As she talked, Dijana sketched Ken on a pad balanced on her forearm. He loved the way she carried on regardless, putting down shapes. Dijana made him look like the sailor on a packet of Senior Service cigarettes, handsome and determined and traditional, his beard grown out to the full Vandyke.
‘Look at me, darling?’
She made a few quick pencil strokes to get him right. She laughed the way a woman laughs who loves a man for his outrageous peculiarities.
Ken twisted his chin hairs and passed them down in a strand through his fingers, as if milking a cow.
‘Could you find a way not to go? Can a boat be cursed?’
‘That’s just silly.’
‘Hasn’t Judy been working her tits off on the water, so aren’t they the ones to decide if she can go if she wants to?’
‘Wes says no. Not for this little jaunt. He’s the skipper for the duration. Someone else to worry about. Three’s company, four’s a crowd.’
‘She’s experienced; she’s made sure of that.’
‘But she’s never been noticed worked up about anything, except my teaching machines, and then in the negative.’
‘Kenny, drop it.’ Dijana was amazed, the way he still went on.
‘How come you’re pushing for her?’
‘I want you here, to be honest.’
‘Rattler is part of both of us, honey hearts – remember those nights anchored around the harbour, how you loved being out on the deck, lying on cushions listening to the cicadas and the lions roaring at the zoo?’ Time for Ken to mime it. ‘Rrrrr.’
‘Mmmm,’ said Dijana. ‘Lovely.’ But then she added, ‘You could have died when the rudder fell off.’
Then he noticed she was crying. ‘Can’t stand tears,’ he said, his commissar’s mode crushing sentiment when called on to do so.
Twice a week now Tony Watson caught the Fokker Friendship flight down from Dubbo, leaving in the morning with a ticket to fly back later the same day. He arrived in the city like the bush did for the Easter Show, bringing numbers with him. Getting off the plane and walking across the tarmac he was not much more than an Akubra Rough Rider hat moving of its own accord, till you noticed there was a bloke under it, the man who rode winners for the accountants and spoke on air with the sentence jerks of a brumby foal tootling round a rodeo ring.
Macquarie Network executives had a job keeping up with him. His agreement on Tony Watson Talking, with a hint of a hyphen between the Wats and the On, noon to three in Sydney, was that if he could not say whatever he liked he would not pull in what was wanted. Cash registers went clang when he opened his mouth. He got his way.
Advertisers were wild about him. Audience figures equating to the sort of numbers bouncing off the dial that he’d proved in his hayseed habitat were, percentage-wise, unknown in Sydney till he came in. Ag ministers had always known him, it seemed; now the whole state cabinet was listening. There was no argument around him politically. There was nothing he personally seemed to stand for. He was numb to ideas, except for taking off on riffs of opinion when inspired. Removed from radio’s ethereal audience he was as weedy and unprepossessing a personality as could be imagined. His handshake had no pressure. When he listened, he seemed not to hear.
When he was set up for the morning spot, five to ten, realm of the crowing cock when sleepers were loose to having their brains pecked out, he needed a house closer to Sydney than Dubbo. Scouts went out and found what he liked on the Dividing Range, where it sometimes snowed. It was not all that close, but if a news chopper flew him to the studio it worked. A pilot was found.
With a cassette thumbed into the small rectangular slot that made doing fifty things at once achievable in a sound booth hardly bigger than a Mark II International Educator, Tony invited Ken Redlynch to take a seat. Here was the clincher: ‘If you want a regular publicity spot, say, twice weekly free to trumpet Boatwear Bushgear Warehouse, mate, take Judy Compton with you.’
‘There’s hardly room for three in that boat, let alone four,’ said Ken, taken aback. ‘You couldn’t even make room for swinging a ship’s cat.’
‘Do you know Tina Stones?’ said Tony.
‘I do.’
‘I’ve heard there’s an arrangement for her to write stories in the Herald.’
‘Yes, I’ve heard that too.’
‘As a matter of fact you organised it, Ken.’
‘As a matter of fact you are right,’ laughed Ken.
‘But no radio station wants to take you, crackle crackle, live cross to pirate ship?’
