Before long Harold was flattered to find his brain could take in more than he knew it could. ‘The bloke’s a commo,’ he remembered Judy saying. ‘Or was once.’ Did it matter, though, what he was, now that they were seeing a lot of him and Dijana? Harold grinned. It was good. They were partners in business. Harold’s family were old-fashioned Labor inclining to DLP. Wait till they learned their boy was hanging out down Balmain way with pinkos and New Left silvertails with the aim of making money. The talk went on. ‘Tactical alliances are the name of the game … just as, to make something worthy of the world, and get rid of the bosses, worker ownership springs up like mushrooms overnight.’
Ken felt excited building new reality, it so rarely satisfyingly happened except in places he only heard about, Yugoslavia or Cuba, in the depths of Soweto with liberationist teachers, or in Paulo Freire’s Brazil. Ken’s teaching machines had proved the world unworthy. Or was it vice versa, while ‘worker ownership’ was a phrase capturing the Linton Simmons signatories and advancing his attitudes, bankrolled, into new places. Cap it all with that school-dream on Whisker Martin’s clifftop eleven acres on the Shipley Plateau Road, with its three or four pisé dongas potential dirt-floor classrooms or dorms. In summary, profit promised the paradigm where Ken’s radical economics failed him.
‘In Spain the factions were dismal,’ Ken went on. ‘Five hundred were necessarily shot. In the Great Patriotic War alliances won victory. In the anti-Vietnam War movement, look right here, look at the groundswell we had, and won with. In this room are many of you who won that day,’ he declared, to a modest scattering of applause. ‘Architects, housewives, teachers, students, workers, tradesmen. Spilling onto the streets.’ He gave another, resounding example, ‘SANT: SCIENTISTS AGAINST NUCLEAR TESTING.’
‘It’s the bitch’s mother he’s talking about.’ Dijana jabbed Margaret in the ribs, her gin-and-tonic breath sweetly close.
‘Stop that,’ giggled Margaret. ‘Enough.’
About the arrangements Ken made with Wes over Rattler and the proving cruise to Queensland Judy knew nothing until they were finalised. She worked in the electoral office as a temp, had a boating world evolved separate from Wes’s in harbour races, in yachts crewed by women, slim, dancing twenty-eight footers. During the brief time left, often under lights, she helped Wes on tricky boat work jobs. She led a life with Wes in the cliff-side flat, socialising with friends and neighbours. But here came the poisonous worm. All that time Judy presumed Rattler was in the water, she was not. She was out of the water having work done. Wes did not always tell her everything he was doing on Ken’s boat, that symbol of Judy’s possession.
Wes set off early one morning from Rushcutters Bay in a dory with a single-cylinder diesel inboard motor sounding a steady donk-donk across the misty water. He took towlines and fenders, mallets, pinch bars, and to help him, Linton Simmons.
They hammered away chocks holding Rattler to a slipway and she went sliding down into the water, swept around bow to shore, and jerked her towrope and settled. They changed roles and Linton cranked the tender’s diesel. Wes stood at the tiller of Rattler and asked Linton to move ahead, taking up the slack, and they started away from that side of the harbour, going under the Bridge to Rushcutters Bay.
Rattler was sitting there on a cradle, on the hard at Rushcutters Bay, when Judy came to look.
‘She’s getting ready to go,’ said Linton.
‘Where?’
‘Hasn’t Wes told you?’
Judy was tearful as she walked around, looking up at the craft from underneath. She had not been told. They were sailing to Queensland, Wes, Linton and Ken. The anti-fouled hull was the belly of a whale. The proud bow, with its gleaming pulpit crest of stainless steel, was a seabird turned away from her. Tins of food in cardboard boxes – baked beans, braised steak and onions, packets of Vita-Weat biscuits and dried soup – were ready to be carried up a ladder and stacked aboard. Judy shouldered a carton, feeling small and insignificant, neglected. Whales ate krill, a pretty well microscopic protein; she was way down at that level being consumed by the plans of others.
