To Become a Whale

by Ben Hobson

  The boy wobbled over and fell again.

  ‘Go easy, mate. You alright?’

  Nodding, the boy found his way over. As he knelt down by his father he saw the man’s face was coated in muck. ‘What happened?’

  His father laughed, brown dribbling over his lips. He spat. ‘Soon as we started I went right over bloody cow crap. Landed face first in it.’ He laughed again and spat once more. It hit the earth murky. ‘Tastes like I used my face to wipe my arse.’

  The boy started laughing too. Their two voices, young and old, father and son, each an echo of the other.

  His mother, coming down the hill, yelling something. The boy tried to pry his father from the barrel, a hand beneath each armpit. An almighty struggle. Soon his mother’s hands joined his own and they managed it together. The family then sitting on the ground, laughing. His mother put her hand on his back. The boy would always remember how it made him feel.

  SIX

  1961

  The boy woke aching. The back door of the car was wide open and his father already absent. A cold breeze had raised goosebumps on his arms. He pulled the blanket higher, tighter around himself.

  ‘You awake in there yet or what?’ came his father’s voice from outside.

  ‘Yeah,’ the boy said.

  ‘Well come on out then.’

  The boy struggled from the front, almost collapsing onto the dirt and mud. The surrounds were mostly wet with dew, the sun barely over the horizon.

  ‘What time is it?’ the boy asked. He blinked his eyes, trying to rid them of their weariness.

  ‘I have to get going, mate. I left you some beans in the fire there.’

  The boy looked, saw the smouldering can. His father already dressed and jumpy.

  ‘You got the fire started?’

  His father’s smile bespoke deep pride. ‘Sure did. Got up early to get it going for you.’

  The boy blinked his sleep away. ‘Get going where?’

  His father looked back up the trail. ‘There’s something I need to do, that’s all.’

  ‘You’re just leaving me here?’

  ‘I won’t be long, mate.’

  ‘Can’t I come with you?’ the boy asked.

  ‘I need the room in the car, mate.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Look,’ his father said, and bent over. His ruined hand gripped the boy’s shoulder. ‘I won’t be long, alright? I’ll be back before lunch.’

  He started for the car.

  The boy realised he hadn’t checked on Albert yet and hurried over.

  The puppy was asleep in its box, one paw up near its eyes. As the boy shook the cardboard Albert was instantly awake and licking at his fingertips. He took the box from the car and put it beside the fire.

  As his father got into the car, the boy’s fear increased. ‘You’ll be back?’

  ‘Of course I’ll be back,’ his father said. He looked out at his son still in his pyjamas. ‘Your clothes are over there.’ He nodded towards a tree. The boy saw his suitcase beneath it. ‘You’ll be right, won’t you? You’re big enough.’

  The boy had no answer for this. His father didn’t seem to understand the boy needed comfort, assurance, and pleading only seemed to irritate him further. The boy felt anger, deep in his stomach, at the realisation that he had no say.

  He said, ‘I guess.’

  ‘Alright then,’ his father said. He turned the key and fired up the engine. ‘That’s my boy.’

  The car reversed. His granddad’s implication from the previous day – that his father was not fit to be a parent – made his fists clench in fear. This man might not return. This might be all there was. It took all the courage the boy could muster for him to remain still as the car, and his father, moved off, leaving him behind in this strange place.

  He sat by the fire and stuck a stick inside it, prying at the ash beneath, feeling his hands warm. Albert still in his box with his paws beneath his chin. The boy petted him absently and thought of his mother. He said, ‘Sorry,’ to her, and didn’t know why he was.

