Stingrays - by Christine Kearney
ISLAND | ISSUE 159
There are stingrays in the lake, Daddy warned. They wait on the sandy lake bed and when you come crashing through the shallows and step on one, boom! You get a poisoned barb through your foot. The pain, he said, is excruciating.
I was eleven years old that summer, and every afternoon when we got back from the beach, Tristan and I went down to the lake with my new dinghy. The MV Adventure, a Christmas present. It was orange and khaki green with orange oars and oarlocks. It was large enough for two people. Two small people. Our older brother, Tom, wasn’t interested in mucking around on the lake. He wasn’t with us the afternoon we saw McPherson’s boy down there.
When we got back from the beach that day, Tristan grabbed the oars and charged down the rough-cut steps from the house, yelling: ‘You were made fa loving me baby
I was made fa loving you!’
I followed, carrying the dinghy on my head. I was in a world of my own, orange and green in the dome of the boat and all I could see was the ground directly under me and a few feet around me. Past the mass of lantana I bobbed, through the casuarina grove where the pine needles slipped and rolled underfoot, and onto the lake beach. I put the dinghy on the sand and Tristan said, ‘Who’s that?’
It was McPherson’s boy. He was standing behind us, on the lawn of his house. He was holding a spear gun and watching us. That was the thing – he didn’t sneer or yell at us like the teenagers who hooned past when we walked up to the shops to buy lollies. He just stood there, holding his spear gun.
‘That’s the McPherson boy,’ I said. Maybe Santa gave him a spear gun for Christmas, I thought. But the spear gun wasn’t new. It wasn’t sleek and shiny like the blades of the gleaming fishing knives I’d seen in the sports shop on Parramatta mall. His spear gun was old. I could tell.
He hesitated and made the smallest gesture as if he was about to come over and say something. Then he swallowed hard, like he couldn’t get the words out.
‘Come on,’ I said quickly. We kicked our thongs off and waded into the shallows. I rowed out until we were in deep water. We had the lake to ourselves, a vast, tranquil pool that was all ours. I forgot about McPherson’s boy. As the sky to the west turned a deep orange and the trees on the western shore darkened and thickened, we dove and bombed and did backflips from the dinghy. We took turns with the goggles, diving as deep as we could, daring each other to touch the bottom. I dived down until I felt strands of silky weed brushing my skin and then I shot to the top.
Tom appeared on the sand, waving us in. I rowed to shore and as we got close Tristan said, ‘He’s not there anymore.’
‘Tom?’
‘That boy.’
But he was there. When I pulled the dinghy through the shallows, I saw him standing in the gloom under his verandah. He stood in an awkward pose, holding the spear gun in his right hand, his hip askew. Mong! I thought. Doesn’t even stand like a normal teenager.
*
That night, I woke up thirsty and looked out the window. The moon, huge and white, hung above the lake. I heard a rushing quiet too, a stilling quiet coming up from the water. Under, up and around it hummed, a broad hum, an everywhere hum that the moon hung above and the lake rippled through. What is it? I tried to hear what it was, then didn’t want to. Heard it, heard nothing, just the shush of night, water and moonlight.
I pulled the sheet up over my head, shut my eyes and held my breath. It’s just like diving. I thought about the stingrays in the lake. I thought about the poison in their tails. I told myself that the stingrays were a family and they had these cables and pulleys, like the rigging on the sailing boats beached on the lake’s edge. They used the cables to pull the light down to the bottom of the lake. Then they sliced it into bars, into the long, slanted piano keys of murky light I saw under the water. The stingrays played with the light, batting it back and forth with their heads, fins and tails. When they were done, they ate up the light and that’s when it got dark and we had to come in.
*
The morning was overcast. ‘Not beaching weather,’ Daddy declared. He stood on the verandah, hands on hips, looking out over the water.
We took the dinghy to the lake.
‘Yuk, what’s that?’ Tristan called when he reached the lake beach. ‘What is it, Allie?’
When I threw the dinghy onto the sand, I could smell it – a fishy stink coming from a dark, flyblown mass where the sand met the trees. At first I thought it was a jumble of cut-up wetsuits. Then I saw that it was a pile of stingrays, and that each ray had a gash in it. Beside the rays was a collection of tails which had been severed from the bodies. I stared at them for a moment, trying to work out what they were. Waterskiers revved around the lake. Cicadas hummed in the trees.
*
‘Far out,’ Tom said.
Daddy didn’t say anything. He drew on his cigarette and then stubbed it out in the sand with his blue thong.
‘Look how many there are, Dad,’ Tom said.
We trooped back to the house and Daddy took the spade from the cellar. He dug a wide, shallow hole and shovelled the carcasses into it.
‘Where’s the barb, Daddy?’ asked Tristan.
‘In the tail.’
‘I wanna see one. Show me the barb.’
I looked up and saw McPherson’s boy standing in front of his house.
‘Dad,’ I said. ‘He’s there, Dad.’
