The Following (28 page)

For months afterwards Judith gave Tiger the cold, hard, yet almost half-amused eye. Their friendship, their liking, recovered.

Max was named best man at Judith and Jake’s wedding, not Tiger. Judith said Tiger was unreliable, he’d only lose the ring. She still said that sort of thing, making it sound raffish, whereas unreliable was a word always too close to people’s idea of Tiger to be comfortably worn. It had less to do with losing things and more to do with direction in finding them.

Tiger’s mother came down from the north-west as Judith’s matron of honour. Her husband – don’t use the word stepfather – Frank Bohrmann, wore a wheat-coloured linen suit, a string tie, a silver bullock’s-horn toggle and a white Western Straw Stetson. The Admiral attended in dress uniform with Leisha Dunfield on his elbow, her cleavage dusted with pollen. Joan had always loved Judith, and in Judith’s eyes Joan’s love-adventure with a cattleman was an example to all women to be free. It acknowledged that her marriage to Jake was an elopement, a triumph of love, not a betrayal of Herring or a shackling.

‘Look how happy Judith and Jake have been,’ Tiger said. ‘Almost as happy as us, darling,’ he pushed.

‘You never told her how much you liked her. You just did damage, like a hurt child.’

There was a code in this coming close to a summation of Tiger’s continuing reality.

‘Hurt?’ Tiger could hardly take this in. His liking for Judith had been just that. If he’d sometimes thought it might have been something else, that was something he’d never wanted to show.

‘A woman likes to know,’ said Sylvia.

Tiger looked up into the south-western sky and every star, each planet, every scattered constellation seemed linked down some long corridor of hope. Sylvia could do this to the universe, bend it to a positive prospect. There was no mud in those crystal heavens. The feeling of the bared oyster stakes didn’t exist up there. It was Sylvia’s gift to Tiger from their start. It seemed to have created him out of the mud of his own unreliability. But sometimes he lost her, and then he seemed to lose himself, went back to his beginning, becoming, at the very least, impromptu, lazy, improvised. He could barely ever get to ask, ‘What have I given
you
?’ – except tonight he did ask, and she vaguely said, ‘Just this.’

They sat with their arms around each other until a ruffle of evening chill came across the water. Down below, Jake pulled out bundles of charts and brought a ship’s lamp over.

‘What are we looking for?’ said Tiger, setting his reading glasses forward on his nose.

‘The Rubbles,’ said Jake.

Sylvia had never heard of the Rubble Islands and Tiger had only vaguely. Jake challenged him to show where they were. His finger hovered over sweeps of ocean until the Rubbles emerged away to the south-east of New Zealand, blurs on the map towards Antarctica, rocks in the Southern Ocean where every seabird that ever rode the roaring forties alighted and laid an egg some time in its life cycle.

‘The Rubbles are proving a mecca for seabird data. Formerly hardly worth a national claim, so we could have them, that was the attitude of the Antarctic Treaty framers.’

‘“We”?’

‘Us Kiwis.’

It was sometimes forgotten that Jake was a New Zealander. In his twenties he’d come over to Sydney to do his PhD and then gone to North Queensland to teach marine science at James Cook. He boasted he’d ‘never had the operation’, and still travelled on a New Zealand passport when he went to marine science conferences around the world. In marker pen he wrote ‘originally Kiwi’ on his conference name tags, despite being a designated Australian delegate, and when he met his old mates they fell on each other, arms around each other swearing fealty to baked beans, kumara, gumboots, the All Blacks, hokey pokey ice-cream, mountaineering and the
Rainbow Warrior
history legend they shared. One of their number was Wigs – daughter of a North Island railway worker, who shed all stiffness and sang ‘Pokarekare Ana’ with Jake whenever they met.

‘The group collectively known as the Rubbles is barely above water at high tide,’ said Jake. ‘The Shingles, the Gravels and the Pebbles – they’re the ones you can land on. But only by Zodiac and by dint of a lot of getting wet.’

‘So when are you going there?’ said Tiger, with a sudden – not so sudden – wish to be gone there too.

‘Last year,’ said Jake, ‘we won a two-year tender with New Zealand DoCS to drop a researcher, Daren Kotsibos, and come back for him three days later. Kotsi likes to take an assistant. He chose Nick Petersen. Nick was brilliant in every way.’

