Even after being ashore more than a week, except it felt like a year, everything was rocking for Judy and she had a cold nose with its own persistent memory of being poked out into the wind when she stood jammed in the main hatch yelling at Wes.
‘Presumably you have done with sailing,’ said Beth.
‘If I ever go to sea again it will be totally under my own control. Nobody to make wrong decisions for me, only me.’
‘But of course you won’t go to sea ever again,’ said Beth, waiting for an answer, a straight answer as to whether she would.
Judy had not, to be honest, thought about it. What she had thought about, and a lot, was what she would have done handling a boat and planning a passage differently. Was that the same?
‘Darling, you said you were terrified.’
‘I was.’
‘And we were all terrified for you. So don’t ever make us feel like that again or put us in a position like that ever again, promise?’
‘That’s an easy promise to make because it wasn’t me who did it to you, it was Wes.’
‘I honestly believe you love Wes.’
Judy did if love was molten rage, if the heat anger supplied could keep her going and burn Wes in its path back to the truest heart of himself.
‘You weren’t there when we pleaded him to turn back, to go back out to sea even though it was rougher than you could ever imagine and all we wanted was safety. You didn’t see what he knew he was putting us through for the sake of SANT.’
‘Not SANT – everyone’s cause, the whole of humanity’s cause until there’s a bomb test ban.’
Judy turned sombre eyes on her mother. ‘Really? Well, we were the ones thrown in the water and spun around like a washing machine, how something floating didn’t kill us I’ll never know, there was stuff everywhere. He was the only one hit, the sea was angry. People on the beach waded up to their armpits reaching out for us. They were glorious. Honestly, just looking at Wes with police and rescuers around, a silly plaster on his head and his hair all limp, all I wanted to do was go running at him screaming and kick him in the face.’
‘Come over here and cuddle up,’ said Beth from her pile of pillows. ‘That’s appalling.’
She wanted her daughter to grow up, to get rid of the avenging streak like a throbbing vein. ‘If you don’t go to him now something will happen, something wrong.’
In the early morning hours Judy felt someone or something like a crouched tiger leap at her from behind and she yelled out in a nightmare. She must have woken all the adjoining rooms. Her mother stroked her hair and there was a steaming cup of tea on the bedside table at eye-level when she blinked awake again, blessedly free of a shattered-nerve feeling for a few steady moments until she remembered the wreck. They sat up in bed drinking their tea with the curtains open and weak yellow morning light creeping in.
‘Tell me about what I don’t know,’ said Judy in a small girl’s voice. ‘How I got called Judy.’
Beth went back talking about her past. It was about the Darkes, about what she called her Darke side, where Judy’s mitochondria came from, her maternal Darke-ness genes, and a possible money inheritance at an undisclosed age, and Judy hardly knew them. Emotions, feelings, were not tolerated among the Darkes. Beth confessed she suffered from that tendency herself. They came from a rational, radical evangelical England at the fringes of the Darwinian revolution in the nineteenth century. From the Midlands out to Australia in a sailing ship in 1860, with a prefabricated house in the hold and their Bibles, tracts, and vaunted financial enterprise at the ready. There was a great-great-aunt Judith, who became the second wife of a student of the geologist Charles Lyell, Henry Darke, later a manufacturer whose scientific instrument works made the Darke Coincidence Artillery Range Finder used in the Boer War.
‘See why I made a change,’ said Beth, ‘into the life sciences? “Judith” was my gift to the Darkes. It calmed your grandparents when they learned I was in the family way but had a Biblical, family name for you. That I wasn’t a rebel about to cut them off. Look at you. I never have.’
‘I do love that expression,’ said Judy, ‘“the family way”.’ I’m in the family way with you, Beth. I’m starting to make or gather in something after waiting for it for a long time. Oh God.’
‘Oh God what?’
‘I didn’t take my pills for a while before we left. Wes and I weren’t talking. Then we were.’
‘You’re not pregnant, are you?’ said Beth abruptly.
‘No!’ Judy laughed.
‘You’re sure?’
‘As sure as I can be, cross my heart, spit and hope to die.’
