Forecast (2 page)

‘A ladies' man,' Peter's mother says. ‘A real charmer.'

‘You're his spitting image,' Peter's dad says.

‘By now, he's cheating on Judy,' Peter's mother says. ‘I'd be willing to bet on that.'

 

Lachlan has many conversations with his father. There is always floodwater rising. They are always swimming for their lives.

‘How come you never even send me birthday cards?' Lachlan asks him.

‘My new wife won't let me,' his father says. ‘She's jealous.'

But sometimes his father says: ‘I do send you birthday cards, but your mum hides them. She's still mad at me.'

‘Pamela's mad at you too,' Lachlan tells him.

‘Are you mad at me?'

‘No,' Lachlan says. ‘Sometimes. Do you miss me?'

‘Every single day,' his father says. Sometimes he says that. Sometimes he says: ‘Who are you?'

Sometimes Lachlan's father is in a military line-up of deserters. ‘Which one is he?' the general demands, and Lachlan moves from one manacled prisoner to the next. One man smells of football games, another of grass cuttings. Lachlan smells fabric softener and bleach. ‘This man is my father,' he says.

‘Fire!' the general orders, and Lachlan hurls himself in front of the condemned man and dies a hero.

‘My son, my son,' his father sobs.

Sometimes Lachlan's picture is on the front page of every newspaper because he has invented a new kind of Braille. ‘This is how it works,' he explains on television. He is sitting in front of his computer. ‘When your fingers touch a word on the keyboard,' he says, ‘pictures bloom in your brain like buds opening. You can see what you read and what you write.'

The TV producer interrupts. ‘Excuse me,' he says, ‘but we've just had a call come in from your father. He's watching the show.'

‘I know,' Lachlan says. ‘I can see him.'

 

‘It's Wagner,' Peter whispers. ‘It's from
Lohengrin
.'

‘I know that. We're s'posed to turn round now.'

‘Shh,' Lachlan's mother warns.

They are in the front pew, and Lachlan is balancing the ring-bearer's cushion on his upturned palms. The two rings are tethered to satin loops. Lachlan, Peter, and Lachlan's mother all turn to face the open church doors, and Lachlan can feel the blinding sun warm against his eyes, he can actually see it, really see it, a dazzle of gold and white. He has always been able to tell light from dark. From somewhere in the heart of the radiance, Pamela is coming toward them, her lace train and her flower girl and her bridesmaids behind her. When Pamela reaches the front pew, she is going to reach for Lachlan's right hand, and he will hold the ring-bearing cushion against his chest with his left hand and go up with his sister to stand in front of the minister, where Rodney is already waiting. Lachlan's mother will also step forward. When the minister asks
Who giveth this woman …?
Lachlan's mother will say:
I do.

‘Mum,' Lachlan whispers. ‘Did he come?'

‘She looks so lovely,' his mother says, with a break in her voice. Lachlan knows she is crying.

Peter tugs at the back of Lachlan's vest. ‘Someone's pushing me,' he murmurs. ‘I think it's him.'

Lachlan can feel a man's hand on his shoulder. Floodwaters press him. He is floundering. He goes over the lip of the falls. Pamela touches his wrist. He is drowning in happiness.

‘Dad!' Pamela says. ‘You've got a nerve.'

‘You look gorgeous,' her father says.

‘I should tell you to bugger off, Dad.'

‘Please
,' the minister says.

‘You look good too, Elly.'

‘You too, Jim,' Lachlan's mother says. ‘You should be shot just the same.'

‘Probably.'

Lachlan tugs at his father's sleeve. ‘I'm Lachlan,' he says.

‘
Who giveth this woman …?
' the minister asks.

Lachlan's father scoops up his son and the ring cushion rises like a snowbird in flight and hovers over Pamela and falls. It hits Rodney softly on the head.

‘
Who giveth this woman
…?' the minister repeats.

‘Do you remember me?' Lachlan whispers.

‘I do,' his father says. ‘I do.'

