Death of a Whaler (12 page)

After a day in the sun they were cooked through. Their noses uniformly bright pink, despite their hats, skin flaking on brown forearms. Eyeballs streaked red.

‘We're actually baking out there. Roasting, like chooks,' Nate had said.

They were light-headed. Flinch found it difficult to concentrate. Felt drunk on the first three sips of his stubbie.

‘Too much sun affects the brain. Too little of it and you fall into depression. When Cook explored the Arctic during its months of darkness, he said his men fell into dreams of melancholy,' Nate continued. Paused and sucked his lips at the end of each sentence.

‘Ah, bullshit. Cook never explored the Arctic,' growled Macca.

‘Well, actually, he did to some extent, but I'm not talking about Captain James Cook anyway. Frederick A. Cook. Different explorer.'

Macca had snorted into his beer and shot Flinch a sideways glance. Meaning,
here we go
.

‘The light affects the chemistry of the brain. The further you are from the equator, the more likely you are to be depressed during winter. Whereas with us, out in the sun all day, it's giving us a high and altering our sensations to regular stimuli.'

‘Sun-fucked,' said Macca. ‘That's what we are.' And laughed.

Nate had glared at him.

Macca coughed and slid another stubbie of beer in his direction. ‘Jeez, mate, where do you find out all this crap?'

‘Unlike some, I read,' said Nate.

‘You shut up long enough?' Macca chuckled. ‘Nothing you can't learn about life that isn't in a racing guide, if you ask me, mate. Or in the tide books even. The highs and the lows.'

Nate had taken a swig of his beer.

‘It's very interesting, Nate,' said Flinch. Like a pat on the back.

Flinch would wake at four am after fitful dreams to turn off his bedside lamp.

A week before he died, Nate had given Flinch his copy of
Moby-Dick
. Dog-eared and yellowing. A few pages in the middle swollen where they had once met dampness.

‘One of my most prized possessions,' he said as he handed it over.

‘Is it about whaling?' asked Flinch, looking at the picture of a white sperm whale on the front cover.

‘Sort of,' said Nate. ‘It's about a lot of things. Madness. Obsession. The political and moral state of the US at the time it was written.'

Flinch read the blurb on the back cover. ‘Hey, this captain has a bung leg too,' he said. ‘It's about a whaler with a bung leg. Just like me.'

Nate smiled and slapped him on the shoulder. ‘Yeah, well, he's not really like you, but you do have that in common. I thought you'd like it.'

Flinch only noticed later the inscription on the inside cover, revealing Nate's intention of leaving the bay.

Dear Flinch,

The world finds ways to reunite old friends. Keep this for me
until we cross each other's paths once more. I'll miss you,
captain.

Nathan West

Now Flinch thinks of the exchange as fortuitous, like a special parting gift from his friend. He reads it often. It's unlike anything he has ever come across, and he finds the language like the sea itself, tossing him to and fro, sometimes at a quiet flow and sometimes wild and incomprehensible. But each time he reads about the fraternal bond that forms between Ishmael and Queequeg, he understands precisely and he cries.

‘Call me Flinch,' he says to the goats in the morning when he steps out to face each long day. He knows that if Nate were around, they'd both have a laugh.

Flinch has spent a lot of the past decade thinking about obsession and madness. Recently he has decided that he is depressed.

It's not depression of the dark or suicidal kind. More like a sleepy malaise. A discontent with which Flinch has grown so familiar he might feel uncomfortable or underdressed if it were lifted. It's a feeling that he's meant to be elsewhere. That he's missed a bus or an important appointment. Just a small, cold, consistent panic. He has stopped wearing watches because he had found himself checking the time with such frequency that he developed a tic in his wrist. It did occur to him that he might fill the day just by watching the time tick away. But it only seemed to slow it down.

Hardest of all, perhaps, is just the plain old emptiness of his life. The something missing. On windy days he would swear he feels the cold breeze pass through him and whirl around the spaces inside him. He feels himself filling up with dust and debris. At nights, there are the hot pangs that wake him in the early hours. That have him stand still as stone under a hot shower, hard pellets of water scorching his skin while he sobs against a mouldy tiled wall. Walking outside too many mornings with that sliver of hope that he may find Nate asleep in the dinghy in the yard. The sliver like a slender blade, his disappointment as sure and sharp as a piercing.

And still there is the question of the sea and its lessons and his destiny. He sleeps with the sound of it in his ears, the waves smashing against the cliffs. The screech of gulls like alarm bells every morning. Some days he feels its siren voice calling his name and he longs to set himself adrift, just to feel the force of the currents rocking beneath him, to have that space above, below and around.

Even though he hasn't set foot on so much as a raft for the past decade, Flinch can see the stain of the sea on other men and he knows that those men can see it on him. When he bumps into them in the pub, or on the beach, they watch each other, looking for an indication of that urge to head to the water, to find a vessel, and when one moves towards the docks the others gravitate towards them also. Like the dogs of Flinch's childhood — a series of dirt-yellow mongrels — who would growl when they heard other dogs bark, even in their sleep, the men react instinctively to the water that they sense in each other's blood. It is an understanding that they don't share with others, though the disdain in the term ‘landlubber' is obvious to the tourists who stroll past the fishermen on the docks, even when said with laughter.

