Death of a Whaler (30 page)

He opens his eyes for a second to see Karma dabbing him with a warm cloth.

In a quieter moment, he is standing on the cliff near the lighthouse. The waves lap at the rocks below and, except for the lull of the sea, everything is still, silent. He hears someone cough behind him and turns around to see the lighthouse keeper, rubbing his eyes, never removing his hand from his face, as if sand were lodged permanently into his sockets. Without looking at Flinch he walks straight up to him, grips him by the wrist, and takes him to the doorway of the lighthouse. Flinch thinks he is going to take him up the stairs, to the top, but instead the keeper points to the door. Flinch sees letters etched into the glass there, something is spelt out, but he can't read it. The lighthouse keeper opens the door to the lighthouse and enters, and when Flinch tries to follow he slams it in his face. Flinch wakes up with his heart pounding to see the door of his bedroom creaking open and slamming in the breeze.

He is aware of his surroundings only long enough to notice that he is in his bedroom in the pastel house, but he can't recall how he came to be here. When he shuts his eyes he glimpses images that seem more like shards of some other reality. Macca and Karma standing on a jetty, waving him in. Blue. Blue. Blue. Being rolled back and forth on the hot vinyl in the cabin of a ute. White walls of a room that is not his own. The watchful eye of a whale under water.

The lighthouse keeper taps on the glass panel of the door to the lighthouse. Flinch inhales the smoke billowing from his pipe and coughs up something wet.

‘For Christ's sake, get over it would you, boy,' says Audrey.

Nate, sitting slumped against a wall, looks up from his open copy of
Moby-Dick
and chuckles.

A woman's hand warms his own.

‘Karma,' he says.

‘Eleanor,' the reply.

He remembers that there are things he would rather forget.

He wakes hot and perspiring with the sun in his eyes, feeling as if he has been dragged up from some deep, dark cave. He listens for signs of movement in the house. Hears nothing but the waves below and the cries of gulls swept to silence in the wind.

He sits up slowly, lowers his feet to the floor. His head spins with the effort. Using the wall as a support, one careful step at a time, he makes his way to the kitchen. Pots and pans have been recently washed and are lined up drying on a tea towel. In the living room, the couch has been covered by a colourful throw. A rug that looks vaguely South American lies over the worn patch in the carpet. Touches of Karma's. No, he thinks. Eleanor's. He shakes his head, tries to clear the confusion that surfaces when he thinks of them, the two women. Of her.

He goes into her room. It smells of her, of incense and frangipanis. There is the hint of chaos that seems to float around her like an aura, the unmade bed, clothes in small colourful piles on the floor. He stands in the middle of the room for a while and holds his breath.

The grunt and churn of Milly's engine as she pulls up. He hurries back to his bed, his knees and back and hip joints creaking like rusty hinges. Pulls the covers up, panting with effort. Keys clink on the kitchen table. He hears footsteps approach and faces the wall. His door creaks slightly as it is pushed open. Hears her sigh, move to the edge of the bed. He squeezes his eyes tight as the bed sinks with her weight and his blanket tightens around his shoulders. She heaves him into a sitting position, his back against the bed rest.

‘Flinch?'

He says nothing. Holds his breath.

She slaps him hard across the face. He moans and recoils but he keeps his eyes shut. Slumps back across the bed. She is bawling, he can hear her struggling for breath in between each wet gulp.

He thinks,
I am under water. I am safe and still and
deep under water
.

She moves away.

He pretends for days. Acutely aware of where she is in the house, what she is doing each moment, the rhythm of her existence. The scrape of the front door, keys clicking over the latch. She goes to work every day. He lies listening to goat bleatings and the squawking gossip of birds. To the rise and recession of the tides. To crickets in the shrubs. Chorus of frog and toad after an afternoon shower. The wind singing secrets below the cliffs. She returns each night with the same question in her voice.

‘Flinch?'

He doesn't know how to answer her. He pretends he is asleep. She makes herself dinner, turns on the radio, sighs often and sings less than he remembers, and, quite a few times, she sobs. She helps him to the toilet each night when she gets home and before she goes to bed and he pretends he is groggy and unseeing. He doesn't open his eyes. She leaves him in there with the door slightly ajar. He wonders how much of him she has seen, before now. Stripped down to who he is, the crooked body, leg, the hated half of himself. Naked, he feels he is only a shred of a human. She makes him sit up and feeds him soup.

‘Good boy,' she says when he swallows. Like a pet.

She has one-sided conversations with him before she leaves each day.

‘Wake up,' she tells him. She runs a warm washer under his arms and over his chest. He allows his head to roll backwards. Arms limp as a rag doll's.

‘Come back to us, Flinch. We have a lot to talk about.'

That we do, thinks Flinch. All the things he cannot say make his chest ache. His throat parches dry at the thought.

Macca comes around once while she is out. Flinch has to hide the evidence of his mobility, a piece of bread and butter he had fetched himself from the kitchen, under the sheets. Lies limp on his side.

‘Hello, mate.' Macca is quiet, as if he's in confession. ‘How you feelin', eh?'

Flinch has to focus to lie still.

‘The boat is goin' so well, got people lined right up some weekends for fishin' and sightseeing. Eleanor painted us some special brochures and everything. She's a lovely yacht to sail, but you'd know that. Would love to talk to you about her maiden voyage.' Macca lays a hand on Flinch's shoulder. ‘Cheeky bastard,' he says. ‘Later, eh.'

