The Bat(54)

Harry felt as though he were tiptoeing through a dormitory. The only sounds were their steps and a faint but regular gurgle from the aquariums.

Birgitta stopped by one high glass wall. ‘This is the aquarium’s saltie, Matilda from Queensland,’ she said, directing the cone of light at the glass. There was a dried-out tree trunk lying on a reconstructed riverbank inside. And in the pool a floating piece of wood.

‘What’s a saltie?’ Harry asked, trying to catch sight of something living. At that moment the piece of wood opened two shimmering, green eyes. They lit up in the dark like reflectors.

‘It’s a crocodile that lives in salt water, in contrast to the freshie. Freshies live off fish and you don’t need to be afraid of them.’

‘And salties?’

‘You should definitely be afraid of them. Many so-called dangerous predators attack humans only when they feel threatened, are afraid or you’ve encroached on their territory. A saltie, however, is a simple, uncomplicated soul. It just wants your body. Several Australians are killed every year in the swamplands to the north.’

Harry leaned against the glass. ‘Doesn’t that lead to . . . a . . . er, certain antipathy? In some parts of India they wiped out the tiger under the pretext it was eating babies. Why have these man-eaters not been exterminated?’

‘Most people here have the same relaxed kind of attitude to crocodiles as they do to traffic accidents. Almost, anyway. If you want roads, you’ve got to accept deaths, right? Well, if you want crocodiles, it’s the same thing. These animals eat humans. That’s life.’

Harry shuddered. Matilda had closed her eyelids in a similar way to the headlamp covers on some models of Porsche. Not a ripple in the water betrayed the fact that the wood lying half a metre from him behind the glass was in reality more than a ton of muscle, teeth and ill temper.

‘Let’s go on,’ he suggested.

‘Here we have Mr Bean,’ Birgitta said, shining the torch on a small, light brown, flounder-like fish. ‘This is a fiddler ray, it’s what we call Alex in the bar, the man Inger called Mr Bean.’

‘Why Fiddler Ray?’

‘I don’t know. They called him that before I started there.’

‘Funny name. It obviously likes lying still on the bottom.’

‘Yes, and that’s why you’ve got to be careful when you’re in the water. It’s poisonous, you see, and it’ll sting you if you tread on it.’

They descended a staircase that wound down to one of the big tanks.

‘The tanks aren’t actually aquariums in the true sense of the word, they’ve just enclosed a part of Sydney Harbour,’ Birgitta said as they entered.

From the ceiling a greenish light fell over them in undulating stripes, and made Harry feel as if he were standing under a mirror-ball. It was only when Birgitta pointed the torch upwards that he saw they were surrounded by water on all sides. They were standing in a glass tunnel under the sea, and the light was coming from outside, filtered through the water. A huge shadow glided past them, and he instinctively recoiled.

‘Mobulidae,’ she said. ‘Devil rays.’

‘My God, it’s enormous!’ Harry breathed.

The whole skate was one single billowing movement, like a massive waterbed, and Harry felt sleepy just looking at it. Then it turned onto its side, waved to them and floated into the dark watery world like a black bed-sheet spook.

They sat on the floor and from her rucksack Birgitta took a rug, two glasses, a candle, and an unlabelled bottle of red wine. Present from a friend working at a vineyard in Hunter Valley, she said, opening it. Then they lay side by side on the rug looking up into the water.

It was like lying in a world turned upside down, like seeing into an inverted sky full of fish all the colours of the rainbow and strange creatures invented by someone with an overactive imagination. A blue, shimmering fish with an enquiring moon-face and thin, quivering ventral fins hovered in the water above them.

‘Isn’t it wonderful to see how much time they take, how apparently meaningless their activities are?’ whispered Birgitta. ‘Can you feel them slowing time down?’ She placed a cold hand on Harry’s neck and squeezed softly. ‘Can you feel your pulse almost stopping?’

Harry swallowed. ‘I don’t mind time going slowly. Not right now,’ he said. ‘Not for the next few days.’

Birgitta squeezed harder. ‘Don’t even talk about it,’ she said.

‘Sometimes I think, “Harry, you’re not so bloody stupid after all.” I notice, for example, that Andrew always talks about the Aboriginal people as “them”. That’s why I’d guessed a lot of Andrew’s story before Toowoomba told me specific details. I’d more or less surmised that Andrew hadn’t grown up with his own family, that he doesn’t belong anywhere but floats along on the surface and sees things from the outside. Like us here, observing a world which we cannot take part in. After the chat with Toowoomba I realised something else: at birth Andrew didn’t receive that gift of natural pride you have with being part of a people. That’s why he had to find his own. At first I thought he was ashamed of his brothers, but now I know he’s grappling with his own shame.’