Death of a Whaler

by Nerida Newton

  ‘See, children,’ the teacher had said, stopping the class a few metres away from the group. ‘Watch the native women at work.’ Flinch wondered why they had stopped so far away, as if the women might suddenly get up and attack them with spears, as the angry Aborigines in the textbook drawing had done.

  A few silent, awkward moments, the women staring at the children and the children staring back. The class was ushered away. They were almost at the gate when an old man emerged from one of the houses. Flinch, dragging his limp leg behind him at the end of the line, stopped.

  ‘Hello,’ said Flinch. Then, to be polite, ‘Thank you for having us.’

  A low wailing sound came from the man’s mouth and he started to shuffle his feet in the sand, pound the ground with his walking stick. The sound was like a chant, steady and repetitive. More instrument than voice. Like a wire vibrating in the wind. Flinch was unsettled by the song. Only later, trying to recreate the sounds himself, did Flinch realise that though the singing was the songman’s own, the lyrics were fragments of common Christian hymns. The ancient rhythm trapped and subdued by the words like a bird thrashing itself against the bars of a cage.

  The landscape of the region, the wild sea, yawning horizon, swamps and hillocks, draws people like ants to honey and most end up just as stuck. Farmers and workers talked themselves into staying even when their crops continued to fail and houses were taken apart room by room for firewood. Very few picked up and left for more promising or proven pastures. They persisted. This grit part of the culture of the bay, borne like a battle scar. A working man’s credo ingrained quickly in those who arrived in the town. Try something until it fails then try something new.

  First it was logging. Beyond the swampland were the massive rainforests, solid with thick red cedar. The Big Scrub. The crash of the massive trees as they fell resounded through the valleys. Logs were shipped down three separate rivers, out to the sheltered natural ports and across the oceans to faraway cities. Trees were ringbarked to cut the sap supply to the upper branches, severing the main artery they depended upon to live, causing the bark to tighten around the slit. Like solid ghosts, these trees stood pale and naked, gravestones of their own deaths. The loggers called them vertical firewood. Widow-makers, when the large dead branches fell. The land was left stripped and empty. The forest, unable to regenerate at the rate of its destruction, dwindled to a few clumps of trees. The loggers looked for something else to do.

  The dairy farmers moved onto the bald hills. They brought paspalum grass with them and spread the seeds until the hills were carpeted, rich and green. The message was passed down from the Minister for Primary Industries, loud and clear, hollered into the ears of the hinterland families with their little herds of cows, their veggie gardens, their chook sheds and their one snuffling farmyard pig. It was stretched over banners and screeched through loudspeakers. GET BIG OR GET OUT. The butter factory was a lucrative venture for longer than any other industry in the region. Became the biggest dairy producer in the southern hemisphere. It was something to be proud of, stamped onto the sides of all of their products. Gone were the days of mere subsistence living. This was progress.

  When they ran out of land, many of the local farmers couldn’t compete with the bigger farms further south and they headed to the hills, but their fat cows slid off the steep inclines around the valley. The banana growers moved in.

  Subtropical fruit attracts subtropical pests and diseases. The fruit growers couldn’t sew the holes in their nets fast enough to keep the bugs and bats from gnawing at their produce, turning it rotten and brown in the sun before it even had a chance to ripen. Men and women in straw hats ran from tree to tree, beating the scavengers off with broomsticks, shaking the trees until the leaves fell off. A farm of any scale was out of the question.

  The local butcher, squinting at the sea, decided that if the land would not provide wealth and prosperity for the town, then surely the abundant ocean would. He put to use the town’s old tram track and engine and a large flat trailer, and extended his present meat works by adding a large corrugated iron shed. Though the little engine that towed the haul was nicknamed the Green Frog, he wanted no such whimsy attached to his serious modern enterprise. So Byron Whaling Company was painted in large square-shaped letters along the side of the new shed. In black.

