Death of a Whaler (2 page)

Nate's family didn't make it to his funeral. The priest said he would send a letter to an address they found in his belongings. It wasn't a complete address. Just the name and postcode of some small town none of them could point to on a map. Under the address there was one word. Eleanor. No last name. No indication of whether she was a wife or a mother or a girlfriend.

Flinch didn't realise how little he knew about Nate until he was dead, and then the questions filling his throat rose so often that they grew stale and tasted of bile. They'd spent every night together drinking, indulging Nate's love of tiny glasses of cold beer, Flinch's standard of a nip or two of rum. More often than not they were the last to leave, occasionally hurled by management onto the grass across the road, where they'd lie on their backs and philosophise in the way they could only when they were utterly drunk, the connections in their logic loose and flexible, the truths they found startling and profound. Flinch, stumbling back to his bed in the old pastel house, would try to remember those truths until the morning, sing them like a mantra until he fell asleep, but when daylight rolled around they were gone.

Nate was the first person with whom Flinch had spent any decent amount of time talking. The old stories again and again about the biggest whales, the difficult catches, the harpoonist who was so hung-over one day he blew up a rowboat that had swept loose of its moorings. Comfortable words. Stories worn and traded like old coats. Putting them on after a drink or two and recognising each other in them.

But these stories give Flinch no comfort now. They are cold and misfit, threadbare without Nate to weave his part. The questions Flinch wants to ask him now are the type the one bored police-rounds reporter asked him after the funeral.

Who was he? Where did he come from? Why was he here?

And there are the other ones, the ones that have stayed with Flinch, the ones the reporter asked with a glint of malice in his eye and his pen poised, but which Flinch didn't answer then, and can't yet.

You were holding the knife that killed him, weren't you? Can you live with the guilt? Will you ever forgive yourself, Flinch?

NATE

The pain first. But it is brief, a second, and then it is
something beyond that, a chill that shudders through me so
violent I lose control of my bowels and a scream gets stuck in
my throat. My body's confusion at being forced open, at the
intrusion of the blade. My brain is in a thick fog until I realise
with a jolt, with a perfect clarity that sears straight through me
— it is a knife in my back. I have been stabbed and it is the
tip of the knife that I feel up against a rib, scraping the bone.

I feel him behind me, my friend. Flinch is touching me
on the shoulder and I am propped up against him, as if
I were his puppet, the knife is his hand inside me. The knife
exits and I feel it slip through the flesh, through parts of me
that have been severed, and I think I land on my knees, at
least I'm lower now. I'm staring right at the whale, right into
her side, her blue-grey skin, its barnacles and crevices filling
up with her blood.

Then I fall I feel I fall for a million miles until my
cheek is against the flensing floor and I'm lying in blood, but
it is not mine and I tell myself this because surely if it is not
mine I will be alright. I tell Flinch ‘I have lived through
worse, believe me' but he is looking at me pale-faced and
doesn't seem to hear.

Hands on me, someone rolls me onto my side. I see the
knife that has fallen from Flinch's hand and as shadows fall
over me and move away the sun catches the blade and it
flashes a wicked bright wink at me. He is here still, Flinch,
he is next to me. I feel cold, I tell him and he nods and I can
see that he is crying. Nothing new. I've seen him cry before.
Old Flinch a soul too soft for his own good. Easily moved
by the most subtle and strange events. Lost children. Red
sunsets. Fresh roadkill. God knows.

A voice tells me that a doctor has been called, the police
too. They should call Eleanor, I think. If it's that serious.

At the thought of her, fear pulses through me and I try
to call to Flinch but my heart is in my mouth like a huge
lump of meat and I choke on the taste of it. I can feel my
blood being pumped through the vessels in my brain, the cold
place in my back where I am severed, the whole mess of my
insides leaking out of me like a sack sliced open its contents
spilling onto the ground.

