Death of a Whaler

by Nerida Newton

  ‘War,’ he says. It comes out as a small sigh, like a whimper. His eyes stay shut.

  He falls into a sleep that seems to Flinch like a coma. Flinch curls up in a corner too, wraps a mottled sweater that reeks of Old Spice and mothballs around his head to block out the sound of Drew’s snoring.

  Just before sunset, they wake. Drew stretches, yawns, takes a container from the pocket of one of the jackets that is sewn to the canvas. He removes a small capsule and puts it in his mouth.

  ‘And here’s one I prepared earlier.’ Grins as he swallows.

  When they crawl out of the tent, Flinch is surprised to find it is still light on the outside, even though it is dusk.

  Flinch can’t sit cross-legged. It’s his knees. They ache. Too many times folded into the crow’s nest on winter days. Snap-frozen and salted like a fillet of cod. He ends up leaning forward and clinging to his knees like a monkey in a barrel. They come up to his armpits and he can’t get them to the ground.

  ‘You know, if you practised a bit of yoga, you’d manage it,’ says Karma, standing over him.

  He winces. Says nothing.

  ‘I’m glad you stayed,’ she says, sitting next to him. ‘See. It was meant to be.’

  Flinch starts to tell her a thing or two about Milly but she shrugs her shoulders.

  ‘Either way,’ she says, and looks away.

  The singing ceremony turns out to be not so much singing as chanting. After a while Flinch’s buttocks start to numb. His right foot buzzes with pins and needles. He is hungry, too. Darkness outside and he figures it is well past six pm. He fidgets and bumps Drew, who is sitting next to him, but Drew doesn’t seem to notice. His eyes are glazed and his pupils have expanded almost to the size of his irises, like a cat meditating on prey. On the other side of him, Karma hums under her breath, sounding like a bee trapped in a jar. Flinch tries to rub his aching foot without being conspicuous. Just as he leans back to rearrange himself, he notices someone else stand up on the opposite side of the tent. Recognises the shadow that falls long and dark in front of the lantern. Jed.

  ‘What’s he doing here?’ Flinch says out loud.

  Karma opens her eyes and stops humming.

  ‘I thought he’d left.’ Flinch says it in a whisper but it comes out like a hiss.

  Karma shrugs. ‘It’s a free world, Flinch,’ she says. But Flinch watches and sees that she doesn’t shut her eyes until Jed walks out of the tent.

  ‘What happened with Jed?’ Flinch asks her later.

  ‘You mean between us?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She is brushing her hair from her eyes with both her hands, over and over, as if her fingers were a comb. A gesture that Flinch finds distracting, and suspects that this is the reason she is doing it. The ceremony over finally when incense burnt to ash. They have moved with the rest of the group to the hay-bale house that serves as a food hall of sorts. Drew calls it ‘the mess’, which earns him the frowns of some of the others.

  ‘We were together for a while, but in the end we wanted different things,’ she says eventually.

  ‘I saw bruises,’ he replies.

  She stops brushing and looks at him. Straight at him. She is, for a second, transparent and they both know this.

  ‘Nothing is ever as simple as what you think you see, Flinch.’

  She ties her hair in a knot to keep it off her neck and Flinch realises that the screen usually around her is in place again. She’s fixed it there with the same quick efficiency with which she tied up her hair. Almost with the same gesture.

  ‘Why do they let him stay?’ he asks anyway. ‘I thought this was paradise. I wouldn’t think he’d be allowed back.’

  ‘Paradise doesn’t suit everybody,’ she says in a quiet voice. ‘But who are we to judge, hey?’ She doesn’t look at him.

  ‘You should move to the bay,’ he says. Suddenly, like an urge.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I, um, there are whales. It’s, you know, spiritual.’

  She smiles at him. ‘Good for you, Flinch,’ she says.

  He doesn’t know what she means. He hopes it means she will come and stay there one day, maybe when he gets back from his journey to find Nate’s parents.

  They are at one end of a long wooden table. Left over hay bales serve as bench seats. They had managed to secure a corner, but the table is filling up as people return from the cooking area to sit down with their food.

  Jed and Matt are at a nearby table. Drew sits next to them, shovelling spoonfuls of lentil stew and home-baked sourdough into his mouth.