‘Not so far.’
FIVE, FOUR, THREE, TWO, ONE, flickered the countdown light.
ON AIR it flashed.
‘I have here,’ said Tony into a microphone with sponge rubber taped over it so that when he blew spray between his teeth the electrodes would survive, ‘the owner of an original first pressing of the Beatles’ “She Loves You”, recorded in German. How did you get it, Ken Redlynch – did you steal it?’
‘Ha ha,’ said Ken.
‘I heard you did, on the old Dubbo grapevine, but no matter, we all have our secrets, even decent upstanding Shipley Plateau schoolies.’
‘I am proud of that,’ said Ken.
‘Call this number,’ Tony punched another cassette and a female chorus sang a phone number. Whisker Martin’s pre-recorded voice came on prickly as a cactus.
‘There’s your key to best dressed, smart dressed, wet or dry, hot or cold, that number, plain and simple,’ said Tony, back on air live. ‘So my question is, Ken, ’cause you’re well educated as anyone, or else I’m a dummy, how do you say it in German, “She Loves You”?’
‘Komm, gib mir deine Hand, Sie liebt dich, I suppose.’
‘You only suppose, Ken? You KNOW. Tell you something else Ken knows, Boatwear Bushgear, the power of rolling up a waterproof jacket so small you can carry it around all day without noticing you have it. Right up to the point of flipping a warm hood over your head in the wet stuff, like a tortoise. I am talking about the Boatwear Bushgear “Terrapyn”. Ken, Ken, why are you waving at me – is there something you know I don’t? Is there something about the raincoat, the Terrapyn, I don’t know?’
‘It makes a fashion statement,’ Ken managed. ‘Thanks to our wonderful designer, and partner director, Margaret Wells.’
‘Thank Judy Compton,’ said Tony when they were off air in the next ad break, ‘for tipping me off in reams about your products, bud. She’s agape with admiration.’
‘Agape?’
‘I love words,’ said Tony.
Ken’s few minutes were gone and were over. The next ad break continued its work of selling while Tony got up from the microphone, extracted himself from the booth, pushed through two soundproof doors with a sandwich of stale air between them, and out through a room full of wires, transformers, glowing valves and sallow technicians, and out through another big soft-closing door to the foyer where he pressed the down button for Ken and summoned a lift.
‘See you next week. Same time, same station.’
‘But I’ll be,’ spluttered Ken, ‘at sea.’ He lost the sentence as the lift doors closed on him. Down he sank.
By the time he reached the street he was hooked, seduced, transformed.
Whisker Martin reported the sales figures for the week. Harold Wells could not believe them. Stores were clamouring for stock. Hollow-eyed, grabby, Margaret Wells gave Ken a full kiss on the mouth. ‘Radio star,’ she said.
‘I am as devoted to Rattler and the whole fucking principle as I ever was,’ Ken said to Dijana.
‘I know you are, sweetheart.’
‘It’s just that there could not be a worse time to go,’ he admitted. Tony Watson mesmerising him like a snake. A directors’ meeting strategic planning on Monday.
On his next delivery run to the jetty Ken told Wes he was bowing out.
‘Dijana’s been at me.’ That was true, of course, too.
‘Women. You can’t tell me anything about them.’ Wes turned as
ide. With three sisters, a mother and a girlfriend like Judy it made him an expert.
‘Wait a sec, Wes, listen.’
‘What? You’ve got cold feet? Bullshit. Linton got cold feet but he’s up for it. You’re the one who was ready to go down with Rattler, remember? Or was that a joke?’
The angry boy in the woodwork room on the brick attack was back.
‘A pretty good joke, I thought.’
Ken followed Wes along the wharf, pushing a barrow of groceries. They loaded oranges, potatoes and onions. Down below Ken grabbed the microphone of the HF radio, there was a Shipmate VHF radio wired in, and someone technical from SANT was looking into installing an on-board fax.
‘Rattler calling Sydney maritime radio, over,’ said Ken, trying out the electricals and listening to his own voice, maybe for the last time in the context of Wes’s super-extended classroom life. Here was the master giving way to the apprentice finally.
