A Sea-Chase Read online

Through that winter of first loving Wes, Judy still taught. She hated it but had her new life with him. Ken Redlynch coaxed her to stay in the classroom, and found her a high school closer in to the city, at Auburn. It was an all-girls’ high. Judy liked it only slightly better than co-ed chaos but Ken proved strict in not letting her use excuses to resign when she had no money to pay off her bond anyway. Ken did his acting inspector work, taught physics and chemistry, worked at night and on Saturday mornings at a coaching college for the extra money involved, and wrote study guides in fat ring binders, competing with authors who pushed their rival guides more successfully with head office than Ken was allowed to push his. He sat on political protest committees, took part in marches.

  Although Judy was drawn to him it was not political. She wanted to please him. With his blind eye slightly veiled over like milky glass he angled his head, peering sharply from the good one. Judy’s brain worked better around him; she felt more alive and deserving of who she was. Maybe it was just that eye that seemed to reserve fifty per cent of possible criticism.

  She lowered her head, looked penitent while Ken talked about vocational satisfactions based on his own experience. As he talked she allowed him to think he might succeed, because she loved hearing him talk about the love of teaching he had himself. It was like music, the stirrings of a jazz solo or a promising overture, the way Ken dreamed aloud his ideals.

  No, Judy was not in love with Ken, but without a crush on his kindness and brains, his optimism and rebellious flair rubbing off on everyone around him, she would never have met Wes, never have crossed paths with someone like Wes or had the remotest idea he existed. She told Tony Watson in her next gushy, weekly lettercard that, falling in love with someone she was mad about, she might make a life or unbelievably try out the idea of making a life with someone, when she hadn’t had any idea she was ready or even had any sort of belief she might be.

  In the corner of a waterfront shed Wes bolted light metal parts together, sanded and buffed ply panels for the cases of the next hopeful batch of teaching machines. After school Judy went shopping around hardware stores on the lookout for wheels. The original Mark II had wheels small enough to tuck into the box but they were not equipped with brakes, so every time a student sat down the unit whizzed off sideways across the room. She barked her knuckles reaching in under the work platform helping Wes tighten a pair of butterfly nuts that always gave trouble.

  Wes sorted through the first-aid tin for bandaids.

  ‘Why weren’t the butterfly nuts worked out after the Mark I?’ said Judy as Wes put the bandaid on and kissed her finger.

  ‘There wasn’t ever a Mark I,’ said Wes. ‘It’s only a name.’

  Over the Queen’s Birthday holiday weekend the weather was good, and Wes and Judy, along with Ken and Dijana, painted the topsides of Rattler, chatting away, and sat on a scaffold at smoko eating sandwiches and drinking thermos tea. Wes grabbed Judy to the rhythm of boatyard hammers and drills and pressed her against the shed wall the way she loved to be held, tight as he could, and they kissed holding their dripping paint brushes out to one side, keeping their balance and laughing.

  The ketch was on the hard, which meant out of the water on dry land in the boatyard. Without anything being said about living arrangements, Judy lived aboard most nights of the week. The other girls at the Glebe house where she had been living since teachers’ college had similar boyfriend transitions going on.

  ‘Who’s Judy on with?’ they asked when Judy used words like gaff and sheer strake, laminated construction, stem, sternpost, frames and knees. The new people Judy was mixing with were changing her. Coming from inland she had rarely seen the sea. Growing up, her big idea of it came when she was eight or nine with the sight of floods coming down from Queensland, muddy water sheeting to the horizons through lignum swamps and coursing through dry gullies with a tongue of dirty foam. Wes Bannister, she told her friends, when she got around to telling them, was a former teenage troublemaker pulled from a General Activities class at Cleveland Street High by a teacher who cared, who owned a boat. Forget that Wes had attacked Ken from behind a door by ramming a brick in his guts. It did no harm standing up to Ken obviously. Now Wes was a boatbuilder and lived on Ken’s boat moored at Balmain. It was fun on Rattler, like living in a shoe, said Judy, giving hilarious descriptions of getting up a ladder and into bed, closing the washboards behind her.

  Dijana Kovačić was not all that happy with boats, although, as an artist, an art teacher, she liked messing around with pots of paint, chunks of wood, specialised materials and tools. She did everyone’s horoscopes as they worked. Judy was a Capricorn.

