By Greg Clough

Bert dreamed of catching a coelacanth. With his beer bottle, fishing rod, and can of worms, Bert’s mate Damo talked enough about the big-mouthed, eight-finned, sharp-toothed coelacanth to launch a thousand dreams. Bert imagined if he ever caught one, he would throw it in a fishbowl and sell it to a museum. Damo said coelacanth were discovered alive only twenty years ago, up north in Indonesia. Before then, it was only caught in million-year old stone fossils, like in the Kimberleys. Now it’s called a living fossil, Damo said, a “bit like me”.

If anyone was likely to catch a coelacanth, it was Bert. He was good at fishing.

He was good at whistling, too. The trouble was, he’d whistled when whistling wasn’t wanted. Once, he whistled at a football game. Every player on the ground froze and turned to the umpire, expecting a penalty.

The local librarian had already warned him about whistling in the quiet zone. Several times. It didn’t bother Bert. He kept going back. With his red marker pen.

He once created havoc during the local self-storage centre’s unclaimed property auction. Ambling by, whistling the Final Countdown, he confused the auctioneer, who mistook Bert’s chirping as a nervous upping of the ante. Bert’s love of the library explains his infatuation with the self-storage auctions.

Books.

Bert loved books.

Yet this love twitched some primal fear within. Still, he would suppress his fear—and his whistling—and attend the library as often as possible. And the auctions. The auctions often sold bundles of old hardbacks, worn paperbacks, torn encyclopaedias, and tossed textbooks. Bert liked looking at them before they were auctioned. His eyes would roam over their titles, his hands over their spines. Only rarely could he bring himself to open them. And, living on a disability pension, Bert could never afford to buy. Besides, he was not a good reader or writer.

“You’re a very good whistler, Bert,” said a retired schoolteacher he’d met at the library, “But your reading and writing . . . yeah . . . nah.”

She told Bert he probably had dyslexia. “But I guess your teachers didn’t know much about dyslexia when you went to school.”

Bert just nodded, perhaps agreeing that they didn’t or he didn’t. She asked him if he was often told to keep quiet and sit at the back of the class.

No, that never happened, Bert said. Most of the time, he was told to sit outside the class.

“All-all-I-I-I c-could hear was the children chanting their times table. You know, ‘one-times-one-is-one, one-times-two-is-two.’ ” He frowned a little, then smiled a little. “B-b-but that’s how I taught myself to whistle. Whistling along with the chanting. And I learnt to do multiplication really good.”

He told the teacher he wished he didn’t have dyslexia. He wished he didn’t always write the letter d like the letter b. He told her he wished he could read and write properly. He told her he would never be a whole man, would always be a fish out of water.

The word dyslexia was mesmerising. The only way he could explain it was to say it sounded like the zing of a cast fishing lure. He asked her to spell it.

When she spelt ‘dyslexia’ aloud, all Bert heard were the letters: b-l-x-i.

The letters, the sound, the meaning – they crawled with texture. Hearing them, he could taste the letters on his tongue. Could almost reach out and grab them from the teacher’s breath.

B-l-x-i … they disturbed yet fascinated him. Just as the library and the books at the auction disturbed and fascinated him.

One evening Bert was walking and whistling his way home from the jetty, fishing rod across his shoulders. His fishing bag empty, as usual, even though Bert always caught bag loads of mangrove jacks, flatheads and toadfish.

For Bert, a cast line was like a cast sentence, with the capital letter dangling like a hook waiting to be snatched. And once snatched, it was a case of reeling in and ravelling out the twists and turns until an end was reached. Just as the snared sentences at the library wriggled across his mind, so did the snared fish across his feet. And once his concentration on catching them was over, both swam before his eyes.

Like the sentence reeled in, the landed fish seemed of little practical importance in a dizzying way. Out would come Bert’s permanent marker, and whether at the library or the jetty, each was crossed with a red x, then returned to their respective schools. Later, whenever an angler or reader hooked that fish or sentence, they invariably wondered what it meant.

Bert asked himself the same question. It was a long time before he knew the answer.

Not long ago, Damo spied Bert marking a red x on a two-kilogram cod caught on a 500-gram line. Damo pointed at the rusty tackle and its barbed, floundering catch, tilted his head, and asked “Bert. what’s that mean?” Bert looked at Damo, paused, returned the marker pen to his bag, returned the cod to the ocean, and returned home.

