People who’d never met before looked out to sea, then turned to one another with puzzled expressions on their faces. They looked out past the pier to the churning water. Some knew it well, having lived in the area since childhood. Others were holiday makers of one sort or another.

            In their faces was a consciousness that they ought to be feeling sad, but the strangeness of this particular drowning held back sadness and confused it with other feelings. 

            When the tide was out and the sea calm, onlookers marvelled that it could have happened. The end of the pier wasn’t all that far from shore, not far from where a person could stand upright.

            When the tide was in, a high swell running and a strong south-westerly, they shook their heads in disbelief that anyone could have contemplated entering the sea just there.

            The strongest rumour was that the man had committed suicide.

            The news reports said very little, simply stating that a man had drowned off Point Lonsdale pier, and giving the date and time. TV crews came, but did not stay long. A drowning was news for a day or two, but not uncommon along that stretch of coast. There were warning signs, pictorial signs for those who did not speak English.

            There were no messages from family and friends; no flowers were left at the end of the pier. A couple of local fishermen were interviewed, who’d been on the pier that day. They said to the reporter that they’d already told the police everything they knew, which wasn’t much. They knew the pier and regularly fished there. Others came to try their luck. On any given day, there could be two or three whom the locals had never seen before. On a good day, during the holiday season, ten or more. On the day the man drowned, there had been only the two of them. They were both retired. They fished because it was what they liked to do. They knew the sea’s power and unpredictability. They stood well back from the railing to cast their lines.

            There had been a thick sea mist that day. They hadn’t seen the man until he was almost up to them. He’d carried no fishing line or tackle, only a packet of cigarettes. He hadn’t spoken, but thrown the cigarettes into the water, then himself.

            One of the fishermen, whose name was Joe, had thrown the lifebelt after him. The man was soon lost to sight. They’d hurried to their car and phoned the police and coastguard.

            In the absence of information, people filled in details, imagined and invented them. The police weren’t talking to the media. It could be that they knew very little; it could be that what they knew they decided to withhold.

            The two fishermen had waited in the carpark for the police to arrive. They’d heard the search and rescue helicopter and the deep diesel engine of the coastguard boat. The sea mist was still thick; you could hardly even see the lighthouse. When the police had finished with them, they went home.

            They were taciturn men, men of few words. They would not have spoken to the reporter had they not been the only witnesses. They would not have talked about it had not their wives demanded explanations and, after their wives, the townspeople whose speculations made up for the men’s lack of willingness to speak.

            The cigarette packet was a mystery. It contained illegal drugs was one story. But the hole in this story was – a man might throw away a packet containing illegal drugs, but he would not jump into a raging sea after it unless he was mad.

            He must have been mad was a popular conclusion. There were far easier ways to kill yourself.

            One thing the two men had not mentioned to the reporter, but had told their wives, was that, running back along the pier, they had seen a seal. Seals hung about the pier from time to time and wild weather didn’t bother them. The mist was thick, but the men had looked straight down into the water when they were almost at the shore, and both had seen the seal.

            They’d only caught a glimpse of it. Neither had thought about it for the next few hours. What relevance could a seal have to the drowning? But that evening the memory came back. This was after phone conversations with their grown-up children, after they’d eaten the food their wives prepared though they did not feel hungry.

            The memory of the seal, seen suddenly through a gap in the mist, a hole that could only be found by looking down over the railing, opened up questions they didn’t want to think about. What if the seal had been swimming off the end of the pier when the man had jumped? What would he have made of it? The seals that visited the pier were males; the females lived at a breeding colony far to the east. Had the seal been trying to tell them something? No, that was fanciful, ridiculous.     

 

          The onlookers kept coming – not that there was anything to see – anything different that is. When the police tape was removed from the pier, people walked to the end of it and back. They stared down over the railing, in the clear light, in the blue days. Even at high tide, the sea was calm. There was mockery in that, for those who looked for signs of mockery in ordinary events. The carpark remained full. Visitors came and went. Some walked up to the lighthouse, saying to each other, ‘Now we’re here, we might as well.’ 

          None left flower tributes. The man’s identity remained a mystery.     

          The two fishermen who’d witnessed the drowning avoided the area when it was packed with sightseers. They sat at the end of the Queenscliff pier, grumping over their tackle boxes. It didn’t suit them; it was not the same.  

