How to cook mullet

I took the fillets out of the fridge, peeled some off and threw them into a plastic bag lined with spelt flour and salt. I rolled the fillets around inside the shopping bag, spilled the fillets into a hot pan full of spitting olive oil, and threw the plastic bag and leftover flour into the bin. I wondered what he’d think about that last bit. Fresh limes squeezed over sizzling fillets. A sprinkle of salt.

The last time I saw Krispy he’d earned his moniker with his demeanour and daily damper bowl. That was ten years ago. I saw his car yesterday, pulled over on the track while I was looking for karri hazel sticks to hold up the purple beans I’d planted. He was looking at his phone at the ‘you’ve got range’ spot.

I flew past him, recognised his red beard and intense orange/crazy glare, stopped and did a whining reverse until I was back alongside his car window, grinning.

“Hello Krispy!

“Ah! Sarah!”

He jumped out of his car. His Bali shirt was unbuttoned and his chest and leg hairs covered in fine black sand. He gave me a huge big smelly hug, which was odd but welcome because he’d always been so shy.

He’d been on a trek from the Chesapeake Road to an isolated lake where he reckoned he’d seen more birds than ever in his life. Camped overnight. Walked back the next day to his car. Someone who’d been looping Australia for decades, recently living in the Daintree and eating red bellied snakes.

He’s a wanderer and a true bushy. I’ve never worked out his past, only his present. That’s how it’s always been with Krispy. You see him. He’s there, on a beach somewhere where you are camping and you eat damper and trench-baked kangaroo tail with him and it is excellent and then, after he’s smashed up the guitar with the twisted neck and thrown it in the fire and disappeared down into his peppermint hollow behind the beach, you won’t see him again for years. I’ve never known him to have a dog, although he likes dogs. He collected boats and canoes and beaches instead. There is something quiet and hurt and hermitty about him. I’ve always liked him. He likes to keep to himself.

I asked him back to my house for a feed and a cup of tea.

I cut up chilli cheese into cubes and looked at him.

“Has it got chilli in it? Then, nah,” he said.

“How about I just give you the knife and some tomatoes and veges and stuff.”

He nodded and cut up the tomatoes into chunks. He started on the fennel bulb. My bread had gone mouldy so we didn’t do bread. I squeezed a lime over the frying mullet and sprinkled on some more salt.

“Where’d you get that mullet? You been netting?” He shouted, not used to the timbre of his own voice.

“Shush Krispy!” I said.

“Ah. Sorry mate. Been in the bush too long. Stuff just comes outta me mouth.”

I picked some coriander and rocket from the garden and put them onto plates. Balsamic. Pepper grinder. Cutlery.

“Oh.” He said. “I’ve know how hungry I am now, smelling that fish cooking. Been eating raw nuts for days. Best energy count per gram, raw nuts. But dehydrated! I can just feel me getting hydrated again.” It was hot and he took another swig from his hot pink water bottle. “That was a huge walk.”

“One of your headlights isn’t working, just in case you enter the metropolis,” I said. “The passenger side one, I think.”

“That’s good to know mate. Thanks.”

I swear when I put down that plate of fresh mullet, tomatoes, rocket, coriander and fried fennel in front of him, Crusty wolfed the whole lot in twenty seconds flat.

I looked at his empty plate.

“D’you want some more?”

“I’ll wait a while,” he said, “see how it goes down.”

Maybe I won’t see him for another decade. Who knows.

Better get the washing in

Perfect, blackened spirals of bracken appear on the veranda

broken down to carbon

blown here from the burn at Mandalay.

Neighbour

He came onto the veranda while I was sleeping. The dog started up a racket when she saw his face looking through the window. A kindly face, blue eyes, crowded with whiskers. He yelled, “Gidday! Having a nap are ya?”

Bloody hell, and now I had to get out of bed, put some pants on and be sociable. It was midday, after all.

He introduced himself. His surname. Ahh. He’s from one of the old families in the area. Highways and lakes and gravel tracks are named after his folk. East, my more familiar country, is mostly named after his family’s cousins. It is a name borne of the Scots; of meadows and meres and of the men who husbanded them. Then they trod sea paths to the antipodes where they took a good chunk of the south west real quick.

