The fates would bring them together if the bullshit Dijana talked was true.
Within days Wes was back in Darwin to find the evangelists he’d sworn to help – and had flown back to help, as promised – were done with him. When he explained what he had rushed off to do, to see his baby son for the first time, but failed at it, the Cornishes said God loved little children and suffered them to come unto Jesus, but Wes and the mother of that son were not married. With pursed lips they looked at Wes, saying it was a problem.
It took a minute for Wes to start laughing. ‘Is that all I need to do to get into heaven, get married?’ Then the Cornishes laughed too, but not as hard as Wes did, and nodded, took their boxes of Bibles and shipped out on an island trader, trusting Wes to sell the Winifred Marlow on their behalf.
Wes felt awake to his life again in the crushing heat of the build-up to the Wet that invaded the blood and brain of the Top End at the end of the year. It would be well after Christmas, probably late February, even into March, Dick Durkheim had told him, before that steel yacht would haul itself north from the Antarctic. Holding the international fax number to the light, Wes felt reluctant to do anything about it except look at the arrangement of numbers and feel how they spread coordinates through a span of space and time, a formula linking two never entirely completely separated people and that third one – the one they had made between themselves without any thought of there ever being another beyond the two of them and their needs and drives.
With the Winifred Marlow Wes had a boat on his hands that he liked, took out around Darwin Harbour, anchored, drank a couple of beers, and brought back in again through the strong tides and soupy tropical water. A cool breeze across starlit water on a humid night was champagne. Boats were his life again, summoned by a quest for completion. Boats were a universe implicated in the sea around him. If the world had a consciousness boats were its dreams, called into action by the elements, made real in the world on waking. Boats had taken Wes over and spat him out and here were boats again, after a time when he’d chewed dirt as penance for extreme sailing in a mood of wishful thinking, getting Rattler embayed.
With a notebook in his pocket, scribbling what to say to Judy, falling short expressing it, Wes took on work scrubbing and repainting hulls hauled up into a boatyard, repainting and anti-fouling, mending and replacing deck gear.
Leafing through boats wanted ads in magazines, obedient to what the Cornishes asked of him, he found a buyer for the Winifred Marlow. A man flew up from Perth. He was an enthusiast for the Albert Strange design, and much else. He knew about the Winifred Marlow and her sail out from England from sailing magazines and newspaper back issues. The ketch was, he said, one of the most storied vessels in postwar sailing history, and he’d kicked himself missing out on her the first time she came up in the classifieds. Wes showed him the intact log and by the time they talked over the entries they were thirsty. STICK TO VIC AND GET ONTO SWAN said a sign nailed over the bar and they followed its imperative through frosted glasses of Vic and Swan.
Then hearing a rumble a bit like an earthquake trembling the walls, they collected their beers from inside the air-conditioned bar and went outside to watch the drama of bruised blue cumulonimbus with frantic lightning bolts away up at around thirty-three thousand feet marching across Darwin Harbour. They joined on that excitement as if their brains were up there agreeing. Brian Papasidero was a type Wes had met a lot around boats – diffident of manner, rotund in appearance, a tired grey complexion concealing a hard man who sailed. He was a businessman, not a surprise.
‘As for you, you’re public knowledge, Bannister,’ he declared.
‘How come?’ said Wes.
‘Yacht groundings get written up, in the case of your Rattler as far away as the UK Yachting Monthly. There’s a letter to the editor there getting stuck into you as a historical nicety if you look up the issue before last.’
‘So that’s the end of me,’ said Wes.
‘No, very much to the contrary, you’ll never get yourself embayed again, or a lesson’s been wasted.’
Brian Papasidero owned petrol tankers delivering fuel to service stations across Western Australia and ran a fleet of pre-mix concrete trucks roaring through town and country rotating their gurgly drums, making a sound like shells being crushed on a beach by dumpers. His sons ran the business now, he told Wes. He still had an interest. It was like creaming a tax every time he heard air brakes hissing on a big truck coming down an incline. He’d thought of making a shift to motor launches after years of sailing but at sixty could not let go of the tiller nor an eye on the sails touching heaven.
