Death of a Whaler

by Nerida Newton

  ‘Yeah,’ says Flinch. ‘Yeah, can’t see why not.’

  They walk up Jonson Street under the shop awnings, snatching shade. The tar on the road shimmering like water in the heat of the afternoon. As they pass the grocer’s, the air is dense and syrupy with the perfume of mangoes and bananas and pineapples, all ready to burst their skins in the heat. Expectant fruit flies hover. Someone is cooking a curry in a back kitchen. The breeze carries murky green scents of brine and seagrass. The whole afternoon overripe and soupy with humidity, the almost-tropics.

  They pause at the end of the street, wordlessly climb the sand dunes towards the beach, sharing the sea-dog’s lust for a glimpse of the ocean. Main Beach, its sweeping arc, the crests of waves as they roll to shore streaks of white. Some way out Julian Rocks, the spray as the ocean flattens itself against them. And the sky, enormous and smooth blue, the horizon the promise of things eternal.

  A Nankeen kestrel wheels graceful circles above them, wings outstretched and perfectly still. A pelican soars steady and low and purposeful over a dark gutter in the ocean, its head tucked back into its body, reminding Flinch of a big old warplane, a fish-focused B52. The gulls at their feet gather, appraise them with a canny eye for the possibility of food or bait.

  ‘Seems almost too good, some days,’ sighs Macca.

  The back room of the pub, cool and dark with shadow, smelling like stale beer and ashtrays. A radio behind the bar cracks and whistles with the commentary of summer cricket matches.

  ‘Score?’ Macca takes a seat on a stool.

  ‘Three for seventy. Chappell out for thirteen.’ The barman snaps the tap on the barrel and plonks two small cold glasses of beer in front of them.

  ‘Shit.’

  ‘Reckon.’

  ‘It’s recoverable.’

  ‘Could be.’

  As shadows elongate in the late afternoon, the torpid weight of the heat lifts and with it Flinch’s mood. People trickle in and out of the bar. The workers down the first few glasses then take their time, sip at the cold froth, chew their gums and offer opinions on the match. Flinch knows he’s a part of this. The back-slap greetings, the casual, friendly ribbing of each other, the shared anticipation of a long, lazy weekend of sunshine, of fiddling with boats and cars and gutting fish and napping on the couch to the drone of the cricket commentator on a flickering TV or radio. Weekends around the bay.

  He arrives home to find the house in darkness, a goat curled like a cat asleep on the welcome mat. He gives it a shove with his boot and it bleats, levers itself to its feet, shakes and wanders off.

  In the kitchen, he switches on the fluoro and it flickers a couple of times before settling into a bright hum. He sees evidence of the beginnings of a meal. Raw chopped onions and garlic pungent on the breadboard. A saucepan on the stove, the oil in it glistening clear and cold. The cutting knife is wedged upright in the lino floor, vertical from the tip like a fallen arrow. Flinch bends to dislodge it.

  ‘I have to go home.’ Karma has moved to the doorway as quietly as a gust of wind. When she speaks she gives him a fright and he drops the knife again and it clatters on the floor.

  ‘Matt dropped by a while ago. They received a message at the commune, from my folks. Some bad news. I’m needed.’

  She looks hollow, as if some part of her has caved in. Flinch picks up the knife very slowly and puts it on the bench, steps back as if expecting it to launch itself through the air again. He’s still wary of knives.

  ‘I’m going to be gone for quite a while, I think.’

  Flinch nods. ‘Do you need anything?’

  ‘A ride to the bus stop tomorrow?’

  ‘Sure. Of course.’

  ‘Thanks. I’ve packed up the room. Leaving some things, though — you don’t mind, do you?’

  ‘No, no. So you’re coming back?’

  ‘Yeah.’ She smiles, small, with effort. ‘This is where I live now.’

  Flinch breathes out, tastes relief. He doesn’t know what he’d do without her just yet. Feel less guilt eating red meat, maybe. But he suspects that’s only the tip of it.

  They almost miss the morning bus. Milly, baking in the heat of the morning, her paint cracking, doesn’t make a sound when Flinch turns the key. He stomps on the clutch, sweat dripping onto the collar of the fresh new shirt he selected especially to say goodbye. Eventually the ute gives in and Flinch floors it all the way into town, to the bus stop, pulling up in a cloud of dust as the bus engine starts.

