A Sea-Chase

by Roger McDonald

  Bill asked Wes about Judy, sensing dismal thoughts. You confide in a friend, especially a new one. That was the way or the deal in the travelling life. With Silver Springs behind him Wes tried to describe her, to evoke her across the windscreen of the ute – the brown curly hair, the bright smile, the good at squash.

  ‘But I’m over her,’ said Wes.

  Coulda fooled me, thought Bill. He understood this Judy had her hooks in. It was something he understood from his own experience, namely you met someone and they were the one. They never changed or went away. The rest of life was fury.

  A few days later Wes was grinding cutters and combs in a noisy, stinking-hot shearing shed a thousand clicks into Queensland and proving himself indispensable. The station owner came over from the homestead at smoko on the third day and told the workers he’d heard on the morning news that the protest ship Rainbow Warrior had been blown up in Auckland harbour and the French were involved – frogman French nationals and secret agents. One person killed, a Portuguese national.

  The news went down with the largely Kiwi workforce like a Rugby loss. They downed tools. Wiped their eyes. It was as personally distressing as an attack on their family. If there was a French national within reach they would have torn that person apart. Bill Rathbone had shorn in France and Spain. They weren’t all bad, he said. But they could be sneaky, and he described the short work he would make of a French national if he came on one.

  That night the gang of men and girls drank their beers and Baileys Irish Cream on the cookhouse steps as they waited for their tea. Wes and Bill moved away out on the edge of the dirt turning circle and squatted on their heels.

  Wes told Bill about the emergency flare as Rattler approached New Zealand, and wondered if it was something to do with the attack on the Rainbow Warrior, someone being landed or met in preparation.

  ‘Sounds like it was,’ said Bill.

  Through their chance meeting on the plane, getting drunk, through their confessed stories, through praying with the Rev. Bannister and throwing their lot in together on the long drive to the shed, Bill Rathbone now knew everything there was to know about Wes Bannister. If Wes chose not to talk to anyone else about what he did before he came out here as Rathbone’s sidekick, then Rathbone was not going to say anything either. Wes was grateful except for Bill calling him Skipper all the time – that was annoying.

  Wes lugged his wire bed and lumpy mattress out across the claypan, away from the metal huts that baked in inland heat well into the night. There was a breath of coolness in the air coming in after midnight, and at that hour, unable to sleep, Wes was able to tune his radio better, getting news from all over the world on the small black tranny that originally was Judy’s and had floated ashore in a Tupperware container, and that Wes had cleaned out with cotton buds and spirit alcohol and packed in a suitcase for the flight over.

  From the BBC World Service he learned that the action SANT was part of had a result. The French suspended testing. Things happened the opposite way from how they were intended. Seems like they had bombed their way to surrender. Almost everything in Wes’s experience now did too. He had ridden Dick Durkheim’s motorbike down from Auckland with a rucksack of Judy’s belongings and had taken the rucksack back with him when she blocked seeing him. Keeping the tranny, a hair brush and a notebook of phone numbers and addresses was a gesture of dumb submission, and he would go wild if they were ever lost or stolen.

  Word went around the shed that unionists were coming over on Sunday for a showdown. It was a measure of how Wes had shrunk into himself, into the small world of loyalty that he had joined, that the union beliefs that he stood for as a personal principle or ideal in his life came second to standing side by side with Bill Rathbone and the others, mainly Kiwis without a shred of union tradition, when a carload of AWU officials and representatives roared up. Sign up and join up was all right, those who had not were advised to do so by the contractor. But during that process it was unavoidable that a few things would be said. One was that Bill Rathbone said he was fine if the others joined the union but he was fucked if he ever would and never had.

  ‘We know about you, Rathbone, you deadshit,’ said the organiser.

  ‘Nobody owns me, nobody speaks for me. I am the master of myself,’ said Bill, thumping his chest like wiry Tarzan. ‘Nobody tells me when to put my blades down or take them up. I believe that I put in double, triple the work you pricks do. Look at my tallies.’

