in schools throughout the world. He has published twenty-two books. Steven lives in the Blue Mountains with his partner Cathie, a belly dance teacher. They have two adult sons, Jack and Joe.

  www.stevenherrick.com.au

  Also by Steven Herrick

  Young Adult

  A place like this

  Black painted fingernails

  By the river

  Cold skin

  Lonesome howl

  Love, ghosts and nose hair

  Slice

  The simple gift

  Water bombs

  Children

  Bleakboy and Hunter stand out in the rain

  Do-wrong Ron

  Love poems and leg-spinners

  My life, my love, my lasagne

  Naked bunyip dancing

  Poetry to the rescue

  Pookie Aleera is not my boyfriend

  Rhyming boy

  The place where the planes take off

  Tom Jones saves the world

  Untangling spaghetti

  To my beautiful wife, Cathie

  Mullet

  Manx and I sit under the swamp oak

  on the west bank of Coraki Lake.

  A howler blows from the south

  clearing the lake of gulls and egrets,

  spiking sand into our ankles.

  Manx picks up a tree branch

  and snaps it over his knee.

  He draws an outline in the sand.

  ‘I’m a mullet in the lake,’ he says.

  I can’t help but laugh because

  Manx’s haircut is a mullet:

  scraggy on top,

  long and lank at the back.

  ‘I’m cruising in the shallows,

  hungry for lunch.’

  Manx glares across the water,

  before continuing,

  ‘I’m stuck in a geriatric unit for fish

  when I should be tackling the ocean.’

  ‘There’s sharks in the deep,’ I say.

  Manx draws a school of fins in the sand.

  ‘I swim in crazy circles

  desperate for an escape.

  My eyes pop,

  my mouth gulps,

  but I end up butting my stupid head

  against the sand wall,

  wondering who stole the outlet.’

  He hurls the stick into the lake.

  ‘You’re stuck here forever, Manx.’

  Manx sinks to his knees.

  ‘Then I’ll flop onto the sand –

  a mullet suicide.’

  He rolls onto his back and

  stares at the clouds.

  ‘You might meet another mullet,’ I say.

  ‘A cute female

  lonely and lost, missing her school.’

  Manx laughs.

  ‘Yeah, Coraki Lake needs

  another twenty baby mullet,’ he says.

  ‘Think of it as a community service,’ I say,

  ‘for the pensioners with nothing to do but fish.

  You can feed them your children.’

  A car horn blasts on Lake Road.

  Manx jumps up.

  ‘Fish and chips for dinner!

  You want some, Jonah?’

  Manx’s dad must have closed the servo early

  and bought takeaway.

  I shake my head.

  Mum and Dad

  shouldn’t be left alone for too long

  or they’ll shout the house down.

  Manx scampers up the embankment.

  His dad leans out the window and says,

  ‘Always plenty of food at our place, mate.’

  The Holden blows smoke down the road

  as it follows the curve of the lake

  to their house near the swamp.

  Coraki Lake

  Coraki Lake is fed by Turon Creek

  through the swamp near Manx’s house.

  The lake used to be linked to the ocean,

  but three years ago

  a storm dumped a levee of sand

  damming the outlet.

  A few locals still go to sea,

  but drive all the way

  to the ramp at Balarang Bay

  ten kilometres north.

  They launch fibreglass boats

  with outboards and ice-loaded eskies

  as if certain of their prize.

  At night they return with sunburn,

  a hangover

  and just enough fish

  to encourage them again next week.

  My neighbour, Mr Crewe,

  and his mate, Mr Huth,

  fish from the rocks

  under the lighthouse

  one eye on their lines,

  the other on freak waves.

  They glory in the taste of whiting

  lightly crumbed and quick fried.

  The rest of us circle the lake,

  each with our own special place,

  and the town joke is

  who will give up first –

  the hundreds of procreating fish

  or the pensioners and teenagers

  casting a line

  and hoping.

  The storm of three years ago

  left us without an ocean view

  from the flat ground.

  It dammed the lake,

  and damned the town.

  Catch the wind

  I remember years ago,

  when Manx’s dad used to dump his tinnie

  straight into Coraki Lake

  in front of their house

  on the marshy side of Lake Road.

  He’d power it straight through the outlet

  with Manx and me,

  ten-year-old kids

  holding tight at the front of the boat

  as we pitched over the breakwater.

  We’d get soaked by the spray,

  and Mr Gunn would

  toss me the life vest.

  I’d look at Manx

  and wonder how we’d share it

  if the boat should sink.