  Karma grabs her rucksack and is out the door before Flinch has even turned off the engine.

  ‘Bye! I’ll see you in a few months. Look after yourself, won’t you?’ She says it as if it were an instruction on a list of things that needed doing, a list that might also include remembering to turn the iron off, watering the plants. She waves to the bus driver to wait, and leans through the open window on Flinch’s side of the cabin to kiss him goodbye. Her lips on his cheek soft and wet and quick.

  ‘I’ll miss you, Flinch. Take care.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘Reckon.’Words failing him, as they do. She smiles and jogs off towards the bus. The doors close behind her. The bus emits a loud creak as its brakes are released, and rumbles away.

  Flinch, the engine still running unsteadily, sits in the cabin looking at the empty spot next to him. The weight of her is still imprinted in the seat, the sagging foam and vinyl slow to resume their shape. He places his hand on the seat to feel her warmth. Such a sudden goodbye. He is unprepared. For a second, he convinces himself that she has just vaporised into thin air and almost panics. Instead, he revs Milly until she whines like a lost dog, turns into the white light of the morning, and heads for home.

  The house, empty before when Karma wasn’t around, seems even emptier still, in a way he did not realise it to be before she came to live with him. Bristling and hot with guilt, he creeps into her room and runs his fingers over the things she has left behind. A few tattered books he wonders if she has read. Das Kapital, To Kill a Mockingbird, a compilation of short stories by Hemingway, something to do with the Third Eye, a Steinbeck.

  There are bands for her hair, long light-brown strands woven around them. He flicks them between his fingers and stings his thumb when they snap. When he wraps himself in the sarong that she uses for a curtain, he smells incense. Lemongrass. He takes a candle from the room, places it on a saucer, and puts it in the dining room, in the middle of the coffee table. At night, he will light it. It’s a little morbid, he realises, but he hopes that rituals and routine will sustain him while she is gone.

  And, of course, filling the long hours, there is the boat. He finds himself thinking about her, the curve of hull and keel, the long, smooth planks for decking, her bumps and hollows, as if she were the object of a schoolboy crush.

  Macca, known for mismatched red and orange socks, lurid T-shirts sporting logos like Aussie Blokes are Big Down Under alongside pictures of well-hung kangaroos, sauce and oil-stained King Gees, has, for some reason, been taken with the idea of painting the boat in traditional colours.

  ‘Understated,’ he tells Flinch. ‘Classic.’

  Flinch wonders if Mrs Mac has had a say.

  ‘I want the deck wood polished and varnished. The outside, though, I’m going to do white. Well kind of white. More like cream. Kind of.’ Macca spreads small cardboard paint samples like a pack of cards in front of Flinch’s nose, like some magician.

  Flinch takes them in his hands and reads the names on the back. Desert Glow. Jasmine. Porcelain. Bleached Blossom. Ice Glaze. Whitehaven. Foam. All slightly different, but each one on its own looking, well, white.

  ‘I never knew there were so many types of white,’ says Flinch. Lays them out on the table in front of him to see if he can distinguish the difference from further away. Reminded of the snowy bellies of seagulls in flight, whitecaps near the Wreck, a grain of sand.

  ‘Me either, mate. I imagine it’s the well-kept secret of painters and brides. I can’t decide, so I’ll l
eave that one up to you. But I did receive this yesterday. I ordered it months ago. Told you I was splashing out.’

  Macca unties string from around a huge column covered in brown paper. Unravels the bolt of sail material and shakes it out, floods a brilliant blue over the floor of the shed. Flinch has to catch his breath. Is taken quickly by images of the ocean on a clear day, sun-streaked and glossy with brilliance, a feeling of abundance, of purity, of an absolute carelessness.

  ‘Pretty nice, eh?’ Macca runs his hand down the sailcloth where it creases and prepares to roll it up again. Flinch, feeling tears hot behind his eyes, bites his lip. Sniffs. Macca pauses.

  ‘You okay, mate?’

  Flinch nods. ‘It’s just a beautiful thing.’

  Macca sighs. ‘Yeah, I know.’

  Knowing that the house is empty, Flinch spends more time in the shed, working on the boat. Summer bleeds away slowly as the humidity drops off and autumn reveals itself in the crisp mornings, on the ocean breeze, in the cool, dark, silky layer that lies beneath the white sand on the beach.