  ‘We have and you want to slow down.’

  ‘Get me a pen right now,’ Bill called out to the boys.

  ‘But it’s a Sunday. No work on a Sunday.’

  ‘I am not particularly religious,’ said Bill, making a cheerful threat.

  The second carload came over from where they were parked waiting at the side of a hut. Out spilled three fighters. The fun began. Wes was right in there beside Bill, laying waste to the unionists till the property owner waded through them yelling for order.

  Tony Watson was a daytime broadcaster but in the early-morning hours, when the Macquarie Network almost but never quite slept, his programme ran on a length of recording tape unspooling itself in replays of the day’s talkback that outpaced sunspot activity and sped around the world’s airwaves like a raspberry ripple at 3 am.

  Away out where Wes worked in those months, in Western Queensland and then across into the NT and WA, he found himself far beyond the extreme outer edge of Tony Watson’s broadcasting reception area except after midnight.

  It was a fetish Wes had, to listen behind that spittle-spray for any suggestion or allusion to Judy from her little mate. He was able to feel an altered warmth or energy in the twangy talk, suggesting when it touched on her. It came when Watson grew wistful about friendship, devotion or trustworthiness. ‘I had a friend once … I still do …’

  Judy was that friend, for sure.

  What Wes never expected, though, was to find the shape of himself swinging down from the stars, a meshed outline of himself in the shape of a newcomer to himself, floating down a bit unhinged, a bat in a nightmare. The tranny was propped to his ear on a greasy pillow. The police were looking for him. He was wanted for questioning for his role in the punch-up. If he did not know what to listen for in Who Brung You he would not have got the warning. Watson talked about how a group of cousins decided to liven up a dull Sunday. When they found they did not have fifteen for the full team they called in an extra, Who Brung You was that extra, and oh they were so glad they did because Who Brung You weighed in like a drunken sailor and scored a few tries. There was no time out for injuries either. The game came to an end when the umpire fired a gun. You could make whatever interpretation of that you liked, but if you knew who the drunken sailor was you knew that the person who fired the gun was the station owner yelling.

  It was impossible to tell if Watson was pro- or anti-union, where he stood politically, or if he really was issuing some sort of hint or warning to Wes and Bill Rathbone or if he wanted them arrested. It was the same when Watson talked about SANT without mentioning SANT or what SANT stood for, when the crew of Rattler heard him on Judy’s tranny when they left Sydney Heads and could still get reception, when Judy’s words transformed by Tina Stones’s articles entered Watson’s patter and came back at them in the voice of a grasshopper. Likewise when Boatwear Bushgear was spruiked, hectic praise and commercial enthusiasm for a program’s sponsor coming with a hint of sarcasm. It was why people believed in Tones Watson. He had to be for real, or you weren’t real yourself, the voice of a country that was always undercutting itself, not believing in itself except for the worst parts of itself: drought, rain, self-destruction, and stupid hope in endless pitiful stories.

  Wes lay out under the stars in those first weeks of exile with his black eye throbbing and his knuckles a bit sore and his cauliflower ears hotly attentive. He guessed Judy was still in New Zealand since Horace the Plague Locust was there, taking a boiling mud pools holiday sponsored by Coopers Dip. Wes wrote his sisters and
parents postcards telling them he was all right, but giving no return address from shame.

  When the protest yachts sailed back from French Polynesia, Judy went down to the Auckland docks to greet the flotilla. Tina Stones interviewed them as they came in. Monica Neale was friends with Dick Durkheim, and when Judy saw them shyly holding hands she realised they were an item.

  Judy was reluctant to leave Auckland. Farming families window-shopped at night, wearing gumboots and eating ice-creams in cold, driving rain. The land and the sea closed their fingers around them. They went sailing standing on a street corner, gusted sideways waiting for the lights to change red to green. It was how connection was made to nature, better than frying up in a drought.

  She found work filling in a few hours a week in a florist’s shop around the corner from where she was staying. As she busied herself sorting blooms she told her boss that her boyfriend had never given her flowers.