  Her death had not been easy on her. She had been confined to bed, always shaking with cold beneath the covers despite the humidity. At first he’d talked to her as though everything was normal; about friends, school, small things that hardly mattered. He looked at the puppy now and wanted to show her his dog. He imagined lifting the box to show her more clearly as she sat up there in heaven, and chided himself for being so foolish. She’d often coughed while she listened, and when she did she’d hold a small white handkerchief to her mouth. This had interrupted him sometimes mid-sentence as her body had sucked upwards and her back had arched and her hand had reached to her mouth and she had barked and barked. It had been difficult to not feel slighted. When she’d finished and turned away from him it was awful to try to work out if he should continue speaking or stop. Stopping was easier, so normally he’d just watched in silence as she drew ragged breaths, her body swelling up and down beneath the blankets like waves.

  Towards the end he no longer pretended things were normal. He’d sit in the chair beside her bed without talking. In the last few days she’d forgotten who he was. He’d still gripped her hand. Her skin had caught on his fingertips.

  His father was with her when she died. The boy was outside on the verandah trying to read, but really he was watching the tyre swing his father had hung from a tree years before sway in the slight breeze. There was no telling how long his father had sat by her side and watched her motionless body. Or what her final words had been. Had they been for him? No telling whether or not his father had kissed her goodbye, said something. If he had cried at all, the tears were gone by the time he walked outside and told the boy his mother had passed and that he’d better come in and say farewell. Maybe he hadn’t cried but had simply sat, watching, gripping her hand with his half-imaginary one.

  And this was clearly his father’s way. To hold things back and get on with it and that was all. The boy knew he wasn’t the same as his father and grew afraid that his father would draw from him this part of his mother’s character, this softness. He determined then, with growing resentment, that there was no way in hell he’d let him. No way in hell.

  When his father returned the boy was playing with Albert. He made a choice not to look at the car as it slowed and stopped. He heard the car door open and his father’s footsteps. The sound of the rear door being opened made him turn.

  ‘Come give us a hand, mate,’ his father said. He was bent over inside the car, having a hard time retrieving something. The boy didn’t want to heed his father’s instruction but found himself curious enough that he came closer anyway.

  His father grunted and heaved and from the car he yanked one of the old oil barrels. He stood it next to the car with his bad hand resting on it and looked proud of himself.

  The boy said, ‘You went home?’

  The father seemed affronted by this, as though he had not expected the question. ‘I just went to get the barrels, yeah.’

  ‘You went back to our house?’ the boy asked. When his father didn’t reply he added, ‘Without me?’

  ‘I needed the room in the car for the barrels.’

  The boy shook his head and almost laughed. There were tears in his eyes as he said, ‘You should’ve taken me. You should’ve let me say goodbye to it.’

  His father said quickly, ‘Mate, it’s just a bloody house, isn’t it? Your mum’s dead. She’s not there anymore.’ His father rubbed the back of his neck, his other hand still resting on the barrel. The boy saw in him deep regret and felt only his own brewing anger in response.

  The father soon looked up at his son and said, ‘I didn’t think, alright? I didn’t think you’d care about it. It’s just a bloody house anyway.’ He turned back to the car, shuffled the still-embedded barrel. He added, almost to himself, ‘Thought these’d be useful for storing water. The new owners let me have ’em.’ He tugged at it, then stopped. ‘Can you get around the other side and shove it thr
ough?’

  The boy hesitated, still angry, still upset. Before him now a decision. He would either have to relinquish all he felt and buckle under his father’s rule, or stand up for himself and make everything harder.

  The barrel beside him, in all its rusted blue, was a symbol for him of a better time, when his family had been whole. He remembered his mother’s hand on the small of his back. So, wiping a hand over his eyes, without further word he rounded the car and helped his father dislodge the second steel drum. They rolled them beneath a tree and stood them upright. The sun high above them diminished by the canopy of leaves overhead. The boy wanted to ask if there was anything else they might proceed with in the making of their new home, but he didn’t. Instead he played with the fire, keeping it going with fresh twigs and brush he found nearby. This was his task for the remainder of the day. He didn’t watch what task his father took upon himself.

  At night, after they’d eaten, they again scrunched themselves into the car to sleep. The boy found it strangely comfortable the second night. The box beside him, the puppy within. He dangled his hand over the cardboard lip and occasionally felt the puppy’s tongue. The boy thought about his mother and the way she had with animals. This started him thinking about the life he had spent with her and so he asked quietly, as his father shifted again, the leather groaning as he moved, ‘When do you have to go back to work?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because.’