  ‘I don’t think I’m a typical one, am I?’ said Judy.

  ‘More typical than you think,’ said Dijana, keeping her total feelings about Ken’s little friend to herself. All that organisational ability around invoices and ledgers and shorthand note-taking, even to careful lesson planning for classroom chaos, switching itself to boats. That Judy is a freak, she decided. She wondered what Ken was thinking when Judy flicked the braces of her overalls under his sunburned nose, getting enthusiastically conversational. They talked about everything from atoms to zygotes, but what they also talked about was the sea, and then Wes joined in, debating if you really could sail around the world on sixpence like Ken said.

  It was what Ken talked to Dijana about too, but while they were in bed together. As a student Ken had worked as a deckhand on an island trader, sailing around New Guinea and the Solomons. ‘You could see the people coming down the beach. They pulled off the sand in their outriggers loaded with coconuts and every sort of spinach greens and sweet potatoes, and the kids, I tell you, bright as anything, grinning like mad, crazy for knowledge.’

  ‘What about the swell?’ said Dijana.

  ‘In the lagoon? Nothing, calm as a millpond.’

  When Dijana had trouble sleeping, Ken said, ‘Believe me, honey hearts, there’s no such thing as a bad sleep on a boat, rocked in the cradle of the deep in the arms of your lee cloths.’

  ‘Your lee whats?’

  ‘Canvas restrainers to stop you falling out of your bunk,’ Ken admitted.

  You could dance on the deck of Rattler when she was cleared of working tools and coils of rope and buckets of caulking compound. Ken had wooed Dijana there with his midget ukulele, at a sheltered mooring in Sydney Harbour, singing sea shanties off-key, wearing sandshoes, tattered shorts, his square jaw flecked with boat paint. Now it was where the younger couple did their rooting, as Dijana precisely expressed it, with the tip of her accented tongue, reserving the word ‘courting’ for what she had in lovely ways experienced herself, and still did, with Ken, who was trained after his two previous marriages to give flowers now and then and reserve part of each day for a close time together that did not necessarily involve ripping Dijana’s clothes off and throwing her on a bed.

  Rattler was a gaff-rigged ketch made of kauri planks and heavy beams. As a ketch she had an extra mast in the cockpit vicinity getting in the way. But her sheer strake, the top plank running along her sides, was a brushstroke in a Chinese painting. Her laminated knees were modern sculptures, only hidden unless you crawled into a narrow dark space to look. A few years ago Rattler was found abandoned by an enthusiast on a mudflat with a hole in her side and brought down to Sydney from the tropics. Ken got a bargain. Without meaning to exploit anyone, just through a habit of helping kids out, he got most of the work done on her for nothing. Boats took time and money, more than Ken ever thought, and he had reason to know, having built his own VJ dinghy as a schoolboy in Rose Bay with the help of his working-class father while the rich kids from up the hill had theirs bought for them.

  Judy loved writing to Tony Watson, expanding the story of Ken, Dijana, Wes, and Ken’s battles with the Department, where he was an anti-hero, and how Wes walked towards her out of Ken’s charmed circle with a lopsided grin, clicking his fingers to get her attention. Nobody else heard it or took notice of it, but Judy could hear
the click over the noise of a party, or if they were shopping, from the other end of the street, as they worked on Rattler, in the pub, anywhere.

  Then one day towards the end of second term Ken said, ‘There’s a Mark II in the Research Branch being pulled to bits. They’ve asked for all my paperwork, receipts, purchases, income, tax returns, bank statements.’

  ‘Well that’s good, isn’t it?’

  ‘It’s more likely a way of shooting me down. If my books aren’t balanced it will be. They want to be certain it’s not making me rich, or if I’m bloodsucking the Department on school time. Would you do it for me, my bookkeeping? It’s totally beyond me, to be honest.’

  ‘Are you kidding? What’s so hard about it?’ said Judy.

  ‘There you go. You’ve got the knack. It said so in your inspection report, on the plus side.’

  ‘As long as it gets me out of the classroom. Any chance of that, Ken, please? Haven’t I proved yet I’m a dud?’

  ‘There’s that word,’ said Ken. ‘Meantime I take off my hat to you.’

  ‘Anything but teach – put me in the salt mines, chain me in a dungeon, I’m willing.’