  Flinch tucks his legs against the bale and leans back slightly so that he can listen in.

  ‘What I mean,’ Jed is saying, ‘is that Drew is an example of someone who threw themselves against the system by refusing to participate in it. He was a cog in the wheel and he removed himself, so the whole machinery, the machinery of conscription, and therefore of an unjust war, will not run as well. If every conscripted American — or Australian — did that, the government would be forced to listen to the people. We have to encourage that kind of movement.’

  ‘Hey man, I was just shit-scared of going back,’ Drew says, bread stuck between his teeth. ‘So, like, I decided to interpret R and R as “Run and Retire from duty”.’ Laughs at his own joke. A lentil shoots out of one nostril.

  Jed ignores him. ‘We need to set up proper channels so that we can let conscientious objectors know that we can provide safe harbour,’ he says.

  ‘The only thing evil men need to succeed is for good men to do nothing,’ says Matt, nodding, rattling dreadlocks.

  ‘Or women,’ says a woman nearby.

  ‘People,’ says Matt. ‘I meant people.’

  ‘You guys got any skunk?’ asks Drew.

  In the bay a storm rides in on the east winds, swallowing the moon. During the day, as he had wandered over to Drew’s tent, Flinch had seen the clouds gathering over Mt Warning as if they had agreed to meet there, to wait, bide their time. The rest of the sky was clear. It seemed to him conspiratorial, at the time. When he steps outside the dining hall, the smell of the storm, like some rank animal. He breathes it deep into his lungs.

  ‘Looks like it’s coming this way.’ She has followed him out. She stands close behind him; almost touching, not quite. The heat of her body makes his skin prickle.

  ‘It is.’

  ‘Rain? Or just all noise and lights?’

  ‘Everything,’ says Flinch. ‘I reckon it’s going to be the whole shebang.’

  Sheet lightning flickers over them, the jagged heads of the Nightcap Range silhouetted against it, their imposing outlines like slender giants. From inside the food hall, they hear Drew shouting something indistinguishable and Jed raising his voice.

  ‘I’ll come back with you, if you want to go tomorrow,’ she says.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘You asked me, didn’t you?’ Her irritation sudden and palpable. Flinch wonders if he has done something to make her that way. The rain starts; tight, hard drops that sting the skin when they land.

  ‘I have something I need to do first,’ he says. She is so quiet behind him he thinks for a second that she has walked away.

  ‘Next week, then,’ she says eventually.

  ‘I’m going away,’ he says. ‘I don’t know for how long.’

  ‘Where to?’

  He doesn’t answer her. The rain starts to pelt down and thunder crashes overhead, a streak of lightning blazes in front of them and strikes a nearby tree, splitting it in two and setting it alight. The noise and explosion send Flinch and Karma reeling backwards and Flinch falls, hitting the ground with a thud, twisting an ankle. The noise of the strike brings people rushing out from the food hall.

  ‘Wow,’ says Drew. ‘Hey, check it out! A burning bush! Do you think God is in there?’ He is laughing again, out of breath. ‘Deliver your people to peace and safety!’ he yells in the direction of the tree.

  Others are looking at him, expressions laced wit
h sting and disapproval, but Drew doesn’t notice or, Flinch suspects, doesn’t care.

  Flinch is soaked through. People mill around him but, distracted by the storm, nobody offers to help him up. With some effort he levers himself to his feet. The fire dies off in the rainfall. The crowd retreats to the food hall.

  ‘I think we’d better stay in here tonight,’ says Karma. ‘Don’t know that my tent is up to this kind of weather.’

  During the night the number of people sleeping in the hall grows larger as tent pegs are ripped from the earth and lean-tos are blown away by the wind. The food hall leaks in places. As Flinch sleeps, the monotonous drip of water hitting the table nearby soaks through into his subconscious and he drifts off towards the whaling station, the thick drops of blood from a dead whale staining his dreams red.

