‘She keeps Watson’s letters in a shoebox. Hers at his end the same, presumably.’
‘Presumably,’ said Raymond. ‘The friendship’s wonderfully loyal.’
‘The two of them are such a tight little knot it’s sick. Wes is my great hope, Raymond. Heavens, he loves her, but all she wonders is, “Do I want him to?” I would be the last to know what she’s thinking, honestly. I get desperate. If only she’d get pregnant like I did.’
‘That’s not a kind thought.’
‘If he loves her like you loved me it is. No, but it gave structure to our lives we did not know we needed. Do I deserve what she throws at me? She’s cruel, or lost, or she hates me, or there’s just one little thing I need to do, and she knows what it is, and the last thing she would ever do is give me the smallest hint of what it is. Do you think she’s nuts?’
‘Give over.’
‘There’s only one topic where everything comes right. In our letters. They are all about biology. What’s going on there?’
‘She didn’t do it at school,’ suggested Raymond.
The next day they went over to meet Len Forester. When Beth introduced Judy he gave no sign of remembering her, in shorts, t-shirt, bra-less no less, leaning over his table to remove his plate of sandwich crusts – how could a man forget that? Except he flashed his horse teeth at her as if to say they had their secret and don’t tell Beth, and who’s this horny dog your boyfriend there?
‘We’re making progress,’ said Beth, raising her voice to a shout. Forester’s hearing aid was lumpy, like a Hercules Club Whelk jammed in his ear from his daily swim in the surf. ‘The French ambassador is meeting our deputation in Canberra on Monday.’
‘You won’t be there,’ said Forester.
‘I won’t. I could be, though, if you think I should be, Len. It’s got to the point where SANT’s putting someone on to do my travel arrangements and bookings. As a matter of fact, it’s how I found the gap to get up here. A volunteer organiser taking over my life. Making it possible.’
‘What a brag,’ said Forester with a skull grin aside to the young folks. ‘If Mururoa goes off without you we’ll hold you responsible.’
‘He’s the limit,’ said Beth, outside glowing.
Back at their flat Judy said to Wes, ‘That baby you wanted to save was dead. You wouldn’t let the cops ignore it. I love that about you, Wes – you’d bring the dead to life if you could. Whenever you go to a demo you’re double-done. But you still keep rolling up. You can cradle a sick dog, go on tough as anything while a boat folds up under you. You’re a pretty wonderful bloke, Wes. You don’t see it, though, what’s coming. She’s on to you. He’s on to you. They are going to burn you up.’
‘It doesn’t matter. I volunteered. I’m on for the SANT campaign.’
‘I know my mother.’
‘She’s a tough one. I like that about her.’
‘I can’t believe I’m her daughter.’
‘You don’t believe in things,’ said Wes.
Judy did not know what to say to that. It was a punch to the stomach with a brick.
Nobody knew how hard it was for her, not even he did, keeping on believing that whatever she did and whatever she felt like doing was some sort of reason for breathing.
‘I don’t even believe in myself all that much,’ she admitted.
‘That’s the kind of bullshit I mean.’
But when Wes put an arm around her, walking back to the flat after sitting on the riverbank looking at the evening light till mosquitoes ate them, she believed she did not have to explain anything, or duck anything.
‘Getting born is quite something,’ she said, and he knew what she meant.
‘Living this life,’ he agreed.
Rattler inched down the slipway from the hard, sitting on a cradle that had carried wooden boats since they were built of trees that no longer existed as commercial species. The ketch settled back into its saltwater element, sending small waves under the wharf piles, exciting schools of fish.
Raymond and Beth waved goodbye and went their separate ways, Beth up to Brisbane to plot with Len Forester, Raymond heading back west with the collie dog sitting up beside him, where he played a game of putting a cap on her head and she looked sidelong at him, making the two of them look as if he had his wife with him in the passenger seat. People often said so anyway.
