by Ben Hobson
The boy nodded. ‘But I don’t like coffee.’
His father laughed at this. ‘You will by the end of the night.’
The boy watched as a man who’d been standing with a group nearby stopped chatting and looked around at his father. He walked over in a hurry and shook his father’s crippled hand. His grip was too tight, judging by the expression on his father’s face. The beanie on his head looked new. He said, ‘I’m Dan.’
His father said, ‘Walter.’ They stopped shaking. ‘Who are you?’
Dan laughed. ‘Sorry, mate. Forgot my manners. I’m the Fisheries inspector.’
His father’s brow creased. ‘Where’s the other one?’
‘The other one?’
‘The old one. What’s his name?’
‘James?’
‘Yeah. James.’
‘He’s not here this time. I’m here this time.’
‘Oh,’ his father said. He looked the man up and down. ‘You done this before?’
‘I was at Byron a few seasons.’
‘So you know what you’re doing?’
The man might have been insulted by this, but it was difficult for the boy to tell considering the man’s smile. ‘I do,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry.’ He looked behind his father and then at the boy and grew confused. ‘Where’s the rest of your team?’
‘Over there,’ his father said, pointing at the two men the boy had heard him laughing with. They were both bent to some task.
‘Can you introduce me?’ Dan asked.
His father nodded and was about to walk off when Dan said, looking at the boy, ‘Who’re you?’
‘Sam.’
Dan looked at his father. ‘How old is he?’
‘He’s fifteen.’
‘He’s your son?’
‘He is.’
‘He’s a bit young, isn’t he?’
‘He’s not working. He’s just watching me work. He’ll work here when he’s old enough.’
‘He’s just watching?’
‘He’ll help out a bit later on, but yeah, mostly.’
‘Help with what?’
‘I don’t know. What he needs training in.’
‘Will he touch the whales?’
‘Is it your business?’
‘It is actually, mate,’ Dan said. He removed his beanie and wiped at the sweat coating his hair. ‘Will he handle the whales? Or the knives?’
‘Not at first,’ his father said. The boy noted the slow breath out and knew his father was attempting to control his anger. Two clenched fists, one imperfect. ‘Tell you what. You tell me when you think he’s ready. I won’t let him do a thing without your bloody say so.’
The man, possibly noticing his father’s clenched fists, said, ‘Sounds fair.’
‘You want to be introduced –’ his father tilted his head towards the other men ‘– or what?’
The two walked off and left the boy. The boy noticed that his father had not introduced him to anyone except when asked about him. In an act of defiance, he approached a man near the ramp with a hose and said, ‘How’s it going?’ He tried to sound casual, like he was one of the guys.
The man turned and extended his hand. ‘Brian. Good to meet you.’
Shaking the man’s hand, the boy said, ‘I’m Sam.’
‘Your Walt’s kid, yeah?’
The boy nodded. ‘How’d you know that?’
‘No other kids here, are there?’ Brian said. ‘Bloody stupid what they let him get away with. No offence to you, mate.’
The boy ignored this comment and bent to touch the ramp. He said, ‘What are you doing?’
‘I’m hosing down the slipway here so the whales can slide up without getting splinters or catching on the wood.’
Brian let the hose fall and spray wildly on the deck and walked to the side and cranked the faucet on further and the water gushed out. The boy was quick to grab it as it snaked from side to side. He aimed it down the ramp and his hands quickly grew cold. When Brian returned the boy handed the hose to him. He shook the water from his hands and tried to think of something to say, but when he looked Brian’s back was to him, so he walked away.
Phil soon showed up. The boy noticed that he was later than most of the other men and as he entered he threw his hands in the air as though crossing a finish line and some of the men hooted and clapped. He turned and stood, a celebrity. He set to sharpening his flensing knife, the boy watching from a distance so he wouldn’t disturb him. Phil was less precise than his father. While he sharpened his knife the other men crowded around and chatted and he became distracted from what he was doing.