          They volunteered nothing about the drowning, not to the men who habitually fished off Queenscliff pier, those for whom it was a second home. Those who’d seen the news reports – and most of them had – tried asking questions and were met with frowns and silence. They gave up, understanding that the witnesses did not wish to discuss what had happened.

          Late at night, in their minds’ eyes, the two men saw the towering waves, the clenching mist, the spark of white as the cigarette packet went into the sea, and then the man, a shadow shape over the railings, out and down.

          As suddenly as they had come, the sightseers left. It was almost as if there’d been a common agreement. One Monday morning, the fisherman who was called Joe, said to his friend Ginger – they lived only two streets apart – ‘Why don’t we give it a go?’

          Ginger nodded in agreement. He fetched his rod and bait box from the garage. They almost always took Ginger’s car because Joe’s wife was a woman who kept her days full of activities, and she liked to drive. On the occasions when Ginger’s wife needed the car, they made some other arrangement, but these occasions were rare. 

          They walked the length of the empty pier and put their bait boxes down under the shelter at the end. An overhead shelter this was, and not very big, useful when it rained, but no protection from the spray when a big swell was running, and no protection from the wind. They moved around each other carefully, placing their boxes on either side of the wooden bench, preparing their lines.

          They cast well away from each other, knowing from long habit where each preferred to cast when the wind was from the east and the tide on its way out.

          Joe was the first to speak. ‘Quiet out here, then.’

          ‘Well, it’s Monday,’ Ginger said.

          ‘Still, you’d expect a couple.’ Joe looked out over the railing in the direction the man had jumped.

          The lifebelt had been replaced on its hook. ‘Funny that,’ said Ginger.

          ‘What’s funny?’

          ‘They found the belt, but not the body.’

          ‘Well, it floats.’

          ‘What d’you reckon was in that packet of cigarettes?’

          Joe said, answering not this question, but an easier one, ‘It wouldn’t’ve lasted long.’

          These days there were very few stretches of coastline where a body might have washed up and lain undetected. A helicopter would have found it if searchers on the ground had not.

          Neither Joe nor Ginger had expressed surprise at this in the days following the drowning. The current had taken the body out to sea. It had been eaten by a shark. Who knew?

          Both men, late at night, had wondered if they’d imagined the cigarette packet. They knew they hadn’t imagined the man. The man, whoever he was, had chosen that time and that place for some reason, perhaps because he had wanted the drowning to be as near certain as possible; he hadn’t wanted to give himself a chance. When he got to the end of the pier and found himself not alone, as he’d expected, he’d pulled the cigarette packet out of his pocket as some kind of gesture or excuse.

          A shallow easterly was blowing; it would never whip the waves into towers. A mild easterly lifted the edges of their jackets, these two men who had witnessed a drowning. It gave the lie to storms. It came from across the bay, from land on the other side, houses and roads and the never-ending spread of suburbs.

          The man had come running like a bat out of hell, though the mist was so thick they hadn’t seen him until he was right upon them.

           Joe and Ginger kept their measured distance. They stood well back from the railing. Never in living memory had a wave washed right over the end of the pier, but this was not to say it couldn’t happen. No European had passed the story down, and of course before Europeans there had been no pier. The people who lived there had gathered shellfish and trapped fish between the rocks.

           Joe and Ginger saw no reason to stop fishing off the pier. It wasn’t as though their lives had been threatened, though they’d had a look at death. They knew one shape that sudden death could wear.

            On that day of a mild easterly, they saw the seal again. Ginger saw it first, and pointed. Joe followed the direction of his hand.

            The seal rolled over, lifted its right flipper and then dived. Neither man was so daft as to believe that it was waving to them.

            The seal was young. This had not been apparent on the day of the drowning, but it had probably not long left the breeding colony. In August their mothers kicked them out to make way for the newborns. About a year they had in the colony, to grow in strength, or perhaps simply to survive. This one looked in good condition; he looked as though he’d learnt to fend for himself. Joe and Ginger silently wished him well. It made them embarrassed, and they didn’t look at each other as they walked back to Ginger’s car.