Another day, a librarian found Bert staring wide-eyed and marking a nervous red x at the end of a five-line sentence he had finally winkled after thirty harrowing vowel-lipping minutes. Pointing at the shaking hand holding the marker pen, the librarian gently scolded, “Bert, what does that mean!?”

Today, Bert knew the answer.

“It means we’ve met before in this very big world,” he said, and scratched a red x on the librarian’s forehead, walked away and whistled the five-by-five times table.

Later, as he walked home with his rod across his shoulders and empty fishing bag, Bert whistled Grieg’s Morning Theme. He continued whistling even when he stopped at the Shire’s recycling bin. Bert imagined Morning Theme playing between the waves millions of years ago when the coelacanth first swam the Earth.

The recycling bin always overflowed with the junk familiar to Bert. The soulless shoes, broken toys, bent and burned pots and pans, faded flannel shirts, flagging bras, old Nokia phones, and mute iPods—all the usual jetsam and flotsam of town life. Sometimes he knew their owners: the librarian’s old stubby pencils, Ms. Trubul’s ancient National Geographics, Mrs. Brook’s secret letters from her Snowy Mountain lover—nearly one a day since whenever Bert first inspected the bin—Damo’s beer bottle, a half-eaten sausage roll, and a slippery thing unpleasant to touch.

But on this evening, Bert spied a bonus. Biting his tongue to stop his whistling, Bert looked over his shoulder before reaching into the bin. After feeling for the love letter, he grabbed something hard, square, and slender. He glanced at them, put them in his bag, and whistled his way home.

After a dinner of Birds Eye fish fingers, tomato sauce and two carrots, Bert grabbed the bag and examined the day’s catch. A faded love letter and an old torn-up book bound in faux leather. He reached for the love letter. They always aroused something indefinable. It was a poem, not a letter. As with everything Bert tried to read, he failed to read it all. On this occasion, tiredness, not anxiety, stopped him. Casting his eyes back and forth across each line, winkling one word at a time, he managed to read the first four lines.

TUMUT LOVE

You with river through your flanks

And white spray on primal rock

The zipping flies and hidden hooks,

My petticoat and soul on Tumut banks.

All this reading made Bert’s eyes droop, yet his cock erect. Lying in bed, his hand touched his penis, or vice versa, either way, the two grew familiar. They nuzzled warmly. Bert thought of petticoats, flanks and rivers and whistled the Ride of the Valkyries. Like b-l-x-i, Tumut swelled in his mouth before splashing off his tongue. His hand and penis grew robust and friendly like boys play-fighting. Images of waterfalls, maiden-haired gullies and spawning salmon washed across his mind. Finally, his hand took its victory, and the seed handed down through timeless generations, that jellyfish blob of his original being swam across his palm.

He nodded off soon after and dreamt of casting a line of words into a pond, into his reflection resting on its surface. And he reeled in fish after fish. And all had human noses beneath a red x. Because they were already marked, he did not know whether to keep them, x them again, or toss them back into his rippling reflection. Finally, the images slowly dissolved, and Bert sunk into a long night of caves and shadows.

Bert awoke, ready for another day of fishing and whistling and dreaming of eight-finned coelacanth. He was about to hop out of bed when he noticed the book he had found the previous evening. He reached for it. Slowly. Rubbed the scuffed faux leather cover across his cheek. Bert loved the smell of books in the morning. With a racing heart, he turned the cover. He scanned the title syllable by syllable: The Whistler Almanac of Angling Literature. The title was bait for his imagination. Unlike his usual tentative reading, his eyes flew across the pages. Four letters nibbled, nibbled again, and finally, he felt them strike.

b-l-x-i

A memory wanted unearthing. The letters were deja vu of something long ago, of something even beyond the time his teacher friend spelt the word dyslexia. Beneath the letters was an entry of six lines. Bert spent an hour deciphering them. They spoke of the blxi, a pre-homo-erectus animist people who believed fish were their underwater equivalents. And as these fish all looked the same to the blxi, the blxi therefore believed themselves to all look the same.

Bert eventually reached the final sentence:

Just as many primitive tribes often hold a fear and fascination for the camera, the blxi were suspicious of storytelling, believing it caught and defined the.