The boy surveyed all the activity going on, the air of busyness and purpose, and found himself uplifted by the sense of a shared mission. The men seemed happy to be there, despite the late hour and despite the hours of work ahead of them. They were engaged in some task or other. The boy had never seen men so fulfilled. His father was one of them. He wondered if he would become fulfilled also and if he had what it took to make it in this world.
TWENTY-TWO
The boy stood with his father at the lip of the slipway watching as a boat came in. It was large and, as the vessel slowly exited the shadow and emerged into the light, the boy saw one of the harpoon guns glinting. The waves hitting the bottom of the ramp increased in measure with the boat’s approach. The boy kept his eyes peeled for sharks.
‘The chaser’ll pull up,’ his father said. ‘It’ll stop there –’ he pointed out to sea ‘– and wait for the Looma. Looma’s a bigger boat; she stays with us. She just goes out to collect the whales from the chasers. Chasers can’t afford to be waiting around for us with the dinghy and the ropes each time, so they head back out while the Looma comes up here.’ He pointed near the end of the ramp. ‘Then we send a dinghy out to drag the whale to the slipway.’
‘Why?’
‘Just how it’s done. Don’t ask me, mate. The Norwegians invented whaling and they organise all this. We don’t have to worry about that side of it, anyway. We just have the whales to sort.’
The boy looked at his father, who was watching his face keenly. There was a part of the boy that wanted to walk away from this, all he saw. Another part that was buoyed by the sense of purpose amongst the men. He shuffled closer to his father’s bung left hand.
‘How often do the chasers come in?’ he asked.
‘When they’ve caught enough.’
The boy was struck with what he would now witness. A whale up close and dead. A once-living creature created by God slaughtered for what was inherent in its design. Bone, fat, meat. Churned into margarine and food for pigs. A reapplied purpose worth more to man than the creature alive. He looked at the men about him and wondered what they might have done to earn the right to take what they wanted from the whale.
Difficult to see in the dark, but out to sea a ship approached and another vessel of longer design met it. An elderly couple embracing each other with tender arms. The men on the deck had grown silent and now over the water came the sound of booming engines and men shouting. The boy watched. Soon the vessels parted and the larger one turned back to them with its cargo.
Smoke billowed from the Tangalooma’s funnel and failed to disperse despite the breeze and the movement of the vessel. As the ship came near the factory, the funnel reflected the bright lights and the surface of the ocean rippled. There were men aboard the boat wearing dark woollen beanies and long trousers and gumboots. The vessel seemed to sit low in the water. There was a large white shape lashed to the side closest to them. Its skin swallowed water and light both and reflected colour back to the boy. One flipper was extended upwards, eternally asking a question.
The boy turned aside from the whale carcass and looked instead to the dinghy headed out from beneath him with three men aboard. They approached the white mass and the motor coughed and struggled. They found the embedded harpoon and attached a thin steel cable they had dragged with them, its other end anchored to the slipway that glinted ben
eath the lights. The questioning flipper smacked against the surface of the water as the whale was released from the Tangalooma and the boy heard a man on the dinghy laugh aloud. The dinghy dragged the carcass to the bottom of the slipway. The whale listed uselessly and bobbed like a bath toy.
‘How’s it floating?’ the boy found himself asking.
His father said, ‘They pump it full of air to keep it afloat on the way home.’
The whale thudded against the wood of the slipway and the boy could feel a faint vibration in his legs. Men near him were yelling directions and orders. He could sense the anticipation in his father and the men in his father’s team as they strained forward, eager to begin. Beside them, Phil and his team handled their flensers and stared intently.
Two more men leaned out from the slipway and attached a heavier steel cable to the beast’s tail that threaded its way up the slipway to one of the winches at the rear of the deck. Brian kept hosing beside him. Once the cable was attached and secured, the men called out with Norwegian accents and the other cable – the hawser, the boy heard it called – was released back to the dinghy, which made its way back out to the Tangalooma to collect another beast.
