CONTENT NOTE
Zowie Douglas-Kinghorn’s ‘Beach’ makes mention of animal death.
On the first day of spring, two hundred pilot whales washed up on the shore. The bodies lay spread on the strip of beach like musical notes or burst balloon casings after a children’s party. They had gigantic blankets over them to stop them from boiling in their gluey blood.
The group chat leapt to action. Was the beaching a result from the seismic testing? The blasts from the airguns, some said, at two hundred decibels were enough to kill a human. Why not disorientate a whale?
Enzo felt out of his depth at the organising meeting. They were all Steph’s friends, people she’d known since high school; high achiever types whose mannerisms belonged to Eisteddfods and debating tournaments they’d rumbled in, the children of academics and political representatives. He was wary of the networks seemingly disposable at their fingertips, the strength of their convictions. At the same time he envied their lightness, the manoeuvrability of their opinions. They trekked from concert halls to protest marches to hiking trails and university lecture theatres. They spoke passionately about the right to assisted suicide for the elderly and infirm and argued whether poor people should get the dole. As he listened, he felt a niggling irritation. What annoyed him was: Who gave them the hubris to think they were the ones to decide these things?
He rarely spoke at the meetings. Instead, he leaned over his laptop, typing up minutes. He wished he could quiet the noise. It gave him away, grumbling and gurgling.
In the past, he had spent whole days strung out on the couch. He often had to sit down quickly, or else he thought he might faint. He kept an empty icecream tub beside his bed at night. Sometimes he struggled to get to sleep because of indigestion. Sometimes the pain in his gut was so bad he found it hard to concentrate.
At the meetings they discussed urchin barrens, the advancing East Australian Current, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. They disseminated pamphlets with bullet points that said a garbage truck full of plastic was dumped in the ocean every minute, that humans ingested several grams of plastic each week, that the influx of ocean plastic was linked to health conditions like Crohn’s disease.
Steph’s role was to make a list of action points to be included at the end of the next agenda. There were three others who regularly attended the meetings. Luke, the leader, was an undergraduate student, clear-spoken and obviously closeted. Then there was Ginny, a Chinese-Malaysian student who worked at a wildlife park. The other volunteer who came regularly was Frances, a soft-spoken teenager with a shock of blue hair. Circling her wrist was a series of pale scars. They reminded him of star trails, the broken lines in photographs taken with a long exposure.
At the end of each meeting, Luke would ask who wanted to volunteer to take charge of each action point. A long, reluctant silence followed. Enzo didn’t want him to feel bad, and he wanted to impress Steph, so he often found himself putting up his hand for jobs.
He soon found himself emailing secretaries to book the lawns at Parliament House. He penned lacklustre media releases to ambivalent journalists, forged certificates of currency for insurance, attended endless conference calls with other volunteer groups over Skype. They were organising a rally to protest seismic testing in Tasmania’s north-west marine park. He liked feeling useful, feeling liked by the group. He volunteered his expertise with the Singer sewing machine as the group sewed banners. They said: THE BASS STRAIT IS IN DIRE STRAITS and DON’T FISH OUR FUTURE.
On the day of the rally a cluster of their friends gathered in clumps at the edge of the lawns. Rain had been forecast; they huddled under bright umbrellas and stretched the calico banner tight as they listened to a marine scientist from the university talk about global warming and the East Australian Current. They said that the ocean had its own circulatory systems that were breaking down. At this point the speaker system flagged; the crowd drew closer around the sandstone steps to listen. A disappointed-looking reporter from WIN News asked him for a quote. He reeled off his line about marine heatwaves, his teeth chattering.
That evening, Luke messaged the group chat. From the news! He’d attached a thirty-second segment from The 7:30 Report. Enzo felt a jolt to recognise himself. His hair was plastered in curling rat-tails to his forehead, his cheeks bright with cold. He spoke confidently as he reeled off his line, cheerfully citing a statistic: In fifty years, the ocean will have more plastic than fish. He felt like he was watching another person.
Later that night, he lay in bed. Dull volts of pain prodded his innards, a pain like fork tines twisting through cold spaghetti. He winced as his gut cramped, clutching against itself.
The group lay low over winter. In summer, they went to beach clean-ups and surveying trips. They counted shellfish and searched for weedy sea dragons. They scooped up armfuls of starfish, prising the dangling limbs off their fingertips, dropping the sea stars into buckets of chlorine to be euthanised. He learned that starfish could extrude their stomachs to feed.
One weekend, he and Steph went snorkelling. They walked down a trail towards the beach. The water sucked at the shore, pebbles and shells tumbling into the estuary mouth. She wore a neoprene wetsuit with flippers; he wore boardshorts and a rash shirt.
As he slipped into the water he felt the dense cold envelop him, muffling his eardrums. His abdomen felt warm and dense behind the elastic material. As he breathed, his goggle lens fogged, tiny pearls leaking in from the sides. He closed his eyes as he floated above the churning kelp.
