Brian Papasidero himself tended the cement mixer from early morning, tilted the handle hard, filled Wes’s barrow over and over. The barrow pounded a smooth pathway through the heat of the day. Flies covered their backs, fiddled into their eyes and mouths. The two men worked on into the late afternoon with shadows lengthening in the astounding heat and continued by lamplight close to midnight. They started at daylight the next day and shovelled through the heat of the day again, numb with work routine, throwing water into the cement mixer drum, hurling in four shovels of shells, fourteen of sand, five of cement. The fine cement dust found its way into Wes’s skin and caked there with sweat, and made its way into his hair. Taking a break, they drove south towards the highway to get another load of shells and collect more cement bags and beer. That was when Tina Stones took Wes’s photo unbeknownst, and Papasidero banged the truck roof shouting, ‘To horse, to horse,’ quoting Zane Grey, not Shakespeare.
For three peak summer seasons Judy had crossed the Drake Passage aboard the Lindblad Explorer, honing her birdlife slide presentations before groups of Americans and Europeans, and getting well paid for it as well as a following. See if you can’t get in Judy Compton’s group if you can, had been the rich Americans’ possessive cry. Birds came to the fore in her thinking, beating their wings before gliding away on the wind: winter plovers, rufous-chested dotterels and a mystery bird, making a croak and a churr, that she challenged her cruise ship’s study group to identify when they went ashore one Christmas Eve in the islands of Cabo de Hornos.
‘Tell me about that bird,’ said Tina, who never asked a question without making use of the answer, modelling herself on Nora Ephron, who said friends’ lives were fair game for copy.
Judy had no idea what that bird was, she said. That was the point. She was missing her son that year back in Santiago, where Wes played Papá Noel until they flew up to Mexico City for New Year. Judy’s excursioners, clambering from the Zodiac in bitter cold and puffing uphill, tried following the bird, to catch it with their bulky cameras and tape recorders, all self-consciously fit and proudly over-seventy-year-old New Englanders and Californians. They wore khaki many-pocketed Boatwear Bushgear outfits made under licence in Thailand in the American style of war photographers’ jerkins, with film canister corrugations across their chests. No matter how fast the bird went it stayed ahead of them. Back in the ship’s library they consulted the copious literature available as they enjoyed their pre-dinner drinks and popped warm savouries into their deserving mouths. Judy listened as one lot argued for canesteros, little ground-creeping birds, while the other said it was seedsnipe, a sort of partridge. You would think the fate of the world dangled on their hopes as they turned to her for the answer. It probably did. She was no wiser than they were though.
The next year, on a subsequent visit from Te Ata, she broke a rule and went ashore alone, saying to Don and Jinx, ‘Don’t expect me back unless I crack this one.’ In the breezy clearing Judy itched for an answer. Chasing the bird, she blundered through wet scrub, making a horrendous noise; when she stopped the bird call was still just ahead of her. It was then that Don arrived, worried and looking for her, while Jinx kept anchor watch on Te Ata, glimpsed far below with the wind getting up and scalloping the tide with whitecaps.
‘See up in those trees, there’s a pair of caracara,’ Don said. ‘They’re the crested kind not seen this far south. Kraak, kraak, chrrrr – they’ve been throwing their voices.’
During a break in assignments Tina took out a magnifying glass and sorted contact sheets and prints. Showing Judy the shots her picture editor rejected, one stood out from among others, colour amid black and white, but all the colour leached back to limestone grey – the ghost man, the man at the bowsers.
‘Boy, now that shot has a chance in a coffee table book,’ said Tina. ‘Australia’s Vanishing Workforce would do as a title – what do you think, Jude? Or a chance in the Walkley Awards, where the judges say a picture’s just as good as a written story. Well, let them prove it and overcome hating awarding pictures taken by journalists who write stories instead of photographers who don’t for once.’
Judy kept putting the photo down and picking it up again, examining detail through a magnifying glass wobbling over the man’s tense frame. How I love that man, Judy thought. He’s the making of me, or is it me that I am of him. One day I’ll tell him I can’t do anything without him, when I’m all on my own he’s the one I’m reaching for.