On the truck radio Raymond listened to Horace the Plague Locust and Who Brung You, approaching yet another town after miles of hot, numbing distance, chortling over the nasal, hectoring, auctioneer’s voice of his daughter’s friend. The voice chuckled out over theme music and Raymond learned that Tony Watson would soon be broadcasting from Sydney statewide on the Macquarie Network two days a week. Tony Watson was on the way up, Beth was on the way up, SANT was on the way up, taking on the French in Tahiti, and Wes punchy as ever was showing his mettle. That left only Judy dangling without direction, and Raymond dangling where he always was, without much expectation.
In a dry country the force of water dominated. Floodway after floodway on a long straight stretch and the approach to a broad dry river gave, on a rising roadway, testimony to an absent power. Raymond remembered what he was like at Judy’s age when he called on Beth at the Darkes’ Northern Beaches Presbyterian manse. What he remembered was Beth, crazy with opposition to her family, defining herself as godless. In that phase quiet Ray won her. His ambition stopped with her. Soon she was pregnant.
They had made their mistakes. The greatest one perhaps was to love each other romantically, a bit wildly, at the expense of their daughter. Their joint effort to reel their daughter back to knowing she was loved was hard, but not impossible. Showing the love they felt for her scared her off. Proving she was worth more drove her to extremes. Judy made Raymond laugh, think, feel. He liked her company, which she doled out to him rather too crankily and withheld almost completely from Beth.
‘Families,’ was his rather lame conclusion to this line of thought.
PART TWO
THEY LEFT THE WHARF and went up the Clarence River under the lifting bridge and came back after a night getting used to being on the go. It was a cold night. Mist came down from the hills. Judy was cosy in the galley, warming her hands over the kerosene stove. She loved that river, the Clarence, running away up-country behind the coast for winding miles, green paddocks with cattle and kangaroos coming down to the water’s edge, old car punts, and pontoons where you could tie up and step straight into the main street of a town and buy your groceries and be back on Rattler in ten minutes. The river life of children who never grew up was there, kids sucked back into childhood by authors like Grace Rathbone, whose settings in The Carson Wand were the NSW Far North Coast and hinterland.
With marine charts flattened on her knee, Judy traced with an attentive fingertip the channel markers they passed under engine power going downstream. Around a bend was a ship loading for Norfolk Island where you least expected to see one, a cargo ship with cranes and a dirty smokestack and a feeling of being caught out. Donk, donk, donk went the Volvo Penta with its Perkins Prima spares stowed away. The post with the green can. The post with the red can. The black and yellow post saying East was an Egg, the black and yellow post saying West was Mae West, reminding you to stay on the western side of the post’s nipped waist and big front.
The engine was noisy but ran beautifully. Raymond had made sure of it that time they camped by cannibalising the old diesel he’d lifted at Wes’s request from the saloon car on wooden blocks at the back of his vegetable garden and carried across the Dividing Range like the Holy Grail. Then he went back to the life he lived, seeing if a fox had his hens and if wild dogs had taken his ewes, or if, in his rain gauge, there was a registration of unlikely moisture. Something had happened to jolt Raymond’s alignment to his country way of life in that visit to the coast. Since then everything had changed. Silver Springs was sold for peanuts and her parents lived on the Central Coast, on a piece of land cut from a dairy farm, on a t
idal lake where Raymond Compton bought an oyster lease. He said there was no surprise in that – why did anyone even wonder about it? An oyster farmer was a livestock farmer pure and simple, except in the sea.
Closer to the river mouth Judy called the line-ups of green and red channel markers in strict order in case Wes aimed for the wrong one and cut a corner heading into shallow water and ran aground. She kept an eye on the state of the tide. They would need to get over the Yamba bar soon. The tide had turned already and was running out. Wes only glanced at the charts with a quick ‘Uh-huh’ when she called attention to the timing.
‘You don’t have to notice everything,’ his reason was. ‘You can miss what really counts that way.’
Judy used binoculars, finding markers she couldn’t yet sight but knew must be coming up. When they shot out past the breakwater and over the bar a long swell rolled under the keel coming in from the north. Nothing when Judy looked back resembled how places looked on land. It was what she loved at sea as you moved over into that dimension. The coastline was rolled back onto itself. No beach visible but a line of haze. The place they left was gone. The high ranges disappeared altogether or sank into low shapes. It was one of the hundred perspective changes about sailing, that was a drug to her now.
