The Tankermen

by Margo Lanagan

  ‘I don’t know. How about you, Don?’ His mum put her arm around him.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Finn. He was exhausted. He checked his mum’s watch: four-thirty. He looked out at the sky—yes, it was greying slightly now, the stars fading from view. ‘Yeah,’ he said again as they followed the sergeant through the packed emergency vehicles. ‘Let’s get it all over and done with.’

  10

  Master Finley

  Greenlawns Nursing Home was much nicer in real life than in the postcard. From being trimmed and painted up for the photograph, it had relaxed slightly. Tropical growth spurted up around the verandah stairs; the curtains behind one of the French windows were going a bit tatty. And of course, once you put real people on those cane settees, old people who tended to lean one way or the other, and not care whether the blanket was half falling off their knees or that their cardigans were buttoned up wrongly, the whole effect was pretty untidy.

  Busy as the front verandah looked, it had a crucial emptiness to Finn’s eyes. He walked slowly up the circular gravel drive, determinedly swallowing the lump in his throat.

  He saw an old hand lift into the sunlight and point waveringly at him. The girl in the white uniform, who’d been bending to lower a tea-tray, stood and squinted out at him, then gave a cry and headed for the stairs.

  ‘It’s Donny! Don Finley!’ she called over her shoulder, and an older nurse came to the front door to see. ‘My, haven’t you grown, just over Christmas!’ The nurse ran down the scrunching gravel. Finn laughed, and accepted her excited hug and a kiss on the cheek. ‘Oh, we thought we might never see you again! You know,’ she added at a lower pitch, ‘some people, they lose their gran and of course there’s no real reason why they should come back, but we do miss them.’

  ‘I’m glad to see you’re okay,’ the older nurse said, coming down the stairs to meet them. ‘We were worried about you. It’s a pity it’s Danielle’s day off—then again, none of us’d get a word in edgewise if she were here. Cup of tea?’

  ‘Yes please, Sarah. G’day, Barney.’

  ‘Young Master Finley! It’s been a long time!’

  Finn put his hand into the cool, papery one extended to him. ‘It sure has. How’ve you been?’

  ‘Oh, the usual. Another day, another chance to beat Mrs Stanwick at Five Hundred.’

  ‘Barney, you’re a ruthless man. He’s just a ruthless man, isn’t he, Donald?’ Mrs Stanwick was a tiny woman with a soft shock of pale blue hair, seated at the far end of Barney’s settee. Her eyes disappeared completely as she smiled at Finn. ‘You’re getting to be quite a handsome young man, Donald, isn’t he, Janine?’

  ‘Gorgeous. If I weren’t already engaged I’d ask him to take me out dancing.’

  ‘Engaged, hey? So you finally got Jason to pop the—’ ‘Finally. I had to literally bend his arm. Like my ring?’ Finn bent over the cluster of miniature diamonds and made dutiful, admiring noises. ‘Have you bitten it to see if it’s real?’

  Janine pushed at him. ‘You’re dreadful! I’d forgotten what a tease you were. We’ve really missed you, haven’t we? Haven’t we missed Donny, Mrs Casey?’ she added in a loud, clear voice to a woman perched dreamily in a wheelchair at her side.

  Mrs Casey looked up and smiled sweetly. ‘No, thankyou, nurse.’

  ‘Still off with the pixies, that one,’ said Mrs Stanwick fondly. She gathered a handful of cotton blanket and pulled it in closer to her. ‘Sit down here, Donald love, and drink your tea by me.’

  ‘I’ll just pop in and get the biscuits,’ said Janine. ‘Can’t have our tea without biscuits, can we?’

  She left the conversation pilotless, and Finn subsided, with the others, into that warm, timeless calm brought on by the wide, silent lawn between the Home and the forest, where birds fluttered and called.

  Barney’s hand wavered to rest a moment on Finn’s knee. ‘Your gran went off very peacefully,’ he said. ‘Right in the middle of Paradise Row, it was, so she must have died happy. Worried about you, of course. What were you up to, running orf like that and upsetting everyone?’

