Death of a Whaler

by Nerida Newton

  Eleanor Eleanor Eleanor Eleanor.

  The memories of her are sucked to the surface like a leech draws blood to the skin. My head feels bloated with them. My entire body, numb just before, is now singing with the thought of her like a string pulled taut.

  I need her and the desire is extreme enough to make me retch.

  And then I see her as if she was before me. Blessed or cursed with an optimism that was ridiculed in our house, and though she quickly learned to hide it from them she shared it with me and her eventual freedom became our secret focus. I am with her under the spiked branches of the lantana bushes in our backyard, where we carved a hiding hole. It took us the three full days of a Labour Day long weekend, with only the carving knife from the kitchen and my pocketknife as our tools. The earth under the bush was hard so we stole blankets from neighbourhood clothes lines and carpeted our dirt floor with them. From the local dump we took some cushions from a flea-ridden couch that had been abandoned there. We itched and scratched like mongrels after every secret meeting in the lantana, but the red welts were worth the temporary escape. Every child hides but some children have more reason to than others.

  The constable is bending over me. He is pallid. Milky and green and damp with sweat. I’ve had a run in or two with him but nothing serious. I know he thinks I’m odd and I guess I am. He’s a good bloke. He probably hasn’t watched too many men die and I know I’m bleeding onto his hands.

  ‘The doctor is coming,’ he says when my eyes flicker. ‘Hold on, son.’

  God knows I haven’t been much of a son to anybody, but then again I’ve never had much of a father.

  I wonder how long it takes for a man to die.

  TWO

  Byron Bay, 1975

  Now here he is, driving up towards the lighthouse — that white, ocean-side phallus perched on the highest rock on the easternmost point of a continent that is, for the most, parched. Fringed on this side by rainforest, it slides into the ocean on the white sand of ground-down coral reefs. This coastline bulges towards the tropics, its fat man’s belly sagging between the Coral Sea and the Tasman and into the depths of the Pacific.

  The ute is chugging its way up the hillside, farting black smoke and grit from its muffler. Flinch crouches forward over the steering wheel as if the shift in his weight will make a difference to his chances of making it up the winding road. But the old girl spits and dies a groaning, shuddering death and rolls backwards a few metres before he catches her, slams his good foot on the brake and his other onto the wooden block that he’s attached to the clutch with string and masking tape. He lets her roll back onto the thin strip of sand at the side of the road. The rubber pieces of his thongs wet between the toes, slippery with sweat. He skids on his short leg as he gets out to check the engine.

  He has to pound his hip against the bonnet to get it to open. No easy feat for a lopsided man on a hill. The latch jiggles apart and Flinch props the bonnet up with the broomstick handle that he keeps in the tray for the regular occasions on which he has to fiddle with some part of the greasy old engine. His shaggy fringe in his eyes as he leans into the car.

  This wind is roaring around the headland, bellowing with its mouth wide open. Vast, stinging waves of sand ripple up the open stretch of Tallow Beach and gulls stall, flapping, midair. The wind gusts in towards the point, making thin work of the streaky clouds. It has been born in those damp islands to the east, where hurricanes drop in like distant relatives who visit at the same time each year and cause the expected havoc. The wind isn’t up to shredding palm trees when it arrives at the bay, but Flinch can smell the intention on its breath and he hates it anyway.

  Flinch has never been good with cars. Never claimed to be one of those men who can slide under a vehicle and reach their hands into its guts and tinker around until an engine bursts to life. He wishes he could have learnt to be handy with a screwdriver but it just never came easy to him as it did to many other boys. When he grew old enough to mow lawns with the stinking, spluttering two-stroke, work the cantankerous washing machine, strike up the outboard motor on his barnacled little dinghy, he would watch bolts rust and smoke stream from cracks and not know how to go about fixing these things. His mother, by that time expert at seeking out the cracks in Flinch, would bemoan the fact that there was not a real man about the house to look after things properly. At first, feeling her manicured nails prying at pieces of him, Flinch tried. He oiled things, got grease in the crevices of his knuckles. Burnt his forearm on the outboard motor when he tried to fix it before it had cooled. Wore that scar like a badge. He made sure his mother could see it when he went to the fridge for butter to soothe it. The first three letters of the motor brand seared into his skin.