Eleanor, I yell to Flinch, but all that comes out is a
gush of thick red blood. Bubbles at the side of my mouth. You
have to let Eleanor know!

The pain has numbed but now the fear is enveloping
me, weighing me down like a cold wet blanket. I struggle
against it, try to wrench free. I am exhausted but I kick and I
use my elbows. It is no good, my struggle futile. As soon as
I move there are more hands on me and the voices telling me
that I must stay still.

Stay still!

I can tell that they are scared I might die. But I will
not stay still and I lunge in Flinch's direction and that's
when the others block him from my view and take him away.

Eleanor Eleanor Eleanor Eleanor.

The memories of her are sucked to the surface like a
leech draws blood to the skin. My head feels bloated with
them. My entire body, numb just before, is now singing with
the thought of her like a string pulled taut.

I need her and the desire is extreme enough to make
me retch.

And then I see her as if she was before me. Blessed or
cursed with an optimism that was ridiculed in our house, and
though she quickly learned to hide it from them she shared
it with me and her eventual freedom became our secret focus.
I am with her under the spiked branches of the lantana
bushes in our backyard, where we carved a hiding hole. It
took us the three full days of a Labour Day long weekend,
with only the carving knife from the kitchen and my pocketknife
as our tools. The earth under the bush was hard so we
stole blankets from neighbourhood clothes lines and carpeted
our dirt floor with them. From the local dump we took some
cushions from a flea-ridden couch that had been abandoned
there. We itched and scratched like mongrels after every secret
meeting in the lantana, but the red welts were worth the
temporary escape. Every child hides but some children have
more reason to than others.

The constable is bending over me. He is pallid. Milky
and green and damp with sweat. I've had a run in or two
with him but nothing serious. I know he thinks I'm odd and
I guess I am. He's a good bloke. He probably hasn't watched
too many men die and I know I'm bleeding onto his hands.

‘The doctor is coming,' he says when my eyes flicker.
‘Hold on, son.'

God knows I haven't been much of a son to anybody,
but then again I've never had much of a father.

I wonder how long it takes for a man to die.

TWO

Byron Bay, 1975

Now here he is, driving up towards the lighthouse — that white, ocean-side phallus perched on the highest rock on the easternmost point of a continent that is, for the most, parched. Fringed on this side by rainforest, it slides into the ocean on the white sand of ground-down coral reefs. This coastline bulges towards the tropics, its fat man's belly sagging between the Coral Sea and the Tasman and into the depths of the Pacific.

The ute is chugging its way up the hillside, farting black smoke and grit from its muffler. Flinch crouches forward over the steering wheel as if the shift in his weight will make a difference to his chances of making it up the winding road. But the old girl spits and dies a groaning, shuddering death and rolls backwards a few metres before he catches her, slams his good foot on the brake and his other onto the wooden block that he's attached to the clutch with string and masking tape. He lets her roll back onto the thin strip of sand at the side of the road. The rubber pieces of his thongs wet between the toes, slippery with sweat. He skids on his short leg as he gets out to check the engine.

He has to pound his hip against the bonnet to get it to open. No easy feat for a lopsided man on a hill. The latch jiggles apart and Flinch props the bonnet up with the broomstick handle that he keeps in the tray for the regular occasions on which he has to fiddle with some part of the greasy old engine. His shaggy fringe in his eyes as he leans into the car.

This wind is roaring around the headland, bellowing with its mouth wide open. Vast, stinging waves of sand ripple up the open stretch of Tallow Beach and gulls stall, flapping, midair. The wind gusts in towards the point, making thin work of the streaky clouds. It has been born in those damp islands to the east, where hurricanes drop in like distant relatives who visit at the same time each year and cause the expected havoc. The wind isn't up to shredding palm trees when it arrives at the bay, but Flinch can smell the intention on its breath and he hates it anyway.

