by Thea Astley
He downed his beer, nodded around the group, laughed at the right moments, and like a man obsessed with a woman thought of his sloop and its small bunk-room, savouring in retrospect the fragrance of wood and spar varnish. Another six months (‘No thanks, Clem, no time for another.’) he would be fitting the deck planking, hatchway, and thinking about whether to work on a timber mast or take Cole’s advice and settle for a lightweight aluminium alloy.
‘It’s quicker,’ Cole said. ‘You’re not getting any younger, mate.’
‘Let me think about it.’
He didn’t know what he would have done without Cole, who persuaded him finally to let him handle the haulage to the coast at the right time and to fit an outboard and its cable and a tiller. He was seeing the end at last; that light on a purple horizon began to hit him in the eyes.
It was towards the end of his second year working on the boat that Howie Briceland’s youngest boy, Toff, a devious fourteen, began hanging around. Toff was a five-day boarder at a school in Rockhampton but on his weekends home he started appearing at the shed door, in spankingly creased shorts and designer T-shirt, poking a polite head round after a tentative knocking to make himself irresistibly invitable, wide-eyed with laddish curiosity.
‘Gee, Mr Randler,’ he’d enthused on that first day, but careful not to overdo it, ‘it looks great. Really great! I hope you don’t mind me coming over. Dad said something about it and I could hear all the work going on when I was up in the top paddock. I wondered if you might need a hand.’
Randler looked up from his sanding machine and something in the directness of those spangled eyes forced him to switch off the power and remove his earmuffs.
‘What’s that? What did you say?’
Toff smiled. All teeth and chirrup.
Gotcha!
He became a bit of a pest. He would turn up early on weekend mornings, ruining Randler’s leisurely pot of tea and toast, sustenance for the rest of the day until his scrap evening meal. Randler didn’t know how to turn him away without offence. He had built the framework of the small cabin by now and was busy fixing laminates to the studs. The passion of the dream had such force that even after working day-long in a heat-lashed shed he left off reluctantly, cooking dinner with the mental resolution of one knowing he had to fuel himself for more work, greater effort. What I will need, he imagined as he turned chops in the pan, is this and this and this.
Already he was in the boat and sailing.
The chops burned.
Another month. Two. The town was filled with term-end kids hanging about the one milk bar/café, bored witless. Toff skirted the fringes of the group.
During the school vacation he dropped in on Randler daily, his busy eyes watching with absorption while a small unrepressed smile plucked his mouth askew, playing a tune he would block with a casual hand, a casual cough, as he plunged fingers into his hair to rumple kid-fashion those knock-’em-dead blond curls.
‘Won’t be long now, hey, Mr Randler? You’ll soon be off into the wide blue yonder.’
The boy was balked by the man’s silent absorption. The old fart hadn’t even looked up.
‘Will you be taking anyone? Won’t you be lonely?’
The questions were hardly worth answers. Randler kept working away at the coaming round the hatch.
‘But won’t you?’ Toff persisted.
Finally Randler glanced across. ‘I’ve been on my own so long, lad, I’ve got to like it.’ He wished the little bugger would push off. No, he didn’t need help but hadn’t the kid better get home to help his old man with the chores? Didn’t he have a holiday assignment?
‘I’ve done it,’ Toff told him with a suitably self-deprecatory smirk. ‘I’m pretty smart, actually, Mr Randler. Top of my form. Dad reckons I ought to be a lawyer. What do you think?’
‘I don’t think,’ Randler said, needled, ‘except about this. Just let me get on with it, lad, there’s a good chap.’
But Toff was back after a cooling-off period of a week, just to see how it was going.
‘Boy!’ he said, his quick eyes registering some kind of admiration – it worked on all his teachers – his fingers stroking the hull. ‘You’re doing a beautiful job.’
‘I am, am I?’ Randler couldn’t help succumbing a little to such overt flattery. He gave Toff a grin. He found his hand stroking the sheer as well, caressing, sensing the satin of the wood enter his own skin and pulse up through his arm. He smiled and Toff caught the smile and held it.