  ‘Put it away,’ she had said, without looking up.

  Finally, unable to fix the internal mechanics of either his equipment or his relationship with his mother, he gave up trying anything more.

  Flinch has learnt what he’s had to do to keep the ute running for the past few years of its life — a progressively longer list of band-aid solutions to ensure she will get him most places around the bay as long as he doesn’t push her too hard or too long. He calls her Milly and talks to her, urges her up inclines and flatters her into chugging awake on cold mornings. A bottle of fresh water and a big container of oil, both of which he keeps in the tray of the ute along with the broomstick, solve a lot of the problems but he recognises that there’s nothing he can do right now. This is something new.

  The wind dies off for a moment. Sky mumbles something about rain.

  Flinch staggers to the side of the road and pushes himself up on the toes of his good foot so that he can see the ocean over the banksias and scrawny seaside scrub. The sun finds a gap in the clouds and the heat on his back is instant and scorching. The ocean glistens in the afternoon light. There’s a deep gutter fairly close to shore that will be vacuuming surrounding schools of fish and passing them through it with the force of the tide, and he can see the gulls hovering and diving into the black water then flying off, each mouth filled with a shimmering fish.

  Turning his back on the ocean, he returns to the car and leans against the bonnet. The heat of the metal sears the backs of his thighs through his shorts. Crickets whirr in the scrub. The sun like a white noise itself. He slumps against the tyre, shades his eyes like a salute. He could wait hours on this road before somebody passes. And it would take him an hour to walk back to town. Hobble down the hill and limp through the streets to the mechanic’s garage, dragging his bung leg like a parody. Some medieval town fool.

  Or. The black water, the gutter. In his mind an abundance of fish, shiny whiting with golden fins. He feels that itch for the tug of the line on his finger, anticipates the tease of the catch as the reel spins, the line singing with pleasure.

  The rod is in the back of the ute, wedged under a deflated spare tyre, next to a foul-smelling canvas travel bag. He dislodges the rod and slams the tray door closed with a thump, recoils from the odour, stumbles, almost falls backwards down the hillside behind him. Cusses again at the balance that eludes him even after years of willing himself to stand upright on freshly scrubbed decks.

  Sweat-soaked by now, the rod slippery in his grip, he decides the best way down the incline to the shore is to sit down and slide. He removes his thongs and slips them between his fingers, over the palms of his hands, shoves his reel under his armpit and lowers himself onto the loose gravel of the hillside. He propels himself forward by pushing himself along with his hands. Still muscled in his upper body, the days of hauling his own body weight up to the crow’s nest with the aid of only one good leg have stayed with him. Strong as his nostalgia.

  He leaves his rod and thongs at the base of the hill, concealed in the stiff grey shrubbery, and makes his way to the damp sand. The ocean rough and churned russet from the wind and a gnashing tide. Smooth rocks and shells in the dazzling thousands along the shore. A decorated beach. It’s a moody stretch. One day naked and clean as a fres
h white sheet, other days like it’s vomited up the entire contents of its watery belly, stinking dead fish and seaweed, rotting coconuts, lost fishing nets, an entire tree with its root system intact. Mutton birds with broken wings floating on the breakers.

  One thing the short leg is good for — the uneven weight means extra pressure when he puts his right foot down. When he walks barefoot on the damp sand tiny bubbles erupt, reveal the location of ugaris. He finds a couple of big ones, wiggles deeper into the sand until he feels them under his toes, hard and smooth as pebbles. He smashes them on the sand further up the beach. The gulls hear the shells shatter and hover over him.

  As the tide recedes he draws the flesh of the ugaris through the water and waits. He only wants one today and soon enough he sees it, the tiny white head, all gaping mouth and pincers. He is patient. The next wave rolls over and wets him where he squats. And the next. The angry white head flails in the rush of water, stretches out of the sand. When he sees a gap in the breaks, he takes precarious steps towards the worm, moves to the side of it and places the flesh of the ugari almost underneath it, careful not to touch. The worm grips the flesh, ready to drag it below the surface. He waits. There is the split second, as the worm arches for a greater tug on its meal, when it relaxes the hundreds of legs that otherwise act as powerful anchors to the underground. Flinch is quick. In that second, he pinches the worm and pulls it out of the sand. It’s a good one. Thick as Flinch’s little finger and as long as he is tall, knotting into indignant coils and offering a sharp bite to Flinch’s thumb. The perfect bait.

