Death of a Whaler (6 page)

Karma sings with the kind of unabashed enthusiasm that Flinch has otherwise seen only in drunks. It makes him uncomfortable. He winds down the window and warm salty air rushes in and fills the cabin. Karma sings louder so that she can hear herself over the coughing engine of the ute.

‘Towards Nimbin, right?' Flinch asks, almost yelling.

Karma smiles and nods. She stops singing and hums for a while instead.

As they head towards the hinterland hills, over winding roads that are mostly sand and gravel, the haze of the ocean air dissipates to allow clear-cut views of the distant mountains. From lush paddocks, black-and-white cows lift their heads and stare blankly at them as they approach, the ute belching and gagging her way up the range. Small creeks full with the previous night's rainfall bubble through gullies, wash pebbles and small green frogs onto the road.

Flinch tries to sneak looks at her while he drives, with his peripheral vision tries to gauge when she's looking out the window so that he can catch a glimpse of her. She seems to him so unconcerned. With anything. While he leans forward when they go up hills, his hands slippery on the steering wheel, Milly grumbling and threatening to give up halfway, she sways from side to side to the tune she is humming. She doesn't seem worried about being in a car with a skewed little man she has only just met. Her trust in him, in human nature, is quite beyond him and he is astounded and suddenly feels responsible for her. Carelessness is a concept Flinch has never understood, having struggled all of his childhood to keep his head above the flood of Audrey's anguish and self-pity. Now heaving around the weight of his guilt, lifting it when he walks and dropping it briefly when he pauses, like an anchor. He decides she is either stupid or enlightened but he is unsure which is more likely.

‘Did you go to the festival?' she asks him suddenly.

‘Um, no. Don't come to the mountains much.'

‘Oh, baby, you don't know what you missed.' She winks. Flinch blushes hot red. ‘You would have loved it, man. It was just all about joy.'

Flinch nods quietly. He wants to tell her that joy is something he doesn't deserve, but she is almost aglow with a quiet enthusiasm and he decides that that particular story is too long to tell now anyway.

‘Where are you from?' she asks him.

‘From?'

‘Yeah, like, where did you come from?'

‘Oh, right. Well, here. Grew up around the bay. Never been anywhere else, really.'

‘Cool. Why would you, I guess.'

They drive from the baking paddocks into a gully, its cool wet shadow.

‘Turn here,' she says.

A driveway near-hidden by brush and long grass, barely wide enough for the ute. Next to it, a timber letterbox, the words
Nim Eden
in white letters on the side, a small rainbow painted over them. The gully is swamp and rainforest, thick dark green and rank with the smell of mud and decaying foliage. Gnats swarm into the car, fly into their eyeballs, up their noses. Flinch wipes his face with the back of his hand and mashes several black spots into the corners of his eyes. The wheels of the ute churn in the mud. Flecks across the windscreen like sprayed paint.

A low-running creek trickles across the path and soon after the rainforest gives way to an open field, a sudden exposure to the glare of the day after the dank tunnel of ferns, palms and cedar.

‘Pull up over there,' says Karma, pointing to a large fig tree, branches sprawled against the sky. ‘It's dry and shady. It's on higher ground.'

Flinch slows the ute down to a crawl and Milly moans and whirrs and sizzles. Flinch knows she's probably overheating. He's a bit surprised she got them this far without more of a protest.

The field they've arrived in backs into the dark shade of a casuarina grove. In front of the grove are tents in all shapes and sizes. Sturdy round yurts. Lean-tos made of sheets of bark and palm fronds. A large rectangular room made up of hay bales and roofed with corrugated iron. Dome structures.

There is an entrance way of sorts. An arbour covered with multicoloured rectangular flags. On either side of it, two long bamboo poles with bright pink and blue streamers that flutter in the breeze. Strung up in the highest branches of the casuarina trees are a number of large banners, painted with different slogans.

No war.

Protect and love the Earth, it's the only one we have.

It will pass, whatever it is.