Oof, a carton went into the cockpit, spilling cans everywhere. It was peculiar, what she felt small about, and afraid of. When she was down in the saloon out of sight stacking things away she had a real cry. It was not so much that she felt left out, why she snuffled into a shirtsleeve. One day her time would come on the open water with Wes, sailing the islands. She did not mind, either, that Wes was involved in arrangements with Ken she did not know about. Not quite, despite Ken looking at her coldly when she appeared. Surely there could never be a wholly trusting friendship again, with Dijana’s sniping breaking trust and Ken so childish and sullen when thwarted. No, to be honest, what Judy felt small about, and afraid of, was the whole world getting on with itself without her. The whole world as it existed, rolling through space, the sea on one side, land on the other. If it was too big a world for one person, whose else was it except one person’s to claim. With this thought Judy discovered a vengeful side to her love for Wes. With the knowledge of wholeness came a feeling of separation. The two of them were competitors against each other in the push to be equals.
A few days later Judy gripped the side rail of a launch and watched Rattler leaving Sydney Heads. In a southerly the ketch ran north against the honeycombed cliffs. The tan sails and gaff rig were distinctive. All three men were jammed in the cockpit waving, Ken, Linton, Wes. From the launch Judy and Dijana waved madly and found themselves easily, lightly chatting. But getting ashore they could not wait to see each other off when the launch dropped them at Darling Street wharf.
Workshops, boatsheds, rusty corrugated iron roofs sloping down almost to water level, iron rails, chains and spikes, rows of duplex houses and tiny backyards, the Balmain waterfront was a mess of abandoned uses. Judy poked around unwilling to go home on a bus ride through a city she had liked but never loved because it was where she had been exiled to boarding school, wrenched from the bush lucky she was not pregnant to Warwick Mickless, and broken-hearted. All the liking she had for it now was tied up in loving Wes, and he was gone.
When a woman at Ayers Rock, Lindy Chamberlain, had her baby taken by a dingo, people over that year and for longer took sides. Raymond said a dingo did it and Beth said it was her, the mother, who did it, as in nature the unsparing consumed their young. ‘Or took the young of others?’ Raymond parried.
On his way to work at Cockatoo Island one day, Wes saw a baby’s body floating in the water at Long Nose Point. He looked down from the rails of the ferry, and no mistake. It was a blotched blue dead baby under the wharf piles. He jumped off the ferry, sprinted up to the cop shop and roused a sergeant to come and look. Wes Bannister the brawler asking for help? They liked his fucking cheek. When they arrived back at the wharf nothing was there. The cops said forget it, think about going to work, you bastard, but Wes kept coming back, asking questions, stirring, confirming his record with the wallopers as pushy. They just could not be bothered getting to the bottom of something that was over and done. You did not say that to or about Wes Bannister ever. He was the only one who ever said, in the context of the Chamberlains’ lost baby, ‘What if she’s alive out there somewhere?’ and believed it till persistence proved otherwise.
Back Judy came to the same place and stepped along a narrow slit of dirty sand between lumpy rocks with gum trees hanging over the water, dried leaves in dark piles under them. Her migraines tracked an angry sadness. What was life all about? Such a precious gift and so quickly, totally gone. She collected rubbish, bottles, cans, plastic bags, old shoes curled up like bananas and carried them up to a bin. Ducking down she looked under wharf piles, hoping to see something living, and did, the beady eyes of a rat. The October election was over and the same lot of politics was back in but with a reduced majority. The electoral office kept her on, getting the rolls up to date. She went around Mosman knocking on doors, alarming old ladies with the threat of a fine for not voting. When they invited
her in for cups of tea and milk arrowroot biscuits she gave them excuses they could use to avoid payment. She went to the library a lot, read a lot. She went to a cello concerto at the Opera House, and when the deep, groaning sadness of the cello rose above the sound of the muted orchestra she cried. She went out for spaghetti with a group of boarding school friends to celebrate an engagement and ended up drunk.
Recovered from a mighty hangover, Judy sat on the ledge of her attic window looking out at a stormy sea. Sparkling and calm days she did not register as much as days like this in her feelings. It was what she liked. Storms. Her brain deserved them. They were the orchestra in full voice against the tiny playing of a solo instrument. The window was where she liked sitting, listening to her tranny, but her tranny was out to sea with Wes. She’d thrust it on him to take. She slept on and off all day as wind and rain made a noise on the roof and blocked out the sound of someone knocking on the door.