‘Come in Rattler.’
‘Are you receiving me, Sydney? Over.’
‘Receiving you, Rattler, over.’
‘Thank you Sydney maritime radio, Rattler signing off.’
With Ken not coming, Wes hated the thought of doing reports, scratching words on paper, reading them out haltingly for Tina Stones and whoever was involved doing a PR job for SANT. Linton was the one for that, except Linton was a mighty foredeck presence and a mainsheet dandy, and if he cracked like he had that time when the rudder fell off, well, just take him by the ears and yell in his face, but don’t unleash him on a mic to yabber like a stool pigeon. A ketch needed discipline, routine, three hands to the watches.
Wes went off to find Judy. She was having lunch with Rhonda. They were at the Italian’s with a bottle of wine between them. Wes pulled up a chair, tossed back a glass of red without being asked. Rhonda was everyone’s favourite, his too, but she did not have a clue about him. She had treasured him as a boy and seen him go haywire. All his sisters had.
Well, he’d surprised them, hadn’t he. Their father even wished he would follow him into the ministry. ‘Heart of oak,’ he said when Wes topped the state apprentices. Jesus was a carpenter, the disciples went forth in boats, et cetera, but Wes would have none of that. If there had been any religion in him, left over from childhood when he started his apprenticeship, it was of the firebrand pagan kind called justice. If only he could express his true, soft underlying feelings when he did good deeds instead of with anger and a white clenched jaw and an impulse to king hit.
‘I’ll have the spaghetti bolognese,’ Wes told the waiter. The women were silent, watchful. He might be numb to feeling in appearances but was all feeling. What he felt was pretty simple, really, that he had to get over the hurdle or superstition or whatever it was of having a woman on board for this jaunt without specifically asking for one to come.
Judy saw it in his eyes. She felt it in his resentment at having to say what he needed to ask to get what he wanted – a third crew member signed on and quickly. It was complicated for him negotiating his way out of loyalty to his old mates and allowing that the woman he loved had a place on board.
‘Is that Linton turning his back to me deliberately?’ said Judy when she came down to the jetty the next morning, carrying her waterproof bag of belongings. ‘Or is it just my imagination?’
There was a stocky man coiling rope up near the bow.
‘You’re both crew, frankly,’ said Wes, ‘sort it out between yourselves whatever it is. When I need either one of you, you will have to be there for me, reliably as best you can be. This is not going to be a picnic.’
‘All right.’
‘Get your stuff aboard then.’
‘Apparently it’s really important I use the right words,’ said Judy, not letting go of Linton. ‘No matter what I know, he knows better.’
‘Use them,’ shrugged Wes.
‘You two are real joint bastards,’ said Judy.
‘Just don’t strip in front of him,’ he said, quietly smiling, pulling her to him.
‘Come home tonight,’ murmured Judy.
‘Name that piece of wood up there that looks like a pole with canvas on it,’ said Linton.
‘Why?’
‘I have a little job for you, made for small fingers. If there’s a lot going on we have to be absolutely in no doubt what I mean.’
‘That sounds like the law. That’s what you’re good at, hey. Why not stick to it?’
‘Law of the sea, yep.’
‘The top yard?’ said Judy, answering his pedantic bloody quiz.
‘No, it’s the main top yard.’
‘But it’s the only yard.’
‘Don’t get clever with me. See if you can get up there.’
‘What’s wrong with it?’
‘Nothing’s wrong with it. Or might never be. Just see if you can get up there.’
When Judy was around halfway up, climbing the fairly short mast on the almost too widely spaced grips, she wondered if Linton was too fat to go up or just scared. Their rivalry, which she understood even if Wes did not, was really over Linton loving Wes, hands-off love of course.
She was to do the cooking by turns and serve watches in rotation. That was what you did offshore, great, but did it mean she would not be able to tuck into the love bunk with Wes when time came round for them both to tumble below? No, that bunk was theirs, said Wes, except Linton would sleep in the forepeak, so Judy had to work out, if she was to fill the role she was accepted for, and make a home back on Rattler with Wes at the same time, how to tolerate Linton’s bum pushing past her nose going in and out through the saloon.
