Death of a Whaler (23 page)

‘You'll fix it up, though, won't you, Flinch?' Mrs Mac stands outside the shed door, hands on hips, housedress flapping in the wind, clinging to reveal pot belly, trunks for thighs.

‘Yeah, I'll give it a shot.'

‘You'd be good with your hands, wouldn't ya?'

Flinch nods in what he hopes is a non-committal manner. He knows she didn't mean it, but he can hear the echo of Audrey in her voice.

‘Leave him be, woman, he's trying to work!' Macca, damp fag hanging from the side of his mouth, calls from his position on the foldout chair in the shade. Grunts and sucks at his stubbie.

‘And what are you doin' then?'

‘Supervisin'.'

Mrs Mac turns back to Flinch, rolls her eyes. ‘I'll save you an extra chop at lunchtime, love,' she hisses towards him. ‘Goodness only knows his lordship over there doesn't need it.' She walks past Macca, nose in the air, sniffs loudly as she passes.

‘Yeah, orright,' he says.

‘Face like a slapped arse,' he yells across to Flinch when she is inside. Mrs Mac's face appears briefly at the kitchen window then disappears. A saucepan clangs loudly against the stove.

‘Thanks, doll, love ya,' Macca calls in the direction of the noise. Then winks at Flinch, and chuckles.

Days in the shed bleed together in the fug of a humid summer. Mrs Mac brings Flinch lemonade and ice water on a tray during the morning, beer after midday. Beads like sweat form on the cold glasses. The afternoons buzz with mosquitos and midges that hover like dark halos over the men as they work. Macca helps with some of the harder stuff, peeling back boards, removing the rust and ill-fitted shell until the boat is bare bones.

‘Contacted some guy in Lismore about replacement pieces. I'm splashin' out,' he says. As the boat takes shape in Macca's imagination, he starts to call it The Yacht. Flinch, more familiar with the bullish shape of trawlers, isn't sure exactly what she is.

‘She has sails, mate,' says Macca. ‘That makes her a sailing yacht. She's a Waterwitch.' Runs his hands down the long iron ballast keel as if he is stroking her into submission, calming some wild horse.

‘See that, look at that,' he says, almost a whisper, the voice he uses in church. ‘That design translates to steadiness at sea.'

‘You'll have to think of a name for her,'says Flinch.

‘Yeah, reckon. Later though. Let's get her in one piece first, eh?'

As Flinch lies in bed each night, aching and satisfied with the day's work, possible names for the old vessel flap through his head like bats. Regal options like
Pacific Diva
,
Wind Dancer
,
Silver Lining
,
Pacific Perfect.
Or like some of the boats he has seen around the region crewed by the weekend boaters, sporting the good old Australian tradition of piss-take monikers,
Wet Dream
,
B-Anchor-upcy
,
Seas the Day
,
Knotty Buoy.

He hasn't landed the right one yet, but he hopes to before the boat is ready to be named. He imagines mentioning it to Macca as if it had just popped into his head, and Macca grinning in that sly old way and saying, Perfect, mate.

‘Bit of history,' says Macca. Hands Flinch a book with a hard green leather cover. Pages tattered at the edges, yellowed to brown. A quick soft creak as Flinch flips it open.
Kathy Anne
, it reads on the top line, handwritten. Excessive use of curlicue.
Voyages and History to Date
.

‘Kathy Anne was the leso wife, from what I know. Called the boat after her, the poor bastard.' Macca sighs and shakes his head. ‘He didn't write down what she was called before he got her, but he recorded where she'd come from. Must have been copied from an older logbook. Thought you might be interested.'

Flinch thinks of the previous owner, pouring his love and dedication into a vessel named after a woman who betrayed him, feeling abandoned twice-over when the boat burnt up. A life even emptier of his beloved Kathy Annes.

Flinch takes the book home and studies it. The last owner had sailed it almost every weekend at one point, taking it out around Yamba and Coffs Harbour. Once to Sydney. A couple of trips to the Whitsundays in the temperate tropical winter. Nothing too adventurous. Flinch wonders if that was why his wife left him. Whether she got bored with sandwiches and beers on the deck every weekend, bobbing about unable to share in her husband's enthusiasm, cruising into the same old harbours.

The boat had been built in Rhodesia in the mid-sixties. Flinch looks up Rhodesia in his old school atlas. He notes that it is landlocked. He imagines the boat being shaped under dark African hands, by workers who had probably never seen the ocean.
Water traps abounded, design faults
, written in a following paragraph.

The boat spent the first few years of her life cruising the Seychelles and Mauritius on the warm, glassy currents of the Indian Ocean, before being shipped to Scotland, where she was tossed and battered by the wild, icy northern seas. She bore down through high, torn water around the Outer Hebrides, survived ice-slicked fogs and pitching water only to be sold later to a man who sailed her up the River Dart and there let her rest, becalmed and pitiful, until she rotted through in places under the dampness of his lost enthusiasm for weekend boating.

Shipped to Antipodes, very poor condition on arrival,
page four. No explanation of why she came all this way, to end propped up on rotting jetty wood in Macca's back shed. Flinch suspects an enthusiast, an obsession. There are bucket loads, he has noticed, when it comes to boats and water.

Most of the pages of the logbook are empty. On the inside back cover, the boat's dimensions are recorded, in a different, far blunter hand than the writing in the front.