His father beside him yelled a warning to the men below, which startled the boy so he almost slipped and he grabbed his father’s sleeve. His father laughed as the boy cursed his ill-suited shoes.
The winch began to turn, and the whale was dragged onto the slipway.
So large a beast seemed to the boy to demand dignity in treatment and in word both, but instead the men surrounding it only laughed and joked, acting as though what happened before them was entirely without consequence. Both of the flippers were squished awkwardly beneath it as the carcass gained traction on the wood and the boy was positive that if there were bones in these appendages then they were by now surely broken. The whale’s tongue lolled out behind it and wobbled and shuddered as the winch cranked. Its skin stuck despite the steady hosing of the wood. The tail was small compared to the size of the creature’s head.
Perhaps no dignity was possible in death. The boy remembered his mother’s made-up cheeks and the look on his father’s face as he shut the coffin lid. He remembered too the colour of her sickness. All death was ugly; why not present it so?
Once the whale had reached the flattened part in the middle of the ramp its progress stopped. A bloke ran out and attached another heavy chain to its tail and the process was started anew. The whale seemingly grew in size as it approached. Looking beyond this nightmare, the boy saw the dinghy had retrieved a second whale, smaller than the first. It bobbed on the surface of the water in the same way and the dinghy started the journey back to the ramp. Brian still hosed, looking bored with his task. The first whale scraped up the wood, almost upon them. It caught on the lip with a low squeak and his father yelled at the winch man and then, without hesitation, he and his team heaved the carcass over the lip onto the deck. The boy caught a glimpse of its eyes as it slid past and he remembered his mother’s colourless pupils. Unlike her, this beast seemed still to be present within its flesh, staring back at him from its premature afterlife.
The smell of it up close was not that bad, but the boy knew it had not been opened yet and that the insides of an animal stank far worse than its outside. As it slid past, still jerked by the chain, its eye and belly wobbling, the boy noticed the ridges on its monstrous head.
The men all followed their quarry. The winch cranked and there were seagulls circling above. One of them landed near the whale’s flipper and arched its wings before flapping away at the next jerk of the winch.
Finally, his father gave a shout and waved a hand in the air, and the whale came to a stop.
‘Stand over there,’ his father said, and pointed to a place near the rail of the deck.
The boy obeyed and watched as the men circled the upside-down whale.
Dan the Fisheries inspector walked up and looked it in the eye then, without hesitation, sank his knife in up to the hilt.
The boy thought at first he was stabbing the eye itself, and was about to look away, but then he saw the inspector had cut a little below. Blood oozed from the wound to coat his bare hands, and as he sawed he shook his hands intermittently to flick the blood onto the timber deck. It landed in droplets the size of pennies. The eyeball wobbled in protest and suddenly out it popped, hanging by a thick membrane, swaying. Dan, without looking, flicked his knife and severed the thread and the eyeball landed with a thud on the deck. The boy wanted to vomit but managed to fight the urge.
Dan reached a hand into the cut he’d made and fished out what looked like a large oyster shell and studied its thickness. He held it up to the light, this gore-encrusted talisman.
‘About twenty-five years,’ he yelled.
The boy saw a man near the back of the deck write something on a chalkboard.
Dan then set to measuring the whale. A little blood seeped from the cut near its eye, the empty cavity that had once held a window into the creature’s depths. Dan yelled out figures the boy didn’t understand to the man at the chalkboard, and when he was finished Dan stood in front of the upside-down beast and patted its colossal jaw. He said, ‘Sorry, mate,’ and then nodded to the boy’s father, who stepped forward.
As his father began pulling the flipper out, Dan presented the shell-like bone he had extracted to the boy. ‘Souvenir,’ he said. ‘If you want it.’
The boy took the object and found it was harder than stone. He looked up at Dan. ‘What is it?’ he asked.
