When he was young, around eight or nine, my uncle became obsessed with finding Harold Holt. He didn’t really know any better. He would go into the butcher’s or the hardware store and when people asked him what he was doing, this eight year old kid, he’d say “I’m looking for Harold Holt.” For a while people found it funny.

It was only a year later, after his younger brother was killed in a car accident, that my uncle started to get more serious about finding Harold Holt. He started reading about tides and undertows. He started walking up and down the beach where Harold Holt had disappeared. My uncle didn’t live that far away and he’d ride his bike there on weekends, taking with him in a backpack a pair of binoculars, a towel, a paperback, and two sandwiches.

He stopped paying attention in school, and teachers started sending home notes that his behaviour was becoming odd and that instead of doing school work he was drawing tide charts on maps and making circles with his compass that read, in the middle of them, “Body May Be Here.” At no point had my uncle ever thought that Holt was still alive. Because of this obsession with death he was hated by almost of all of his classmates and some teachers. He was left alone though, and most people disliked him in the same way they disliked bad weather.

The only person exempt from this feeling was Mrs Swann, his second grade teacher, who admitted later to her friends that now and then she would have visions of holding my uncle’s head under water either up to the point that he had lost consciousness or drowned. These visions would strike her with a disturbing regularity. While she was writing on the blackboard, while standing in line at the supermarket, even, once, while making love to her husband, her mind would suddenly stop its normal thoughts and fill with the sight of my uncle’s face, silently screaming under clear blue water. This was something that she hoped would pass.

By age eleven my uncle had started to become more secretive with his obsession. At school he was still a mediocre student, but he was more attentive, and teachers said that at least, now, he was trying. He would only go to the beach now and then, so as not to cause suspicion, and any chart drawing or research was relegated to a torchlight under his blanket in the middle of the night.

The end of this searching came when my uncle bought a dead pig from his friend Troy Ferrari, whose father worked at a meat warehouse. My uncle had been reading how a new scientific development had led to human hearts being replaced by pig hearts due to their similarity. In the middle of the night he and his friend carried the pig to the beach on a cart hooked to the back of one of their bicycles. They waited for dawn and then floated it out into the ocean on a surfboard and flipped it in. He had tied four reels of fishing line together and attached this to one of the pig’s haunches for purposes of tracking the body. For further accuracy of the simulation the pig had been dressed in a full body swimsuit. The pig’s body had been missing its head.

As a means of tracking the body, the four reels of fishing line weren’t effective, because one of the knots snapped while he was running down the shoreline, like he was holding onto a kite in a storm. A few days later the pig’s body washed up on a beach three kilometres away and was found in the morning by a woman walking her dog. By then the effects of the ocean had distorted the body into a hideous thing and the woman had called the police, thinking that in the swimsuit it might have been a person. There were news reports in the paper, a small police investigation, and my grandparents sent my uncle to a psychiatrist. At no point did anyone confuse the pig for Harold Holt.

After this my uncle gave up the search, but in life he never seemed able to settle. When he was eighteen he joined the army, but was dishonourably discharged a year later after buying cocaine from two undercover police officers. He travelled around, and then came home and enrolled in university. He got a pretty good job later, working for the deaf society, but he’s been divorced three times and still drinks pretty heavily.

The last time my uncle was over at my house we watched the tennis together, one night, and he was off his head on antidepressants and making all these jokes that weren’t really funny, but he’d still smile at them, the lines in his face crinkling, like the wake of a boat in water.