  A sigh. ‘June fifth. Ship out on the Monday. So I guess I gotta leave here the day before. Or early that morning. Why?’

  ‘So that’s about a month away?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What do you normally do, to leave?’

  ‘You know what I normally do.’

  ‘It changes. Sometimes you go the night before and sometimes you go in the morning. What are you going to do this time?’

  ‘I don’t know yet, mate. Does it matter?’

  Silence. The boy breathed and flicked his fingers against the cardboard box. Albert’s head showed, tongue lolling, grey in the dark. The boy shoved the puppy’s head back into the box. He said, ‘What’s going to happen to me?’

  ‘Well you can’t stay here.’

  ‘I know. I gotta go to school.’

  His father sighed and drew in a breath. ‘You might not go back right away, mate. Year’s half over anyway. And I was thinking –’ his father coughed once, muffled by his hand ‘– it might be time I take you with me. You’re old enough to learn what I do. You could make some extra coin for us, help us build the house. Eventually, anyway. You’d start off just shadowing me a bit, so there’d be no actual pay, but it’d set you up for later, which is important. Good to have options. What do you say to that, hey? Take after your old man?’ The boy could tell, without looking, that his father was grinning. ‘I gotta ask Melsom, of course. But it will be good for you. Get you used to working, being one of the blokes, you know?’

  The boy was immediately struck with the fear of it. The thought of whaling, of flensing, of all his father had described to him. In this almost perfect black of the bush the boy sat up and regarded his father. Hard to make out his expression and hard to tell if he even noticed the boy. He was looking at the roof of the car with his arms behind his head. In his rushed voice had been a strange sadness, as though he had risked rejection. So the boy, despite his misgivings, murmured a half-hearted assent and laid back down, breathing terror.

  The father seemed to take this for enthusiasm and added, ‘You could end up liking it, you know? I know you don’t like hurting animals, but they’re already dead by the time they get to us. And, you know, there’s not much to it. Good, simple work. Never have to go back to school at all, if you don’t want.’

  The two were silent after that and soon the boy heard his father’s snoring. He pictured himself atop a whale carcass, slipping on the blubber and the blood. Pictured himself with a knife, violently stabbing the way his father had stabbed at the can of beans, and blood gushing from the wound he caused, covering him and the knife. And the smell. It had travelled back with his father at the end of every season embedded in his clothing. Despite weeks and weeks of bathing and heavy soaping, the stink would remain, and his mother, the boy remembered, had complained loudly and often.

  One year she’d stormed out from the laundry, where she’d been cleaning his clothes, and onto the verandah. The father had been sitting drinking a beer and the boy had been reading and both had been silent, as was their custom. She had thrown the clothes at him and he, laughing, had chased her inside. She had squealed. The boy followed and had watched as the two of them collapsed onto the couch and the boy thought he was looking at the truest form of love. His father ruined this by forcing his mother to smell the clothes, wadding them up beneath her nose. She had resisted, playfully at first but then more forcefully, and screamed and pushed at him until he released her. He had fallen back, stunned, and she had stormed from the room, sobbing. His father noticed him staring. Shrugged and said, ‘Women, mate.’

  These memories, of course, made the boy miss his mother, compounded by the barrels sitting under a tree outside their car. As he tried to sleep, matching his father’s breathing pattern, he forced himself to keep thinking of her and all the ways she had offered him goodness and life. The last remnants of what he’d had with her – their home, his school – had been taken from him now. He’d clung to some hope that he’d return one day. Now he knew better. He cried silently, draped over the front seat with the puppy licking his palm, mourning this new loss.

  In the dark of night, the boy was woken by the sound of the puppy crying. The boy rolled over to comfort the dog, but the puppy would not be subdued with pats or soft cooing. So the boy, as quietly as he could manage, opened the car door and clambered out with the dog. Leaving the door ajar, he carried the pup away from his father, still sleeping noisily on the rear seat. No telling what his father might do were he to be startled from his slumber.