And there, the entry stopped. Abrupt. With a period. Mid-line, mid-sentence, mid-stream, before the Almanac’s following definition, bowdlerise. Although Bert had never previously completed reading an entire story, chapter, or any passage of writing, he was outraged the entry stopped halfway. Abrupt. With a period, no less! The text was on the verge of saying something. Something his whole being not just his mind responded to.

He would go into town and ask the librarian if he had a copy of the Almanac. But it was almost midday, the library’s closing time on Saturdays. Hurrying down the road, he repeated the letters over and over. Walking up the hill to the library, he smiled, looking at the bay below where the jetty crept from the low dunes and waded into the sea. The tide was lower than usual, almost to the end of the jetty. A king tide pulled by a rare alignment of stars and planets. He stopped and looked at the freakish event. He wondered about the fish left stranded in rock pools, left wallowing in the mangrove’s muddy loam, waiting the return of their watery home, waiting the return of their fellow species. He thought about it for so long that he was late for the library.

Carrying the scuffed Almanac, he walked back down the hill. Along the way, he passed some children playing in the road outside the self-storage yards. An auction was underway, and the kids were playing chase and tag.

“I’ll count to one hundred using the ten times table,” one boy shouted. “You gotta run like billy-oh and get to home base and shout ox-in-free.”

Bert crossed the road into the auction. A sale was underway.

“One hundred!” harangued the auctioneer, “Do I hear one twenty?”

For all the times Bert had walked past the self-storage centre, he had never attended an auction. It reminded him of standing in the school corridor, hearing the students chant, “One times one is one, one times two is two, one times three . . .”

“One twenty?” repeated the auctioneer. Bert knew in a flash one times twenty was twenty.

“One times twenty is twenty!” he shouted.

“Er…okay, I think that’s a bid for one twenty, do I hear . . . “

“One thirty,” bid a voice from the corner.

“Do I hear one forty?”

“One times forty is forty!” shouted Bert.

“Ah… right. I take it that means one hundred and forty. Okay, do I hear … “

“One fifty,” interrupted the voice from the corner.

“Do I hear one sixty?”

“That’s sixty!” shouted Bert, wondering when this numbers game would finish, but realising numbers and counting, unlike words and sentences and the ocean’s fish, never finished, never had a sense of completion.

“One sixty is the bid, said the auctioneer, holding the book up. “Do I hear anything higher for this rare edition of the Whistler Almanac of Angling Literature? Going once, going twice . . . “

Before the voice in the corner could speak up, Bert sprinted at the auctioneer, plucked the book from his grasp, and kept running.

People stood agape with hands half raised.

Half a dozen men looked at each other, looked at Bert, looked at each other again, and dashed after.

Bert had a good lead. He charged down the road, waving the two Almanacs, weaving in and out of cars and pedestrians. Running red lights, defying one-way streets, sprinting past Don’t Walk signs. He careened through the Shire park, tripping over a Keep Off the Grass sign. He ignored a policeman directing traffic, shot diagonally across the intersection, stubbed his toe, then his nose on a manhole cover, screaming “B-b-blue bloody b-blxi!”.

Seeing a shortcut via the supermarket, Bert smashed through the exit door. Glass shattered. Cashiers locked registers. Trolleys backed up. Mothers grabbed children. The rampaging madman wielding two identical books and shouting “blxi, blxi”, exited through the entrance.

Bert did not see the pensioner pushing her trolley towards the car park. Nor she him. The trolley and Bert tumbled three times before landing in each other’s laps. Groceries spun across the bitumen. A torn packet of Campbell’s alphabet soup cartwheeled across the sky. The letters b, l, x, and i rained down. Bert bolted upright and bolted off.

The chasing crowd grew in size and noise. “Get ‘im, Get ‘im.”

“Deviant!” shrilled the pensioner.

“Pinched an Almanac,” cried someone else.

“Deviant monster!” repeated the little lady.

“What’s an Almanac?” someone asked.

“Deviant monster bastard!”

“A kind of ephemeris, miscellany or lexicon,” said the librarian.

“Oh, I see!”

“Deviant monster bastard, go take a flying root at a running boot!!”

Bert ran precisely like someone who’d stolen something. Fast and fretful. Again, he fell. Blood trickled across his lips. It tasted salty. He headed for the jetty. As he sped along, the angry gang behind him began losing breath and pace, their screaming protests eclipsed by the increasing wail of a police siren.