  ‘Put it on, Jonah,’ Manx’s dad would yell.

  ‘My boy can swim

  better than a mullet.’

  I’d pull the vest over my head

  and sit low in the boat,

  my hands gripping the sides.

  Manx would lean forward,

  his face to the sun,

  laughing and raising his arms

  to catch the wind.

  Manx

  Manx and I have lived here

  since we were born.

  His dad runs the petrol station

  in the shadow of highway gums.

  It has four bowsers, a pot-holed driveway,

  a besser-block toilet covered in graffiti

  and a neon sign flashing

  P TROL.

  The only customers are

  truckies like my dad

  and goggle-eyed tourists

  who missed the all-night service centre

  on the four-lane at Balarang Bay.

  Manx’s dad sleeps at the station

  as often as in their fibro shack

  beside Coraki Lake

  where Manx has the front room,

  and a fishing line dangling out the window

  ready to go at a moment’s notice.

  In their backyard is a twisted clothesline,

  a shed full of rusting tools

  and a ’67 Valiant up on blocks.

  Manx and his
dad are working on

  dropping a reconditioned engine in,

  ready for his seventeenth birthday.

  Manx has a chipped front tooth

  and one of his ears is missing a bit on top

  where a dog nipped him when he was six.

  Manx told me he’d never seen so much blood.

  When he ran indoors to show his mum

  she covered her eyes

  before fainting theatrically on the lounge.

  Manx’s dad ignored her

  and raced his son off to hospital

  where the doctor stitched up Manx’s ear

  and told him not to play with animals.

  That was years ago

  before Manx’s mum left

  on a summer Saturday

  when we were out on the boat.

  The weekend after she left

  Mr Gunn tossed everything he could find

  that reminded him of his wife

  into a bonfire

  and he told Manx to

  fill her spare trunk with soil

  and plant seeds of lettuce and cabbage

  so that something good would come

  out of Manx’s mum

  leaving town.

  Turon

  The sun drops below Sattlers Hill

  as I walk home along Lake Road.

  My town wins the prize

  for being the only place on the coast

  that doesn’t have a safe beach.

  A treacherous rip replaced the breakwater

  where the outlet used to be.

  A thicket of blackberry bush

  and a jumble of slippery rocks

  stretch south from the lighthouse.

  Tourists crowd the curve of sand

  at Balarang Bay

  and leave us to risk it off the rocks.

  The brave – or foolish –

  creep to the sandstone edge,

  watch the incoming swell

  and judge their time to dive.

  Manx has mastered it.

  The rest of us swim in the lake

  jumping off the pier.

  Or we ride our bikes

  on the track through Morawa National Park,

  our shortcut to Balarang Bay.

  Once a week in summer

  a car will pull up beside Manx and me

  as we walk along Lake Road.

  The passengers wind down their windows

  and, with curled lips and a frown ask,

  ‘Is this Balarang Bay?’

  I tell them they took a wrong turn

  and should head back to the highway.

  Or sometimes, Manx says,

  ‘Yeah, this is it.

  Enjoy your holiday.’

  We walk away quickly

  to hide the smiles on our faces.

  Droopy, Loopy and the neighbourhood dogs

  I turn into our dead-end street

  away from the blackberry-infested coast.

  Our house, the last before Sattlers Hill,

  is built of timber that needs painting.

  The roof is more rust than iron,

  but it doesn’t leak,

  so Dad isn’t changing anything.

  Mr Crewe, the old fisherman who lives next door

  mixes a batch of concrete

  and trowels it onto the base of a garden gnome.

  He plops the gnome on the brick front fence.

  Sixteen gnomes stand to attention,

  each painted red or green,

  a jaunty line of dwarf sentries

  guarding the property.

  Mr Crewe sees me counting and smiles.

  ‘Quite a line-up, Jonah,’ he says.

  ‘The paper should do a story on it,’ I reply.

  He laughs.

  ‘They can print a picture of this old fool

  sticking his head up

  between Droopy and Loopy any day.’

  He wipes his brow with the back of his hand

  and slaps down the last piece of concrete mix.

  ‘Two reasons for this display,’ he says,

  steadying the gnome into place.

  ‘One, so people keep thinking

  I’m a batty old man

  with not much going on up here.’

  He taps his wrinkled forehead.

  ‘Two, the stray dogs

  have been using my rose garden as a toilet.’

  He winks at me.

  ‘Let them jump the fence now.

  They’ll have a garden gnome stuck up their arse.’

  Raised voices burst through

  the front window of my house.

  Dad’s yelling at Mum

  and she’s giving it back at double the decibels.