Rather like the thought of whether she would ever want to go back to sea, whether she was pregnant was not something Judy had actually thought about too much, except at some time during the previous week, surrounded by Monica’s angels in grubby cardigans, she had experienced a kind of hormonal lift, a very definitely physical as well as mental kick, where an alternative life offered itself to her imagination, tracked by her blood. A close, hilarious, warm, domestic roller-coaster kind of life with little arms tight around her neck and wriggly toes twisting with delight.
Only factual statements were tolerated when Beth was growing up, or statements linked together as propositions that could only be moved along to their next step if a proposition could be tested and proved. Mealtimes were a bunfight in the Darke family dining room.
‘How did all that logic make the Darkes religious?’ said Judy. ‘And turn them into scientists at the same time?’
Beth’s brother John Darke was an archaeologist, if that was a science. And he preached. He was the one Ken knew about the day Judy and Ken met, and she would not have been here now without that kick of interest from Ken, mixed with envious derision that led him to believe in her enough to draw her into his circle.
‘Revelation as a source of knowledge,’ said Beth.
‘Huh?’
‘The proposition or hypothesis their religion was based on, that I grew up with, was revelation as a source of knowledge. My uncles set it as the most difficult exam question a Darke teenager ever sat for; they loved putting us through our paces.’
‘In your case it took you to the top of the class,’ said Judy.
‘Yes, to the university gold medal in biochemistry and chief geneticist at the plant farm,’ said Beth, pulling exactly the face that Judy pulled when she felt she had miles to go before accepting praise for anything she did. ‘It also was how I fell pregnant. Your father,’ she added, and paused.
‘My father what?’ said Judy.
‘Your father put sex to me as a fact. He was a cunning boy. My God, the testosterone.’
‘Don’t embarrass me with those facts,’ said Judy.
‘Everything I did was logical with an illogical result. A yes or a no. A one or a zero. I found myself pregnant and unmarried in a family that prided itself on its brains and was more straight-laced than Queen Victoria.’
‘So there wasn’t any love,’ said Judy. ‘Just facts. And I am the illogical result?’
Her mother kissed her, hugged her, held her. Judy wiped away a tear and laughed, listening.
‘No, dear, the illogical result was that love was my revelation. Love was the underlying emotion of the religion of the Darkes, as it came out in me,’ said Beth, rocking her daughter to and fro as she might have done, must have done, of course had done when Judy was a small child, except Judy could never remember it. ‘Love was my parents’ weapon for doing what wasn’t easy.’
‘Love as in,’ said Judy, ‘when you were being given love for your own good, love that you hated?’ She thought of the Salvos’ interlude and bored a look into her mother’s eyes.
‘Must you rattle your tambourine?’ said Beth. ‘I know what you mean and I am sorry. Yes, that kind of love too, the kind where I loved you more than anyone in the world, when you were my treasure, and I had to put you aside to save myself for you.’
The Greenpeace vessel R
ainbow Warrior, standing at the Marsden Wharf at the bottom of the main street in Auckland, was ready to leave for French Polynesia. On a nearby vessel the SANT flag rescued from the wreck of Rattler was run up her pennant halyard by Kelvin Forester, named after Lord Kelvin and rather ogle-eyed himself representing his father the ogle-eyed SANT chairman. There were marches, speeches, confrontations through city streets that day. Wes marched with sullen dedication, looking for a fight. The marchers were a rip-tide going in one direction. Everything was an enemy now, to Wes, including nature.
Judy and Beth tromping a few rows back kept their eyes on him. Beth went forward and spoke to him, and dropped back. It was evident that, having made his tries by phone and motorbike to reach Judy, he was not going to allow himself to turn around and look at her. Her refusal to see him when he came looking was something she thought he might have spent enough time thinking about. Just when she had the impulse to run forward and walk alongside him Beth came back.
‘What did you say?’ said Judy.
‘I told him that Raymond and I loved him, I really had to, I needed to. Then I said you did too.’
‘What did he say?’
‘“Thank you.”’
Judy pushed forward through the crowd, looking for Wes, but lost him.
