A Sea-Chase

by Roger McDonald

  Over the next few days Ken and Wes packed up the machines for Judy’s sales trip. Ken sighed, grumbled, threw a hand back through his sun-bleached hair, laughed and took a wild breath. ‘We have a world to win,’ he said, applying Marx to getting something over the opposition. Judy was on expenses plus minimal pocket money for the week, as her being on leave with pay helped Ken get by.

  Rattler was back in the water. The day before Judy left, Wes slipped the mooring. The rusty-red sails moved over to a starboard tack and carried the two of them under the Harbour Bridge and towards Manly. They talked about a life on the water. They both said, chiming with Ken, ‘You can live on sixpence.’ They made love enough times to keep them going while separated, then came up on deck and dived into the cold blue water and clambered up the swim ladder, flicking towels at each other.

  Judy arrived at a country school mid-morning, when it was hot and bees were packing away pollen from weeds and snatching nectar from ironbarks and red gums along road borders. Introducing herself at the front office, she was told where she could set up and trundled a boxed machine along a corridor. The noise of a class without a teacher grew louder.

  ‘Cut that racket,’ she yelled as she passed a door. Nobody took any notice, but she was young, pretty and needed a hand.

  Boys came out and helped her lift the machine, opening the box, getting the legs straight. Girls hovered around her. A hardened old teacher with a mug like a convict herded them back in and bawled Judy out for being away from her desk without permission. She said she was a teacher, not a student, and when he asked what right she had to be there flogging merchandise on government property, she said, because it explained as much as she knew why she was there, in fact her only true justification, ‘Ken Redlynch.’

  Thanks to Wes, opening the box was clever. One end hinged where a holding pin was pulled. The sides lifted to form a platform top. The box became a seat if you kept your elbows tucked in or were really skinny. Getting the projector level with the butterfly nuts almost out of reach was tricky. When the lunch bell rang Judy was ready. The projector blinked and whirred. Its faint burning plastic smell gave her a headache. A few teachers came ambling in, bringing their tea mugs and paper bag lunches.

  Standing in a telephone cubicle outside the post office, Judy rang Ken.

  ‘They’ll take one, I think, but only on approval, if the rest agree, who are coming in after school,’ her voice trailed off. ‘They don’t like the butterfly nuts.’

  ‘Bugger them,’ said the inventor. ‘It’s not really all that complicated. Just tell them to use a little force to lift the plate higher, but not too much force.’

  ‘I do that, Ken. They still don’t like it.’

  ‘Who’s the Head?’

  ‘The Head’s away. They’ve got a teacher filling in. He bawled me out for being away from my desk. He thought I was a kid.’

  ‘You are, cheeky as anything. Don’t worry. See how you go this afternoon.’

  ‘He said I shouldn’t be talking my way into schools, getting privileged treatment being allowed to flog something in class time.’

  ‘That’s aimed at me,’ said Ken. ‘There’s always one of them. The gizmo sells itself.’

  A few teachers came in after school, standing around glancing at their watches, clutching their briefcases to their chests, ready to cut loose as Judy went through her routine. ‘The gizmo sells itself’ was a slogan of Tony Watson’s. He blared it on 2DU, Dubbo, selling tin openers, toasters, bottling sets, tennis balls on rubber strings, tyre-repair vulcanisers – or anything, really, that nobody wanted or already had but couldn’t resist grabbing because Tony said they should. It had worked when Ken started, a turnover of two machines a week for a month before the orders dried up. They were from teachers who liked Ken, in schools whose Heads went along with him. They were proved a minority when Judy hit the road.

  It was possible, though, even without the blinds drawn, to get a thrill, to see the images Dijana Kovačić had slaved over brilliantly clear, letters and line drawings and cut-out animals, birds, storm clouds and slit eyes looking through vegetation. Things looked fleetingly three-dimensional on the grainy screen. A slide clicked and ‘footpath’ words compounded into ‘roadway’ words becoming ‘highway’ words that carried knowledge forward in a convoy of lettering. Overlooked kids with underrated potential were the targets of Ken’s thinking, high-energy disrupters of convention with potential to burst out beneficially. Nobody could argue with that, except English teachers, psychologists and counsellors, and most of all Research Branch, all of them questioning one-two slide-click mechanics based on a hyperactive science teacher’s staggering enthusiasm.

