From the headland above the holiday town you looked west to the smoky blue ranges. Broken jet trails were roads in the sky. When you turned and looked out to sea a line of thunderheads were lit from inside by lightning. South America one way, inland the other.
Wes welded up a windvane self-steering system like the one Knox-Johnston described as a problem in the book aboard Rattler that was swollen with seawater and gritted with sand. The structure, when he made it, sat on the ground like a jungle gym, with steel crossbars and a metal tail like a windmill. At some point it was going to be craned up from the ground and bolted to holding plates at the stern of Rattler. The plans came from Whisker Martin, who had sailed in a steel cutter to Lord Howe Island where, years ago, he’d climbed Ball’s Pyramid, a two-thousand-foot-high spire poking up from the Pacific Ocean. Wes had never used a self-steering mechanism. Now he had built one. But he could not explain how they worked in any way that made sense to Judy or possibly even to himself. Using one would teach him. That was Wes. And here was something else that he thought about all the time, namely they had rudders, laminated plywood panels plunging down each side of the stern. If in a million-to-one chance your rudder fell off you would still be able to steer. Million-to-one chances were possibly everyday events at sea.
‘It’ll be like having an extra crew member aboard,’ he said.
‘You wouldn’t need an extra crew member, you’d have me.’
‘That’s right. But I’m thinking about when I don’t have you.’
‘When would that be,’ said Judy, longingly disbelieving.
‘Say you were,’ and his voice floated off.
‘Say I was what?’
Wes shrugged and tried for the words. Lost them. Ducked his head. Judy guessed what he was going to say, ‘Say you were pregnant?’ If that was it she would have to tell him she was in no way ready, but what a thought for him to have, thinking about the safety of a baby that did not exist. Dear Wes.
‘Remember that first night when you got me drunk and took advantage of me. What we talked about?’
‘Did we talk?’ Wes leered.
‘You did, lover. You had no idea how you got me in. All your dreams. About being on a boat and waking up not just tied to a mooring. Bounding free was what you said. I got the definite impression it was going to be you and me. Going where Ken went, Tonga, Samoa, Tahiti.’
‘Yeah, and New Guinea and the Solomons. The Louisiades. But I dunno. You weren’t out there, Jude. It’s a sick feeling, the sound of a rudder falling off. Not quite a sound, more like a feeling. I never want to hear it again. I never want to see anyone with that funny look on their face, like Ken had, holding a loose tiller in his hand.’
‘You said you weren’t scared.’
‘I wasn’t, except for a few hairy moments, I’ll admit. Linton lost the plot.’
‘That doesn’t mean I would,’ Judy said.
‘You think you wouldn’t. I was so bloody angry with myself that something I’d worked on let me down I just about took off.’
‘It’s something we could do together,’ said Judy.
‘Aren’t we doing a lot together?’ he said.
‘I mean really together.’
They only got that far talking about it. Wes didn’t or pretended he didn’t know what she meant. She wondered if she did herself. She wanted them to be like Ken and Dijana, their closeness an anchor no matter what. To get to that point young, not wait till she was past forty. Rollicking in a narrow bunk like two fish in a waterslide was all right. Falling asleep breathing together in case they fell on the cabin sole too. Judy didn’t know, had no idea really, if she would like being on the water outside the shelter of a harbour. But she wanted to find out. Hearing herself asking Wes to make it happen for her she felt him blocking her.
When Judy was at boarding school she swam, played tennis, never won any cups, only sashes for second, third and unlucky fourths. At dinghy sailing and harbour racing she impressed. At squash, now, she played to win, with a bite to her mindset, beating Wes and advancing through the table for the local championships. Losing to him made her spit. Sport was getting a feeling in place where it ought to be while being on the move, advancing. You might not be a winner, but you got a feeling of how it would feel.
Since coming unstuck with Ken, Judy thought about what Ken meant when he’d said to her, the day they met, that the best in her had to be good. She kept that in front of herself, changing herself. Ken meant it around the Darkes but Judy didn’t. On the thumpy, dust-motey courts she felt the trillion cells of her body lining up when she scraped her racquet along a wall to get a high shot. The strength of her serve flattened the small black ball against the racquet strings, dead flat sucked into itself till it was almost nothing. Floating up off the boards and nudging a return into play with a bend of the wrist was a moment of perfection enclosed in a split second of levitation that lingered in the nerves.
