Lingerie For Felons (32 page)

I suddenly thought that maybe we could get beyond all our crazy history and be friends. You know, salvage something from all the madness. Enjoy and respect each other for the things we had shared, and the things we had done since. Without all the complications of love and sex. I could actually do this thing right for once. Not jump into bed with him, but really enjoy getting to know him deeply, on a platonic level.

But twelve hours later, I was remembering that and feeling a bit of a fool.

You see, I slept with him. Of course.

We dropped Eve off at my Mom's after the boat trip — she was going to be staying there — and Wayne had offered me a lift home. I hesitated, but then agreed. Wayne suggested we grab some burgers at the local café. And then a long, alcohol-fuelled late lunch turned into an afternoon at a bar. And then into Wayne offering to whip us up an early supper at my house.

Which was great, of course. But look, that's just the logistics.

What really happened was that we started talking. And laughing. Our stories gradually came out over the course of the afternoon and evening. He told me all about his last fifteen years. The tale unfolded, like a series of chapters, at each location. Over tofu burgers and curly fries he told me about the wildness of Sierra Leone — the excess and the insanity. About deciding he needed to do something real. Over Guinness with whiskey chasers at O'Reilly's he told me about buying the shipping company. But still feeling like he needed to do something different. Something that mattered. Over this amazing Thai salad he whipped up with God-knows-what from my fridge, he told me about how he'd developed the green fleet idea, and how he was now developing a whole line of eco-friendly freighters. And it was really working. People were responding to the concept. And freight companies were realizing it was the way of the future. But he told me much more too.

As we lounged on the sofa, drunk and completely stuffed full after our meal, he told me about how lonely he'd been. About how he expected so much of people, since us. And how most of the time, they simply failed to deliver. How he kept thinking he'd meet someone who rocked his world again one day, and so he kept seeing women, kept dating. But he never had. How he dated a girl for a few months before running into me, and he thought maybe things were going to work out with her.

‘Right after I saw you, at Che's, I called her to tell her it was over.'

My breath caught, thinking about that other woman

He traced a long, calloused finger down one side of my face, looking so deeply into my eyes I wondered what he'd find there. ‘She asked me why.'

‘What did you tell her?' My voice was quiet. I couldn't hear anything except the deep, warm constancy of his breath, so close to my face.

He touched my hair, and I wanted to purr and wriggle. ‘Because I'd seen you. And because I wanted to see you more. Lots more.'

Thirty seconds later we were in bed.

And it was like the time that had slipped away between us had never been. My body recognised his, like cell memory. My fingers slid over every inch of him, reacquainting themselves with the lovely lines of him. The soft hair covering his chest, the hard muscles of his arms, the length of his muscular legs. His mouth lapped at me like I was a drug and he couldn't get enough. His breath was on my neck, in my hair, and he was saying ‘you're just so fucking beautiful, Rocket' and ‘I've missed you so much.'

Hearing him swear under his breath, that slow, broad voice of his whispering against my skin, lit me up. I pushed him onto the bed with the flat of my palm and straddled his chest. I slowly tipped my breasts down to tease his chest and face, enjoying watching his face darken.

We were older, and we were really here.

After that, we didn't talk. This wasn't light, or fun.

This wasn't nice. It was serious.

I wanted to batter myself against him, crashing into him time and time again. And I could feel it in him too. He wanted to brand me. He held my hands while I rode him, and then moved his big hands to circle them almost all the way around my waist and held on tightly. His face was dark and concentrated, like it hurt him to look at me. I could feel him deep up inside me, deeper than I ever remembered him being. But I wanted more.

I arched my back and flexed my thighs, trying to have more of him, trying to push the very centre of me against him. I couldn't get close enough. A strangled, frustrated noise slipped from my throat. His eyes focused and he looked into mine, before plucking me from him and laying me beside him.

He pushed me onto my side, covered my body with his big frame, and slid one of my legs high up the bed, until my knee was close to my face. Then he started again. Almost covered by his body, his breath on my face, feeling him fill all the deepest places inside me, I finally let go. We'd never done it like this before. Not so dark, not so deep.

