Death of a Whaler (3 page)

One thing the short leg is good for — the uneven weight means extra pressure when he puts his right foot down. When he walks barefoot on the damp sand tiny bubbles erupt, reveal the location of ugaris. He finds a couple of big ones, wiggles deeper into the sand until he feels them under his toes, hard and smooth as pebbles. He smashes them on the sand further up the beach. The gulls hear the shells shatter and hover over him.

As the tide recedes he draws the flesh of the ugaris through the water and waits. He only wants one today and soon enough he sees it, the tiny white head, all gaping mouth and pincers. He is patient. The next wave rolls over and wets him where he squats. And the next. The angry white head flails in the rush of water, stretches out of the sand. When he sees a gap in the breaks, he takes precarious steps towards the worm, moves to the side of it and places the flesh of the ugari almost underneath it, careful not to touch. The worm grips the flesh, ready to drag it below the surface. He waits. There is the split second, as the worm arches for a greater tug on its meal, when it relaxes the hundreds of legs that otherwise act as powerful anchors to the underground. Flinch is quick. In that second, he pinches the worm and pulls it out of the sand. It's a good one. Thick as Flinch's little finger and as long as he is tall, knotting into indignant coils and offering a sharp bite to Flinch's thumb. The perfect bait.

He returns to the scrub where he has hidden his fishing rod. Surfers leave all kinds of things unattended on this beach while they are in the ocean. Some mornings, when the swell is best here, the soft, dry sand is a gallery of surfer paraphernalia. Tubs of wax, shoes, bottles of soft drink, abandoned clothes, thongs, bicycles, boards. But Flinch is precious about his rod. He always hides it somewhere. Under logs. Up trees.

Flinch settles himself behind the shrubbery, rolls his squirming bait in the sand to allow more grip. He squeezes its head off between his nails. The head is the best bit. If the fish don't take it, they're not out there.

From up the beach, wisps of a conversation and laughter. It's always been his instinct to hide from strangers, like some ill-treated family mutt. He squats low behind the shrubs, tucks his shrivelled leg beneath him so that he can lie flat and watch.

A woman and two men walk up the beach towards him, apparently looking for shade. They settle just near him, spread bright sarongs underneath the boughs of an acacia. Without even looking around, they strip down to nothing, and run laughing into the water. The men are fit and lean and young, and they move with the kind of ease that reminds Flinch of horses. The woman last in the water, lithe and brown as a seal. When she dives Flinch can see her buttocks above the water for a second, a bright white flash, like an unripe peach.

Near the shore, large dumpy water is ricocheting off the sandbar, behind which is the gutter streaming fish. The gulls still crying and cussing overhead. The men catch the waves as they curl under and break and they swim with them to shore, race back for the next set. The woman tries to bodysurf once, but she misses the crucial moment and is dumped by the wave — Flinch sees one foot then the other appear above the rush of white foam — before getting up, spluttering, long hair over her face and a piece of seaweed laced around her throat like a mermaid's necklace.

She calls to the men and they wave at her, and she heads in towards the beach. The men seem unconcerned by her nakedness, unfazed by it. How do men become that way, he wonders. He remembers his first and only experience with a naked woman; if anything, the whole incident had left him more curious and confused and excited than before.

As with all of Flinch's poignant moments, he remembers the smell of water. With her it was stale water, the kind left in vases or jars that has turned mouldy with the remnants of seaweed or the stems of dead flowers. Bovine and much larger than he was, when she clutched him to her chest that time his nose had lodged in the crook of her armpit, and he could smell her damp odour and talcum powder, a cocktail which at the time seemed both erotic and needlessly intimate.

She seemed to be always hiding something, tucking a brown paper bag into her satchel, fingering something in a pocket, concentrating so hard on it that her eyes glazed over. Flinch had recognised her straight away as another outsider, and avoided her. To schoolyard bullies, the only thing more attractive than one freak was two. If you grouped, you inherited the joint playground inadequacies of the entire gang. You weren't just a cripple then, you were also a nutter, loser, spaz, retard, dago, wog, coon, crybaby. She was teased cruelly in that way only teenagers understand, but she resisted by fondling the things in her pockets, crept off into some place inside herself. Flinch saw her retreat there, and some part of him was envious.

In his last year at school, there was a dance. Not much by most high school standards. The community hall decorated with tinsel left over from Christmas and lights covered with blue cellophane. The class of 1958 had, predictably, decided on an underwater theme. Dry fishing nets had been borrowed from the local fleet and, still smelling vaguely of the ocean floor, hung around the walls of the room, cardboard fish with shocked expressions woven between the nylon. When Flinch leaned against one, it felt gritty, and grains of sand fell to the floor beneath it. Flinch wore an eye-patch, pinned a cardboard skull and crossbones to his terry-towelling fishing hat, and tied his left leg to a block of wood.

He spent most of the early part of the evening against a wall sucking on a bottle of lemonade, watching the other kids dance. Then she entered the room. She was wearing a bikini top, massive breasts oozing out from under each cup, and a long silver skirt. Above her waist she wore a leather belt, to the back of which was pinned a cardboard cut-out of a dorsal fin. Flinch could see that she'd taken great care in making it. It was covered with the silver aluminium lids of milk bottles, each shaped and placed like a scale. Flinch estimated that to cover the fin she must have been collecting those lids since the theme had been decided at the beginning of the year. Over two hundred pints of milk had been consumed to decorate it.