I did feel a bit like a blackfella checking out some neighbour’s skin. I should have asked him his original clan. From a Scot who is rapidly running out of male heirs, and relying on mother maiden names to keep up our lineage, I’m interested in how this family can keep their name in this region for so long. How did they do that? Possibly by being matrilineal Scots. There must have been a few women who’ve passed on their surname to their oldest son as his middle name on birth certificates and gotten away with it.

Sorry, I digress. It’s fun but let’s pursue that one later.

I put my pants on, opened the door and made him a cup of coffee. He didn’t quite have the profile of the noble colonial but his grandparents built the hut he was staying in, he explained. “The one on the corner, with the big table.”

It’s a really big table, he said, because pricks steal everything around here that isn’t nailed down.

Someone stole his last table. It was where he liked to sit outside and think. He came back one day and it was gone. So he built a really big table, with tree stumps for legs and a clean slice of marri as the table top and big mother fuckers of bolts to hold it all together.

He complained about the commercial fishers taking all the fish and my thoughts were akin to Old Salt’s. Well, you obviously don’t know how to catch fish then. He shook my hand after he’d shaken out his cup and said, it’s really nice to meet you. 

That night we both set nets. He was back in the morning.

He walks with his thumbs against his body.

“How many fish didja get?”

He’d caught two herring.

‘Four herring, a sea mullet and a yellow eye.’ (Fist pump) The time of day or night that I finally pulled up my net has nothing to do with anything.

He asked if he could borrow my book. I was a bit twitchy about this transaction as I handed it over because it is my own copy, with signatures of the people mentioned in the book scrawled all over the back page. It’s quite a precious copy of Salt Story but I thought, with a name like his, I could find him anywhere.

Fragments of Friends #5

Her energy burns inside, quietly, though powerfully. 
She has no concept of strolling, perhaps in the bush, but not on streets.
She walks quickly, long legs striding.
On the very few occasions I've walked down a street with her I've had trouble keeping up. It's more like walking behind her, and getting further behind with each step.
Down the main drag i was way behind. She was powering along and kind of glowing. If it had been nighttime she would have lit up the street.
And i was caught in this cloud of bucket loads of pheromones
I managed to catch up to her and said,
"You know, you have rampant sexual energy".   (Big rampant)
She smiled, paused, turned, laughed, "Yes".        (Big yes)

Having some experience of body energetics i was a little concerned about potential energy blocks. She didn't appear to have a boyfriend.
Needn't have been concerned. "I always have a lover".
And she does.
Like a dog with bones, she has them stashed all along the south coast, on boats, on islands, onshore, in caves on mountain tops, in tents, vans, shacks, shanties. ........ and sometimes.......even in houses.
By foot or by boat, by daylight, moonlight, or torchlight, she goes and finds them.
So, no worries there.

A feral fringe dweller by circumstance and passion her conversation is sometimes silent sighs or monosyllabilic answers. She's a keeper of my secrets. She's very good at keeping secrets.
Her own, "they don't know my life" and of others, "it's not my story".
We have shared stories, around a campfire, on a verandah, over a kitchen table.
One drinks and pizza evening i told her of Essa's last day.
She leaned forward and softly her heart said "I'd like to write that story".
"It's a love story".
I'll never get to read that story. Some stories you take to the grave. Stories that can only be told to one person. A person you completely trust.

She has her love stories. She has written them. No one but her has read them.
I hope i live long enough to read her love stories.

She is a spectacular friend.
It nourishes me to witness her life of exuberance, drawing me into her vision.
Her writing focused precisely within a vastness of life and experience, sometimes here, always now. An utterly generous and caring soul.
Sometimes frail and fragile. Mostly powerful and strong.
I have images of her.
Laughing and crying.
Standing still in a doorway, saying goodbye.
Standing bone straight in the dusklight of a campfire, gazing, looking out, looking in, the boketto distance in her eyes. .
Running barefoot over slippery rocks chased by a king wave, her life in her feet.
Running from bees.
They see her coming, those pheromones again!  Unsuited, she approaches her girls for a casual check. They attack, and get inside her clothes with their frantic buzzing. Sending her running through the scrub, leaping over logs and rocks, shedding clothing until the little buzzsaws are lying on the ground and not against her skin.
After all, she did kill their queen, and they've never forgiven her for it.

