Death of a Whaler (18 page)

The ticket seller has to sweep before he goes off duty.

‘Will you be right there, mate?' He talks to Flinch slowly, as if he suspects Flinch won't comprehend what he's saying. As if he's drunk or mad or slow or foreign.

‘Yeah, mate, ta.'

‘Righto,' says the ticket seller. Shuffles off. He brings Flinch a cup of steaming tea before he leaves. ‘Leftovers from the flask.' Almost heartbroken with gratitude, Flinch makes it last an hour.

He sleeps lightly, waking often, but except for a rat rustling around in a plastic bag and the creaking of the tracks as they contract in the cool of night, there are no disturbances, nobody comes around. Dawn expands quickly along the concrete platform like a sheet of light unfolded. Flinch wakes groggy and disoriented in the early morning heat. The grille on the door to the men's bathroom is locked, so he wanders to the edge of the platform and relieves himself there, checking over his shoulder in case the ticket seller returns early. He wipes his hands on his trousers.

The trip home is a blur. He is in and out of trains, moping around under the fluorescent lights of bus centres, picking at hot chips that taste like stale oil. Surrounded, it seems, by entire families carting pillows and suitcases, children with sticky faces overtired and bawling, people napping upright, their heads lolling forward and back.

On the bus back to the bay, he shuts his eyes, but on the verge of sleep he is jolted awake by the image of the kangaroo, its mangled legs, the shock of the impact.

When the bus finally reaches the bay, dusk has settled pink-hued over the town. The streets are empty, the workers knocked off and home, the surfers eking out a ride on the last few waves before it gets too dark. Flinch breathes deeply of the sea air, the wind flecked with sand grit and the briny smell of the ocean. White gulls, fat on chips and fish batter, shriek and wheel overhead towards the lighthouse. He is home. For the first time in his life, it smells to him like a haven.

Macca answers the door when he knocks. Grunts.

‘You made it back in one piece then.'

‘Yeah, guess so.'

‘Who is it?' calls Mrs Mac from inside. Flinch can smell grilled meat.

‘Flinch,' Macca yells over his shoulder. ‘Made it back in one piece.'

‘Hooroo, darl! Hope you had a lovely trip?'

‘Yeah,' calls Flinch. ‘Yeah, I did thanks, Mrs Mac.'

‘Where'd ya go?' Macca has his eyes half-closed, like he is expecting Flinch to lie.

‘Duchess.'

‘Duchess? That was where Nate was from, wasn't it?'

‘Yeah.'

‘Shit, eh. So what was it like?'

‘Like he described it, pretty much.'

Macca sticks his bottom lip out and nods.

‘You know someone else out there?'

‘Nah,' says Flinch. ‘I just wanted to see what it was like.'

‘Why?'

‘Change of scene. You know.'

Macca shrugs. ‘Good a reason as any, I guess.'

‘Yeah.'

‘Fixed your ute up a bit. She's getting a bit long in the tooth, isn't she?'

‘Thanks, Macca.'

‘Yeah, no worries. Anytime.'

‘Thanks.'

Macca sighs and scratches the back of his neck, inspects his fingernails afterwards and sniffs his fingers.

‘I'd better get going,' says Flinch.

‘Yeah, righto. Keys are in the ute. See you later, eh.'

‘Yeah,' says Flinch. ‘See ya.'

He is grateful to be able to climb into the sun-warmed creaking vinyl room of Milly's cabin. She chugs over reluctantly when he turns the key, but whatever Macca has done seems to have made a difference, because the engine doesn't sound like it is swallowing chunks of itself, clunking and rattling, like it did when he left her here. Macca's a good mate, he decides, in that don't-ask-don't-tell blokey kind of way. He stopped enquiring how Flinch was coping all these years after the repeated attempts at drawing Flinch out and the stoic rejections. So now he just has a go at fixing the obvious things Flinch leaves in his proximity. That's a gesture, though, from a man like Macca.

Flinch drives slowly through the town, along the beachfront road and up the hill towards the pastel house, windows wound down, savouring the familiarity of the journey, the grainy afternoon light, the eucalypts and banksias and horsetail oaks shadowing the road. When he pulls up outside the pastel house, Milly whirrs contentedly, as if she too recognises the place as home.

The door to the pastel house is rarely locked, but Flinch had bolted it when he left, after Karma said she wouldn't be staying. The lock is stiff, he has to lean against it, grunting, to unlock it. The door swings in rapidly when it opens and sends Flinch stumbling into the kitchen. He has to steady himself by grabbing the table. He pushes back the curtains, opens the windows. Outside he can hear the ocean roaring as it charges the shore. He gets himself a beer from the fridge — he had been sure to leave a sixpack in stock for his return — and settles himself on the couch. It is almost six pm. He turns on the radio. Static rolls like waves over the voice reading the news. Flinch sips at his beer. A goat wanders in the open door, takes a long look at Flinch and leaves again. Only halfway into his beer, Flinch settles into the couch and sleeps and sleeps and sleeps.

In the early hours he does not dream but is haunted by the reflections of his journey; an old man dying unseen, kewpie dolls in pink tutus, the sour scent of lantana, young Nate in sepia, the shadow that he cast over brown-grey fur as he lifted a rock above his head, the green blur of cane fields through a window. They run over and over like a reel of film, flipping in and out of order. He wakes still exhausted.