‘Who’s there?’
‘The boy with the spear gun,’ said Tristan.
Daddy squinted up and looked back down at the sand. ‘When did you see him with a spear gun?’
‘Yesterday. Didn’t we, Allie?’
Back at the house, Mummy made coffee. ‘Are you going to talk to McPherson about this?’ she asked.
I watched them. Something had happened, something bad. How bad? I didn’t know. I watched and listened, in case it might spill over from tight and bad, to loud and bad. Daddy stirred sugar into his cup. The spoon clattered in the saucer. The drop of coffee made a mark on the saucer. It has to be washed now. Sometimes the sugar on the spoon would form a little crust and you had to scrub at it to get it off.
‘I don’t know the man,’ he said.
‘He’s a widower,’ Mummy said. Widower, the word spindly and unfortunate.
Daddy said to get our towels, that we were going to the beach.
‘Thought you said it wasn’t beaching weather,’ I complained.
‘It is now,’ he said.
Tom surfed. Tristan and I hunted for crabs in the rocks. We dropped the crabs in a bucket which we’d prepared with a layer of sand, shells and water.
‘What’s a windower?’ asked Tristan.
‘Widower. Someone who doesn’t have a wife.’
‘But why don’t they?’
‘Because they’ve died already.’
‘But why have they?’
We took the crabs home. ‘Put the bucket in the shade, Allie,’ Tristan called from the kitchen. ‘Otherwise the crabs get hot and flip over and die.’
I put the crabs on the back verandah. After lunch, I went to check on them. The water in the bucket was warm and the crabs had started blowing little bubbles. They blow bubbles because they miss the sea. They miss the big rocks and the cool, dark crevices where they hide from the sun.
‘It’s fined up nicely, hasn’t it?’ I heard Daddy say.
I moved the bucket into the sun. ‘Widow, widower. You and you and you,’ I whispered.
*
After lunch, Tristan and I went to the shops to buy lollies. We’d crested the hill above the house when a paddy wagon overtook us. It stopped in front of McPherson’s place and two policemen got out. They walked across the kikuyu lawn and up to McPherson’s front door.
I hid behind a telephone pole to watch.
‘What’re we stopped for?’ Tristan whined. ‘I wanna go to the shops.’
‘Shut up.’
I picked at the splintery wood of the pole. There were two letters on the pole – H and P. Ham and pineapple. Hot and pokey. Hair and peas.
The policemen came out of the house a few moments later, guiding McPherson’s boy in front of them. They opened the paddy wagon and the boy ducked and got in. They drove away.
A man in a flannelette shirt stood at the front door. One of his hands was bandaged and he was cradling it. He was older than Daddy. Old flannie, mouth open, he held his hand and watched the paddy wagon disappear up the street. Then he turned and went inside.
We walked on. I knew Tristan was going to ask me something. We were near the shops when he said, ‘The policemen don’t know do they?’
‘Know what?’
‘That his Mummy’s dead.’
*
On Saturday morning, we packed up the house and drove back to Sydney.
We were crossing the Wyong River when the news came on the radio. ‘And in other news, a 14-year-old Lake Munmorah youth appeared in Wyong Children’s Court yesterday, charged with assault after he allegedly attacked his elderly father with a spear gun and a fishing knife.’
‘Did you hear that?’ their mother asked.
‘Far out,’ said Tom.
‘The boy has been remanded in custody and will reappear for sentencing next week.’
We drove up to Peats Ridge and into a sea of static. Daddy snapped the radio off.
Two hours later, we pulled into our driveway and began unpacking. The dinghy had been folded up and put back in its box. Daddy handed it to me. ‘There you are missy.’
There are stingrays in the lake, he’d warned. They lie there waiting, and if you step on one, boom! You get a barb in your foot.
‘Have you ever seen a stingray, Daddy?’
‘In the water? Nope. Have you?’
‘Yes,’ I gabbed, ‘once I had my goggles on and I saw one and then I swam away as quick as I could.’
‘Good for you.’
I wanted to ask him something else but it got stuck in my throat. I wanted to ask about what I’d seen and what I’d heard them say about McPherson, widower and all. About how the policeman had guided McPherson’s boy from the house and how his father watched as the paddy wagon drove away. But I couldn’t say it. It was like the light under the water. It would never be the same as the light on top of the water no matter how many ways you tried to explain it.
He heard it too Daddy. Who did? Him, the boy, stingray boy. That night, I heard this creaking dark, the creaking quiet and it was coming up from the water. He heard it too. I pictured him, crouched on the sand, hacking and cutting with the moon at his back. At first he was nervy, jumping at every noise in the trees. Then he heard the flat hum of the lake and just got on with it. Then it was all done. He picked up his spear gun and went up to the house.
In the morning, I saw what he’d left for us.
They’re everywhere, flat and tricky and camouflaged. If you step on a ray you’ll know it. You will. ▼
This story appeared in Island 159 in 2020. Order a print issue here.
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