Pounding on the door, more like it. Judy had not heard the news that the high wind warning that had intensified to a gale off Sydney had spread far to the north. That it was up and down the coast, a low-pressure cell glancing off southern Queensland now, wildly sucking in air. A yacht was missing and a widening search including aircraft and shipping reported no sign of her, the Rattler. Judy had gone to bed knowing nothing about it and now there was more banging at her door, opened in a gust of wind to a neighbour who knew Wes sailed, who wondered if Judy knew anything about what was in the news and saying now there were messages for her to call a Dijana, and to call a Tony in Dubbo, reverse charges any time.
‘Nothing,’ said Judy to the neighbour. ‘I know nothing about what’s in the news,’ as a cold feeling slammed into her nerves before any thought reached her brain. ‘The Rattler?’ she said, along with the words, ‘So it’s happened,’ when she’d never, ever thought anything would happen with those three knuckleheads, nothing at all. ‘Don’t say it’s the Rattler!’ she yelled at the neighbour, who said, backing off, ‘Well, I might have the name wrong.’
Judy sat on a bus crossing the city, gripping her stomach and inwardly moaning. Other passengers got on with their lives. Hers was in turmoil. She stared down at her hands as if she were praying. Wes was a rock, an island. Linton Simmons was unsinkable or else. Ken Redlynch said when the world stopped believing he’d go on believing, he’d be the last Red standing, and that was the sort of determination a limpet or a barnacle needed to hang on to a wrecked boat. But it didn’t help Judy’s imagination. The three of them bobbed in the waves with their arms around each other singing the hymns of Wes’s childhood. They threw their arms up, sinking down like the Water Babies in love with drowning.
Dijana opened the door to Judy’s knock and they took one look at each other and burst into tears. ‘It’s all right, Jesus but it’s all right,’ said Dijana, holding her tight. But it was not all right. There was no news.
She hates me, thought Judy. She hates me, but she can’t hate me now. I can’t hate her either. There were a dozen people crammed into the tiny terrace kitchen. Harold and Margaret were there. Ken’s first ex-wife, Bonnie, was there. Ken’s sixteen-year-old son, Georgy, named after General Georgy Zhukov, hero of Stalingrad, was there. His mother, Bonnie, as a rule kept him away from Ken’s circle of friendship. Rebelliously, he sided with Dijana. But who was this, now, knocking at the door.
It was her parents. Judy went to them. They hugged in a circle, a heart-sinking circle of three; they’d been worried sick. Tony Watson had alerted them from his Dubbo studio, patched through to search and rescue HQ. They had rushed from Silver Springs and from AGS mad with wondering if she was on the boat. That if it was Rattler she might well be on board. But Judy was safe and her mother was angry – illogical, red-faced mother love. Her father looked stern, so unlike him. Her mother made an accusation. No-one had been able to raise her. ‘I was asleep.’ ‘In daytime?’ Meantime Wes was missing, in trouble, possibly drowned. Dijana sat in an armchair drinking a glass of stout. The room was a fuggy, distraught, dramatic centre of attention.
Harold Wells was on the phone. He held up a hand for silence. ‘Wait, wait. Tony Watson’s on the line. Judy, it’s your little mate. He’s heard something. Maritime search and rescue. They’ve picked up a call sign. Three on board. Sailing yacht Rattler. Safe, drifting, weather improving. Coal carrier from Newcastle steaming to pick them up.’
They had been sailing north, somewhere off Ballina, when a soft, brief gonging sound was heard under the hull. The tiller went loose in Ken’s hand. The rudder had fallen off. In a rolling sea Wes went overboard with a rope tied around his waist, wearing a mask and fins, and confirmed that nothing was there. The stock had fallen clean out of the rudder tube, taking the rudder with it. He’d checked the fittings before they left. Gone over everything but couldn’t predict metal fatigue, if that’s what it was. Must have been what it was.
They rigged and deployed a sea anchor in the form of trailing lines but had no directional control as strong winds and swell drove the yacht broadside north. Somehow they got the sails in, sodden and heavy. All they could do was hang on and stop themselves from being battered and concussed. Rattler tilted on her side, an awkward, although soon, they realised, survivable proposition, as she thumped and shuddered and surged, making her way under storm clouds and lightning. The wind reduced but swell came from three directions at once in a threshing boil. Linton had to be held by the ears to understand they were all right. Ken shouted into his stunned moon face. It was an instructional method of the last resort. Never use force to get attention unless for hysteria. Save actual violence for the revolution.