NINE

The day after the healing ceremony, Flinch sleeps for hours longer than usual in Karma's orange tent. In the afternoon, the sun blazes across one side of it and the heat through the canvas causes him to wake sweating, feeling drowsy. Karma is not there. Through a gap where the tent flaps hang partially open, he watches the activity of the commune. There seems to be a kind of haphazard sense of duty. A woman is planting seeds in the vegetable garden and two small children guard its perimeter, chasing away the persistent chickens that are scratching at its edges. A few men are stringing up a tarpaulin between the branches of a fig tree. From somewhere nearby, the sound of an axe splintering wood. Fires have been lit, the smell of wood burning thick and blurred against the damp odour of the hinterland.

The inside of the tent feels like some sort of cocoon. Flinch is reluctant to emerge. He's more comfortable with caterpillars than butterflies.

He leans back on the pillows. One of the bull ants bites him on the base of his palm and he recoils. He is scratching at the bite and swearing when Karma pokes her head through the tent flap.

‘Itchy palms, eh?' She smirks.

‘Bloody ants.' It's the best he can come up with.

She flicks on the single gas cylinder and waits a second before striking a match. She holds the match over the gas and a blue flame bursts to light with a small pop.

‘Not really very safe, you know,' says Flinch.

‘Safe enough. Do you want some tea? Peppermint? Chamomile and honey?' An old tin kettle balanced precariously over the flame.

‘No. Thanks.'

She shrugs. ‘Have it your way. But you'd feel better, you know.'

‘I do, though,' he says. Like a reminder. Hoping she won't start again on the business of healing him.

‘Now, darl, since you're staying, we'll have to work out what you can do around here to contribute.'

‘What?' says Flinch.

The kettle whistles and she removes it. From a small jar she scoops some dried leaves, and filters the water through them into a mug.

‘Smell,' she says, puts the mug underneath Flinch's nose.

‘Nice,' he says.

‘Bliss in a cup,' she replies. ‘Sure you don't want some?'

‘Sure.'

‘I was thinking maybe you could catch fish once a week or so, that seemed to go down well with the meat-eaters, though I have to admit I don't entirely approve. But it's against my nature to force my beliefs on others. We're not evangelists here, that's not the point. Live and let live. At some stage you have to decide whether you'll save your own soul or run about saving the world. That's the dilemma, isn't it? I know they're not mutually exclusive goals but very few human beings have the spiritual energy and wisdom for both. The Dalai Lama maybe. Or some of the Indian swamis, but I don't think many of them are all they're cracked up to be. Each to their own guru, I guess.'

Her voice washes over him, Flinch swept back by the flow. He waits to snag on an understanding of something that she is saying but she may as well be speaking another language. She takes a sip of her tea and looks at him, as if for a response.

‘I'm not staying,' he says.

She furrows her brow and takes another sip of her tea. ‘What do you mean?' she says, swallowing. ‘I thought we'd been through all of this.'

‘I had fun, like you said, and it was good. Very … um…' Scrambles for something that will impress her enough to release him. ‘Rejuvenating.'

‘I see,' she says.

‘Thanks for, you know. And everything.'

She nods and turns her back on him.

The air in the tent stales.

Flinch crawls out through the tent's opening on his hands and knees.

Milly refuses to cooperate, as if she is holding a grudge.

‘Aw, c'mon, you rusted piece of shit.' Flinch slams his foot on every pedal, to no avail. ‘Please, Milly.'

A man Flinch hasn't seen before walks slowly towards the ute. ‘Now, Milly, now,' he begs from between clenched teeth.

‘Hey dude, what's the problem?' The man is American. He leans in through the window and grins at Flinch, a little slack-jawed. Some of his teeth are missing. One of the remaining teeth in the front is gold. He is burnt brown, the skin on his forearms and the back of his neck the colour of cut redwood. Baggy clothing hangs over a lean, wiry frame as if over a coat-hanger, takes no form.

‘Aw, yeah. It's nothing, mate, she's just a bit rundown,' says Flinch.

The American laughs out loud, snorts. A few people look over in their direction. Flinch slides a fraction down the seat and pulls his collar up closer to his ears. He wonders what he said that is so funny.

‘Jesus, you Aussies.' The American wipes tears from his eyes. ‘How do you say it? Goo-day.'He offers his hand. ‘I'm Drew Daniels, Grover Beach, California.'

Flinch notices the man's hand is shaking. When he takes it in his own, it's as clammy as damp cloth.

‘Flinch,' says Flinch. ‘I'm from around here. Kind of.'

‘Cool, man,' says the American. He looks around the paddocks, then up into the trees, as if expecting to see Flinch's house perched there.

Flinch sits quietly for a while, pretends to fiddle with knobs on the dashboard, hoping Drew will go away. But when he looks up again, he is still standing there outside the ute, nodding and grinning.

‘Well? Dude? You staying around or what?' he asks. Louder than necessary.

‘I was on my way back to the bay, actually. Sorry.'

‘Man, you ain't going
nowhere
right now in that pile of junk.'

‘Yeah, guess not,' Flinch sighs.

Drew smiles broadly.

Flinch opens the door of the ute and swings his legs through it.

‘Hey man, one of your legs is shorter than the other.' Loud enough to cause Flinch to wince. Exclaimed, as if Flinch may not have noticed.