There's a joke that's current at the resort and on the whale-watching boats. Tourists who are leaving the island pass it on. New arrivals splurt laughter, clap hands to mouths in embarrassment, cast sidelong glances at the skipper of the
Moby Dick
, then furtively retell and embellish. The whispering buffets Rufus – his hearing is painfully acute – though he knows no malice is intended. The rumours multiply like krill and bruise him, but gossip is normal, he knows that. He knows this is the sort of thing that normal people do. He watches as they arrive from the mainland on the catamaran, already infected, brushing salt and hearsay from their cheeks. The story, the joke – with variations – always travels
sotto voce
, stealthy as a harpoon, but hits target with a brutal bang of laughter.

This is the way the joke goes.

Question:
How do you know if he likes you?

Answer:
He looks at
your
shoes when he's talking to you.

Rufus gets it.

Call him Rufus,
he has heard many times, always spoken with a slow American twang. He gets that one too, though the backpacking college students believe it is their in-joke, coded and not translatable into Australian.

Call him Weird,
he has heard them say.

Rufus does not keep count of the contusions. They are lobbed from bar chatter, from beach recliners, from the railings of the
Moby Dick
when he casts off. When Tangalooma – the former whaling station – is behind them, when they are heading north at a brisk fifteen knots, the wind mutes and muddies the voices. Even so, he can sometimes hear entire phrases, sharp as fish hooks, when the boat passes over the wrecks of the two Norwegian whale-chasers that were sunk in the early sixties, and when he navigates the tricky passage between Cape Moreton and Flinders Reef.

He's a bit, you know, retarded.

Not retarded, just weird, like everyone who lives on the island year round. Talks to whales. Or believes he can. There was an ABC documentary, don't you recognise him?

Ssh, he can hear you.

Even if he hears, he can't understand – can't process – what you say.

He never speaks.

It's Asperger's.

It's the aftermath of childhood trauma.

Born below the waterline,
one story goes.
He's part fish.

Rufus more often feels like a fish out of water, though he believes he is indeed part ichthyosaur. He also knows he was actually born above the waterline in the front parlour of his grandparents' home in Redcliffe, a four-room cottage on the shores of Moreton Bay.

His father was a whaler,
tourists are told when they purchase tickets for the cruise,
and his mother was a marine biologist. A shark got his mother when Rufus was ten years old and they say he hasn't talked since. But he's an expert on whaling and whales.

Rufus shivers whenever a fin breaks the surface of Moreton Bay.

 

With Cape Moreton behind him, he keeps his eyes on the smudged line between ocean and sky, scanning for humpback pods. At first sight of a breaching whale, he rings the ship's bell. Tourists crowd the decks. The Americans (who outnumber all others) hold video cameras aloft. There is much oohing and aahing. A pod of humpbacks, on the annual trek up the coast from Antarctica to the tropical Whitsunday Passage where they calve, is
frolicking out there like puppies. What acrobats! They are an oceanic circus troupe, their striated white bellies flashing sunlight as they make their astonishing leaps, their black flukes pelting spray.

What easy victims they were, Rufus thinks sadly. Slow moving (at only four to five knots per hour), passing close to land when other whales (the blue whales, the killer whales) kept well out to sea, the humpbacks offered themselves as lambs to the slaughter.

And slaughtered they were.

Rufus remembers the day his father took him to the flensing deck at Tangalooma. He was eight years old. He remembers the way the whales were winched up the ramp, their shattered hulks belching blood, the hooked knives ripping away their skin and blubber with a nightmarish sound. He watched his father shove the long, jellied ribbons of whale-hide through great holes in the deck to the furnace-cookers below.

‘See!' his father pointed to the skinned carcass. ‘Now you can see the harpoon.'

The weapon was twisted like a pretzel, its explosive head peppered like shrapnel through bone cage and flesh.

