The Following (32 page)

Tiger held the dinghy into the wind and belly-flopped himself around the rudder to get adjusted, then rocked and wobbled until he found all the ropes. His bones would be blue-bruised tomorrow. Then she took off.

Nick watched from the rocks. It was a good way to go about starting a day’s clean-up. At this rate they’d take a month.

Gusts were unpredictable around the north-side headland, as of old, where the catboat foundered. It was Crater Bay’s Bermuda Triangle, where Tiger had swallowed a formative fear, his father’s disgrace. That fear was back as a force to beat him. This was in miniature – enlarge it. Jake Try, why aren’t you watching now? Herman Melville, Henry Fielding, Jack London – step forward from your pages wearing sea robes stained with ink and look at your loving hack on the emerald waters.

The craft tensioned, then glided along with curls of current slipping astern. It sailed over the wreck of the lapstrake catboat and around the bare frames of the oyster lease. No southerly forthcoming, just the sea breeze cutting in, Tiger kept his head low to avoid being whacked by the boom, and gybed. There came a creaking shudder as he ducked his head and missed being struck, the mainsheet streaming into his hands as he brought it back to himself. If the wind had been stronger the boom might have sheared off and the sail ripped, taking the dinghy down.

Add dinghy sailing to Tiger Yeomans’s litany of tractor-handling incidents, tree-felling close shaves, shotguns going off through fences, drunken drives through nights of remembering nothing. Here was Tiger talking about the call of the sea and dreaming of owning
Workers Comp
, or a yacht something like her, to take to the oceans of the world, or something like them, and how did he sail? Not well. In a sweat. Badly.

Or so he thought, for then, without his thinking, the dinghy went about with easy, elegant grace. And the thought came:
How did I do it? How did I fare through that little episode of ‘bring her up, let her out’?
– the old man in his baggy shorts braying from the shore, and Leisha Dunfield with her gaze of voracious appetite for a son of her own, watching.

As
Red Lemon
slapped towards the beach there was only Nick to be seen, collecting litter among the rocks – plastic bait bags, broken glass worn smooth, half lemons squeezed for on-board gin and tonics on pleasure craft and tossed overboard to float ashore in a state of salty preservation.

Before Tiger was quite to the land the wind changed to the southerly quarter. He invested that wind with a tone of genial sarcasm. It spoke to him in whispers of damaging intent. Dipping the fingers of one hand in the water, his other on the tiller, he was caught by gusts and found himself sailing so tight on the wind that he nosed directly into it and stalled, sailing backwards while a tornado, as he felt it, or a dinghy sailor’s version of it, slammed past the gunwales. He couldn’t think what to do then without being knocked down, but next moment found himself on a blissful downwind leg after some elaborate confusion involving a jib sheet and a wet sail slapping his cheek after he’d brought the dinghy back somehow from lying almost flat on the water.

Tiger vainly wondered how he looked from the beach – superb? When he came closer Nick had his back to him, coiling tangles of lost fishing line. The little boat was galloping like a pony across the wavelets.

The foxie dog, Dart, ran up and down, barking at seagulls and shags, then turned to find Tiger. Running into the water, she lifted her narrow black nose and barked shrilly at the apparition of Tiger flaming Yeomans.

Nick allowed fragments of the scene to poke from under his simmering, angled brows and floppy Cancer Society hat tied with string and a wooden toggle under the chin. Tiger was not sailing too badly for an old bloke who complained about rheumatism and weak knees, saying how he couldn’t sail, but went at it. You couldn’t understand him when you watched him doing what everyone else did without complication. He made things so much more bloody important than they were – he challenged your own ideas of what mattered, and when you sorted through them, not as much mattered as you thought. He was his father’s friend.

Tiger heaved the rudder away and turned in just as sailboarders and Laser-sailors on the far side of the estuary launched from a camping grounds’ beach, deciding that a white-capper blowing up was the very wind they needed for a proper go at the Olympics or, failing that, the Crater Bay Dinghy Club championships.

Nick came wading through the chop to catch the bow of the dinghy before it struck rocks. They swapped roles without much to say. Tiger unbuckled, threw Nick his lifejacket and stepped out staggering. Tiger held the nose of the dinghy while Nick strapped on the lifejacket.

Do you really want to do this?
was Tiger’s wordless look. Nick’s return-look seemed to say,
Who are you talking to?

‘Ready,’ he said.

Tiger let the dinghy go and the small craft, after a moment of sulky sidling, took a liking to Nick and went bounding away through the chop – straight out into the white-capped channel to perform and caper.

When Tiger looked up next, Nick was stacking out as far as he could,
Red Lemon
straining at every lashing the wind could give her.

Assembled with my schoolmates in the playground of Temora Public School on the 17th of October 1949, I heard the voice of the prime minister, Ben Chifley, on the radio, at the launch of the Snowy Mountains Scheme, and assumed that he was the one who pushed the explosives plunger and made the loudspeakers on the classroom verandah ruffle so memorably. But history tells me otherwise: it was the Governor-General, William McKell, who pushed the plunger – and so Book One of
The Following
, derived from that echo, is owed to a ghost of Ben Chifley, with apologies to the real one. Likewise, throughout this book, it is a ghost of the party he belonged to, not the party itself providing a focus of spiritual attachment. Therefore it has no name.

Book Two is owed, with gratitude, and in a delight of fictional reworking, to my brother, Donal McDonald, and the jackaroos of Inverarity Station and points north-west of the black stump quite a few years past. Thanks, Don, for what I took without asking from stories that are so much yours. Thanks, too, to the invaluable writings of Patsy Adam-Smith on fettler life, Ruth Park’s on her youth, and George MacDonald Fraser’s recollections of Burma.

Book Three of
The Following
is owed in lasting friendship to Rob Fenwick, Jennie Fenwick, Greg Shand, the late Diana Shand, and above all, with love and thanks for more than words can say, to my wife, Susie Fisher.

Finally, my thanks to Trevor Shearston for a writer’s words when needed most.

Roger McDonald
was born at Young, New South Wales, and educated at country schools and in Sydney. His writing has been awarded the Adelaide Festival Book of the Year, the New South Wales, South Australian and Victorian Premiers’ Prizes, and the Miles Franklin Award.
The Following
is his ninth novel.

Also by Roger McDonald

Fiction

1915

Slipstream

Rough Wallaby

Water Man

The Slap

Mr Darwin’s Shooter

The Ballad of Desmond Kale

When Colts Ran

Non-Fiction

Shearers’ Motel

The Tree In Changing Light

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Copyright Act 1968
), recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of Random House Australia. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

Version 1.0

The Following

ePub 9781742759937

Copyright © Roger McDonald, 2013

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

A Vintage book

Published by Random House Australia Pty Ltd

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First published by Vintage in 2013

National Library of Australia

Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

McDonald, Roger, 1941 – author.

The following/Roger McDonald.

ISBN 9781742759937 (ebook)

Subjects: Political fiction, Australian.

A823.3

Lines on page 149 from ‘Parting’ by Boris Pasternak, as translated by Lydia Pasternak Slater, published in
Fifty Poems
by Allen & Unwin, 1963.

Song lyrics on page 185 from ‘South Coast’, written by Frank Miller, Sam Eskin, Lillian Bos Ross and Richard Dehr, published by J. Albert & Sons and performed by The Kingston Trio.

Cover image © Nikki Smith/arcangel-images.com

Cover design by Sandy Cull, gogoGingko

eBook production by
Midland Typesetters
, Australia