Wes took Judy to dinner in a pub they liked for lamb shanks, gravy, mashed potato, green beans and a bottle of red sending out purple winks of light from their wine glasses. Before they knew it they were in a taxi with their hands all over each other and then under the doona in the old attic flat where Judy denied to herself that she had forgotten her pill, or if it even mattered that she had.
At the end of the week they went across towards Manly and anchored Rattler for two nights, getting into the rhythm of a shipboard life as much as could be managed in calm water and with the interruption of a TV cameraman and a sound recordist doing a segment for ABC-TV.
Tina Stones kayaked over to get a feel of what she would be describing without being there, to warm up Judy, who she was depending on to be her window on Rattler. The two young women grinned meeting on the water. The girl with the cat on her old canoe, who used words Wes added to his vocabulary list, had a chiming, fun-loving laugh. Tina passed up a bottle of bubbly then clambered out of her kayak and up the rope ladder that Linton dangled over the side for her.
The four sat in the cockpit drinking a farewell toast. The SANT flag tickled their heads in a light breeze. Wes and Linton downed their share and got back to their jobs. Taking photos with her pocket camera, Tina posed Judy against the flag.
‘I’m not important,’ said Judy, moving where Tina put her.
‘Get over that,’ said Tina.
She coached Judy for what she wanted from her. It was to give the actuality flavour across the Tasman, into Auckland and right up to and including Rattler joining a protest fleet and crossing three weeks of ocean to confront the French, then carrying on making her reports up to but not including witnessing – pray from a safe distance – the atomic blast test sequences so endlessly unfolding that simply must be stopped.
‘Is that all?’ said Judy. ‘You’re giving me the willies.’ She had not thought much past getting on board and getting her berth settled, and after that just being on Rattler at sea together with Wes.
‘Look,’ said Tina, ‘there are going to be moments when you’ll want to shriek and not want the boys to know what you’re going through. I chase the girl angle for Woman’s Day. I’ve written out a code.’
She gave Judy a bundle of index cards held together by a thick rubber band. ‘They’re from the Antarctic; the scientists use them to talk in private to their girlfriends.�
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‘I don’t think I’ll ever use anything like that. I’ll be with Wes.’
‘Get a load of this one, “WUVNE. Penguins have started to arrive on the island.”’
‘Great,’ Judy said.
Tina waved her hands over her head every time Wes or Linton came through the cockpit and stepped over them.
‘Do the boys take you seriously enough as a female?’ she asked.
‘I don’t take myself as seriously as all that,’ said Judy. ‘It’s just I would have hated being left behind, so I’m glad to be along, and I know I’m not completely useless, otherwise Wes would not have said come.’
‘I’ve noticed something about you. Since the first time I ever heard about you from Wes. Everything you do you put everything you’ve got into it. Even knocking yourself, I notice.’
‘I don’t believe in things like other people do,’ said Judy.
‘Yeah and you swallow a lot of bullshit. Look at your carry bag, it’s a hefty weapon for somebody without a cause.’
‘Margaret Wells made it for me. Sailors call them ditty bags.’
‘She’s overdone the stitching,’ said Tina. The bag was on a chaff bag scale, with a leather bottom turned up at the sides, and it made Judy look defiant but touching, clutching it on her knees like a treasure find from granny’s reject pile.
‘Not overdone if you know those five different types of stitching stand for the five oceans,’ said Judy. ‘Or that needles, threads, bits of cord, and so on, are essentials aboard a sailing boat. Also, it’s hard to get wet, and inside, see, the various pouches. Here’s my knife, twine, shackle spanner, lip balm, hair ties.’
‘I love the Judy Compton side of this story,’ said Tina, making a note. ‘Two great women, you and your mother.’
‘Leave her out of my part. Don’t forget Margaret Wells. What everyone else cares about I don’t, or don’t seem to in their opinion. I want the tests to go away. Who doesn’t? Then I just think of everything that’s in front of me, what I have to deal with. That’s what fills me up.’
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