The Following (24 page)

S
TANDING ON THE VERANDAH AT
C
RATER
B
AY
, looking down the estuary and out through the heads, Tiger Yeomans did one of his performances – snapper crunching shellfish on the shore. ‘They came up the creek into the paddock bottom, the cattle went down for a look.’

‘You were there?’ said Max.

‘Assume that,’ said Tiger, describing jaws, tiny serrated teeth, savage, almost suicidally semi-amphibian hunger as the crazed snapper flipped and grovelled. ‘Smell the mud, hear them squeal.’

You’d think Tiger was drunk, but he wasn’t. The other two, Max Petersen and Harry Johnstone, were drunk, or should have been, considering the amount they’d tossed down. Tiger was drinking water. He rattled ice in his glass.

Each day they started earlier.

A yacht,
Workers Comp
, sailed to the sub-Antarctic on bird counts and combed the Pacific for long-liners. She was heading down the coast to join them. Her progress was an hourly topic. She evoked another dimension, the elastic dimension of the sea.

‘I’d give anything to be out there,’ said Tiger.

‘At the helm?’ said Harry.

‘Assume that,’ said Tiger.

Max had the binoculars now. It was hard to see anything past the bushfire haze rolling down from the hinterland. The ocean had a smoked-glass look, blurred of detail but exciting to the mind. They were all of them sick of the land and the hold it had on them, for reasons that would last or would not, but Tiger was the one who said so.

The only expertise Tiger Yeomans had ever displayed around that heroic bolt,
Workers Comp
, a cutter-rigged ketch with a lifting keel, was to suggest an apostrophe in the name, they could choose where.

‘It’s not them,’ said Max, putting the binoculars down.

Until a few years ago Max had employed Tiger editing trade magazines, doing the writing, layout and distribution. Tiger kept the firm going after Max entered parliament. Tiger liked the work, keeping to his own thoughts and buffing sentences to needless perfection. His family thrived and was educated, the farm, Tussockdale, was paid off, and Sylvia went to the top of her profession. All thanks to Max in there on the backbench, working hard for a ministry.

Tiger extended his arms. ‘Everything was enormous in those days, a legend of itself. Crater Bay was a veritable fishbowl then.’

Max said, ‘And the whales?’

‘Snapper,’ said Tiger. ‘I know what you’re thinking. I couldn’t have been more than four or five years old.’

‘More that you weren’t born yet,’ said Harry.

‘Those snapper were, believe me, even making allowances, huge.’

Harry and Max held out their empty glasses. It was a vintage from Tiger’s Coriole stash and the third bottle between them. Tiger liked having a cellar full of reds for occasions, all the best names. It was how he wanted to be seen, exuder of largesse. Red wine did that as a man reached behind himself into a dusty cupboard. There were other aspects of the ideal amusing to his friends. Everything he’d ever wanted to do was tied up in fishing and boats. What he wouldn’t give to be out there in mid-ocean plotting a star-passage.

‘To the clean sea,’ said Tiger, clashing the ice in his glass.

Max and Harry gave Tiger the tolerance of a few salty quips. Emotion, agitation, verbal displays were Tiger’s ways of saying something that couldn’t be said. You’d find out later what it was. He was the friend who mistrusted their friendship but made it work.

Tiger’s father, Godfrey, had been a destroyer captain in the Med, Coral and China Seas during World War Two. In peacetime he steamed HMAS
Thursday
down from Jervis Bay and prowled the headlands, looking for the bonfire that signalled Tiger’s birth.

‘Too many years ago,’ said Tiger. ‘What have I done to trounce that? What totally over-the-top, completely magnificent, absolutely insane move have I ever made that hasn’t been bettered by my old man?’

‘You got . . . born,’ said Max.

A hesitation in the words, the kick of an old injury, gave ordinary statements of Max’s a touch of tension. He’d crashed his Jag in his twenties, no seatbelt worn, and given his cranium a shake on the Inverarity straight, hard right by Inverarity siding, after which, unlike the way similar accidents affected people, he seemed to have improved his grip on life, except his speech sometimes faltered.

‘You made a life of your own, the one you w-wanted,’ he said. ‘We did that together.’

‘It’s not finished,’ said Tiger, cracking ice on his back teeth.

Max ground his cigar into the dog dish, trying not to send sparks over the verandah rail. The dry bush wanted to go up. Smoke slid between trees from forested ridges. It burned the throat.