Despite huffing and puffing, Bert breathed a sigh of relief as he scurried over the low dunes. The tide was already returning, submerging the isolated fish beneath their fluid home. Just as he hoped, Damo was at the end of the pier, one hand on his rod, the other on his beer. Bert handed Damo the stolen book and pulled out his handkerchief to staunch the bleeding.

“D-Damo,” wheezed Bert, “b-blxi, read blxi.”

“Steady on,” said Damo. “Bleeding first, blxi second.”

“N-no time, Damien! People after me. Blxi first!”

Beyond the jetty, beyond the mangrove jacks, the police siren wailed. Damo grabbed the Almanac and gave Bert his fishing rod to hold, its line still soaring out to sea.

Bert stared in fright at the far end of the beach. A policeman walked, bent over, following Bert’s morse code blood.

“Please hurry, Damo,” begged Bert, issuing a low, husky whistle.

“Ah, here we go!” Damo exclaimed. “Ain’t seen a book like this since high school.”

Looking over Damo’s shoulder, Bert could see the BLXI entry was complete and unabridged. No abrupt period mid-line, mid-sentence, mid-stream. He swooned, anticipating the uncensored definition.

“J-just the last paragraph, Bert.”

“Hold onto your seahorses. I ain’t such a swimming reader myself.”

Bert ran a guiding finger across the lines of print and muttered in a stumbling voice, “Well, it says, hrrrmmmmphhh, Just as many primitive tribes often hold a fear and fascination for the camera, the blxi were suspicious of storytelling, believing it caught and defined the soul of the story’s characters. And because the blxi perceived all members of the tribe as identical, story characters should also be indistinguishable from each other and the blxi themselves, lest communal harmony be destroyed. Whenever a story threatened this harmony, the blxi would whistle an incantation against possible fragmentation of the group soul. According to various legends, the BLXI either went underground and became clay or went underwater and became fish.”

“That’s all there is, Bert. There is no more,” said Robert, closing the book, “Now, why don’t you tell me what this is about?”

But Bert wasn’t listening. On hearing the definition, his mind and soul felt immediately tugged, twisted, turned and tied in a perfect fisherman’s knot. As if something never known became something long forgotten, and something long forgotten became something long remembered. The past jerked into the present.

Bert’s head spun. To steady himself, he clutched at Damo’s fishing rod. But he gripped too hard. His hand could not release itself quickly enough when the reel zinged to the tune of its racing line, pulling the rod, reel, and Bert into the ocean. As he tumbled over the edge, the last thing Bert heard was a policeman shouting, “You’re under arrest, you’re under arrest!”

“I’m underwater”, thought Bert, the ocean pouring through his mouth.

The deeper he sank, the louder his ears rang. But from without, not within. Ringing pure like crystal harmoniums. His eyes searched for the music’s source as fish, thousands of fish, each wearing a red x, poured forth out of the loamy seabed like bubbles from a muddy geyser. And It was they who were ringing harmony in his ears. Whistling. Whistling in unison. Whistling come, come, swim, swim, swim away.

His body felt like jelly as the water imploded through him, swishing his saliva, thinning his gruel, bleaching his sperm, leaching his life, and blending it all with the undying ocean. His penis grew into a fishing rod as he watched himself from the cyclorama. He saw himself casting reeling sentences, burning rubrics, and endless epiphanies. He saw himself on a riverbank, unhooking camisoles and petticoats. The river of his drowning mind flowed into the ocean, where the fish still whistled at him.

A loud explosion boomed through his head. Just as quickly as the whistling started, it stopped. Bert came to, strapped and handcuffed to a stretcher, staring into the face of a drenched, dripping policeman.

Bert looked up at Damo, at the ambulance medics, and at the crowd of peering faces who had chased and finally caught up with him. He coughed. Like a jellyfish, phlegm flew through the air and plopped in the ocean.

“All I wanted was to learn to read and write and be a whole man,” spluttered Bert.

Bert looked out the window of the red and white van reverse down the pier, lights flashing. He read the word ɘɔnɒlυdmA without even trying. He glanced at the book in his left hand. He glanced at Damo’s rod thrashing in the water below. A fish frantically fought with Damo’s line. With a slam, It leapt from the water, eight fins quivering, hanging suspended. A glimpse of primordial beauty.

As its sharp teeth cut through, it paused, looked Bert in the eyes. Then headed north.

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The fish whistler © Greg Clough, 2023