It is midafternoon, the commune quiet. People lie in hammocks that are strung between trees, sleep on hessian sacks in the shade. Nearby, a man leans against a hay bale, reading and smoking from a hookah. A group of women huddle around a table outside a yurt, cutting up vegetables. Dirty-faced naked children chase each other around a garden of wilting lettuces, throw clumps of mud at each other. To Flinch, the people here look as if they are somehow shipwrecked. Marooned inland. Unkempt and unassuming, with nowhere to go, nothing urgent to do.

‘C'mon,' says Karma, getting out of the ute. ‘Come and meet everyone.'

‘No, I'm right,' says Flinch quickly. ‘Not today.'

‘Oh, come on,' she says. ‘You'll like it here, I can guarantee it.' Flinch looks over at the commune. Two young men in flowing white trousers are walking towards the car, laughing and talking. ‘It's paradise, you'll see.'

If he thought Milly could do it, he'd start her up and floor it now, speed off and leave them chewing on his dust. But he knows she'll need to cool down a bit and he'll probably need to get out to top up her water anyway.

‘Okay.'With a deep sigh.

He swings his good leg out and pulls the other one around with his hand to hurry the process. Tries to swallow down the reluctance, knowing what's to come. The stolen glances at his leg and torso, the cautious curiosity, uncertainty at how far the impediment spreads, monosyllabic words spoken slowly, even when people are trying to be polite.

One of the men rushes towards Karma and picks her up. Flinch can see their tongues as they kiss openmouthed.

‘Hey, baby, we were just going to start looking for you.' Eyeing Flinch when he says this, the suspicious sideways glance.

‘No, it's cool,' says Karma. ‘Flinch gave me a ride. The store up the road was out of rice so I managed to catch a ride to the bay, and Flinch drove me back.'

The young man lowers her to the ground. He's shirtless, hard muscle, deeply tanned to the waist. Evidence, Flinch guesses, of long hours labouring in the sun without a shirt or hat. Something the local fishermen would never do, be seen without a faithful terry-towelling hat or a cap, their skin bronzed exactly to the edges of rolled-up flannel shirtsleeves.

‘Where did you meet Flinch?' Asking her, looking at him. An inspection that makes Flinch feel like he's being pressed against a cool hard surface.

‘By the hardware store, hey, Flinch?'

‘It's not there anymore, but,' says Flinch.

‘Hey, you hungry, Flinch?' The other man steps forward and places a hand on Flinch's shoulder. Leaves it there, waiting for the response. It's a gesture that Flinch finds off-putting. Among the fishermen, no matter how much you admired a man, no matter how good a friend you were, you didn't touch him except to knock his cap off as a joke, punch a shoulder affectionately.

‘No,' Flinch says quickly. The hand stays there.

‘Sure? There's plenty of food around today.'

‘Yeah, I'm sure.'

‘Okay, then. Thirsty maybe? You could come hang out with us for a while in any case, relax a little after the drive.'

‘No, I'm good, thanks anyway.'

The man takes his hand away. ‘Well, thanks for dropping Karma home. I'm Matt. This is Jed.'

The muscled man. Jed flicks his chin up, an acknowledgement not impolite, but not welcoming. Matt fiddles with the hair at the nape of his neck, rolling it around his finger. It is shoulder length, clumped in cocoon-shaped dreadlocks. Oily at the roots.

‘I have to head back,' says Flinch. ‘Nice to meet you blokes.'

‘You're welcome any time, mate. Come back and visit. We're having concerts every night at the moment. It's wild.'

‘Yeah, maybe another night. I have to get back.'

As he turns around to get into the driver's seat, he hears Karma laughing and the two men talking in low voices. Milly has cooled down enough and he decides to take the risk of not checking the engine. He just wants to leave. He begs her quietly from between pursed lips and finally the old ute rasps to life. He waves as he drives off.

‘Come back, won't you, Flinch?' he hears Karma call after him. ‘We'll be expecting you!'

A few miles out of Nimbin, as the sun is setting, Milly finally breaks down and refuses to turn over, and no amount of water, oil or apologising will bring her round. Flinch is not unprepared for this, though he wishes he was closer to the bay. He removes the front bench seat from the cabin and puts it into the tray. He keeps a worn blanket rolled up in the back, for days when the chill gets to him after an afternoon fishing thigh-deep in the ocean. It smells mouldy and has a large hole in it where one of the goats has chewed through it, but it will do for the night.