When I got there I wanted to scream at him.

I wanted more, more, more.

And he gave it to me, thrusting into me over and over until all I could see was purple and my ears shut out all sound.

***

That was the night before I left for this trip and I didn't even tell him that I was going.

I know I should have, but I think I'd been trying so hard to convince him — or maybe convince myself — that my life was different, that I wasn't some scatty fool who was always chasing a lost cause. Someone he had to cultivate police contacts in order to keep tabs on. We'd talked so much about coming full circle in your life, about finding your way to make a difference. I'd gone on and on about how I didn't want to put everything I loved at risk anymore.

So I just kept thinking I would mention the trip later. And then I woke up and wasn't sure what had happened. What this was. I thought I could tell him all about it when I got back. Make him understand I wasn't regressing. That this was important and I was doing the right thing.

Oh man. Who the hell am I trying to convince? Him? Or me?

There was so much I wanted to tell him that night, before drunkenness and lust took over.

So much I should have told him to make him understand why I kept away all these years.

Stuff about how hard it is to live up to yourself. To your own ideals and expectations. About how easy it is to get side-tracked, and for life to take over. And more. I wish I'd told him how it felt so good to hold him again and kiss him again and feel him deep inside my body. How it felt even better to listen to him, and feel his heavy arm on my shoulder and hear his raspy Crocodile Dundee voice mumbling in my ear as we went to sleep.

Somewhere, in the middle of that long, beautiful night, I realized I still loved him.

It sounds kind of corny, but I guess you don't just get over a love like we had. I lay there looking at his long eyelashes and his wrinkly, crinkly face in sleep, and my heart turned and flipped and turned and flipped and my stomach was doing crazy things.

And I just knew. Knew that I loved him. Knew it with a sickening certainty.

You know what? I've never gotten people who find love comforting and reassuring. It's always felt like white lightning to me, this thing with Wayne. So, anyway, during the course of that night, at some point, I also realized that I would have to tell him.

But I had to do this first.

And I wasn't entirely sure that he would understand.

***

I flew in to Australia to meet up with the people that would airlift me to the boat. It was weird doing that long-haul route again. I was assailed by memories of the first time with Wayne. In fact, apart from fretting about Eve, all I could think about was him. I should have been mentally preparing for what I was about to do.

But I wasn't.

I'd hopped out of bed with him, and onto the plane, and I was lost in this cloud. I could still smell his cologne on me, and every time I closed my eyes I could see his big, dark face close to mine, whispering beautiful obscenities and kissing me and licking me and…

In fact, the only rational thought I had was
Oh God, what is he going to think when he finds out I've skipped out on him again? He's going to hate me.

I really am the most ridiculous coward. I should have told him.

Anyway, it all went kind of fine until I got to the boat. Well, apart from the self-flagellation and the helicopter ride, but don't get me started on the chopper. I think it's sufficient to say that the guy from Earth Warriors who accompanied me in the helicopter may need to re-grow large areas of flesh on his thighs. Even I was surprised that my nails managed to puncture his jeans. Those filthy old jeans looked like they were twenty years old and were as hard and dirty as old boots. Puncturing them was some achievement. But the helicopter seemed really small buzzing around over this big, wide ocean like some demented dragonfly, and we've already worked out that I've never been brave.

Anyway, the whalers keep their locations top secret, because they don't want to be disrupted. They're very reluctant to hunt in plain view. The world has gotten very touchy about these things since all that footage of the harp seals being clubbed to death made the rounds twenty years ago and people started to get a bit squeamish about wearing coats made out of the poor little things.

The activists like to keep their activities secret too, because surprise is a central element of what they do, and because they often don't know where they're going until they catch up with the whaling boats. I'd been told that the boat I was to join was pretty basic, but had state-of-the-art facilities for beaming audio and visual messages back to civilization so they could broadcast pictures of the hunt.

So the whole thing was run like some kind of military operation.

Clandestine. Highly synchronized.

