A Sea-Chase

by Roger McDonald

  ‘You don’t have to build the sea up all the time,’ said Judy, jabbing at the typescript with a pencil. ‘It’s big enough in itself without all those adjectives and exclamation marks you throw at it – it’s only the sea.’

  ‘I suppose you are the expert on that, Jude, but honestly, the first thing you want to say about something I write when you read it is that I use too many adjectives? Why are you so cranky? You can’t have had enough time to get past the first few paragraphs. Isn’t the point going to be when I write that I am going to have a point eventually, and you won’t know that point I’m making until you get to the end of the article and I make it?’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Judy, reeling at the strength of Tina’s reaction. ‘I’m pregnant.’

  ‘Oh shit, darling,’ said Tina. ‘What?’

  She made Judy a cup of tea, sat her on the couch and pulled a blanket over her, then filled her a hot water bottle because it was a drizzly, misty evening, not cold so much as damp through after weeks of rain.

  ‘Put your feet up. Do I need to ask who?’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous. I stopped taking the pill because we fought, and then we bonked ourselves silly when we made up. This is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard, but it looks like Wes has gone bush with a Kiwi, Bill Rathbone, Dick’s second cousin, and they’ve got themselves on a wanted poster or something, for starting a fight with union reps in Queensland.’

  Tina got on the phone and rang her sources on a recent story. She came back after few minutes.

  ‘He’s one of my Rathbones. One of the Grace Rathbones. Bill Rathbone is their odd man out.’

  Tina had written a story about a family, the Rathbones, who had supplied to New Zealand, from a railway worker bunch of union-organisers and socialist high achievers, a judge, a heart surgeon and a novelist. Not to mention a stroppy industrial chemist involved with SANTNZ and engaged to Monica. Years ago Grace Rathbone had moved to Australia as a young journalist, married, started a family, begun writing books, lived in poverty and happy hardship until The Carson Wand became a bestseller, and everyone on the other side of the Tasman, including Judy, believed she was an Australian while the truth known over on the other side was otherwise. The Kiwi was a flightless bird. Once a Kiwi always a Kiwi. They never truly left where they evolved.

  Judy and Tony had started on the Grace Rathbone books in Bourke, passing the The Carson Wand trilogy back and forth to each other, starting again when each of them got to the end of the third one. The same with Wes when she introduced them to him. The plots involved orphans, dead mothers and missing fathers who turned up no longer missing with their belongings in a spotted handkerchief hanging from a stick. New Zealand came into the early chapters. Judy had forgotten that or never really noticed. Grace Rathbone wrote about things that happened to her Australian husband, also a writer, as a boy in New South Wales timber camps, hunger at the edge of starvation in hard years saved by scrounging, richness of feeling and plenty of soul wrung from hardship. Judy said she had watched Wes reading Grace Rathbone with utter concentration.

  ‘So you still love him,’ Tina said.

  ‘That’s not the point,’ said Judy with a sob. ‘You weren’t on Rattler, you didn’t see the way he was – he drove a stake through my heart.’

  After a few weeks at the flower shop Judy’s application for teaching came through, with an interview lined up. Her father had posted her teaching diploma over. As well, without asking Judy, Beth had asked Ken for a reference and Ken wrote one, not quite perjuring himself, saying she was a teacher with potential. Judy had learned something from facing up to her mother and being honest with her in a way that she now applied to other people. If you changed, other people did. Ken anyway meant a kindness.

  Dick Durkheim took Judy and Monica out on his mullet boat Whiro. Monica was hardly ever in the shared house anymore but always over at Dick’s or out at the land Dick owned.

  He sailed them there one day, to the oystery beach protected on two sides by craggy, eroded headlands with dead pine trees gaunt as the spokes of wrecked umbrellas. He anchored the yacht instead of running it ashore, as the day was a lot calmer than when Dick and Wes came in to the same shelter. She would bottom out at low tide and lie crookedly like a table with only two legs. They swam ashore, holding their clothes above their heads. Dick showed them the grass beds where he and Wes had spent the night stranded either side of a smoky fire, waiting for the wind to drop and the tide to come back in. Dick told Judy what he had said to Wes that night, that cursed by boat disasters Wes had been the fool who made them happen. This made Judy feel softer in her feelings, not so entirely one-sided in packing Wes off, and a little defensively hostile to Dick.

