"I was much too far out all my life / And not waving but drowning."
— Stevie Smith, "Not Waving but Drowning"
The swell hit them side-on coming out past the groyne and the Riviera pitched hard to port and Macca's beer went flying and Chase laughed and opened the throttle and felt the twin Cats dig in, thirteen hundred horsepower churning the water white behind them, and the bow rose and steadied and they were out -- the river and the traffic bridge and Fremantle falling away and nothing ahead but eighteen kilometres of open ocean and Rottnest sitting low on the horizon like something that couldn't be bothered to be impressive.
This was the thing. The actual thing, and Chase didn't have words for it and didn't need them. The throttle vibrating under his palm. Spray coming over the bow in sheets. The sound of the diesels, not a roar but a sustained growl that came up through the deck and through his legs and settled in his chest like a second heartbeat. He was twenty-one and driving a forty-eight-foot motor yacht across open ocean on a Friday afternoon and his two best mates were below loading slabs of Emu Export into the fridge and arguing about the Dockers and the sky was enormous and the water was that dark navy it went when the shelf dropped away, and he was happy in the uncomplicated way he was only ever happy on this boat -- the one place where his body and his mind were doing the same thing.
His mum had named her Chardonnay. Chase had wanted Full Send or Rip Tide, but the boat wasn't his -- his father's, technically, though by now Chase had driven it more hours than Bob and knew the crossing by feel. The swell pattern south of the groyne. The wind shift at the halfway point where the Fremantle Doctor met the Southern Ocean rollers. The moment Rottnest resolved from a smudge into an island with that insane turquoise ringing it. Forty-eight feet of fibreglass and teak, twin Caterpillar C-12s. Not new, not flash -- the blokes with real money had sixty-footers with crew -- but solid and fast enough and his in every way that mattered.
His dad was up on the flybridge. Chase had registered this without really looking: Bob in the skipper's chair with a coffee, staring at the ocean with that blank look he got, like he was tuned to a station no one else could hear. Dad did this. He went somewhere inside his head and you could talk to him and he'd nod and say "yeah mate" but he wasn't there. Chase had learned a long time ago not to examine his parents too closely, because examination led to questions and questions led to territory his family didn't visit. His mum had a word for it -- Bob was "in one of his moods" -- and Chase had adopted the phrase without investigating what it meant.
Macca came up the companionway holding two Export Golds. "Your old man not drinking?"
Chase cracked his and drank. Ten-thirty in the morning. The taste was the taste of every good day he could remember. "He's got a coffee."
"A coffee," Macca said, like it was a foreign word. He leaned against the helm station. Six-two, played second row for the Cottesloe rugby club, had the neck of a man who settled arguments by existing near them. They'd been mates since Year 8, since they'd both been sent to the deputy's office for throwing bread rolls and bonded over the shared injustice of detention. Macca's dad was in proper mining -- Pilbara iron ore, the kind of money that didn't need a boat to prove itself but had several anyway.
"He's all right," Chase said, turning the wheel a degree, reading the swell. The next set was coming long and rolling from the southwest and he wanted to take them at an angle. "He just likes the quiet."
"Quiet," Macca said. "Yeah, nah. Fair enough."
Deano was still below, texting. Deano was the quieter one -- not quiet by any normal standard, but quieter than Macca, which was like saying a car alarm was quieter than a fire engine. He worked for his brother's property development outfit, wore RM's to the beach, and believed with the unshakeable conviction of a man who had never tested it that he'd be rich by thirty. Chase liked him. Chase liked most people. It was easy, liking people, when you didn't look at them too closely.
They were at the halfway point now, the chop picking up as the Southern Ocean rollers met the coastal current. Chase widened his stance. He liked this part -- the way the boat demanded attention, the ocean becoming a partner you had to negotiate with. Some blokes drove their boats the way they drove their cars, all throttle, as if the sea owed them passage. Chase didn't. You read it, you adjusted, you found the line, and if you got it right there was a moment when hull and swell locked into the same frequency and the boat seemed to fly, and that moment was better than anything.
Thomson Bay opened up like an oversaturated postcard: turquoise so bright it looked artificial, the white sand curve, the settlement of white buildings, thirty-odd boats on the moorings catching the morning sun. Chase eased back the throttle and the Riviera settled, bow dropping, wake flattening. He idled through the mooring field.
"Starboard, mate. Forty-seven."
He brought her around with the ease of someone who'd done it a hundred times: a slow turn to windward, gliding on momentum, engines in neutral, Macca on the bow with the boat hook. The line came aboard. Chase killed the engines. And then the silence -- the total silence when thirteen hundred horsepower stopped and the world became wind and water and birds and the slap of small waves against the hull.
