by Ros Baxter
‘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.
Suppositories. I swear, until that moment, I would never have believed that shoving my own finger up my own behind could be so entirely pleasurable. Just knowing that doing so was going to make the vomiting stop was enough to make me moan with relief.
By the time the nausea finally stopped, it was evening.
The afternoon had been taken up for most of the crew in meticulously planning an operation they were undertaking at dawn. Two of the team were going out in a rubber boat to try to board the Japanese whaling boat to speak to the crew. It was audacious and fascinating, based on Gandhian principles of trying to engage with the oppressors. The technical people had been planning the operation down to the last detail to ensure that it was as safe as possible, and the weather was scheduled to be calm for the operation.
Another rubber dinghy was to shadow them, to take pictures and document the event. I was amazed by the courage of these people and, now that the nausea had subsided, I was really looking forward to spending the night with them to hear more about their plans and stories of other battles fought and won.
But of course, things never go to plan.
After heating up a few cans of beans and eating some power bars, the group started to sing a few rounds of really off-key peace songs — really, I thought my Mom was the only one who still listened to Joni Mitchell. They weren’t terribly keen when I suggested some power ballads. Given how cold and wet it was, I thought ‘November Rain’ might have been appropriate. And they were kind of disgusted when I enquired, in a fit of desperation, where they kept the alcohol.
So, in the end, I gave up, and snuggled down in my incredibly warm, tested-in-the-Arctic sleeping bag for an early night. The seas had calmed somewhat, and for the first time all day, I finally felt like I understood why the hell nature might be worth protecting. The sea was kind of humming to me, and I came over all earth mother as I started to nod off with the delicious effects of the suppository keeping my stomach even and the lap-lap of the waves against the hull calming my shattered nerves. Then, just when I thought I had really experienced the full effects of what we were here for, it started. The singing.
Baleful songs rising up out of the ocean like eerie, breathy power ballads. Normally you only hear the songs with a hydrophone, but sometimes, in the right place, at the right time, you can hear them above the surface, amplified through the hull of the ship. The noise was so full, so meaty, that it seemed to form spirals of sound and emotion that went right up into the stars. One whale started and then the song seemed to be repeated and echoed all around us. My God, how many were there? How many whales were outside, trilling and groaning and crooning to each other in this crazy harmony?
I swear I felt like those big, beautiful whales were singing directly to the whalers. Trying to convince them how magical and special they were. How utterly worth saving. How criminal it would be to destroy them. I thought about Eve, and how impressed she would be by this symphony. And I made a decision. I was going to go with them. In the morning. In the second boat. To watch, document, take pictures. I was going to put aside all my petty human fear, and sickness, and do what I had come to do. The right way.
I was going to make sure I could tell Eve that I had done all that I could do.
Over the top — The Southern Ocean; November 15, 2012, midday
The morning dawned clear and bright. In the cold light of day, without any whale noises to spur me on, I almost lost my nerve. But then I realized I still had six hours to kill, and it was either stay on board watching the action unfold, or get out there and be part of it. Well, you know, kind of part of it. Our observation dingy wasn’t going to attempt any boarding stuff like the two guys in the other craft.
We were going to be staying reasonably out of the way, and just observing and filming. There were three of us in my dinghy: someone to drive, someone to film, and me. Footage was going to be beamed live via wireless satellite technology back to media in the US. Jorn had arranged a rendezvous with CNN, not that I imagined the whol
e thing was going to get that much coverage. And I was going to take pictures for my article.
Getting into the dinghy, I almost lost my nerve. Actually, that’s kind of an understatement. Far from leaping heroically into the thing, which was so small it suddenly made the Rainbow Serpent look huge, I inched like some kind of caterpillar with a learning disability down the rope ladder and then sprang in terror into the arms of the cameraman at the last moment, almost upending the entire deal and causing God knows how many thousands of dollars worth of technical equipment to meet a watery grave. The guys on my dinghy didn’t share the humor of the moment when I joked ‘oops, anyone for a dip?’
The crew was even more serious this morning. They were actually wearing balaclavas. I tried not to laugh, but declined the offer of one myself. I didn’t feel I’d earned one. Actually, I was feeling kind of hysterical. I wondered if I’d overdosed on the suppositories. I was vacillating between terror, manic amusement and this other thing. This kind of martyr or hero thing that I recognized as a vain and petty emotion, but was having trouble suppressing nonetheless. The whole thing was pretty eco-terrorist. And I was working the part big-time. I’d dressed all in black, like Zorro. Momentarily, as I sat there, I wondered whether vanity was a significant factor in my decision to go out with the dinghy crews.
Possibly.
I was already imagining how I would recount the story when I got home.
As it turned out, I wouldn’t need to.
Despite the calm weather, the little dinghies were bucking around quite a bit in the water as we sped towards the largest of the whaling boats. Everyone was silent as we came around from behind. I could see the crew in the first boat making hand signals to each other and to the guys on my boat. I suppressed the urge to giggle again. The whole thing did seem kind of melodramatic. These people were whalers, after all, not international terrorists. Well, you know, depending on your perspective on the whole thing.