  What Ken wanted for himself tempered his stand against Judy weathering rowdy classrooms. He argued Judy’s head-mistress into giving her a month’s stress leave with pay, to begin after the September holidays. What the hell. His enemies in Head Office were gathering. Bend the truth in the name of the revolution. His bank balance on foreign orders was drained from one salary cheque to the next. His one friendly contact in Head Office, out of a half dozen hostiles, told him the Research Branch specialists were wild about a computerised device called Speak and Spell. Ken went in for a look.

  Speak and Spell had something the Mark II made no claim to have, a calculating capacity like an army of mathematicians quiet as mice and packed into a case smaller than a cigar box, except it lacked a screen for pictures. ‘That screen is my saviour,’ said Ken.

  Judy started on Ken’s dockets and ledgers at the beginning of the September school holidays and got them out of the way in thirty-six hours. It was like cleaning up after a flood. She was shocked checking her figures. The machines barely paid for their materials and parts. Watching Judy through the door of Ken’s study, Dijana was hypnotised. Judy’s whole body angle loosened as if drugged. The tips of her fingers sped. Her glance locked into messy corners and found bundles of bank statements that she speared onto metal spikes with a ripping, popping sound. She sat thumbing through cheque stubs like a croupier shuffling cards, suddenly stopping to note down a number. No wonder she hated teaching school. Concentration without intrusion was the method of her brain. Timeless, driven, calculating, ambitious? mused Dijana, withdrawing down the corridor listing Capricorn traits she might not be able to keep from telling Ken about in a bitching tone.

  Getting the books done left time in the holidays for dinghy sailing with Wes off a pontoon at the dinghy club, around to a tiny beach where Ken watched and called out advice.

  Judy could not get it exactly right, what Wes wanted her to do with the tiller in one hand, the jib sheet, which was in fact a rope, in the other. She wanted to please him, to do better than he expected. And she was a quick learner, too, and had always loved sport, was good at tennis and squash.

  It was time for Judy to understand that a crew member had duties that involved getting out in the water while the skipper stayed hunched at the tiller. ‘So get out in the water,’ Wes said. Standing waist deep in a winter current snaking into the harbour from the Tasman Sea, holding the bow of the dinghy into the wind and waves, Judy’s teeth chattered.

  Ken called from the beach, ‘Wes, do you want Judy to enjoy this?’

  ‘Yeah. I do.’

  ‘Then swap places.’

  Soon she handled the twelve footer on her own, tacking through moorings and various floating hazards. A dinghy under solo sail was a loyal companion. It had a keen, wicked personality of its own. The action of balancing on the edge of a shifting wind was not something Judy had ever thought about wanting, but now she craved it. Wind was the best teacher she’d had, after that, by a close margin, Wes, and Ken coaching from the beach.

  Judy’s parents belonged to the Australian Club in Macquarie Street. It was embarrassing telling her friends they were invited to meet them there for a social dinner and there was a dress requirement. Her father, Raymond, pulled a tie from his pocket around Blacktown, driving down from Silver Springs. Her mother came down from the research station in the Hunter Valley. She brought the old Mini Minor she was handing over to Judy.

  Ken wore a suit and tie. Wes wore a silvery linen jacket and a green string tie loose at the collar, defying the dress code concept. Judy wore a denim miniskirt, pale lipstick, a Laura Ashley blouse that flared out from the elbows, and her best sandals with her toenails silver. Dijana wore red.

  ‘I like this,’ said Ken, drinking sherry from a crystal glass from colonial days, cheerily looking around at establishment figures he loathed – conservative judges and crooked politicians with crusty rural cranks and jolly monarchists and a yachting club heavy, an armchair sailor Ken recognised with a curt nod, a pink-faced, well-fed barrister last faced off in a handicapper’s brawl off Bradleys Head.

  Beth arrived late, waving from the dining room doors wearing her government scientist’s khaki shirt, khaki slacks, before going up to change. Raymond went sweet on Dijana over the wine. He splashed his drink on his tie, making an excited point about paintings he liked. When Beth came down Judy jumped up and kissed her, then introduced her round the table. Dijana sketched her on a paper serviette, a bustling, curly-haired woman, a maker of changes who Dijana made look homely with a felt pen.

  ‘But isn’t sailing a sport for the rich?’ said Beth, addressing Ken. It was all Judy talked about lately in her letters, she said. Sailing and how her new friends had little, did much. ‘She is in love with all of you, of course.’

