Death of a Whaler (9 page)

Next to him, Karma is swaying in rhythm to the drums. Her eyes are shut. Every time she leans in Flinch's direction he can feel the soft brush of her hair against his shoulder.

‘Here,' says Matt, and hands him a fresh joint.

‘It's amazing,' Flinch says. Before he can stop himself.

Karma opens her eyes and nods, puts an arm around him.

‘Told you,' she whispers.

‘You should come to the cliffs,' he says, overcome with a need to prolong the experience, to repay in kind. ‘Come see the whales.'

Jed moves the hookah to one side. He leans towards Karma and takes her chin in his hand and kisses her hard on the mouth. She pulls away sharply.

‘Not now,' she mutters.

‘Have it your way, baby,' says Jed, and laughs.

Flinch is quiet.

Later, he wakes in the same place he has been sitting. It is dark and, except for the croaking of frogs and the sound of someone nearby snoring, it is quiet. The stage, now black and bare, makes him question for a moment if he had imagined the entire show. He can't remember falling asleep. Someone has covered him with a light woven rug. His head is thick with a woolly fog, his mouth tastes like dirt and he is thirsty beyond anything he has previously experienced. He looks around. Next to him, he can make out the shapes of Karma and Jed, her head resting in the crook of his arm. Matt is asleep behind him, wheezing when he exhales. Flinch had been dreaming that he was standing on the cliff, near the lighthouse. Someone had been walking up behind him but he was unsure whom and he had woken before he had found out. The soft vibrations of a whale song had been reverberating in his ears.

He lies awake, uncomfortable, until the crisp predawn when he decides it is best to leave. He folds the rug, then crawls over the pillows, around other sleeping bodies, and out through the open doorway. In the burgeoning light, Flinch makes his way along the pathways that have been trodden between the tents and hay-bale houses. He stumbles over one small vegetable garden and clutches at a trellis to steady himself, squashing a tomato in his fist. Awoman emerges froma tent, brushes her forehead with her arm. Anaked toddler clings to her skirt. Outside a tepee, the remnants of a pig on a spit cool over a shallow pit. A little further on, the muffled sounds of people waking slowly, the dawn chorus of magpies and the whip-crack of a stormbird. Fromone of the bale houses, Flinch can also hear a soft chant, like a benediction, some sort of praise for the birth of a new day.

Back at the ute, he drinks all of the water that he usually reserves for the engine, then takes a swift shot of rum. He sits in the cabin watching the sun rise over the paddocks, tinging the grass mauve, then pink. From somewhere on the other side of the commune, he can hear hammering and someone singing, baritone. A couple of cows wander to the edge of their paddock and stare at him with placid curiosity. When his head has cleared a little, he turns the key and the ute chugs to life, sounding a little worse for wear.

‘You and me both, Milly,' he says.

On his return to the pastel house, Flinch puts the kettle on and brews himself a strong cup of tea. An easterly rips through the open door of the kitchen, sweeping sand and dirt from the bare patches of yard into the house. Flinch gets up to shut it, as Audrey would have ordered him to do had she been there. She hated the wind, said it got up her nose, so she kept all the doors and windows shut, even through the stifling wet summers. She was erratic when it came to cleanliness, polishing the silverware and turning the tins in the pantry label-out one week, leaving plates to grow mouldy in the sink and lying in bed unwashed for days on end the next.

Flinch had learnt to watch her carefully, trying to gauge a pattern. But she was always a step ahead of him, and began shaking him awake in the middle of the night, asking him questions that he could never answer correctly. Once, when he was about nine years old, he had yelled back at her and she had slapped him so hard across the cheek it had sent him reeling. But it was she who collapsed on the floor, sobbing, and he spent the rest of the evening with his arm around her, trying to piece her back together. She was just better at the game.

The anger always brewing in her had surfaced in fits, sudden and violent. It made her hands shake. Dark moments of insecurity slid rapidly into a black hole of emotion and she yelled at him the same words, over and over.
Bastard Idiot Bastard Bastard Bastard.
Until he felt the words were tattooed all over him and that people on the street could read them on him as well. He wore her love and hate of him like a mismatched pair of socks, never knowing which would be exposed at any one time, knowing the other was always there even if it was not apparent. Understanding that either way, something about him just wasn't quite right.

