A Sea-Chase Read online

  In the club you never looked around behind you to find out if it was all right if you talked to someone, as you would in a Balmain boozer. Yelling out race rules at each other was the way, protesting and being protested against was remembered, but not as in the political pub scene. You did not need asserted belief in order to say who you were. Specialised words meant what they said, applied exactly. If something did not work watch out. Failure of gear was final.

  Judy was assigned releasing the leeward jib sheet. Leeward was pronounced ‘loo’ard’. A sheet was a rope, Judy was told by Linton Simmons, who called the gusts from the bow, who, if he kept repeating himself, seemed to think he could win her over.

  ‘She knows that, Linton,’ said Wes, ‘leave her alone,’ and she blew Wes a kiss thanking him. Next time Linton tried she gave him the finger. He was Wes’s oldest friend and a protégé of Ken’s from Cleveland Street. From delinquent to articled clerk to young, overweight lawyer.

  Wes drove the yacht hard in twenty knots with the shackles, wire stays, pulleys called blocks and blocks called sheaves all groaning and creaking. Bottle screws, what a name, threatened to pop, to fly out like bullets but didn’t. How anything didn’t was interesting. Between each tack the crew sat on the windward rail like kookaburras huddled on a tree branch in a rainstorm. Other boats in the race, when the squall peaked, tore sails, gybed out of control and smashed their booms on their stays, called shrouds, and smashed into other boats hard on the wind. Wes laughed when they crossed the finish line first.

  ‘You were like a monkey, racing all over the place,’ he said. ‘You stuck to it, Jude.’

  ‘Stick it to him,’ she said quietly.

  ‘Linton?’ Wes laughed. ‘Give him time. Weren’t you scared?’

  Here was another wonder.

  ‘I forgot to be.’

  They took hot Malay curries up to Judy’s attic haven, sat on the floor with beers watching the light fade over the ocean and not turning the light on until it was too dark to see.

  Wes’s growing up as a preacher’s son was around inner Sydney and the harbour, getting on his bike, weaving down to the water through the honk and yell of city drivers. He was part of a juvenile gang, including Linton, that lifted dinghies, work boats, from their moorings and tied them up under the jetty at Luna Park, his boyhood illicit playground, a drenched in moonlight 3 am wonderland, when the city hummed with an undercurrent like wind through the rigging and his gang went everywhere unseen.

  That winter of Judy’s move to Bondi there was a fire in the ghost train at Luna Park, five boys and a father burned to death. Nobody took the blame. When Wes heard about it he went down there and demanded answers and never got any. But he still asked. Take the blame, you bastards.

  Before the fire, getting Wes’s growing-up story from him was like pulling teeth – the real story, as opposed to the one Ken pushed as Wes’s political education. There was nothing particularly shameful about it to make Wes reluctant, doling his childhood out to Judy bit by bit, or oughtn’t to be, except that shame gave shape to it, the shame of growing up in a loving house that consigned Wes to the bottom rung. Expectations were the trouble. Not from his parents so much, though they counted. His father was a carpenter before he got the faith. ‘Like Jesus,’ people said. It made Wes cringe with inverse pride. What could he do around that but wrong, or with wrong-headedness fight wrongs? Wes’s mother adored Wes, her longed-for boy. ‘So do I,’ said Judy, encouraging Wes to go on. She traced the line of his nose and the curve of his lip, his sharp profile that she could hardly see but touched in the dark.

  He cried tears for the kids burned to death in the ghost train, and here the point was, tears of anger, and Judy recoiled. Anger in Wes she wasn’t sure about. She stood at the window understanding but unable to take that anger. It felt like a danger to him unlike his rage against injustice, which burned steadier, deeper, more like love and served him better.

  Three sisters who shone were an annoyance to Wes, but when they met Judy they loved her, and her them, and she made particular friends with Rhonda. The youngest in the family, Wes, was Rhonda’s precious baby until he hit puberty, when she gave up on him, but never quite entirely. His teachers despaired of him and sent notes home that Wes tore up on the way. There was a lot more that he was than just one thing or the other. It was true that he and Linton Simmons stole struggling people’s milk money to buy cigarettes. They shoplifted hardware. They had no conscience, Wes’s father had been sadly of the opinion, getting them into his study for talks. When something was wrong, though, a classroom injustice, Wes stood up on a desk and shouted out, putting it right. He was always the first to act, and his father loved him for that.

  When Ken Redlynch stepped in after the episode of the brick attack he was like Napoleon making his appeal to the masses over the heads of authority. He saved Wes from reform school. Boys worshipped Ken and, when he was at co-ed schools, girls too. He squinted and made things right with his blind-eye charm. Judy admitted to Rhonda that she’d had a near or actual crush on Ken. It made her cry hearing Wes talk about what Ken meant to him.