On a high ridge, with a weatherboard house at nine hundred metres above sea level, and a few old cottages in a gully below, Tony Watson had made a celebrity’s retreat for himself with the tirelessly hard-working Bill Rathbone’s help. He’d driven the tottering old Watsons down from Blindale, lined a cottage, put in double glazing and connected a powerline looping through windblown scrub up from distant generators operated by hydro-electric turbines to bring reverse-cycle heating to a mountain top.
‘What is it about Bill and people?’ said Judy.
‘He’s a demon for work,’ said Tony flatly.
It was owing to Wes how Bill Rathbone got to know Tony and got in with him, Wes who had talked about the jumped-up disc jockey in grinding tones of disparagement over a miserable Northern Territory campfire, talked so much that Bill, on a circuit through Sydney, had looked Tony up and they clicked. Wouldn’t you know it.
On his days a week off, Tony on horseback gingerly followed the ridgeline on a narrow, rocky path for almost two hours with Bill dressed like a bandit in Mexican chaps watching out for him. They reached a bald knob called The Surveyor at fifteen hundred metres. It was intermittent snow country up there, with black sallys olive-green trunked among rocks. The house and cottages of Tony’s gleamed, their tin roofs away below. You could see the sea away to the east a long way out, the Tasman Sea a splinter of light that showed when conditions allowed.
It was spring up there at last although bitterly cold, still. There was a forecast of thunderstorms. Chippy was asleep in front of the fire in a bean bag, with an Indian blanket thrown over him. Judy and Tony played Scrabble. Tony came right out with something bothering him when Judy came back in with a pot of tea, wearing her flannelette pyjamas and pink chenille dressing gown. She yawned, ready for bed, doubtless to dream of the bloke she had said she wanted nothing to do with for the rest of her life when he almost drowned her in New Zealand.
It was late. They were both tired. Tony ached from his ride, but pleasantly. Bill had given him a massage on the pantry table, with the door open so anyone walking past could see there was no hanky-panky. Bill had a knack for finding sore spots on the frames of wrecked shearers. Judy and Tony still had not finished their game that ground on with multi-syllable word deprivation and clever tactical manoeuvres with single-syllable words they were both good at. A stalemate was inevitable.
‘P, Y, A, L, I need another A and an O.’
‘Don’t ever use that word, Judy – not around me. Do you even know what it means?’
The word was PAYOLA.
‘Of course I do, well, something like a bribe?’ said Judy, scrutinising the board to see where PAYOLA would fit.
‘You said once, when I spruiked you on air, it was something I normally never did unless for payola.’
‘Did I say that? Who to? When? Are you sure? If I did I was just shy and proud of you, darling.’
‘Just use words properly in those goddam lectures or Lars-Eric Lindblad will pull the plug on you. I can make that happen,’ he threatened, narrowing his eyes, sleepily dangerous. Lindblad Cruises were a sponsor.
It was incredible. Dispute woke them up. Judy felt alive in every nerve. She needed to get back at him for this though.
‘That new voice of yours, Marron Monroe, is that meant to be me?’
‘Impossible, Marron Monroe lives in a creek in WA.’
‘Yes, but there’s a hint there of big bezoomas, just in the name, a lot of hefting and heaving in that creek. I believe you said to Bill that I was a bigger woman than
when I went away last time.’
‘I do that for my sponsors over there; they’re that cement crowd, the Papasideros Sons.’
‘Well that’s payola, so it’s all right?’
‘I said don’t use that word.’
Tony was, as usual, up for bending the rules before the Broadcasting Tribunal Judy had made herself into. Their friendship was always tested down to bedrock, and if that ever stopped it would be over. She had that effect on him. A mighty crack of lightning lit up the windows. Chippy burrowed himself deeper under his blanket. Then it started to rain, then hail. After a while it snowed. Judy woke Chippy to show him fat flakes sweeping along the veranda through the already-flowering wisteria tendrils. Chippy stood at the window while Judy held a hand to his strong, straight back.
‘Tina Stones makes a lot of his Spanish accent,’ said Tony. ‘Really, I don’t think he’s got one at all. But he might need to see a speech therapist, that’s all.’
‘Anything else in my life needs pointing out?’ said Judy.