  They followed a track up from the beach over fallen logs and through thickly wooded gullies into and out of leafy shadows. At the top, on a bare plateau or shelf of land a hundred acres wide with a view past the end of a peninsula to a distant, hazy island, there were old houses and farm outbuildings.

  The farm took its name from a tree, puriri, Vitex lucens, something that grew. Some of Dick’s friends camping there were off boats that had sailed to Tahiti in the protest fleet. These friends of Dick’s were people putting their guardian stamp on a landscape and a seascape that was nature left to its own devices at its peril.

  To Judy’s amazement Georgy Redlynch was there looking like a wild woodland creature, reminding Judy of Wes when she first met him, and carrying a pinch bar. He was round-eyed and furry-whiskered, his trousers held up by string braces. He ran over to Judy, gave her a boisterous kiss, told everyone she was one of his stepmother Dijana’s best friends.

  In the few hours she was there Judy decided to come back. She could not have decided this on her own. Dick and Monica begged her. Dick said he did not have much to share, but it was a lot more than he and Monica needed to live on. Judy said what money she could put in, she would, and sorted out something with three over-the-hill mothers living in a commune, who had six young school-age children between them. They were looking for a helper to run the kids’ schooling while they carried on building or took jobs in Auckland, walking out on a foot track to a dirt road where they kept cars. The country childhood in Judy answered to that need. At the ages those kids were now, five to eleven, she had done correspondence school, her father her lone playmate when she finished her schoolwork early, poking a stick in an ant bed and following native bees to a hidden hive. She had chosen to forget about that when it was eclipsed by Blindale. That there was a full life before its interruption, and she was loved. Unaware, it gave her a life model, including a chronology not yet played out.

  The kids along this lonely seascape messed around in boats. They would need watching. Dick said Judy had sailed like a witch coming over. They had better get back to the boat as a breeze was coming up. Judy was welcome to give birth here, she was told, the mothers over the hill sharing an assumption that anyone reaching their time would throw down their pick or their hoe, ship their oars or drop their corn-picking basket or whatever, have their baby, wrap it in a shawl, hoist it over their shoulder, and get back to work.

  Next time Judy came she stayed longer, and camped. With relief she cancelled her application for NZ teacher registration and surrendered back into the idea that life would take care of itself. That feeling was her reflex mode of existence. It got her to where she was, after all, through wrong turns to where she dared fate for more than just one and without Wes. Towards dark, Dick, Monica and a few friends gathered in a hollow where they baked potatoes in the ashes of a fire, spooned baked beans from enamel plates and drank gorse flower beer.

  ‘This is me,’ Judy said when asked if it was all a bit crude for her. ‘I’m an Australian, remember,’ as a kind of boast. They ate fatty ribs from a wild pig Dick had shot in a gorse thicket. The beer was hopped with gorse flowers so strong it gave them wild headaches and sent Georgy Redlynch staggering off into the night, spewing and moaning.

  Judy read a Grace Rathbone novel to the kid
s she looked after, eking out the story into episodes each day. She realised she pretty much knew it by heart, phrases and sentences coming back to her. And this was where the author had lived for an impressionable year as a child, here where so many pipies lived on the beaches that walking over them was endless with a scraping sound as the tide swirled, and scooping them up for the pot always easy.

  What Grace Rathbone made you feel was longing. She created longing in you, and if you did not know it was there she showed you where it was. Judy was about halfway through the novel when a side room in the back of Dick’s house became available. Monica urged Judy to stay there for a few months until the space was needed.

  Monica and Dick were married on the ridge where a big green puriri tree, like a chestnut, threw shade and shelter, and where as part of the ceremony they hammered in, stroke by stroke, the corner peg of a new house. The botanical name of the puriri meant energy and light. ‘If I ever get married,’ thought Judy, ‘this is the wedding I want, under a tree.’

