Two Tides

I watched a gannet make a free-fall dive. Craig reappeared, holding a spherical compass that rolled around like a weighted eyeball in his palm. I watched as he climbed one-handed out of the hatch and fitted the compass into a socket in the centre of the boom. It was about the size of an infant skull, heavy and wet-looking, and it sat just low enough to show the phosphorous degrees that spun around its equator beneath the glass. The red needle swung and hovered in its lolling underwater way.

‘You got to have a compass above board,’ he said as he dropped back into the cockpit and unwedged his coffee mug from beneath the windshield sill. ‘If you got a steel hull you got to mount it up above. Makes the needle go funny below.’

We were flanking Mana Island now. I watched the red needle pitch back and forth and tried to hold her at twenty degrees. The northern fingers of the Sounds were still pale and fogged and flattened by the distance. I saw now that the surface of the sea had a pattern to it, a weave, and I could feel it through my arm and the arches of my feet as a push or a pull. The wind gusts showed a long way off before they struck; they approached like a little burnished patch of silver where the water was disturbed. You could predict exactly the moment when the flat hand of the wind would strike your face.

I said, ‘How long would they have lasted, the bodies of those kids? If he pitched them over and weighed them down.’

They had made an arrest for the murders, Hope and Smart. We saw it on the news. There were fingernail scratches on the inside cover of the hatch, and a slender female hair on a swab in the saloon. The evidence was small. But the man was sour and dirty and he had a bad family like a killer ought. The story was he’d pitched them over, both of them, somewhere deep. He might have raped the girl. What were we doing that night, we all asked – that New Year’s Eve, a few dark hours past the midnight toll, while somewhere north of Picton two lovers were stabbed, or brained, or strangled, while the boats all around them trembled back and forth on some dark sheet of oily calm? Lovers. It was too awful. The worst thing was that no one knew – no one knew the method of the kill.

Craig said, ‘They’d disappear. Flesh like that. Fish would eat them away in days, maybe a week. If he weighed them down all right. They’d disappear.’

Scott Watson’s boat was called the Blade.

I said, ‘The temptation would be to cover them in plastic. That’s what I would want to do. Isn’t that stupid? To want to preserve the bodies somehow. Like an instinct. To make them keep.’

Craig laughed and shot me a sly look. We didn’t speak again for a long time. I finished my coffee and switched hands on the tiller and rolled my shoulder joint to feel it click. The cockpit floor was choked with empties, and mismatched sea boots, and the roped saltwater bucket, and a pair of life jackets that showed a fine spray of mould against the yellow. All of it shifted back and forth.

I watched him. Craig was short, five four. His hair had been reddish once but it was sandy now, white at the temples and the sides of his beard. He had a white scar above his left eye and a thick pink scar running down his left forearm like a vein. His hands were big. He was stocky and barrelled but his legs were slender and his calves were fine. I watched him watch the ocean and saw how his weathered squint had left the crinkles of his crow’s feet untanned, so when his expression softened you could see two pale stars at the outer corners of his eyes. The tawny skin on the back of his neck was creased three times.