  The whaling company closed two days too late for Flinch. Two days earlier and Nate would be here now. Or would probably have moved on, knowing Nate. He was a fidgety fellow, Flinch had always thought. Even sitting on a stool at the pub he scratched and belched and swivelled in his seat. He twitched his mouth, pursed his lips frequently and sucked his teeth. Chatted incessantly, but in a good-natured way, and he listened to Flinch with an intensity that sometimes unnerved him, to be studied so closely. Nate stood out among the other blokes, content to rest their elbows on the towels that served as beer mats and a have cold drink or several before going home to their families and a night in front of the white static of a radio that crackled out murder mysteries and local storm warnings. The only time Nate sat still was when he had a book in front of him. Flinch had noticed early on the private daily ritual, on the way back into shore after the catch, Nate’s back up against the mast, a book open on his knees. Nate angular, knees, elbows, cheek and jawbones, the sharp edge of a hardback, and like an anchor he didn’t budge, not even in rough seas, unless it looked like his pages were going to get wet. Flinch had learnt to shake his shoulder gently when they were nearing the docks so that he didn’t get yelled at by the captain. Nate walked a lot, even at night. Sometimes Flinch woke to find him asleep in the old dinghy on the lawn in front of the pastel house. He took to leaving blankets and a ham sandwich in it just in case. It was one of the habits he had to break in those shadowy months after Nate’s death.

  As he drives down the main street, Flinch wonders what Nate would have thought of the place now, all empty streets, the silence that has descended on the town and the odd old bastard crying quietly into his beer. The dairy factory shifted to Lismore, causing a landslide of lay-offs. Padlocks on the gates of the produce plants, dust collecting on the machinery.

  He pulls up beside the recently deserted hardware store and is peering through the window when he steps back to see her reflection.

  ‘Ah,’ she says, ‘it’s the Peeping Tom!’

  Flinch, caught doing nothing unsavoury, feels he may as well have been and is suddenly hot and itchy all over.

  ‘No, I’m not, no, it’s a, it’s the, I need a screw. I mean, some screws and a screwdriver and this used to be…’ Sweat on his forehead, dripping into his eyes.

  The woman laughs. ‘I’m just teasing,’ she says. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Oh,’ says Flinch. It’s the woman from the beach. The naked woman. Only now she’s dressed in a long flowing skirt and a light green top embroidered with floral patterns. Flinch notices that she’s not wearing a bra. Or shoes. A mesh bag slung over her shoulder. She is straining against it, one hip cocked sideways to bear its weight. Her hair blowing around her face, getting tangled in the beads she’s wearing around her neck. Damp and warm in the midday heat, giving off a sweet, overripe scent like the hot-pink frangipani in Flinch’s cliff-side garden.

  ‘Are you okay with that bag?’ asks Flinch.

  ‘Yeah, I’m fine,’ she says.

  She is just standing there and smiling at him, and Flinch can feel all of his inadequacies, the stump leg, the crooked angle of his hips and the bend in his neck that compensates, every chink and crease in his awkward body.

  ‘But is that your car?’ she says after a moment. ‘I could do with a lift, if you’re not too busy.’

  ‘Oh,’ says Flinch. ‘Right. Of course. Yeah.’

  ‘What’s your name?’ she asks.

  ‘Flinch.’

  ‘Flinch!’ the woman says. ‘Wow, cool name. A bit out there, hey? Weird.’

  The woman throws her mesh bag in the tray of the ute, and climbs into the front seat, sidling close to Flinch so t
hat he can see small beads of perspiration on her upper lip.

  ‘Well, nice to meet you, Flinch. I’m Karma.’

  Karma sings with the kind of unabashed enthusiasm that Flinch has otherwise seen only in drunks. It makes him uncomfortable. He winds down the window and warm salty air rushes in and fills the cabin. Karma sings louder so that she can hear herself over the coughing engine of the ute.

  ‘Towards Nimbin, right?’ Flinch asks, almost yelling.

  Karma smiles and nods. She stops singing and hums for a while instead.

  As they head towards the hinterland hills, over winding roads that are mostly sand and gravel, the haze of the ocean air dissipates to allow clear-cut views of the distant mountains. From lush paddocks, black-and-white cows lift their heads and stare blankly at them as they approach, the ute belching and gagging her way up the range. Small creeks full with the previous night’s rainfall bubble through gullies, wash pebbles and small green frogs onto the road.