  But she wondered what she meant. Like and dislike, mistaken character judgement and personal reassessment marked her thinking. She needed a counter-image of herself, a contrast. Grace Rathbone’s The Carson Wand was set on the North Coast somewhere so typical it must have been Yamba, where a girl from one generation found she could go back and live with the people of a different generation. How she did so was by walking across on a tree trunk dropped over a narrow, fast-running creek coming down from the hills to a salt lake and a surf beach. Turning around three times on pointed toes, the girl in the story felt herself fall through into another place. Here Judy was on the shallow Firth of Thames in a country not her own. There were thousands of beaches on the New South Wales coast between Victoria and Queensland. They thundered in Grace Rathbone’s pages, heard from inland behind the dunes. Sand bars blocked the mouths of rivers and creeks. Coastal supply vessels with short raked smokestacks shot over them at high engine revs. Sea eagles looked down from hot blue skies. Fish were scooped in nets. And here it was here again in a different disguise of ecology.

  Judy and the kids from Puriri Farm walked the eroded headland and looked down into a tidal creek they knew was a place Grace Rathbone would have known when she was a girl, as she had once visited a farm near here, where her aunty lived. Judy guessed that when Grace Rathbone wrote about going across into the past, into another time, she was drawing on what she remembered of her New Zealand childhood and putting it into a realm of magic in Australia. Judy felt she was doing something like it herself in New Zealand, back the other way.

  To say there was not the variety of bird, animal, or tree and shrub life at Puriri as there was where she grew up sounded ungrateful, picky.

  ‘Do you mean we don’t have snakes? That’s a good thing, Jude.’

  Contrasted with the pride people felt about New Zealand, Judy felt she did not have much pride in Australia, not pride she could personally take credit for the way they seemed to over here in a Rugby team, a yacht race or an anti-nuclear protest. Judy grew up somewhere harsher mentally, harder in the heart. Australia you loved without liking.

  In Bourke some kids in her class had come from a blacks’ camp, where they lived in tin huts or humpies. They were noisy, energetic kids, funny as anything, friendly and wild. At some times of the year they would disappear from school and go with their parents doing seasonal work, gathering wool in sheds or peeling it from dead sheep, going off picking peas, or off just doing what teachers and white kids and sometimes the kids themselves called going walkabout. Sometimes they never came back, either because they went somewhere else and stayed or they died.

  All the whites Judy knew, including the Blindale Watsons, had put the black kids down. The lack of pity was phenomenal. The kids with sores, bare feet, croupy coughs and maybe their parents on the booze, right down to a craving for methylated spirits mixed with milk. Few stayed through into high school, and anything else disliked was called their own fault. Warwick Mickless, who came in to be educated, knew something different, out where he rode with black kids following cattle droves, and mobs of sheep like cloud shadows driven over the red sandhills out from Yantabulla. Telling these Kiwis over here about this, Judy felt shame. There was no other word for it and no way around it, which the Kiwis did not understand; it was inconceivable to them.

  That Judy was unbeatable at table tennis bothered Dick. A ping-pong competition was held in an old hayshed on Saturday afternoons. Dick was sullen if he lost. If he had not been anti-nuclear he would have gone into making the most bombs, said Monica. Judy, after winning a round, started giving the comp a miss.

  On good weather days Judy and Georgy Redlynch sailed. Judy had a specific aim. It was to sail around obstacles on an accurate course, to know where those obstacles were through memorising charts, to know the state of the tide and to study the weather so she was able to predict what the day was going to do by the shape of clouds and the colour of the sky without listening to a weather forecast, or, if she did, to use the forecast to judge when she had it right.

  One day they were drifting along in not much wind in the old dinghy from the mud flat, a heavy fifteen footer with a rare catboat rig and a mouldy old sail. Judy asked Georgy why he had said Dijana liked her, because it was not the impression she had.

  ‘Dijana said when Ken went missing you were kinder to her than anyone else.’

  ‘That’s not right. I wasn’t.’

  ‘You came right over to her and gave her a kiss.’

  ‘No, she came right over to me.’

