A Sea-Chase Read online

  ‘You just toddle off to bed whenever you like,’ said her father. ‘You must be tired.’

  ‘I do have a stupid headache.’

  She bent over and kissed him on the top of the head. He was reading seed catalogues and his pipe smoke seethed up through his hair.

  Judy went outside and looked at the stars. The bright ones and the planets she named to herself mattered if she got them right. Orion, Orion’s Belt, the Southern Cross hung there perfectly still. Mars, Saturn, the Scorpion. Wes was a Scorpio. A water sign.

  Judy took the mattock and the toilet roll and went off to one side of the shadows of the blazing light streaming out through cracks in the hut walls from the Tilley lamp. On the way back, on the other side of the outside fireplace, was a tiny wreck of a plywood caravan with a few lengths of roofing iron on a metal frame over the top. Judy went in, lay down and pulled the sheets and a thin blanket up to her chin.

  In the morning she heard Tony Watson on the radio giving out sheep sales prices. It was turned up loud and crackly.

  Tony was not as discreet as he pretended to be in his mix of jobs. On the auctioneer side he spotted bargains. Her father told her about it as they dragged a trailer around, trickling wheat from an auger for the hungry sheep. There was not a blade of grass for them. It was not a drought either so much as Silver Springs at full throttle. The sheep were due to be trucked out soon. He wanted them settled. The flock was bigger than it used to be, thanks to Tony ringing and asking did Raymond want to pay a fair price for a good buy. It had been carefully put because of the party line. On the radio side there was a price they had to reach and it was reached that morning. The buyer was coming out. When he arrived he had three young blokes with him. They did not seem to have any other reason for being there except to look at Judy. Dimly they clarified into boys she’d been to school with in Bourke.

  ‘Wocka Wocka Wocka,’ said one of them.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ said Judy.

  ‘You know, Wocka. Aren’t you that Judy Compton who was on with Wocka Mickless?’

  She had nothing to say about that. She had never used the nickname Wocka. Nor had Tony. Of course there had been nothing like it, being on with him. That feeling was locked away. The gold standard. Whose business was it? Three scorched outback galoots rammed their hot brains into her eyeballs wondering. She was the one who was screwing years before any girl ever gave any thought to their peckers. She was a legend to leer at.

  ‘Just a whirling mess of hoop iron,’ said the second one, as if the words were the lines of a song. A hit song too, by the sound of it. He came at Judy with the same spinning hand motion that the first one used.

  The third one leaned back as if he was in the saddle and jamming the stoppers on a horse, using the reins to hold himself from flying back over its tail. He said, ‘Cha cha chaaaa,’ imitating a helicopter juddering down to a landing.

  They stood around waiting for Judy to make up her mind which one of them she’d like to marry. It was not a joke. They cleared their throats, looked at the sky, and rolled their smokes fastidiously and waited. How could a girl resist them? She’d better hurry up though. They absolutely believed she was a fool if she didn’t choose. Every one of the girls in her class before she’d left for boarding school was a mother while a teenager, and one had four children, the eldest being nine. There was no hanging about after sixteen out west.

  ‘Look, just so you know. I don’t want to ruin your lives but I’ve got a boyfriend.’

  ‘In the city?’ they gawped.

  She nodded. They were beaten.

  Her father told her that Warwick Mickless had landed a helicopter after an engine problem near Silver Springs. He was on a training flight. He’d been the instructor. While a mechanic drove up for repairs Warwick borrowed a motorbike and came across to Silver Springs. Raymond asked him wasn’t flying a helicopter hard and Warwick said yes, but there was no easy way to be good at anything, to which Raymond could only agree.

  Judy sucked on a grass stalk. People floated away from you in life. They came thudding down into it.

  ‘I knew those boys in Bourke,’ she said.

  ‘They’re all right.’

  ‘Do you think so?’