  ‘You have to train them.’

  ‘Too late,’ said Judy, pulling a face.

  The woman looked her over. ‘Are you entirely on your own, dear?’ she said, stressing the word entirely.

  ‘Why do you ask?’ Judy looked away. She was touchy, but the florist needed to know, at the practical employer level, where things stood with the younger women she spent hours training to make up bunches of lilies, peonies and ferns, accurately trim stems and put them into high cones of silver paper and create elaborate bows from cheap ribbon with one blade of a pair of scissors.

  ‘What I mean is, are you pregnant?’

  Judy looked startled.

  ‘Um,’ she said.

  ‘About three months would be my guess unless I’m very wrong.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Judy. ‘Yes, I am pregnant and you’re right, three months. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before I started. I haven’t known how to tell anyone. I wasn’t sure. I haven’t been able to tell myself, even, if you know what I mean.’

  ‘That’s all right, nobody ever stays more than a few months. You will find I care where it matters, which is why I asked.’

  ‘Thank you. I’m not alone – well, not entirely alone, any sort of alone really that I don’t want to be, gosh no, I’m not alone at all. I’ve got a tremendous number of friends and family all sticking by me.’

  ‘Your parents?’

  ‘Well, actually, they don’t know yet. In fact, you’re the first person I’ve told.’

  ‘So how can your friends be sticking by you if they don’t know what they need to stick by you for?’

  ‘I’ve been through something else and they came good for me,’ said Judy. ‘I didn’t know how many friends, real friends, I had. Gosh.’

  ‘Then why are you crying when you tell me how happy you are?’

  Staying on in New Zealand, Judy shared a small wooden house in Auckland with Monica Neale, who came up to the city at weekends, and Tina Stones, who was often away travelling around the two islands gathering stories.

  It was her father Judy told first, after the florist, when Raymond came over to New Zealand bringing his fishing rod.

  They hired a car and left at noon on the Saturday when Judy finished work. They drove north to look at where the hulk Rattler was, a five-hour drive. Judy had the fixed idea that a small jewellery purse she was missing since the wreck would be washed up in a lump of sand. It held her rings and earrings, and a few treasured keepsakes that had retained their original meaning, that she held on to as lucky charms or connections giving the successive parts of her life a tenuous meaning. Nothing else seemed to matter more, when she thought of them, than keeping those things, one of which was the first, indeed the only, love letter she had ever been sent, an almost folded and unfolded to bits faded wad of paper torn from a school exercise book.

  The vast lonely beach was empty on a Sunday morning except for isolated dots of figures fishing. The day was so calm that Judy and her father were able to walk out to the wreck at low tide. Light sparkled on ripples of water where tiny fish nibbled weed around the inverted topsides where Judy had spent weeks applying marine paint finishes while Ken talked about islanders sailing outriggers and trading coconuts, fish and vegetable greens.

  The soul was gone from Rattler but Judy had another soul feeling about her. Anything removable or souvenirable had been taken off. Rattler was a picked-clean skeleton, thrown back in time to join whatever disintegrating skeletons told the fullest story of life possible when there were no more witnesses. Raymond cast a line and Judy went beachcombing off into the distance. The Parengarenga shoreline was the cleanest beach imaginable, except she came across a tangle of socks and straps and buckles that revealed, half-buried, Linton Simmons’s sailing bag. There, lumped in a bunch of seaweed beside it, was her jewellery purse, holding cheap precious earrings and rings, lip balm and her eyebrow pencil still sharpened just how she liked it, and in a little wet ball, the love note a boy-man had written her when he was sixteen and that she had always carried around with her as love’s gold standard.

  Raymond seemed to think that if his daughter was pregnant it meant not just a grandchild but that he had a great son-in-law thrown in, the one he would have chosen if he was given the choice. Wes Bannister.

