Death of a Whaler (19 page)

‘Beans on toast,' he says. He puts the plate in front of her, steam rising from it, and hands her a knife and fork. She eats without saying anything, scrapes the plate clean. He watches her from across the table.

‘Aren't you eating yours?'

‘Yeah, just waiting for them to cool a bit.'

She shrugs. ‘That went down a treat. Thank you.'

‘No worries,' says Flinch.

She goes to the bathroom. Flinch hears the toilet flush, then the shower running. She walks back through the kitchen wrapped in a towel, her bare shoulders glistening with drops of water, and Flinch can see she is hunched around herself, concave, her collarbones protruding. She shuts the door to Audrey's bedroom.

Flinch eats his beans. Retreats to the couch. He unscrews the cap from the rum bottle but doesn't pour anything into the tumbler. The radio whines with old songs of heartache. Somehow the house feels empty. Haunted, perhaps. And it is, thinks Flinch; but aren't all houses, sometimes even by the living?

Karma spends most days sleeping. She shuts Flinch out of the room, and Flinch, his ear pressed to the door, hears her crying softly, or snoring. He dutifully makes her breakfast and dinner, which she eats mechanically, always thanking him politely and then retreating into the shadows of the bedroom. She doesn't come out for lunch.

Forced out of his own funk of temper tantrums and frustration, Flinch is resentful, in a way, that she is the one who gets to be like this and that he has to look after her. He hadn't finished, with the anger, with the regret. But he suspects that if he doesn't feed her, she'll starve herself. He can see it in her, the determined apathy. Flinch runs out of bread and milk and beans and drives into town to buy some more.

He bumps into Macca at the store. He's buying bait. Lazy old bastard, thinks Flinch. They used to laugh at the out-of-towners who did that and it was an unspoken assumption that real fishermen found their own bait.

‘G'day, Flinch.'

‘Yeah, g'day, Macca.'

‘Rumour has it you got yourself a girl.'

Flinch is startled. But it's a small town and he guesses Karma must have passed through here on the way to the pastel house, maybe asked for a ride. He hadn't asked her how she got there. He'd assumed she'd walked, but maybe she wasn't up to it.

‘Not really.'

‘What's
not really
mean? You either got a girl or you don't.'

‘She's a friend,' says Flinch. ‘She's just staying with me until she finds somewhere else.'

Macca gives him a knowing wink. ‘Yeah, righto, mate.'

Flinch shifts his weight, feeling awkward, his back and shoulders suddenly aching with his involvement.

‘Going fishing?' he says eventually.

‘Yeah, y'know. Just getting out of the house. The missus.' Macca doesn't elaborate.

‘What'd ya get?'

Macca looks embarrassed, as if he's been caught perusing the aisle that holds the porn magazines and condoms.

‘Squid.'

‘Aw, right. Heard where they're biting?'

Macca scratches his bum with his spare hand. ‘Nah. Just thought I'd chuck a line in. Y'know.'

Flinch knows. In his self-imposed isolation, he has missed that sense of calm, the connection from self to the vast ocean by a near-invisible thread, casting as if to propel a life's worries into the waves, to be taken out on the tide. He guesses Karma would call it a cleansing ritual.

‘Good luck, eh. Say hi to Mrs Mac.'

Macca snorts. ‘Yeah, righto. See ya.'

On his way back through the town, Flinch notices a few changes. The hardware store has reopened as a surf shop. Sleek, gleaming boards are lined up neatly like soldiers inside the window. Most of the surfers who drive to the bay are from the cities down south. Articulate suburban boys with blonde fluff over their lips and on their chins. Uniformly sporting unbrushed hair to their shoulders, tight T-shirts and a well-rehearsed air of nonchalance. Wearing Speedos and thongs into the grocery stores when they get to the coast, as if this might help them fit in to the fishing villages. Blaring the Bee Gees and Neil Sedaka and the Rolling Stones from crackling car radios. Flinch avoids them. In the town the division between locals and tourists is as solid as a wall and both sides regard the other through peepholes in it. There are more people out on the street, peering in shop windows, eating ice-cream, laughing, holding the hands of children in swimming togs, plastic buckets and beach towels hung over arms and shoulders.

There's a breeze blowing in off the ocean and as Flinch looks around the streets he feels a slight shift, in himself maybe, or in the town, or both.

But on his return to the house, all he can sense is the staleness of her sorrow. The doldrums is what Nate used to call it. ‘Slightly north of the equator,' he had said. ‘Right smack bang between two trade winds.'

‘I'm just a bit stuck,' Flinch had replied. Another exhausting round with Audrey the night before still upon him, wearing the blame like an overcoat, unable to shrug it off.

‘Too right, and no wonder,' Nate had said. ‘The doldrums are noted for extended periods of calm, when the winds completely disappear and sailing vessels are trapped for days, even weeks.'

‘I'll be right,' said Flinch.

‘You will,' Nate had said, leaning closer. ‘Because despite overcast skies and high humidity, the pure discomfort of the place, hurricanes originate there. Big, powerful storms that churn away over entire oceans, and everything in their path is shattered by their might. That could be you, Flinch.'

Flinch didn't see it, but had nodded anyway.

‘Cheers,' said Nate. ‘Here's to the wind picking up.' They had clinked their beer glasses.

‘You're in the doldrums,' he says to Karma that night when she is eating the dinner he's made her.

She pauses midway through her mouthful and looks up as if noticing him there for the first time. ‘How funny that you should say that. Yes. Yes, I guess I am.'