Even during wakefulness, without desire or conscious effort, he finds himself replaying the trip to Duchess in his head, scripting alternative endings, endings in which he confesses, in which the mother hugs and forgives him, in which the grown Eleanor arrives at the door and he is able to explain everything to the family with perfect clarity. Frustrated at the futility of these imaginings, he slips into the habit of waking up angry and staying that way for the entire day. When Milly won't start, he gets out and kicks her tyres. He chases the goats away with a rolled-up newspaper, and doesn't offer them the scraps from his meals anymore. When he leaves the house, they no longer follow him around the yard. They stand at a distance and stare at him with disapproving yellow eyes.

After dinner one night, he throws his plate across the room and it shatters against the wall, leaving a splatter of tomato sauce like the blood stain from a gunshot against the pale pink paint. He sits on the couch, stunned by his own action. Sauce dribbles thickly down the wall. Sharp-edged chunks of the plate lie upside down on the carpet. The house smells like burnt sausage.

He realises he is indulging his anger. Like Audrey did.

He had watched the anger and regret consume her as if she were its prey. Piece by bloody piece of her, ripping its way through bone and marrow. And he can feel the same things starting to consume him, in the same way. His heritage, the inherited failure. As if he is genetically predisposed to sorrow, the same way others end up with black hair or big ears.

He doesn't know what to do about it.

He contemplates, some nights, returning to Duchess and giving it another go — telling them, the ageing mother, the lost, whimpering father, that their son is dead. He wonders what Nate would have wanted. He flips open his copy of
Moby-Dick
the way faithful Christians flip open their Bibles, looking for hidden answers in the text, a message from Nate on the other side encoded in the prose.

On the first page he opens, he reads the lines:
Now, in general,
Stick to the boat
, is your true motto in
whaling; but cases will sometimes happen when
Leap from the boat
, is still better.

He thinks about this for a while, but can't work out what it might mean. So he opens another page, and reads
But no more of this blubbering now, we are going
a-whaling, and there is plenty of that yet to come.

He has a sneaking suspicion that, even from beyond the grave, Nate is poking fun at him. He gets angry at that, too.

Flinch is not ready for her when she arrives bruised and swollen on his doorstep. He had slept in, woken thickheaded, the tang of last night's rum and cola still on his tongue. Made a cup of tea, wrung the tea bag out over the sink in a way that allowed him to feel like he was strangling it. He had chased the goats down the hill with yesterday's rolled-up newspaper. Lay around in the dinghy for a while in the middle of the day when the sun was at its wretched worst, his hat over his eyes, allowing lethargy to set in. Sun-dazed and burnt, he'd headed back into the house and was napping on the couch, the radio buzzing in the background, when she knocked.

‘What happened?' His eyes crusty with sleep and sun, the afternoon hum of the hangover still in his head.

‘Jed.'

‘I thought he wasn't around much. I thought you didn't see him anymore.'

‘Can I come in?'

She looks like she's been caught in a storm. Hair in knots, the pale lines of old tears still glinting metallic on her cheeks. Her left eye is swollen shut, the bruise around it no longer the blue-purple it would have been a few days ago. Now the green of mushy peas and hail clouds.

‘Of course.' He steps back to let her through, and as she passes he feels the weight of her and more, how small she is, and brittle.

‘What happened?' he asks again, though he can guess enough.

‘We had an argument.'

‘At the commune?'

‘Yes.'

‘Where were the others?'

‘We were in my tent.' She sniffs and he hands her a tea towel. She blows her nose in it. Apologises.

‘Why?'

‘We kind of got back together. I thought he might have changed. I'm an idiot.'

‘It's not your fault.'

‘I, of all people, should know better.'

She is crying properly now and he is at a loss. This isn't like Audrey crying. She doesn't seem to want anything from him. At least, she's giving him no clues.

‘Cuppa?' he asks finally. ‘I'm making one.'

She nods.

‘It's just plain old tea,' he says.

She offers a weak smile. ‘That's okay,' she says. ‘Thank you.'

He makes up the bed in Audrey's room, taking care to shake the dust out of the blankets and smooth down the quilt, but when he sneaks a peek through the crack in the door later in the afternoon, he can see she has collapsed on top of all the covers, fully clothed, one sandal hanging off her foot.

Flinch has been getting by on toast and potato chips for dinner, washed down with a tall bottle of beer. He has been eating out in the yard, sitting on the grass, looking out to the ocean as if scouring the horizon for some passing ship that might sail in and rescue him. Sometimes, in the fading light, he has seen the fins of sharks rise and sink mechanically like submarines, their dark shapes slide by the surfers out near the breaks. He doesn't call out to the surfers. They wouldn't hear him anyway. Perhaps wouldn't care. They sit astride boards with legs dangling, laughing and talking until a set rolls in and delivers them in a white foam closer to shore. Some of them get dumped, sprain ankles and wrists, but while Flinch watches there are no attacks, nothing happens.

He has, sometimes, thrown his leftover chips to the gulls that crowd around him, bickering and jostling like old pub brawlers for the best position. He's only done it a few times but they seem to know already to congregate around him when he comes out at that time in the evening.

Karma, he is sure, will want more than bread and fried potatoes for dinner. He scans the cupboard for supplies. There's a tin of baked beans and he figures that's about as good as it will get. When he hears her stir, he puts a saucepan on the stove. She emerges from the bedroom looking dazed, though she's brushed her hair and pulled it back into a bun at the nape of her neck.