Rufus remembers leaning over the edge of the flensing deck to vomit, clinging to the rail at the top of the ramp. Below him, at the foot of the
slick and bloodied slope, the tethered carcasses of six dead whales, each pumped full of air to keep it afloat, rocked gently against the dock. They looked like six black pontoons, each gushing rivers of scarlet. He remembers watching the circling sharks, the way their jaws closed repeatedly on the tough black hides, the way the bloodied water drove them mad, the way they plunged into the dead gaping mouths of the leviathans and ate the tongues.

He remembers sobbing in his father's arms.

He remembers that the ocean was made not of water but of blood and that when his father took him down to the jetty, the blood crested in waves and lapped his ankles.

He has never forgotten the dirges of the whales who escaped the harpoons.

It's a requiem mass for their mates,
his father told him.

The
Moby Dick
has cut its engines and now the tourists can hear the humpbacks singing: the low-throated bass notes, the high keening, the fluted mating calls, the lullabies of mothers to calves.

‘It's like the music of the spheres,' a man says, busily recording.

Some of the tourists (and not only the women) are weeping.

‘This is the most amazing thing I have ever seen or heard,' another man says. ‘It's awesome.' He
can't even hold his camera steady. He brushes his sleeve across his eyes.

Even normal people, Rufus thinks, with a vaulting flicker of hope, can sometimes understand a language they cannot speak.

 

When he was a child, his mother and grandmother loved to tell him that his baby clothes were made from American sheets washed ashore from the
Rufus King.
‘That's why we christened you Rufus.'

In the school library in Redcliffe (a one-room affair, but well-endowed with the diaries of nineteenth-and twentieth-century settlers) Rufus tracked down the history of the wreck whose name he bore. He did this when he was in Grade 5 and needed to believe that salvage was possible. His need to believe was desperate. For months, he could not look at the ocean for fear of seeing the haemorrhaging of whales or the bloodlust of sharks or the remains of his mother's body, never found.

The
Rufus King,
he discovered, was an American Liberty ship that mistook the South Passage below Moreton Island for the North West Channel. She struck a sandbar and was wrecked in 1942, in the month of July.

There are shoreline scavengers still living who will swear that the date was the Glorious Fourth and that the bodies of sailors washed up on island beaches in
rigor mortis
had their fingers clamped around American flags, the miniature kind waved in parades.

The ship was already mythical for Rufus before he started school. The wreck of the
Rufus King
was his favourite bedtime story, and his grandmother told and retold and embroidered. ‘In those days we were more worried about Japanese subs than sharks,' she confessed. ‘We'd stand on the beach with telescopes and watch for black conning towers. We'd place bets. We bet on everything that moved. Were they humpbacks or sharks or submarines? The odds favoured submarines. We watched for hours on end every day. We were perpetually expecting Japs but what we got was dead Yanks with American flags in their hands.'

Rufus knows the rest of the story by heart: the debris washed ashore, the salvage fever. ‘Miles of American cotton, soft as silk,' his grandmother recalled. ‘Like a gift from God. The luxuries those Yanks took for granted! I'm talking the bedding on their bunks, you'd think it was the Ritz not the U.S. Navy. You can't believe how excited we were, wartime rationing and all. You couldn't get cloth for love nor money back then.'

Rufus pictures his mother and his grandmother dragging stinking soggy bundles from the sea. He pictures them pegging yards of sheeting to the clothesline and hosing off seaweed and salt.

‘Then we boiled them in the copper for days,' his grandmother recalled. ‘And we bleached them and made blouses and skirts and your baby clothes. It was almost sinful.

‘It
was
sinful, I suppose. Or at least indecent. But don't get me wrong. We were sorry for those American boys who drowned, and we held a service on the beach and said prayers and sang hymns for them.'

His grandmother's face would turn dreamy. ‘Still, I made a lovely dance dress for your mother. Macarthur had his HQ in Brisbane by then and there were Yanks all over the place, at all the dances … Oversexed, overpaid, and over here, we used to say. We hated them and we loved them. They buzzed around your mother like flies round a honey pot … There was a boy from Oklahoma,' she would say, ‘at one of the dances. He gave your mother a ring and he promised her … oh, what he promised!'

