Death of a Whaler (11 page)

She grabs Flinch by the hand and they half stumble, half jog until they reach the end of the procession. Karma's laughter like bubbles rising to a surface and Flinch, suddenly elated after the short, wobbly sprint, feels himself rise as if upon them.

Up and down the procession, people sing. All sorts of songs. Mutating tunes, verses snatched out of the air as they float by and turn into something else. Someone behind Flinch beats a shallow drum, pauses every now and again when the track gets narrow. Thick, exposed roots of fig trees that snake out of the earth have to be negotiated.

‘Hey, Karma!' someone yells.

Flinch turns around to see Matt jogging towards them.

‘Hey, darlin',' she says. Gives him a hug. As if they hadn't seen each other for a year, Flinch thinks. Snorts softly to himself.

‘Hi,' he says.

‘Man, you should come up the front! It's great up there, the energy is amazing.'

‘Oh, cool,' says Karma. ‘Come on, Flinch.'

Flinch is already having difficulty keeping up with the procession. He feels he is in the middle of a current, anchored to something that is slowing him down while debris streams around him. Feels his back up against it, the cool, steady pressure of it making him sway slightly as he limps forward.

‘Aw, no, I don't mind it back here. I like the sound of that drum, and everything.'

Matt shrugs his shoulders. ‘Whatever turns you on, man.'

‘You sure?' says Karma.

‘Yeah, sure.'

‘Okay, well I'll catch up with you later.'

Matt takes her by the hand and they rush off, carried away with the flow of the crowd. Flinch, suddenly exhausted, slows down until he is one of the last few in the procession. Reminded with a tiny, bitter pang of school days, being last in line, last on the team, the pressure of keeping up more painful than his aching back and hip, trying to block out the glances of frustrated teachers and the whispered taunts of his classmates.

Just as he is about to give up walking and return to the commune and then to the familiar vinyl safety of Milly's cabin, the head of the procession turns tightly and rounds back on itself, meeting up with the stragglers at the end so that a circle is formed. Flinch looks for Karma, but cannot see her among the throngs of people who have grouped around him. A few move into the centre of the circle. The man with the drum. A woman with a harp. Others, too, all clad in flowing robes. A large bonfire that Flinch hadn't noticed in the darkness of the night is set alight with a sudden roar.

From somewhere in front of him, a man shouts something Flinch can't quite make out. Something about spirits, he thinks. The moon maybe.

Some people near Flinch stomp the ground and holler.

‘Like Indians,' Flinch says out loud, accidentally.

‘That's
Native Americans
, man,' says a girl next to him. Rolls her eyes. The emphasis on the words like a rap over the knuckles.

From the middle of the circle, a chant begins and spreads through the crowd like a virus, getting louder and louder. Flinch can't decipher what is being said but hums along until he becomes confused and loses the pitch. When people around him start clapping, he watches carefully and tries to join in, but finds he keeps losing the rhythm and his claps are like an echo when everyone else falls silent. Every now and then, a voice from the circle hollers to the heavens, sometimes a loud sigh, sometimes laughter. The girl next to him starts to weep.

A joint is passed to him and he closes his eyes and inhales, sucks small grassy seeds into his mouth. They stick to his teeth. When he swallows they make his throat itch. He knows he is meant to pass the joint on, but instead he holds it low by his side and steps back out of the circle, moves away one careful step at a time. When he is free of the crowd, he sits down in the darkness, watches the shapes move around the glow of the bonfire. Takes a few long drags on the joint. The silhouettes of bodies blur in front of a haze of red and orange. The chanting sounds as if it is coming from somewhere in the distance, softer and more musical than it was earlier. Eventually he feels he should get up, and he levers himself to his feet, surprised at the effort this takes, and staggers a few metres before he feels the drug lift his head off his neck. He takes large steps, as if he is walking on the moon, though he has to drag the long leg a little at first to manage it. He stumbles over something — he thinks for a second it was something moving — and sprawls on the dew-wet grass. He concentrates on lying very still, but can't help chuckling quietly to himself.

