Death of a Whaler (8 page)

‘Cool. Would you mind giving us a ride back to the commune?'

‘Sure,' says Flinch.

‘I hope you will hang around for a while this time.'

‘Yeah, thought I might.'

‘Okay, then. So where's the car?'

‘Over there.' He points at Milly.

‘Cool.' She takes his hand so that she can walk at exactly his pace. For once, Flinch realises with a buoyancy, he doesn't feel annoyed or embarrassed that he's inconveniencing someone. He allows himself to lean on her when the road gets a little too steep for him to move freely.

Flinch opens the passenger door for her. The other women hitch their skirts and clamber onto the tray. Flinch winces as he hears them throwa fishing line aside.

‘Hey,' says Karma. ‘What's in here?' She pulls the lid off the esky and the stench of the fish and a burst of cold air fill the cabin. Even from where he's standing, Flinch can see the frozen expressions of the fish, the clear glazed eyes and the mouths agape.

‘Oh,' says Karma, and puts the lid back on quickly. ‘Dead animals.'

‘For dinner,' says Flinch. Feeling as if he's confessing. They stand on the footpath. A shy sun slips behind a cloud.

Karma sniffs and looks into the distance. ‘I don't eat meat.'

‘I'm sorry,' Flinch says. ‘I didn't know.'

She sighs and shrugs her shoulders. ‘It's alright. I don't but some of the others do. They won't go to waste.' She opens the lid of the esky again. ‘Thank you for giving your lives, little fish. Your deaths will provide us with nutrients and will not be in vain.'

Flinch covers a smile with his hand. He decides not to tell her that they didn't exactly swim up to the shore and throw themselves on the beach at his feet.

‘Right then,' he says.

Karma lives in an orange tepee.

‘It's the colour of energy, a celebration of all things living,' she says. ‘Buddhist monks wear this colour, you know.'

Flinch doesn't know but nods. They sit down on some brightly coloured cushions on the floor. Karma lights a little gas cylinder and boils some tea, and hands Flinch a cup that is really an old jam jar with a tea towel around it. It's unlike any tea that Flinch has ever tasted. A little like apple. A lot more like cut lawn. No milk or sugar either. They've emptied the esky of fish into a metallic icebox in a hay-bale house that is otherwise stacked with hessian bags marked
Rice
,
Pasta
,
Barley
. A crate full of apples. Some sort of communal food stash.

‘There, now you've contributed to the good of the community,' Karma had said. ‘A gift of sustenance from an anonymous good-doer.'

Flinch had kept an eye on the magpies that were perched in the trees above, knew they'd probably steal whatever they could manage as soon as there was nobody around.

He leans back on the pillows. A woven rug covers the ground. Bull ants have made a nest in one corner, under the rug's tassels.

‘Ants,' says Flinch, pointing at the nest. ‘Nasty ones.'

‘Oh, yeah, I know. But you know, they were here first. I'm intruding on their home really.'

‘Don't you get bitten?'

‘Yeah, quite often. But what can you do? They deserve a place here as much as I do.'

Flinch makes a mental note to buy some ant-rid powder next time he's in town.

‘You know, it's good for healing, too,' Karma says, leaning towards him. ‘Orange. And I sense you need healing, Flinch. That's why I hoped you would come back.'

Flinch takes a large gulp of his tea.

Karma waits, looking at him, silent.

‘There's nothing that can be done,' Flinch says finally. ‘When I was young I wore a shoe that was built up so that I walked evenly. Big braces up to my knee. Leather straps and everything. Looked a bit like a monster, I think.'

He smiles to demonstrate to her that he is unconcerned and she smiles back.

‘But I couldn't wear that on the boats. So I just got used to it. I can get around. It's not really a big problem.'

‘I didn't mean your leg,' she says.

‘But there's nothing else,' he replies. He hopes she hears the finality in his tone.