  Parts continue to arrive from all over the country, dumped outside the shed by couriers. Flinch arrives at Macca’s place to find ropes coiled like snakes basking on the lawn. Rolls of thick wire glinting silver. Boxes of bolts and fittings that rattle and clank as Flinch moves them into the shed. Each day that Flinch opens the doors to let the light and air stream into the boat shed, he is taken aback by the difference the work is making to the appearance of the boat now, after months of reshaping the internal structuring but seeing no real change in the boat’s formation. Each morning, he can see the evidence of the previous day’s work and it is as if he has forgotten overnight what she looks like. It makes the boat appear as if it were coming together by some kind of magic. He opens the small window on the side of the shed to let that blue smell of ocean and sky in, the same way a horse trainer might let the smell of turf into a stable to comfort the beast.

  For the outside of the boat, Flinch chooses a crisp white paint that reminds him of the bellies of the humpbacks when they roll under water. When he has finished painting the final layer, he and Macca stand back to observe his work.

  ‘Startin’ to look like the real thing,’ says Macca. ‘Think that deserves a beer.’

  Over the next few months, the varnishing is completed, masts and sails and lines put on and fixed into place, bronze fittings attached. Macca does up the inside as well, fits out a small galley and the cabins. Flinch watches on like an anxious parent at a dentist’s office as an electrician and a plumber drill through the walls down below. Mrs Mac sews cream and light-blue striped material over the new bench seats for the cabin, buys toilet paper printed with small blue starfish for the head.

  ‘That’s a nice touch, love. The tourists will think they’re on a luxury liner,’ says Macca. Puts a sweaty arm around her shoulders and squeezes, plants a kiss on the side of her head. Mrs Mac smiles, coy, blushes. Flinch catches a glimpse of the way she must have looked in her youth.

  A letter arrives from Karma. It sits in the letterbox for three days before Flinch discovers it there. By the time he retrieves it, the envelope is soggy due to afternoon showers, the postmark and his address completely blurred. He is unused to receiving anything more than utility bills and envelopes from Readers’ Digest telling him he could already be a millionaire, remnants of a one-off subscription of Audrey’s that expired decades ago. Flinch admires their persistence. He’s never the millionaire.

  Darl!

  Wish I could say I was having a wonderful time, but sadly that’s not the case. I hate this place and long to breathe the fresh sea air into my lungs. Have to stay a little longer to sort out some family business but will be home before you know it. How’s the boat going? I can’t wait to see it, I bet it will be beautiful. Please drop into the surf shop and let them know that I’ll be back in time for the school holidays. Pat the goats for me.

  Miss you. Love, Karma.

  Flinch reads it twice before he folds it into his pocket. Three times more before he goes to bed. Again upon waking.

  Macca catches him with it flattened over his knee during a break for lunch.

  ‘Letter from your girlfriend?’

  ‘She’s not my girlfriend, Macca.’

  ‘What is she then? She lives with you.’

  ‘She sleeps in the other room. She pays rent. It’s not that kind of thing.’ Flinch folds the letter, shoves it into a back pocket. ‘It’s a friendship. A really close one.’

  Macca raises his eyebrows. ‘She’s a bit of a doll.’

  ‘Yeah,’ says Flinch. ‘She is. But she’s kind of like my sister. Y’know. You’d give your life for ’em, but you just can’t feel that way about your sister.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ says Macca. ‘Guess you’ll never fall out that way.’

  ‘Yeah,’ says Flinch, flooded warm at the thought. ‘I guess not.’

  At night, Flinch lights the candle that he has taken from her room. Its flame, almost imperceptible under the stark white light of the fluoro, flickers large and brilliant when he turns out all the household lights. He lets it burn down, peels the hot wax from its sides as it drips and cools, and moulds it into a small ball that he flicks across the table and into the sink.

  Later, he takes out Moby-Dick. Reads, We felt very nice and snug, the more so since it was so chilly out of doors; indeed out of bed-clothes too, seeing there was no fire in the room. The more so, I say, because truly to enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself.

  Flinch can’t say why, but the passage seems to him more like a parable. No warmth without cold. No joy without sorrow. No sense of freedom without imprisonment. No resurrection before death.

  In the morning, he wakes up knowing what he wants to name the boat.

  SIXTEEN

  The final coat of paint on the boat dry, Flinch puts the name to Macca.

  Westerly.