Rattler’s repairable condition after being wrecked was a tribute to the work Wes did the first time, all that unpaid work for Ken, a good part of it structural and gratefully rewarded by a vessel strong in a beaching. In this next phase, though, Judy heard herself bringing up her bookkeeper’s complaint again like a broken record. ‘The insurance money is good, Wes, but Ken still has to be squeezed. There hasn’t been a single cheque on time in the whole time we’ve been here. Just to get by, I’ve done extra days in the café for the fun of being ogled by old farts sitting around half the day not ordering.’
Traipsing down to the corner phone box to squeeze Ken. Judy submitting to his act of surprise that it was her on the phone. The next cheque ‘waiting to be posted’. Ken ‘not needing reminding’. Nothing more being said except the possible sound of Dijana breathing as she listened on the handpiece extension.
‘What a great big dopey sulk you are,’ said Judy as she clattered the handpiece back on the hook. How anyone as intelligent as Ken could be so dumb made her wonder. That Dijana had the knack of handling him, she had no doubt. Good luck to her.
When Judy came back into the flat, she leaned over Wes’s shoulder and blew in his ear:
‘Pouff!’
‘How was Ken?’
‘Unfriendly. He still loves you though.’
They chased each other around the room, throwing cushions until their landlord underneath banged the floor with a stick.
‘Are you still on the pill?’ said Wes, pinning her on the couch.
‘Of course I am,’ said Judy. ‘You don’t have to ask.’
After tea Wes pulled a fraying newspaper article out of his wallet. It had become a habit. The rescue had been written up in the Herald by the profile writer Tina Stones. There were a few too many ‘I’s’ in Judy’s opinion. ‘If I was Tina Stones I’d have left myself out of it,’ she said.
‘You just said I,’ said Wes.
‘Who wants to know about when she was younger and her cat rode in her canoe, and so on.’
‘You can’t bear I’m in the limelight,’ said Wes. ‘Me, Ken, Linton.’
It was true. The three had limpeted onto each other more than ever since the rudder fell off. ‘THREE MATES SAVE EACH OTHER BY CRACKING JOKES.’ Tina Stones made them famous for a week, or longer.
So there was that article making Wes known. But the fact was you couldn’t land a wreck on a holiday coast and get away with being a nobody. Everyone knew Wes around the river mouth. He was the one who took a Laser out in nineteen or twenty knots and tracked the water in spray and spume. Twenty knots was a dinghy sailor’s gale. It was Olympic-standard exposure. Judy took over, getting knocked down and getting up again in water shallow enough to stand in, admitting defeat as she trudged up the sand hauling the Laser, throat raw from swallowing salt water and bruises that would still show a week or two later.
A country pub was a refuge or it wasn’t. The laughing clowns greeted you along the bar with their jaws swivelling and their mouths round O’s of resentful surprise. Nobody blamed Wes for what had happened. But
they thought it. A rudder falling off was like your pants falling down.
Wes knew if the rudder had not fallen off Rattler would have reached Southport, the intended destination on the three mates’ proving cruise. Linton and Ken would have flown back to Sydney and Wes would have sailed back, testing himself on a thirty-two-foot gaff-rigged ketch single-handed.
There was a look Wes had that Tina Stones caught in her feature article – ‘Bannister’s grim anger at himself that nothing would assuage’. Judy knew that look except take away the word grim, and who was a stranger to invade Wes’s mental privacy? Judy herself never did. She loved that privacy when they made love, her loving him while he got his rocks off.
The word ‘assuage’ found its way onto Wes’s self-improvement vocab list. He’d fitted the rudder stock, secured it top and bottom, made sure the steel he used was strong. It was higher grade steel than had broken in a twist of force. Next time he’d fashion the bolts, turn the screw threads personally, and secure the fit down into the rudder as good as the sword Excalibur plunged into stone. That was what assuaged meant.