  He returns to the scrub where he has hidden his fishing rod. Surfers leave all kinds of things unattended on this beach while they are in the ocean. Some mornings, when the swell is best here, the soft, dry sand is a gallery of surfer paraphernalia. Tubs of wax, shoes, bottles of soft drink, abandoned clothes, thongs, bicycles, boards. But Flinch is precious about his rod. He always hides it somewhere. Under logs. Up trees.

  Flinch settles himself behind the shrubbery, rolls his squirming bait in the sand to allow more grip. He squeezes its head off between his nails. The head is the best bit. If the fish don’t take it, they’re not out there.

  From up the beach, wisps of a conversation and laughter. It’s always been his instinct to hide from strangers, like some ill-treated family mutt. He squats low behind the shrubs, tucks his shrivelled leg beneath him so that he can lie flat and watch.

  A woman and two men walk up the beach towards him, apparently looking for shade. They settle just near him, spread bright sarongs underneath the boughs of an acacia. Without even looking around, they strip down to nothing, and run laughing into the water. The men are fit and lean and young, and they move with the kind of ease that reminds Flinch of horses. The woman last in the water, lithe and brown as a seal. When she dives Flinch can see her buttocks above the water for a second, a bright white flash, like an unripe peach.

  Near the shore, large dumpy water is ricocheting off the sandbar, behind which is the gutter streaming fish. The gulls still crying and cussing overhead. The men catch the waves as they curl under and break and they swim with them to shore, race back for the next set. The woman tries to bodysurf once, but she misses the crucial moment and is dumped by the wave — Flinch sees one foot then the other appear above the rush of white foam — before getting up, spluttering, long hair over her face and a piece of seaweed laced around her throat like a mermaid’s necklace.

  She calls to the men and they wave at her, and she heads in towards the beach. The men seem unconcerned by her nakedness, unfazed by it. How do men become that way, he wonders. He remembers his first and only experience with a naked woman; if anything, the whole incident had left him more curious and confused and excited than before.

  As with all of Flinch’s poignant moments, he remembers the smell of water. With her it was stale water, the kind left in vases or jars that has turned mouldy with the remnants of seaweed or the stems of dead flowers. Bovine and much larger than he was, when she clutched him to her chest that time his nose had lodged in the crook of her armpit, and he could smell her damp odour and talcum powder, a cocktail which at the time seemed both erotic and needlessly intimate.

  She seemed to be always hiding something, tucking a brown paper bag into her satchel, fingering something in a pocket, concentrating so hard on it that her eyes glazed over. Flinch had recognised her straight away as another outsider, and avoided her. To schoolyard bullies, the only thing more attractive than one freak was two. If you grouped, you inherited the joint playground inadequacies of the entire gang. You weren’t just a cripple then, you were also a nutter, loser, spaz, retard, dago, wog, coon, crybaby. She was teased cruelly in that way only teenagers understand, but she resisted by fondling the things in her pockets, crept off into some place inside herself. Flinch saw her retreat there, and some part of him was envious.

  In his last year at school, there was a dance. Not much by most high school standards. The community hall decorated with tinsel left over from Christmas and lights covered with blue cellophane. The class of 1958 had, predictably, decided on an underwater theme. Dry fishing nets had been borrowed from the local fleet and, still smelling vaguely of the ocean floor, hung around the walls of the room, cardboard fish with shocked expressions woven between the nylon. When Flinch leaned against one, it felt gritty, and grains of sand fell to the floor beneath it. Flinch wore an eye-patch, pinned a cardboard skull and crossbones to his terry-towelling fishing hat, and tied his left leg to a block of wood.