‘Great job,’ the boy enthused. ‘Great, great job. Ex-cell-ent!’
The swelter days of December. Almost ready for Cole’s haulage to the coast and the fitting out of sails and outboard. An emergency feature, that last, he kept telling himself, Cole kept telling him, for tricky harbour entrances, for mooring, for those landfalls of the mind.
He preferred to think of his sails engorged with wind, taking him out on the roadsteads, a dancer about the islands studding the littoral. Always a dreamer. Sometimes, sagging exhausted back at the house after a ten-hour day in the shed, he could smile wryly as he realised his status as an armchair mariner, stuffed with Masefield but little theory, a schoolboy reading of coral islands and buccaneers and no practice beyond the half-dozen visits he had made in his adult years back to the same beach, the same lagoon, to find the elderly couple moved on but the dinghy rental business still there.
The new owner had encouraged him to hire a small skiff and he had skated across flecked glass, intoxicated with both the sound and the silence of air and water, the noises of space eaten by wind. It was then he knew what he wanted most but doubted there would ever be the opportunity; he could see no escape from the farm, the heat dust poverty of his life.
But he’d changed that. He’d made the break.
Another week. Two. Some final spit and polish to the tiny cabin. A bunk. A cooking bench.
Toff loitered round the edges of Saturday morning.
‘Almost there, hey?’
Randler grunted as he fiddled with rudder and pintles, not looking up, keeping his eye to the particulars of the business.
‘Let’s come on up, Mr Randler,’ Toff pleaded, admiring. ‘Let’s have a look at the cabin.’
So he’d given in, simmering in his own pride, watching the kid peering, feeling, even cheekily flopping on the narrow bunk.
‘What about the mast and sails?’
‘They’re being fitted down the coast. I’ll be there.’ He thought it was like assisting at a religious rite. ‘I’ll be there doing my bit.’
‘And then you’ll be off, yeah?’ Toff rolled off the bunk, climbed up the hatchway and stood for a moment on the deck, his eyes raking man, boat, shed, in a dizziness of envy. ‘Hey,’ he said. ‘How about that!’
He ambled off, looking back once to see if the old geezer watched, but he was bent over the deck again, fussing around the rudder housing, and the whole of a turned around Saturday scalded the boy’s mind as he went down towards the creek, dodging through the scrub past Massig’s house and heading towards the footbridge and the road into town.
Yes, she was a beauty, old Randler decided, standing back to gloat over his clinker-built love. Nearly three years of work had gone into it: the primitive steam box he’d built for the planking, the fixing with clenched nails, carving the rebates, the seemingly endless coats of varnish. He smiled at his passion. It was to be rigged fore and aft and he had attached a bowsprit for the jib stay. Each morning now he took his mug of tea to the shed to stand sipping and looking, sipping and looking.
Cherry Cole had promised to be up to shift her to his workshed near Yeppoon within the fortnight. Randler would wait there with the boat, rather like a father outside a maternity ward, expectant, letting the surgeon fingers of Cole make the final adjustments and bring it to birth, full term, launched into the silky tide of the marina. He hadn’t yet decided on a name but something suggested Vagabond, which seemed hackneyed enough but held its own memories and harmonics of those me
mories. There was a poem by Stevenson they’d all chanted on afternoons in the classroom, staring at the chalk-streaked blackboard, the globe, the pictures of the Barron in flood, the aerial view of the Whitsunday Passage, and outside the windows the sagging pepper trees blocking the dry curves of the seemingly endless sheep paddocks.
He leaned back on a bench in the shed and lit a cigarette. Words that kid of Briceland’s had uttered kept coming back and fanning resentment. ‘All the same, Mr Randler, it’s kind of out of date, isn’t it? Like clinker! Everything’s fibreglass now. Even concrete.’
‘There’s nothing as beautiful as timber,’ he’d said. ‘Anyway, lad, I’m out of date too. Almost passed my use-by date.’
But he put the thought aside in the steady lapping of water against the bow.