Reaching for his snack after Macca leaves, Flinch feels the butter like a paste against his palm.

He can't pretend for much longer. He wishes he had Audrey's strength of conviction in fictional realities. His mother has disappeared from his dreams. She stormed out in a gust of wind and dust and slammed the door shut behind her. Nate has left too. Faded into the wallpaper where he was sitting. The copy of
Moby-Dick
that he was reading lies open and face down on Flinch's bedside table. The lighthouse keeper returns during pasty daytime dreams, tapping away on the door of the lighthouse like some demented woodpecker. Flinch tries to speak to him.

‘I don't understand,' Flinch tells him, trying to still his rapping hand.

The lighthouse keeper coughs. ‘Olim,' he splutters. Flinch wakes, the word in his head like the rusted key for some padlock he has long ago misplaced.

Flinch picks up
Moby-Dick
. On the page on which it was lying open, he reads:
And the drawing near
of Death, which alike levels all, alike impresses all with a last
revelation, which only an author from the dead could
adequately tell.

He throws the book spinning across the room. Pages flap once like broken wings.

It's the routine of ablutions that forces him to admit his awareness. She comes home one day looking exhausted. Circles shadow her eyes. She doesn't say hello to him, just shakes him a few times and attempts to hook his arms over her shoulders, sit him up.

‘C'mon,' she says. ‘You must need this more than I do.'

He resists.

‘Come on Flinch. A quick trip to the loo then you can go back to bed. You know the routine.'

‘Karma,' he says quietly. ‘Eleanor.'

She springs back from him. ‘Flinch?'

‘Yes.'

‘When did you…?'

‘Come back?'

‘Yes.'

‘A little while ago. Not long.'

She wipes her eyes with the base of her hands. ‘We've all missed you, you know, you silly bastard.' She doesn't try to stop herself crying. ‘We didn't know where you'd been or what happened to you out there.' She sniffs, looks at him in a way that makes him feel like hiding. ‘What
did
happen?'

Flinch thinks of the underwater, the airless, blue peace, the wings of whales.

‘I fell overboard,' he says.

She strokes his fringe from his face. He turns his head away and she lowers her hand.

‘I must have suffered lack of oxygen to the brain.'

She doesn't look convinced.

‘You still got the
Westerly
home. Lucky you did, too. Macca knew where to find you.'

‘I had to bring the boat back. Macca would have finished me off for sure if I didn't, eh?'

‘Near drowning or not, I suspect.'

The humour a welcome diversion. As thin and brittle as paper.

They eat dinner in silence. He looks up from his plate a few times to catch her staring at him with the wide-eyed curiosity of a cat. She starts to say something but stops herself. Takes their empty plates to the sink and runs the tap, leaves the water gushing over her hands even after she's rinsed the crockery. As if she's trying to dilute something, the memory of some incident, thinks Flinch. Cooling what is burning. Flinch fingers a pile of brochures left in a small stack on the table. On the front cover of each, a beautiful, hand-painted portrait of the
Westerly
. Desire and shame rise in him spontaneously, feeling acidic.

‘Come outside,' she says. ‘It's a full moon.'

They sit in the dinghy.

‘Funny,' Flinch pats the side of the boat. ‘We've spent a long time in this little boat that goes nowhere.'

‘Don't know about that,' she says. ‘Not all journeys are physical.' She's not looking at him but there is a message for him in the words. They cause a ripple through Flinch like a stone thrown into a pond.

‘So, who are you now?' He asks to distract her. To shift focus.

‘What do you mean? I'm me. You know me.'

‘I mean, what do you call yourself — are you Karma or Eleanor?'

‘Eleanor,' she says.

‘Oh.' Even now, when she says it he feels as if it is being scratched afresh into his mind. He thinks of the little girl with the blonde pigtails in the photo on the mantelpiece in a decrepit weatherboard house in Duchess.

‘Do you remember everything? Like, do you remember our bonfire night?'

‘Yes,' says Flinch. He can say nothing more. He knows he will give himself away. He tried and failed to hide himself from Audrey, who accused him of wearing his heart on his sleeve as if it were an embarrassment, a foul stain.

‘Flinch, I want you to listen, and not say anything. Even if you think you need to. Can you do that?'

He hears the tone in her voice that sounds like panic, the waves splintering against the rocks and dissolving. The wind picks up and he is cold, suddenly, immersed in something he doesn't understand. But he nods. His teeth rattle in his jaw.

‘I didn't know why you took off that night. I thought maybe you were just really into it and had gone off to … I don't know, reflect. I didn't follow you. When you didn't come home the next day, I looked all over town for you, and then I went to Macca's place to see if you'd stayed there, but Macca was only just back from his trip. I told him you'd disappeared and then he saw that the boat was gone. Some fishermen thought they'd seen you at the old jetty so we went out there, and we found Milly. We waited for hours. You were a mess when you docked. You couldn't speak. You were spluttering half-sentences, throwing up sea water.'

‘I don't remember,' he says.

‘You weren't yourself. You looked like you'd been struck by something. Blinded, almost. You were unseeing.'

She rubs her eyes with her fingers. Flinch can't work out whether she's crying again or whether she's just exhausted.