A Sea-Chase Read online

  About the Book

  Growing up in inland Australia, Judy, a young teacher, has rarely seen the sea. But when she flees a rioting classroom one dismal Friday, a dud and a failure, she gets drunk and wakes up on a boat. Overnight her life changes; she is in love with being on the water and in love with Wes Bannister, who lives on the boat. Sailing was not something Judy had ever thought about wanting, but now she craved it. Wind was the best teacher she’d had, by far …

  Judy believes that the one trusted continuation of herself is with Wes, and always will be, but then events at sea challenge their closeness. Must they become competitors against each other in the push to be equals? It seems they must.

  A Sea-Chase is a novel that vividly tracks ambition, self-realisation and lasting love, tied up in a sea story. The idea that nobody who sets off to do something alone – without family, friends, rivals and a pressing duty to the world – ever does so alone, finds beautiful, dramatic expression in Roger McDonald’s tenth, and most surprising, novel.

  CONTENTS

  COVER

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  EPIGRAPH

  PART ONE

  PART TWO

  PART THREE

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ALSO BY ROGER MCDONALD

  COPYRIGHT NOTICE

  To those who said you would do great things (and you did)

  As I looked at their faces I almost decided not to go; it was too unfair.

  I patted Gus, the family labrador, went forward to cast off, and found Ken and Bill still busily bolting down a Highfield lever for the jibstay.

  ‘OK, I’ll finish that,’ I said. ‘I’m off.’

  – Robin Knox-Johnston, A World of My Own (1969)

  I’ve been thinking about my boyfriend and our relationship when I get home though. We’ve been drifting along for seven-and-a-half years now – too long with nothing happening. I’ve decided, now I can see it all from afar, that I couldn’t live like that for the rest of my life.

  – Kay Cottee, First Lady (1989)

  PART ONE

  LAST PERIOD FRIDAY an acting inspector found a young teacher sobbing at her desk in the farthest demountable classroom of the lower secondaries of an outer suburban high school. She had made a wrong turn, she wailed. A wrong turn into teaching. A subject report spread in front of Judy Compton splashed with tears said she created a ‘zone of indifference’ in her classes. It meant she was a dud.

  ‘Dud is a word I never want to hear from you ever again,’ the inspector said, pulling up a chair that had been thrown to the ground after a rioting class fled for the day. Passing Judy a box of tissues, he leaned forward over her desk with a manner implying he had known her for longer than thirty seconds, which he hadn’t.

  Ken Redlynch was involved that year in regional staffing, a roving commission aimed at teacher retention. It was vocational enforcement, low-level work in a hierarchy he longed to dismantle and would do so, come the revolution, make no mistake. Judy had heard of him. He drove a jungle-green Austin Healey sports car, the BJ8 with an exhaust note like a trumpet blast, had been married three times and was blind in one eye like a pirate. The Department had a few known names like him, men and women each with their own band of acolytes.

  ‘The bloke who wrote that report is the dud,’ he said.

  Judy flicked aside a long braid of hair, peered up at Ken through tearful brown eyes, smiled weakly and said it was good of him to say so, but her wrong turn into teaching was her own fault. She could not believe how stupid she’d been for going in for something she hated.

  ‘Then why make the choice in the first place?’ said Ken, who believed a vocation – any vocation – was never a choice but a flowering and a quest. Look at his own path of duty. It was never a plod. It was often a dance diablo. Opposition and difficulty beefed it up.

  Teaching had happened for Judy, she said, through sticking with a bunch of girls who did everything together when they left school. At twenty-one she was not much older than the teenagers she stood in front of yelling. After matriculation she had taken on teacher training without much thought. It was for the parties, the easy hours, the freedom after boarding school of coming in, as late as she liked, to a shared house in the inner city. Also, she confessed to Ken, there was her mother, the research scientist Dr Elizabeth Darke, who had higher hopes for her. Enrolling in the dullest, slackest course imaginable, Business Studies, Bookkeeping and Stenography, seemed like a good way to annoy her mother at seventeen but not so much now, four years later.