‘I do have a list,’ said Tony.
In the early morning when it was sleeting and still dark, barely, with the occasional silent, distant lightning flash, a helicopter flew over slowly and steadily, and its sound faded down towards the coast. In the morning they heard it was the ABC helicopter diverted from news jobs to boat rescue.
‘It’s our old friend Warwick,’ said Tony over coffee and Weet-Bix. ‘I don’t see him but Bill does.’
‘Bill seems to know everyone. What is it about him?’
‘“Weave a circle round him thrice, and close your eyes with holy dread, for he on honey-dew hath fed, and drunk the milk of Paradise,”’ said Tony. ‘Or so I believe from a card Tina Stones sent to him that he showed me.’
By the following weekend summer had crept down the coast. It was a few days before Chippy was due to fly to Perth to stay with Wes. Judy and Chippy and a few others straggled in a long line on a beach between headlands. Chippy broke away and ran. Back at the rock pools with his two grandmothers, he poked about collecting shells. Chippy was mad about shells that crawled. They were little families of shapes of houses in the limpid rock pools. Their variety and colours were endless, and if you collected them, killed them, sorted them and looked at their shapes you saw how they fitted together. Spanish helped with the Latin names, for cluster-wink, nutmeg and scaly foot. The grandmother who was a scientist, Beth, said Chippy was her boy. She taught him the deft requirement of scientific murder. Boil them, or drown them in fresh water, or pull out their strange bodies with a bent wire, or smother them in an ant bed and let the ants eat their guts out. ‘I want a nautilus,’ said Chippy.
Beth said, ‘The nautilus creature can leave its shell, but if you take its shell away it dies.’
‘Dad’s new boat is the Nautilus,’ said Chippy. He could not help himself.
The grandmother who was not a scientist, Edith Bannister, plain-mindedly told Chippy how she cooked molluscs, or at least the ones better known in recipe books, such as mussels and oysters. He knew, from living in another country, about creeping shells. How when he was a baby lying naked on the sand a corniño had bitten him on the pico. Judy said, yes, it had happened – my Chippy doesn’t lie. He was bitten on the dick by a dog whelk, she translated, on the beach north of Chiapas, in the state of Oaxaca, where they took a casita.
‘But, Chippy, I told you, you don’t remember it, darling, you were far too young.’
‘I do so too,’ said Chippy, jutting his firm, pointed, dimpled jaw they all said was Wes’s.
The two grandfathers, Raymond and Charlie, fished. Back above the tideline they had camp stools, plastic buckets, fishing gear. Their rods were jammed in the sand with lines stretching out beyond the breakers. This was what happened when you got older. Some member of your family connected to some member of some other family and created what could be somehow described as another family. Charlie Bannister agreed when Raymond said so and said it summed up a good part of what religious belief consisted of – a need for belonging – while Raymond Compton, an atheist, saw it as what he was willing to call spiritual. It just did not extend past the grave, and Charlie said he thought not either.
‘Then how can you preach?’ said Raymond.
‘The more I do my ministry as a social service and just give handouts and comfort with a few worn-out words, the more I am up out of bed after midnight answering a knock at the door, the less I do actually preach.’
‘You know,’ said Raymond, ‘I loved your son from the day I met him. We did things together. Practical things, like pulling apart engines without a word.’
‘That’s spiritual, Ray.’
‘You’ve got something,’ said Raymond, meaning a fish. He reached over and held the rod while Charlie Bannister scrambled to his feet and reeled in a flathead.
They were all agreed, Chippy’s four grandparents, that there had never been such moments of contentment as the day afforded them in all their lives. Beth said something like it to Edith Bannister, watching Ray and Charlie – no day quite like this one – as she took in the two men chatting and the rather simple Edith prancing around with her skirt tucked up into her underpants. But when Judy came into her peripheral vision Beth, as ever, was not so sure. She was afraid of Judy, to be honest, with a fearful sort of love. It was a real sort of fear, a physical space she was unable to cross or was buffered by, and it was a real sort of love too. Judy, when she was younger, had been fearful; Beth never forgot. Some of that fear Beth had sown in her. Fear of the nuclear tornado. Fear of being left, when she was, minded for an interval by the rescuing Salvos, and so fear made real afterwards for longer than reason demanded. Judy seemed to have been elevated through that fear into a weird, dangerous sort of bravado, taking to the sea. Her love for Chippy was huge. The boy simply made her glad. Gladness had never been what you could say about Judy when younger, not ever expressed to Beth that way anyway. Her eyes contentedly watched every move Chippy made pouncingly on life in the tidepool.
