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SHARKEY’S SON
Gillian D’achada
Tafelberg
I would like to dedicate this book to my oldest daughter,
Lissa, who is now twenty-four, but who was even younger
than Grant, Smiler and Ally when we first discovered,
and explored, the Langebaan lagoon together.
One day, while sunbathing in a hidden cove, we came across a dead
crab. Lissa immediately dug a hole for it and buried it. “Why are you
doing that?” I asked her. “So it can go to heaven”, she replied.
My prayer for every boy and girl who reads Sharkey’s Son is that,
one day, when all their adventures on earth are over, they too
will go to heaven. I hear it’s a fantastic place.
Chapter 1
By the time the sun was low enough for Grant to stare unblinkingly at it, he knew that something bad had happened to Sharkey.
For three days he’d been looking out. On the first day he’d thought, “Oh well, he had a bit of a party at the Paternoster Hotel last night. He’ll be home.”
On the second day he’d thought, “He must have gone out with the Saldanha skippers. He’ll be home.” But by the evening of the third day he had run out of thoughts that made any sense.
Down at the lagoon, boats were bobbing gently at the edge of the sandy shoreline and Tant Lisbeth was locking up the Beach Café. All of Langebaan seemed just as it had always been. Except that tiny hermit crabs of fear were scrabbling around inside Grant and he knew that something was terribly wrong.
The sky was darkening rapidly, but he was loath to leave the lagoon’s edge, reluctant to return to the low, thick-walled house he’d lived in all his life. It had been strange and still without Sharkey the last two nights.
So he stayed and watched the gulls gliding high overhead on their way to Schaapen Island. They rested there, with all the other sea birds, every night. Grant loved the gulls. They were the big, black, cold, fierce Atlantic gulls. Their cry was wild and free.
The best flyers you can get, Grant thought. Sharkey loved them too, as long as they stayed away from his fish.
Where was Sharkey? What had happened to him? Grant knew better than to ask anyone if they’d seen his father. Sharkey wasn’t exactly respected any more in the small fishing village of Langebaan. Not since he’d started working mostly after dark – or started to smokkel, as some people put it.
“Grant!” Tant Lisbeth’s voice floated down from the Beach Café. “It’s not good to sit outside in the damp, go home now. Hier’s ’n brood vir jou. Here’s a loaf of bread for you.”
Grant stood up and brushed the sand from the back of his legs. Lagoon sand was the finest, softest sand in the world, he was sure of that. He walked the short distance between the incoming tide and the stoep of the Beach Café, where Tant Lisbeth stood holding a loaf of machine-sliced white bread out to him.
“Thank you, Tannie.”
“Grant?”
“Yes, Tannie?”
“Everything all right?” Her tired, lined face and pale grey eyes were the only islands of tenderness Grant had known since his mother died.
He didn’t know what to do with tenderness any more. He was especially wary of softness tonight.
“Of course,” he replied, kicking up a flurry of sand with his right foot. “Thanks for the bread.”
He would give some of it to the gulls in the morning, on his way to the school at Langebaanweg. The rest he would eat for supper.
He walked up past the hardware store and turned left into the gravel road where nothing had changed in the last fifty years. Other parts of Langebaan had changed since the people from the towns had “discovered” it and started building huge white mansions that greedily gobbled up the strandveld, the grassy banks adjoining the beach. But not in Grant and Sharkey’s street; it was still the same there as ever. And that was something to be proud of, Sharkey always said. The way Langebaan had been before the rich people came lay at the heart of many of Sharkey’s favourite stories. He reminisced about those days so often that Grant felt as if he’d lived in the village then too.
Sometimes, when tourists were negotiating with Sharkey for fish or crayfish, he would tell them, “Come to my house later, after dark. You can’t miss my street. It’s just past the hardware store, on the left. It’s the only one without tar or a double-storey house in it.”
That’s the way they liked it. It’s not like town people hadn’t tried to buy the house before. They tried every summer. And every summer Sharkey told them the same thing: “This house belongs to me and my boy. It’s not for sale.”
There it was: squatting solid and reliable, as it had in the face of wind and the grate of sand for as long as he could remember. The kitchen door was never locked. Grant pushed it open and went inside. They didn’t have a fancy stove in their kitchen – just a gas burner and a small bar fridge that Sharkey had once swapped for some of his famous whalebone carvings. Those rich people had called the carvings “scrimshaw” and oohed and aahed over them. Afterwards, Sharkey and Grant had laughed together. “Rich people – ag, too much money, not enough kop,” said Sharkey, tapping his head. It was not that Sharkey wasn’t glad to get the fridge, it was useful – you could put things in it and on it. Before the fridge came the only shelf was next to the sink. It was a rough wooden shelf, perfect for cutting fish on. They ate fish most nights.
Grant didn’t switch on the top light in the sitting room. It was just a naked bulb hanging from the ceiling by a cord and he didn’t feel like its interrogative presence in his thoughts right now. Instead he sat in the gathering gloom eating slices of fresh bread until he couldn’t fit any more in.
Where was Sharkey? Why had he left his knife behind? He would never usually leave home without it. But there it was, lying on the kitchen shelf, as if Sharkey had just popped outside quickly to see which way the wind was blowing – and then vanished, suddenly, into thin air.
Grant knew that most of the other Lagooners didn’t altogether approve of the way Sharkey was raising him, but it suited him just fine. His father understood his need to walk to school in the morning by himself, to amble home on the hot, windy afternoons by a different route every day, to go swimming on Saturdays in Churchhaven, on the other side of the lagoon, and perhaps come home only on Sunday.
Sharkey had the same blood in him. Sometimes Sharkey didn’t get home until two o’clock in the morning. On those nights Grant would have a small supper of dry, salty bokkom fish and bread all by himself and watch the stars move across the sky until he fell asleep. In the morning Sharkey would be there. That’s the way it went with them.
On the nights that Sharkey stayed home, he told Grant Langebaan stories and carved animals from whalebone and wood.