  ‘Dr Elizabeth Darke, the geneticist?’ Ken tipped back his chair and contemplated Judy afresh. The Darkes were an intellectual, freewheelingly arrogant sort of brainy family, including a professor of archaeology at Sydney University who made trouble for everyone who came up against him. Of course they were not left-wing political, the way Ken was, waving the red flag when he could, though Elizabeth Darke had, on the anti-nuclear side of protests, made speeches.

  ‘Interesting,’ said Ken, ‘that you’re a Darke.’

  ‘I’m not like them,’ said Judy. ‘I grew up in the bush, in Louth, Bourke and Byrock. I hardly even know the Darkes.’

  ‘The best in you’s got to be good,’ said Ken with conviction.

  Judy was to remember those words. Engrave them on stone, you might say, when things came unstuck with Ken Redlynch.

  The corridors went quiet as footsteps faded. School was emptied out. Flocks of galahs flew overhead with the sound of inland places. Public transport that end of Sydney was hopeless. ‘I’ll give you a lift back into the city,’ said Ken. ‘If you’d like one?’ The tone he used implied they were going to be friends. That he would make everything all right. That he was Judy’s saviour.

  ‘Can you get me out of my bond?’ said Judy as they walked to Ken’s car. She skipped keeping up with him, a young girl again with the teaching week behind her. ‘Please?’

  ‘No, I can’t do that. Don’t be ridiculous. But looking at that dismal report I can make a recommendation for a transfer. You need another chance, a fresh start, a changed perspective. Listen. Your feeling that everything’s wrong is not always a bad thing in this game.’

  ‘Not if I really have that vocation you talk about.’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Ken.

  ‘Well, I don’t have it,’ said Judy, stamping her foot like a spoiled kid.

  Ken laughed, enchanted. First opportunity he had, he would like to talk to her mother, Dr Elizabeth Darke. Beth. Bright woman. Front-line researcher at AGS, the Agronomy Research Station in the Hunter Valley, a nursery for shy geniuses. Daughter must have capacity to do same or similar, in some way yet to find.

  The low-slung Austin Healey with the top down created a glossy magazine moment in the eyes of anyone watching it burble past on the way to the city. The driver wore a black beret like Pablo Picasso, a red neckerchief, and had a pretty young girl in a light cotton frock beside him, the two of them in animated conversation.

  Ken drove right-handed with his left arm trailed along the seat behind Judy, her body arched in his direction as she listened. Or to be honest half-listened. Ken talked about an invention aimed at rescuing teachers from drudgery, a teaching machine with four spindly legs like a lunar lander, the Mark II International Educator. It was simple. You wedged into a tiny desk, kicked in a mini-cassette dicta-phone operated by a foot pedal, listened back through hissing headphones, and watched Kodak colour slides jerk past on a small grainy screen. You engaged with it physically, like a boat. You wrestled and tamed it like a tiger. When you finished, you packed it up portably into a lightweight plywood carrying case. It did not just sit there like other recent inventions, silently spewing the green fuzz of
a computer device onto a murky TV screen.

  ‘Who invented it?’ asked Judy.

  ‘I did,’ said Ken. ‘I’m also the manufacturer, with a little help. I’m not in them for myself. I want the Department to buy up the whole lot and mass produce them. But if they won’t do it I’ll bloody well do it myself.’

  ‘Good on bloody you!’ shrieked Judy over the noise of grinding gear changes. She had no idea really of what he was talking about. His invention, as he called it, sounded out of date – less like an invention, more like a collection of parts.

  ‘Take rote learning out of the classroom, restore pupil–teacher engagement,’ said Ken. ‘The ideal of understanding. A connection of minds.’

  ‘So even you think teaching can be a dead loss.’

  Ken ground down through the gears and slowed the car.

  ‘Look,’ he said. ‘Stop thinking I can just pluck you out of a school and get you out of a job you hate. I won’t do that. I can’t. I never give up on anything, never give up on anyone. I can help you but I can’t just give you what you’re asking. You’ve got to do something out of yourself.’