He was not assuaged though. Judy saw it in the set of his hypothermic blue lips when he came back in from the Laser. Next he started getting the cylinder head off the engine, freeing the injectors with a heat gun and setting out, like parts of a puzzle, the valve buckets in a numbered row. Judy did not dare go near him while he arranged springs and screws on a canvas sheet and admitted defeat. But he would get the engine running again if it killed him. It was an old car engine, or based on one, with spares fitting if anyone had an old car of the right make. It happened that Raymond Compton did, but way out west. Wes folded canvas over the pieces and laid spanners on top. He bought his beers from the bottle shop instead of breasting the bar. Turned off local mechanics, he rang Raymond and asked for help, and Raymond said he’d load up his gear and come over. He made it sound like a hop round the corner but it was a fifteen-hour belt cross-country.
On Raymond’s way, on the last leg through coastal hills and tick gate controls, his border collie pup, Fancy, got a tick. They did not know for a week. Every day Raymond checked, parting her coat, every inch of her. She was clear but now Fancy collapsed on a rubber mat, broke their hearts at the vet surgery recovering after a needle. Beth came up to Grafton on the train, went straight to the collie and cried with Judy over the pup’s stoic paralysis. Judy wondered how her mother even knew the pride of her father’s heart, as she had been down at AGS working on cell wall microscopy almost ever since Fancy was born. They went back to the bare rise at Yamba where the tent was pitched by Wes and Raymond. It had heavy, sun-bleached canvas, a tapered roof-line brought to a point where a central pole poked through a stitched eye. Boatwear Bushgear were sweeping whatever remained of that heavy look from the market with nylon and polyester igloos.
Wes set Fancy down on a sack. She lifted her eyes and looked up at him with love. It was a balmy evening. They sat around on camp stools eating salami, Jatz crackers, cheddar cheese. Stars came out as they competed, seeing who was the first to see the next one and name it. Judy was studying Mary Blewitt’s Celestial Navigation for Yachtsmen on the sly so that Wes would not feel she was getting fuller of herself than he already thought she was around boats. She came second after Raymond naming stars, Jupiter standing all night long to the north, Mars, Saturn, the Southern Cross back over her shoulder, the Emu overhead.
‘Well,’ said Beth. ‘Here we are. Isn’t it splendid? I’m so glad I made the time.’
Wes filled their drinks from an aluminium bladder ripped from a cardboard wine cask.
Raymond proposed a toast. ‘To that blankety-blank engine.’
‘How did you make the time?’ Judy asked Beth. ‘Was it all right with your boss?’
‘She’s the boss now,’ revealed Raymond.
‘Only of the genetics lab,’ said Beth.
‘But that’s big,’ said Judy. ‘That’s huge. Isn’t genetics the whole point?’
‘It’s getting to be. For plants,’ said Beth.
‘Well, it is the plant farm,’ said Judy. If AGS, the plant farm, was not the biggest lab there was, what was she doing there putting it over everything in their lives for years? She had cancelled her study leave in Maryland for the sake of the promotion.
Raymond said, ‘It was on the ABC, announced by the ag minister and the shadow ag minister. Huntington, that stirrer, came on the opposition and said Mummy should keep her trap shut about SANT.’
‘Which opposition was that?’ said Beth.
‘The Tony Watson program.’
They looked at Judy, world authority on Horace the Plague Locust and Who Brung You voiced in the nasal, humming tones she loved to imitate, decry and defend.
‘Don’t blame me.’
‘I worked on the train,’ said Beth, ‘wrote letters, read papers. I wanted to see you’re all right, dear, after all Wes’s been through.’
‘Wes,’ said Judy. But they had come to find her, she acknowledged, to see that their daughter was all right.
‘Yamba is one of the places where Beth and I came on our honeymoon,’ said Raymond. ‘We pitched the tent up there a bit on the rise, more exposed but with a better view. You could do that then, couldn’t you, hon.’
‘One day we drove into Grafton,’ said Beth, ‘and when we got back there was a howling gale and a little boy holding the guy ropes and running around saving everything from blowing away. We went to quite a few places. It was a gypsy holiday.’ She rattled off place names, zig-zagging them up the coast into Queensland.
