Forecast

by Janette Turner Hospital

  Lachlan can feel a man’s hand on his shoulder. Floodwaters press him. He is floundering. He goes over the lip of the falls. Pamela touches his wrist. He is drowning in happiness.

  ‘Dad!’ Pamela says. ‘You’ve got a nerve.’

  ‘You look gorgeous,’ her father says.

  ‘I should tell you to bugger off, Dad.’

  ‘Please,’ the minister says.

  ‘You look good too, Elly.’

  ‘You too, Jim,’ Lachlan’s mother says. ‘You should be shot just the same.’

  ‘Probably.’

  Lachlan tugs at his father’s sleeve. ‘I’m Lachlan,’ he says.

  ‘Who giveth this woman …?’ the minister asks.

  Lachlan’s father scoops up his son and the ring cushion rises like a snowbird in flight and hovers over Pamela and falls. It hits Rodney softly on the head.

  ‘Who giveth this woman …?’ the minister repeats.

  ‘Do you remember me?’ Lachlan whispers.

  ‘I do,’ his father says. ‘I do.’

  Salvage

  There’s a joke that’s current at the resort and on the whale-watching boats. Tourists who are leaving the island pass it on. New arrivals splurt laughter, clap hands to mouths in embarrassment, cast sidelong glances at the skipper of the Moby Dick, then furtively retell and embellish. The whispering buffets Rufus – his hearing is painfully acute – though he knows no malice is intended. The rumours multiply like krill and bruise him, but gossip is normal, he knows that. He knows this is the sort of thing that normal people do. He watches as they arrive from the mainland on the catamaran, already infected, brushing salt and hearsay from their cheeks. The story, the joke – with variations – always travels sotto voce, stealthy as a harpoon, but hits target with a brutal bang of laughter.

  This is the way the joke goes.

  Question: How do you know if he likes you?

  Answer: He looks at your shoes when he’s talking to you.

  Rufus gets it.

  Call him Rufus, he has heard many times, always spoken with a slow American twang. He gets that one too, though the backpacking college students believe it is their in-joke, coded and not translatable into Australian.

  Call him Weird, he has heard them say.

  Rufus does not keep count of the contusions. They are lobbed from bar chatter, from beach recliners, from the railings of the Moby Dick when he casts off. When Tangalooma – the former whaling station – is behind them, when they are heading north at a brisk fifteen knots, the wind mutes and muddies the voices. Even so, he can sometimes hear entire phrases, sharp as fish hooks, when the boat passes over the wrecks of the two Norwegian whale-chasers that were sunk in the early sixties, and when he navigates the tricky passage between Cape Moreton and Flinders Reef.

  He’s a bit, you know, retarded.

  Not retarded, just weird, like everyone who lives on the island year round. Talks to whales. Or believes he can. There was an ABC documentary, don’t you recognise him?

  Ssh, he can hear you.

  Even if he hears, he can’t understand – can’t process – what you say.

  He never speaks.

  It’s Asperger’s.

  It’s the aftermath of childhood trauma.

  Born below the waterline, one story goes. He’s part fish.

  Rufus more often feels like a fish out of water, though he believes he is indeed part ichthyosaur. He also knows he was actually born above the waterline in the front parlour of his grandparents’ home in Redcliffe, a four-room cottage on the shores of Moreton Bay.

  His father was a whaler, tourists are told when they purchase tickets for the cruise, and his mother was a marine biologist. A shark got his mother when Rufus was ten years old and they say he hasn’t talked since. But he’s an expert on whaling and whales.

  Rufus shivers whenever a fin breaks the surface of Moreton Bay.

  With Cape Moreton behind him, he keeps his eyes on the smudged line between ocean and sky, scanning for humpback pods. At first sight of a breaching whale, he rings the ship’s bell. Tourists crowd the decks. The Americans (who outnumber all others) hold video cameras aloft. There is much oohing and aahing. A pod of humpbacks, on the annual trek up the coast from Antarctica to the tropical Whitsunday Passage where they calve, is frolicking out there like puppies. What acrobats! They are an oceanic circus troupe, their striated white bellies flashing sunlight as they make their astonishing leaps, their black flukes pelting spray.