‘Good old Nick,’ said Tiger, stung that a young man of uncertain capacity was living what he only dreamed, in a story he hadn’t been told, in a place of wonder he barely knew existed, accessible only by a yacht that he longed to sail away on, but had never been asked.

‘There’s no anchorage so we landed them with supplies from as close in as we could get,’ said Jake, ‘then sailed back out and waited. Kotsi and Nick slept under a tarp between rocks. We got hit by a force-eight gale rising to nine and rode it out hove to for almost a week. They thought we were lost but just carried on counting eggs.’

‘Struth, an all-round adventure.’

‘By the end of that time they were eating mutton bird,’ said Jake.

‘It must have been one hell of a storm.’

‘We lay on the floor and played magnetic scrabble,’ said Judith. ‘It was hilarious.’

‘You know what Judith is like,’ said Jake. ‘She doesn’t know fear. I’m one of those scrupulous, safety-conscious skippers who make things as boring as possible.’

The zest, the bite, the achievement, the God-defying astonishment of hurling themselves into the worst of the Southern Ocean’s gales left Tiger’s mouth dry. Did he really want his adventures so cranked up? Jake’s reputation was that of a superb seaman with a habit of sailing to extremes.

Nick Petersen was Jake and Judith’s godson. They’d had no children of their own. There was a feeling, with Nick, that Max and Wendy had supplied the boy just for them, then gone ahead and had their twin girls and another boy to take care of what they needed for themselves. This air of appropriation on the part of the Trys had always been galling to Tiger. As with Wigs it was sheer captivation.

At birth Nick was covered in matted, coppery hair. His little monkey face peered out through an old man’s whiskers, like a monkey god. There was still something of that feeling to Nick in his early thirties, that he was called to a following denied to other humans, his life more belonging to nature. The difficulty was his trouble with Max – something in Max was withheld around his son. Something felt but unseen. If only he would tell Nick what it was. Nick responded with trouble for him, seeing Max, in his working life, giving people what they needed when they couldn’t ask and withholding what was wanted in his son.

It was too late to drive home and Tiger went up on deck to ring the house while the two women made up the bunks.

‘Things are coming along nicely,’ said Max, answering a little breathlessly – he must have been crouching over the phone. ‘Nick arrived just after you left. I’ve got no roof to my mouth. He’s cooked us a curry. We all send our love to
Workers Comp
. Harry is pretty satisfied that Sonia has turned a corner, he’s up there now in the cottage feeding her a witch’s brew of dried antelope penises or whatever.’

‘What about you?’ said Tiger.

‘Don’t worry about me, cobber. I’m made of six-inch-thick forged-steel boilerplate.’

It sometimes seemed that friendship existed for no other reason than to allow friends to say what they liked about each other or anyone else, maybe, and suffer no penalty through acceptance. The four of them lay in their bunks within earshot of each other, talking above the sound of water lapping the hull.

‘I’d say the PM definitely hasn’t rung, otherwise Max wouldn’t have grabbed the phone as quickly as he did,’ said Tiger. ‘There’s nobody else he’d want to talk to in a hurry, quite the opposite.’

‘Except surely Wendy,’ said Judith.

They could hear Jake’s knuckles cracking as he lay in his bunk thinking. It drove them quietly mad. On fine nights, becalmed, Judith slept up in the cockpit just to get away from it. Jake would be considering the question: Would it be better if Max didn’t get a portfolio at all? Would he be more useful to his campaigning friends on the backbench and not wearing a ministerial policy straitjacket?

‘Max is all heart,’ said Jake. ‘But when he tries to please everyone you start to wonder.’

‘Max never makes enough sacrifices,’ said Tiger.

‘Max is getting a hammering tonight,’ said Sylvia.

‘Wendy thinks he’s sacrificed her,’ said Judith, less an observation, more a question aimed at Sylvia.

‘Loyalty,’ said Sylvia, ‘when you take it right out as far as you can, is a definition of love.’

‘Not blind loyalty. Wendy’s loyalty must be worn thin,’ pushed Judith.

‘Loyalty is what Nick has in spades,’ said Jake. ‘Whatever his parents lose, he gains.’

‘Come
on
,’ said Tiger, but thinking of his own two sons, measured by such a formula, what they had gained with such a father as he was. So perhaps it was true.

‘There’s that routine Nick has of reporting in to Wen. It’s always so touching,’ said Judith. ‘Wen’s the information exchange, letting the kids know what each of them is up to without them having to explain themselves to each other all the time, and forever explaining Max. To the limit she can.’