  He put Albert down his pyjama shirt and let the dog scratch at his unprotected belly. The puppy’s high-pitched whining carried to the trees. The moon was full and silent and there were few bats flying now and the trees shook only slightly in the breeze. The ocean sound was full and rich and more present once Albert ceased his noise. The gentle sound of the waves was somehow warm, steady as a heartbeat. The puppy soon fell asleep and the boy debated whether to take him back to the car or instead remain awake until the sun came up. He wondered what the time might be and looked at the moon, but couldn’t tell.

  He stood a while and regarded the moon, then decided to try his luck. He slowly eased the car door open and climbed in and lay down across the seat. Starting to sweat. The boy unbuttoned his pyjama shirt to release the sleeping puppy and brought him up to cradle him in the crook of his arm. Albert didn’t stir. Nor did the father. The boy was pleased he had been so brave. His mother would have been proud. He shut his eyes and quickly fell asleep.

  SEVEN

  They woke, sweaty and baked in sun. His father groaned and the boy could see his feet jab against the window and his knees straighten. His head popped over the seat and he looked down at his son with a grim expression.

  ‘You sleep all night with that puppy?’ he asked.

  The boy rubbed sleep from his eyes. ‘Yes.’ He looked down at the sleeping mutt, so peaceful.

  ‘You know, you mollycoddle him and he won’t ever sleep on his own.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He has to learn to go to sleep by himself,’ his father said. He reached down and scratched the dog behind the ears. The boy almost snatched the dog away before his father’s hand could touch it. ‘If you answer his cries at night, he’ll learn that’s how he gets attention. And for the rest of our lives he’ll be whining at night to get into bed next to you. It might be cute one night, but you’ll soon hate it, believe me. We did the same thing to you. You would cry at night. We had to leave you in your room so you learned to go to sleep by yourself. Your mother hat
ed it, but it was good for you.’

  The boy looked at the pup and imagined a baby’s face there and wondered what he would do if his own son cried. The rust-coloured fur of the puppy was dull and dusty and the tip of its nose was somehow always moist. He scratched behind Albert’s ears.

  ‘I like having him here,’ the boy said.

  ‘Yeah, well, he’s not going to be able to do what we need him to do if he’s crying for you every night, is he?’

  ‘What do we need him to do?’

  His father opened the car door without answering and more sunlight streamed in, low over the horizon of swishing leaves. The boy, holding the dog, opened his door and let Albert down. The pup shook himself and scampered off. The boy gave chase and quickly caught him up in his arms and put him safely back in the box in the car. He lowered a window and shut the door, the puppy already whining.

  They ate more of the bread, butter and Vegemite. His father spread the tar-like paste too thick but the boy pretended to enjoy it. He got up from his milk-crate seat and offered some to Albert through the window.

  The father eventually stood and opened the rear car door and got in, sat with his legs swinging out the side. The puppy’s crying was silenced with a stern ‘no’.

  ‘What are we doing today?’ the boy asked from his seat on the milk crate.

  ‘Well,’ his father said, and his legs stopped, ‘we gotta shift the rest of the wood, I guess. And the mixer.’

  They changed into clothes that still smelled like sweat. As he put his shirt on, the boy wondered how they might wash their dirty clothes in this, their new home. He stuffed his pyjamas back into his suitcase and then walked into the forest and urinated against a tree, the sound of the ocean duller in the light of day.

  Moving the wood took until past midday. Albert cried, but the boy had no leash for him and no way to keep an eye on him were he to let the pup roam free, so he stayed confined within the box next to the pile of cement bags. When they were done the boy stood back to survey the pile of timber and found there was less of it than he’d expected. Nowhere near enough to build an entire house. He told his father so as the man approached and dangled a bottled orange juice over the boy’s shoulder. The boy opened it and drank the warm liquid.