A Sea-Chase

by Roger McDonald

  It was not funny. Wes mashed the pudding into his mouth with a free hand. There was nothing left of love’s gold standard, the freedom of two people closer than a kiss to say anything they liked to each other without penalty. Judy was afraid.

  Cliffs loomed at the southern side of the bay and were on the wrong side of them, to port not starboard; the wind increased past thirty-five knots, a howling, hairline-parting gale, so they wore and went north again. Linton shouted into Wes’s face, ‘Stand on north!’ Their past roles were reversed, Wes now the one in mental grippers and in danger of having his ears twisted and his brains shaken. Hours passed. Wes decided and decided and decided. Judy got into her bunk with the lee cloths holding her and Linton jammed himself in the companionway. In darkness and isolation and brain-frozen self-justification, up in the cockpit, wedged against the tiller, Wes zig-zagged Rattler.

  ‘We’re past,’ he yelled at first light, and the other two came up to see North Cape behind them. He stood at the tiller, their courageous captain. How could Wes not see this, though, that in the melee of the dark and blinding rain and crashing sea, when the intensifying wind had backed more to the north-east to let them through, that the driving north-easter came on more or less square to the land. Rotate the chart to the compass and see what it said. Linton was a meticulous navigator and Judy his disciple. Was that what fixed Wes’s lips in a sour grin, their agreement, as in a conspiracy against him, or was it just some answer, what he was doing, to the promise of prayer that his father had made to him as a boy, that he could do what he liked under the hand of the Devil but God would still love him?

  No other boats were out. It was a mad day. They drove broadside, leeward, with as much canvas raised as could be dared, which was little, the engine screaming and the feeble prop thrown up into the air and thrashing down again. They could see a line of surf paralleling them. A mist hung over it like a veil. Rattler was caught within the two enclosing headlands of Great Exhibition Bay and would need to sail out of the bay to survive but would only be able to do so if the wind changed.

  They crouched waiting, holding on, dashing bullets of sting from their eyes, wearing their bulky red life jackets lashed tight. The wind did not change. Judy got on the radio, calling out as a precaution, PAN PAN PAN. A coastguard station answered. They would need, in the next few hours, a tow if they were unable to clear Cape Karikari. The coastguard station operator said sorry, they had already tried to get out as Rattler was sighted but were beaten back.

  Ploughing into the wind the diesel revved at a screaming maximum, then died. Back the other way they tacked. Through the misty driven sea New Zealand defined itself greener. A Land Rover and people appeared on the shore, small stick figures of a netherworld drawing closer. ‘Try for the bay in the north-west corner,’ was the word the coastguard gave, ‘Parengarenga.’ Wes conveyed the only optimism available to get there: ‘The rudder is holding.’

  In they went into a maelstrom of churning white water. The boat was kicked and booted along, driven sideways. Just when they felt they could not hold on any longer, but would be better to jump overboard, they touched bottom, dragged with a humpy, thumpy motion, then came free. Rattler landed on the other side of a sand bar into relatively calmer water. The wind howled overhead. There was a minute of disbelieving coming back to life. ‘Is that all it was? Drop anchor!’

  Linton crawled along the deck towards the bow. It was not all it was. A wave rose on the seaward side of the sand bar and kept growing. A great swell came in under them and drove them onward to the shore, Rattler on her side, gear tumbling out, Linton sprawled like a body surfer, holding on, anchor gone in a spill of chain, mast splintered, separating the three of them from each other, crashing, heaving, pounding, rolling them over through the surf until they blinked, choked, disbelieving they were alive, people waiting on the shore wading out to them, hauling them half-drowned up the wild beach.

  Judy was taken to a house where her rescuers ran a hot bath. Linton went with the police to the nearest town where he made a statement. Wes refused to leave the beach.

