They call it tommy time—when the small tommy ruffs fin their way at dusk beneath the sunset boulevard of the sea.
Like lances of a waiting army, the fishermen’s rods waver and nod to the approaching night; nests of little lights flicker and bob on the jetty ramparts, manned and watchful and armed to the dentures.
Will the tommies come now or later or never? Perhaps they will swim the silver sidewalk of the moon to destiny and death on a number nine hook.
The cleaners and cutters, the fryers and scalers all wait, pungent with the smell of doctored ground bait.
But now all are motionless except the endless traffic of the waves.
A lip curls in a hunter’s snarl.
A young girl draws back at the cold, calculated impaling of live bait.
The man in question scarcely notices her. In his way, he is immaculate. Trim-moustached, he is alert, his fingers like steel. His fishbox is disciplined, his hooks regimented. Even the live bait lines up like lemmings awaiting their cliff plunge. Thus he threads his hooks with a living sacrifice.
But will the fish come?
They came late last night, says the man from the south. They came earlier the night before, says his companion. They didn’t come at all the night before that. Fickle fish. We who are about to fry salute you.
It’s a funny year, says the first man. Not enough water going into the sea. No rain. Fish like rain.
His wife looks a sort of Mrs. Scott of the Antarctic. She has a folding chair and her glasses are twin moons behind which one catches a glint of savagery. Not all wives are here.
The wife of the fat one is a gulf away beside television set, and thankful to be there she tells a visiting girlfriend.
He never catches much but his excuses are about being undersized and beautifully coloured.
Back on the jetty the fat one feels romantic and sees visions in his modest mind.
Once the squareriggers anchored here, masts like forest trees, spars and sails, rats and cats, masters and ordinary seamen, a whiff of the Horn in the rigging.
The old ketches rub their affectionate cheeks against the jetty stiff with salt and protocol. Bagged wheat sighed down polished wooden chutes and wheat lumpers orchestrated the catch blue-singleted grim masters of grain handling.
The tommies have not arrived. Can there be some fishy business going on? Is there a marine industrial dispute beneath the waves, some tommy-ruffian haranguing and calling for a mass swim-out?
The fat one wonders.
The sea is all mystery and reticence. He thinks he hears on the roll call of the wind the names of the good sea scouts, Josh Slocum and Frank Chichester, Matt Flinders and Jim Cook, Billy Bligh and all the rest. Shivering their timbers in some sheltered Valhalla, anchored and secured for eternity.
So the fat one returns to his camp. The smug whiting fisherman leers from his caravan and says, “The tommies weren’t there tonight?”
The young girl will have gone home happy and will waft away into her night on a mother-of-pearl barge drawn by doting dolphins.
But the tommies will be back tomorrow night and, after all, a fisherman must take the ruff with the smooth.
Max Fatchen