Skimming stones at Cape Leveque, two hundred kilometres north of Broome, near King Sound, with king tides, the ocean blood red in the evening, sand like white flesh, and an iodine sky. It’s a strange sort of place on the interface of land and reason, where every stranger and every strange thing is accommodated in the tourist season.
In short, unnerving. You can hear your own heartbeat.
Boy Dog, the mad staffie, was at my feet, farting, and chewing on rocks that lolled at the water’s edge. The stones I skipped seemed to float for a moment before the sea swallowed them up.
A flash of white caught my eye. Salt spray I thought, or the breeze on the sand, but a second glance revealed a white shirt on an old man, rolled up at the sleeves (the shirt, not the man), flickering in the dying sun as he too slung stones into the sea.
He spat them out with a fillip of his forearm, and each flat stone skipped a long, long, long way into the sea before somewhere presumably it stopped.
I drew close and watched and thought, This guy is a master. He skims the stones so far I cannot see.
I said, ‘Nice technique,’ and Boy Dog farted.
‘Nah, losing me touch.’ His voice was weathered sand and blown about, and he loosed another stone.
‘Got one out there once.’ He pointed to the horizon where a freighter sank from sight like a slow stone.
Oh dear, I thought, a nutter, and Boy Dog let fly.
The old man shot a pebble after the ship, its smooth surface smacking the vermilion sea like stone on marble. Did I hear it strike shipside, or was that just my inner ear?
‘Perfect round it was. Perfect smooth.’
God knows why I attempt to reason with folks like this, but I said, ‘There is no perfection. The circle as a concept of perfection in Platonic thought, yes, but in practice, well, a whole team of scientists stuffed up the Hubble telescope.’
Boy Dog squatted in the water like a fat cane toad and dodged his eyes like stones between us.
Two nutters.
The old man said, ‘I measured it against the sun.’
Round eyes, round sun, round stone, round world: he had conviction without malice. I felt my patronage more fetid than Boy Dog’s farts.
‘‘Yep,’ he winked, ‘better go an’ pick ’em up, eh.’
And he splashed out on to the shallows and stepped out for the horizon.
I sat on the shore beside the canine toad and watched the old man wander across the water, like it was wood he was walking on, his feet tapping the darkening tide, his figure diminishing with distance. Now and then I saw him bend – to retrieve a stone – and then turn and wend his way to another.
He had a steady gait – it was a still tide – and his white shirt in the red dusk grew crepuscular, like salt spray.
* * * * * * *
Photo by Micah N, C/- Unsplash