  ‘It’s been going on for a while, son,’ says Mr Crewe.

  ‘Something about the Magna breaking down again.

  Not that I’m eavesdropping.’

  ‘The whole street can hear,’ I say.

  ‘I’ve got a pot of soup on the stove

  if you want to camp here for a few hours.’

  I shake my head.

  When I walk into their arguments,

  they go quiet for a while.

  I pretend to do my homework

  at the kitchen table

  and they act like nothing’s wrong.

  No-one says a word

  when I’m around.

  Tattoos and hairnets

  ‘I’ve got no idea how you’re getting to work

  if the car’s—’

  Dad stops yelling

  as I walk into the kitchen.

  They both look at me.

  Dad leans against the sink

  wearing shorts, a t-shirt and

  his trucker’s cap, worn and sweat-stained.

  On his forearm is the faded tattoo of a woman

  wearing a red-and-white polka-dot bikini;

  a dare when he was seventeen.

  He reckons it’s Mum when she was young.

  Mum doesn’t wear bikinis anymore.

  She sits at the kitchen table,

  still dressed in her blue uniform

  after an eight-hour shift on the filleting line

  at the SeaPak factory in Balarang Bay.

  She looks tired,

  her hair pulled back in a tight ponytail,

  her hands cracked and worn from

  wearing mesh gloves all day.

  Mr Crewe told me

  that every man in town sighed

  and hit the pub

  the day Mum married Dad.

  She was the prettiest girl around.

  My dad promised to give up

  the interstate trucking runs for good

  if only she’d say, ‘Yes’.

  Eighteen years is a long time

  not to keep a promise.

  The sigh of a sea breeze

  I wake in the night

  to the sound of the television

  and snoring.

  I walk to the lounge room

  and find the lonely flicker

  of an advertisement

  for WonderVac:

  ‘Five payments of $15.95 per month!’

  Dad’s asleep on the lounge,

  one hand flung across his eyes.

  When I was young

  Dad told me

  that if the day ever arrived

  where he spent more time

  with the television

  than with his family

  he’d fetch his surfboard

  from the shed,

  paddle into the ocean

  and not stop

  until he reached Chile.

  I asked him how far that was.

  He looked at me

  with something resembling a smile

  and said,

  ‘It’s further than heartbreak

  and somewhere past caring.’

  On the side table is an empty beer bottle

  and the Balarang newspaper

  op
en at the employment section.

  Nothing there but jobs

  for kids leaving school

  to become kitchenhands in cafes

  or shelf stackers at the supermarket.

  Dad has one boot on;

  the other has been kicked across the room.

  I don’t know how he sleeps

  with his feet above his head,

  the blood running the wrong way;

  as if blood ever gets a choice.

  I gently remove his boot,

  pick up the other and

  put them both behind the lounge

  where he won’t trip over them

  should he wake

  and stumble to the bathroom.

  I find the remote under the coffee table

  and switch off the television.

  The room darkens.

  The only sound is Dad’s heavy breathing,

  the call of a curlew

  and the sigh of a sea breeze.

  This embarrassment

  In the morning,

  I walk to the bathroom

  and stare into the mirror.

  My reflection

  is all long nose and full lips

  and, when I smile at myself,

  my teeth are too big for my mouth.

  I’ve seen photos of Dad

  at my age

  and I can’t tell us apart.

  I cup my hands in the water,

  splash it through my hair,

  grab a towel from the shelf

  and scrub my head dry.

  My hair spirals at awkward angles.

  In primary school, my friend Rachel

  would gently pull each curl

  and giggle when they popped back into place.

  ‘Like a spring,’ she’d say.

  Outside the bathroom window

  a cat creeps along the fence

  stalking a wren

  nesting in the black wattle.

  I open the window.

  The cat leaps to the ground

  and scurries away

  as the wren adds another twig to its nest.

  Dad snores from the lounge.

  I take my embarrassment of hair

  to the kitchen for breakfast.

  Breakfast

  I lift a bowl from the dishwashing rack

  and wipe it on my shirt

  ready for Weet-Bix.

  Dad walks in, grunts hello

  and sits down to tie his steel-capped boots.

  ‘The Magna’s blown a head gasket,’ he says.

  He looks out the back window

  to where the car should be.

  ‘How will Mum get to work?’ I ask.

  The door to their bedroom is closed.

  Mum’s still asleep –

  or tired of arguing.

  ‘We’re working that out,’ he says.

  ‘Where you going today?’ I ask.

  ‘Adelaide,’ he answers.