Death of a Whaler (20 page)

Karma spreads a sarong on the soft white sand and Flinch sits down next to her, fiddling with his fishing line and hooks. He hasn't been fishing for a while and he is almost shaking as he ties a knot in the line to secure the sinker, hearing all the while the ocean whispering its promise of bounty.

Kneeling in the shallows, it takes him a little while to bring a worm to the surface. Karma is nearby, wetting her ankles in the bubbly waves that rush up the beach. He finally spots his prey, and pulls the worm writhing and coiling from the sand.

‘Far out!' says Karma.

‘Cool, eh.'

‘What are you going to do with that?'

‘It's bait.'

‘But it's alive!'

‘Not for long.'

The worm bites him hard on the soft flesh between his thumb and forefinger. ‘Shit!'

‘Serves you right.'

Karma flicks her hair over her shoulder and retreats to her sarong, where she lies face down as Flinch snaps the worm's head off and baits the hook. He wonders how she will react when he brings the first fish, flapping and gasping, back to the bucket that he has placed near their things.

‘If it makes you feel better, I lose a lot of the bait to fish that get away, so I feed more fish than I reel in.'

She doesn't answer, but shifts her weight slightly on the sarong, and he figures this is as close as he's going to get to a blessing from her.

Flinch is usually lucky with fish. On the boats, they sometimes joked he had an unfair advantage, being the shortest on board and therefore closer to the water. Nate told him that his knack for fishing was a gift.

‘The universe responds to you, Flinch,' he had said. ‘Fishing is a spiritual activity. Christ proved himself time and again by fishing. Island religions tell of their deities fishing their islands out of the water, dragging them out of the depths to form landmasses. In many eastern cultures, fish were the embodiment of gods and spirits, and made deals of fortune with the men and women who caught them.'

‘Guess I had to be good at something, eh,' Flinch had replied.

But today they're not biting. Flinch catches a few small whiting but throws them back into the waves because they wouldn't be worth the effort of filleting. Karma watches him from the shore and he wonders if she thinks he is throwing them back in to please her. After a while, he sees her sitting cross-legged, her hands upturned on her knees, meditating. Flinch catches one decent-sized dart and decides to leave it at that, considering he's the only one who will eat it and Karma will be disapproving anyway. He figures he won't be able to convince her to hold the bucket on the way back, so when it's time to leave he balances it in the middle of the spare tyre in the tray of the ute, like he usually does.

As they are driving up towards the pastel house, Karma spots a whale out at sea and Flinch pulls over to the side of the road so that they can get out and watch its progress, the steady rise and fall of its massive back, appearing like a metallic island in the middle of the deep blue, then disappearing again as if the ocean was swallowing it like some rock of Atlantis.

‘They're amazing,' Karma says. ‘You like them too, don't you? You keep mentioning them, anyway.'

‘They remind me of things.'

‘What things?'

He shakes his head. ‘Another lifetime really. I used to be up close to them all the time. It was my job to spot them. Then we'd harpoon them. It would have been the worst job of my life, but it was really the best 'cos of my mates.'

‘You killed the whales? What? Around here?'

‘Yeah. We'd bring them up on Belongil Beach.'

She is silent. Flinch can feel her struggling with the concept. She doesn't move but leans slightly away from him.

‘I don't know how you did that,' she says finally.

‘Neither do I really. It was just a job. Like any butchery. Like killing cows for supermarket meat.'

‘But the whales are so huge, and wonderful, and special! It's not like killing a cow.'

‘I doubt the cow would share that opinion.'

Karma smiles despite herself. ‘No, probably not.'

They stand quietly and watch the whale sink out of sight. The dart in the bucket thrashes against the plastic as it dies.

When there was an argument on the whaling boats, about anything, Nate was sure to be involved. His knowledge seemed to cover most topics. Either that or he just managed to sound authoritative. But Flinch had seen the amount he read, the intensity with which he pursued even the most obscure topics, and he believed every word Nate said.

‘Fuckin' know-it-all,' Macca would growl, signalling an end to any conversation. Knowing but not admitting that he had been outwitted.

On the days when the sun shone crystalline through the water, splintering into shards below the surface, and the ocean was almost still, Flinch would wish they could just ignore the whales, call off the search, so that they could drink cold beer and lie on the deck in the warm morning sun, daydreaming and dozing to the lull of the sea.

‘Not likely, mate,' Macca had said when Flinch suggested it.

‘Unless there's a mass beaching,' said Nate. ‘Then we could just drag them up off the sand.'

‘Why do whales beach themselves?' Flinch had asked.

‘There are a number of theories, actually, but it remains a mysterious phenomenon.'

‘Christ, listen to it. Don't get him started, will ya?' Macca had pulled his hat low over his ears, spat overboard and wandered off.

‘All cetaceans can strand themselves ashore.'