A Sparkman & Stephens thirty-four foot sloop Brian Papasidero owned, Gurgly Drum, was a sturdy, unpretentious, seaworthy yacht and the man loved her. He and his wife had sailed her together out of Fremantle and cruised the wilderness WA coast year after year since their twenties. Sad to say, last year his wife died.
Gurgly Drum, Brian Papasidero said, was bought for little, done up for a lot and was worth less than the price he’d paid for her originally. She looked a bit like a banana with a stick poking up from her sway back. But talk to sailors who had driven thirty-fours round the world. There were a few of them, and Papasidero had once hoped to be one to go that far.
He met circumnavigators when they made landfall at Fremantle. They only stopped there if in trouble and needed to start all over again if they wanted a record. They weren’t lone wolves as the solo sailor tag implied but were all unreasonable in some way, shape or form that Papasidero liked. The Rattler story as interpreted by him showed Wes was troublesome, awkward, contrary, difficult, tiresome, annoying, vexatious, obstinate. ‘Yeah, not perfect, but bundle that up under expert, unreasonable, and it makes you a bloody useful find.’
Self-made men never looked to anyone outside of themselves for permission to do anything. Wes understood he was being offered work from a man with ideas around achievement at sea in small boats who had money to spare. That, just like that, he was trusted to look after the Winifred Marlow till the end of the WA cyclone season. ‘Do that here or take her to Macassar till the cyclones finish. When you get to Perth you can look after Gurgly Drum for me, her and the Winifred Marlow that I’d like to see done up into mint condition, like when she was first delivered to her first owner, the marine artist Albert Strange. What’s your answer?’
Wes told him about his son. About Judy sloping off into the Southern Ocean. About the fax he was to send Te Ata when he found the words to fit.
‘There’s only two words you need, “marry me”. They worked for me, getting me the beautiful girl I scored, who’s now gone. So hang on to what you have and treasure it. If you’ve never actually put those words to your Judy Compton, Wesley my friend, I’d say get on with it.’
Wes set off clearing out of Darwin Harbour and cyclone threats, planning a course north to the equator before looping back. The Arafura Sea belonged to another totality of existence. A sea-people owned it. Standing on northwards the Winifred Marlow passed brown-faced, tough-looking characters in open fishing boats with sewn-together plastic rice bag lateen sails. As sea winds changed, tides shifted, thoughts ripened, objectives faded and new aims came up stronger than first plans ever made them out to be. Under the heading of being unreasonable list Wes Bannister doing exactly what he wanted to do, a habit hard to break. Soon enough he’d let this freedom go.
He was island-hopping, edging north to the equator and away from the cyclone corridor. With adze and chisel he delayed in boatbuilding villages with traditional craftsmen teaching him old ways, useful on old boats, and heard about Christian churches being burned on Ambon, with riot police posted around worshippers. He wrote to Papasidero, saying yes, he was taking his time and what he was doing taking it. It was no risk opening up to a man who trusted him on a handshake to be nowhere in particular by a certain date. You thought you knew a lot, Wes wrote, till you learned what other people could be.
Papasidero wrote back saying he would m
eet Wes in Macassar and sail a leg with him. He wasn’t there, Wes waited, and in a few days a telegram came collected in a Macassan village kantor pos, saying ‘Singapore’ and giving a revised date.
I’ll never get rid of that man, thought Wes, feeling more secure about life than he’d felt for a while, and grinning. Time now to brand a few words on paper.
‘Dear Judy,’ he wrote, starting his fax, and then crossing that out:
‘Darling,’ he continued, ‘I love you. I always did and always will.’
He let that hang, and SENT.
Then he went on, with a conversation opened just like that, on a new sheet: ‘What, do you reckon, is the best age to start doing things with Chippy on the water? Round the age of eight might work I’ve been thinking. A kid that age is quick. Eight I had the shoulder rotation of a monkey, the doctor said when I broke it, but he’s half and half of each of us so he’ll have good looks yours and real guts yours too.’