  He didn’t reply. He probably did think they were all right. They’d be as familiar to him as the skinny scrub around him anyway. She had no word for what they were to her. They had been herded in the same classrooms, had screamed at the same horror movies at Randalls’ flicks, and had been dumped or not with the Salvos or the Cattle Ticks. They had grown up on the same ringwormed dirt she’d played on as a baby. They had divided themselves off from the black kids who were their playmates across from the camp. They had hung around wanting a nod from Warwick, who never put anyone down, black or white. They were not her friends and never had been, nor would be, but they had a claim on her. For people like that she always wanted to be better than she was.

  Judy’s friends all liked Raymond, and they liked Beth too. They saw them as special, unique, doing their bloody best in the wrong place for both of them. Beth was emerging from the AGS lab into public life. Raymond came to the city more often. They aroused the special affection Ken and Dijana had for those with lives they would never dream of leading themselves, in places that were ridiculous to live in. They were clever cartoons with a punchline: ‘Judy!’

  When Judy arrived back in Sydney, Ken opened on the attack:

  ‘Five hundred volunteers on the Republican side in the Spanish civil war were shot by their own comrades. It was the side I would have supported if I’d been born then. A united front worldwide, right down into all my arrangements including the personal is what I want. Give me the books,’ he said in a hard voice new to her. She handed them to him.

  He licked his thumb and turned the pages of the red ledger and the invoice dockets.

  ‘Tidy, tidy,’ he muttered.

  It was a hot night. Judy was up from Rattler, fresh from a shower in Ken and Dijana’s bathroom. She took use of the bathroom for granted. That was a mistake now apparently.

  She waited for Ken to say something more than just she was tidy.

  ‘You’re not happy with me, Ken, are you?’

  ‘No. It’s a fuck-up. I gave you a chance and you walked away from it. That telegram you sent me was a kick in the guts.’

  ‘The boxes are too heavy,’ said Judy. ‘When the machines are pulled out people pinch their fingers. Getting the tapes matching the slides after the exercises, and reading them back from the question book, is a challenge.’

  ‘That’s the whole point,’ said Ken. ‘Footpath, roadway, highway. It’s progress in building order.’

  ‘Kids love the machines at first sight, Ken, but they peel off when the fun stops. Teachers see right through them, and I know why.’

  ‘You do, do you?’

  ‘There’s other things on offer.’

  ‘You didn’t say this before you left.’

  ‘I thought Research Branch did.’

  ‘That’s a low blow. What I have is high-definition clarity transparencies with top-line photo lab guarantees.’

  ‘The machines make it harder for them, Ken. By the time the slides are set up the period is half over.’

  ‘That’s outrageous.’

  ‘The machines take what teachers already do with the kids and they make it clunky, slow it down, take it back a step, another obstacle to getting through the day.’

  ‘They’d be the ones without a vocation,’ said Ken. ‘Good teachers don’t think like that. They’re the ones who told me, “Get on with it.” I can’t believe you didn’t just get the best teachers together, the real schoolies – it’s bound to get knocked by time servers.’

  ‘They all look real enough to me. God, Ken, I hate classrooms.’

  ‘Politely fuck off,’ said Ken. ‘Would you?’

  The weather that week was hot, dry, still. In the middle of the afternoon a sea breeze cut in. The harbour broke out in white sails. Judy had no mo
ney but she went into the Department and resigned.

  Wes was working at Cockatoo Island, restoring an old launch. All day he breathed fumes of glue, dust of wood fibres. A timber yard at Rozelle was looking for a receptionist and Judy took the work on. ‘God, I need something to open my soul,’ she said after a dead day doing the orders. Straight up fighting with Ken left her in a rage. This was her brick in the guts to him.

  She listened to Joan Baez, her tranny pressed to her ear as she walked home. The high, rising purity of that voice, the sorrow, the conviction, said things Ken also touched on. But Judy was at war with him.

  On Friday there was a demo in Martin Place against the Franklin Dam in Tasmania. Wes stormed to the front of the column. Two plainclothes coppers high-tackled him. He swore when they put him in the paddy wagon and thumped him. He used a t-shirt to mop his bleeding nose. Judy came down to Central police station with Ken and Wes’s friend Linton Simmons and got him sprung. She slipped her hand into Wes’s as they walked away, in the most natural action of lovers in the mood, displaying an exclusive, voluptuous pity leaving others out. Ken strode ahead. They went to the pub post-demo, and when Dijana came in Ken joined her at the other end of the bar.