On the SANTNZ Crusader Georgy Redlynch helped out in the galley. While he made cups of tea and handed around beers he had his photograph taken with a group of hard-case objectors he hardly deserved being seen with, but who hugged his pimply carcase to them because he was a young, ignorant Australian whose mind could be moulded. Ken took credit for him, the budding environmentalist, although it was Dijana who had looked after Georgy and shown love to him, in recent years, giving him his values more convincingly than Ken had managed on custody weekends.
It was said by the hard cases talking about the wreck of the Rattler that Australians could not sail as Kiwis did. That might be true but Wes resented the talk with his shame turned inwards. There was a pub down a side street where he did his drinking in a corner on his own. Linton went back to Sydney, leaving Wes with the thought that he might be legally, financially responsible for the loss of the Rattler. It would be up to Ken to decide that, or Ken’s insurance company. What Ken felt about Wes, what they all felt about him really, was the blow struck by Ken’s words related by Tina Stones in the Sydney Morning Herald: ‘Regarding safety at sea Bannister broke a rule so basic, etc., etc.’ It set him apart. Made him a leper. Regarding Judy and their stand-off it felt like war.
Wes’s billet, Dick Durkheim, an industrial chemist and SANTNZ’s chieftain, said, ‘We’ve got a few hours before dark, what say you come out with me on the water. I think you should.’
There was a whole other world miles from Auckland in the islands and estuaries of the approaches to the city, with its shipping channel guarded by a candy-striped lighthouse plugged up into a sea road to the Pacific. They took Dick’s twenty-two foot mullet boat Whiro that Dick had built himself, not badly, either, and rigged with gaff sails dyed rusty-red like Rattler’s. Down a long, dim, silvery strait a howling south-westerly made it a rocket ride.
Wes was unafraid to be back on wild water but took no great pleasure in what they were doing. His emotions were numb. He supposed Dick thought he might crack. He did not understand. He was through with boats. They were nothing to him. He was on one doing what a boat demanded to keep it doing what it did in a twenty-five knot south-westerly. That was all. It was hard sailing but going nowhere regarding his state of mind. After a two-hour run they pulled around a headland of an island where gravel was quarried onto a sheltered, oystery beach and made a fire. The wind swung to the south and held them there.
You could hear Whiro’s hull clunking on the pebbles. Dick Durkheim showing off his creation had gone too far into the darkening afternoon driven by wind changes. But he was proud of this place, where his uncle had left him a hundred acres only approachable by sea, and then with difficulty depending on tides. The southerly thundered through the trees at the top of a steep hill above them, but in the shelter of the hill cupping around them it was calm. Night came on, the tide went out, and they were decidedly stuck. They smashed open oysters and picked the meat from them where they sat on the rocks. Wes felt better seeing that Dick had made a kind of mistake. Over a Brandivino flagon steadily emptying they talked.
In the great Napier earthquake this far north and sheltered by land, there’d been a tsunami and Dick’s great-aunt, Grace Rathbone, the writer, had seen stingrays and sharks stranded in the shallows as the sea withdrew. Yes, Dick would have sailed pretty much as Wes had done coming around North Cape and across the wide mouth of Great Exhibition Bay and Parengarenga Harbour, but he would not have done what Wes did shaving past North Cape. Instead he would certainly have headed back to sea and held off. Sorry, mate, that was not smart.
Wes caught a bus to the airport. Nobody saw him go. Nobody gave him a send-off. He was defeated, crushed, diminished. An alphabetical fucking disaster from A to Z. Pride sucked away, taking with it enthusiasm, belief and the whole meaning of every skill he had developed since beginning his apprenticeship. Going through passport control he shrank when an official asked him if he had enjoyed his time in New Zealand. Noting his point of entry was Parengarenga the official raised an eyebrow. His name was recognised. Wesley John Bannister – the Australian boat-wrecker.
The same tropical low-pressure cell that came south from Fiji and wrecked the Rattler still hung about in shreds and tatters in the upper atmosphere over the Tasman Sea. Turbulence jingled the drinks trolley as the Qantas Boeing clawed into a headwind towards Sydney, engines whining.
Sitting next to Wes drinking mini single malt for mini single malt was a New Zealander, Bill Rathbone, a shearer and helicopter deer-shooter who worked around the world over a year’s timetable. Rathbone told his story. It was unique in a way that matched Wes’s mood of severance and bonded them. Yes, Dick Durkheim was his second cousin. Everyone round Auckland was related to everyone else – they’d never met.
