Death of a Whaler (28 page)

She picks up a twig and draws circles in the sand.

‘We buried him and I thought that was that. But tonight I realised that I still pay tribute to his legacy of abuse.'

‘Because you went out with Jed?'

‘That, but I won't do that again. I'm aware now of repeating the cycle.'

She wipes the scrawling in the sand clear and starts drawing again.

‘When I left home, I discarded the name my father called me and made up a new one, because I thought if I didn't use that name, then I would be a new person, I wouldn't be his daughter, the girl who was abused. But it wasn't that easy. I still was that girl. And I've only just realised that it's okay to be that girl, because she became me. I can accept my past and its lessons and rise above it. Overcome it. So I think from now on, I'll start using the name I was born with. People who loved me called me by that name as well, after all.'

She finishes her scribbling, breaks the twig in two and throws it over her shoulder.

‘There,' she says.

Flinch looks down at what she's drawn. Sees the name etched in the sand. The name etched in his head.

Eleanor
.

SEVENTEEN

A blur of images in Flinch's head as he hurtles towards the beach, Milly's engine whining torture. The name in the sand,
Duchess 4825
, a dead kangaroo, kewpie dolls, a lantana bush, the photograph of a man with a scar above his eye, thrashing white water, flames, flames, Nate's hair sticky with whale blood.

He had made it to the ute before she had realised he was leaving, and now he was driving, her voice the wind in his ears, calling his name.
Flinch, Flinch, come
back, what's the matter? Come back.
Pieces of the puzzle fall into place like pointed shards into soft flesh.

Off Main Beach he parks the ute and stumbles down to the shore, the sand a disintegrating cold blanket, the night blackest around the piercing single light of a distant trawler out at sea. He makes his way to the water. The lighthouse sweeps its gaze high over the beach and disappears. The water around his ankles is cold, forces an involuntary gasp, but still he sinks to his knees and sits with it swirling around him, his teeth chattering, until he is numb, feels nothing but the sea and the night air and each pure breath in his lungs.

Dawn, the water swelling around Flinch turns liquid silver. The tide has stolen in like some wary visitor and Flinch sits up to his shoulders in sea water. He hasn't moved. The water has carved a hole in the hollows beneath his body and built dams of thick sand up against his torso and he feels embedded. A couple of surfers have wandered past, asked
Are you alright,
mate, do you need a hand, shit how long have you been
there?
Flinch has ignored them. They have taken their boards into the surf, the lure of the waves curling into tubes too tempting, promising if he's still there when they get out they'll be taking him into town, to the doctor, to the police station.

The promise reaches Flinch from some distant place and he realises he has to move. His legs are numb, stretching them out brings tears to his eyes, the pain like some slow tearing. His skin is wrinkled taut, soft and pasty as dough. When he licks his lips he tastes the crusty layer of salt that has formed around his mouth. His tongue thick with thirst.

He drags himself out of the water with his arms. Lies on the dry sand as the sun rises, waits for the heat to melt the pain in his body, to warm his blood. The light hardens bright white. He lies with an arm slung across his eyes. The darkness has a red glow to it.

When he feels he can, he sits up. Almost collapses again with dizziness. He squints and sees that the ocean in front of him is clear today, unhurried, unchurned, just … waiting. A quiet swell beckons. It is pale, aquamarine, glittering as if diamond-encrusted. He can make out with ease the dark patches of rock further out, gutters of deep sapphire.

It is a perfect day.

Any other day, he would feel glad just to be alive.

Today, he decides, there is no escaping his destiny. Karma, Eleanor, his message from Nate. A revenge, Flinch thinks, from beyond the grave. To have and to know and then to lose. Again. He has not been forgiven. Leap from the boat, he hears Nate say. Cases will sometimes happen when
Leap from the boat
is still better.

Feeling even more the cripple, he retreats slowly from the beach. Each step sends sharp spikes of pain up into his ankles and knees. He makes his way to the tap in the park and there drops to his knees, drinks with his tongue out like a dog, gulping the water down.