  Wes said he’d rather contend with the coppers than take on Ken the way Judy had over the Mark IIs.

  Ken still owed Wes money for the work done on Rattler. All the work done ever. Wes still never wanted to talk about it. Judy went on about it as a point in her battle with Ken, as if the more she talked the more Wes would listen. The selfish, driven, stubborn side of Ken was revealed to her. So different was that Ken from the Ken who professed to be something else that he got away with it in other people’s eyes. Judy worked on getting the idea across to Wes that Ken was not straight about a lot of things.

  ‘It’s more like what I owe him,’ Wes said. ‘If it wasn’t for Ken I’d be working for the council, picking up garbage cans for the rest of my life.’

  ‘Don’t be insane,’ said Judy. ‘Ken made it possible for you to make a choice. You’re the one who made it.’

  Dijana stood in a group of boozers at the other end of the bar, shooting glances over at Judy inspired by cheerful malice. Judy said she wasn’t political but Dijana reckoned she was. Everyone was, was the saying that wiped out differences but drew lines of opposition.

  Judy was a running dawg, said Dijana, in a throaty affectation, and you could not help liking her, or at least laughing along with her, because it was all a game, or at least great fun for her. In that pub things started quietly, until the rip-roaring end of the night turned drinkers out on the footpath, still arguing. That was Balmain for you. Trotsky with an icepick in his brain pan wandered the streets after closing time.

  The next time they went to the pub Wes collected his beer and made his way through the noise closer to a TV screen. Judy joined him. A delegation was in Canberra, wanting French nuclear testing stopped in the Pacific. In the months leading up to Christmas there was an underground test almost every other week. Radioactive ocean currents poisoned the sea. Protesters filed past the cameras on the Parliament House lawns holding a banner, SCIENTISTS AGAINST NUCLEAR TESTING. Dr Elizabeth Darke looked into the lens and spoke for that body, SANT. Her manner was bold, barking. The camera made her eyes look close together, like a brown bear’s. That corner of the bar area went quiet watching. Wes pulled Judy closer.

  Down at the other end of the bar Dijana was heard to say, ‘Look. It’s the bitch’s mother.’

  ‘You should clock her,’ said Wes, but he smiled. Ram it home. How he loved a battle, even one on the sidelines, with his friends and mentors, and now with Judy showing grit the two of them could take on the world.

  Week after week, until she could stand it no longer, Judy scurried past Ken and Dijana’s house, down the narrow, formerly working-class dead-end street to the water, stared at by Dijana holding a paint brush poised in the air, looking out through her studio windows amused as hell and mouthing the word bitch.

  Judy had to find somewhere else to live. That was her resolve, although she loved it aboard Rattler, waking in the mornings to a separate existence from Sydney routines as complete as waking up in the bush. Wes said he wouldn’t shift, and they had their first fight. He had done all the fittings, made it his home. Ken’s anger with Judy, the offence he took from her telling him what everyone said behind his back, did not extend to Wes on Rattler.

  Judy said goodbye Balmain and found an attic flat in the eastern suburbs, looking south into the teeth of southerly busters that came roaring along the crumbling sandstone cliffs of the Bondi coastline. Late on the night she moved in, there was a knock at the door. It was Wes. ‘Got a bed?’ he grinned. Judy grabbed him by the shirt collar and pulled him stumbling over the threshold.

  Judy rang Harold and Margaret Wells in the country. She was afraid of finding too much unhappiness but was stuck with getting the three unsold machines back to Sydney out of Harold’s shed. Harold had good news. Margaret was writing a textbook; they were moving to Sydney, making a change for the good of them both and their twins. It was bloody exciting, said Harold, planning a new life like this.

  ‘Now, Judy,’ he added.

  ‘What?’

  ‘A question, if you don’t mind.’

  ‘Sure. I’m ready. Dubbo?’ she risked.

