Pescador's Wake by Katherine Johnson Read Free Book Online Page A

having emptied its guts on the floor, greasing the linoleum with its thin brown slick. Dave kicks the mug away.
    â€˜Hell of a time to get yourself a hot drink, wasn’t it? With that growler under us.’
    â€˜Harry brought me the coffee ages ago. I didn’t take my eyes off the bloody radar. What do you take me for?’ Dave heads the boat straight into the guts of a wave. The Australis climbs and the men fall silent until they have made it over.
    â€˜Shit!’ Cactus shouts, as they bottom out in the trough.
    â€˜We’d have been lucky to see that growler on the radar even in good conditions,’ Dave continues. ‘You know that as well as I do.’
    Cactus says nothing, and Dave recognises fear in his eyes. Come nightfall, the icebergs will be as good as invisible, until they’re caught—too late—in the ship’s lights.It’s some hours before conditions start to ease, and Dave can finally inch the boat northwest, away from the low-pressure system that created the southerly gale. It’s a reprieve, but he knows there’ll be another low soon enough. The vortexes of foul weather circle the continent like vultures. The trick is to stay either north or south of them. Harry indicates with a slight backward flick of his head that they have company. William, their youngest crew member, is at the wheelhouse door, his eyes wide as he surveys the sea, trying to read its complex language. Dave wonders if he did the right thing putting in a good word for Sam’s best mate as trainee crew. He thinks back to how young William went off the rails after Sam’s death. How, after gaining a reputation as a fine jackaroo on properties all over Australia, he threw it all away by getting drunk one night and trashing a farm. Dave had seen this trip as a chance to straighten the young bloke out. ‘What better classroom is there than the sea?’ he’d said to Trish, William’s mother. But Cactus has never thought it a good idea having a novice on board.
    â€˜What was that God almighty bang a while back?’ William asks.
    â€˜What d’you bloody think?’ Cactus’s veins stick out of his neck like fingers under his skin. He is angrier than Dave has ever seen him. ‘We just had a cuddle with the coldest bloody mermaid this side of Antarctica. Her left tit’s probably still pokin’ up through your bunk. Why don’t you go back to bed and feast on that till it’s all over?’
    William, visibly startled by the outburst, turns to leave the wheelhouse. Dave catches his eye and gives him a wink.
    â€˜That was a bit rough,’ Dave tells Cactus as he passes the searchlight over the ocean. The winds may have eased, but nightfall hasn’t waited for the huge seas to subside. With the relentless hammering of the waves, the boat lurches from side to side.
    â€˜Well, it doesn’t take too many neurons to work out we’ve hit a berg!’
    â€˜Give the boy a break,’ Harry says. ‘It could’ve been a whale, or a sunken hull—’
    â€˜Or a bloody mermaid,’ Cactus jeers in Dave’s direction. ‘We never should’ve taken him on. He’s a friggin’ liability, your surrogate son.’
    It’s typical of the man, Dave thinks, to launch a personal attack when he’s feeling threatened. To fire hostile words ahead of any attempt at good judgment. He ignores him.
    â€˜Any sightings of our foreign friends on the radar?’ Harry asks.
    Dave knows what he’s up to. He and the first mate know that when tempers flare at sea, the best strategy is to get everyone focused back on the job at hand. If there’s to be a fight, it can wait until they’re on dry land. Right now you could cut the air with a knife.
    â€˜Nope. They’re well and truly gone,’ Dave says. He imagines the pack to the south of them—vast chunks of icerallying for supremacy like feuding tectonic