  All that afternoon, draped in a blanket and swigging rum plied by well-wishers, Wes watched the storm dismantle Rattler. He was haggard as a scarecrow, worn out as a 100-year-old, ablaze from a gash to the forehead he did not know about yet. Long hours, days and years of work were undone on Rattler as he looked on, truly a lifetime’s work by last light when ribs were revealed through the salt mist haze. Formerly lovingly crafted timbers broke open to every hammering breaker. There was to be no towing her back out and rebuilding her as there had been when the rudder fell off. Rattler made her last malicious and suicidal cough into oblivion in collusion with a tropical depression sent down from Fiji at the wrong time of year.

  The SANT flag and the set of code cards Tina Stones had given to Judy washed ashore. WYSSA: All my (our) love darling. YIKLA: This is the life. Sections of ply self-steering vane appeared in the surf, flew about and disappeared. A St John’s ambulance man cleaned the gash to Wes’s forehead and hid it under a dressing.

  Judy came back to the beach and gathered the sodden code cards and a few other belongings that came bobbing in, swirling and dumped on the sand, her ditty bag and the Nancy Sinatra boots she had brought for partying ashore. She and Wes had nothing to say to each other. They were sudden strangers. A doctor checked them over. Nobody had died, nobody was badly hurt, but their hearts were astounded back into shells they did not know they carried.

  They had been lucky not to be struck by floating objects worse than Wes was. Rattler was done and finished. Blame crawled out of the sea and onto the shore with them and got into their shells with them. Other items of Judy’s washed in but she was not there later when Wes looked for her to hand them back. Nobody could tell him where she was. Rescue scattered people and lost them to each other just as surely as being lost did.

  The next day the three of them parted without seeing each other. Their eyes were strange and their hair was unmanageable. Judy and Linton were driven separately to Auckland and billeted by different protester families. Wes stayed up north. Tina Stones in Sydney and Judy in Auckland spoke at length on the phone. Judy said nothing about Wes, little about Linton.

  ‘You must be in shock,’ said Tina.

  ‘I am NOT in shock,’ Judy shouted down the line. When she stood up she fell against the wall, and when she walked she rolled drunkenly.

  The family Judy stayed with had a daughter, Monica, a teacher. ‘I was a teacher once,’ said Judy, pulling a sour face, looking back on her life. Teaching was just the first step in getting her to where she was now. Fish and chips were wrapped in a headline: AUSTRALIAN BOATIES WRECKED ON NORTHLAND BEACH. Classroom, Ken, Wes, Rattler, storm. Impossible to alter the sequence unless you decided it was time to live your life backwards and leave love out of it. In thirty-six hours Judy had tumbled over a cliff and down a rabbit hole and out the other side. Shock mimicked resilience as she answered questions from newspaper reporters, TV crews, an Australian consular official, police, and nuclear protest organisers who came at her with a mixture of hero-worship and irritation at the monumental fuck-up Rattler represented, taking attention away from the flotilla.

  Where Monica Neale taught was a few hours’ drive south of Auckland. When they got there the place felt to Judy like somewhere Wes would never be able to find her again if she stayed there the rest of her life. Forget the matter of her heart. He was a danger to her life and limb. Stay away, she shivered, seeking the inner shelter of caution. At three in the morning she woke curled in the foetal position sucking her thumb.

  Judy asked if she could stay for a few days, sleep, rest and take it easy as the doctor who had examined her had ordered. As there had been at Silver Springs there was a party line at the teacher’s house, water was fetched from an outside tank in a bucket and sawn offcuts burnt in an open grate.

  Monica said, ‘Why not?’ It was the Sunday night when Monica’s parents were ready to drive back to Auckland. Should they pass
on messages? they asked. Judy said, ‘Yes, of course.’

  That same night in the teacher’s house the phone started ringing. Friends, acquaintances, old schoolmates and family members, including her parents and distant Darke cousins and Compton aunts, all calling at Sunday night international rates from Sydney keeping the phone busy till midnight. Ken, Dijana, Margaret, Harold. The softness in their voices when they heard she was all right made her cry. What it was to be loved, in a tide flowing her way. Her father said she carried a flag for her callers. The SANT flag was not what he meant. In the firelight shadows of the spark-spitting grate playing on the plywood walls of the teacher’s house Judy saw herself in outline with the receiver to her ear. She was in the shadow of her life and sheltered there.

