Death of a Whaler (5 page)

The goats that hassle Flinch and eat his laundry are falsely rumoured to be descendants of a goat from that same ship. Daisy. First goat to circumnavigate the globe twice. Once with Byron, once with Cook. A goat with sea legs, providing an endless supply of milk, buckets of it spilt in rough seas. She avoided, somehow, becoming the victim of the crew's desire for fresh meat. Awarded, on her return to London, a silver collar engraved with a Latin couplet that had been composed for her by Dr Samuel Johnson. The collar buckled around her neck by Sir Joseph Banks. She became the well-travelled pet of the Cook children, and spent the rest of her years grazing on the family's lush lawn.

Long before Cook sighted the coastline, the northern and southern clans of the Bundjalung people, the Minjangbal and the Arakwal, called the bay Cavvanba. Meeting place. Where mother land lay resting in the ocean, they recognised the shape of her body and named the headland appropriately. Walgun. The Shoulder. This name for twenty-two thousand years. A place of ceremony and burials, of dancing and ritual. Miles of beach were swallowed once during that time by a rising sea that never subsided, drowning the ancient ceremonial sites forever. Later, the lighthouse was erected on top of the meeting place for men's business, a boat ramp built over the midden that used to exist at the pass.

Flinch remembers a class excursion fromhis childhood, one taken during the term they learnt about Australian history, about Australia being discovered by men in bright red coats. His school textbook showed a picture of angry Aborigines throwing spears, with one or two lying wounded on a beach. A few white men sat offshore in a small boat, rifles aimed. The artist had drawn a grey smudge above one of the guns to indicate that it had been fired. Their overenthusiastic teacher had thought that taking the class to see how the local Aborigines lived would help bring history to life. So the class had taken a rickety bus up to Woodenbong, the housing commission camp well out of town to which most of the local mob had been relocated. The children were led past run-down weatherboard shacks, mostly abandoned, one burnt out. No doors, just gaping holes at the entrances. At the end of a scratched dirt path, in the shade of a large tree, women in torn housedresses sat on the ground. They looked up as the children approached and Flinch felt that he was trespassing. The starched collar of his school shirt, too tight because Audrey refused to buy a new uniform every year to accommodate his pubescent growth spurt, cut into his neck and he sweated as he hobbled towards the women.

‘See, children,' the teacher had said, stopping the class a few metres away from the group. ‘Watch the native women at work.' Flinch wondered why they had stopped so far away, as if the women might suddenly get up and attack them with spears, as the angry Aborigines in the textbook drawing had done.

A few silent, awkward moments, the women staring at the children and the children staring back. The class was ushered away. They were almost at the gate when an old man emerged from one of the houses. Flinch, dragging his limp leg behind him at the end of the line, stopped.

‘Hello,' said Flinch. Then, to be polite, ‘Thank you for having us.'

A low wailing sound came from the man's mouth and he started to shuffle his feet in the sand, pound the ground with his walking stick. The sound was like a chant, steady and repetitive. More instrument than voice. Like a wire vibrating in the wind. Flinch was unsettled by the song. Only later, trying to recreate the sounds himself, did Flinch realise that though the singing was the songman's own, the lyrics were fragments of common Christian hymns. The ancient rhythm trapped and subdued by the words like a bird thrashing itself against the bars of a cage.

The landscape of the region, the wild sea, yawning horizon, swamps and hillocks, draws people like ants to honey and most end up just as stuck. Farmers and workers talked themselves into staying even when their crops continued to fail and houses were taken apart room by room for firewood. Very few picked up and left for more promising or proven pastures. They persisted. This grit part of the culture of the bay, borne like a battle scar. A working man's credo ingrained quickly in those who arrived in the town. Try something until it fails then try something new.

First it was logging. Beyond the swampland were the massive rainforests, solid with thick red cedar. The Big Scrub. The crash of the massive trees as they fell resounded through the valleys. Logs were shipped down three separate rivers, out to the sheltered natural ports and across the oceans to faraway cities. Trees were ringbarked to cut the sap supply to the upper branches, severing the main artery they depended upon to live, causing the bark to tighten around the slit. Like solid ghosts, these trees stood pale and naked, gravestones of their own deaths. The loggers called them vertical firewood. Widow-makers, when the large dead branches fell. The land was left stripped and empty. The forest, unable to regenerate at the rate of its destruction, dwindled to a few clumps of trees. The loggers looked for something else to do.

The dairy farmers moved onto the bald hills. They brought paspalum grass with them and spread the seeds until the hills were carpeted, rich and green. The message was passed down from the Minister for Primary Industries, loud and clear, hollered into the ears of the hinterland families with their little herds of cows, their veggie gardens, their chook sheds and their one snuffling farmyard pig. It was stretched over banners and screeched through loudspeakers. GET BIG OR GET OUT. The butter factory was a lucrative venture for longer than any other industry in the region. Became the biggest dairy producer in the southern hemisphere. It was something to be proud of, stamped onto the sides of all of their products. Gone were the days of mere subsistence living. This was progress.