‘He didn’t like me,’ said Wes.
‘What’s wrong with him?’ said Bill Rathbone.
Starting in New Zealand, moving to New South Wales and Queensland, then to Colorado or maybe Wales or France or Spain and back to New Zealand, and so starting all over again, was Bill Rathbone’s yearly work cycle. As they swapped stories Bill’s was interesting, but Bill said, ‘You’re in the news, Bannister. I heard about you, mate. Tough luck. I’m a nobody. You’re famous.’
He grinned when he said that, without slyness or envy or blame. A ratty-looking man of around forty with a pencil-thin moustache, Bill Rathbone seemed to know how fulfilling being a nobody could be through a lifetime of being one. Wes was drawn to him as to an imagined younger uncle come in from the family outskirts gifted with fellow-feeling. If there was a tuning fork in himself that Wes needed to chime a note to respond to, after what had happened to break the rhythm of his life, it was Bill Rathbone. Maybe he was just epically, poisonously drunk. If so, so what. They clicked their plastic whisky cups, rattled the ice, tipped back their throats and signalled the hostie for more.
In Sydney, Wes found Rathbone a bed for a few nights in the Bannister household. Up Parramatta Road, pulling out a wad of notes, Bill bought a Holden ute for going west, and a swag and a big-sized chilly bin from Whisker Martin’s old outlet, now Boatwear Bushgear and the place to go. He had work lined up.
‘Why don’t you come?’ he said, and laughed when Wes replied, ‘I don’t have the skills. What work would I get?’
‘You have the skills or I’m a Dutchman.’
Wes liked hearing that. It was the opposite of what was thrown at him at the end of his sailing botch-up.
Before they left Sydney, Rev. Charlie Bannister invited them into his study. He reached behind him for a bottle. It looked like whisky, being amber-coloured, and Rathbone rubbed his hands and looked happy. But it was non-alcoholic, Claytons Tonic served with soda water, and Bill Rathbone still
rubbed his hands and looked happy.
‘I like this stuff,’ he said, taking a second glass, and when Rev. Bannister mentioned a Bible text, just in passing, Bill finished it off for him with a laugh.
‘Are you religious, Bill?’ said Rev. Bannister.
‘If it’s all the same to you I’m not,’ said Bill.
‘Then if it’s all the same to you, let us pray?’
Bill happily submitted, bowing his head, while Wes ground his teeth, met his father’s eye and dropped his gaze.
Wes’s mother, saying goodbye, told Wes how glad she was that he was getting away from the sea. She had been in a state over what had happened and was happy he’d thought things through.
‘I’m starting to,’ said Wes. He sounded bitter. It was unlike him though.
His mother said, ‘But where is dear Judy? What is going on, Wes? I hope you haven’t talked this way to Judy.’
‘We’re not talking, Mum.’
‘You must get over that,’ said his mother.
Rev. Bannister supposed Wes’s friend Bill Rathbone was a good man in all probability, and told Wes to make sure he used his skills going outback with Bill as God might wish him to, which was another way of saying that although they were skills relating to boats and the water, they were easily adapted to dry land for a spell, and thank God they would be.
‘Come back soon,’ said his father, embracing him with the same physical acceptance he gave the homeless.
Barrelling up the Mitchell Highway towards Queensland, Wes watched the road signs towards Silver Springs getting closer. ‘What’s this shithole called?’ Bill blinked as they drove through the settlement. Putting the place behind them, just a few scattered houses and grey scrub, Wes said nothing about it. How Raymond Compton was gone from there to become an oyster farmer. How Ray was a man Wes would have liked as his father, a quiet man instead of the preaching one he had, in another sort of life. When Wes fell for Judy and met her family, he fell for the whole lot of them like Beth said Judy had for Ken’s circle. When Raymond had his clearing sale, Wes had come up and helped him for a week getting ready. In a week Wes had got to know a few people around the rail siding. Shame now if they saw him defeated, lost and astray, a dog with its tail between its legs scampering off to Queensland.
A Sea-Chase Page 15