Up in the guest cottage Sylvia and Sonia sat in a window seat watching the last light fade, the first stars come out. From the sound of their laughter you’d think nothing was wrong, nothing changed from the pattern of every summer at Crater Bay since they’d started coming down there as a bunch of friends in the 1970s. That was over forty years ago. Easy enough for Sylvia, in good health, to trust to the memory, but for Sonia, sick, getting sicker, hilarity in the circumstance was heroic. Each time her doctor, John Saul, ran tests, the news was dire, yet her lightness of mind increased, or seemed to.

Tiger watched Harry’s face, every catch of Sonia’s laughter reflected as hope, every paroxysm of coughing as fear.

Tiger leaned on the verandah rail and gazed down the estuary. ‘I do want to be out there,’ he said.

The fishing you could understand with Tiger, but sailing boats, ocean-going boats, yachts at the wind’s command? Each had a role to fill in their friendship circle. Jake and Judith Try did marine research. Harry did architecture on a big scale – Kuala Lumpur, Bahrain, Beijing. Max Petersen was the federal member for Parslow, in line for a ministry, ever-hopeful and awaiting the PM’s call.

Down the pecking order into the shallows and twinkling low-tide gullies, if you wanted a freshly caught fish ask Tiger. Give him a tin dinghy or a kayak, a handline and a bucket of bait – that was their Tiger, down from the hills for a spell of herding flathead and snapper, wearing his floppy blue fabric sheep cocky’s hat and smelling like a bait bucket.

Back in the days of Sergeant Pepper, flared trousers and revolutionary headbands, Harry, Max, Jake and Tiger had arrived at Crater Bay one uni vacation in Max’s green Jag. It was a step up from student identity into a more calculated style. A crippled old stayer had taken a shine to Max – Tim Atkinson. Hadn’t just given Max the car but handed the firm over as well.

Tiger had talked about his seafaring father (RAN, retired), then they met him. Godfrey Yeomans made pink gins and watched them choke them down. They looked like girls, he said, with their lank hair swinging. Being navy he was clothes-conscious as Yves Saint Laurent, white shorts with razor-sharp creases. When he sat in a cane chair a gappy opening appeared and his nuts showed in a hairy blaze.

Tiger dressed in those days in army disposals, tall and skinny. At nineteen he’d still hardly ever needed a shave, downy-cheeked, ringleted, he’d laughed too much at his father’s jokes, then looked sour.

Years on, they pulled out a few spotty slides. There in the Kodaks Godfrey had a Beatles haircut, gingery hair a seaweedy thatch. The politicians had beaten him and he’d swanned with the younger generation more than they’d thought, a big-framed man, a bull walrus lurching up the track through the ti-trees and banksias after his early-morning swims. ‘Singing,’ said Max. ‘Bellowing out at the top of his voice.’

‘I never heard him sing much,’ said Tiger, no sort of expert on his old man’s bonhomie, though remembering ‘The Shooting of Dan McGraw’ and ‘The Fighting Temeraire’ foghorned on sentimental occasions.

Max, Harry and Jake scored an edge on Tiger by winning a friendship with Godfrey Yeomans, an influence. Godfrey wasn’t the only one they’d charmed, those three whose future achievements were always going to happen versus Tiger’s hopeful changes. A feeling of stacked weights remained after forty, almost fifty years. Max had been impressive young, preternaturally. Back when Tiger first knew him he’d swung what he liked to call (these days, not then) a land rights investigation by doing the title searches and settling the Aboriginal Milburns back on their ancestral land when he was only an articled clerk. Just don’t, please, raise the subject of race with their old mate Ross Devlin. It’s not that Ross is not proud of the Milburns – his own children and grandchildren are Milburns. You can talk about things now that couldn’t be said then with pride, regarding family background. His Jenny he’s proud of, don’t mistake it, but too much of the bitter scorn of the landscape and the vexatious vituperation of country towns has rubbed into Ross for him to be open on that score.

Tiger knows about it, all about it, as his mother, Joan, married Frank Bohrmann, who bought Inverarity Station. Tiger has only ever referred to Frank as ‘my mother’s husband’, not as his stepfather. That’s where they live now, elderly Ross Devlin’s even more elderly neighbours. He’s over there having a cup of tea with them every second day, telling them what Terry Kidney, who runs the place now, is doing wrong.