SIX

‘It's like a village,'Karma is telling him. They're walking on a path that weaves through the commune, past soggy gardens sprouting stunted green lettuce leaves, picketed with empty stakes, everything planted struggling except a rampant cherry tomato vine. They pass a cluster of tents set up like small domes. To Flinch, they look like the alien pods from his childhood comic books. It is that hazy gloaming period, a mauve twilight that makes the fields and surrounding hills seem mystical, a landscape out of the pages of a children's fairytale book. Flinch is surprised he sees them this way, knowing them for what they are. Frequently flooded, muddy cow paddocks full of weeds and brambles.

‘We're a tribe,' she is saying. ‘The Aquarians. The Alternatives.'

The commune, sluggish and silent in the afternoon, is now gently humming and seems to have a pulse of its own. As people drift back from the town, the field, out of their tents, the commune starts to awaken, like some nocturnal creature stretching and scratching as darkness falls. Lamps are lit, small bonfires struck alight, someone thumps out a soft-sounding rhythm on some drums and, as if in answer from across the field, someone else strums a guitar. Flinch feels inexplicably light-headed. When he breathes, feels a little like he is gasping for oxygen but instead inhales the exotic smell of the commune, a rich, smoky scent, a combination of incense, spices, grilled meat, burnt rice, the odd whiff of tobacco and marijuana.

‘Do you need a shower before we eat?' Karma asks him.

Flinch realises that he must still stink of fish and sweat and ocean.

‘Yeah,' he says. ‘I have a towel in the ute.'

‘Cool. Okay, well if you want to go and get that, you can shower over there.' She points to a square, open-roofed bamboo room at the bottom of the sloping paddock. ‘You just use a bucket and a sponge. The buckets are over there already.'

Flinch has had to bathe like this before, once when he worked on the fishing boats and the crew were forced to camp overnight on a remote point due to inclement weather, but he hasn't heard of anyone washing like this unless there was no alternative.

‘When you're done, head over to that big tent there. I'm on cooking duty tonight. I'll save you a meal.'

‘Fish?' he asks as she walks off. Though not far from him, she doesn't turn to answer.

In the shower room, there are a couple of bush showers — waterproof canvas bags that can be filled with warm water, which then filters out through a nozzle. Flinch decides to try one. Nearby is a fire, over which buckets of water are boiling. He uses his towel to grab hold of a bucket's handle, and pours some hot water into a cold water bucket until the temperature is suitable. Spills almost half of it before he's even reached the shower room, sloshes it up and over the edge, wets his trousers at his crotch and thinks,
That'd be right.

The showers have no partitions. It is fairly dark, though, and Flinch, aware of the laughable sight of a man whose willy hangs longer down one thigh than the other, is grateful that there is only the dim light of a nearby lantern by which to bathe. In the corner, under the lantern, another man is bathing with water from a bucket, using what looks like a sea sponge as a loofah. He notices Flinch staring, and smiles at him.

‘Beware the ulcers,' he says, and points to some open wounds on his ankle. ‘Bloody tropics. Everybody has them. Spread like bloody wildfire.'

Flinch dries off and dresses quickly, then heads back into the thick of the commune. The damp crotch of his pants clinging to his thigh, the seam sticking to his bare skin promising a rash.

When he gets to the food tent, Karma is nowhere in sight. A young woman with fair hair in a plait to her waist is scrubbing a pot. She seems fixated on it, moving the cloth in a slow circular movement over the same spot.

‘Excuse me,' says Flinch, ‘where did Karma go?'

The woman looks up at him and wipes her brow with her wrist. Her eyes are a very pale green and have a glaze over them that reminds Flinch of a fish.

‘Karma?'

‘Yes,' says Flinch. ‘She has wavy brown hair and it's long, not as long as yours but long, and she's kind of tanned but a bit freckly, and she's on the thin side and—'

‘I know Karma,' says the woman.

Flinch waits but she says nothing more.

‘Do you know then?' he asks eventually.

‘Know?'

‘Where she is?'

‘Karma?'

‘Yes,' says Flinch, trying not to sound frustrated.