She stood at the tiller wearing a bulky jumper and a black and white beanie with a stalk like a mushroom. Wes called for a heading into the wind. He ran up the sails and turned off the engine. The wind strengthened. Judy felt the boat stiffen and lean, catching the wind under sail. Rattler drew away, reaching south in a surge of motion, leaving a whirlpool of wake astern as proof of progress. Judy loved that sensation, dangled her head over the side watching eddies and bubbles, shouted hooray, we are off at last, and Wes came back and worked adjusting the windvane system. It wasn’t needed but he fiddled and fretted. A gaff-rigged ketch did not point up as much as Wes liked, he complained, then relaxed into moving around the deck adjusting sheets and halyards. It seemed he would never stop finding something that needed doing.
Rattler might not sail close to the wind but she held a heading. Judy stayed at the helm with just the slightest awareness that there was somebody else on board, Wes moving around attending to what he needed to do. The feeling of them together, doing something together but separately and apart, was a strong feeling. It was a marriageable feeling. They had settled into a life together. The one trusted continuation of herself was with Wes. It might only be, though, that she meant being on a boat. She sometimes thought that, then denied it. The reliance of every part on the other was sufficient to make the comparison. They were a sailing couple now; people saw them as that. But Judy had never varied once in her love for Wes, and he was the same towards her, she trusted.
They stayed out in the cockpit the whole day. When it was time to eat they munched apples. In the night, not really as late as Judy thought it was, Wes shook her awake and told her it was her watch. She thought it was nearly morning but it was hardly past anyone’s bedtime. Judy rigged up a line holding the tiller with a knot for adjusting it back on course if the heading drifted. Over the slap and creaking of the vessel, the bump of waves and banshee whistle of rigging, she heard Wes snoring in the love bunk and smiled. Oh that lovely old love bunk. Here she was alone in the cockpit but together, in that feeling of being lifted out of herself while tethered that was the making of her life, if she had anything to do with shaping it at all. It was a sense of the whole of herself under the soft, pitching stars, the blinking red flash of high distant late flights going home close to midnight, streaked phosphorescence trailing aft of the stern, splashing off waves otherwise unseen. The whole of herself or the possibility of the whole of herself, of a beginning and a beginning anyway of reaching out to herself where she was not yet, but getting there, always getting there, where she had the strangest feeling of making who she was out of nothing.
Back in Sydney and rolling as she walked, so happy she whistled wherever she went, Judy could only think of getting back on Rattler again and the two of them doing night watches. She believed, never having been seasick, that she never would be, and had often boasted, to the friends she met with babies in their strollers, who had husbands working their arses off to pay mortgages, that she had run off to sea. Yes, it explained her absence from their lives.
Recently Margaret Wells had stitched up a SANT flag designed by Len Forester with the peaceful uses of uranium shown by electrons whizzing around a proton core, framed by a microscope, a wheatsheaf and a medical snake. There it was hanging from the mizzen mast when Judy saw Rattler next. She frowned, feeling a jolt of mistrust. What was going on? Her mother was behind this. SANT was behind it. Professor Len Forester was behind it. Next she learned that Wes, Ken and Linton would be sailing to Auckland on behalf of SANT. The snake on the flag twisted and writhed.
When Judy asked why she was left out Wes said she did not feel like the rest of them did around injustices. What she was on about was just her own feelings.
‘Yerra bunch of cowards,’ she told him through tears. ‘No guts not telling me.’
‘We’ve only decided now,’ said Wes, with a bundle of documents he shielded from her under his armpit.
‘I don’t get it. I don’t understand you. How come, look, there’s your passports and your customs clearance documents. I can’t work you out.’
Wes could not work her out in return, he said. Was she ever a part of anything? No. Did she want to be part of anything? No. Not the way people who believed in things went full bore getting them done and stood up to be counted. Her closest friend of either sex was the little creep she grew up with. It was impossibly nasty the way they sprang like this at each other. In fights the unforgivable was standard. Judy produced a big, trembling, translucent tear that paused and then cascaded down her cheek.
