He fell by the knife, they told me. They wouldn’t let me see. Too frightful, they said. Too bloody, mate.

Blood has never stopped me from skinning rabbits, though. They come out just when the currawongs seek out those hills behind those giant myrtles. Three clinks from the shadows across the darkening blue skies, then the bloody rabbits come out to tuck into my purple carrots.

Strange, they prefer them purple to orange. If there’d be any left, I’d use the purple ones for roasting; Ed liked ’em a bit crunchy. I liked the orange ones for making stew with the blue-eye trevalla that Stu used to bring home. Ed always said to him, what’s the point of fishin’ when you got a boat full of crays, son? Whatcha gonna do with the ones that are left behind after the markets, hey?

Stu dragged his feet behind Ed like the way a boy would, you know. It was hard for him to grow up – school in the morning, then off to the boat with his pa cray fishing in the arvo. Ed added one boat to another when the seafood markets took off in the west coast. Lots of crayfish out there, darl, waiting just for me, he’d say, wiping his slimy hands on his pants. It smelled bad but he wouldn’t get rid of them. He loved his pants the way he loved his boat.

What fish do you have in there? From the harvest market in Launceston, did you say?

Ahh spotted trevalla. Now that’s a fishy fish, if you know what I mean. Strong-tasting. Good for pan frying, if you like a bit of fried fish. Goes well with some chips, and I make them by hand with real potatoes, not like those bland frozen ones from Coles. Strong-tasting fish, that trevalla. Good for curries, too, not during the summer though, it’s too hot. It’s thirty-three today. Way too hot. I like it cool. We moved down to Tasmania as it got just too warm for us in Queensland. Stu was born here. Ed loved it here … he loved anywhere he could make money from fishing. We were lucky to be doing the crays at a time when restaurants wanted more of them because of all the tourists going to Arthur River.

Yeah, Arthur River ain’t as it used to be. Thirty, forty years ago, nobody wanted to live there, except for fishing and mining. ‘Twas cold, windy and bloody wet at the river banks. Lots of fishing but boats cost an arm and a leg. There was a pub there that served a decent pint. Oh yes, I loved my ale and Ed his stout. Elvis Presley kept me happy. Ah yeah, I’d do a bit of a jailhouse rock, doing my thing in front of the band, and I’d get on top of the bar counter, even with my mini skirt on. Oh, I was a bit of a catch and the guys would buy me a beer. Ed wouldn’t join me, oh no. He was a proud one, sitting in that corner table with his mates, talking about the tides, the markets, the crays.

Tell you the truth, I cared more for Elvis than Ed. I listened to all of Elvis’s records when I was younger. Oh yeah. I used to say, Ed, if only you had those sideburns like Elvis does, I would dance with you. He’d shrug it off mostly. Once he said, go get yourself a bloody Elvis then and leave me alone! But how could I? I was already married to a fisherman and his three bloody crayfish boats! But the gramophone didn’t work anymore and Stu told me to buy a computer and get music from the internet. Computer and me? I said. It’s like Mars and Earth! Try an iPad, Ma, he said. And get Spotify. Spot-it-for-why? I said quickly. He laughed so hard he started coughing. Son, those cigarettes will kill you, I said, if your sports car doesn’t, first. You stink. He’d shrug it off the way his pa did, too. All those bad habits.

They called me Missy Elvis because I had everything with the singer’s face on them. See my phone? Hang on, it was here just a second ago … always gets lost in my handbag. Ah, here it is. See the cover? Yeah, I love that picture of Elvis. Have had it for years now.

So, you say I can get his songs from the internet? This thing called YouTube, I can play off that, right? Yeah, Mavis from next-door told me about it. She comes around to see if I’m ok. My legs are a bit stiff these days, and this walking cane helps. Don’t mind the glitter on this cane. Not all that glitters is gold, oh no. Hahaha … Ed gave this to me just before he left.

