Two Tides

The harbour at Mana was a converted mudflat, tightly elbowed and unlovely at any tide but high. I had never been there when the tide was high. The birds were shags mostly. The fish were small. Low water showed the scabbed height of the yellow mooring posts, and the thick curded foam that shivered under the wharves, and the dirty bathtub ring on the rocks on the far side of the bay. The waves left a crust of sea lice and refuse and weed.

The marina was tucked into the crook of the elbow, facing back towards the shore. To make the hairpin journey from the shallow flats to open sea was dangerous, and so a central trench had been excavated in the seabed to create a channel deep enough for yachts to travel safely, even on the ugliest of tides.

‘Bad luck to have a woman on board,’ Craig said as I stepped down into the cockpit and took the tiller in my hand. ‘That’s the oldest in the book. But I’ll tell you something else. There are grown men on this marina, educated men, who will never leave an anchor on a Friday. Grown men. Never leave on a Friday. It isn’t just a quirk for them – something runs deeper. And you know the reason why?’

I did: he’d told me this twice already, the first time at the yacht club with a gale wind thrashing at the door and the second time in the conical dry space beneath a fir tree on the Plimmerton domain, passing the last cigarette back and forth between us with our fingers cupped tight to keep it burning.

‘No,’ I said. I smiled at him. ‘What’s the reason?’

‘Vendredi is French, that’s Friday. Right? That’s a word from way back when. And Vendredi means ruled by Venus. Right? And Venus is the ruler of women. And women are bad luck at sea. Right?’ Craig sucked in the wind through his teeth. ‘So never leave on a Friday.’

‘Would you?’ I said. ‘Would you leave on a Friday?’

Craig thought for a moment.

‘Say if the conditions were perfect,’ I said. ‘Say if the Strait was like glass.’

‘Depends on the journey,’ he said at last. ‘If it was a day trip I would. But if it was some voyage – some huge beginning – I’d think twice. You don’t want a curse on that.’

The limit was five knots inside the marina, impossibly slow. Even the speedboats seemed to drift. Once they passed the five-knot post you heard the grinding click and then the roar. The vessels ghosted by, passing close enough to whisper. I saw a seasick dog on a cabin roof and a charcoal smoker pouring steam and a scalloping basket hung like a flag from a boatswain’s chair. It was still morning.

We left Mana with our faces turned back towards the harbour, watching the leading lights that showed the safe passage out of the bay. The leading lights comprised three colossal lengths of sewer pipe, diverging in three spokes and set into the hillside against the scrub. The central pipe was aligned with the excavated channel down the middle of the harbour, so if you were sailing safely you would be able to look cleanly up the length of the pipe and see the white light at the far end. If you strayed from your course you would no longer be looking down the unobstructed length of this middle pipe, and so the white light would disappear. Too far port and you would come into alignment with the left-hand pipe, which showed the warning red light; too far starboard and you would be aligned with the right-hand pipe, which showed a warning green.

There were two sets of leading lights in the harbour. The first was to guide you out of the marina and past the moored yachts, all shelved and slotted into the skeletal docks like a vast nautical library. Once these leading lights diminished in the distance and the light became difficult to see, you looked around to find the next set, fixed at an obtuse angle to the first and mounted on the shore above the motorway. The leading lights fascinated me. I drove the tiller to the right and left just to see over my shoulder the warning flash of green and then of red, leaping out from the hillside like a private flare.

Craig was smoking a cigarette and the ash was whipping off the butt and shredding whitely in the wind. The mainsail was up, but tightly reefed, and we hadn’t yet switched off the diesel. He called the horsepower ‘not quite enough to make a herd’ and the description amused him so much that he had said it more than once, with minor variations. His foot was cocked, pinning a Primus stove upright against the hatch cover so it didn’t fall and gutter as we bucked and rolled. The pale flame was invisible in the brightness of the day but I could see that the water in the billy was beading and ready to boil.

I was standing braced against the sides of the cockpit, half-turned and holding the tiller arm behind my back. ‘Like backing a trailer,’ Craig said. ‘Just push the opposite to where you want to go.’ I was not strong and my hand seemed to shiver on the tiller arm, the stout taper of teak wound around its length with a tight coil of waxed rope bleached grey by the salt and the sun. My awkwardness showed in the bunching lather of our wake. Craig’s helming always left a crisp and minted streak; it conveyed a sense of purpose, a resolve. My wake was full of doubt. I looked back over my shoulder at the white spearhead stamp of our passing and watched the spume get sucked downward into the blue.

Craig flicked the end of his cigarette into the sea.

‘That’s what’s missing,’ I said. ‘A dog.’

‘You never met Snifter,’ Craig said. ‘Hell of a dog. He got so crook in the end, his skin just hung down. Kidneys. The boys said goodbye and I said I wanted to take him to the vet myself, in the truck, just him and me. But I took him out to our Foxton plot instead and we walked into the trees and I told him to sit, and I shot him. I bloody shot him. God, I cried that day. I cried. Could hardly see. That was a shit of a year. My dad died that year, and a bunch of other shitty stuff. Never found it in me to get another dog in place of Snifter. Buried him myself, under the trees.’

I’d seen the grave on his land at Foxton. There was a pine cross driven into the earth and a piece of aluminium was stapled to the upright spar like a plaque. With a shaky engraving tool Craig had written LOOK OUT, LOOK OUT, THERE’S A TERRIER ABOUT! and underneath, SNIFTER MCNICHOL and a pair of dates. I’d come across it on my own, ducking off to take a piss behind a blackberry while Craig lopped Christmas trees with pruning shears and dragged them by their stump ends to make a pile. My hands were sticky from the sap. Later we sat on collapsible chairs on the Foxton drag and drank a case of beer and sold the trees for ten dollars, five for the ugly ones.

I thought about him sobbing as he dug the slender grave.

‘Christ, I loved that dog,’ Craig said. ‘It’s stupid. It’s stupid. Hell of a dog.’

He reached down and pinched out the Primus flame. With one hand wrapped in a gutting glove he picked up the billy and poured out the hot water into two plastic mugs jammed tight between a cleat and the steel frame of the windshield. He was alert to the pitch and roll of the boat and he poured in steady, deliberate gulps. Nothing spilled. He tipped in coffee grains and milk and used the saw blade of his pocketknife to stir.

‘It’s bloody primitive,’ he said as he passed the mug to me. ‘Bloody primitive, savage really. The milk – I steal those creamers, anywhere I can. I can’t offer – savage really. Acid in your mouth.’

He was embarrassed. I said, ‘It’s exactly right. It’s great.’ My hair was whipped across my face from the wind.

‘It’s bloody primitive,’ he said, scowling now, and then backed swiftly down the narrow hatch into the saloon. I heard him sliding the panels behind the engine where his tools were stowed. The tiller leaped against my hand and I flexed my arm to hold her firm. I listened to him rummage and over the noise I said, more loudly, ‘It’s exactly what I feel like.’