‘Families are like that,’ said Tiger.

‘I suppose I don’t know it,’ said Judith.

‘Nick was always so fatherly to the twins,’ said Jake, ‘even when he could hardly talk, when he was first walking, with that gutsy, stompy gait he had, he watched out for them, the darlings.’

‘Then he shot up so skinny you couldn’t see him sideways,’ said Tiger. ‘Remember Max called him “One Dimensional Man”?’

‘I always thought that was pretty rough,’ said Jake. ‘When the missing dimension was something Max ought to have supplied.’

‘So why did Nick call his band The One Dees if he didn’t like it?’

‘To get back at Max in case the band was a hit?’

‘That’s clever,’ said Tiger. ‘As if that bunch of skunks would ever get anywhere.’

‘They were gorgeous boys,’ said Judith. ‘Absolute rascals. Still are.’

Tiger hardly knew who she was talking about. Even his own sons, as teenagers, had been little more than types, for a while blurred into subcultural identities. But this was typical of Judith, she’d know their detailed stories, their likes and dislikes, and send them cards on their birthdays from whatever corner of the ocean
Workers Comp
happened to be warring in.

‘Remember when Nick came back from Tassie and was served Scotch fillet at that steakhouse on London Circuit?’ said Jake. ‘Max ordered it for him like he always did, the way he took control. We thought Nick had turned vegetarian because he sent it back to the kitchen. Next thing we know he jumps from the car and drags back a wallaby. Road kill. It wasn’t too fresh, but it wasn’t farmed protein – that was the point. He made wallaby rissoles and ate them.’

‘Making himself sick,’ said Tiger, ‘though not wanting to show it?’

‘In the Rubbles he ate raw titi, no problem, and drank the blood.’

‘Ate raw what?’ said Tiger.

‘Titi – sooty shearwater – mutton-bird.’

They would all four rather keep talking in this vein of praise and disparagement than speak about the one person controlling their thinking – Sonia in her clammy bedsheets reaching forward through a haze of morphine capsules to an oblivion from which there was no word ever heard calling back to the living.

‘What is it, your prayer?’ said Judith. ‘The one you say for Sonni.’

‘The traveller’s prayer. “Preserve us from wild animals and demons along the way.” ’

Silence settled over the yacht bumping softly against its fenders.

I
N THE MORNING, BACK AT
C
RATER
B
AY
, Nick helped Harry measure out pill doses on the kitchen bench, barely lifting his head from the counter to say hello when Tiger walked in.

When Jake and Judith entered, however, so much more life came into the room.

‘Nicholarse!’ said Jake, arms out.

‘Hey, bros,’ Nick said, looking eager and shy as Jake slapped his back and Judith embraced him to the count of ten.

Sylvia waited in the doorway until Harry caught her eye.

Don’t cross-examine me or put on any pressure
, was the look Harry sent her – expressing defiance as he amassed his pile of cures.

‘You can see there’s a lot been happening here, it’s my pharmacopoeia.’

‘Dear Harry,’ Sylvia advanced and kissed him on the cheek. ‘I’m sorry I couldn’t do my shift for Sonia last night, things just didn’t work out for the return drive.’

‘It was a good night. It was a bloody good night. The best night for a long time. We did well without you.’

‘Where’s Max?’ she said.

‘Gone to the fire shed,’ said Nick, ‘to hang out with that bunch of old pyros who’ve never voted for him.’

‘Except they love him like a brother,’ said Harry.

‘Every Sunday morning it’s the same,’ said Nick. ‘He goes to the bakery, gets a bag of pastries and takes them over there. Where does it lead? It goes nowhere.’

Sylvia remembered the words used by Wendy, the identical tone of thrust and exasperation after Max ran his car into the water:
Where does it lead? It goes nowhere.

The instincts of a PR hack were honed on disappointment. Failure created space for a role, lack of a considered position called not for brilliance but delaying tactics. From Tiger’s years of working with Max he knew how a point came when Max lost nerve, lost his way, and Tiger became stronger. The drive Max had taken into the tidal mangroves had precedents. There would be an important meeting, a celebratory lunch with clients. While the chairs were being shuffled Tiger would look up and Max would be gone. Next day he’d phone from Adelaide or Brisbane. ‘Can you follow this through?’ he’d say, vague, wishy-washy, floaty. ‘Too many irons in the fire.’