‘That’s the whale’s eardrum. It’s how we measure their age. See?’ He pointed at some barely legible, mostly translucent lines that ran the length of the object. ‘People keep ’em as souvenirs. You can paint a face on it. Your dad never brought you one?’
The boy shook his head and stared at the greyish white eardrum coated in gore. When he next looked up Dan had moved away to join Phil’s team as they walked the new whale onto the deck. The boy put the eardrum down beside him and vowed to forget where it was.
His father’s team did not mess around. They extended the flippers and hacked at the joints with their long flensers until the flippers had fallen to the wood. Next they sliced the sides of the whale in thick strips almost to the tail. The whale’s shiny black skin and the white skin of its underbelly were soon covered with a pink-red syrup that gleamed beneath the lights. His father was covered in the slime. There was something pink and gristly in his beard.
While his father and one of his team sliced, another man attached winch lines to each strip they cut. The winch was cranked and the blubber and skin were peeled off in a thick sticky mess. And the process was repeated. It wobbled like jelly in a bowl as it thumped onto the deck. The man not cutting into the actual carcass used a knife and hacked into the blubber until he had formed multiple squares. These were shoved with his foot into a nearby hole. Then the process was repeated.
The boy watched the blood as it pooled out of the whale onto the deck. It threaded its way to the side and into a deep gutter. One of the team slipped in a puddle of blood on the deck and laughed and caught hold of the whale to save himself from falling.
Soon they had finished stripping the underbelly. What was left was bone and pink. His father gave the boy a blood-soaked grin as he passed and they hooked on another winch and, with all the men shoving, flipped the carcass over. The process began again on top of the head.
The father turned to the boy and said, ‘You want a go?’
The boy shook his head. ‘No.’
‘Come here. Have a look.’
The boy carefully inched closer. His leather shoes fared poorly in the blood and he was deathly afraid of slipping and falling – not because he would face embarrassment, but because he would end up covered in viscera. He managed to make it to his father, who pointed out the cuts.
‘We cut here. Then we strip off the blubber and throw it in that hole.’
‘Why’s there so much blood?’
His father laug
hed. ‘Big animal.’
They finished the head and the stink slowly soaked into the boy’s clothes. Once all the square pieces of blubber had been shoved into the hole in the floor, they hacked up the red meat, the intestines, the liver, all the innards. The boy stared in wonder as the whale’s heart was unearthed and flopped onto the ground without ceremony, to be set upon by some bloke and his knife with the viciousness of a dog. This muscle that once gave such monstrous life treated so poorly.
The whale’s massive tongue was cut into strips and these were pushed into a different unmarked hole in the floor. This dreadful job did not tire the men. Rather, it gave them energy so that they almost leaped about as they worked. All meat and innards were passed through the same hole and they were left with a giant bone carcass and some bristly bits that were in the whale’s mouth.
‘That’s baleen,’ his father said while he sharpened his flensing knife. ‘You bored, are you?’
The boy shook his head. ‘No.’
‘You look bored.’
‘I’m not bored,’ the boy said. ‘I feel sick.’
‘Sick?’
‘This is making me sick. I want to throw up.’
‘Come on, mate. You’ve seen your granddad cut up a pig.’
‘I feel sick,’ the boy repeated stubbornly.
His father sighed. ‘Why don’t you go help Brian?’ His father nodded to the man still on the hose.
‘What if I mess it up?’
‘You can’t mess that job up. Why they put Brian on it.’
His father smiled in that sinister way he had and the boy, grasping his chance to escape, dashed over to Brian. He avoided the innards and meat and life as best he could. The strong smell, gulls pecking at whale bone. He felt he was in hell.
The boy tapped Brian on the shoulder when he reached him.
The man turned. ‘Yeah?’
‘I could help?’ the boy said.
‘Right. Here,’ Brian said and handed him the hose. Without further ado the man walked away and left the boy to the task.