A Sea-Chase

by Roger McDonald

  Staticky radio programs came through randomly, snatches never lasting for long, a rotation of Chinese violins, Indonesian gong music, the BBC plum-in-the-mouth World Service, or Radio nasal Australia, where one night Ken Redlynch’s old familiar voice made Wes sit up.

  Ken was on about international schools. He talked about how he had a school and used his own money in a battle with the Education Department. What Wes thought about this was that people’s lives went on without him, getting bigger without his help.

  He twisted the dial escaping crackle and whoa! Up came Who Brung You and Just Orf of the Train on a loop tape, and a new one, Shift Your Carcase Arthur, a tinny-voiced barking mad termite the size of a Jack Russell terrier and blind as a bat, living in an ant hill in the Northern Territory scrub.

  ‘You dirty little bastard,’ said Wes to the cunning brain of Tony Watson. What it was about was the gorgeous lovely queen termite saying, ‘Shift your carcase, Arthur, and lend a bloody hand with the brood, you lazy layabout.’

  The tranny died and only night sounds surrounded him. Spitting dirt from his mouth, Wes wrapped himself in a swag with the canvas pulled up to his nose to keep out the night chill. The campsite was surrounded by thorny thickets that could tear a man to shreds if he walked in his sleep. Insect sounds were soft as radar pings.

  The affidavit naming W. Rathbone and W. Bannister alleging grievous bodily harm to willing workers hung on a police station clipboard in a small town below the Tropic of Capricorn somewhere gathering dust. It was a blown leaf come to the end of where the winds of complaint blew hardest. Wes had no way of knowing that Linton Simmons, going through the courts pro bono for his old friend, had had it quashed.

  The work Wes did for good pay for a few weeks was for a geological survey, a Land Cruiser trayback hauling a caravan of seismic equipment through a prickly scrub tens of thousands of square miles in extent south-east of Tennant Creek. You could not call it work. Instruments did that. Otherwise it was punishment. Wes mended tyres punctured by thorns as he followed a shot line. Three flats a day made it work on a par with splitting rocks in a chain gang, except with tyre levers on hard steel rims. It was all right though. His exile was ending. Supine on his camp stretcher, aching in every bone, the stars rearranged themselves across his eyeballs. He missed the sea with a feeling that wrenched a sob from him. Down they had sailed along the east coast of New South Wales, naked as two porpoises with the sun overhead. Watching the Milky Way as it folded down through the low hills on the horizon, Wes saw the hills as waves, dark jagged shapes swallowing the rotation of the earth tipping east. Judy as a presence slipped across the moonlight into the love bunk.

  A church did not need a congregation to bring it to life. At the end of his contract Wes found himself in Mt Isa standing at the door of one. It was soon to be demolished and an A-frame built. The empty interior was familiar as a feeling. His father had preached in places like it and his mother had taken the kids along because she played the organ and had nowhere to park them. The lectern peeled with bubbles of badly applied varnish. Wes guessed the minister had done it and guessed why kids of ministers were practical – to help the poor buggers out. Number cards curled on the hymn board from way back when. Neglect and abandonment was the best way for meeting God, his father often said. Wes did not believe in God but it fitted his feeling. The two people he loved most were opposed to him, Judy and his father, and both for the same reason, apparent lack of faith. He took a deep, dry breath. The poor and the hopeless had nobody to depend on so they were closer to God. They had no distraction from suffering, and that was their spiritual privilege. Wes had money, a lot saved from a few months’ work that was all found. He thought about what to do with it. A rich man turned to his possessions. He neglected the spirit. Here ended the lesson.

  The building was airless but gave shade from the hammering-down sun. Seating himself in a pew a couple of rows from the front, Wes dropped his head in a look of prayer. His toecaps formed an obstacle for a wandering ant.

  A floorboard creaked and Wes felt a tap on the shoulder. He turned to look into a pair of blue, bloodshot, somewhat crazed eyes set in a pink, sun-reddened face. ‘Brother,’ he was asked, ‘would you like a cup of tea?’