Walking by my friend's rainwater tank, stepping quietly and firmly, she yelled out that i had almost trod on the tiger snake and it had slithered under the tankstand.
This puzzled me. I'd lived long enough in the bush with snakes i thought i would have seen it. I was carrying my snake gun so put four blasts of ratshot in different directions under the pallet stand. Now she was standing near her shack door and hadn't seen it come out from under the pallet. It wasn't under there either, dead or alive.
She has seen this tiger many times, inside and outside her shack.
Others have ransacked her shack and never seen it.
I have been in a few times, door left wide open ready for a running retreat, with a gun, long handled shovel, torch, crowbar, axe, chainsaw, throwing tomahawk and throwing knives.
If the tiger runs at you, have to use the long handled shovel to chop it as close to its head as possible. Too far back, propelled by its blood and guts it can still fang you on the leg as it falls to the floor.
In her shack I've dismantled perfectly good carpentry work, cleared the floor and walls, looked everywhere, a number of times, and never seen this snake.
She is the only one who has ever seen it!
I may not believe everything she says, she has the memories and imagination of lost places, and she is a storyteller. Her fiction can sometimes slide into her life.
But i trust that this tiger exists. .... somewhere.
I've seen it in her eyes.
By the campfire i suggested she could feel privileged the snake only shows itself to her.

Now I'm saying goodbye and wonder if i will ever see her with her bees again, sit around a campfire telling tales.
Tell our stories.

Late afternoon last new years eve we drank a large bottle of baileys in a little less than an hour. To welcome a different and peaceful year.
Always different, this year has been different with a difference.
There had been that unnecessary awfulness of the drive, driving his van home with the detritus of his life floating around her head.
This year she has changed in a slightly orderly way.
She has exiled herself into hermitry.

She doesn't talk to me much anymore.

I live in my bush shack in the city. I have a flush toilet, hot water, and electricity.
Sitting under the tin roof of the back room with acres of sky through walls of glass, trees, and ocean in the distance, i can see all the way to Antarctica.
I watch candlewicks burning.
From my front door to a quiet street, a vehicle perhaps every two hours. Across the street is solid bush with a winter creek, where housing development was not allowed. To protect the carnivorous pitcher plant.
The only hunting i do these days is in a shop for vegemite rabbit toast.

Often i feel so grateful to be able to turn a tap and have warm hot water come out.
It's a miracle.
Sometimes before i flick on an electricity switch i remember Slim, working at the coal seam face. We worked behind him timbering the shaft and extending the conveyor belt to take the coal two kilometres to the surface.
He worked out front driving the miner.
One day the roof came down and crushed him out of sight.
Before i flick the switch i give thanks to all who risk their lives, every day, so i can flick that switch.
To have light and warm water.

I'm sitting now looking at the brand new heavy duty chrome dimpled handrail installed yesterday by the community care tradie, to help weakened muscles lift  ageing bones off the toilet seat.
I'm seeing life like a toilet roll, the nearer the end the quicker it goes.
And now as my life folds back in time i talk to the animals and birds and trees and listen to the rocks. ... and wait. ... see what happens next.
I wonder if dementia is a wonderful meditation.

As she moves through her seventh septum, approaching her crown, she's growing and flowering. She's becoming more still. Waiting.
Truth is I've already said goodbye. It wasn't so easy this time.
A bewilderingly unfathomable mind.
I know her well, and do not know her at all.
She is a beautiful mystery.

I know that i will always love her. It's not possible not to.
I will always remember her. ... pre dementia of course!
I will think about her every day. ..................... for awhile.

All i know is she carries the wilderness in her bones that i recognised when i first met her all those years ago.
When there was a silent conversation going on. 
Voices maybe do, but bones don't lie.

All i know is this.

'I could live here, away from the complications and machinations of my current existence. I could fish for just enough to eat each day and garnish that with native spinach and celery. I could grow quiet and hermity, surprise myself with words occasionally. And i would sing. I would watch and listen to the gentle meanderings of this isolated universe. I would stitch myself into the inlet. I could do that'.