  ‘No,’ said Harold with a soft explosion of breath around that town name. ‘What did you think of the swag I lent you, and the camp stool?’

  ‘They were good. I used them. Stayed the night on the bank of the river. Harold, they were great. They’re bundled up ready to give back to you.’

  ‘Construction-wise, how did they look?’

  ‘Strong as anything.’

  ‘Well, there’s a tent now, a bushwalking pack, a rain jacket. Margaret stitched them by hand. Prototypes. They’re the best. I’m coming to Sydney to buy an industrial sewing machine. I’ll bring your hero’s gizmos back.’

  Judy cried when she put the phone down. She did that easily now. All the small, perfect worlds she made for herself bumped and collided, then sprang apart. They were smaller than atoms but counted to her. Ken had been so unusual when they met, so kind. He’d given her a slogan to live by: the best in you’s got to be good. When he had coaxed her to stay teaching she hated it, but she liked him more for a belief in her battling through.

  Dijana Kovačić was lofty and European, brilliant and good with her art. She was said to be a great teacher, but with elite pupils only. She also wrote poetry. Dijana was Judy’s first experience of being slandered, blithely cursed by someone with a gift for words who was able to articulate just about anything except sympathetic understanding. It made her feel sick and kept her awake at night thinking about it. ‘Is that me?’ she wrote to Tony Watson. ‘Am I a capital b you know what bitch double underlined treacherous slag, or what?’

  When Tony’s reply came it helped. Yes, she was a victim of circumstances who cried too much, was a real sook as a matter of fact, but he’d seen her when she was eight, remember, one leg tucked up behind the other standing on a block of wood leaning forward like the silver skater they’d read about, in one of the girls’ magazines she’d liked reading and he had too. They were awful, rubbish newsprint in double columns, stapled together at the spines, too rough even for bum fodder. The girl skater in the dust dreaming of frozen canals was a Judy he recalled among others. She might even have a bit of the real bitch in her too, Tony gave of the opinion, let the other one watch out.

  Judy filed Tony’s letters in a shoebox, the quantity mounting up since they were kids until they were tight as the pages of a book. She grabbed a rag and cleared a window-pane of salty streaks. A weather front was building to the south, low rolling cigar-like clouds ahead of a gunmetal grey sea streaked with foam. Staring at the storm rid Judy of any thoughts about herself. The dimension of the sea was a language without an I in it.

  There was a circle of friendship and connection Wes had. Throughout that summer and into the following au
tumn Judy became part of it. It had something to do with Ken but not his political side, or anything except the water. It was the sailing crowd. Ken raced in a different class, so Judy did not have to deal with him. Only sometimes he was there in the starter’s launch, looking as if someone ought to be banned, and he was looking at her, expressing that ought with his eyeballs.

  Something improvised, yet perfected, was the attraction of a bunch of people who sailed. They were from all walks of life and did not care what Judy did or did not do. They seemed to have been waiting for her since, at eight, when she saw the floods at Blindale and wondered about the sea. A less-than-perfect world on the landward side was united off shore. That was her thought, her gut feeling, her wonder. Snap after snap of alteration and movement as loose lines were drawn tighter on yachts drew her away, and Ken was no longer an element of unease judging her.

  A yacht’s bow turned from the clubhouse as they headed out to the start line. The red-tiled roofs and hazy, low, undulating Sydney skyline took on a new feel. Everything stood for something else, revealing a shape underneath, while everything remained what it was. It doubled the world in value in Judy’s eyes, going sailing, and made her happy through the hard time of being picked on and undercut by Ken and Dijana. Tatters of blue cloud broke up racing over Rose Bay, parting and flying, greyhounds or water dogs so-called signalling a southerly buster.

  Wes was a wonder on the water. A friend of his at the bow called out how long the gusts were taking before they reached them, a matter of seconds counted down. Judy had the lowliest role on the screaming, bucking thirty-three footer. It was up from the dinghy class in skills required but on the same principle. Co-operation demanded obedience but obedience was not incompatible with freedom under sail. Judy met people at the level of the task required on the deck of that jumping jack. She remained herself and excelled herself.