  The morning is dank with a drizzle that casts a silver sheen over the commune. Reflections are everywhere, in puddles that have formed on the uneven ground, in the ridges of aluminium sheeting. The whole commune covered with mirrors, begging a second look at what remains. Many tents are no more than bundles of canvas on the ground, water collected between their creases. All of the lean-tos are gone. Chickens pick through what remains of the vegetable gardens, where stakes lie prone on the ground and lettuce leaves are flattened under the mud. Children dance around the edges of the largest puddle, splashing each other.

  People wander with grim faces, kick the ground, scratch scalps and rub their chins into points. Someone organises a search party of sorts for the pieces of wood and rope and canvas that the storm has redistributed across the commune. From inside one of the tents, a woman and a baby cry in pitiful unison. More than ever, thinks Flinch, they look like they have been washed up here, as if they are clinging to the smashed remains of some wreck. Searching for something of value among the debris that the tide brings to shore. There’s that ragged look to some of them this morning that Flinch guesses is caused by a long-worn hope of rescue. Others are laughing. Stacking wood. They’re a motley bunch, thinks Flinch. Everybody seems to expect something different from commune life.

  Drew’s tent has remained intact. He emerges from it and whistles.

  ‘Bastard of a storm! Reminds me of this one we had in ’Nam.’

  He pauses, waits for a reaction from the few people searching the ground around his tent for their washed-away belongings. They ignore him. He retreats to his tent. Flinch hears him talking loudly to himself.

  ‘You couldn’t have seen it coming,’ he is saying.

  Karma is wringing her clothes out. The dye trickles dirty purple over her hands and down her arms. Her feet are stained with it.

  ‘Everything got wet,’ she says. Offers a small, sour smile.

  ‘At least your tent is standing.’

  ‘Yes, I guess.’

  She still looks drenched. Her hair is hanging in heavy clumps down her back. Her beads have left a brownish stain around the sides of her neck.

  ‘I’m going away,’ says Flinch. ‘But you can stay at the house, if you want. Until you, um, dry out. Maybe. If you want.’

  ‘Can’t now, really. I had better stay around and try to fix up this place.’

  She cocks her head to one side and breathes in deeply, stares at him with an intensity that disquietens him. ‘It’s funny, isn’t it? It’s like the elements set out to destroy the place. I mean, look at the other paddocks around here. They didn’t get hit in the same way. Maybe we’re being sacrilegious in some way, or something, trying to create our little haven. Just about everything has to be built again.’ She sighs. ‘It seems almost intentional.’

  Flinch sees a heaviness settle upon her. The weight of some unwelcome epiphany.

  ‘Nah,’ he says quickly.

  She shrugs and returns to wringing out her clothes.

  ‘Nah,’ he says again, clearing his throat. ‘It was just a storm.’

  TEN

  After even this brief time away, the pastel house smells stale and damp when Flinch opens the door. He shoves open the windows. A sea breeze lifts the curtains and they flutter like wings.

  In the fridge a green fur has grown over the top of some half-eaten dish he had left in there on a plate. The milk has soured. He pours it down the sink and runs the tap, the faucet coughing up fluid like an old man.

  He knows Audrey had a suitcase. She’d packed it once in front of him when he was ten or so. He had asked where she was going and she hadn’t answered him. She was in a blind rage. A perfume bottle hit the edge of the case when she threw it, bounced and smashed on the floor, but she hadn’t even noticed. The room reeked with the musky scent of her emotion. The perfume sweet and sickly, Flinch faint with nausea. She hadn’t packed any of his things. He left a pair of undies and a fresh shirt and a pair of shorts near the doorway to her room. She stepped on them, not noticing, the imprint of her stiletto in the soft material.

  She had put the case near the front door. She only made it as far as the couch. She left for the night via a bottle of whisky, but the case stayed and so did she, and Flinch put himself to bed in the knowledge that she’d be there in the morning. There was comfort in that.

  He finds the suitcase on top of the wardrobe in Audrey’s room. The buckles are rusted but they snap open with a loud clunk when he presses them. He packs a few singlets, a couple of long-sleeved checked flannel shirts. Also the only pair of jeans he has that fit him, ones that a shop assistant had altered just for him, so that the left cuff didn’t drag on the ground getting filthy and worn like his other pairs.

  He takes his copy of Moby-Dick, the photo of Audrey, and the piece of paper that they’d found in Nate’s belongings. Yellowed and as thin as a single layer of skin, now. But he can still read the writing. Eleanor. Duchess, QLD, 4825.