Bitterness had kept her strong for a long time, but in the end she'd just decayed. The year after Nate's death, cancer ripped through her body like a fire in a forest, leaving the singed flesh melted over her bones.

‘Typical,' she had croaked, and stopped breathing. They didn't try to resuscitate.

The day after she died, Flinch had scrubbed every square inch of the house and shoved open the windows and doors, shattering the dried-up nests of hornets and dislodging a long-abandoned bird's nest. The scent of the ocean filled the house and Flinch could hear the waves and the cries of gulls when he lay in his bed on the long, languid mornings that followed her death. He had left the house open for an entire week, only relenting and closing the front door after one of the goats wandered in and started chewing at the corner of his newspaper while he was reading it.

In the late afternoon, despite a frowning grey sky, Flinch takes his fishing rod and drives down to Tallow Beach. The threat of an oncoming storm has stirred up the ocean, the surf frothing like a rabid dog. The easterly has washed thousands of bluebottles onto the shore. They hem the tide line like glistening beads. Flinch decides against casting his rod. He sits on the sandbank, listening to the surf seethe, and sees in the distance a single black hump rise out of the water in an arc, then the creamy underside of a fluke raised vertically out of the water, like a signal for something bigger than himself.

SEVEN

To Flinch, his life is not a seamless continuum as other people's lives seem to be. There is no progression. No evidence of that cycle of birth, schooling, job, marriage, children, retirement. That path of an average life, which ends with long pointless days drinking cold beer from ten in the morning until nightfall, and the odd weekend fending off the grandkids. The job-done-well-enough period to which most of the town's blokes aspire.

In Flinch's life there is the moment that cuts through his existence, separating it into two sections, neat as an axe through a block. The
before
and
after
periods. He sees examples of
before
and
after
photos in the newspaper. Men with fat, sagging bellies.
Before
. The same men grinning like fools, flexing bulging muscles and swivelling lean torsos.
After
. He wonders whether, if someone had taken a photo of him
before
and
after,
it would have showed, if it would have been revealed in his grainy black-and-white visage. Man.
Before
. Murderer.
After
.

When he steps outside the pastel house, he sees whales. At least once a day anyway. It's well into the season. They're hugging the coastline, following that cold Antarctic stream until it meets, with a tidal clash, the warmer Pacific current, creating a whirlpool in which the jetsam and flotsam and marine life from two different spheres intermingle, the water just tepid enough to keep both ecosystems alive.

He figures he can't help but spot them after spending his days in the crow's nest for so many months. During that last season they'd been out on the water for one hundred and forty-four days in a row, hour upon hour, but the number of whales they could sight and kill diminished regardless.

He knows what to look for. First the blast of fine spray from the blowhole, like some watery volcano erupted. Then the black metallic back and jagged fin above the water, the graceful arch of the leviathan. Occasionally the spy hop, the huge pointed head upright above the surface, just to have a look around, gauge what might be hovering in the strange world above their own. Flinch wonders if they remember the shores from which they crawled into the ocean sixty million years ago. They seem almost joyful when they reach the warmer waters, breaching and crashing in an explosion of white water. They rise two storeys out of the sea, propel themselves up and curve backwards, their pectoral fins like sails, exposing their huge white bellies, ribbed like accordions. Almost airborne. On quieter days, just the flukes rising out of the water like the static wings of some great bird. Leaving footprints on the surface as they dive; still, glassy ovals flecked with the creamy slivers of whale skin. Flinch is always surprised to see them at play, see them take themselves so lightly, especially in the waters that would have been their graveyard little more than a decade ago.