            The seal had witnessed the drowning. Joe and Ginger were suddenly sure of this. In all that heave of current and wild water, a wild creature had appeared. Perhaps the seal had seen divers on his journey from the breeding ground, divers from boats near to where male seals congregated in Port Phillip Bay. However it had come about, Ginger and Joe were sure the seal had been there, at that moment. They had been above the water and the seal below it. Feet first the man had jumped, a long dark shape. Perhaps he’d struggled for air. Perhaps he’d see the lifebelt Joe had thrown. The current had taken him away from the pier. Perhaps he’d gone on struggling, perhaps not.

            Young male seals were curious, adventurous. Those who made it to the pier had survived the sharks and orcas who preyed on them, who waited just outside the breeding colony, knowing they must leave. They’d survived the treacherous currents of Port Phillip Heads.

            Joe and Ginger hoped that this one wouldn’t stay. They didn’t mind seals, but quite a number of the fishermen disliked them, called them thieves when they were only doing what they’d always done, catching fish to eat. They hoped that this one would live around the rocks far out in the bay. It wasn’t unknown for seals to swallow baited hooks, and, even if this one didn’t, the pier was too close to humans.

            Most of the regulars came back over the next few weeks, and at the weekends families who had not fished on the pier before, Middle Eastern and South Asian families, who spoke to each other in their own languages, and were polite to Joe and Ginger, who did not like children running around on the end of the pier. They tried to warn the parents, speaking slowly and with hand gestures. If any of the children fell in, who would save them? It didn’t look as if the parents could swim well, maybe not at all. Would they have looked at the pictorial signs and known what they meant?

            They doubtless all had television, but was their English good enough to follow news reports?

            Joe had thrown the lifebelt, but he could have jumped in after the man. He could have grabbed him and somehow dragged him back to the pier. A few strokes would have done it. They could have jumped together. Younger, fitter men would have tried.

            Joe and Ginger stared at one another with this thought in their minds. It had come to Joe at night, and he was sure it had come to Ginger too, that they’d been faced with a test and they had failed. Furthermore – and this upset Joe almost more than failure – the seal knew it. That young animal, at ease and comfortable in the ocean, had seen what had happened and had judged him. Of course it was absurd.

            He wished the seal would go away. Joe wanted a return of the easeful passing of days, time simply to breathe in and out, relaxation befitting a man fast approaching old age, with grown-up children and grandchildren.

            He would die when his time came. He was not afraid of that. What he was afraid of, what disturbed his nights, was the eruption of a test, a challenge, in front of him, before his eyes, demanding action that he couldn’t or had been unwilling to take.

            Joe went down to the pier late at night. He didn’t tell Ginger he was going; he did not tell anyone. It was a moonlit night. He didn’t bother with a torch. He walked all the way. His wife had taken the car and gone to stay overnight with her sister, who was in poor health. She did this every couple of months. His peace of mind had been taken from him, and walking was better than lying awake.

            Joe thought that, if he tried to explain to his wife, she would tell him it was ridiculous to blame himself.

            He walked on, buttoning up his jacket. The water would be freezing still; it never warmed up before mid October. He’d never been much of a swimmer and only went in on the hottest days.

            The seal was there. In some part of himself, Joe had known it would be.

The tide was on its way out and the shorebreak small. Perhaps the seal had decided to make the rocks near the pier its home base, rocks that were submerged at high tide, but now becoming exposed.

The seal was sitting upright, clearly visible in the moonlight. The great white stalk of the lighthouse was off to one side, the pier ahead. All the landmarks of his life were there. He needed only to put one foot in front of the other. There was no storm to fight against; there were no crashing waves. He needed only to walk out to the end and then keep going.

            Joe didn’t know why the man had jumped, and he would never know. He didn’t know what the seal had seen, and he would never know that either. If the seal had come to tell him something, it was perhaps no more than that life went on. The seal was young, but already understood that to survive meant facing danger, overcoming danger, if not every day, then most days.

            ‘Go away!’ he felt like shouting. ‘You’ve made your point young fella, now go and find a rock in the middle of the bay. Humans will never be your friends. They’ll cause you trouble, more than trouble, if you hang around here.’

            Joe raised his hand in a kind of half salute. ‘Good night,’ he said, and then, ‘Good hunting’, before he turned around and went back home.