Another two weeks and he would lock the house, whistle his old dog Cracker onto the front seat of his truck and they’d hit the road and the high seas together. Well, not the high seas. A journey up to the Whitsundays for a start, maybe as far as the Cape if he found he was handling things right.
That night he stayed late in the shed, putting finishing touches to the tiny cabin – the cooking bench, the storage cupboards – touching up the painted surfaces with the care, he thought, of a woman making up her face. Cole had promised to fit a small gas cooker and fridge. Not that he would need much. He planned to live off the sea. When he returned to the house he fell asleep almost at once, to dream of fish fresh from the water, tasting of salt and the sea gardens.
Now he had reached the end of his labour, the days dragged. He rang Cole and asked if he could bring the date forward. ‘Only by a couple of days,’ Cole told him, his voice frayed by distance and bad connection. ‘I’ll be up on Monday.’ When Randler replaced the phone in its cradle it seemed that he had erased fifty years of grinding farm work in one beautifully timed decision that would take him from Drylands to waterlands in a second. At night admiralty charts fluttered from uncurled sleeping fingers to the floor beside his bed, frightening Cracker who grunted and lurched away to his usual corner in the living-room.
Three more days. Impatience was making him despise – that was the word, though it shamed him – the farm that had sucked so many decades from him; reject the townsfolk whom he knew too well, the street of sun-dried fly-struck stores, the sheer languor of service, a languor he had once admired as a countryman’s quirk that set him apart from the money-grubbers of city canyons, a languor – the manyana principle he called it – that he had practised himself until now.
No more. He slept dream-filled in hope.
Toff’s dad was a councillor, fat with graft, expense accounts unvouchable for, owner of one of the larger grazing properties now swollen by Randler’s sell-off, owner of Drylands’ one hardware store where he rarely gave dockets for cash sales but siphoned off the week’s takings for household expenses, neatly obviating earnings declarations for tax purposes. (‘Christ, Win, everyone does it.’)
Onya, Pop!
Toff hung about quietly, shadowlike, ears alert when the olds discussed business, bickered over debts, hopped into the neighbours with petty censure, planned financial coups. He’d early learned to appreciate the finer points of rorting and living well. Yet despite his approval of parental scams, he resented his parents themselves for his having, in a gloomily ripening adolescence, to fend off the jibes of schoolmates whose own parents were aware, or victims, or less successful. In fact he loathed the older generation his parents moved in: buddies from properties farther out, coastal businessmen and their wives who came up for loud drunken weekends and planned development along the seaboard. And he loathed even more the generation beyond that: smells, wrinkles, contused veins, the staggers, jowls, guts, curved frail bones, plastic munchers, word-gropers. Gross!
And oldsters had everything in a way. Rights of passage. Small authorities. Large authorities. Even when they couldn’t remember, the stupid old bastards, the name of their local bank manager, the man who’d leased the next property out but one, the names of his friends – he didn’t have many – they could remember to the last piddling detail the proscriptions demanded by custom, all the half-pint tyrannies adults felt free to impose by virtue of their age.
The plan he had been fermenting during sleepless nights of the last school term ripened as the full moon fined down to its last quarter. He’d come home that weekend with a lousy note from his form teacher who’d found him cheating during the maths paper in the yearly exams. Stuff ’em, he thought, wriggling under the hot sheets. Stuff the lot of them. He didn’t want to go back to that dump next year, anyway. His poncy father had raised eyebrows and said it was about time, anyhow, he came back to help on the property. The only use an expensive school like his had, his father pronounced, waggling a spoon for emphasis over the apple crumble, was to make connections. The right connections. Toff hadn’t made any.
He shifted his hatred out from the centre. Bishop’s gambit. He had to whip up reasons for his next move. He recalled the indifference of old Randler to his earnest youthful presence, the rejection of proffered help, the selfishness of the old bugger, yes, the sheer bloody meanness, when it came down to it, of refusing to share even the sawdust and shavings of his dream.
Resentment made him feel better. He smiled in the dark, lying awake waiting for the olds to hit the sack, not to listen in to erotic tumblings, for they were so rare he regarded his parents as neuters, but to hear the heavy snoring of the old man and the lighter, regular breathing of mumsie entwined in God knows what dreams of profit and loss, a snooze duet that would make it possible for him to lever up his casement window and head into mindless midnight.