  Outside, under a lone thin-leaved gum tree, a tiny woman of Malay origin had the billy boiling over a small gas stove set up on a rickety table. Pastor Nick Cornish was a Bible basher. His wife was his helper. Boy could he talk. The back of his ute was stacked with cartons marked Tuna in Springwater, containing Bibles in Bahasa Indonesia with God spelled as Allah that were intended for handing out across the many islands of Indonesia, where either laws precluded it or fanatics killed to make it stop.

  ‘We have been blessed with a boat,’ said the pastor.

  He told a story, the great story of his own life, every detail interested him as Wes listened with half an ear following a deluded life’s progress as a motor mechanic towards a blinding conversion to Christ. Eventually Cornish got round to admitting he had never handled a boat in his life. ‘The bloke’s an idiot and a tremendous bragger, but I like him,’ was Wes’s summation. ‘If somebody doesn’t help them with that boat they’ve never seen and know nothing about, they’re done.’

  The pastor beamed at the end of his tale and looked at his wife for confirmation that he was not so foolish as he seemed, and she smiled back at him, a lovely smile, confirming that he was godly from where she sat cross-legged, feeding twigs and dry leaves into a tiny grill of chicken satay sticks. They had never seen the boat they had paid church money for, it was true. It had a reliable motor and a large fuel capacity tank and cargo space was all they knew.

  ‘Everyone says what I am proposing is impossible,’ said the pastor, pacing up and down in the dust with a mug of tea held between his fists, ‘but no-one has ever tried it to prove it is possible.’

  ‘That’s a pretty good argument for getting things done,’ agreed Wes, ‘but what do you mean when you say that nobody ever did it?’

  As far as Wes knew, the places the pastor talked about were where people put to sea in anything. He liked the idea of it.

  ‘Join us in prayer,’ said the pastor without blinking. ‘Lord, give us your blessing as thou gavest thy blessing to the fishermen disciples upon the Sea of Galilee, to bring our craft across the Arafura Sea to Tanimbar, Aru and Kai. But if it be not thy will to send us in that direction, drive us elsewhere to Timor, Flores and Sumba. We are at thy mercy, Amen.’

  ‘Amen-lah,’ said Mrs Cornish sweetly.

  Two vehicles travelled in convoy from Mt Isa towards Darwin. In the leading one pulling a camping trailer, the Cornishes broke the drive up into shifts. At every roadhouse they passed they left stacks of pamphlets. Up ahead they slowed, Wes hauled over and they boiled the billy. A spicy cake was served with strong tea in which, without being asked if he wanted it, a tablespoon of sweetened condensed milk was added. Over a few days of regular smokos Wes became addicted. He would rot his teeth for another taste of that stuff squeezed from a tube. The sweetness fed his loss.

  Here was a problem for the world’s religions to nut out and give their answer. Because there was no God, Wes helped two trusting believers. He was an angel wearing mining company-issue khakis, the monogrammed logo of a fossil feather sewn on a shirt pocket flap.

  On a dawn flood tide Wes went down to Darwin Harbour and rowed out from the shore with the pastor and his wife. Wes had a hangover. The worst he had ever had. It felt as if he should be in hospital on a drip and anaesthetised and have his liver cut out. Last night he’d made friends for life and lost them in the dark. In a dream a TT motorbike rider crouched low over handlebars like a snake. Bill Rathbone for sure. The sound of dove calls greeted the damp, fresh morning, the humidity building. The missionary couple eyed Wes mistrustfully as he sculled through moored and anchored boats, looking for a shape of vessel the Cornishes were not able to describe. What God intended for them had come through the instrument of a classified ad in the Courier Mail. The
y did not know what it looked like except it had a mooring number painted on a buoy. It had a motor and was big enough and had a name, and it had travelled the islands. That was enough. They had trusted the churchgoer who sold it to them, who had not seen it either, that was all they knew.

  There were a number of possibles rejected, drifting past until the name Winifred Marlow materialised on the one boat Wes had his eye on the whole time, a yacht looking worse for wear but of seaworthy design. They came alongside. A boarding ladder dangled from the port side. Mrs Cornish clambered up but the pastor had trouble. Wes held the man’s varicosed legs on the swaying rungs and guided his elbow along the narrow deck. The pastor was in shock. They had been dudded. A yacht – no, not a yacht, he pleaded. ‘This cannot be right.’ Keys opened a padlocked saloon hatch and the air that wafted out was stale, fishy.