An extreme example of Tiger’s friends’ takeover of his family’s story is Tiger’s grandfather, his mother’s father. They’d met Sapper Boden in the Sundowners’ Home the year he died at ninety-six, a grizzled, toothless old crank. For his M.Arch. thesis Harry made a study of vernacular buildings, including the Sapper’s milking sheds constructed without nails from timbers felled in an upland gully and Inverarity’s famous Arcade. ‘Intuition Versus Plan’ was the thesis title. From that distant, youthful ideal Harry had evolved to armies of architectural draftsmen doing his bidding in glass-walled office blocks.
The Friendly House
, an influential monograph, was preserved under a glass tabletop in a North Sydney conference room. It had its place in architectural literature alongside
Roughly Refined
, written by Harry’s professional mentor, Warner Tarbett II.

Max was the other one weighing in on Tiger’s family story around the Sapper. Max’s opinions of Tiger’s grandfather had travelled from scorn to trumpeted respect over the years. As a student politician he’d called the Sapper’s politics a hoot – so antediluvian right wing that they came round behind and kicked him up his own skinny arse. Now, as the member for Parslow, at Anzac Day gatherings Max told admiring yarns of the Sapper digging tunnels under Turkish and German lines. ‘Sprinting to the dunny killed more men than the – t-trenches,’ he liked to quote, lacing his demotics with bawdry.

Crater Bay was originally a dairy farm on the Boden side, Joan’s side, the Sapper the one who’d set the pile of rubber tyres on fire the night Tiger was born, a white-whiskered old loon at cosmic play, metal-plated head thrown back, toothless gums shining. Tiger’s mother said (still, at ninety-five) that the destroyer’s visit like a wild horse tethered in sea foam had been a show put on for the benefit of the crew of the
Thursday
, who’d been through the Med and the Far East with Godfrey and were more precious to him than a loving wife.

Now they were all of them older than Godfrey was when they’d met him. A few years along and they’d catch up to the Sapper. Only Tiger’s mother survived from the older generation. Joan, with her jowly bull of a husband (now blind), Frank Bohrmann, had buried her own generation, most of the half-generation below her, and soon might bury theirs.

Tiger’s name wouldn’t be inscribed on any granite memorials or memorial toilet blocks – maybe Max’s would, as a local politician. Also, when you thought about it, there were buildings with Harry’s name on them that might last, and Jake and Judith had for a while now written themselves into legends of the Costeau caste.

That just left Tiger, rueful and sun-fried and well past middle-age, thinking about the starts and stops he’d made over the years, the defeats and rescues, the schemes and dreams looking faded.

That week’s routine Tiger found consoling for the reason of its fragile predictability – the eating, the drinking, the swimming, the fishing, the exchanged banalities and competitive repartee, the fires on the ridges that could only ever be a backdrop to the situation they were in, an illustration of Australia getting on with its hot, dry business while closer matters played out.

Elvis the water-bombing helicopter thudded overhead at an angle favourable to TV news, a layer of smoke pasting the sun, filling rocky creek beds, pouring from ridges and rolling across the bay. When spirals of burned leaves settled on the decks of yachts, camouflaging their white lines, escape routes were planned, emergency bags packed. When the wind turned east the mood swung to hilarious and back-burning started. Word came that the road to Whistling Corner was open – a clear way in and out – and that Tiger and Sylvia’s son, David, their daughter-in-law, Leaf, and the farm caretakers, Gary and Sandra Brill, had saved Tussockdale from burning.

Torching their way inland, the Crater Bay Bush Fire Brigade, licensed pyromaniacs, lived in their orange overalls, slept under their trucks, thrived on ham and mustard pickle sandwiches, cold meat pies and trays of Crater Bay oysters. Max was brigade president, a non-active role when it came to attending fires but not when it came to distributing the bounty of a patron. Max’s aquaculturist, Sam Noori, had perfected a method of layer-freezing oysters and Max donated unsold, out-of-season batches in the shell. They were eaten by gourmand volunteers who planned to go home and goose their old ladies with Max’s compliments.

The oyster lease tugged at Tiger’s thinking when he couldn’t sleep. At low tide he could not look at the bare frames poking above the water, smoke sheened over them. He would rather face a firestorm than that bronchial phantom. He was haunted by the story of Kyle Morrison of Inverarity, the man who walked into water until it closed over his head. Now it was time for Tiger’s friends. The black sticks were the structures of a slowly heaving constricted lung. It was a drowning, a drowning on dry land that was offered.