He drinks until his stomach is engorged with water. Feels at that moment entirely fluid. Back at the ute, he crawls across the hot vinyl and with some effort starts the engine. He sees he is almost out of petrol, but he will have enough, he estimates, for what he has in mind.

At Macca's, the house is still locked up. Windows shut, dead flies lining the sills inside. The lawn overgrown where it doesn't bald to dirt. The
Westerly
is there, dormant under the tarp, waiting too, Flinch feels now, for this moment. He releases the ropes and the wind lifts the tarp partly off the boat, revealing a bright wink of metal along the edge of the deck. Flinch drags the rest of the tarp off so that she is laid bare.

It takes him twelve frustrating attempts before the ball of Milly's towbar is lined up properly underneath the trailer. The trailer itself is rusted, and for the half hour that Flinch struggles to release the old brake and the jockey wheel, he begins to doubt whether this is what he is meant to be doing. But as he is about to give up, it snaps into place, and the trailer sinks onto the towbar.

He knows of a disused concrete ramp and jetty that is a short drive out of town. Only the occasional hobby fisherman uses it now. Flinch is betting that on a day like today there'll be one or two out there. No crowds, but he'll need a hand with the launch.

Milly groans and rattles like a sick old mule all the way. Flinch checks his smeared rear-vision mirror every minute or so. The
Westerly
's massive bow fills the frame, bulging white. She stays steady on the road behind him, following like some faithful steed.

Near the jetty, he spots another ute parked in the shade, an empty trailer hitched. He turns a wide circle and inch by careful inch backs the trailer up the jetty, towards the ramp. Sweat drips into his eyes, he's licking it off his lips by the time he reaches the edge. Two men stand on a boat tied to a pylon, watching Flinch's slow progression, their eyes fixed on the yacht as if it were some street carnival float. Flinch watches the
Westerly
lower towards the water as the ramp dips towards the sea. He stops, pulls with all his might on Milly's handbrake, and gets out.

‘Oi,' says one of the men on the boat, ‘need a hand there, mate?'

‘Yeah, thanks,' says Flinch. ‘Was meant to meet someone here but they cancelled last minute.' He wonders if he sounds convincing. He's never been any good at lying. But the men nod and climb onto the jetty.

‘She's a lovely vessel,' says one. ‘She yours?' Flinch can hear the suspicion. Decides that if he tells another lie, he won't sound believable.

‘I wish,' he says. ‘I've just been helping restore her. She's McTavish's. He's been away for the week and I thought I'd have her in the water before he gets back. Sort of a surprise. He's been a bit down, you know, since the lay-offs.'

The man nods and sighs. ‘Yeah, it happens to the best of us.'

Flinch guesses that they probably know of Macca, but even if they don't, every worker from the bay to the mountains knows the state of the industry, knows someone who has been sacked, knows of the struggle to provide for your kids and hold onto your land and your house and keep your chin up despite it all. The men start unhitching the boat from the trailer.

The
Westerly
sinks into the water with what Flinch imagines is relief. Small waves lap at her sides.

‘Will you be right now?' asks one of the men.

‘Yeah, ta,' says Flinch. ‘I can manage from here.'

‘Good on ya.'

The men wave as they motor off into the distance. Flinch watches them until their boat is a small white speck on the watery blue landscape. After checking the ropes that tie the yacht to the pylons, he climbs back into Milly, wrenches the handbrake loose and drives back up the jetty to park under some low-hanging tree branches. When he turns back towards the sea, he forces himself to take a deep breath. The walk up the jetty like the walk to an altar, the first few steps towards his destiny.

On the boat he clings white-knuckled to the handrails. The rhythm and sway of the ocean beneath him rocking unsought memories to the surface. The dead-fish stench of a slippery panic. A chunk of blubber carved off a ribcage that curves almost as tall as he is. Pages of one of Nate's books lost overboard, dissolving in sea water.

It takes him almost half an hour to will himself to let go of the handrail. With small steps he makes his way to the side of the boat and releases the knots that bind the
Westerly
to the dock, and makes his way to the motor. As a wave rolls in, the boat lists sideways, a slight tilt, but enough to cause Flinch to land hard against a railing. He cusses, but only quietly. His heart's not in it. He has never expected to arrive at his destiny unscathed.

