Shallow Breath

4

Jackson




The sea is breathing.

For a moment, Jackson is a young boy again, a shell pressed to his ear, marvelling at the miracle of sound. Then he comes to with a start, to find himself lying close to the water. Half his face is cupped by the sand, and his mouth tastes putrid and gritty. His skull is an iron bell, being struck repeatedly, and his ears ring with each aftershock. As his brain grumbles into gear, he pats frantically at his pocket, pulls his phone out and squints at the time. Five a.m. He is due at the boat in two hours for his first day of work. He is on a dream assignment and he is about to royally screw it up.

As his head clangs again, he rolls with a groan onto his side, pulls his legs up, away from the skittering foam, and finds he is not alone. Close by, the surface of black rock shifts, the obsidian eyes of countless marine iguanas opening to squint suspiciously at him. He stays very still, observing the ripples in their baggy skin as a few adjust position to slouch against the rock, or lie splayed on top of one another.

This is not good at all. He doubts it is legal to sleep on a Galapagos beach, this close to the hallowed wildlife. He doesn’t remember how he got here, and hopes none of his new colleagues witnessed it. His last memory is of drinking alone, at a small, empty bar – the way he prefers it.

Drink is a familiar, fickle friend to Jackson. Most times it doesn’t seem to matter, the wasted days of retching into the sink, lying around, waiting to recover. If he’s going to binge, he times it to make sure an empty day follows. Drink doesn’t completely control Jackson – even if sometimes he can’t resist the lure. But he hopes he doesn’t live to regret this one.

He takes a deep breath and struggles to sit, his stomach cramping and a bout of nausea washing over him. He swallows it and wraps his arms over his knees, taking deep breaths and staring out towards the sea. In a few hours he’ll be somewhere over that horizon with a team of scientists, sailing towards one of the few refuges for the whale shark – a gentle giant of the ocean, and the long-declared love of Jackson’s life.

What about Kate?

The question sneaks up on him, making him miserably aware of his feelings. For nearly ten years he has deliberately avoided anything but casual fun. It has worked so well that he has begun to inwardly scorn the traditions that so many of his friends have fallen for – blokes who are now saddled with children and mortgages and never stay out past ten. His feelings for Kate are all the more startling since he has known her for less than a month, but he fears that the course of his life has taken an irrevocable turn. Because if she were here now, leading him away from the research boat at the dock – from his dream job – he had a good idea of which way he would go.

There had been plenty of girls over the years – ‘conquests’, his father had called them recently in the midst of an unsettling question: ‘When are you going to stop all these conquests and settle down?’ Jackson was pretty sure it had been Kate who brought the question on. His father had doubtless seen her scurrying back to her tent early the same morning. Jackson had only laughed and turned away, and yet Kate had been on his mind for the rest of the day – that lively face with cerulean eyes, the gentle sand-spun curls in her hair. She was gorgeous, but what really made his head whirl was the way a conversation went with her. When he told other girls what he did for a living, he could predict their excitement. A man who swam with sharks – even filter-feeding, harmless ones – was a catch, and most didn’t care that he wasn’t a keeper. Their responses were along the lines of ‘Wow, how exciting!’ or ‘That’s really brave’, or sometimes, from the plucky ones, ‘I’d love to do that’. But when he had told Kate what he did, she had said, ‘You’re a lucky man, Jackson.’

She had turned up in Lovelock Bay late one night, when most people had already pitched their tents and settled in for the evening. Charlie had brought her across. ‘This girl here is asking about Desi,’ he’d said, and marched off again, leaving Jackson struggling to apologise for his father’s rudeness.

‘My sister isn’t around at the moment,’ he’d answered carefully. ‘Can I help you?’

Kate had shrugged. ‘I wanted to look her up. She’s my aunt – or as good as.’

‘Well,’ Jackson had laughed, ‘as far as I know, she only has one brother, and that’s me … are you sure you don’t have something to tell me?’

She had grinned at that. ‘No – I’m Connor’s niece.’

Jackson had stopped smiling then. To hide his surprise he had asked if she needed help pitching her tent, and by the time they had finished it had grown dark. He’d invited her to share the drinks in his van, and they’d sat outside, breathing in the scent of eucalyptus and listening to the camaraderie of the other campers while they got to know one another.

They had bonded quickly over their mutual love of the ocean. She told him about working as a dive instructor in Asia, and how long it had taken her to save enough to get to Australia. So the next day he had called in a favour from a friend, borrowed a boat and taken her diving. She hauled equipment around with ease, managed to swim like a mermaid even with a tank on her back, and knew instinctively where they might find small fish and invertebrates hiding. Best of all, she seemed to genuinely enjoy hearing him talk about whale sharks. In no time at all, a week had passed with a similar pattern to each day, and then one afternoon he had accidentally pulled her over as he tried to help tug her out of her wetsuit. She had hit the deck hard, and he had been down on his knees straight away, making sure she was all right. And then he had taken a risk, leant in and kissed her. After that, they had been inseparable for another fortnight, until the day he left.

Jackson gets to his feet, trying to shake off his thoughts. Less than five metres from him, the iguanas barely move. They are remarkably different to Australian reptiles, which he usually encountered only as frantic rustles in dry leaves, or on a bandy-legged sprint towards the bush. This lot are a little too relaxed, he thinks, picking his footing carefully around a few of those closest to him.