  ‘You did well,’ said Wes, whose eye in the gloom began to appreciate well-crafted detail and whose nose detected no wet stink of wood rot, amazing for a tropical mooring.

  ‘No, this is not right,’ repeated the pastor as Wes took a screwdriver to dark corners, jabbing into the wood. He found patches of rot, not much. If he’d been surveying this yacht for a possible owner he would say take it, for sure.

  The Winifred Marlow was a thirty-two foot gaff yawl designed by Albert Strange and built by Dickie, the name on the saloon wall plaque told them, in England in 1911. Wes was over old boats. Old boats had destroyed him, pitted people against him and lost him Judy Compton, but the ketch had, according to her logs, a pretty good pedigree. You learnt everything from a log, where the story of a ship’s life was kept. Wes leafed through the pages while the Cornishes moaned. She had sailed the wrong way around the world from England through Suez, the Red Sea, India, Malaya, Java and across to Kupang, where the skipper, a New Zealander, died after being bitten by a rat and his estate had her sold to the man who signed her over to the pastor. Heavy canvas sails, a plough anchor, miles of heavy chain, booms like tree trunks – this was a real sailor’s challenge, impervious to the whims of a Bible flogger.

  In the same way as he sprang to the frontline in a demo and wanted to get to Mururoa more than his own life was worth, Wes turned to the Cornishes. Mrs Cornish was festering. She spoke in Malay to her husband, a rapid jab-jab-jab of reproach, and he looked stung. Hanging his head, the poor man succumbed to being humiliated until they both turned and looked at Wes. What they saw in his face unfolding with an expression of resolve was a revelation, a soul thirsty for a draught of spirit.

  ‘Let me help you,’ said Wes.

  But just as he made that vow Tina Stones found him. He was sitting in the shade of a tamarind tree, looking out over the molten harbour, dreaming of the Arafura Sea towards Tanimbar, Aru and Kai, planning stores for the voyage ahead and wondering how to get updated charts for Indonesian waters.

  ‘Wes Bannister?’

  ‘It’s you,’ said Wes, squinting against the light. He struggled to his feet. ‘Tina Stones!’

  Tina told him, before he barely had time to react as to what sort of apparition she was, that he had a son. Wes tried to take it in. There was a whole other life Judy had made for herself in New Zealand while he was gone for months into his wounded self-importance. He knew that of course and had been waiting in his spiritual phase. Out of it – he could hardly believe what Tina was saying – came this:

  ‘Your son is totally gorgeous. Don’t get a swelled head, but he’s lovely, little sharp face like an elf and wispy red hair, ears pointed like yours are a bit. I tracked you down through the Rathbones, ending up finding Bill Rathbone just as he got on a plane for Singapore and the US. He’s a funny one. How did I find you from there, when even Bill didn’t know exactly where you were? A pastor in Mt Isa told me you met some people he knew, Bible bashers, you were helping them. Is everything you ever do always for other people, Wes Bannister, leaving others in the lurch? You left a trail like an elephant at every crappy roadhouse all the way over from the Isa. Leaflets flogging the Holy Bible with bootprints all over them. Are you out of your mind? Where the fuck’s this taking you? All I needed in the end to find you was the motel where the preachers were staying. And here you are under a tree doing fuck-all. Judy’s in New Zealand with Dick Durkheim’s crowd, living on their land. Your whole family and Judy’s parents have been worrying themselves into an early grave over you. Me too, if you want to know. Judy’s the one you need to think about. She’s a stubborn independent law unto herself. But I love her.’

  ‘She gave me the shove,’ said Wes.

  ‘Don’t ask me to tell you what I think you should do,’ Tina said as Wes looked at her totally without expression, stunned, flummoxed, hit by the thought that there was nothing more important in the universe than getting back with Judy.

  Tina said, when Wes asked her if Judy wanted anything more from him than to know they had a son, ‘I don’t know. I don’t think so, to be honest.’

  This answer did not discourage him. Not with their son in her care.