From the world above, he heard Steph call his name. ‘Hey, Enzo. Come look at this.’
He swam over to the rocks where she was treading water. Her webbed flippers disturbed the sand at her feet, which drifted around her like a snow globe. She had taken off her mask; her long hair plastered to her back. She looked sleek and shiny. He felt chunky, matte. He still wasn’t sure if they were a proper item yet.
Then she smiled at him. Her front teeth jutted out slightly in front of the others. They made him feel weak.
She wrapped her arms around his neck. In the water, her skin felt warm and smooth, like the inner tube of a bicycle tyre. She pointed her toe toward a space beneath them.
‘I gan shee anyfin,’ he said thickly around the snorkel. But as he looked closer, he saw that the shiny particles were moving, flicking what seemed to be tails. ‘What is it?’
‘Fish fry,’ she said. Her breath smelled of mint. ‘They’re baby fish.’
He looked in wonder. The baby fish floated like a storm of glitter. They reminded him of the seahorses giving birth, spraying their young into the water like so many musical notes. Beneath the freezing shield of water, he felt a pleasant bubbling in his gut. She kissed him and her mouth felt warm and wet, like an underwater cave.
On the day of the endoscopy, he ate nothing but a cup of Oxo broth. By the afternoon, he had a gnawing, bottomless feeling. It made him think of tiny fish feeding on his innards, the same kind that cleaned predators’ teeth. He had been researching cleaner wrasse for his zoology course. He discovered the same joyful relaxation he’d found watching nature documentaries. They studied theories of evolution: Why did certain animals evolve around others?
The scans came back on the same day as his exam result. He folded the marked paper beside the folder of X-rays, ghostly cauliflowers flaring in his intestines. The diaphanous blooms reminded him of the dark, cloudy broth of the algae they’d seen in the summer, around the salmon farms. He thought of the worm-ridden sludge at the mouth of the bay. A sadness attacked him when he saw the gyre of fish, the salmon that were meant to leap from waterfalls and oceanic currents across the Atlantic and back to the freshwater creek of their birthplace, only they were devolving in the same churning circle, like a never-ending dance. His father had worked at a salmon hatchery. He felt sorry for the poor things, riddled with parasites and pumped full of antibiotics.
Since childhood, his world had been ruled by microbiota. They orchestrated his social life, dictated the workings of his inner being. It had been more than ten years since he’d had food poisoning. In that time he would have regenerated every cell in his body, yet somehow they were still there, the descendants of whatever algae or bacteria had infiltrated his gut.
‘The scans don’t tell us that much, I’m afraid,’ the doctor said in a flat voice. ‘What they can do is give us an idea of possible scenarios going forward, into the next couple years or so.’
‘Okay,’ he said uncertainly. ‘What’s the worst scenario?’
‘If worst comes to worst, you might be looking at a feeding tube.’
‘Like one that goes in your nose?’ he said, trying to keep his voice level.
‘Not necessarily,’ he said. ‘There are PEG tubes that go directly to the abdomen.’
He imagined a baby’s pegged belly button. An umbilical cord, feeding him liquid. He felt a deep despair curdle around him. He cleared his throat. ‘So,’ he said jokingly. ‘What’s the good news?’
The doctor removed his glasses, rubbing the exposed bridge of his nose. A pearl of pale skin appeared beneath the soft pads where the glasses rested on his skin. Enzo wished he hadn’t. The vulnerability implicit in the action made the doctor seem fallible, unreliable.
‘The good news, is,’ he continued, putting his glasses back on and blinking. His eyelids were pink around the rims. ‘We’ve found it early, before gastroparesis has set in.’
Enzo swallowed. ‘When do you think—when do you think it might set in?’
He didn’t know why the doctor was making such a fuss of his glasses. ‘I’m afraid I don’t know.’ He added, ‘I’m sorry.’ Then Enzo saw he looked as if he were about to cry.
‘It’s OK,’ said Enzo, numb. ‘Really. It’s OK.’
‘Alright. OK,’ said the doctor, as if he was indulging him. He looked extremely tired. He smiled wanly as he showed him to the door. ‘Take care, now.’
Enzo sat outside at the bus stop. Waiting for the 426, he thought about time. Not a month ago he had gone swimming with friends. If he closed his eyes he could picture the horizon, open and inviting. Life had seemed normal, enclosed, contained from the world around him. Now he thought of the fossils embedded in the beach cliffs. Shells were compressed and grooved like vinyl records, fingernails. He wondered what kind of sound would come from them. Their soft innards hardened, protective shells calcified, their whole world turned to stone.
He thought about the algal bloom that had colonised his gut. It was strange to think that the pollution was churning inside him. In his mind it was inseparable from him. While others were contained, he was the gyre of swirling rubbish. Now he thought of nuclear waste, greenhouse gas. He remembered the middens, shelters, and artefacts classified as garbage.
The bus had arrived. As he stepped on board, a jangling Sprite can rolled to meet him. Strange, he thought, that the empty casings of their lives should outlast them all.