‘I love seeing you happy,’ said Beth.
‘You know, I think that animals are really, really happy,’ said Judy.
‘What, even dog whelks?’ said Beth. ‘I don’t think so, darling. That’s barely even a hypothesis. Their whole lives are about response and retreat, and creeping around wondering, except I doubt if they wonder, except where the next attack is going to come from and how they had better be ready for it.’
‘Haven’t you ever been happy, Beth?’ said Judy, looking at her mother.
‘Well of course I have, and am, darling. What I am talking about is evolution.’
‘There you go, then,’ said Judy. ‘All our biochemistry is so similar – you’ve taught me that. If we can feel happy, really happy, why can’t animals? Look at a cold bird in the morning sitting in the sun. All the kangaroos up at Tony’s are the same, even when it’s windy and icy cold they find a protected gully, get down in it and sprawl out getting warmth into their pelts as they drowse.’
Judy ran off chasing Chippy through the ankle-deep waves, making the boy hysterical.
‘I don’t mean this negatively about Wes,’ said Beth to Wes’s mother, ‘but the two of them are strange and outside of the ordinary, both of them. When someone does something better than other people, it’s done not so differently from the way other people do it, only it’s done without deflection from the task at hand and for much, much longer. I can’t help feeling that’s Wes, and I know it’s Judy.’
‘It comes out of all that boatbuilding they did together.’
‘Edith, it comes from thinking she knows better but not actually operating at a very high level intellectually, doing everything by feeling.’
‘I think she’s awfully smart.’
‘She doesn’t think, Edith. There’s a wonder or a puzzle she has that keeps her on a track she can’t know for sure is there, but she has the gift of making it up for herself as she goes along – well, not making it up so much as having a shape or a pla
n the more ill-defined the better up ahead.’
Chippy thought about how small the world was on his flight going over to Perth. The smallness of the world pinched him like a pain, getting smaller but more intense, like the last chocolate crumbs on a sheet of silver paper. He had a window seat and looked out for yachts carving away below in the Great Australian Bight. There were none. Of course there were none. If there was one, it would be like a fleck of foam. If there was one, it would look no different from foam away down from thirty-six thousand feet up. But if a seabird died it just might have jet fuel in its blood. That was how small the world was. Chippy opened his book to the page he was up to, his finger moving along the line of print, reading The Carson Wand with his lips moving in response to the English words.
The Nautilus in the big shed open at the sides loomed like a spacecraft over Chippy as he ran through under her. She was built by the last surviving boatbuilders left from the days of the Wadia’s Mumbai shipyards, when only hand tools were used, Wes told him – the adze, the axe, the beetle, the drawing knife, the bow drill, the horsing iron, the jerry iron. ‘Shipwright’s tools made for the human hand,’ said Wes, showing Chippy around his new home, which he already knew was to be his new home intimately from photos and plans. It would be all their new home when his mother came aboard. ‘The adze those old-time, half-naked men wearing loincloths wielded produced a scarph as fine as any made by a hand or electric plane.’
Nautilus had been hauled by bulldozer out of the water across the nearby beach over rollers and into the shed, and when ready with her modifications, come a king tide, would be rolled out again.
‘When?’ asked Chippy.
‘Not for a while yet,’ said Wes. ‘Boats take time. Your mother will like this boat. Take this photo back for her. Don’t let on to anyone else, because the job’s not finished, and people like to get stuck in. Only fools knock a job before it’s finished because a job that’s not finished always has something to tell you that’s not known by anyone till it’s done, even you. She’s more female in shape than any cat I’ve ever seen. I put that into the plans but nothing there’s got three dimensions; she’s bloody real now. The power to blast her along comes from her spinnaker wardrobe. Do you understand what I’m saying?’
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