  ‘Duchess,’ Flinch had repeated, when Nate had said where he was from. ‘Sounds posh.’

  Nate had snorted into his beer, sent specks of foam flying. ‘Posh isn’t a word that springs to mind, mate.’

  ‘Where is it?’

  ‘Back of Bourke. Really. Old Burke and Wills went through there on their godforsaken journey. It’s near Mt Isa.’

  ‘Is it nice?’

  ‘It’s a shithole.’

  ‘Some people just don’t suit their hometowns,’ Macca had added.

  ‘I never had what you’d call a home there,’ said Nate, and downed his glass.

  Flinch knows he can’t take Milly. He isn’t exactly sure where Mt Isa is, but he’s sure it’s too far for her. On his way home from the commune, he stopped in town and bought a bus ticket that will get him to Brisbane, and from there he’ll take a train to Townsville, then a connection to Mt Isa. He’ll have to find his way to Duchess from there. He’s not sure how, just yet. He figures he’ll worry about it when he gets there. Flinch is usually one for planning. Not the type to venture into the unknown. But this time he has a purpose. He’s on a mission. He thinks of himself dressed in black. Maybe with a cape. Like a cartoon hero, arriving on the scene to put things right. He slings his suitcase into the ute and drives to Macca’s place.

  Mrs McTavish is in the backyard when he pulls up outside their house. It’s a worker’s cottage, one of the old ones that sit only steps from the road, their verandas almost on the footpath, houses that were built before traffic noise and passers-by were considered a nuisance. When all you would want was to get to work and back with as little walking as possible. From the footpath, there’s a gap along the side of the house paved with an uneven concrete pathway. Yellowing weeds sprout between the cracks. The path leads to a Hills hoist. Mrs McTavish is hanging clothes. The sea breeze lifts her hem, revealing stockings that end just below dimpled, spongy knees.

  ‘Flinch, love!’ she cries when she sees him. The basket at her feet full of Macca’s sopping wet underwear, singlets with yellow stains under the arms. ‘Pet, how are you?’

  ‘Yeah, good, Mrs Mac,’ he says.

  ‘And how’s the leg?’ She says leg in a whisper, screwing up her nose a littl
e.

  ‘It’s fine, no trouble.’

  ‘Oh, that’s good to hear. We haven’t seen you over here for so long. Are you going to stay for lunch? I’ve got sausages. Plenty of them.’

  It is a hot morning and she is sweating. Flinch imagines her perspiration dripping into the frying pan, sizzling in the oil with the sausages.

  ‘Thanks, Mrs Mac, but I can’t. I’ve got to get on my way. I’m going on a trip.’

  ‘Oh, how lovely! Where are you off to?’

  ‘Queensland.’

  ‘Now won’t that be nice. I’ve heard there are some nice hotels up there.’ She is sounding old, Flinch thinks. It has been a long time. Her hair is rinsed a purple-blue. Flinch can see grey roots and glimpses of her pink scalp underneath.

  ‘Er, yeah,’ says Flinch. ‘Anyway, I was wondering if I could leave my ute here until I get back. I’m catching the bus and it’s easier for me to walk from your place.’

  ‘Of course, of course!’ says Mrs McTavish. ‘Anything we can do for you, love. You know, your mother was like a sister to me.’ She pauses. ‘Or maybe a cousin. We always said we’d look out for you.’ Her smile contains the small trace of a grimace. She busies herself with hanging a singlet. Flinch knows Mrs Mac couldn’t stand his mother. Audrey didn’t make a lot of friends. But they kept up appearances, these women, clucked and cooed at each other like aviary birds when they walked past each other in the street, then hissed judgments to each other over weak cups of tea or afternoon nips of sherry. When Flinch came on the scene, though, Audrey discovered that the other women softened a little and so she brought him along to town fairs and picnics, propelling him in front of her as if he were her pass, her free ticket.

  ‘Poor little angel,’ the women would say. Stroke his hair.

  ‘It’s a handful, really, but you love them all the same, don’t you? In fact, these ones need it even more,’ Audrey would say, voice thick and syrupy with the tone of the martyr.