Seamonsters

Aunt Peggy had a dog called Suzy which Mum described as neurotic. So I knew that word before I was ten. Suzy was a small black yapping thing. She was touchy but there was a kind of incurable darkness beneath that tip that worried me. Peggy was Matron of Nurses at the Townsville General Hospital but also owned a house at Bingil Bay. We went there for a few Easters in a row and maybe some May holidays. It was magic.

I mean that, magic by crown standard. Things happened at Bingil Bay or on the way there that seemed to be from a weirder world than the controlled settlement in Townsville. My brother Greg saved a boy from sharks while surfing. My sister Rina was chased through the forest by cassowaries. Out there in the dark of the copse of pines that obscured the house from view by anyone on the road, spoken of but never seen, was a giant moth. And once, there was a seamonster. It was on the news.

I heard Dad tell someone that Bingil Bay was only a few hours drive from Townsville. I still don't know if that's true but the stretch applied to all time and distance by a child turned it into a day's journey. It was probably a few memories compounded. Anyway, I clearly remember stopping by the beach and lighting a campfire on the sand. Dad saw me finishing a can of softdrink and told me to throw it into the fire. If we waited only a little we'd see it turn molten red like lava.

The seamonster had been reported on the radio. The real one. The ABC. The woman reading the story mentioned pictures in small local papers. It had been sighted off the North Queensland coast between Airlie Beach and Mission Beach. That's where we were. I listened from my usual position driving in the car at night, curled up in a blanket in the back, staring through the window at the clouds and the stars as they raced above. The  newsreader had the cooling voice of a kind teacher. She must have been right.

I pictured the monster as an unhelpful black and white photo in a newspaper. A mess of tentacles burst out in a tangle from a helmet like head. It had an angry face, dead or even still alive it glared pure hatred at whichever red faced idiot fisherman had stolen it from its home. It was a king. The fisherman was a thief.

I never saw the picture but didn't need to. Dad talked about a great ray that had lived from the time of the ancient kingdoms and was so powerful that nothing could damage or injure it. So it just kept living. Living and living and living until it was no longer like the other sea creatures which had long become the dirt of the ocean floor but a modern monstrosity, moving as a great destroying shadow just below the surface of the clear blue Pacific.That same Pacific hissed and whispered behind us in the dark, a lightless black expanse of unknowable hungry evil. I fell asleep before the softdrink tin turned red. My dreams were black and white, smothering like waves and sounding like a huge distant roar.

Everyone was talking about the monster at the Bingil Bay house. Some of us were scared. Dad loudly told Mum he thought it must have been a dugong seen by a drunk at midnight. Lots of laughter. But I know that I went out to the cliff and looked.

A fairly recent version of The Monsoons featured a literal seamonster, heralded by an axe-bearing trawlerman (who was real but I got to the Island after his appearance). But the more I thought of it the more I remembered how I preferred not seeing the picture of the monster of the northern coast.

The sea of the bay was shining from the moonlight and the cold air of Easter was pleasing and fresh. I looked into water that rippled all the way to the edge of the world and knew that under it lurked a power that if it chose could break the surface, climb the rocks and the slime of the red mud cliff and wrap its angry tentacles around our hearts each and every one, gasping in our sleep until the end when there would be no more sound and we would be the sea.