Manly Beach was famous, Yasmin was aware of that, as she crunched across its gritty sands in a blustery dawn wind. Breakers washed in relentlessly and she spotted a few surfers, grey seals in their wetsuits, riding foamy crests. She couldn’t help but think of them as foolhardy, after the news this week. A man bitten in half by a shark off Little Bay. Yasmin enjoyed swimming but wasn’t sure she would ever be able to go into the sea again. Certainly not at Little Bay.
Manly Beach suffered from its great fame. The sand wasn’t clean, there were old concrete water pipes half-buried under low dunes, the famous Norfolk Pines were looking ratty. A row of businesses lined the street opposite the beach: cafés just opening, swimwear places still closed this early in the day, racks of brightly-coloured surfboards, entrances to a few lucky apartment blocks enjoying views of the ocean from their balconies. What would it cost to rent there, she wondered?
Idle speculation, since she’d lost her job. Well, not exactly lost it. Made redundant. Or not even that. What was the right word, when you were forced out of your job by sexual harassment and agreed to take a bundle of hush money to keep your trap shut? Considering the matter now, as she trudged along in the wind, Yasmin wondered if she’d acted wisely. Or even ethically. Should she have complained to some watchdog? Been more of an activist?
Yasmin had grown up near the mouth of a river. As a small child, she’d scurried about on sandy estuary beaches, building sand castles and trying to dig to China. Not far from her childhood home, a sloping bank of prickly gorse led down to a fingernail beach called Second Sands. Her mum had made her wear plastic buckle-on sandals when she went down there to paddle, because of the soldier crabs. Their purple backs skittered across the wet sand when the tide was out, tiny crab legs scrabbling in and out of the little holes they dug. Yasmin wondered if there were any crabs on Manly Beach. All she could see were a few strips of slimy-looking seaweed, not even any sea shells. It was an urban beach, well-used.
Her childhood town, was not far from the open ocean and terrible weather often blew in. As a kid, she’d learnt how to walk with a strong wind behind her. The technique involved leaning back. Out at the mouth of the river, the winds had whipped huge whitecaps around the rocky feet of a promontory, a lighthouse perched atop. There were wild beaches out there. Not sheltered little coves like Second Sands but long, free, untouched stretches of sand and seaweed with names like Five Mile Beach and Nine Mile Beach, looping up the coast to who-knew-where. Now, trudging along the edge of the Pacific Ocean, Yasmin missed that fierce wind and welcomed the chill Manly breeze.
Outside of her town there’d been several lighthouses, painted white with red horizontal stripes, standing where the river met the sea. Big ships, lumbering like stately whales, often glided into the river heading to the container dock and the factories. Pilots had to go out and help the ships negotiate their way through the reefs and sandbanks at the entrance to the estuary. In Yasmin’s class at school there’d been a girl named Philippa whose father was a pilot, Captain Barber. She couldn’t remember now if she’d ever seen Captain Barber, but thought so, and was sure he’d had a thick beard and wore moleskins and a sou’wester. As a child, Yasmin had considered the profession of pilot to be one of courage and glory.
She hadn’t been home for some time, and thought about going back, as she stepped in and out of the wavelets breaking on the beach. As far as Yasmin knew, on the mud flats of Second Sands the sea still ebbed out on long tides, leaving wide expanses of wet sand for the scuttling soldier crabs. She had a recurring dream about that place. The details were dream-hazy and involved a threatening tide coming in and purple soldier crabs spiky under the bare soles of her feet.
When the man was taken by the Great White at Little Bay, people were watching from the headland. Some even videoed the scene on their phones, yelling Oh my God! and Fuck!!! and similar desperate and helpless noises. Yasmin had seen the videos online, though they were quickly pixilated and slapped with warnings to viewers because the scene was so awful. Authorities closed the beaches straight away. Not only at Little Bay; also at Malabar, Maroubra, Coogee, Clovelly, and La Perouse. Helicopters scoured the inshore ocean, checking for the shark, or for any sharks. They never found the culprit.
It was the first shark fatality in Sydney for decades, though it seemed to Yasmin the news was more or less constantly filled with stories of sharks grabbing people, munching off their limbs, puncturing them so their blood stained the sea, up and down the coast, all around the country. At the tiny beach off Second Sands, the crabs were the only creatures she’d had to think about. Swimming there had been fun. Since she’d moved to Sydney to start the accounts job she’d just lost, Yasmin had never dared swim out of her depth.
According to news reports, the man taken by the shark off Little Bay had been an experienced diver. Yasmin wasn’t sure if that made it better or worse—his life claimed by the ocean he loved. In Yasmin’s view, you had to be careful about nature. It was mistaken to consider the natural world benign. Her dream of the crabs, she felt, was a warning of some kind.
A meandering line of her footsteps straggled behind her, imprinted in the wet sand, the unceasing waves dashing in and obliterating her passing.