‘That blow wasn’t here, it was at Alexandra Headland,’ Raymond corrected her.
‘Surely not,’ said Beth.
Whenever Judy heard her mother’s emphatic denials she felt her turn would come round next, being told she was not entitled to feel what she felt or remember memories that were hers to have. She thought she should have a say on that shotgun honeymoon, for example. She had been along for the ride, after all, in a floating amniotic sac, her zygote hammock where she was lone authority on planetary existence for an interval. Try that for size scientifically, Dr Elizabeth Darke, if you dare.
Beth slid a photo from inside the plastic sleeve of her change purse and passed it to Wes. It showed Judy, snapped running at a school sports carnival.
‘Did I ever show you this one, Wes?’
‘Cute,’ said Wes. ‘I could go for her, I reckon.’
‘She has a very handsome boyfriend,’ giggled Beth.
‘Cut it out,’ said Judy.
She walked off into the night, until their voices reduced to a murmur.
Beth and Raymond liked Wes, make that loved him, make that loved him a bit more even than the way everyone loved him. If they scored him as a son-in-law, you could hear them thinking, they’d get Judy minded for the rest of her life. Wouldn’t that be something.
‘What are you doing brooding out there?’ Beth called to her.
Raymond lit the gas hotplate. While the sausages were cooking Judy and Wes wandered over to a seat, carrying their wine glasses and to smoke a joint.
‘It’s bigger than all of us,’ said Wes, ‘what she’s on about.’
‘How big?’ Judy said, feeling herself released, in a puff, in a lovely, easy way, at one with the universe, climbing to the moody Emu in a ribbon of pungent smoke.
‘SANT,’ said Wes.
Back to the tent everyone got stuck into their sausages straight from the hotplate fountaining fat when stabbed with a fork.
‘Professor Len Forester’s staying at Iluka with his daughter,’ said Beth. ‘He’s down from Brisbane. It’s a good chance to catch up with him while we’re here.’
Oh, that Nobel Prize winner, thought Judy. His face was on a postage stamp where his eyeballs spiralled and sparkled, where an etching artist had gouged out his eye-sockets and inserted radium rays.
‘It’s Forester,’ said Judy, ‘who ogles me in the café.’
‘Judy, will you stop saying that! I want Wes
to meet him.’
‘SANT’s putting you on the frontline, watch out,’ she said.
‘No worries if they do,’ said Wes.
Len Forester was eighty-one years old, a nuclear wizard, swallower of irradiated capsules in experiments that slid through his gut like lollipops. He’d worked with Cockcroft at Cambridge on atomic nuclei. Since the Manhattan Project, in which he’d played a part, he’d urged for world peace.
Something hormonal happened to Beth when she talked about SANT. A sheen of sweat appeared on her upper lip. There was a whiff of a metallic something around her, like the smell of blood. If anyone else in the world had a mother like her, Judy wanted to know who it was. Sometimes it seemed her feet did not float quite on the earth and her low, gravelly voice came from a cloud of radioactive hail.
After Judy and Wes left that night, Raymond and Beth talked themselves to a standstill in their boxy tent with its heavy canvas walls and floor of lumpy, trodden kikuyu grass, creaky camp stretchers positioned side by side and their shadows making Indonesian puppet shapes on the canvas walls. To passers-by it seemed they were dancing back and forth in the restricted space as they heaved out sentences in attempts to hold their daughter in their minds.
‘Isn’t Wes lovely?’
‘Rock solid.’
‘I wonder if Judy ever thinks about Mickless now.’
‘Don’t dare raise it.’
‘I should think she does. Her first love, though I shudder at the thought. I mean to say, Raymond, the Education Department has a lot to answer for, putting that horse of a boy in with her on a double bench seat together while everyone looked the other way.’
‘He came to see me.’
‘You don’t say.’
‘After he crash-landed a helicopter.’
‘Nothing surprises me. You know she’s that close with Tony Watson, still.’
But Raymond was too, in his way, that close to Tony Watson, benefiting from advance information about livestock sales.
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