  What easy victims they were, Rufus thinks sadly. Slow moving (at only four to five knots per hour), passing close to land when other whales (the blue whales, the killer whales) kept well out to sea, the humpbacks offered themselves as lambs to the slaughter.

  And slaughtered they were.

  Rufus remembers the day his father took him to the flensing deck at Tangalooma. He was eight years old. He remembers the way the whales were winched up the ramp, their shattered hulks belching blood, the hooked knives ripping away their skin and blubber with a nightmarish sound. He watched his father shove the long, jellied ribbons of whale-hide through great holes in the deck to the furnace-cookers below.

  ‘See!’ his father pointed to the skinned carcass. ‘Now you can see the harpoon.’

  The weapon was twisted like a pretzel, its explosive head peppered like shrapnel through bone cage and flesh.

  Rufus remembers leaning over the edge of the flensing deck to vomit, clinging to the rail at the top of the ramp. Below him, at the foot of the slick and bloodied slope, the tethered carcasses of six dead whales, each pumped full of air to keep it afloat, rocked gently against the dock. They looked like six black pontoons, each gushing rivers of scarlet. He remembers watching the circling sharks, the way their jaws closed repeatedly on the tough black hides, the way the bloodied water drove them mad, the way they plunged into the dead gaping mouths of the leviathans and ate the tongues.

  He remembers sobbing in his father’s arms.

  He remembers that the ocean was made not of water but of blood and that when his father took him down to the jetty, the blood crested in waves and lapped his ankles.

  He has never forgotten the dirges of the whales who escaped the harpoons.

  It’s a requiem mass for their mates, his father told him.

  The Moby Dick has cut its engines and now the tourists can hear the humpbacks singing: the low-throated bass notes, the high keening, the fluted mating calls, the lullabies of mothers to calves.

  ‘It’s like the music of the spheres,’ a man says, busily recording.

  Some of the tourists (and not only the women) are weeping.

  ‘This is the most amazing thing I have ever seen or heard,’ another man says. ‘It’s awesome.’ He can’t even hold his camera steady. He brushes his sleeve across his eyes.

  Even normal people, Rufus thinks, with a vaulting flicker of hope, can sometimes understand a language they cannot speak.

  When he was a child, his mother and grandmother loved to tell him that his baby clothes were made from American sheets washed ashore from the Rufus King. ‘That’s why we christened you Rufus.’

  In the school library in Redcliffe (a one-room affair, but well-endowed with the diaries of nineteenth-and twentieth-century settlers) Rufus tracked down the history of the wreck whose name he bore. He did this when he was in Grade 5 and needed to believe that salvage was possible. His need to believe was desperate. For months, he could not look at the ocean for fear of seeing the haemorrhaging of whales or the bloodlust of sharks or the remains of his mother’s body, never found.

  The Rufus King, he discovered, was an American Liberty ship that mistook the South Passage below Moreton Island for the North West Channel. She struck a sandbar and was wrecked in 1942, in the month of July.

  There are shoreline scavengers still living who will swear that the date was the Glorious Fourth and that the bodies of sailors washed up on island beaches in rigor mortis had their fingers clamped around American flags, the miniature kind wav
ed in parades.

  The ship was already mythical for Rufus before he started school. The wreck of the Rufus King was his favourite bedtime story, and his grandmother told and retold and embroidered. ‘In those days we were more worried about Japanese subs than sharks,’ she confessed. ‘We’d stand on the beach with telescopes and watch for black conning towers. We’d place bets. We bet on everything that moved. Were they humpbacks or sharks or submarines? The odds favoured submarines. We watched for hours on end every day. We were perpetually expecting Japs but what we got was dead Yanks with American flags in their hands.’

  Rufus knows the rest of the story by heart: the debris washed ashore, the salvage fever. ‘Miles of American cotton, soft as silk,’ his grandmother recalled. ‘Like a gift from God. The luxuries those Yanks took for granted! I’m talking the bedding on their bunks, you’d think it was the Ritz not the U.S. Navy. You can’t believe how excited we were, wartime rationing and all. You couldn’t get cloth for love nor money back then.’