There was no life raft. They hadn’t brought one. Anyway, it wasn’t good to use one even if they had one, Ken shouted, again to Linton because Wes understood these things and didn’t have to be told. STAY WITH YOUR VESSEL. He needn’t have worried. Linton came good. Maybe Linton wasn’t quite totally come good, seasick and biffed and battered by changes of hull attitude as tins of food, a lantern and a bottle of whisky flew from shelves and landed on him. Wes wedged himself in the companionway, a fly half urging the scrum together.
There was a pram dinghy used to ferry one person at a time from the shore, strapped to the foredeck. It worked itself loose and flew away like a leaf. A radio kept working but not the ship’s radio – it was dead. It was Judy’s tranny that worked, with its sweaty, crusty Eveready batteries crackling. They heard the ABC news, heard they were being looked for. A RAAF Orion went over, appeared diving through a gap in the clouds, pulling out just over the wave tops and making a low pass. Linton told three-men-in-a-boat jokes. Two cigarettes make a match. O PUN the hatch. Rattler was a crippled duck, down by a wing. Wes ran through everything that could have happened through human error and argued there was none. He looked dark and brooding and separate. The whole thing was so bloody well a stroke of malicious fate. ‘Start drafting your insurance claim,’ said Linton. Ken said, ‘Good thinking.’ They were knee deep in water in the saloon, sloshing around with compromised buoyancy steadying Rattler as she heaved through the dark.
Out from the other side of the storm they emerged into a grey morning, hungry as sharks. Up ahead the coal carrier nosed along, ready to take them aboard. It was guided by the Orion that dipped its wings and flew off. One at a time they were ferried across in a ship’s boat to the ladders lowered down the ship’s side. Ken said he wouldn’t get off, insisting, ‘Save the Rattler!’ Then he got off, a bottle of whisky in the deep pocket of his Boatwear Bushgear prototype foul weather jacket sewn by Margaret Wells.
Wrapped in blankets Wes, Linton and Ken looked down from the high deck of the coal carrier, passing the bottle from hand to hand. Rattler moved away obedient to currents, tide, chop and a change of wind. She ploughed along as if under power, but lying on her side. The level in the whisky bottle dropped as they watched. A hazard warning to shipping went out: keep alert for a drifting unmanned vessel and report position. Ken, bleary-eyed, followed till he could not see her but kept
imagining he could.
Landed days later at Gladstone, they learned Rattler had washed ashore near Yamba. Ken and Wes went down to see what could be done. Electrics ruined, engine swamped, gear broken, but there was no obvious hull damage to be seen. They pumped out the bilge. At high tide she was hauled floating into deeper water. A boatyard made room for her, towed her into the river and lifted her out. It was as if the Rattler was a person, the sturdy, bruised body of a living hopeful. She made them smile.
Late summer the following year Judy came up; they found a flat. The electoral office let her go. She could have made a career there. Her farewell party was held in a Chinese restaurant. JUDY COME BACK read a banner strung over the tables.
She found work in a fish and chip shop, then on a milk run, jogging through the early mornings with a wire crate bottle carrier lopsiding her. Ken’s insurance payment came through and he released money in staggered instalments, enough for them both to work on Rattler, except for Judy waiting on tables, to help with their groceries when Ken’s cheques were late, on busy Fridays, in a boisterous café run by three women, all ex-teachers.
Judy loved the life away from Sydney, warm winter days pouring into each other, early-morning body surfs, hours of sanding and painting in a hot stupefaction, with energy left for playing squash at the local courts. She used the skills she had, thanks to Wes and her father, keeping a drill bit straight, using a spokeshave and plane under a watchful eye, and when everything was ready, Wes coaching over her shoulder, mixing epoxy glues, unrolling lengths of fibreglass tape, getting it flat, wetting it with epoxy and smoothing it along replacement strakes with a plastic spatula, avoiding runs, lumps and rucked-up corners.
A Sea-Chase Page 9