  Wes thought he ought to be able to put Judy in moods where she didn’t cry at all. If he did she’d really love him, otherwise why couldn’t he make her happy? But I do love you she said. And I am happy, she frowned. There was no phone in the attic flat, but Ken had the number of the flat below, they made sure of it, but he did not call.

  There was no election that year, when Judy found work at the Commonwealth Electoral Office in Mosman, making her a temporary public servant with a bus and ferry ride to get there for unhurried filing. On weekends she worked alongside Wes doing painting and anti-fouling jobs at Rushcutters Bay, or they sailed. Without anything being agreed between them that fixing boats was what she was doing, now, where she was going, just through her quickness and cleverness in picking things up, and through her learning by persistence, matching herself to Wes, Judy learnt a lot. Some tools and refinements of techniques she got from her father when he came down to Sydney or she made visits home, travelling back with her mother in the Mini when Beth could get away.

  Margaret Wells was a new face at the Balmain green grocer’s and at the newsagent’s, browsing romance magazines. Resolved on a fresh start devoted to her family, she was not eating much. Posing for Dijana Kovačić, she crouched, obedient, on a cushion. Or she sat in a studio window frame at Dijana’s command, wearing a flowered kimono, knees up, doing her toenails. In the finished work Margaret hated how she looked, a skinny, longing, dissatisfied cat with hollowed-out eye sockets. But it was brilliant. Since the move to Sydney they had become friends. Margaret liked Dijana, was in awe of her talent, her warm, sarcastic soul, with its twisted, superior European intelligence, and liked the pigments she used – bold reds, deep blacks, stark whites. Margaret obliged with swathes of fabric, Tyrian purple cut into lengths. They were both teachers. Real teachers. They had that in common, bringing something up out of the thread or outline of their experience into their classes.

  ‘You really do have a great eye,’ said Margaret. ‘Have you ever painted Judy?’

  ‘No. Just doing the freckles would be a killer.’

  At poetry readings, headband- and caftan-wearing poets waited their turn to go up on the stage and talk about themselves when Dijana finished giving her blast of language that included bursts of Serbo-Croatian-like owl hoots. It was a new world for Margaret, a bohemian show-offy step up from country towns. Normally Margaret hated Art Department staff; they had raving opinions and made wild denunciations of others positioning themselves exempt from wrong. At the poetry readings, sure enough, Dijana made wild accusations, pointing a finger into the audience at interjectors and rivals, calling them running dawgs, arse-lickers, sheet stirrers. Her paintings were better than her poetry. They were quieter, had no words in them to get in the way. In fact, they shone.

  Margaret did not like the way Dijana talked about Judy but she was pliant in the face of slander for the reason that enough
said about her was true, or had been lately, around Stumpy, leaving her with little pride. People in general weren’t much good, if she herself was anyone to go by. She trusted Dijana was better than herself because she was so confident. Margaret liked all the brainy, troublesome people she’d fallen in with. The leprosy look was gone from Harold’s eye. Having started as a plumber and become a teacher, he seemed to want to change himself all over again. Well, she did too. It made Harold interesting against the dullness she secretly worried he had at the core.

  At night, when the girls were put to bed, Margaret worked on the textbook she was writing. For every page or so of typing she rewarded herself, doing a pencil sketch of some aspect of instructional detail. Her ambition, from a time before she could remember, had been to be a teacher. Then it was to rise through the ranks of classroom teachers to home science needlework inspector and regional director of an entire subject area. Since the age of two she’d been able to thread a needle. Her lips bled from holding nests of pins. A love bite did something similar when she’d dissembled to Harold. Now when she filled her mouth with pins she felt loss.

  But Dijana – thin-lipped, sharp-nosed, blonde with a single plait or else with that canopy of loose hair she hid in, skin pale as moonlight – made life feel possibly liveable again. Sex was easy for her, she said, like eating dessert. ‘How does Ken handle that?’ asked Margaret, blushing, thinking Dijana was saying she had affairs. But she wasn’t saying that at all, didn’t have affairs, and Ken didn’t need to feel jealous, though he did, said Dijana with a contented laugh.

  They found themselves at the pub gravitating towards each other, barstools pulled up in the corner of the Ladies’ Lounge. Just by being still in a crowd or sitting on a barstool Dijana attracted attention. The small-town disadvantages Margaret suffered under she found, being back in the city, disappeared in a crowd. A bit of flirtation did wonders. She told Dijana about Stumpy and how sex wasn’t like dessert to her, it was a lightning strike in a Dubbo motel room, leaving her brittle and broken.

  ‘Poor you,’ said Dijana.