  Not knowing where to look, Judy blushed. Wes squeezed her hand under the table. She squeezed back. There was a feeling of Beth’s headlights moving around the table, isolating and outlining the guests one by one, in a build-up of attention that was going eventually to culminate in Wes. He gave off a clammy, white, sweaty, tactile feeling, with his knuckles tensed around the stem of his wineglass while the waiter refilled it with chablis.

  When anyone said sailing was a sport for the rich Ken argued back at them. ‘The production of too many useful things results in too many useless people.’ He screwed up his blind eye and watched through the only one he had, interpreting the saying the other way around from the way Marx meant it. As a matter of fact he was a manufacturer himself, not quite on the scale of Marx’s friend Engels, of course, but in a small way in that direction, he admitted. Raymond was interested and Ken described the problem with the butterfly nuts. Then he explained his blind eye to Raymond and Beth. It was the result of a childhood injury, leaving an eyeball glazed as a mulligrub. A little girl had stuck a cake fork in it at a children’s party when he was seven. It was at a Vaucluse mansion, and Ken was there because his mother did washing and ironing for the rich. So much for attractions on that side of the social divide, he explained. His father was a tram and bus conductor, a union rep rising to supervisor at the Bondi Junction depot.

  ‘And yours, dear?’ Beth asked Wes.

  ‘My father’s a Methodist minister,’ said Wes, a bit gruffly, defensively. Beth shot a look at Judy as if to say, You never told me that, and why, when our Darkes are such churchgoers. You really do like to withhold things, dear, and look at you, you are in love with this skinny blue-eyed wildwood creature and you’ve barely told me anything about him.

  ‘He’s a great man,’ said Ken, referring to Rev Chas Bannister, who put into action, through natural compassion, ethics Ken envied around the homeless and poor of inner Sydney. They had never got on though. Wes was their battleground, as if each must have one not the other, politics or the spirit in the young, late achiever.

  A lot
of what Ken said, even when it was not a quote, was done in quotation marks. It was noticeable how he enjoyed himself in a context of waiters wearing cummerbunds. Attention to place settings, elaborate candlesticks, silver cruets of vinegar and oil gleaming like treasures in the Kremlin delighted him. Marx said labour made machines to replace labour. But Ken had a love of hand-built, crafted objects, such as his kauri ketch, made for a lifetime, he told Beth and Raymond, not for profit.

  Beth and Ken talked about the chemistry of sugars and nucleic acids making up the DNA ladder. Talk bounced to atomic weapons too soon for Judy but too late to stop. Her mother’s voice rose a notch, then another. There was a nightmare where God skated on a lightning rail apparently.

  ‘The lightning was made up of people opposed to nuclear war,’ Beth said. ‘God was trying to CHANGE HIS COURSE to BEND the bolt of lightning.’ Heads turned from nearby tables. After a few wines her voice carried even farther, reflecting on what she’d just loudly said. ‘GOD, I had a dream about GOD,’ she said, catching herself, and laughed with a shriek, covering her mouth with her hand.

  ‘Drunk as a skunk,’ Judy said to Wes.

  Ken told Raymond Compton the story of Rattler. She had been holed on a reef in New Guinea, beached on a mudflat near a coconut plantation and brought to Sydney on the deck of a freighter, where she languished at Berrys Bay until he got her for a song.

  New Guinea was where, at sixteen, after falsifying his age and faking the army eye test, Raymond had served as a stretcher-bearer in the final days of World War II. If you ever wanted him to talk about things, he did not, and if you did not, he very much did. Judy learned things about her parents when they talked to other people. Otherwise she was in a bubble outside their risks, disappointments and hopes, and only really felt things about them when they affected her. It was news to her that Beth had applied for study leave next year in Maryland in the US. She was juggling the opportunity, she said, with her commitment to SANT, Scientists Against Nuclear Testing, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Professor Len Forester its chairman. With Beth’s mention of Forester a higher pitch of excitement entered the conversation, leaving Judy feeling left out. Ken said he revered Forester as an inspiration. Wes was anti-nuclear, he told Beth, up to his ears. And they were away. Judy pushed crumbs around her plate and wondered if it was possible for her to feel smaller and more insignificant as a force for good in the world than she felt.