  When Wes rang, she answered him with silence. She was frozen down into her brain stem, hollow where her heart was towards him. After hanging up she wondered what it was she felt and why it was so extreme. Words hardly expressed it. The part of herself that was gladly his and had been since they first met she took back for herself. Or the part of him that she had felt was gladly hers she gave back to him. What did she know. Nothing. There was nothing about them that was uniquely theirs anymore. It had been thrown away.

  Wes rang back and Judy said, ‘You could have killed us and you didn’t care. Well, you’re in Auckland now. You’re not running late anymore, you’re on time. Not everyone’s left for the bomb test site yet. So you’ve made it, good luck, get back out there before it’s too late and get on with it. The only thing is you don’t have a boat.’

  ‘That’s rough.’

  ‘Why did you put me through this?’

  ‘Nobody asked you to come.’

  ‘I thought you wanted me.’

  ‘You volunteered.’

  Surf boomed over the hill from the school. The ground shook from thundering breakers.

  When she got up in the morning Judy felt she really might stay for life, in this quarter of the world gleaming with wet cold grass on eroded ridges, if it meant she did not have to deal with Wes ever again. She remembered when he arrived at the restaurant where she had lunch with Rhonda there was a plea in his eye. It meant, I want you with me. As loud as that the look was, and she had packed and gone down to the boat and they went on from there.

  When Judy was asked, the day after, by someone down at the crossroads if she wasn’t that girl on the front page of the Star wrapping the fish and chips, the Aussie girl crew member sitting on a stormy beach in Northland, two blokes, her shipmates sitting beside her, heads between their knees, half-dead and lucky to be alive, she said, ‘I might be, why?’

  ‘A bloke was here on a motorbike asking for you.’

  ‘A skinny, blue-eyed bloke with a mad look in his eye?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘The only one I want to see is my mother.’

  She found herself crying when she said that. Her mother rang every day. She had bought her air ticket and was coming over. Judy described the sea life on the other side of the ridge from the school – snapper, paua or abalone, crayfish – how bounty was brought back behind the dunes and never eaten on the shore.

  ‘SANT has an interest in the sea,’ said her mother, which made Judy laugh because it was so typically self-serving. You could not keep Dr Elizabeth Darke down. But there was a difference. Either Judy had never listened for the crazy love in her voice or it was new. Being thrown out into the sea and surviving meant she was not the only person to be changed.

  Despite the doctor’s instructions to rest, Judy went spinning through the week, a drink in one hand as soon as school finished, a fag in the other. She was Monica’s twin zombie who got drunk, stoned, and mentally reversed the sworn oaths she had made to Ken Redlynch about hating classrooms. To sign up as a teacher in the backblocks of Maori New Zealand was enticing; she only needed to have her diploma posted over. As a cure to being wrecked it was the antidote. Here a kind of chaos had a kind of meaning.

  Cut-out figures cast their lines way out in nights warmed by rum and dope. Surf crashed leaving weed-waving rock pools. Never had being ‘out of it’ been so true to the meaning of the expression in terms of what it provided to someone overwhelmed by events. Some of the parents of the infants’ classes were still teenagers. Wherever they went the mothers took their babies with them. Normally the young girls hated pakeha women, they were bitches. Judy had the status of a ghost passing through. Her story in the Auckland Star had the feeling of a legend being born. She had come over to New Zealand on a boat with sunset-red sails. On approaching the North Island a flare shot up from the sea and the Rattler went to investigate, as did an air force plane, but nobody was there. After that nothing was right aboard her boat. They had gale-force winds, adverse currents, her boyfriend went practically nuts, frightening her and the other crew member by sailing the wrong way, the weather turned into a hurricane, and they were wrecked.

  ‘So is he the one, your fella?’ the girls asked.

  ‘If he comes round looking for me again tell him to fuck off.’

  The moon came up over the high, bare, rumpled hills and the way Judy talked about that moon made out a Kiwi moon was, compared with Australian moons, cleaner, almost holy.