  Judy turned aside. She had heard it all before. All her life, in fact. Tears of disappointment welled.

  ‘I want you to meet Dijana,’ said Ken. ‘Dijana Kovačić, the artist. My wife, my third wife,’ he added a little coyly, rather lovingly. ‘Dijana’s been through everything you’re going through now. But she’s long over it and there’s a lot she could tell you about what teaching means to her.’

  ‘I’d rather not,’ said Judy.

  ‘I think you should,’ said Ken. ‘She’s meeting me at the pub.’

  ‘Then all right!’ said Judy.

  Ken turned off into Balmain. Late-afternoon sun lit the industrial harbour rust-red. His local had its doors flung wide with drinkers standing around on the footpath getting in the way of pedestrians. It was the week Bob Menzies died, the abominated Pig Iron Bob laid to his eternal rest. Ken steered Judy in by the elbow through the boozy political and Cockatoo Island working-class crowd. Dijana waited for him up at the bar.

  ‘I’ve brought someone to meet you,’ said Ken. ‘She’s not sure she wants to teach.’

  ‘I’ve had it, I really have,’ said Judy.

  ‘You are very young,’ said Dijana by way of a greeting and an assessment all wrapped in one, expressed in a throaty European accent.

  ‘I’m sorry about that.’ Judy laughed. Actually, she felt old after the day she’d had. Wise with bitter experience of failure. It was certainly her day for feeling that sort of feeling.

  ‘What’s your poison?’ said Ken. ‘Middy or schooner.’

  ‘Schooner,’ said Judy.

  ‘Where’s Wes?’ said Ken, looking around before signalling a barmaid.

  ‘I saw him,’ said Dijana, scanning the crowd where people pushed through, barely able to move it was so densely packed. ‘There he is.’

  Judy looked where Dijana pointed and saw the unsettlingly blue-eyed bloke with the bony forehead and coppery mop of hair she had bumped into a minute ago at the end of the saloon bar. They had exchanged glances and looked away from each other. Now they looked at each other again and looked away again.

  Ken got the beers and Dijana passed Judy’s to her like a relay baton, foam spilling down the sides of the glass through many-ringed fingers. Her long, pale hair swayed around her long, pale face, forming a canopy. Ken ripped open a packet of Smith’s Crisps and Judy took one. They sat perched up at the bar, a trio of teachers among the workers.

  ‘So you are one of Ken’s hopefuls,’ said Dijana.

  ‘Except I’m not hopeful,’ said Judy, but she was. There was the hopeful feeling a cold beer gave her, ribboning down inside her. Friday night pub night. What would it bring?

  She looked around down the bar at the bloke again. Dijana caught her looking.

  ‘Wes lives on Ken’s lovely ketch, Rattler, she’s moored at the bottom of our street in Birchgrove. Very quiet, leading down to the harbour. There is a dinghy for getting out and back, padlocked to a ringbolt on a stone wall.’

  ‘What’s a ketch?’ said Judy, holding a golden crisp to the light, studying its salt grains with calculated indifference.

  Wes Bannister said later that he fell in love with Judy when his eye ran along her arm to her wrist and to her fingers where she held that Smith’s Crisp to the light, twisting it left and right like a tiny sail. For Judy, she said, it happened when she heard his fingers click behind her like a radar ping, before she even saw him. But she had already seen him.

  She gave a jump. There he was, right there beside her, waiting for her as if he had been there all the time.

  Ken and Dijana left after a few drinks, witnessing a sight not unlike a buck and a doe in a clearing, two wildly alert young animals staring at each other bewitched, naked attraction taking hold as their heads touched over schooners.

  Next morning Judy woke aboard Rattler in the love bunk, a berth more like a shelf where the two wedged in with an enactment of the Kama Sutra offered every time they turned over on a countdown. It was hilarious, and sombre. Had she and Wes known each other before, in some former life? Was Wes’s thousand-year love pitch absurd, when he said he’d loved her forever?