They inflated the tender, loaded the cooler, motored to shore. The settlement was ten minutes end to end: the general store, the bakery with its twenty-minute pie queue, the bike hire. And the pub -- the Rottnest Hotel, the social engine of every Rotto weekend Chase had ever known.
They were early enough to get a table in the beer garden. He bought the first round. He always bought the first round. Not generosity only -- position. The boy who bought the round was the boy others oriented toward.
The pub filled the way it always filled. The boat crowd, the ferry crowd, the overnighters. Boys from Scotch and Aquinas and Hale, girls from PLC and Iona and St Hilda's, the whole social map of Perth's western suburbs reassembled eighteen kilometres offshore. Everyone knew everyone. Everyone's parents knew everyone's parents. You could draw a line from any face to any other through two connections -- school, yacht club, parents' dinner party. This was Perth. Small. Closed. And Chase existed at its centre with the unexamined comfort of a man who had never stood outside.
He saw the girl. Dark hair, a real tan, a linen shirt over her bikini top with one shoulder slipping. She looked at him and looked away, and the looking away was the thing, because it was an invitation disguised as indifference, and Chase understood this language without knowing he'd learned it from his mother. He stayed where he was, telling a story, buying another round, being the centre. She would come to him. He was in no rush. Rushing was for blokes who weren't sure.
They swam. The jetty was high enough to jump off -- four metres, maybe five. Macca's bomb sprayed a family of tourists. Deano pencil-dived without a ripple. Chase ran and jumped, all power and no form, the water hitting him like a cold hand across his whole body and then the silence underneath -- blue-green, the white sand bottom visible, the shadow of the jetty above -- the clean, wordless, animal feeling of being exactly where he was supposed to be.
He came back to the boat at dusk. The Chardonnay sat white and solid on the mooring, lights not yet on, flybridge dark against the sunset.
His mates went below. He should have too. He was hungry and tired in the good way, body loose and heavy from the water and the sun.
But he went up.
His father was in the skipper's chair. A beer beside him, barely touched. Looking west. The sun almost gone, sitting on the horizon like a coal, the sky running through copper and amber and rose and violet, the water darkening, holding the light and letting it go at the same time.
"Hey."
"Hey, mate."
Chase sat in the passenger chair and put his feet up. The silence between them was the comfortable silence of men who share a space without needing to fill it. He accepted this about his father without appreciating it, the way you accept air.
"Port engine was running a bit rough on the way over."
"Injectors, probably."
"Yeah. Might need to pull them."
"I'll call the mechanic Monday."
They talked about the boat for a while. The engine, the anodes, whether the tender's outboard needed a service. This was the language they shared -- mechanical, practical, the language of things that could be fixed. It was how they said what they couldn't say in other ways: I am here. I see you.
Chase talked about the Dockers, about a mark in the third quarter that was the best thing he'd seen all year. Bob listened, nodded. Chase talked about Deano's property deal, the margins, the risk. Bob asked a question that was smarter than Chase expected -- something about the financing structure -- and for a moment they were two men talking about money, the family's native tongue, the lineage of numbers passed from father to son like an accent.
Then Bob went quiet.
Chase was still talking when he realised his father had stopped responding. He looked over. Bob was staring at the water. Not the sunset -- the water itself, the dark surface stretching west toward a dissolving horizon. And his face --
Chase had seen his father's faces. The charm face for yacht club dinners. The tired face. The rare angry face. The Dad face that appeared when Chase did something right on the boat.
This was none of those.
This was his father with the features stripped of everything Chase knew how to read. Open in a way that was almost frightening, slack, the eyes seeing something that wasn't the ocean or was the ocean but was also something behind it. The face of a man measuring a distance Chase couldn't identify.
He felt something cold in his stomach. Not fear exactly. The feeling you get when a wave lifts the boat higher than you expected and for a moment you can't tell which way the water wants to take you.
"You right, Dad?"
Bob turned. And the face disappeared. It folded away so quickly Chase almost doubted he'd seen it -- features rearranging, eyes refocusing, the mask caught and replaced.
"Yeah, mate." A pause. "Good sunset."
Chase looked. The last band of copper along the horizon, the sky darkening, the first stars. "Yeah. It was."
They sat a while longer. The lights came on around the mooring field, reflecting in the black water. From below came Macca and Deano arguing about whose turn it was to use the head. Chase let the moment go. He let it go because he was twenty-one and lacked the language for what he'd seen, because his family had trained him to let things go, because the alternative was a question he wasn't equipped to understand the answer to.
He filed it away. The place where he filed it was the same place his father filed things -- the sealed room, the closed door. He didn't know he had such a place. He didn't know his father had one too.
"Want a beer?" Chase asked.
"Yeah," Bob said. "Why not."
Chase climbed down the ladder. He did not look back.