I was flown to this spot, around lunchtime on the fourteenth, where I was to be picked up again at the same time the following day. Apparently the boat, which was called the
Rainbow Serpent
, had only just found the whaling fleet. No broadcasts had gone out yet. The game of cat and mouse had only just begun.

As my feet touched down on the boat, my stomach turned to water.

When I queried where the Ladies was, Jorn, the organizer on board, pointed to the macerator. Yep, you heard me right. The M-A-C-E-R-A-T-O-R. You know, for macerating your poop. My bowels turned to stone on the spot. But then I felt the first stomach-churning roll of that little boat, out all alone on that great ocean, and my bladder had the exact opposite reaction. And I had to avail myself of the facilities immediately.

The boat felt like it was made of cardboard.

As I squatted over the little thing that really did not deserve to be described as a toilet, in the only totally enclosed space on the boat, in what looked to also be a makeshift office, I made a quick decision: I was going to get these interviews over with really, really quickly and get them to radio that little bastard of a helicopter to come back ASAP and get me back to dry land. The helicopter suddenly seemed liked the safest place on earth.

There were five key people I needed to interview on the boat. Three of the critical leadership team: Jorn — who was kind of the organizer as well as the scientist — the navigator, the communications expert, and two crew, for color and interest.

The only problem was that they weren't particularly interesting.

I know, I know, it sounds incredible. Here they are, these amazing, brave, clever people, doing this really awesome, meaningful thing. And they were like your fourth grade geography teacher. Kind of quietly spoken, earnest. All the revolutionary zeal of an Avon lady. And heaps less enthusiasm. Really boring, actually. I prodded a bit, too. Tried to get them to say some sensational things, maybe mouth off about the Japanese whalers. I cracked a few jokes about the evils of the G8. Nothing. For them, it was all about the whales. They were there to do a job, and they were quietly focused on doing it.

So I concentrated on the logistics of the task. What they were doing. Why. How much planning they had gone into it. Their philosophy. What the hell, it made for a good story anyway, even without salacious tidbits I'd been hoping for from the people themselves.

It was a dark, overcast day, and I used a black and white wash as I took the photographs to make the activists look like these Greek Gods, thrashing around in the wild ocean on this tiny boat amid these ancient sea creatures, with the backdrop of the Japanese factory whaling ship in the background, looking huge and ominous by comparison. I had the interviews over in just under two hours.

And just as well, really, because that's all the time it took to realize that I was really, desperately seasick. In fact, I suspect it had set in during the first interview, but I'd been so focused on trying to get the things done, so I could get the hell off this floating cereal box, that I had somehow repressed it. Within a few minutes of concluding the last interview, I was hanging over the side, evacuating my stomach contents in the most noisy, aggressive-sounding vomiting the crew had ever heard.

My terror of the huge ocean was abandoned to my greater misery, and my desire to vomit somewhere that wouldn't require the good, earnest people of the
Rainbow What-Freaking-Ever
to have to clean it up as well as save the world's whales. As soon as I could stand without barfing, I advised the captain that really, I'd seen all I needed to and had the material I required and I could get out of his way now. When I asked him if he could perhaps radio the chopper to come back early, he just looked at me like I was insane.

‘No,' he informed me in his precise European accent. ‘The helicopter does not make unscheduled trips. Too dangerous. And expensive.' I felt like an adolescent who went to Robben Island to ask Nelson Mandela where to get good nail polish in South Africa.

I lurched around miserably for several hours before one of the activists sidled up to me. ‘I have something,' she whispered, in the cutest little French accent I'd ever heard, her sweet little face pale under a black beanie. I made a groaning noise as she pressed something into my hand. She did it kind of surreptitiously, out of earshot of the other warriors, like she didn't want to admit that she got seasick too. I opened my hand to see a strip of little pills. ‘If you can't keep those down,' she whispered, ‘try these.' Another strip. This time the pills were bigger and I looked at her questioningly. She pointed a finger at the rear end of her jeans. ‘For your ath,' she lisped quietly.