When she stood in the entrance of the hall, the light flooding in around her, Flinch thought she looked like some great sea goddess arisen from the depths.

It wasn't long before the other kids started taunting her, laughing and pointing at the layers of flesh folded on top of one another over the waistband of her skirt.
Bring out the harpoon!
someone cried. The boys made a game of picking the silver caps off her fin and she had spun, her fists clenched, and swiped at them, making contact with two of them. She was on top of a third, beating him around the head, before a teacher managed to drag her off. Flinch had seen her eyes, seen something rise up within her and watched as she had come out of her secret place to defend herself. He was filled with admiration.

Ten minutes after she was sent home he found her crying quietly behind the woodworking shed, and half an hour after that he found himself squashed against her, enveloped by the expanse of her naked flesh, tilting his head right back as she bent over to kiss him wetly on the lips. He walked home later with shimmering aluminium scales stuck to his forearms.

The naked woman stretches out face down on the sand and Flinch, on his haunches now, rocks forward to peer through a gap in the shrubbery. Her ribs visible, rising almost imperceptibly, damp hair clumped to one side, the soft cushion of her breasts spread against the sand. She's no local. Flinch, scratching absent-mindedly at the familiar ache in his groin, guesses she's a leftover from the festival. From one of the hinterland communes.

The first group of newcomers had wandered into town — sandaled or bare-footed, some cloaked in orange, others in white like high priests or vestal virgins, some bald, some as hairy as apes, beards and hair down to their waists — the same month as the whales had started to appear in numbers again out in the bay. They had set up in and around Nimbin, first, where they had a festival, the beating of drums a pulse throughout the valley for an entire year. Flinch had heard stories of the festival while he was in one of his temporary jobs, at the meatworks. The farmers who dropped off their cattle and pigs for slaughter leaned over the fences of the stockyards, tipped their hats back, wiped their hands on their overalls and had a good chuckle with the butcher. There had been a friendly competition. Aquarians versus locals. A tug of war. The Nimbin team were national champions. District heroes. Farmers' sons used to shoving bulls around with their bare hands, tossing hay bales into lofts, riding the bucks out of difficult horses. All beef and beer gut.

The competition had been reported in the local newspaper because it was attended by the Deputy Prime Minister, the man in the black suit demanding progress. He'd been a dairy farmer from around here, once. A fact he liked to remind the voters, the little people, when they complained about the degradation of their land and livelihoods.

During the tug of war, a tightrope walker had sprung with feline agility onto the taut rope and walked the length of it, as if circus entertainers were nothing out of the ordinary in rural communities. The boys from the Nimbin team had been taken by surprise but despite this, and despite being outnumbered, they had won anyway. There was mud on the faces and clumped in the long hair of the Aquarians, but it all ended in laughter.

There were other stories, too. Rumours whispered among the ladies chattering and nodding like pigeons outside the church after the Sunday service. Of both men and women walking around topless in broad daylight. Of songs sung at dawn by thousands of people. Drumming that never ceased. Of a midnight concert. A grand piano on a platform in the middle of a cow paddock at night, reflecting a full moon. The pianist pounding out Mozart and Bach and Lennon and Dylan. One farmer claimed to have seen a silent sea of people wandering across his property in the pitch-black of night, candles and lanterns bobbing in the darkness like buoys on the water. People living in the treetops like apes. A woman dying to the sound of a chant that was intended to heal a venomous snake bite. Rasputinesque monks preaching from soapboxes. A jumble of images from tall stories. Flinch could not decipher the fact from the fiction, hence the whole festival became half-myth in his mind.

Mostly the Aquarians were students, but the ones still here appeared to have forgotten that they were due to return to university courses; pack up their pot, shave off their long hair and apply for jobs at the beginning of the new year. Flinch hears some of the townspeople whisper about them in the grocer's shop as if their arrival is some unspeakable disease.
Hippies
, they hiss, in the same tone reserved for when someone's son has gone to Sydney under the suspicion of being
ho-mo-sex-
ual
. The old biddies love an opportunity to be appalled. This is a town of blokes, loves, darls, fishermen and their wives, battlers, farmers, good decent clean-living folk. On the whole.

Flinch doesn't know what they are doing here, why they chose this place. On the main street, planks of wood barricade the windows and doors of shutdown businesses. The weatherboard houses rot in the heat and salt spray, white lace curtains stain brown and yellow. Behind the curtains, the old stayers, peering out through the tears in the lace. But the newcomers seem unaware of the slow disintegration of the town. Perhaps they just don't care. Or perhaps, Flinch suspects, they are blind to what he sees. A town coloured with memories of what used to be here.

The woman rolls over and sits up to gather her loose curls into a low knot at the back of her neck. She swivels around to reach for a scarf and Flinch, the backs of his knees sweaty with crouching, slips forward and clutches a branch to catch himself. It breaks off with a loud snap. The woman looks up and catches Flinch's eye. She smiles and waves at him. Flinch, horrified, scrambles back up the hill on hands and feet like a lame dog. It is only when he reaches the ute that he realises he has left his fishing rod at the base of the hill. His penance for peeping.