Death of a Whaler (25 page)

‘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 leave 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.