I wake in the morning to the sound of a man right above my cabin, speaking loudly on the phone. I can't hear Maggie or Mac up there, so I pull on my jumper and a pair of leggings and go up on deck to check it out. But when I come out into the cockpit, I find there's no one except for me. Yet I can still hear the man, chatting away.
And then I see him, standing on a boat on the other side of the bay. It's so quiet his voice carries across the water so clearly it's as if he's standing right next to me.
Mac appears through the hatch in his board shorts. He walks past me up to the bow of the boat, climbs up onto the rail. Stands tall. Falls forward, pushing off at the last moment. His body arches in a perfect swan dive, barely making a splash. When he surfaces, he has a smile stretching from ear to ear. 'Ah,' he says, floating on his back. 'This is living!'
***
Over breakfast, Maggie asks me to read her a poem by H.D.
I read her 'Moonrise', finishing on:
She is great,
we measure her by the pine-trees.
'I love the line "we have a song".' Maggie smiles. 'Women are all kinds of unheard songs.'
Mac passes me a cup of orange juice. I take a sip as Maggie tells me about the first all-woman show she curated in London. 'It was one of the first London had ever seen. Hardly anyone came. But that didn't matter to me. I'd never been so proud of a show.'
'But if you were proud of it, surely you'd want people to see?'
'You're right,' she says. 'But what was important was that I saw those women. And they saw each other … Because even as women, we don't always see each other.'
'Did you keep putting on shows of women artists?'
'Of course.'
'Even though nobody came?'
'Those early shows asked, are we women artists? Or are we just artists, asserting ourselves, unapologetically?'
'Does it matter what we call ourselves?' I say.
'How can it not? We make our worlds with words.'
***
Mac comes on deck with a fishing rod. 'I think we need to add a new rule: twenty points for catching a fish,' says Mac.
'I thought you were a vegetarian,' I say.
'We eat fish if we catch them ourselves,' Maggie explains.
'Except salmon,' says Mac.
I cross my arms. 'Why not salmon?'
'They're monogamists. I respect that.'
Maggie laughs. 'I'd eat a salmon.'
'Yes, well, you're a heartbreaker, aren't you?' Maggie blows a kiss in his direction.
'Do you believe in soulmates?' I ask.
Mac nods.
Maggie shakes her head. 'I do believe you can meet someone and feel like you've come home. But for me, love has always been plural.'
'Meaning?'
'Meaning I've loved and been loved by many people.'
I think of Adam, the good feelings intermingling with the bad. Pain and pleasure. The blue equilibrium. And I say, 'I'd be happy never to be in love again.'
Maggie makes a hmm sound, and then says, 'Tell me about that?'
'I just think …' I pause. How do I explain a grief that is so intricately intertwined with relief? 'I don't know … Like, one minute I feel fine, and the next I feel totally empty.'
She asks, 'How long were you with this person?'
'Four years.'
'That's a huge part of your life, then. Especially at your age.'
I try to summon memories of Sydney that don't involve Adam. But he's there, undulating through them all.
'My first love whittled me down,' says Maggie. 'God, it was a long time ago. But I can remember exactly how I felt.' She takes a deep breath. Exhales. 'I felt like he'd carved out parts of me, so slowly I didn't even realise what he was doing.'
My eyes glass over, blurring the horizon.
'And,' Maggie says, 'it wasn't until much later that I realised my first love wasn't really love at all.'
But I loved Adam, I think.
'Oli, have you ever seen how a forest grows back after a fire? How the leaves sprout from everywhere, even the trunks?'
'Yeah,' I say, though I'm not really following.
'Well, I think that's what love is supposed to be.' A second later, there's a twang, a slackening, a giant pull. 'Oh, oh!' I shout. 'The line! We got a fish!'
Mac reels the line in, landing a fish in the cockpit. It's silver with blue stripes, iridescent in the sunlight. Mac calls for me to hold the fish. I lean down to stop it floundering as Mac reaches under his seat in the cockpit and pulls out a bottle of rum. He unscrews the lid, covers the fish's head with his hand and splashes alcohol on its gills. The fish goes limp instantly. He puts the rum back and pulls out a knife.
'Thank you,' he whispers to the fish, and then begins to slice. I look away. 'Oli,' he says, 'if you can't stomach the truth of killing the fish, you don't deserve to eat it.'
***
We have mackerel sashimi for dinner, anchored for the night in Port Macquarie. Afterwards, I climb into my bunk with bruised shins and stubbed toes, and a comment Maggie made swirling about behind my eyelids. Something about eating fish fresh from the ocean. A part of the ocean becoming a part of you.
In the morning, while we're eating breakfast, Mac says to me, 'It's time for you to rack up some of those distance points.'
We raise the anchor and motor out of the bay into open ocean, where a breeze is picking up. The sky is clouds layered like fish scales, fanning out.
'It's a mackerel sky,' Mac says, gazing up. 'This is good luck for a sailor, because it means it's about to get really windy.'
He sits me down at the helm. 'You've driven a car, right?' I nod. 'Yeah.'
'Well, this might seem obvious, but it steers the same way as a car. Left is left. Right is right.'
'Don't you mean port is port, and starboard is starboard?'
Mac glances across at Maggie, who chuckles and says, 'Oh, she's good, isn't she!'
'Yeah, yeah. Well, the difference is, a road is fixed. It doesn't move. So you can read what the road is going to do to the car, because you can see the road ahead. The ocean, on the other hand, is always moving, so you have to read it as you are moving over it. More importantly, the ocean will talk to the boat, and the boat will react to what it hears. Your job is to listen to that conversation, and guide the boat to where you want it to go.' He takes my hand, puts it on the wheel, resting his hand lightly on top of mine. 'But you must coax it, steering it just enough … Using too much rudder is like shouting at the boat. You must be firm, confident, yet guide it gently.'
Mac lets go of my hand and sits down opposite me in the cockpit, next to Maggie.
I feel the Sea Rose lurch, straining against my hand on the wheel.
'Gently,' he says.
I soften my grip, feel the boat surf down the back of a swell.
'Now hold tight.'
I clutch the wheel, steering the boat up the oncoming wave.
Maggie cheers. 'Bravo!'
'You'll become familiar with the song of the ocean,' says Mac. 'Her lilting lullabies, her roaring … somethings!' He laughs. 'Can't think of the right word.'
'And if it all becomes too much, just close your eyes,' Maggie says. 'It makes it easier to hear.'