  Rufus pictures his mother and his grandmother dragging stinking soggy bundles from the sea. He pictures them pegging yards of sheeting to the clothesline and hosing off seaweed and salt.

  ‘Then we boiled them in the copper for days,’ his grandmother recalled. ‘And we bleached them and made blouses and skirts and your baby clothes. It was almost sinful.

  ‘It was sinful, I suppose. Or at least indecent. But don’t get me wrong. We were sorry for those American boys who drowned, and we held a service on the beach and said prayers and sang hymns for them.’

  His grandmother’s face would turn dreamy. ‘Still, I made a lovely dance dress for your mother. Macarthur had his HQ in Brisbane by then and there were Yanks all over the place, at all the dances … Oversexed, overpaid, and over here, we used to say. We hated them and we loved them. They buzzed around your mother like flies round a honey pot … There was a boy from Oklahoma,’ she would say, ‘at one of the dances. He gave your mother a ring and he promised her … oh, what he promised!’

  ‘What?’ Rufus would ask, entranced with his possible histories. ‘What did he promise?’

  ‘Let’s just say you were almost a Yank and you almost had a daddy from Oklahoma. Oh, those Yanks! They were like people in fairytales. They believed anything, anything, was possible. They expected magic beanstalks outside every kitchen window. They made promises the way the rest of us breathe.’

  ‘What happened to the boy from Oklahoma who could have been my dad?’

  ‘The usual. His ship was torpedoed. He’s part of the reef now. He’s part of the Coral Sea. So much wreckage from the Rufus King, washing ashore for days and days. We had a beachcombing party with a bonfire and dancing on the sand. And then we had a Sewing Bee party. You have to understand, the Rufus King was like manna from heaven. And it wasn’t just all those yards of American cotton, though I can’t begin to tell you how many bridal gowns were made from ship’s bedding.’

  She would take to daydreaming until her grandson prompted, ‘What else?’

  ‘Oh, there were the medical supplies. And there was vacuum-sealed coffee, real coffee, oh my …!’ She would put a hand on her breast. ‘To this day, all I can say is that my heart races when I remember what washed ashore. And best of all was your baby clothes.’

  ‘But I wasn’t even born when it sank.’

  ‘That’s true,’ his grandmother acknowledged. ‘But we knew you’d come sooner or later. Your daddy was somewhere on a ship in the Coral Sea at the time, along with those American boys fighting the Japs, but we knew he’d come home and when he did, we knew he’d make you.’

  Rufus knew that his father’s ship was strafed by Japanese bombers and that his father, clinging to wreckage, was picked up by the USS Yorktown. ‘They shipped him home to us in casts and bandages,’ his grandmother said, ‘but that didn’t stop him and your mother making you. You were our V-J baby.’

  Rufus knows this story: Victory-over-Japan Day, 15 August 1945, the day he was born.

  ‘You popped out and Japan surrendered,’ his parents would tease.

  His mother had already made his baby suit from cotton flotsam. ‘It’s undrownable stuff,’ she claimed. ‘That’s how we knew your father would come home.’ She had sent her husband back to the war with underwear made from sheets. ‘Anything salvaged from the Rufus King can’t drown.’

  Rufus thinks he would not mind drowning. Everyone who matters is there already, waiting for him under the sea.

  When Rufus was seven years old, his demobbed father signed on at Tangalooma as a whaler. The ships and crews were Norwegian; the blood-work was done by Australians. In the first four months of 1952, six hundred whales were killed.

  ‘We only go for the males,’ his father told him. ‘We don’t touch the females and calves. This is how we cut off the flukes, with these long knives.’

  Rufus threw up again.

  ‘I know, I know,’ his father said. ‘It’s not pretty. But you’ve got to toughen up.’

  Nevertheless it was at Tangalooma that his father began to drink a lot. He worked seven days a week, twelve-hour shifts, on his six-week stints.

  ‘Worth it though,’ he told Rufus. ‘I’m rolling in money. Besides, where else can I get a job?’