  He spent most of the early part of the evening against a wall sucking on a bottle of lemonade, watching the other kids dance. Then she entered the room. She was wearing a bikini top, massive breasts oozing out from under each cup, and a long silver skirt. Above her waist she wore a leather belt, to the back of which was pinned a cardboard cut-out of a dorsal fin. Flinch could see that she’d taken great care in making it. It was covered with the silver aluminium lids of milk bottles, each shaped and placed like a scale. Flinch estimated that to cover the fin she must have been collecting those lids since the theme had been decided at the beginning of the year. Over two hundred pints of milk had been consumed to decorate it.

  When she stood in the entrance of the hall, the light flooding in around her, Flinch thought she looked like some great sea goddess arisen from the depths.

  It wasn’t long before the other kids started taunting her, laughing and pointing at the layers of flesh folded on top of one another over the waistband of her skirt. Bring out the harpoon! someone cried. The boys made a game of picking the silver caps off her fin and she had spun, her fists clenched, and swiped at them, making contact with two of them. She was on top of a third, beating him around the head, before a teacher managed to drag her off. Flinch had seen her eyes, seen something rise up within her and watched as she had come out of her secret place to defend herself. He was filled with admiration.

  Ten minutes after she was sent home he found her crying quietly behind the woodworking shed, and half an hour after that he found himself squashed against her, enveloped by the expanse of her naked flesh, tilting his head right back as she bent over to kiss him wetly on the lips. He walked home later with shimmering aluminium scales stuck to his forearms.

  The naked woman stretches out face down on the sand and Flinch, on his haunches now, rocks forward to peer through a gap in the shrubbery. Her ribs visible, rising almost imperceptibly, damp hair clumped to one side, the soft cushion of her breasts spread against the sand. She’s no local. Flinch, scratching absent-mindedly at the familiar ache in his groin, guesses she’s a leftover from the festival. From one of the hinterland communes.

  The first group of newcomers had wandered into town — sandaled or bare-footed, some cloaked in orange, others in white like high priests or vestal virgins, some bald, some as hairy as apes, beards and hair down to their waists — the same month as the whales had started to appear in numbers again out in the bay. They had set up in and around Nimbin, first, where th
ey had a festival, the beating of drums a pulse throughout the valley for an entire year. Flinch had heard stories of the festival while he was in one of his temporary jobs, at the meatworks. The farmers who dropped off their cattle and pigs for slaughter leaned over the fences of the stockyards, tipped their hats back, wiped their hands on their overalls and had a good chuckle with the butcher. There had been a friendly competition. Aquarians versus locals. A tug of war. The Nimbin team were national champions. District heroes. Farmers’ sons used to shoving bulls around with their bare hands, tossing hay bales into lofts, riding the bucks out of difficult horses. All beef and beer gut.

  The competition had been reported in the local newspaper because it was attended by the Deputy Prime Minister, the man in the black suit demanding progress. He’d been a dairy farmer from around here, once. A fact he liked to remind the voters, the little people, when they complained about the degradation of their land and livelihoods.

  During the tug of war, a tightrope walker had sprung with feline agility onto the taut rope and walked the length of it, as if circus entertainers were nothing out of the ordinary in rural communities. The boys from the Nimbin team had been taken by surprise but despite this, and despite being outnumbered, they had won anyway. There was mud on the faces and clumped in the long hair of the Aquarians, but it all ended in laughter.

  There were other stories, too. Rumours whispered among the ladies chattering and nodding like pigeons outside the church after the Sunday service. Of both men and women walking around topless in broad daylight. Of songs sung at dawn by thousands of people. Drumming that never ceased. Of a midnight concert. A grand piano on a platform in the middle of a cow paddock at night, reflecting a full moon. The pianist pounding out Mozart and Bach and Lennon and Dylan. One farmer claimed to have seen a silent sea of people wandering across his property in the pitch-black of night, candles and lanterns bobbing in the darkness like buoys on the water. People living in the treetops like apes. A woman dying to the sound of a chant that was intended to heal a venomous snake bite. Rasputinesque monks preaching from soapboxes. A jumble of images from tall stories. Flinch could not decipher the fact from the fiction, hence the whole festival became half-myth in his mind.