  At four o’clock a vote was taken, led by Harold Wells, the industrial arts teacher, yea or nay. Judy had been to teachers’ college with Harold and his wife, Margaret, who was the sewing teacher. Harold was the older man in their group, a plumber aged twenty-six coming into vocational teaching from under his plumber-father’s thumb. Harold and Margaret were the first to get married, and Judy had thrown confetti all over them at Ebenezer Church. Judy was hoping they would swing a purchase. Margaret shot her a glance and left the room before the vote.

  ‘No sale heading west sorry,’ Judy’s telegram to Ken read, sent from the post office just before it closed. She could not face him. She would rather not ring him again at all. Back in Sydney she would tell Ken she was done with the Mark II International Educator. He would be furious. He never gave up on anything. Wes never gave up either, through an inner stubbornness that was like a rock in nature. So how could Judy herself ever give up with two such mighty examples leading her? The teaching machine itself, the bloody junk-box monstrosity – beautiful on the outside, clunky within – was teaching her how, that’s how.

  What a great big cold beer would be like, Judy thought vengefully, wishing she was back with Wes having their welcome-home dive into the love bunk for their hello fuck before coming up on deck and looking around in the evening light, a cold beer in hand, then slipping their sarongs and diving overboard, risking a shark attack, not caring because the point of life was its pinnacle moments.

  She rang Wes, inserting silver coins clunk into the coin slot. Then another and another as she waited. The works’ office on Cockatoo Island, where he was repairing a boat, went off looking for him. They put her through to the mess room where he was just coming out of the shower amazed and happy she was taking the trouble to track him down. He did not like it, though, when she said she was going out west to a place she often talked about, Blindale, and to Silver Springs to see her father on the way back, before facing Ken.

  ‘What, you’ll be away longer?’

  ‘Four days if I drive like a bat out of hell.’

  ‘Don’t kill yourself but Jesus, Jude, can you stand it? Blindale?’

  He used that word Blindale with the full force of what he understood it meant, which was very little but enough to tinge it with uncertainty or even a grudge. For once and forever Judy loved Wes, but he was not her first great love. That had come to her through Blindale or rather a sequence of one thing connected to another that started from Blindale. As an underage teenager she was wrenched from the arms of a boyfriend, Warwick Mickless, and sent to boarding school in Sydney by her aghast parents. And what that experience told her was that love could go but not die, something she tried to tell Wes, whispered to him tracing the words on his back with her fingernail till it hurt, I Love You.

  The unsold boxes were heavy lugging. Nobody was around to help her. She had three in the car, one on the front seat and two in the back. The gear lever was blocked and she drove in first gear around to her motel. She planned to unload the machines at Harold and Margaret’s for temporary storage and get on the way to Blindale first thing in the morning. She honestly wished she did not have this plan except she could not face Ken yet, telling a man she admired, revered, loved in a kind of way, what nobody else would, not even Wes. That his machines were duds, and always had been. Also she
had made a promise to Tony Watson, Mum Watson, and Pop Watson to join them at Blindale while she was on the road. And besides which she wanted to.

  Walking from her motel room down to the pub to meet Margaret Wells, Judy was followed by stray dogs and eyed by townspeople sitting on their verandas in the hot late afternoon. There was a levee bank at the end of the street, bulldozed against the flood of a billabong. Easy to feel a small town strangling you if you lived in one. Scrambling up the levee bank, looking out across tin rooftops to the dark scrub streaming westwards, Judy felt she was gliding over a sunken world. The Royal Crown Hotel had teachers’ cars parked up and down along the kerb. Friday night was party night all over the Riverina, and the gathering point tonight after the pub was to be a party at a teacher’s house. Small towns were made for getting away from by teachers at weekends but escapes weren’t always an option. The country was too big. Judy was from a small town herself, or rather from that blasted woody-weeded station way to the north, Silver Springs, out from a small, almost nonexistent straggly settlement on the railway line and the long straight road between Nyngan and Bourke. If Judy had just told Wes that she was looping up to see her father he would have been all right. But he could not see much sense in why she gave up time with him to go farther west to Blindale, to spend time with Tony Watson, a name that was summed up when Wes rolled the word out, lazy as a lizard’s disdain for the fate of a bush fly, Blindale.