He fell by the knife. Took his life, he did …

He couldn’t live without his boats and the bloody crays after the stroke. Wouldn’t want me or Stu to push him around on those wheely chairs. Didn’t want to be seen like that, not by his mates. Proud man he was, no mistake. He could walk again after some months, with one of those things to support him … what do you call it? Yeah, a walking aid. Wanted to go out fishing again. Of course, I wouldn’t let him. It was dangerous – he could fall and hurt himself anytime.

But he went out one morning, when I drove out to buy some rashers of bacon to go with the rabbit stew. The wind was wild. I wound the window down to feel it and it messed up my hair. I coiled my hair high up on my head then. Now I don’t. They tell me, at the home, to keep it short – tidier that way and easier to look after.

White caps on the sea as far as my eyes could see. The sky was so blue, like the colour of blue-eye trevalla when the light catches on that monster of a fish as you hold it up for the camera. I think of how lucky we were to live there where it was cold and blowing, far from the city … not in Sydney or Melbourne, Lord forbids, oh no, especially with all the fires raging in New South Wales and Victoria now … you heard about them too, did ya? Things have changed.

I’d give anything to be back to Arthur River, I would. But here I am at a retirement home in Launceston that has a pond and some shrubs. Pretty. But no, it’s not quite the sea in the west coast, but the pond has some fish, they say. Maybe they’ll let me fish someday. They don’t let me go near the water; not safe, they say. I never took to fishing when Ed was alive. Now I feel like I need to hold a fish in my hands ... and feel it catch its breath.

They found him at the far end of the beach, a quiet spot where we used to take Stu when he was just starting to walk, just further up the tide line. Beautiful sand there, so soft, and white, it’d hurt your eyes when the sun’s high above you. The sky so wide, you could feel yourself shrinking like a clam. Fantails dart around the sedges getting at sandflies. And the superb fairy-wrens, what a beautiful colour they are against the reeds ... so blue next to their brown lady friends. Maybe he was too proud to be found near the neighbourhood or in his own house. Used his old gutting knife on himself, he did. But that was ten years ago ...

It was Stu’s idea, really, for me to listen to Elvis to help me drift off to sleep. I keep thinking of the days we used to go out on the boat, you see, and that keeps me awake. I’d chuckle thinking of me playing rock and roll on the transistor radio so loud, to drown out the noise of the damn motor when lowering the pots into the deep to trap the crays. Ed couldn’t hear much of the engine noise in the later years; must have been going deaf already. Sometimes, the sea would be so choppy, I’d hold on to Stu tight!

But Stu went on to Hobart to work, didn’t care much for fishing, broke his pa’s heart, but that’s how it is with young people these days. Met a girl, she’s not much good for him, to be honest. She can’t cook, doesn’t like seafood ... a vegan! Can you imagine? They eat out, mostly.

After Ed was gone, Stu found me a safe home to go to, but I didn’t like it in the big city. I said no to Hobart, too noisy, and the air doesn’t smell as fresh as the wild wild west! You see, back at Arthur River, I loved the smell of the blackhearts after crushing them in my hands. There aren’t any blackhearts here ... what? Oh, sorry my dear. I’m talking about the leaves from the Tasmanian blackheart sassafras, you know, their wood is beautifully streaked with dark stains. You might have seen them in crafts, like fruit bowls, or carved tables. Their curly leaves ... they smell of sarsaparilla.

Stu found me this place here in Launceston, a little closer if I ever wanted to get back to Arthur River for a bit of a look around, he said. The girls at the home, the caregivers, they are nice.  Some are from the Philippines, Nepal, even. They call this town Launnie, not Launceston. I guess after you’ve lived here for a while, you could call it Launnie.

Once Ed came home from his walk by the river, all excited. Dashed in through the back door and yelled, hey darl, come and take a look at her. Gimme a minit will ya, I shouted, my hands deep in the dough. Nah, come now, you ain’t seen nuthin’ like this before, he insisted, so I dropped the dough and left a trail of flour dust on the floorboards all through the kitchen to the back porch. And oh my lord, there it was—the biggest crayfish Mother Mary had ever put her finger on ... she was that long, yeah, three-quarters of a metre, she was. Oh no, I’m not pulling your leg. Weighed six kilos, fair dinkum! Made it to the papers the next day: ‘Tasmanian Giant Freshwater Crayfish caught with bare hands’. She was an amazing creature, alive and twisting, despite the ropes. People dropped in on our deck to see it, and Ed couldn’t stop grinning and showing off the cuts on his arms where the spines had caught his flesh. What a circus it was!