‘All what?'

‘Cetaceans. Whales and dolphins.'

‘Oh. Yeah, right.'

‘There have been countless theories put forward. Acoustic testing that stuffs up their sense of distance and direction; parasites that clog the inner ear, meaning they can't navigate by sound, which is how they usually work out where they're going; magnetic field anomalies; social bonds in pods that dictate following a sick or dying animal to shore. Nobody knows for sure, really. But toothed whales strand more frequently than whales with baleen, so our humpback friends are usually okay.'

‘So we probably won't get a day off then?'

‘No.' Nate had smiled. ‘Probably not.'

As the whaling boat made its way back to the station, sailing parallel to the shoreline, Flinch could make out the top half of the Surfside Hotel over the dunes, the blurred pastel dots of scattered weatherboard cottages on promontories, the slender trunks of the coastal pines. That was all there was of the town. Since so much of the industry had shut down, it seemed to him that the town itself was beached here, had landed on the promise of greener pastures and was stranded now with no way back. Being slowly crushed under the weight of its own ambition.

Flinch used to despair sometimes for the fate of the bay, and he wondered whether it would ever recover, if people would ever again picnic on its beaches and share jokes with strangers in the local, like they did all those years ago when the pier was still standing and the big ships would cruise in and draw the crowds. Long before the blood of whales and farm beasts reddened the ocean and the whole place smelt like offal.

Nate wasn't so worried. ‘Life works in cycles, Flinch. Things will pick up.'

But he didn't sound convinced to Flinch, especially when the whales started to disappear, and the men spent the days of that last season pinned down by the unforgiving heat of the sun, the glare reflecting off their wristwatches when they checked to see if the time was passing any quicker.

Flinch is glad to see the whales back. He decides that it's a good sign for all of them.

THIRTEEN

After that first trip to the beach, Karma leaves the house more often. Flinch lets her take Milly, and sometimes she's gone by the time he gets up, and doesn't get back until he's fallen asleep on the couch listening to the six pm news.

‘I've got a job,' she says one morning.

‘Where?'

‘The surf shop. I'm working behind the counter.'

‘How'd you get that? What do you know about surfing?' He remembers the first time he saw her, her complete inability to read the wave and the dumping she received as a result.

‘Nothing. But I don't have to. I just find it easy to hook into the whole vibe, you know. The surfing subculture is not unlike that of a nomadic community; it embraces the concepts of freedom and connection to the planet, and I can dig that.'

Flinch looks at her, how lean and nut-brown she is these days, her eyes bright with health and enthusiasm, and figures they hired her because she is, as Nate would have said, one hot tamale.

‘And I know you're low on money, so I'm going to start paying you rent.'

‘You don't have to. You're a guest.'

‘You've been very kind, Flinch. But I want to. I want to be independent.'

‘Okay,' he shrugs. ‘Your choice though.'

‘Yep.' She smiles and brushes the hair from her face, pulls it back from where it is caught in her beaded necklaces.

‘And,' she says, ‘check out what I bought. A little pre-emptive since I don't get paid until next Thursday, but as it will contribute to the healing process, it is a justifiable purchase.'

From her shoulder bag, she produces a large sketchbook, a palette, tubes of oil paints and brushes.

‘I haven't done this for ages, but I used to sketch and paint quite a bit when I was a child. At one stage I dreamt of being an artist.'

‘That's nice.'

‘You should try it too. Very therapeutic.'

‘Nah,' says Flinch. ‘Don't need to while the fish are still biting.'

She shrugs. ‘Suit yourself.'

On the speckled laminex of the kitchen table, Karma cuts the paper into even rectangles and folds them in half.

‘Greeting cards,' she says when she sees Flinch watching her. ‘They said I could put a display up in the surf shop and see how they went. There are a few tourists and backpackers passing through these days, so you never know.'

She starts first with pencil sketches. Soft grey lines trace the outline of the lighthouse, the curl of a wave.

‘That's wrong,' says Flinch, when he looks over her shoulder at her sketch of a whale. ‘The pectoral fin is too high.'

She rubs out the fin with her eraser.

‘Here?' she asks, her pencil poised further down the body of the whale.

‘Yeah, and make it a bit longer.'

‘Hey, you're right,' she says. ‘Thanks.'

From then on she shows him her sketches before she fills them in with colour. Dolphins, sea turtles, manta rays, gulls and the whales. His days out on the boat, spotting, are put to use again as he recalls the observations he made out on the ocean, remembers the lessons the sea taught him. After he talks her through the details, he can taste salt water in his mouth.

Flinch counts the number of whales she draws. She's up to eleven. With each one he helps her shape, he feels he is restoring one that he spotted, harpooned. Recreating them. He feels a small chunk of his guilt break off and crumble into nothingness. The lightness that follows is disproportionate. He feels as if he could float.