  ‘That was when I met you, when everyone came round.’

  ‘Can I give you a word of advice, Georgy?’

  ‘Yes, Mum, what is it?’

  ‘Don’t smoke so much dope.’

  Georgy trailed his fingers in the water and tapped his shirt pocket with the other hand to make sure he still had the joints he had rolled to smoke when Judy went ashore and left him to the dinghy on his own. He had a young girlfriend over the hill. They were in love.

  Judy stepped out, waded ashore and called back, warning Georgy not to stay out too long as a strong south-westerly would be coming up, by the look of the sky.

  She was right and the wind got up. Dick came back from standing on the headland amazed. ‘Georgy’s out there sailing up and down the Firth in the catboat. It must be twenty-five knots, gusting to thirty. Take a look at him. He’s not wearing a life jacket. Didn’t we make that rule? Are all you Australians so bloody stupid on the water?’

  In the middle of the week Judy went back to Auckland and worked in the flower shop from Wednesdays until Saturday lunchtimes. She did bookkeeping as well as flowers and the florist, Mrs Packer, valued her. Tina had gone back to Australia. Monica was resident at Puriri Farm with Dick, the old house in Ponsonby where Judy kept a room was often full of strangers who wondered who she was when she came in, after dark, exhausted and alarmingly pregnant, a year or two older than they were, which felt like a generation.

  When her labour pains started she was at the florist’s. Mrs Packer drove her to the clinic and stayed with her until Monica and the mothers from Puriri arrived. But Judy wanted Wes. She screamed his name in the birthing room. One day on Rattler they had dived overboard and swum under the boat, through the shadow of the hull that pierced down into greeny blue depths. She was given a gas to breathe, had anyone warned her that cresting to the surface meant so much pain?

  Then her baby, sticky with blood and fluids, was wrapped in a blanket and placed beautifully in her arms.

  ‘Oh. Such wonder,’ she said to the tiny creature somehow seeking her, lids dimly parted, eyes blurrily blue, and what Judy felt was a blinding love that was never to leave her. ‘Oh, my dear God,’ she said. ‘Heavens. Such wonder.’

  Word went out from the Bannisters seeking Wes with news he was a father. The police and the sheriff’s office who delivered summonses were unable to find him. Linton Simmons worked on having the charges withdrawn meantime. Tony Watson concocted a tirade about
a woman left in the lurch. A number of church people, social workers, evangelists and round-Australia travellers, grey nomads with time for poking around on and off the beaten track, approached strangers in camping grounds and in outback roadhouses asking after him. They did it for the Bannisters, to reel in a poor sinner. Tony did it for Judy, who he couldn’t think of without wanting to go too far for.

  One day like many others Bill Rathbone twisted the ignition of a raised-suspension four-wheel drive with a contract mustering logo on the side door – a chopper herding a bull chased by a stick figure wielding a stock-whip – and, handing Wes a cold beer, planted boot and belted along hideous roads through the labyrinthine spread of the outback.

  Judy chose the first name Raymond, for her father, second name Charles for Wes’s father, when the Bannisters with Wes’s sister, Rhonda, flew in. Auckland Baptists donated baby clothes and a bassinet. ‘Ray or Charlie?’ was a first-name dilemma Judy overcame by nicknaming him Chicka, which she thought about and changed to Chippy, a little splinter fathered by a man who worked in wood.

  With Beth and Rhonda, and Chippy in a basket, Judy went back to the campsite after a week. Beth would have to get back to AGS soon, she said. She was practically wearing a groove across the Tasman, the Science Minister warned, awaiting some overdue findings. When a young mother herself, Beth could have done with the level of help people gave Judy, what an ideal. Not just the other mothers but Judy had, for example, the help of the string bean, Georgy Redlynch, who elected himself Chippy’s big brother and changed nappies right up to the elbows in muck.

  Efforts redoubled to get word to Wes while something tempestuous in Judy prevailed not making her part of the attempt. Proudly, she said nothing one way or the other about wanting him back but naming the boy Chippy counted, and Beth noted that Judy had never, not once, said she had stopped loving Wes.