  Flinch tries to sneak looks at her while he drives, with his peripheral vision tries to gauge when she’s looking out the window so that he can catch a glimpse of her. She seems to him so unconcerned. With anything. While he leans forward when they go up hills, his hands slippery on the steering wheel, Milly grumbling and threatening to give up halfway, she sways from side to side to the tune she is humming. She doesn’t seem worried about being in a car with a skewed little man she has only just met. Her trust in him, in human nature, is quite beyond him and he is astounded and suddenly feels responsible for her. Carelessness is a concept Flinch has never understood, having struggled all of his childhood to keep his head above the flood of Audrey’s anguish and self-pity. Now heaving around the weight of his guilt, lifting it when he walks and dropping it briefly when he pauses, like an anchor. He decides she is either stupid or enlightened but he is unsure which is more likely.

  ‘Did you go to the festival?’ she asks him suddenly.

  ‘Um, no. Don’t come to the mountains much.’

  ‘Oh, baby, you don’t know what you missed.’ She winks. Flinch blushes hot red. ‘You would have loved it, man. It was just all about joy.’

  Flinch nods quietly. He wants to tell her that joy is something he doesn’t deserve, but she is almost aglow with a quiet enthusiasm and he decides that that particular story is too long to tell now anyway.

  ‘Where are you from?’ she asks him.

  ‘From?’

  ‘Yeah, like, where did you come from?’

  ‘Oh, right. Well, here. Grew up around the bay. Never been anywhere else, really.’

  ‘Cool. Why would you, I guess.’

  They drive from the baking paddocks into a gully, its cool wet shadow.

  ‘Turn here,’ she says.

  A driveway near-hidden by brush and long grass, barely wide enough for the ute. Next to it, a timber letterbox, the words Nim Eden in white letters on the side, a small rainbow painted over them. The gully is swamp and rainforest, thick dark green and rank with the smell of mud and decaying foliage. Gnats swarm into the car, fly into their eyeballs, up their noses. Flinch wipes his face with the back of his hand and mashes several black spots into the corners of his eyes. The wheels of the ute churn in the mud. Flecks across the windscreen like sprayed paint.

  A low-running creek trickles across the path and soon after the rainforest gives way to an open field, a sudden exposure to the glare of the day after the dank tunnel of ferns, palms and cedar.

  ‘Pull up over there,’ says Karma, pointing to a large fig tree, branches sprawled against the sky. ‘It’s dry and shady. It’s on higher ground.’

  Flinch slows the ute down to a crawl and Milly moans and whirrs and sizzles. Flinch knows she’s probably overheating. He’s a bit surprised she got them this far without more of a protest.

  The field they’ve arrived in backs into the dark shade of a casuarina grove. In front of the grove are tents in all shapes and sizes. Sturdy round yurts. Lean-tos made of sheets of bark and palm fronds. A large rectangular room made up of hay bales and roofed with corrugated iron. Dome structures.

  There is an entrance way of sorts. An arbour covered with multicoloured rectangular flags. On either side of it, two long bamboo poles with bright pink and blue streamers that flutter in the breeze. Strung up in the highest branches of the casuarina trees are a number of large banners, painted with different slogans.

  No war.

  Protect and love the Earth, it’s the only one we have.

  It will pass, whatever it is.

  It is midafternoon, the commune quiet. People lie in hammocks that are strung between trees, sleep on hessian sacks in the shade. Nearby, a man leans against a hay bale, reading and smoking from a hookah. A group of women huddle around a table outside a yurt, cutting up vegetables. Dirty-faced naked children chase each other around a garden of wilting lettuces, throw clumps of mud at each other. To Flinch, the people here look as if they are somehow shipwrecked. Marooned inland. Unkempt and unassuming, with nowhere to go, nothing urgent to do.

  ‘C’mon,’ says Karma, getting out of the ute. ‘Come and meet everyone.’

  ‘No, I’m right,’ says Flinch quickly. ‘Not today.’

  ‘Oh, come on,’ she says. ‘You’ll like it here, I can guarantee it.’ Flinch looks over at the commune. Two young men in flowing white trousers are walking towards the car, laughing and talking. ‘It’s paradise, you’ll see.’

  If he thought Milly could do it, he’d start her up and floor it now, speed off and leave them chewing on his dust. But he knows she’ll need to cool down a bit and he’ll probably need to get out to top up her water anyway.

  ‘Okay.’With a deep sigh.

  He swings his good leg out and pulls the other one around with his hand to hurry the process. Tries to swallow down the reluctance, knowing what’s to come. The stolen glances at his leg and torso, the cautious curiosity, uncertainty at how far the impediment spreads, monosyllabic words spoken slowly, even when people are trying to be polite.