In his fishing bag he keeps a bottle of rum, ostensibly also to warm him up on cold days, but more often than not consumed even on humid evenings. It's still half full. Flinch offers thanks for small mercies.

He lies in the back of the tray, wide awake. Overhead the stars punctuate the solid, dark prose of night. They sharpen and blur as Flinch sucks down the rum, focusing on one bright point until all others disappear, then shutting his eyes and starting over. In the distance there is drumming and an indistinct chanting. He would like to go back, he thinks. Would like to see what it is like, so many people living together, all trying to make a new world out of the wilderness. Matt and Karma were both welcoming to him. He has already decided he would stay away from Jed. Years of quiet observation have nurtured in him an accurate gauge of others' dislike and discomfort, feelings he knows best from a childhood with Audrey, later because of his leg, and after that because he'd killed a man and allowed that fact to become a feature of himself, like others accept a big nose or bright red hair. Some people notice his wariness, that guilt, immediately and look away politely, walk away quickly, not trusting what it might be that made him that way.

He rolls over on the bench seat and pulls the blanket up over his shoulders. From the direction of the commune, a loud gong sounds. The drumming resumes. They were friendly, Flinch decides, insistent even. But he hasn't had a proper friend since he buried Nate. He wouldn't know where to start.

FIVE

Although Flinch doesn't make a conscious decision to return to the commune, over the next few weeks he tinkers with Milly's engine, better equips her for a long drive. He washes his mouldy blanket and hangs it out on his rusty old clothes line to dry in the ocean breeze. A goat chews a second hole through one corner of it.

Occasionally he sees a few of the hippies in town, or on the beach. He looks for Karma among the small groups of women with flowing skirts and long hair, but he doesn't see her again.

A cake tin that he keeps in his sock drawer holds all of his accumulated wealth. Money he saved from working on the boats, a very old penny that he'd found on the beach one day and thinks might be worth something, and the bullets that he'd retrieved from some of the whales. They'd been lodged into the blubber, metal cylinders as long as his hand, from Russia, Japan and England, remnants of the times they had escaped the flensing floor before they met their fate at the end of the harpoon. At the bottom of the tin, he keeps bits and pieces that once belonged to Audrey. There wasn't too much left after she passed on. A blue sapphire ring that he suspects is fake. A pearl necklace. A pale pink scarf that still smells of her, that suffocating combination of hairspray, musk and cigarette smoke. A single photo of Audrey as a young woman, on the beach, smiling in a way that Flinch never himself witnessed.

The money is starting to run low. He is a good saver and he gets by on very little, but he hasn't worked much since the accident. A token job here and there when Milly needed repairs or when he needed new fishing line. One season picking fruit. Another cracking macadamia nuts. A month fencing paddocks. A few weeks repairing fishing nets.

Where Karma is living, at the commune, they don't even have real money. They have made up their own currency. During the car ride to Nimbin, she had taken some stuffed paper out of her skirt pocket to show him. ‘It's a concept we carried on from the festival,' she said. ‘We call them Nimbungs. Nobody gets greedy over Nimbungs.'

She explained that everyone got the same wage whatever they did during the day, however they worked, and people donated as much as they could afford towards the meals. Nobody went hungry.

‘But don't people store them up?' Flinch had asked. ‘Don't they save?'

‘What's the point?' Karma had responded. ‘Everything good about living at the commune is free. Music. Philosophy. Poetry. Knowledge. Love.' She had winked but Flinch wasn't sure why. He thought she might have a tic of some kind.

The concept of Nimbungs struck Flinch as strange, but not as strange as receiving someone's love for free. Flinch had never been given love for free. He had to pay for even the slightest brush up against it from Audrey by first swallowing her bitter tales of defeat and depression. With the fishing blokes, well, that wasn't love. More like respect. Mateship, maybe. He thinks he might have loved Nate. He never had a brother, but that's what he imagined he would have felt if he had.

He still talks to Nate. Lately more than ever. Last week, in the grocery store, he found himself discussing the unseasonal heat, asking Nate if he could remember a year like this one. The whole conversation without realising he was talking out loud. His thoughts interrupted by someone nearby coughing. Then the furtive glances of the other shoppers. A mother had hurried her child past him.