‘Oh,' says the woman. ‘Karma. Yes. She's probably at the concert. Follow the music, man.'

The woman goes back to scrubbing the pot.

When he steps out into the field again, he hears it clearly. A cacophony of drums, strings, horns and what he suspects might be bagpipes. The sound billowing out like hot air from one of the larger yurts. When he gets nearer he is relieved to see that Karma is standing outside it, her back to the darkness, her face lit up with the glow of the lanterns inside.

He sidles up to her. He wants to touch her. Instead he leans forward, so that he is close to her ear.

‘Hello again,' he says.

She inhales sharply through parted lips. He notices her hand skip to her breast.

‘You startled me! Here.' She hands him a few hot pieces of pastry wrapped in a scarf. ‘They're veggie pakoras. Delish.'

Flinch, suddenly realising how hungry he is, doesn't bother asking what a pakora is, even though he's never heard of one before. He's had a steak and three veg, fish and chips, meat pie kind of upbringing. But in this atmosphere, he feels braver than usual, and he bites into one and finds its spicy, buttery heat tasty and somehow comforting.

‘C'mon,' says Karma. ‘Let's go and sit down.'

They squeeze through the crowd, into the heart of the yurt, engulfed by the thick smells of sweat and hash. Karma heads towards the stage, on which a bald black man is singing in a language Flinch has never before heard, a language, it seems to him, born first in music. He recognises the yearning in it. The black man is accompanied by a shirtless man playing animal-hide drums, and a woman blowing into a wind pipe. They reach a space just off to the side, where Jed and Matt are sitting cross-legged on some cushions. Jed is smoking through the pipe of a hookah, his eyes shut, inhaling deeply, one hand resting upturned on his knee. Flinch, reminded of the fat caterpillar on the mushroom in
Alice in Wonderland
, smothers a grin by sucking his lips in.

‘Hey, man,' says Matt.

Jed opens his eyes and then shuts them again slowly, a reptilian gesture both lazy and cold.

‘Hi,' says Flinch. Feels a piece of pastry fall off his chin.

They sit down on the cushions. Matt takes a shrivelled joint from the pocket of his vest and lights it, squeezes his eyes shut as he inhales. He passes it to Karma, who breathes it in, coughs with her lips closed. She passes it to Flinch, and he takes it between his fingers and thumb, as he has seen them doing. He smoked a cigarette, once, on the fishing boats. He was sixteen. He had refused offers of beer, so one of the blokes said that there was no law against smoking at his age, and handed him a lit cigarette. Flinch, wanting to impress, had drawn hard and long, and ended up coughing and spluttering and losing the cigarette overboard, to the great amusement of the crew. It wasn't so much the tobacco as the overwhelming reminder of Audrey, of being like
her
, his mouth puckered, breathing out smoke when he spoke, that made him feel nauseous.

But the joint smells and looks different. He puts it to his lips and draws in tentatively, swallows down hard on the smoke. He coughs a small cough and his eyes water but the others don't seem to notice. He hands it back to Matt.

The black man and the woman with the wind pipe have left the stage. The drummer remains, pounding out a steady rhythm that resonates through Flinch like a heartbeat. Six women in brightly coloured loose skirts and bare midriffs walk onto the stage. Slowly they sway in rhythm to the drumbeat, then start twirling in circles, dancing, arms above their heads, the silver bands around their ankles glittering in the candlelight and the bells around their waists tinkling as they move. The drummer speeds up the pace of the beat, and the women dance faster and more erratically, dipping and swaying and swirling their skirts. Flinch can see the glistening perspiration on their arms and torsos. They appear to him preternaturally luscious, as shiny and desirable as forbidden fruit. Dizzy with the effect of the joint, intoxicated by the movement of the dancing women, Flinch feels that he's stumbled on some kind of oasis. Though squeezed between the others, he feels totally alone, an explorer wandered out of the desert and into a culture he is immediately drawn to but can't understand. In the atmosphere of the yurt, he feels forcibly immersed, as if his head had been pushed underwater and he is meant to emerge baptised.