After that, it is an easy climb up over the rocks onto the road leading to town, but he’s grateful that it’s still so early and the place is empty. He’d rather not have to offer explanations to anyone. The town of Puerto Ayora is small, his hotel only minutes away, but Jackson isn’t surprised that his inebriated self had chosen the beach for a bed. It has always felt more relaxing to him to sleep and wake beneath the stars than beneath a cold white ceiling. It reminds him of Lovelock Bay, and the nights spent in swags on the beach with Desi when he was a child.

When he thinks of Desi back then, the memories seem so old now. They have worn and warped, and are harder to recall with certainty. Her smile – the genuine one – has been absent for a long time. Way before she went to prison. Now Pete is bringing her home, and he tries to imagine what will be happening there. He is half-sorry and half-relieved to be missing it.

He also wonders if anyone has told Desi about Kate yet – because, although Jackson is smitten, it is Desi that Kate has come halfway around the world to see.

All these questions, all these worries, and nothing he can do about any of them while he is here. He continues along the road, reaching the first small tourist shops. Soon afterwards he passes the fish-cleaning area, where yesterday he’d witnessed three sea lions battling over discarded entrails, tourists snapping away, while under a bench two marine iguanas, supposedly herbivorous, played tug of war with intestines. The sun has barely risen, but already there is a sea lion asleep on one of the benches, lolling like a drunk sleeping off the night’s excesses, presumably waiting for an easy breakfast. Jackson thinks of taking the opposite bench and curling up there himself – what a great shot it would make for some early-rising tourist. But instead he breathes in a few deep lungfuls of stale fish and finds himself hurtling to the railing, splattering his stomach contents onto the ground below. Another group of iguanas tilt their heads, then a couple begin a low-bellied amble over the rocks, eyeing up this unexpected delicacy. Further out, brown pelicans and blue-footed boobies are busy diving, repeatedly forming themselves into streamlined darts that hurtle from sky to sea faster than his eye can follow, bobbing up a moment later, casually shaking the water from their feathers. Nearby, on another rock, a few birds that have taken their fill wait patiently with wings stretched wide, drying themselves in the morning sun.

As Jackson stands watching them, despite his nausea, he has an unfamiliar rush of pride and validation. Everything he has done since he was seventeen has led to this moment. When he had first bought the old ute and made plans to travel north, his father had been apoplectic. ‘I’d thought better of you than to follow your sister,’ he had said, adding as he turned away, ‘That man has ruined this family.’ Which meant Connor, even though Connor had been gone for nearly ten years by then, and Desi was back living in the shack, and she and Charlie were no longer speaking. But Jackson had gone anyway, and spent most of the first six months pestering tour operators in Exmouth to give him a try – until they caved, as he likes to think of it, although he knows the transient nature of the industry now. Jackson has seen many people come and go, but for the last ten years, weather allowing, every day between May and July he has gone out on a boat with a group of excited, nervous tourists, to see the beautiful Ningaloo Reef, and meet its most impressive resident, the whale shark.

His father had been right, in a way: it was Connor who had first introduced Jackson to this gigantic fish; who had driven them from Monkey Mia to Exmouth when he was seven, and bribed their way onto a spotter plane, from where they spent the day observing whale sharks surfacing, feeding and diving. But, unlike Charlie, Connor hadn’t been thinking of Jackson’s career prospects – he simply wanted the boy to have a great day. And surely, in hindsight, Charlie couldn’t complain, because, for the nine months the whale sharks aren’t feeding along the reef, Jackson is back in Lovelock Bay, helping run the caravan park, doing all the jobs his father’s arthritic hands are no longer capable of.

Focus, he tells himself, as he sees his hotel in front of him. He just has time to run in and shower, grab his bags and hurry to the dock. He keeps his head down as he goes through the small lobby and up the stairs. There’s a moment of panic that he might have lost his key, but it’s in his pocket, and he lets himself in to his small room. A shower is all-important – to clear his mind, and to get the grime off him before a week on a boat where the water will be rationed and quite possibly stone-cold.

He turns on the taps, steps under the stream, and cannot help a recent memory resurfacing. He sees Kate standing there with him, the water running over the curves of her body before he pushes against her, his face buried in her neck, their hands slipping over each other’s skin. Later, he had tried to tell her how he felt, that he didn’t want to leave her. He still wasn’t sure what her laugh meant. Perhaps it was designed to reassure him, but it made him uncomfortable.

‘It’s an amazing opportunity,’ she’d said with a shrug and a smile, when he had finished apologising.

‘Will you come back?’ he’d asked, hoping he didn’t sound as lovelorn and foolish as he felt.

‘Of course. I still haven’t met Desi.’ She had smiled at his expression. ‘Of course I will come back and see you, Jackson.’

Before he could say anything else that made him seem idiotic, he had pulled her to him and kissed her, hoping to convey that this was too good to leave behind. But now, as he hastily towels himself dry half a world away, her kiss, her words and her email address all seem far too insubstantial. He can only hope he hasn’t made a huge mistake in letting her go.