  ‘Too soon, just love me,’ she’d said in the night, putting a finger to his lips.

  Reflected watery ripples played on the ceiling inside the cabin. What a great thing a boat was, thought Judy, staring around the inside of one for the first time in her life, happily nursing a hangover. She stretched her arms the limited distance available before touching the ceiling and feeling the vibration of Wes moving about on the deck above transferred to her fingertips.

  The domestic neatness in the cabin space brought tears to her eyes. Rattler was Ken Redlynch’s boat but Wes had worked on her in his apprenticeship and after, putting in time replacing the masts, fixing the rudder post – whatever that was – getting down on his hands and knees caulking the decks, a proper bastard of a job. Ken knew he owed money for the work but Wes never brought it up. He owed it to Ken, was what Wes said.

  When Judy poked her head out of what was aptly named the companionway and whistled, a country girl’s piercing whistle, Wes grinned and hopped back down below, and they scrambled back into the love bunk. Wes raised himself on his arms above her and stared into her warm brown eyes staring back. Yes she could, could say it, suddenly and completely, her whole life before him was nothing, and as she said it, it was gone, it was nothing, her whole previous life was just a shimmer of light on the water and a sigh and a shudder of feeling. But she also said that if she did not hold on to that life she would maybe get lost, even to him. And when she was away from him, she said, she wanted to take the feeling of being with him with her. Otherwise love at first sight would never be proved to be what it said it was.

  So she smoothed Wes’s serious eyebrows with her thumb and gave his ear a sudden sharp pinch to share that reality.

  ‘I love that line down the length of your arm from your shoulder to your wrist,’ said Wes, holding her sturdy arm across to the light, marking what she could not see, running a finger along a nerve path she had never felt before, what had never been there before.

  Wes cooked a hangover breakfast of fried eggs, bacon, brown bread, slightly rancid butter and Vegemite spread thickly. When Judy searched around for something in the small galley kitchen to pass him, she found everything had a place or else the boat was chaos. Over their breakfast she pulled books from the bookshelf. They were all ex libris Kenneth Redlynch, with passages marked in pencil and exclamation marks or the word ‘No!’ in the margins. Wes was reading A World of My Own by Robin Knox-Johnston, the solo sailor. A place was marked where, in the vicinity of New Zealand, Knox-Johnston had thrown a piece of equipment overboard. Ken wanted Wes to make him one, a windvane self-steering contraption. Wes made things for Ken a lot, foreign orders. That included the famous teaching machines, or at least, Wes said, the part people liked best: the cabin
et of sanded wood with rounded corners and concealed sliding partitions that opened out into a tiny desk and a tiny seat to perch on if you were small-sized. Wes glued, sanded and oiled them with the care he gave to working on boats where craftsmanship saved lives.

  ‘The water was never a part of my life before,’ was Judy’s explanation of a sudden raw radiance exhibited by love bites on her neck when she was late meeting up with a friend. His name was Tony Watson and they had been friends since Judy was eight. There was no explaining what Tony was to Judy, although she tried explaining it to Wes, who was naturally suspicious if not outright jealous to find, just when he learned he was the love of her life, quite possibly, that there was another bloke just as important to her.

  ‘Think of it like this,’ said Wes, scratching his head, ‘if I said to you, like you’ve just told me, that there’s a woman I’ve known forever, and every week I write to her telling her everything I do, and every week she writes back regular as clockwork, and we cut our wrists and mingle our blood we’re that close. What would you think?’

  ‘You don’t understand,’ said Judy. ‘It’s not like that at all.’

  ‘What’s it like, then?’

  ‘You’ll have to wait and see till you meet him.’

  That was a postponement. Nobody ever liked Tony much. Tony was hardly ever in the city anyway; a meeting with Wes could wait. It was just ridiculous that any part of what Judy felt about Tony had anything to do with what she felt about Wes. But every boyfriend she had ever had, when she told them about Tony, had been the same except the first one, and that was different. She just hoped Wes was different. Surely he was, or she would not feel the way she did, she argued as proof to herself.