For weeks after his visit to the commune, he wanders the pastel house in a fog, losing things like car keys and cutlery only minutes after putting them down. Unwilling and unmotivated to leave, he eats his way through the pantry — baked beans, tinned tomatoes, cocktail onions, asparagus and peaches. He misses the six pm radio news, forgets his nightly routine. A stack of books lies untouched near his bed, the top one marked with the rings of coffee mugs and swollen with the damp. The corners of the photo of his mother turn up at the edges. The dust on every surface remains undisturbed.

He tries to sleep but his back aches, his spine feeling as twisted as wrought metal, his right hip bone grinding against his ribcage. But it is more than just that. He is unsure of what it was about his visit to the commune that has made him feel so disjointed. So dysfunctional. He often finds himself awake for hours in the night, irritated without reason. Some mornings, he wakes terrified and claustrophobic and exhausted, as if he's been buried alive and has spent the night scratching at the inside of a coffin.

When he eventually runs out of tins of food, he realises he will have to venture into town. Milly, unused for weeks, is recalcitrant, but he thuds the accelerator with his good leg until she turns over, and speeds off down the hill, revving the engine in case she has second thoughts.

At the grocery store, he stocks up on all the food he's been through and a whole lot more that he suddenly craves. Tins of tomatoes, rosella jam, hot English mustard, three loaves of fresh white bread, a side of corned beef, lemonade. When he takes his basket to the counter, he realises he hasn't brought enough money for it all.

The lady behind the counter sighs. She's old, about as old as Audrey would have been had she still been alive, sitting on a stool reading a magazine. Her eyes are enlarged by massive glasses that remind Flinch of butterfly wings, sharp points at the outer edges.

‘It's alright, love,' she says. ‘You fix yourself a good meal. You can make it up next time, eh?'

Flinch nods, grateful, and shoves the goods into a hessian sack and limps from the store, making an effort to appear stoic. Sometimes, he thinks, the leg helps, especially when it comes to people who are moved by pity to perform acts of kindness they wouldn't otherwise be inclined to. He throws the sack into the tray and climbs into the cabin. He is exhausted by even this much of a journey, this interaction. It is as if the experience of the commune overloaded his senses, offered too many challenges, too many differences, all resulting in questions. That's the last thing he needs. More questions. He feels a need to retreat. To clear his head. And he would be able to successfully, if only he could overcome the nagging irritation of his curiosity. To see how other people start over.

He sits unmoving in the ute for some time, just watching the slow, steady rollover of the town. At this time, the middle of the day, it's more or less deserted. A couple of women who look like farmers' wives, in checked dresses and stockings and shoes and hats, chat in front of a dress shop window. A few bronzed teenage boys, all shaggy fringes and lanky limbs, lean against the bonnet of a car, trying to appear nonchalant but obviously keeping an eye out for authorities, or anyone else who might ask why they're not in school. A surfer rests his board against a wall while he eats a dripping corner-store steak and beetroot burger. One of Flinch's old fishing mates, a lot greyer than Flinch remembers him, walks across the street and catches sight of the ute, waves at Flinch. Flinch waves back, hoping they can leave it at that. He's not feeling up to socialising. Especially not with old Macca. After the accident, after Flinch retreated, Macca had made quite a few attempts to bring him into town, have him to dinner, take him fishing. Mrs Mac there too, sometimes, sitting in their car parked in the driveway of the pastel house, beckoning. Tins of shrivelled meatloaf wrapped in a teatowel and left on his front step when he hadn't answered the door. The McTavishes had been the only ones to bother, really, after the whaling days. Everyone else offering a vague nod in Flinch's direction when they passed him in the street, but that was all. Preferring to forget about the whole damn mess. But Flinch, frightened of the everyday conversations that turned inevitably to whaling, Nate, the accident, had always turned down the McTavishes' invitations, excusing himself by nodding towards the leg, grimacing and hobbling as if it were paining him. Something he had never done before, and did only out of a desperate need for isolation. He remembers with shame shutting the door on Macca, the expression on the man's face, like some big old dog locked out in the cold. But even now, despite that, Macca pauses in the street and then comes over to the ute, leans in the passenger window.

‘G'day, Flinch.'

‘Yeah, g'day, Macca. How's things?'