Wes saw Chippy leaping aboard the Winifred Marlow with a plastic pirate sword between his teeth and his belongings in a spotted handkerchief tied at four corners. Chippy, yes, he loved that name, would have liked a say in choosing it, but let that go. Over another Bintang he started revising the ideal age downwards for getting his son adapted to the water until he thought six months of age would be perfect – they could swim then, babies, he’d heard, only he’d need his mother, Judy, the two of them there, wading either side of a gasping tryer and smiling at each other over their success.
‘Marry me,’ he concluded, and watched the page smoothly withdrawing into the fax machine in the kantor pos.
Wes arrived off Singapore, found the marina to lay up the Winifred Marlow, and Brian Papasidero was there waiting for him.
‘I haven’t handled this the way you wanted it,’ said Wes. ‘I kept edging north while the cyclone activity lasted to the south-west, then it finished but I never turned round.’
‘What would you say you think you’ve done?’ said Brian.
‘Buggered your timetable up for you,’ said Wes.
‘Yes, you’ve been unreasonable. Lucky you’re a bloke who gets things done that way. You’ve got the Winifred Marlow looking great. I don’t remember any toe rail like that teak you’ve had put in, nor, let me say that I like them, these claw tool marks that haven’t been sanded out on that reinforcing where the cable runs in to the anchor locker.’
‘Yeah, well, I had help from an old man and his apprentices. It was all done in a flash though they never worked hard, or seemed not to.’
‘We still have our contract, our handshake. Do what you have to, come back here, then sail south.’
Brian Papasidero had his two sons and their wives and children, his several grandchildren, with him. What would it be to grow old like that? thought Wes. They were on their way to Thailand for a family holiday.
Judy’s fax came in.
Three days of confused time zones later, Wes landed in Mexico City.
PART THREE
WHEN JUDY RETURNED FROM Antarctica each year until Chippy turned eight she ran information nights and gave talks around public halls and yacht clubs to raise money for Greenpeace, the World Wildlife Fund, and the Antarctic and Southern Ocean Coalition.
Degradation of cold places was her theme at the mic. She loved the frozen south. There was beauty, conscience and adventure there. There was damage and change. There was no ‘zone of indifference’ in her talks, to quote her old subject inspector. A world was being squeezed like a lemon for its gifts. What was the science of this? she was asked. Natural history witness, experience and observation was a form of science, she said, a form of hope as a friend of hers, Ken Redlynch, liked to say.
As she said his name, Ken in the audience half-rose from his chair, turned to the room and bowed. Also, said Judy, while she was at it, doing the acknowledgments full bottle, observational attention grew from the example given by her mother.
‘Hello, Beth there,’ she said, a bit showily. ‘Mi madre.’
In row five Beth returned the greeting and beamed. See how her daughter had evolved, holding the room in her hand.
Yet Beth and Raymond still worried about Judy as they always had. Beth still loved Judy with difficulty, compounded by the easier understanding between father and daughter. Her love for Chippy was of another order, a diamond splinter in her heart. For the past eight years Chippy had gone back and forth, with and between his parents as if they lived in adjoining houses instead of at opposite ends of trailing-off landmasses of the Southern Hemisphere.
You could see that Chippy wanted this over. A fine furrow was ploughed across his ivory forehead, just above his perfect, quizzical eyebrows and his eyes as blue as robins’ eggs. Oh he was lovely, and when you saw him with both parents he glowed and the ridge of worry disappeared. This was the Rumpelstiltskin moment between Judy and Wes, the age when Chippy was to be delivered up to the idea of great things happening for the three of them. This had been agreed between Judy and Wes since Mexico City, when they sealed their lives together in a boat gypsy pact, when they had each, in Beth’s opinion, got exactly what they wanted.
Wes had courted Judy there. He had never in actuality courted her ever, not since they first met, when all his charm was in the excitement of scrambling aboard Rattler and into the love bunk rápidamente, as Judy liked to tell it.
In a barrio made for brassy music echoing through narrow, worn streets, red roses arrived by Harley Davidson delivery and a mariachi band crowded a courtyard doorway. ‘Give me a break,’ Judy had blushed, putting a rose stem between her teeth, and loving it.
Wes hefted a squealing, comically blissed-out, eyeball-rolling, damp-smelling baby Chippy to his face and blew gentle raspberries in his ear.