  One of the men rushes towards Karma and picks her up. Flinch can see their tongues as they kiss openmouthed.

  ‘Hey, baby, we were just going to start looking for you.’ Eyeing Flinch when he says this, the suspicious sideways glance.

  ‘No, it’s cool,’ says Karma. ‘Flinch gave me a ride. The store up the road was out of rice so I managed to catch a ride to the bay, and Flinch drove me back.’

  The young man lowers her to the ground. He’s shirtless, hard muscle, deeply tanned to the waist. Evidence, Flinch guesses, of long hours labouring in the sun without a shirt or hat. Something the local fishermen would never do, be seen without a faithful terry-towelling hat or a cap, their skin bronzed exactly to the edges of rolled-up flannel shirtsleeves.

  ‘Where did you meet Flinch?’ Asking her, looking at him. An inspection that makes Flinch feel like he’s being pressed against a cool hard surface.

  ‘By the hardware store, hey, Flinch?’

  ‘It’s not there anymore, but,’ says Flinch.

  ‘Hey, you hungry, Flinch?’ The other man steps forward and places a hand on Flinch’s shoulder. Leaves it there, waiting for the response. It’s a gesture that Flinch finds off-putting. Among the fishermen, no matter how much you admired a man, no matter how good a friend you were, you didn’t touch him except to knock his cap off as a joke, punch a shoulder affectionately.

  ‘No,’ Flinch says quickly. The hand stays there.

  ‘Sure? There’s plenty of food around today.’

  ‘Yeah, I’m sure.’

  ‘Okay, then. Thirsty maybe? You could come hang out with us for a while in any case, relax a little after the drive.’

  ‘No, I’m good, thanks anyway.’

  The man takes his hand away. ‘Well, thanks for dropping Karma home. I’m Matt. This is Jed.’

  The muscled man. Jed flicks his chin up, an acknowledgement not impolite, but not welcoming. Matt fiddles with the hair at the nape of his neck, rolling it around his finger. It is
shoulder length, clumped in cocoon-shaped dreadlocks. Oily at the roots.

  ‘I have to head back,’ says Flinch. ‘Nice to meet you blokes.’

  ‘You’re welcome any time, mate. Come back and visit. We’re having concerts every night at the moment. It’s wild.’

  ‘Yeah, maybe another night. I have to get back.’

  As he turns around to get into the driver’s seat, he hears Karma laughing and the two men talking in low voices. Milly has cooled down enough and he decides to take the risk of not checking the engine. He just wants to leave. He begs her quietly from between pursed lips and finally the old ute rasps to life. He waves as he drives off.

  ‘Come back, won’t you, Flinch?’ he hears Karma call after him. ‘We’ll be expecting you!’

  A few miles out of Nimbin, as the sun is setting, Milly finally breaks down and refuses to turn over, and no amount of water, oil or apologising will bring her round. Flinch is not unprepared for this, though he wishes he was closer to the bay. He removes the front bench seat from the cabin and puts it into the tray. He keeps a worn blanket rolled up in the back, for days when the chill gets to him after an afternoon fishing thigh-deep in the ocean. It smells mouldy and has a large hole in it where one of the goats has chewed through it, but it will do for the night.

  In his fishing bag he keeps a bottle of rum, ostensibly also to warm him up on cold days, but more often than not consumed even on humid evenings. It’s still half full. Flinch offers thanks for small mercies.

  He lies in the back of the tray, wide awake. Overhead the stars punctuate the solid, dark prose of night. They sharpen and blur as Flinch sucks down the rum, focusing on one bright point until all others disappear, then shutting his eyes and starting over. In the distance there is drumming and an indistinct chanting. He would like to go back, he thinks. Would like to see what it is like, so many people living together, all trying to make a new world out of the wilderness. Matt and Karma were both welcoming to him. He has already decided he would stay away from Jed. Years of quiet observation have nurtured in him an accurate gauge of others’ dislike and discomfort, feelings he knows best from a childhood with Audrey, later because of his leg, and after that because he’d killed a man and allowed that fact to become a feature of himself, like others accept a big nose or bright red hair. Some people notice his wariness, that guilt, immediately and look away politely, walk away quickly, not trusting what it might be that made him that way.