  But a gap had widened into a chasm and Raymond got a sense of it. He told Judy how looking after, bringing up a baby was hard, but Wes would be a hard-working provider, he was certain of it, and her life with the fun offered by a kid would be great for the unexpected benefits it would bring. He was excited and glad but he picked up that Judy looked woefully uncertain. More than that:

  ‘Stop!’ she said. They were in a pub restaurant in the Bay of Islands having dinner.

  ‘You have to be happy about this,’ he offered. ‘You don’t think I was but I was, and Beth was when you came along.’

  ‘It’s too late or I might have had an abortion.’ Raymond was shocked. ‘I’m not ready. I hate saying this to you.’

  ‘Nobody is ever really ready for anything very much when it’s a big thing. We weren’t for you, but look.’ He spread his palms wide and smiled at her rather helplessly.

  ‘I know that,’ said Judy as close to sardonically as she could manage with her father. Not all that long ago sarcasm layered with irritation was mostly her way of dealing with him. She had forgotten that. He’d jumped ahead of her, making the swift change to oyster farmer, going from inland to the salt sea on the path she thought only she had the rollicking freedom to grab for herself when she met Ken and his circle.

  ‘You’ll have help,’ said Raymond, making a vow as he rose from the table where he had eaten most of a bowl of green-lipped mussels. ‘I’ll be back in a minute.’

  She saw him down the dim end of the hotel corridor, under the stairs where the phone was. She saw him frantically signalling to her. She went to him and put the receiver to her ear. It was Beth excitedly getting the news.

  Within days, back in Auckland, Beth joined them, pinching Judy’s cheeks with ridiculous pleasure at intervals. No mention of SANT this time. She had made this trip with Judy in mind only. The two of them were full of plans, Beth and Raymond. It was incredible. You would think they were the parents themselves. Tina and Monica were away that week. Beth took over the house. Raymond searched for glasses to drink champagne from and came back with Vegemite jars.

  They cracked a bottle of New Zealand sparkling wine as it would not have done to ask for French wine, in the mood the country was in. Raymond said he was having a holiday without having to put anything into it himself, such as loading a truck with camping gear and putting up tents, cooking meals and running around for other people. He sat in a lounge chair watching raindrops race each other down the warped glass and putting bets on which one would release itself next. He wondered if he should delay his return ticket. Likewise Beth. She had a genetics conference to get to and SANT speeches to make all over the place, but her ticket she was pleased to say was an open return. They waited for Judy to say something, hoping she might tell them about where she was hea
ded in relation to pulling Wes into her situation. ‘Have you told him yet?’

  ‘I don’t have any plans to,’ she said.

  They were quaint sitting on the couch looking at her expectantly. At last she’d found the formula to silence her parents.

  She said what she knew: ‘Nothing, except Tony heard, after a fight on a station where the AWU brought charges against anti-unionist shearers for a barney, that someone called Bannister was involved. And I’ve heard from Rhonda, his sister, that Wes did go bush apparently. Out through Bourke to Queensland. Anyway, that was the plan but all she’s had since is a postcard with no return address.’

  ‘You’ve hurt him,’ said Beth.

  ‘He hurt me,’ said Judy.

  Judy knew how much they both loved Wes. It left her out somehow. For her father it was because of valve clearance biscuits and cam carrier bearing surfaces that were better than Wordsworth’s poetry to the mechanically minded because they were metal locked atom to atom – not humanly, slippery feelings or words – and could be oiled and wiped over with a rag, then brought together into a snug fit and bolted down ultimately predictably. For her mother it was SANT.

  Beth went to the Bank of New Zealand, opened an account for Judy and organised the transfer of a regular weekly amount. When that was done she felt better about heading back to Australia, as did Raymond.

  It seemed that if you made the slightest hint of a suggestion to a journalist or writer that something they wrote was not perfect, even a single word, a mere adjective, then there was no way back to putting the friendship on the level of trust it started on and nuclear war broke out.

  Tina Stones wrote about the yachts returning from Tahiti with a touch of exaggeration around the sea. She showed Judy a draft.