4 berths, 2 cabins

Length: 33 ft

Beam: 8 ft 6 ins

Draft: 3 ft 3 ins

Displacement: 6 tons in full cruising trim

Hull: 15 mm marine ply on mahogany frames

Decks: 12 mm ply, cabin trunking 18 mm ply

Doghouse: varnished teak

Then, underneath,
Happy Birthday Greg. Love, Kath.

Flinch closes the book with a snap.

A crash from the kitchen, exaggerated whispers and Karma giggling like a schoolgirl. A man's voice, the door to her room dragging across the floor then silence. It's not late but Flinch, the skin on his hands and knuckles raw and arms and legs heavy with hard labour, is already in bed. He lies awake listening for more but even the thin walls will not betray any secrets.

In the morning she wanders out of her room buoyant and dishevelled and flushed and grinning. When she has left for work, Flinch peeks through the crack in her doorway to see crumpled sheets, pillows on the floor, a burnt down candle and the muddy prints of a man's sandshoes near the bed. Flinch winces. Hot pang of something close to jealousy. He's thought about this since she moved in and, apart from a couple of inevitable schoolboy fantasies, realised he doesn't really desire Karma. She's not a partner. She's more like family. And besides Macca, she's his only real friend. All the same, he doesn't know if he's up to sharing her so soon. To the possibility of losing her. A worn sarong has been tacked up over the window that looks out over garden and ocean. Flaps careless hot pink in the breeze, catches the scent of the frangipani blooming virulent just outside.

‘Are you going to move out?' he asks her later, over dinner. He thinks she looks as smug as a cat. Shovelling pasta into her mouth while she reads a newspaper.

‘What? Are you thinking of evicting me?'

‘No,' Flinch says, louder than he means to. ‘No, I just thought that you might be thinking of it, since you have a boyfriend.'

Karma pauses. Yawns. Ties her hair back in a knot. ‘He's not a boyfriend.' Through a mouthful of pasta.

‘Oh,' says Flinch. ‘I thought…'

‘Nope. He's just passing through. From Holland. He leaves tomorrow, I think.'

‘Oh.'

Pasta grows cold on Flinch's plate and starts to coagulate. He separates it with a spoon and fork. Karma has finished hers quickly. She simply has an appetite for everything, he thinks.

She leans back in the chair and stretches. Creaking vinyl. Contented sigh.

‘How's the boat coming along? Out on the water yet?'

‘No.'

‘Why not?'

‘There's still quite a bit to be done. Macca wants to restore it traditionally. Lots of bronze and varnish.'

‘Ah, right.'

‘You don't just make something like that seaworthy overnight.'

‘My mistake.'

Silence hangs in the air, a remnant of something else, like the smell of a burnt dinner. Even the chewing noises gone. Cutlery resting on plates. Flinch puts the kettle on, hovers over it while it boils, his back to her.

‘Flinch?'

‘Yeah?'

‘What makes something “worthy of the sea”?'

‘It's just a term. It just means she'll float, I guess. That when we push off from shore she'll deal with whatever the sea hurls at her.'

‘Flinch?'

‘Hmm?'

‘I love you, you know. You're the best friend I've made in a long time.'

She slips her arms under his armpits and hugs him from behind. The kettle blows a shrill whistle. Steam dampens his cheeks. His heart thuds as if he's been struck in the chest.

‘I'll have chamomile, ta,' she says. Releases him and strolls humming into the living room to turn on the radio. He stands for a long moment clutching at the kitchen bench for support, reeling, unsteady in the wake of her affection.

FIFTEEN

Stripped back, naked and sanded, the wood feels like silk. Flinch strokes it and thinks of skin. Some days he almost convinces himself the boat is starting to breathe again, in between the buzz of saws and the thump of hammers he hears its soft moans, catches the scent of the sea in its exhalations. He tells Macca.

‘It's the echo of the tools. They're ringin' in your ears. And the heat. You might be spending too long in the shed, mate. It's like a sauna.'

Macca buys Flinch a new pair of earplugs. Flinch takes his shirt off when he's working and steps outside every hour to cool his sweat.

Macca has been researching, contacting old boating and fishing mates, swapping stories of catches and information on where to get pieces for the boat. He appeals to their sense of shared passion. Puts in the time on the phone, long distance, discussing Friendship sloops, American sharpies, pinkies, bugeyes, skipjacks, coasting schooners, Chinese junks. Debating the merits of gaff cutters, yawls, ketches. There's a huge phone bill at the end of each month, but it pays off. Bronze-rimmed portholes arrive from Broome for the cabin. Smooth, solid foredeck beams, strapped together with masking tape, land with a clatter outside the shed, postmarked Hobart. A letter from someone they've never met describes the best way to build a self-draining cockpit. The letter folded neatly around a photograph of a small weathered man in a beanie, beaming to reveal teeth like rotting stumps, standing on the deck of a beautifully polished yacht.
My
Bella Donna
on
completion, 1973
, scrawled on the back of the photo.

The boat remains a hollow animal, bare to its glistening mahogany ribs. On the wall of the shed, written in chalk, is a list of things that have to be done, which they seem to add to each day, even as they patch parts of the boat and cross items off. Almost everything needs restructuring or regalvanising or some sort of touch up before she'll be ready for launching. The whole transom, the main bulkhead, the bridgedeck structure, the port and forward cabin trunk, the beam shelf.

Flinch feels a little like a surgeon, some days more like a witchdoctor, working and observing her slow and careful resurrection.