  The ferocity Judy found in herself just thinking about Wes became stronger. Half the time in her imagination that week she ran away and made a new life entirely, it was already happening – what a difference a day made. Not just marking time but hooking up with one of the blokes already eyeing her off would be a way to go. Giggling pairs of girls eyeing her off as she chiacked them seemed to think so too. The other half the time even in her sleep, in her dreams, Judy never let up hunting Wes down and belting him with a lump of wood. The various strokes she devised doing it felt good as she came awake in the mornings, running through her techniques lavishly.

  Tina Stones rang from Auckland where she missed Judy and was interviewing New Zealanders. She read out from her article about the wreck of the Rattler, ‘Regarding safety at sea Bannister broke a rule, driving them on to their destination right onto a lee shore.’ It was a direct quote from Ken. Yachting identities were consulted confirming its accuracy as a principle. Foolhardiness was a word used. All Wes’s previous strengths were seen as warning signs. Never giving up was a virtue made for insanity.

  Sitting on the floor at Judy’s feet in a steaming classroom warmed by a wood stove were Monica’s angels with runny noses, their grubby knitted cardigans missing buttons and their bare toes, dusty as little mushrooms, missing shoes. Judy loved those small children at once and for ever, adoring them for their trust and bewilderment as she ran them stumbling through their ABCs and first numbers. Each day she found something more in herself, an unconnected or torn-off fragment of herself she could not throw away, even from as far back as early childhood. Monica’s infants’ class was an example of a faith she did not know she had. There was nothing complicated about it, or weird. All it needed was response matching response to live in the open. Her mother was due any day to prove it, or Judy to prove it to her. Call it that first step going backwards the other way into her life.

  The paddocks above the school rode through the sky, their highest corners of strained wire a thousand feet above sea level. It was hilly, treeless, flax-gullied, gnawed-over grazing land. Wherever there was a pocket of soil, potatoes, turnips and lucerne were grown. Windy and wet. Hectic clouds. Rain, when it rained, like no other rain, spilling down like silver dollars. Transportation was gumboot four-wheel drive. You followed the ridges on foot while your dog scoured the gullies like a flea in the Grand Canyon. The greatest treat was to set off with a hot smoked fish pie in a paper bag bought at the service station down on the highway.

  Up a ridge Judy went, on a track made by sheep and cattle and scoured by rainstorms blowing in from the Tasman. The school and the schoolteacher’s residence shrank away below into its copse of macrocarpa cypress. The vegetable garden was fertilised with seaweed but Judy found polyps in her pockets that weren’t from the
re, that had worked themselves in at the wreck of the Rattler. When you were dead, and crossed over, it was how you lived, a bit of sand in your socks and the feeling that getting up to this trig station and cairn was important, so get up there over and over. Yes, when you were dead it was like that. But also when you lived, or lived again.

  After a few days her father rang back to say he was planning to come over as soon as he could. He was able leave an oyster farm easier than a farm. The old bloke he had bought from still hung around, unable to stop working. Since being invalided from New Guinea in a Dakota forty years ago Raymond had not been in a plane. Judy told him about the vegetable beds never short of water and the black volcanic soil, about the kumara or sweet potato that was grown in special beds and cooked in a ground oven, the hangi, with pork and chook and oohed and aahed over. There was no shortage of labour in the scattered shearing sheds of the locality; whole families dived in. The school mothers took their babies and slung them from the rafters in hammocks while they swept up the scrappy wool. Babies, children, toddlers, Judy heard herself going on.

  ‘We could have done with a bit of that work ethic at Silver Springs round shearing time,’ said her father. The shearing families would have heard that crack on the party line if he was still there.

  Ken, Dijana, Gerry Tubman, Whisker Martin, Professor Len Forester’s fifty-year-old son, Kelvin, and Ken’s sixteen-year-old, Georgy, arrived in Auckland. Billets were found for them by SANTNZ. They piled into a mini-van and drove down to see Judy. As suddenly as she had arrived Judy said goodbye to Monica and the young mothers and hugged the small children. She went back to Auckland with the others in the van, and her mother arrived. They shared a hotel room with a double bed and a single bed and like two girlfriends ended up sleeping in the double bed. They stayed up late talking.