He is shivering when she bends over him but he doesn't feel cold.

‘God. Flinch, are you okay?'

He squeezes his eyes shut and when he opens them again, a second later, he guesses, he is lying in her tent on a mound of pillows, wrapped up in a number of glittering, brightly coloured saris. Candles flicker, splattering strange dark shapes against the orange canvas.

She is leaning over him, staring at him with wide eyes. ‘What happened, Flinch? Were you overcome?'

‘Huh?'

‘By the energy.' She sighs. ‘Do you feel different?' With the hope and fervour of the born-again.

‘Yes.' He lies. ‘A bit.' He doesn't want to disappoint.

She leans back and smiles. ‘Wow. That's so cool. It's like … it's like something divine.'

‘Yes,' he says. And wonders if she really believes it happens, just like that.

EIGHT

Like a grumbling schoolmaster, the sea insisted that Flinch learn certain things over.

That depth and colour are matters of perception. That if you stare only at the surface, you will miss the wonders below and may also become snagged on what lies there. That even wrecks become fixtures, develop a jagged loveliness of their own.

During his time on the fishing boats, he was washed overboard twice while contemplating the ocean during rough seas. One of those times, almost drowned. He had to be wrenched out of the ocean by his collar and the waistband of his shorts. An hour later he was still vomiting up sea water. Flinch considered himself a good student.

Knowing that Audrey would be lying in wait for him like a cat for a mouse, twitching with anticipation, Flinch prolonged his shift on the boats any way he could. After a night out at sea, he would settle into the cool white sand at Tallow Beach with a thermos of sweet milky tea and sip it slowly while the sun rose over the ocean. Sitting on that beach, he knew himself to be the first person in the country to see the sun rise and he always thought of that as a little reward, some sort of shining acknowledgement, much like the sticky gold stars that his primary school teacher used to hand out for a good maths test result. After a day shift, the blokes would retreat to the pub like soldiers back to the barracks, covered in scales and oil, reeking of sweat and salt water and fish gut, and Flinch would go with them. Usually ordered a tall glass of soft drink in those days. When the bartender was in a good mood, he could get away with a shandy. A sweet one, more lemonade than beer.

Night or day, she'd be sitting in the kitchen for his return. Straight-backed as if she had a cold steel rod for a spine. Stockings on under slippers. False nails clicking on the laminex. Wisps of cigarette smoke still visible, the curtains reeking of it. Flinch's eyes stung when he walked through the door.

‘Good catch?' Her voice a rasp.

‘Yeah, Mum.'

If he was lucky, she'd sigh and leave it at that.

On the unlucky days, there'd be the stories. The miserable accounts of her life, anecdotes that spread out like spider's web, entangling all sorts of incidents, stringing one to the next with a leap of memory or regret. The men who had betrayed her, the hairdressing apprenticeship she had given up pursuing when she found out she was pregnant with Flinch, her father's callous refusal to allow her into the house even after Flinch was born, and then the time she was a child and her mother had forgotten to fetch her after school. Inevitably all stories led her to recount her dismay that Flinch didn't Continue to Senior, didn't Make Something of Himself. The regret that comes when you know you were meant for better than this, all this. For the brief time she could muster the energy after Nate's death, there were the sly insinuations, acid-laced and concealed in conversational tones, that if Flinch had been a better man he could have saved Nate, maybe wouldn't even have ended up a whaler in the first place.

Audrey was a persistent storyteller, following him into the bathroom and sitting on the toilet seat while he showered so that she could continue uninterrupted.

‘You know, when I was young they said I had the legs of Ginger Rogers. Lot of good it did me, eh? All I managed to attract was the scum of the pond — that bastard who fathered you, for instance.'

The cigarette stubbed out on the nylon bath mat. Audrey frowning and stomping it under the heel of her slipper until it smouldered. Brief foul smell of burning toxins.