  The lounge bar was crowded when Judy walked in. Margaret Wells wore a scalloped, artfully stitched low neckline. Nervously pretty, with dark eyes always just a bit agitated, she had something she wanted to tell Judy between themselves and guided her over to a corner shelf where they placed their drinks.

  ‘There’s something the matter with someone,’ she said.

  Judy looked around at Harold at the bar.

  ‘It’s not him,’ said Margaret. ‘I can’t fault him. Harold does everything for me. Anything I ask.’

  ‘You’re lucky, then.’

  ‘Well, it does drive me mad. But anyway, our two little girls are precious – our house is bought, paid for, not rented – we are settled in, in this lovely town – but now, oh gosh, it’s me – I’m in love with someone else.’

  ‘You are not.’

  ‘I didn’t ask to be. But I am.’ At teachers’ college Margaret was the one who always had to have what she wanted to have, and that had been first and last Harold.

  ‘Does Harold know?’ Margaret shook her head. ‘Then I shouldn’t know either, not if Harold doesn’t know. Don’t tell me anything.’ Judy mimed blocking her ears.

  Margaret bit a fingernail with the snicking action she used breaking cotton thread. ‘Stumpy’s a doctor in Dubbo. I’m mad about him. It’s wearing me out.’

  She looked exhausted and elated. Judy told her about Wes.

  They left the pub for the teachers’ party house where bowls of spaghetti, saucepans of bolognese sauce, dishes of grated cheese were spread on a table. Bottles of wine were uncorked and sleeping children placed on cushions, pillows and couches. The two-year-old twins of Harold and Margaret Wells slept top to tail. Cars were parked on dry grass among thistles. There must have been fifty or sixty people in the house drinking from glasses and tumblers, empty jam jars, water jugs and flower vases. Some had driven hours from other towns. Couples were dancing to a reel-to-reel tape Harold had set up, played through stereo speakers that rumbled like a bomb going off every time someone stomped the floor. Judy went outside and sat on the veranda steps. Harold sat down beside her. Margaret was dancing with a curly-haired, feisty man wearing tight jeans and a blue silk shirt.

  ‘Tell me,’ said Harold. ‘How’s that Dubbo friend of yours, Tony Watson, the one who does the voices – Horace the Plague Locust, Just Orf of the Train and Who Brung You. Does he do autographs?’

  ‘I don’t offer encouragement,’ said Judy.

  ‘I hope you didn’t mind my vote went against you with that machine of yours. It’s a dog’s breakfast.’

  She remembered Harold’s open-faced look at his wedding. The look of a man who’d won a great prize. Now he looked angry and crushed.

  ‘No, I don’t mind.’

  ‘We’re always in the car going somewhere.’ Harold’s voice whined a bit. ‘Lately it’s Dubbo. She does the costumes, the sewing and stitching for amateur dramatics. It’s a three-hour drive. Four hours to save petrol. Or it’s Dubbo for conferences and syllabus committee gee-ups, and whatever have you, and she stays overnight while I babysit. Ask your friend Tony Watson what’s going on in Dubbo for me, will you? I always remember you said he knew everything up there, or so you said, laughing a lot together.’

  ‘You never liked him,’ said Judy.

  ‘So what,’ said Harold. ‘Nobody does. Are they rooting, that’s all I want to know. People do know, you know. Then there’s the fool who doesn’t.’ He paused, looking doleful. Then he looked over his shoulder. ‘That’s him over there dancing with her. Look at them going at it.’