  ‘Westerly? Doesn’t sound as slick as I was hoping. I was thinking more along the lines of something … posh. Imposing. At least meaningful.’

  ‘But it is,’ Flinch protests, almost desperate. ‘Think about it. The westerly is the wind that will take us out to sea. Out to the big blue.’

  ‘Rotten wind,’ snorts Macca. ‘Blows a bloody gale in winter. Carries the flu and the smell of cow shit from inland.’

  ‘Not out on the ocean.’

  Macca’s mouth screwed up as if with the taste of something sour. ‘I don’t know, mate. Why do you like it?’

  ‘It reminds me of good things. Being out on the ocean and knowing we could drift on that wind to the horizon. And of … other things.’

  ‘Westerly. West. Nathan West, you mean.’

  Flinch nods.

  Macca can see the tears brimming and Flinch’s nose turning red. Doesn’t have the heart to say no. ‘Alright, then. In honour of that mate of ours, a windy bloody gasbag himself, we’ll call her Westerly.’

  They sit back on foldout chairs on the grass and look up at the bow. A shaft of sunlight catching the brass trim of the boat, glinting like gold. The lawn crisps brown in the heat.

  ‘He was a good bloke, wasn’t he?’ says Macca, after a while.

  ‘Yeah,’ says Flinch. ‘He was a good mate.’

  A fly buzzes thick and dull around them in lazy circles. They take turns brushing it from their faces.

  ‘Well, better get on with it.’ Macca grunts as he stands. ‘I’ll call a sign writer today. Running writing, you reckon?’

  ‘Yeah,’ says Flinch. ‘With curly bits on the ends of the letters, like they do.’

  ‘I get to name our next one, y’know.’

  ‘Yeah, alright, Macca. The next baby’s yours,’ Flinch concedes. Hides a smile behind his hand.

  On the way back to the pastel house, Flinch buys a single white bed sheet and some blue paint in a large tin. At home, scatters old blankets and crusty
fishing gear onto the floor in order to retrieve Audrey’s sewing box from the back of a cupboard. She’d used it once, to sew a button onto one of Flinch’s threadbare school shirts after a concerned teacher had sent a letter home suggesting a new one might be in order. Flinch had hung onto the sewing box after she died, used it a few times over the years to sew patches over worn pockets and to alter the hems of trousers to fit his shorter leg. The leftover fabric and the thread in the sewing box were rarely the right colour for his purpose. He left the house some days knowing he looked like a rag doll. A clown. All bits and pieces, uneven and uncoordinated. Learnt to shrug off with good humour the comments from the others in their blue overalls. Secretly thought the patchwork suited him.

  He takes a measuring tape and measures twice, to be sure, a perfect square. On hands and knees, cuts it out. Drags the furniture to the edge of the living room and covers the floor with newspaper, so that he can lay the square flat. From Karma’s room he takes the largest paintbrush he can find, and the big, dull pencil she uses for drawing before she paints.

  In the centre of the square sheet he draws another careful square. The outer square he paints bright blue. When it dries, turns the sheet over and does the same again.

  He leaves the windows open, but paint fumes waft in to his bedroom on the night breeze and he wakes with a headache.

  Unrolls the flag in front of Macca and his missus the following day.

  ‘A Blue Peter,’ chuckles Macca. ‘Bloody genius.’

  ‘It’s so everyone will know she’s ready to sail,’ says Flinch. Feels a little swell of pride at his handiwork.

  ‘It’s very pretty, Flinch.’Mrs Mac, in the tone of a benevolent teacher.

  Buoyed by his success with the flag, the following night he takes a sheet of paper and the paints from Karma’s room. Sits, pencil in hand, unmoving. Later, pins and needles through one leg and his hip and spine aching with immobility, and the paper still blank, he gets up and makes himself some toast. Eats without tasting. The night ages pitch-black, barren of moonlight. Eventually he gives in to the colour rising inside him. Adds black to the fire-engine red of Karma’s palette until it is dark, streaky scarlet. Paints quickly and furiously, overcome with fervour to have it out, covers every square inch of paper red and leaves globs of the colour drying on the kitchen table and floor like some gruesome crime scene. He goes to bed in the early hours and dreams of a harpoon exploding, a cloud of whale blood rising to clot the ocean surface. The lighthouse keeper, propped against the closed door of the lighthouse, shakes his head.