‘I thought we were together. Sailing around the world on sixpence, remember?’
‘It’s simple,’ agreed Wes. ‘Think of it as a job I have to do first and my job’s boats.’
‘So’s mine,’ Judy attempted. She was working with a bunch of high-energy women running a yacht hire business and doing as much of the repair work as they could by themselves. Men, even Wes, never took them entirely seriously.
Wes said, ‘I can’t let the bastards, the Frogs, get away with what they’re trying. This is the big one, blowing up a fragile reef with atomic bombs, Jesus. We have to be there before the end of April. There is a chance the weather might pack up sooner. The rig is tuned. The sails are good. The engine is hunky-dory. Nothing is a problem. She’s a bit slow, specially closer to the wind.’
‘I know that. Why are you going on and on?’
‘A limit date is set. It’s the fifth of May. A bunch of yachts is leaving Auckland for the atoll and if Rattler is going she will have to get there by then. No surprise to anyone, it’s all over the papers. It’s huge.’ Wes laughed.
‘I know it’s huge, that part of it, I do read the papers. And my mother is practically shrieking. It’s us I’m talking about.’
‘You’re onto it. Okay,’ said Wes. ‘Struth. Us.’
If he did not roll his eyes he would soon. What his look said was, How could she put them above this?
Judy wrote her weekly lettercard to Tony Watson splotched with tears. Of the three going, she wrote, one was off her, still off her, Ken. The second hated her, sneakily hated her, Linton. The third, Wes, who she loved and who loved her, wished he was going alone except for that extra crew member the windvane self-steerer. What was she thinking about thinking they could take her? But she went down to the passport office and got herself one just in case.
Dijana talked about Judy to Ken. It took Ken a minute to realise what Dijana was saying, because what Dijana said about Judy never varied and this was no exception, only it made a difference.
‘If you don’t go, my love, why can’t she? Isn’t there always a ship’s cat?’ Dijana mimed a pair of raking claws.
‘If I don’t go?’ said Ken. ‘What do you mean “i
f I don’t go”?’
He still owned Rattler. More money than ever was poured into her. She was a Cruising Helmsman magazine notable classic, that was why, he said. Money was no longer a problem. Ken and Dijana were now by any standard loaded, able to indulge themselves in expensive satisfactions ranging from Rattler to restoring a Bill Lucas marvel of contemporary domestic architecture in the Bulwark, Castlecrag, where they now lived stepping around tradesmen, and on to patrons’ season tickets for the Sydney Symphony, Belvoir Street Theatre, and more recently the Sydney International Piano Competition, which Dijana followed the way other people did the tennis, with a yen for Balkan prodigies.
At the kitchen table Ken marked off a checklist. Each item had a small square box drawn beside it – wet weather gear, seasick pills, rum, life raft, flares. Only after each item was absolutely secure for carting down to Rattler berthed at the bottom of their gully could a ticked box be circled. Very few items were circled yet.
‘We haven’t discussed it,’ said Dijana in her lazy, smooching way.
‘You and Judy haven’t discussed it?’
‘You and I haven’t discussed it, Kenny.’
Ken was bewitched by Dijana gathering him into her gaze. Always had been since the day they met, when he saw her standing on the other side of a room at an art show, wearing a filmy blue dress to just below her knees, where it stirred in a breeze from the outdoors, and staring at him with utter erotic solemnity. Dijana, bless her, had the power to scramble his brains. Neither of his first two wives had that power, and one was a Mensa member, the other a certified sociopathic manipulator. The great thing with Dijana was they had perfect understanding, and of the two of them, a bonus if it was possible to rank conviction, Dijana was the one soused in socialist instinct to the extent that she never had to think through a position and had not the slightest guilt feelings around their sudden wealth from Boatwear Bushgear Warehouse and associated diversifications, the profits rolling in. Nor did Ken, but really only thanks to the balance offered by the Shipley Plateau School, where he taught three days a week, pro bono.
A Sea-Chase Page 11