After a few hours in the house Jinx Behr’s Chicago family kept in Condesa, the bohemian quarter, they told the housekeeper they only needed the one bedroom, where they returned after going out to a steakhouse and getting drunk on red wine, eating five hundred grams of Argentinian beef per head, and went to bed finding each other again. Chippy was brought in by a nursemaid and placed between them at daylight while they snored.
Mornings Judy came blearily awake watching Wes playing with Chippy in the window seat, tickling his tummy and then putting his ear down to hear the boy’s delighted gurgles as if he’d never heard such wonderful music. Wanting a blessing beyond reason they lit candles to Mexican saints. A Peruvian nun dragged a lame leg across cobblestones and made a sign over Chippy with weird intensity, which they took for an omen. Two weeks later an American Episcopalian priest married them under a flowering black locust tree. A girl from the Australian embassy bore witness and mixed margaritas.
From Mexico City they flew, a family of three, to the Pacific coast, deplaned in steaming heat at an airport among hills, and drove an hour to where a steep, gritty beach made every wave into a potential spine-breaker and turtles came in at night to lay eggs, and all drinks were included in the low price paid for three good meals a day and a concrete block casita with a cold shower and the same steady supply of nursemaids with ancient face profiles as elsewhere in the Central Americas.
Judy’s talks were advertised on leaflets pinned up in Boatwear Bushgear stores and stacked on counters beside cash registers across six states. Tony Watson spruiked her on air. Ken, Dijana, Margaret, Harold, and Wes’s employer, Brian Papasidero, weighed in with cheques. Kay Cottee, Judy’s role model for pluck, had sailed into the record books sponsored by a natural cosmetics and vitamin pill maker. Cottee said she had never really counted how much he put in, but it was a lot. Judy knew how much in her friends’ case, as she never stopped bookkeeping.
Tina Stones wrote boat gypsies up in the Good Weekend, a survival-funded lifestyle with save-the-world compunctions. Judy and Wes encapsulated a culture, she wrote. They made sailing their life and their adventures were a form of privileged subservience, seeing as they got to do what they wanted and got to be themselves absolutely, short of paying the bills.
/> Chippy took money at the door and handed out tickets. Wonderful to think that boy was raised in a hammock, spending four years before the mast till he started school in Santiago. Last year Chippy flew for the first time as an unaccompanied minor, bounced, on the Qantas pogo stick, LA to Sydney, Sydney to Perth. He was growing up, getting an angle on the world he was born into.
Judy sat him in the front row and wagged a finger, warning him to sit still and stop tapping his feet on the chair rungs. When up flashed a striated caracara, called a Johnny Rook in the Falklands, where it was a cheeky thief par excellence, Chippy imitated its cry and brought the house down.
A panoramic photo showed the grey steel hull of Te Ata cabled against a frozen shelf of land. Using a slide remote controller, last relic of the Mark II International Educator, Judy waited till the oohs and aahs subsided and flicked through transparencies of iceberg archways and sheeting auroras marvellous beyond description and talked about threatened bird life, an incessant theme. Albatross, penguins, kelp geese, turkey vultures, oystercatchers came and went across a freezing sky or stood around between stones, hatching eggs and finding food in the intertidal margins.
Her talks were consistently booked out, with people turned away at the doors and invited to listen on loudspeaker extensions while sitting in corridors. Environmental anxiety craved witness accounts. She told of Te Ata losing her mast and a temporary one rigged in a blizzard, enabling Don Fawkner and Jinx Behr to sail her to the American base on Anvers Island, where Don shaped a new mast in the carpentry workshop and Jinx helped in the medical bay with emergency operations. The barnacled hull of a whale, said Judy, emitted a stink of breath through its volcanic blowhole as it swam alongside a Zodiac bumping through sea ice, making her giddy with delight. She loved a whisky, make that a double, but the midnight sun intoxicated her more. Up came another slide, somewhat technical: Te Ata’s anchor chain in a sixty-knot gale stretched bar-tight and the whole structure vibrating, Judy said, as if airborne. See how it led off into a blur of gelato spume and disappeared. Meantime the children, Chippy and the two Behr-Fawkner daughters, laughed and rolled around as they played Uno on the cabin sole.
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