When they ran out of land, many of the local farmers couldn't compete with the bigger farms further south and they headed to the hills, but their fat cows slid off the steep inclines around the valley. The banana growers moved in.

Subtropical fruit attracts subtropical pests and diseases. The fruit growers couldn't sew the holes in their nets fast enough to keep the bugs and bats from gnawing at their produce, turning it rotten and brown in the sun before it even had a chance to ripen. Men and women in straw hats ran from tree to tree, beating the scavengers off with broomsticks, shaking the trees until the leaves fell off. A farm of any scale was out of the question.

The local butcher, squinting at the sea, decided that if the land would not provide wealth and prosperity for the town, then surely the abundant ocean would. He put to use the town's old tram track and engine and a large flat trailer, and extended his present meat works by adding a large corrugated iron shed. Though the little engine that towed the haul was nicknamed the Green Frog, he wanted no such whimsy attached to his serious modern enterprise. So
Byron Whaling Company
was painted in large square-shaped letters along the side of the new shed. In black.

The whaling company closed two days too late for Flinch. Two days earlier and Nate would be here now. Or would probably have moved on, knowing Nate. He was a fidgety fellow, Flinch had always thought. Even sitting on a stool at the pub he scratched and belched and swivelled in his seat. He twitched his mouth, pursed his lips frequently and sucked his teeth. Chatted incessantly, but in a good-natured way, and he listened to Flinch with an intensity that sometimes unnerved him, to be studied so closely. Nate stood out among the other blokes, content to rest their elbows on the towels that served as beer mats and a have cold drink or several before going home to their families and a night in front of the white static of a radio that crackled out murder mysteries and local storm warnings. The only time Nate sat still was when he had a book in front of him. Flinch had noticed early on the private daily ritual, on the way back into shore after the catch, Nate's back up against the mast, a book open on his knees. Nate angular, knees, elbows, cheek and jawbones, the sharp edge of a hardback, and like an anchor he didn't budge, not even in rough seas, unless it looked like his pages were going to get wet. Flinch had learnt to shake his shoulder gently when they were nearing the docks so that he didn't get yelled at by the captain. Nate walked a lot, even at night. Sometimes Flinch woke to find him asleep in the old dinghy on the lawn in front of the pastel house. He took to leaving blankets and a ham sandwich in it just in case. It was one of the habits he had to break in those shadowy months after Nate's death.

As he drives down the main street, Flinch wonders what Nate would have thought of the place now, all empty streets, the silence that has descended on the town and the odd old bastard crying quietly into his beer. The dairy factory shifted to Lismore, causing a landslide of lay-offs. Padlocks on the gates of the produce plants, dust collecting on the machinery.

He pulls up beside the recently deserted hardware store and is peering through the window when he steps back to see her reflection.

‘Ah,' she says, ‘it's the Peeping Tom!'

Flinch, caught doing nothing unsavoury, feels he may as well have been and is suddenly hot and itchy all over.

‘No, I'm not, no, it's a, it's the, I need a screw. I mean, some screws and a screwdriver and this used to be…' Sweat on his forehead, dripping into his eyes.

The woman laughs. ‘I'm just teasing,' she says. ‘Sorry.'

‘Oh,' says Flinch. It's the woman from the beach. The naked woman. Only now she's dressed in a long flowing skirt and a light green top embroidered with floral patterns. Flinch notices that she's not wearing a bra. Or shoes. A mesh bag slung over her shoulder. She is straining against it, one hip cocked sideways to bear its weight. Her hair blowing around her face, getting tangled in the beads she's wearing around her neck. Damp and warm in the midday heat, giving off a sweet, overripe scent like the hot-pink frangipani in Flinch's cliff-side garden.

‘Are you okay with that bag?' asks Flinch.

‘Yeah, I'm fine,' she says.

She is just standing there and smiling at him, and Flinch can feel all of his inadequacies, the stump leg, the crooked angle of his hips and the bend in his neck that compensates, every chink and crease in his awkward body.

‘But is that your car?' she says after a moment. ‘I could do with a lift, if you're not too busy.'

‘Oh,' says Flinch. ‘Right. Of course. Yeah.'

‘What's your name?' she asks.

‘Flinch.'

‘Flinch!' the woman says. ‘Wow, cool name. A bit out there, hey? Weird.'

The woman throws her mesh bag in the tray of the ute, and climbs into the front seat, sidling close to Flinch so that he can see small beads of perspiration on her upper lip.

‘Well, nice to meet you, Flinch. I'm Karma.'