‘And Lorelei, you know Lorelei, she'd always said to me to watch out for sailors and the like. Though she can hardly talk, look who she ended up marrying, and that daughter of hers is a mess now, ran away to Sydney and why wouldn't you when you consider the way Lorelei runs that house.'

The exhaled smoke was always trapped on Flinch's side of the shower curtain and he rarely bathed without coughing.

‘That reminds me, meant to drop into her place for coffee tomorrow. But my arthritis is playing up again, wouldn't you know it. Can hardly hold a teacup, that's what comes of working your life away in some factory just to get by and feed your child.'

A jumble of regrets and broken lives, over and over. Her voice grating up against his bare skin, the words a dull buzz in his head. He'd heard it all before. Occasionally she added something, rewrote the past a little to shift the spotlight, depending on her mood. Like an actress working out whether today she would be playing the role of the betrayed lover, the neglected daughter, the stoic mother, the glamorous youth, the child prodigy, the forsaken woman, harlot, heroine.

She required no feedback, no comment. Flinch was a receptacle for her acrid disappointments and that was all. She didn't ask for his opinion on any of it. Or on anything. When he tried to console her — he did right up until the end, he couldn't help himself, pleading with her over tight, greying hospital sheets — she would look at him blankly, pause, and continue as if he had not spoken. She never asked him a question unless she intended his answer to provide a launch for her own stories. Flinch grew to believe he had nothing to offer her. At first, on the boats, unused to being asked questions and unprepared to answer, he was also regarded as ‘a little bit slow'.

A little bit slow, the bloke with the short leg. But a good little fella.

The ocean taught Flinch that beautiful creatures can have painful stings. And sure enough, between the fishing and his near drowning, the sea seeped into Flinch's blood. A combination, perhaps, of his willingness to open his veins to it and some sort of genetic code in his makeup, courtesy of his father. He convinced himself that he felt it as it happened. The fluid thinning in his arteries.

‘How did you meet him?' he used to ask Audrey when she started on the topic of his father. She was not shy about the details. More than anything else, Audrey loved a rapt audience. Flinch knew the story almost by heart, though every now and then Audrey spiked it with more detail, which Flinch found irresistible and intoxicating.

‘Well, there I was in my red dress, just sitting with Lorelei at the Great Northern minding my own business. I had just ordered a glass of shandy. The sun was shining right in on me through the window and Lorelei says even to this day that I did look like an angel, just as he said I did when he came up to me.'

Flinch pictured his mother perched on a stool, auburn hair glinting in sunlight. He imagined his father as tall and muscular, dressed in a proper sailor's white uniform, clean-shaven, crease-free, though Audrey had told him otherwise. She described him fairly consistently as short and squat, dressed in a faded blue singlet and stained trousers, with a ginger moustache that had grown down below his jawline, a recent tattoo on his shoulder still scab and pus. But if she could describe herself as an angel, Flinch reasons, he could alter the image of his father, too.

‘Of course, he was a sweet talker.' She always said it.

‘He said I was the most sophisticated lady he'd ever come across.' This too.

‘Mongrel seaman.' The inevitable ending.

Flinch knew the script and had learnt from experience at which point she was going to need a few tissues into which to snivel. Poured more whisky into her coffee at the end of her monologue and watched her slip into her own world, slack and dull-eyed, sinking into the worn velour of the couch. Flinch turned the radio on and left her there. She was always in her own bed by morning.

Flinch figures that if she could slip away with such ease, maybe he can as well, so sometimes at night, in the dreamy half-world before sleep, he squeezes his eyes tight and forces himself back to some other place. Onto the boats, over the breakers, through to the sighting of the whale, the shining black mound rising above the surface of the water. The flensing floor and the stench of the vats. Hacking his way through sheets of blubber as thick as his torso. Finally to the pub, perching up on a stool, his bad leg dangling. Nate next to him, always.