  Finn looked at him, the milky eyes and the mouth that delicately fumbled around the dentures. ‘I’m not sure,’ he said. ‘It all seems like a long time ago now.’

  Barney smiled distantly. ‘I remember doing exactly the same thing when I was about sixteen. Ran off to the war, you know. Of course, I was small for my age then, so they sent me straight home again. By the time I was old enough it was all over. Just as well, probably.’

  He laughed a little, soundlessly, then allowed a long, sleepy pause before continuing. ‘We all miss her, of course, your grandma. Even Lores there—’ he glanced at the nodding Mrs Casey ‘—sometimes asks “Where’s Iris gone? Is she having another bath?” she says, because, of course, your gran liked to bathe so often, in the summer.’ The battered dentures showed in his smile, and Mrs Stanwick laughed creakily, like a cricket starting up.

  ‘Here we go,’ said Janine, bringing back noise and bustle with her as well as biscuits. Sarah followed, handing Finn one of the unbreakable Greenlawns cups and saucers. The two nurses went ceremoniously up and down the verandah, handing out biscuits and pouring tea and milk.

  ‘So what exactly are you doing here?’ Sarah asked, when they’d settled with their own tea in front of Finn.

  ‘Yes, I thought you were going to spend this year in the Big Smoke,’ chirped Janine.

  ‘I was.’ Finn had a sip of scalding tea. ‘But my dad decided he was fed up with living in the city. My mum found this property for him and Janet and Alex to live in—and me, of course, sometimes—outside of Lismore. It’s great, really big, a bit like this—you know, verandahs all round. They’re renting out our old place in Sydney. Now I get to go to the same school every year, which is good.’

  ‘Oh, you can pop in any time now, can’t you?’ said Janine. ‘Goody, you’ll be able to help us with our Easter celebrations again. You remember that beautiful bonnet Don made you last year, Mrs Stanwick?’

  ‘Oh yes, with the pink and white frangipanis. I was a real picture!’ She smiled charmingly at Finn.

  ‘That’s lovely though, Don,’ said Sarah. ‘What made your dad change his mind, though? I thought your parents didn’t get on.’

  ‘Well, Dad got sick just before Christmas,’ said Finn, pausing slightly in wonderment at all the things he was leaving out of the story, ‘and when he was getting better he went through a kind of crisis—you know, “What am I doing with my life?” type of thing. And Mum had seen this house ages ago, and it just came on the market at the right time. It was like we were meant to take it! Not to mention Mum and Janet getting on like a house on fire.’

  He grinned. Thick as thieves, he heard his father complain. I turn my back and my two wives get together and start conspiring against me.

  Who better, to know what’s best for you? Janet had said, winking at Finn. Now just sign this contract, Richard my sweet, so we can get this whole thing moving.

  ‘Goodness, all that happened pretty quickly!’ said Sarah.

  ‘I know. We were lucky.’ Finn took another biscuit from the tin.

  He surveyed the jungle-fringed lawn. He knew it so well, this view, but it was all different now. His eyes were different, his brain behind the eyes. Everything peaceful, everything restful and natural, was now something that he had helped save. These people on the verandah, sipping tea and crunching biscuits in the summer-heavy afternoon, owed him and his mother, Janet, Jed and the police their lives—for how long would it have taken the tankermen to colonise the seas, to set up putrefaction chambers along the coast, to start collecting people and animals for processing? A tanker rolling in at the gates of Greenlawns . . . a cold dart of leftover fear shot down Finn’s back at the thought.

  They were gone, he told himself, remembering the charge going out of the tanker under his very hands, the rock-face becoming solid again. FinCom had been coordinating the testing of seawater all over the world, and there was no evidence of
the tankermen’s presence. The contamination around the Sydney beaches had become diluted; the division and multiplication of the cells had slowed and ceased. Unless the tankermen sent in another team, set up another pilot project, safety had returned. Finn had gone over all this time and again with all the people who’d been there. At the hospital, he had repeated his story with each of the tankermen’s victims, as soon as they were healthy enough to begin asking questions. He had worked with the police, with his father, with Janet and Stella, with Jed—not to mention the psychologists, a dozen or so curious scientists and a politician or two—combing through the details of the events, trying to make sense of them.