  The next day Wes took off from Darwin, watching the dry continent revealed through a pattern of dry creek beds for hours before they came to the Tasman away below. The drinks trolley rattled and made its invitation. Wes drank only water. Astonishing the number of babies and small children you found on a plane; on other flights mothers dealing with them went unnoticed unless they screamed. It was hard for them Wes saw, but they never lost devotion. The eyes of those small ones peered at him over the backs of seats and he returned a gaze.

  Lying awake in a shabby motel room after a midnight landing in Auckland, Wes rehearsed in his mind what he wanted to say to Judy. He needed words from her to untap him before he decided what.

  When he got to the end of the winding, hilly track in a bush taxi cresting a ridge and dipping down into the crater bay of Puriri, where he had once spent a night sleeping in the grass, Dick Durkheim told him that Judy and Chippy were gone.

  ‘Gone?’

  ‘Yeah, that’s the news, brother, gone off to South Georgia doing bird, seal and whale counts over the entire summer on the yacht Te Ata and pretty much out of contact until autumn. A seventy-foot steel beauty with a sail bag of belongings and your Chippy in a baby sling. She said to give you this if you fronted.’

  It was an international satellite fax-phone number on a slip of paper headed, Wesley, call.

  You set off to stop something going wrong in the world and you ended up sitting on an eroded headland with two cranky Kiwis sucking Monteith’s and looking down into a tidal creek empty of a vessel that had filled it with hope for them. And the absence of that vessel held hope for you.

  Dick and Monica had never known Judy at all, the real Judy, they complained as they farewelled Wes. Somehow she had got ahead of them scoring a berth on Te Ata.

  Wes felt he did understand Judy, though, perhaps alone and uniquely through that fax number as he latched his seatbelt on his flight back to Australia and watched a rain-slicked runway drop away behind and give way to a grey, gale-streaked sea surface. If he was angry he was not aware of it, but what about her? Nobody ever slammed a door as hard as Judy had twice in a row without wanting attention. He stuck to that thought.

  High over the Tasman Sea Wes smiled and gave thought to Chippy Charles Raymond Compton Bannister, bundled against the cold, trusting to what surrounded him, in the wildest end of the world. Flip a coin and get angry about events knocking you out or flip a coin and know what love was.

  Stopping over for two nights in Sydney, Wes stood in his parents’ kitchen backed up against the fridge while his mother sliced carrots and chopped onions for a stew. His father watched from the doorway. They talked about the Auckland Baptists who’d found a few things Judy needed. His parents going over there had found her fully coping on her own. It broke their hearts seeing her without Wes at her side.

  Wes said, ‘She gave me the boot in no uncertain terms after that wreck.’

  ‘Hardly surprising,’ was Wes’s father’s reaction.

&nb
sp; His mother said Judy had called out for him in labour as Chippy was being born. Wes took that in, turned the fact of it over in his mind. Like the moment a tide turned, nudge of a great force. He mentally noted it down in what he wanted to say to her in his fax.

  But, said his parents, as for this present alarming move of Judy’s, yes, it was astounding. Gone to Antarctica on a steel yacht swallowed into white emptiness, putting new life at risk. From the look in his parents’ eyes, Wes saw them as people involved in the same difficulty he was in, more like equals instead of the ones in power he needed to push against. He took a breath, filling his lungs without pushing past them out of the house and going for a walk around the block, like he used to.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I just didn’t know she was going to have a baby,’ and shook his head wonderingly.

  His mother raised her eyebrows. ‘Really?’ It summed up her general impression of men.

  ‘Let us know where you are, from now on,’ said his father. ‘That’s all a parent ever wants. A postal address, a phone number.’

  ‘But thank you anyway for your cards letting us know you were at least alive,’ said his mother, wiping her eyes with the corner of a tea towel.

  Over grace at the family table Rev. Bannister called Wes the prodigal son, and forgave him his long absence. Wes said very little as hands linked around the board welcoming him but accepted the feeling they lavished on him. The next night he met Ken and Dijana in Stanley Street for spaghetti. Dijana read him his horoscope. A Scorpio would always find reason to trust his own actions. Wes had never been any different from that. Judy, a Capricorn, would never need to wonder if she was important. Her too the same, that was demonstrated. They were two peas in a pod.