A restaurant paid him a hundred bucks for it. Don’t get much of them giant crays now. Overfished, I suppose. The Aboriginals called it lutaralipina, I like the sound of that better. Yeah, we had lots of memories back then at Arthur River. Things were raw. Nothing stood between us and nature. Mostly, I remember the wind now. Yes, the wind ... wild and winding and penetrating. And cold. So cold, it made my eyes feel like marbles just waiting to crack.

Nothing like the weather where we grew up in Queensland, though. It was so hot and dry when we got married on the mainland. Now I hear it’s even hotter there. The sky that morning was so blue, stretching on forever and ever, without a single cloud! The narrow old chapel stood tall against that blue sky ... it was just perfect! I wore this long white dress my ma had sewed. Ed looked dandy in a brown suit and tie, and I can never forget the way he looked at me as I walked down the aisle. Then he surprised me by singing, ‘Like a river flows, surely to the sea, darling, can’t you see, some things are meant to be ...’

‘Take my hand,’ and that’s where he took my hand, just like this. ‘Take my whole life, too ... ’ and now please sing along with me, ‘For I can’t help ... falling in love with you.’ You do have a lovely voice!

Sometimes I wonder if that Elvis song was meant to be. ‘Like a river flows ... ’ How many times have I stood there, watching the river flow, from the highlands to the sea? Too many days, yet too few. Where Arthur River meets the Southern Ocean, there’s such a turmoil! The spray, the current, the energy! I never tire of watching them, even when the wind howled.

We learned to do everything on our own back then. We grew our own food, too. At first, I hated the cold, the wind lashing from the Indian Ocean, the wilderness of the Tarkine. But going out with Ed and Stu on those boats and pulling out those crays and whatever other critters that got caught in those pots gave me a sense that we could just bloody do anything. That energy. That sense of rawness. That sense of living on the edge. The edge of the world it was truly, not just a touristy thing ... I’d give anything now to get on a boat and go snaking down that river, around that amazing rainforest. But now, I hear they’re stealing the trees.

On his way back after moving me in to this retirement home, Stu went around the bend too fast, they said, over that narrow stretch on Denison Road, and they couldn’t find the car, at first. When he last spoke to me, he mentioned seeing a house up on Cataract Gorge that reminded him of our previous home on the coast. We had sold that house and the boats and all the fishing gear after Ed had died, to pay for my retirement home and a house for Stu in Hobart. The wind rushing through the trees made it hard for me to hear what my son was telling me while he drove, but I think he said get an iPad ma, and you’ll get Elvis for life. Yeah, I think that’s what he said. Or maybe he said, get an iPad ma, Elvis will keep ya alive.

They wouldn’t let me see him. Too bloody, mate.

This is an adaptation from the original version, “Elvis on my iPad”, published in Mallika Naguran’s debut story collection titled She Never Looks Quite Back (Penguin Random House SEA, 2021). For the woman who loves Elvis and once lived at Arthur River. She’s now the owner of Mallika’s iPad. 

Mallika Naguran has been concocting stories and crafting poems since she was a child. She Never Looks Quite Back is her first collection of short stories published by Penguin Random House SEA in December 2021. The stories depict themes of nature, war, migration, reconciliation, the pandemic, and love. It made the Singapore Literature Prize 2022 Shortlist. Mallika also enjoys retelling certain Asian and Western classics; she authored Ramayana: The Quest to Rescue Sita and Peter Pan in the POP! Lit for Kids series (WS Education, 2021). She is currently working on another volume of short stories, a poetry series on Tasmania, and two novels.

Mallika Naguran is the founder of Gaia Discovery (gaiadiscovery.com), an online publication on sustainable living. She is passionate about all things wild and wonderful. For more information, see her website: https://linktr.ee/MallikaTheWriter