Flinch grins. He can't help it. It's the most she's said to him in a week or two.

‘Do you want to listen to the radio after? When you've eaten?'

‘Okay,' she says. ‘Can't hurt, can it?'

The radio has been on the same station all of Flinch's life. When Audrey was around, and since. Flinch knows the schedule, when to tune in to get the news, the tide times, the golden oldies.

‘Bit dull, isn't it?' says Karma, when Flinch has turned it on. She kneels in front of it and starts fiddling with the dials. The radio squeals and hisses and Flinch feels something akin to panic.

‘Oh,' says Karma, homing in on a new station, ‘Simon and Garfunkel. I love them, don't you?'

‘Yeah,' says Flinch. ‘They're great.' But he's not sure who they are or whether he loves them.

They sit sipping tea for a while, Karma cross-legged on a cushion on the floor, staring through the window at the darkening sky, Flinch slumped awkwardly on the far end of the couch.

‘I had to leave, you know,' she says, when the song on the radio ends. Flinch turns down the volume. ‘Did they ask you to?'

‘They? The others? No. I just couldn't stay.'

‘Because of Jed? Was he still there?'

‘No. He was asked to leave and he won't ever be welcome back. Violence is frowned upon, it's against the general community philosophy. Most of us ended up there in the first place because of shared anti-war sentiments. We knew violence was not a solution, on a personal or a political level.'

‘So he was banished.'

‘Yes,' she laughs. ‘I guess you could say that. We were both forced out of Eden. Your garden variety, modern-day Adam and Eve.'

‘So why did you go?'

She sighs. ‘I guess because I realised that there will be no safe haven for me there or elsewhere until I understand what it is that makes me put myself at risk. Do you know what I mean?'

‘Kind of,' says Flinch. ‘I always did think you were hiding out there.'

She smiles. ‘I was, in a way.'

‘And why did you come here — I mean, to my place? Don't you have anywhere else to go?'

‘Do you mind?'

‘No. It's just … don't you have any other friends?'

She looks away from him. Rocks gently in time with the music, her arms encircling her knees. ‘I do. But not around here. All my other friends are still at the commune. I want to stay in the bay for a while. I just don't feel ready to move on yet. Are you sure it's okay?'

‘Yeah,' he says. ‘It's okay. Till you, you know, find your feet.'

‘Hoping to find more than that.' She sighs and smiles at him but he can't read what she is feeling. Flinch decides against asking her what it is she is looking for.

Outside, a wind picks up and rustles the leaves of the trees near the house so that they sound like they are gossiping in whispers. The radio hums quietly to itself.

‘There was a rumour,' she says. ‘After you left. Someone said you killed a man.'

Flinch takes a long hot gulp of his tea. Instantly feels sweaty and dizzy, as if he's suffering some kind of flash fever.

‘But it was probably rubbish,' she says quickly. ‘The source wasn't exactly reliable.'

‘Drew,' says Flinch.

‘Yes. He left as well, by the way. Reckoned he'd seen a bull or something in the bushes near the cow paddock. We checked with the farmer next door, in case one had got out, but there are only cows in that paddock. Drew ended up burning all the shrubs along the fenceline near his tent. We caught it just in time, before it did any damage. He took off the next day, anyway. Don't know where he went.'

A window in the kitchen slams shut in the wind.

‘Sorry,' says Karma. ‘That was stupid. I shouldn't have brought it up.'

‘But I did,' says Flinch. ‘He wasn't lying.'

Karma is silent. She's staring at him and Flinch can feel the heat of that old curiosity, the same as he used to feel when passing other locals in the grocery store or on the beach soon after Nate's death.

‘Why?'

‘It was an accident. He was a friend.'

‘Oh.'

‘I think about it every day.'

‘That's what it is that is still hurting then, inside you? That's what I sensed?'

‘Guess so.'

The light has faded completely. They sit silently in the shadowy room, listening to Karen Carpenter proclaim that she is on top of the world. Flinch feels as if he's breathing it in, the darkness, filling his lungs until they're black, like Audrey's were when she died. Or so the doctor said, after that many years of sucking the tar down her throat, heels yellow from stomping out cigarette butts. Flinch, at the time, thought uncharitable thoughts about the colour of her heart.

‘Well I haven't killed anyone,' Karma says, almost a whisper, after what seems like a long while. ‘But if it makes you feel any better, there have been moments in my life when I've wanted to.' She lifts the teacup to her face, leans her bruised forehead against the warm china.

Flinch is frying eggs in the morning when she wanders in, freshly showered and smelling of lavender, and declares that she's decided to start the healing process.

‘That's good,' says Flinch.

‘Yes,' she says. ‘And I have a plan. We're going to the beach today.'

‘We?'

‘Yes.'

‘Why?'

‘Why not?'

‘I'll take my line,' says Flinch.

Karma sniffs and looks away. ‘I guess you could do that,' she says after a while.

‘Bloody oath,' says Flinch. ‘No point going to the beach without it.'

He takes her to Tallow Beach.

‘What a beautiful name,' says Karma. ‘Almost sounds like
mellow
.'

Flinch decides not to tell her that it was named after real tallow. Animal fat. Casks lost in a shipwreck, washed onto the beach. Some had exploded in the surf, smothering the shore with the hard fat of horses, cattle and sheep, the beach allegedly reeking for weeks afterwards, enticing black clouds of flies.