The motor starts with an easy snap, purrs steadily. Flinch would expect nothing less, knowing the care Macca has taken. Fortuitous, he thinks, that there will be no stalling now that he is facing up to the ocean. He sits down on the bench, grabs hold of the tiller as if it were the horn of a bull and guides the
Westerly
away from the dock.

It takes him a few minutes to remember the feel of the sea, the roll and pitch and the churn, the flatline consistency of the horizon, the expanse of it all and the sound of it smashing against the bow, coiling foam at the stern. The yacht is steadier than the old trawlers on which he started his fishing career. She slices through the swell barely heaving.

Flinch motors out until he can no longer see the dock. The shoreline, too, a distant streak of rock. He can just make out the peak of Mt Warning cut sharp against the sky. He turns off the engine. He longs to unravel the sails, to set the boat free on the wind to take him where it may, but his experience on fishing and whaling vessels hasn't prepared him for sailing. He had read carefully Macca's books on forestays and shrouds and kickers and jibs and mainsheets and clewstraps when they were rebuilding the boat, but out here the location and use of each makes no more sense to him than surgical implements, or saddlery, or even the parts of Milly's engine.

He feels thirsty all of a sudden and wishes he'd thought to bring a water bottle. He leaves the rudder and lets the boat drift, and makes his way below. Mrs Mac's cushions are tied to the bench seats with tiny neat bows. A cupboard door swings open on its hinge. Flinch makes a mental note to put a bolt on the door at some stage. He doesn't think through to when. He doesn't yet know what he is going to do, or where exactly he is headed.

He opens the small fridge and it hums bright but there is nothing in it. The cupboards, too, empty of food or drink. He will have to face his fate on an empty stomach.

As the boat drifts further out to the open sea, Flinch allows himself to be rocked towards daydreams under the long straight shadow of a mast. The water at the sides of the boat makes licking and sucking noises, wet noises, as if suckling. The sun reflecting off the water scatters patterns through the shadows on board. If he could just sleep and wake up in some other place, in some other existence. One in which friends survive to squabble over space on park benches in their old age. One in which bodies are strong and useful, in which the land remains bountiful, in which lessons can be learnt the easy way. He shuts his eyes and wishes for such a place. Appeals to the wind gods to blow him in that direction. He realises he needs Nate around to tell him their names.

The slight breeze that had cooled Flinch as he lay in the shadow dies away. The boat barely moves on the swell. There is a stillness in the air that seems to Flinch ancient and elemental and ominous, like the eye of a tornado, the calm before a storm. Squinting, he scans the sky for clouds, but it is a huge blank blue canvas. He can almost see the curvature of the earth. He imagines what he would look like from space. A crooked little man on a boat, adrift in the midst of so much open water.

The sound of a bellow, of a watery, guttural exhalation, shakes him from his sleepy contemplation. It's a sound he knows well. A sound his ears strained to hear in days past, now like some trumpet blast announcing a victorious homecoming, his return to the sea. He moves to the side of the boat and leans over the rail. There's a footprint on the surface, the flat watery sphere left by a diving whale. Flinch waits. In a few minutes he hears the blast of another blow. He turns to the other side of the boat to see fine spray like a mist dispersing, and then the back of the whale, a humpback, emerging from the water like a gleaming revelation. Next to the whale, a small replica of the perfect arch appears and Flinch realises it is a mother whale and her calf. Both move, arch and sink, with unhurried grace. Flinch hangs his head over the side of the rail and sees a dark shadow slip beneath the boat; they have an escort, a male humpback. In the old days, that would have meant two kills instead of one, the escort occasionally following the corpse of its mate nearly all the way to shore. The boat would harpoon the female, unload at the jetty and turn around to seek out the male. Flinch felt sorry for them then, and is filled now with a regret that weighs down his heart and limbs like lead in his veins. The whale in front of him hasn't moved. She's hanging in the water, her nose sticking out slightly above the surface. She is only a few metres away. He can make out the length of her, the bulk, the streaks of white along the top edges of her fins. The calf has disappeared.