Flinch has never been good with cars. Never claimed to be one of those men who can slide under a vehicle and reach their hands into its guts and tinker around until an engine bursts to life. He wishes he could have learnt to be handy with a screwdriver but it just never came easy to him as it did to many other boys. When he grew old enough to mow lawns with the stinking, spluttering two-stroke, work the cantankerous washing machine, strike up the outboard motor on his barnacled little dinghy, he would watch bolts rust and smoke stream from cracks and not know how to go about fixing these things. His mother, by that time expert at seeking out the cracks in Flinch, would bemoan the fact that there was not a real man about the house to look after things properly. At first, feeling her manicured nails prying at pieces of him, Flinch tried. He oiled things, got grease in the crevices of his knuckles. Burnt his forearm on the outboard motor when he tried to fix it before it had cooled. Wore that scar like a badge. He made sure his mother could see it when he went to the fridge for butter to soothe it. The first three letters of the motor brand seared into his skin.

‘Put it away,' she had said, without looking up.

Finally, unable to fix the internal mechanics of either his equipment or his relationship with his mother, he gave up trying anything more.

Flinch has learnt what he's had to do to keep the ute running for the past few years of its life — a progressively longer list of band-aid solutions to ensure she will get him most places around the bay as long as he doesn't push her too hard or too long. He calls her Milly and talks to her, urges her up inclines and flatters her into chugging awake on cold mornings. A bottle of fresh water and a big container of oil, both of which he keeps in the tray of the ute along with the broomstick, solve a lot of the problems but he recognises that there's nothing he can do right now. This is something new.

The wind dies off for a moment. Sky mumbles something about rain.

Flinch staggers to the side of the road and pushes himself up on the toes of his good foot so that he can see the ocean over the banksias and scrawny seaside scrub. The sun finds a gap in the clouds and the heat on his back is instant and scorching. The ocean glistens in the afternoon light. There's a deep gutter fairly close to shore that will be vacuuming surrounding schools of fish and passing them through it with the force of the tide, and he can see the gulls hovering and diving into the black water then flying off, each mouth filled with a shimmering fish.

Turning his back on the ocean, he returns to the car and leans against the bonnet. The heat of the metal sears the backs of his thighs through his shorts. Crickets whirr in the scrub. The sun like a white noise itself. He slumps against the tyre, shades his eyes like a salute. He could wait hours on this road before somebody passes. And it would take him an hour to walk back to town. Hobble down the hill and limp through the streets to the mechanic's garage, dragging his bung leg like a parody. Some medieval town fool.

Or. The black water, the gutter. In his mind an abundance of fish, shiny whiting with golden fins. He feels that itch for the tug of the line on his finger, anticipates the tease of the catch as the reel spins, the line singing with pleasure.

The rod is in the back of the ute, wedged under a deflated spare tyre, next to a foul-smelling canvas travel bag. He dislodges the rod and slams the tray door closed with a thump, recoils from the odour, stumbles, almost falls backwards down the hillside behind him. Cusses again at the balance that eludes him even after years of willing himself to stand upright on freshly scrubbed decks.

Sweat-soaked by now, the rod slippery in his grip, he decides the best way down the incline to the shore is to sit down and slide. He removes his thongs and slips them between his fingers, over the palms of his hands, shoves his reel under his armpit and lowers himself onto the loose gravel of the hillside. He propels himself forward by pushing himself along with his hands. Still muscled in his upper body, the days of hauling his own body weight up to the crow's nest with the aid of only one good leg have stayed with him. Strong as his nostalgia.

He leaves his rod and thongs at the base of the hill, concealed in the stiff grey shrubbery, and makes his way to the damp sand. The ocean rough and churned russet from the wind and a gnashing tide. Smooth rocks and shells in the dazzling thousands along the shore. A decorated beach. It's a moody stretch. One day naked and clean as a fresh white sheet, other days like it's vomited up the entire contents of its watery belly, stinking dead fish and seaweed, rotting coconuts, lost fishing nets, an entire tree with its root system intact. Mutton birds with broken wings floating on the breakers.