  ‘In the end, it doesn’t make sense,’ Jed had said, letting his head fall back on to the pillows. ‘It can’t—to us, anyway. It’s like trying to read a slug’s mind, or a rock’s. Those guys just operated on a completely different wavelength to us. They were a different species—they were after different things.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Stella had said. ‘They’re only doing what we do, trying to make the world safe for themselves, and populating it. It’s only natural, isn’t it, to want your own species to continue?’ Finn had felt her thin fingers stroking his scalp through his hair.

  ‘Maybe,’ said Jed. ‘Don’t know if I like being compared to a giant ant.’

  They’d all laughed, and like all the laughter since their escape it had been subdued, dampened by the knowledge of what they had narrowly avoided, and of the numerous people who hadn’t avoided it.

  ‘You’ll never exactly recover,’ the counsellor had said. ‘It’s like going through war—the nightmare stays with you to some extent. It’s not always in your conscious mind, but it will surface from time to time, less and less as the years go on. Right now it’s a difficult time, but you’ll weather this, and life will go on.’

  Finn did feel weathered, like a ship that had fought its way through a hurricane: his sails were shredded and his masts were broken. He felt he was sitting right where he belonged: on the verandah of a rest home, attended by nurses. But he had his new home, too, where everyone but Alex knew what he had gone through. On nights when bad dreams disturbed him he could go into the room where his father lay recovering. Even in the dim light from the window, it was easy to see how the flesh was beginning to soften the angles of his skull, how his silvered hair shone with Janet’s care. And Alex, too, who had slept through everything, was helping to heal them with endless games, irrepressible chatter and the way he innocently took life for granted—he was an anchor to steady Finn in the sudden, unnerving calm, a charm to deflect past horrors. Finn had seen every one of them, Jed and his mother included, looking at Alex in the same way, realising why they had gone through what they had gone through. Their own lives might be changed forever by what they had seen and what they could now fear, but everyone else’s lives could go on unaffected. No more bereavements, no more mysterious disappearances, no more weapons fizzing in back lanes, no more putrid vapours wafting over the sea. No-one else need feel their fillings sing with the strange charge of a tankerman, or hear the lid of a collection-coffin clang shut.

  ‘Happily ever after’ wasn’t exactly the phrase that came to mind, but Finn had hope, that some day their lives would return to something like normality—that his mother and Janet would lose the circles of haunted sleeplessness from around their eyes, that his father would regain the strength to put out his arms and hold Finn against his reconstituted body, that Finn himself would shed this aged feeling, this sense of his eyes being webbed by experience. He wanted to be a kid again, safe for a while among his reunited family. He wanted to go up on the Range with Jed and take the bike along the dirt roads, whooping at the speed, at the rush of fresh wind and the freedom from care.

  ‘More guests!’ Barney was saying. Finn’s mother’s ute was driving in at the gate.

  ‘That’s your mum, isn’t it, Don?’ said Janine.

  ‘Sure is. She’s come to pick me up.’

  ‘That big bloke, is he her boyfriend? And who’s the little boy? Look at him, jumping up and down in his seat like a yoyo!’

  Finn laughed. ‘“That big bloke” is my mate Jed. He’s up here on holiday.’ Finn raised an arm to return Jed’s wave. ‘And the little one’s my half-brother, Alex. Jed and my mum are helping look after him while Janet takes care of Dad.’

  ‘Talk about cute,’ said Sarah, as Alex, released, powered up the lawn. ‘Look at those curls!’

  ‘I’ll introduce you, as soon as he’s wound down a bit,’ said Finn, standing up and heading for the steps.

  He ran across the clipped kikuyu grass, getting up momentum. Then he did three cartwheels and a forward flip, landing a metre short of Alex.

  ‘Wow!’ said Alex in awe.

  A thin patter of applause drifted down from the verandah.