‘What?' Rufus would ask, entranced with his possible histories. ‘What did he promise?'

‘Let's just say you were almost a Yank and you almost had a daddy from Oklahoma. Oh, those Yanks! They were like people in fairytales. They
believed anything,
anything
, was possible. They expected magic beanstalks outside every kitchen window. They made promises the way the rest of us breathe.'

‘What happened to the boy from Oklahoma who could have been my dad?'

‘The usual. His ship was torpedoed. He's part of the reef now. He's part of the Coral Sea. So much wreckage from the
Rufus King
, washing ashore for days and days. We had a beachcombing party with a bonfire and dancing on the sand. And then we had a Sewing Bee party. You have to understand, the
Rufus King
was like manna from heaven. And it wasn't just all those yards of American cotton, though I can't begin to tell you how many bridal gowns were made from ship's bedding.'

She would take to daydreaming until her grandson prompted, ‘What else?'

‘Oh, there were the medical supplies. And there was vacuum-sealed coffee, real coffee, oh my …!' She would put a hand on her breast. ‘To this day, all I can say is that my heart races when I remember what washed ashore. And best of all was your baby clothes.'

‘But I wasn't even born when it sank.'

‘That's true,' his grandmother acknowledged. ‘But we knew you'd come sooner or later. Your daddy was somewhere on a ship in the Coral Sea at
the time, along with those American boys fighting the Japs, but we knew he'd come home and when he did, we knew he'd make you.'

Rufus knew that his father's ship was strafed by Japanese bombers and that his father, clinging to wreckage, was picked up by the USS
Yorktown
. ‘They shipped him home to us in casts and bandages,' his grandmother said, ‘but that didn't stop him and your mother making you. You were our V-J baby.'

Rufus knows this story: Victory-over-Japan Day, 15 August 1945, the day he was born.

‘You popped out and Japan surrendered,' his parents would tease.

His mother had already made his baby suit from cotton flotsam. ‘It's undrownable stuff,' she claimed. ‘That's how we knew your father would come home.' She had sent her husband back to the war with underwear made from sheets. ‘Anything salvaged from the
Rufus King
can't drown.'

Rufus thinks he would not mind drowning. Everyone who matters is there already, waiting for him under the sea.

 

When Rufus was seven years old, his demobbed father signed on at Tangalooma as a whaler. The
ships and crews were Norwegian; the blood-work was done by Australians. In the first four months of 1952, six hundred whales were killed.

‘We only go for the males,' his father told him. ‘We don't touch the females and calves. This is how we cut off the flukes, with these long knives.'

Rufus threw up again.

‘I know, I know,' his father said. ‘It's not pretty. But you've got to toughen up.'

Nevertheless it was at Tangalooma that his father began to drink a lot. He worked seven days a week, twelve-hour shifts, on his six-week stints.

‘Worth it though,' he told Rufus. ‘I'm rolling in money. Besides, where else can I get a job?'

 

By the time whaling was banned in 1962,
the recorded voice on the PA system tells the tourists,
the whales had been almost wiped out. Tangalooma began operations in 1952. In that year, it is estimated that fifteen thousand humpbacks were migrating up the east coast of Australia. As pods were depleted, the whalers became more desperate and less selective, and females were harpooned. After ten years, it is estimated that only five hundred whales were left.

Now the cetacean population is slowly regenerating itself, though humpbacks remain at risk from Japanese
whalers in Antarctica. The illegal slaughter in Australian and New Zealand waters has provoked international protest.

And yet the whales may have the last laugh because spermaceti is the only known lubricant that will function in the ferocious sub-zeros of outer space. The NASA shuttles run on whale oil, and the Voyager probe beams the song of the humpback into galaxies far far away, a terrestrial salutation to whatever's out there.

 

Rufus feels the whale-song as a caress. It brushes his skin and travels like a low electrical charge through his veins. It hums inside his skull and fills him with happiness. He sings back silently, but he knows the whales hear. He asks what he always asks.