  By the time whaling was banned in 1962, the recorded voice on the PA system tells the tourists, the whales had been almost wiped out. Tangalooma began operations in 1952. In that year, it is estimated that fifteen thousand humpbacks were migrating up the east coast of Australia. As pods were depleted, the whalers became more desperate and less selective, and females were harpooned. After ten years, it is estimated that only five hundred whales were left.

  Now the cetacean population is slowly regenerating itself, though humpbacks remain at risk from Japanese whalers in Antarctica. The illegal slaughter in Australian and New Zealand waters has provoked international protest.

  And yet the whales may have the last laugh because spermaceti is the only known lubricant that will function in the ferocious sub-zeros of outer space. The NASA shuttles run on whale oil, and the Voyager probe beams the song of the humpback into galaxies far far away, a terrestrial salutation to whatever’s out there.

  Rufus feels the whale-song as a caress. It brushes his skin and travels like a low electrical charge through his veins. It hums inside his skull and fills him with happiness. He sings back silently, but he knows the whales hear. He asks what he always asks.

  So close that he is showered with salt spray, he receives an answer. A humpback breaches in front of the ship, its vertically pleated white belly like a vest made from salvaged sheets. The whale, a female, thumps the skin of the ocean with its flukes and her calf leaps out of the water beside her. Their long curved bodies make a fleeting uneven arch. They sing, an antiphonal chant, and Rufus translates.

  Thank you, he telegraphs back.

  Republic of Outer Barcoo

  Jodie’s desk in the capitol building in Wirranbandi is a scratched and gouged door resting across two wooden sawhorses in a room that was once the lobby and teller area of a now-defunct bank. The room is rather grand, with high ceilings and ornate mouldings and the blistered remnants of gilt around tall windows that date from the glory days of banking and gold-rush rumours. Apart from the makeshift desk and a view of the wide verandah, the room contains four termite-pocked wooden pews and a linoleum floor the colour of which could best be described as violently mottled dried blood. These items date from the brief period when the former bank served as the Holiness Church of the Word of God Triumphant. Following its fleeting liturgical reincarnation, the building was derelict for a decade, though often put to use for drinking bouts, morning-afters, and sexual trysts when jackaroos flocked into town from the cattle stations, every last cow-hand hell-bent on squandering his pay with the local barmaids.

  There are no screens on the windows so flies are a problem. Jodie keeps a fan in her hand to fend them off. Naturally there is no air conditioning, but propeller blades in the ceiling turn sluggish
ly, run off a generator on the back verandah. Periodically, and without warning, the generator, choked with red dust, takes smoko breaks that can vary from ten minutes to several hours in duration. Since nine in the morning, when the office opens for official business (currency transfers, passport applications, enlistment in the militia) the dust has been settling like a terracotta mist on Jodie’s desk and on Jodie. Her arms feel gritty when she strokes them, and this pleases her, because she figures that if she belongs anywhere, she belongs to the earth itself.

  Jodie is reading, or trying to read, but she is aware of the horse on the verandah and of the feral pig snuffling at the door and also of the bloke with the semi-automatic who has just dismounted and knotted his reins around the railing. He is unkempt and unshaven. Even from this distance, she can smell the stink of sweat and of long-unwashed body. She can also see that the bloke is good-looking, the Hugh Jackman type, a real hunk.

  ‘You Ruth?’ he asks as though he owns the place and has no need to knock.

  Jodie raises her eyes over her book and lowers them again. She affects boredom. ‘That’s what my pa calls me.’

  He is now leaning over her desk. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘It means that’s what my pa calls me. It’s not what I call myself or what folks who know me call me.’

  ‘Folks?’ The Hugh Jackman bloke ponders this word. ‘What’s folks? The local codgers, you mean?’

  ‘Right. That’s who I mean.’

  ‘What do they call you?’

  ‘They don’t call me Ruth. Since you do, I know you’re here because my pa sent you.’

  The man props his semi-automatic, pointed to the ceiling, against Jodie’s desk, removes his Akubra and scratches his head.

  ‘That supposed to be a white flag?’ Jodie asks.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The fact that your semi-automatic is not pointed at me.’