He checked his watch. Twelve-fifteen. Surely old Randler would be asleep by now.
Gently he slid out of bed and padded across to turn the key in his bedroom door against outside intrusion. He pulled on black joggers and beanie and let himself out the window into a fragrance of bruised geraniums.
Stock-still. Waiting.
Toff felt a bit of a pro. He had a small history of petty crime that had never been brought home to him. There was that little matter of the primary school out at Drylands Creek, a trashed convenience store not far from his own school, an unexplained paint job on a war memorial in downtown Rocky. Not that he stole things. The kicks didn’t come from that. He was above stealing, he decided with savage pride. It was something deeper, a tiny fuse of hatred that burned away like a pilot light. He’d never had a girl. He’d tried. He still remembered the laughter.
Over the house lawn, now, through the paddocks and past the imbecile stares of drowsy cows to the creek that led up past Massig’s place and twisted in behind Randler’s property. There wasn’t much left, his dad having bought most of it. Randler’s home paddock was a mess of unslashed weed and the beginnings of scrub growth that Toff knew clump by clump.
He crouched behind a stand of wattle, from where he could see the dark hump of Randler’s house and the higher ridge of the shed. In the farmhouse one window stamped a yellow rectangle against night-plush and Toff waited, chewing his nails in fury that the old sod was still up. He wished he smoked, like his classmates, but there was a manic puritanism that drove him into mental violences that had no connection with torpor or ease or the small carnal comforts the other kids talked about. He never masturbated. He was relieved by convulsive dreams that left him drained. He never nicked drinks from his father’s stocked cellar. He perfected a vile sterility.
Sometimes he surprised himself with the rampage of his wishes. A military plane manoeuvring from its coastal base and leaving an upward-lengthening contrail across the passive blue once swept him unexpectedly behind the controls in a downward, ever-accelerating plunge to the miraculous, longed-for whump-explosion-oblivion. When he returned from the verandah he could hardly swallow his breakfast cereal.
‘Did you see that plane?’ he had asked his dad, hidden behind the Red Plains Gazette.
‘Eat your breakfast, lad.’
‘But did y
ou?’
His father rose, made a face at his wife and took tea and paper into another room.
Toff could only grin.
He grinned now in the patchy dark, revolving in his mind every aspect of his forward move, every leap of his backward flight, knowing each hide of scrub like familiars, every secret waterhole in the dying creek that made the faintest of gasping sounds to his left as it staggered over a small rockfall on its way to Massig’s.
The moon sliver wasted away and the window in Randler’s house suddenly became a rectangle of black. Still Toff waited, chewing on a grass stalk, waiting until the stalk was a tasteless string that cut at the edges of his tongue. He spat a silent slobber of grass and saliva and lay back listening to the earth tick. Nothing disturbed him, neither rustle nor slither. He became grounded, literally, earth-merged, closing his eyes until another hour went by. His watch said two-thirty before he began a cautious progress to the shed, armed with the aids in his pockets, the kerosene-soaked fire starters, the matches.
Briefly he wondered about the dog. It slept inside, he knew. He’d asked about that innocently enough weeks ago. Silence was everything.
The old fool hadn’t bothered padlocking the shed. This was a town where they still believed nothing happened. Didn’t they know times had changed? He eased the door open and tiptoed up to the hulk of the boat where it slumbered on its scaffold-trestles imagining the sea.
This would be different, Toff decided, not like that crummy one-teacher-school job where he had merely chucked stuff about. He laid his fire starters in strategic spots in the belly of the cabin, like white nougat decorating the cupboard skirtings, the bunk. Sorry, mate, he whispered and grinned again. He scattered wood shavings over the decking and soaked them with petrol from the can Randler kept in a corner of the shed. Not enough, he regretted, and nosed about the walls of the building with his pencil-flash until he found cans of paint-stripper and methylated spirits.
Quick! He had to be quick!