As she rounded the point, she saw today’s ocean temperature chalked on a concrete pillar protruding from the beach wall. Twenty-one point two, the figures artistically entwined with a drawing which looked, at this distance, like a large shark. The man who chalked up the numbers was a local character; Yasmin had heard about him, seen his Instagram. Surely he hadn’t chosen to celebrate sharks at a time like this? Though she was inclined to warm fuzzy feelings about the guy who rose before dawn, rain or shine, to measure the ocean temperature with a meat thermometer and post the figure for the early swimmers, this unmistakable outline of a shark left a bad taste.
There were few people around; the sun had been up for half an hour. Like the surfers, some of the early swimmers had opted for wetsuits, usually grey or charcoal or shiny like platinum. How would a shark, if there was one out there, tell the difference between a swimmer and legitimate prey? Perhaps swimmers were legitimate prey for the denizens of the ocean. Peering towards the horizon, Yasmin spotted a fin out there, for a moment she thought she saw a fin. Perhaps an upturned surfboard? Or something more sinister?
Yasmin gave herself a mental shake. She was brooding too much on the shark tragedy. Probably to obscure her own mini-tragedy: moving to Sydney for a dream job, then being ousted so ignominiously, and none of it her fault.
The man who chalked the temperatures every day sat on a beach rock near his handiwork, gazing pensively seaward. At least, he looked pensive to Yasmin as she neared him, though she could have been projecting. He was leaning his weight on a long, furled golf umbrella as if it were a wizard’s staff.
She paused in front of the chalk drawing. Not a dolphin or a porpoise; definitely a shark. This was too much. She had to say something. ‘A shark, mister? After what happened at Little Bay?’
The man looked up from his reverie and paused to consider his response. He had thin hair and tanned wrinkles, an old fellow, maybe in his seventies by the look of him, though Yasmin was in her twenties and found it difficult to estimate the age of older people.
After a few moments, he replied. ‘We all have to co-exist. People swim in the ocean, sharks swim in the ocean, occasionally there’ll be a clash.’
‘And people will always come off worse,’ Yasmin said, tasting a bitterness which wasn’t, she knew, entirely about sharks. She plumped down on a nearby rock, suddenly feeling tired of everything. The old bloke seemed to intuit her mood.
‘What’s up, love?’
Yasmin’s skin crawled at his use of the familiarity. Her mind reasoned it was just an old-fashioned hangover from earlier times. She glowered at him with a grimace of distaste but he seemed to miss her disapproval.
‘You look a bit glum,’ he said mildly. ‘Want to talk it over?’
The sun had risen above the eastern horizon and the ocean, the poorly-named Pacific Ocean, had begun to glitter. The wind was still inhospitable, the surfers were still impersonating seals. The man was a stranger, though not completely. People around here seemed to like him, to judge by social media. Perhaps he had some advice for her.
Yasmin introduced herself, told him she lived in a pokey flat in Surry Hills. She’d taken the early ferry over to Manly because she wanted to feel real wind on her face, not grimy city draughts. The bloke grinned at this, as the salty breeze whipped Yasmin’s long dark hair across her face.
‘I’ve just lost my dream job,’ she told him.
‘Bugger.’
‘It was in a big city law firm, in accounts. I moved to Sydney to take it. Then one of the creepy old partners exposed himself to me in the office, and they offered me a payout to leave and shut up about the whole thing, and I took it.’
It all sounded so grubby, now she’d said it out loud.
The bloke regarded her steadily. ‘Did you get any support?’ he asked, sounding like someone from corporate HR.
Yasmin snorted at the thought of it. ‘There are only two female partners in that firm, one old girl who’s proud of acting as much like a man as possible, and a younger bitch who’s willing to sell her soul to make money. Those two told me to accept the cash and go.’
A few of the swimmers were returning from their ocean swim out to Cabbage Tree Bay, hurrying up the beach, stripping off swim caps, ready for coffee. The old bloke watched them, his hands clasped between his knees. He drew in a breath.
‘In an earlier life,’ he said, ‘I too came a cropper in the corporate world. I was one of the high-fliers. Yeah, it was full-on. Then one day—bam. Down and out. I won’t give you the full story, you’re depressed enough, but here’s my tip: you’re better off out of it. There are too many—well, sharks in that sea.’
Yasmin had to smile at the rueful cliché. ‘What did you say about co-existing with sharks?’
‘Well, yeah, if you go into their world, you’re never going to win, unless you manage to steer clear of them. So leave them to it. Come back to the real world, Yasmin. Community. Want to come swimming here in the mornings?’
Yasmin gazed seawards. The wind was whipping up choppers farther out. The ocean changed in a blink from silver to slate as clouds scudded across the morning sun. She turned back to this chance acquaintance, this wise pilot, who had steered her out of the storm.
‘I think I’ll leave Sydney.’
Rising to her feet, she said goodbye and he bid her good luck, and she wandered up to the street to look for a decent café.