  The next day everyone had hangovers, including Judy. She called in to say goodbye and ask if she could store the machines in their shed until they were picked up some other time. Harold checked the Mini’s oil and water while Margaret napped. He was brighter as what had bothered him last night did not seem as real in daylight. Anyway, the doctor, Stumpy, was gone back to Dubbo with the carload of nurses he’d arrived with. Harold found a waterbag and wired it to the metal frame Judy’s father had welded to the bumper bar of the Mini. He filled the waterbag and tipped it back, slaking his morning-after thirst before hooking it on. If Judy did not get away in time she would not get to Blindale before dark. Blindale was on the Louth road south of Bourke and a huge drive. She was going via Wilcannia and was prepared to camp if she needed to. Somehow she wanted to. It was mad but what she longed for, time to herself alone in nature. Harold found her a billy, a foam rubber mattress and a swag.

  Judy drove all day, peering forward in the hot, dry light, gripping the hard steering wheel of the tiny car, bouncing over ruts, potholes and corrugations. She had almost reached Blindale by last light but not quite. She was glad of it as she pulled off beside the river, the Darling, that had brought floods down from Queensland when she was a child. She stepped out into the dust, stretched her hands above her head and turned around, twisting her hips. The Darling was a deep trench with what looked like a muddy creek at its bottom with river red gums on the banks. The air was heat-crackling dry, with corellas around a bend making music. Ducks crossed the clay-coloured water, a frogs’ chorus began. Judy gathered sticks and made a fire. A truck went rumbling past.

  When it was dark, with stars flashing white among the twigs and branches of the red gums, she listened for the truck coming back. It did not, but her ears strained for sound. She could have driven on, another hour and a half wiggling and weaving to Blindale on the rutted backroad, headlights peering dimly, and might have done, enjoying a shower by now under the tankstand and resting her bones from jolting around in the cranky Mini, and washing the incessant pale dust from her hair that sparked with electricity when she combed it. Might have done, but she wanted to give herself a test.

  Judy had never, ever camped out alone in her life without feeling at some point in the night terrified. Not just alone either. The way Judy was brought up at Silver Springs meant that sleeping in the bush without a roof over her head happened a lot. As a girl she was out under starlight with her mother or with her father in the flatbed truck, over that crisis time in her parents’ lives involving her mother’s science career, until they gave up on her getting in the way of what they needed to sort out and called in the Salvos to temporarily take care of her.

  The Salvos were the ones who took her to Mum Watson, who thought raising a girl at Silver Springs that was virtually a camp, a girl sleeping in the bush, given a mattock and a dunny roll by clever, overly clever, parents to wander around in the dark doing her business, was the limit. All right for working men, blacks, itinerants and swagmen but no
t for a little splinter of a wide-eyed innocent Orphan Annie.

  Judy knew she was letting Mum Watson down pulling up short of Blindale, but she also knew she would have to supply all the conversation if Tony was not there yet, and she was not sure if he would be until tomorrow. He had the Dubbo show to commentate on. And when Judy talked to Mum Watson without Tony she got critical. They both did, growing snappy.

  Judy had a can of baked beans warmed against the fire, one side bubbling and burning, and the side away from the fire cold as she spooned it up. Pop Watson would have his best home-brewed beers broken out from the cool room, the three- or four-year-old ales saved for an occasion. Judy had the hair of the dog in the form of a Reschs DA at air temperature, black stump cool she called it, holding the long-necked bottle at arm’s length before taking a swig.

  She was all right getting out of herself by herself. She missed Wes but did not feel deprived. She loved the alone and together feeling that being in love gave her, or somehow brought up, like a topic in her blood, an intensity of completion presently fuelled by alcohol. That taste was formed early. The first time Tony ever drank beer was under Pop’s watchful eye when they made a return visit when they were older teenagers. Judy came next and was given a shandy. The Salvos would have had a fit if they had known.

  Now there would be the two of them not quite giving up on her, Mum and Pop watching for Judy’s headlights coming through the orange trees, Pop with a big hand on Mum’s bony shoulder as they peered through the window glass wearing their pyjamas, dressing gowns and slippers with bunion slits in them like the eyes of old eagles.