  That year and into the next, while Judy stayed in the background, Margaret worked in Sydney schools as a relief teacher, getting what she and Harold and the girls needed to live on, doing as much as she could to forget Stumpy except for weeping into her pillow at 3 am. Harold taught too but in his spare time took their carry packs, tent flies, canvas water buckets, ponchos, boot gaiters and sleeping bag liners around to disposal stores, camping shops and the doyen of portable gear merchants, Whisker Martin, a white-haired gnome of an all-over muscled Blue Mountains demon walker and sailor, who had a sprawling outdoors shop in Castlereagh Street.

  Where the teaching machines were stored, under a tarp gathering dust in a Rozelle warehouse, a sail-making business had space, and Harold asked if he could share the rent. There was a flat out the back and the family moved there. Harold felt qualified to do anything except work with ideas and abstractions, or lose himself in verbal quibbles. But even to conceive of the brainy side of things mentally overcame what he lacked, thanks to Ken Redlynch making him part of his circle. It was the same feeling Judy had being taken in. One shrank, another got bigger. You never thought you would be the one spat out. Harold had no real intellectual interests but felt smarter around Ken, like Judy had.

  Even so, exasperation was Harold Wells’s wonderment, as he surveyed people’s rock-bottom incompetence. He remembered the words he used to Judy about Ken before he met him, jumping to conclusions, disliking the bloke as up himself, and mind you, he still thought Ken should be banned from tools. Ken did not seem, as a man who loved boats, to have much idea of working on them except for slapping on paint and working out complicated mathematical formulas relating to hull-stresses. Harold was ready to help him. In the same way, Harold’s love for Margaret had exasperation, wonderment and something more in it, greater than wonderment. Because look what they had overcome. And what he had to prove to her was not even tested yet. Getting it out of himself hurt, but that was life.

  Harold watched Margaret in the pool of light she worked under. Her black wavy hair was pulled behind her ears by a green silk ribbon, dark eyes wide at the forehead and long, almond-shaped face and fine nose carved down to that lovely puckered mouth. Harold watched her like an owl watching a moth. Whatever she did or was doing, happy or sad, Margaret’s stitching never stopped, never reached the point where it was possible to leave off the established routines involved. Stitching was to the seamstress as weeding to the gardener, kneading to the baker, knots to the sailor.

  She came back from a teaching day straight to the workbench while Harold cooked, wearing a hearts and flowers apron, wielding a metal spatula. She let in bits of material to give shape, tacked or basted with long, loose stitches, hemmed, darned and picked seams apart, sometimes with her teeth. After doing the washing up Harold stood behind her, massaging her neck muscles, knuckling knotted shoulder tension away as she murmured satisfaction. The girls played in a corner, twisting the hair of dolls into tight plaits and pulling small, perfectly finished little blankets up to their chins in bassinets.

  Being invited over for dinner at last, as relations thawed all round, Judy and Wes witnessed the scene. Judy had loved – had she ever – but she had never come near to destroying herself and transforming herself with a passion like Margaret’s, and Judy wondered what it was in her that made that so. She felt she was still climbing towards something whereas Margaret was already there. She would need to find some way to destroy herself, or obliterate herself with utmost sincerity of passion, to be Margaret’s equal. The idea did not belong with her ordinariness.

  Over the course of the year Harold and Ken Redlynch, with Graeme Sawtell the sailmaker and Whisker Martin drawn in, evolved what they did together into a business that might one day pay off. Linton Simmons drafted and redrafted agreements. Ken held off signing. But it was surprising finding out what business agreements were if you had only ever thought about them with scorn for bosses and their lackeys. The teaching machines had failed; Ken was broke; his acting inspector’s salary barely paid the bills; he hated the work, more or less, with little time left for real teaching, but there was a chance for recovery with a compromise of principles. The ground under his feet shifted. It was not a compromise of principles kitting up dinghy sails, making a bid for supplying them with a chance at the Moscow Olympics dashed at the last minute when Australian yachtsmen decided not to compete.

  The formula as ever with Ken was hope. Business, he gleaned, was a gathering in of strangers with rules for maintaining respect. It resembled Marxism that way. Lucky he had good partners. Remember tactical alliances as historical necessities. Apparent contradictions as part of a higher truth. Marx himself by a mere shift of his arse on his chair in the British Museum Reading Room was a man of action. Engels his closest friend and collaborator was a factory owner, remember, and was rich. No mud there on that point ever stuck to Engels.

  The guardians of national wealth, the people, Ken argued, winning himself around to himself, asked of governments nothing less than their wealth be maintained when they lent them power to secure their anxieties. He’d grown a trim beard in recent months, a silver wedge. He loved to stroke it while in thought.

  Ken kept his excitement muted. God help him if he ever dropped the feeling that compromise was betrayal. Or that science was hope in action. The utopias of his dreams, the bold zealotry of his beliefs, the questioning of so-called common sense and untested experience, the rejection of gradual change over revolutionary change. All these were intact as he made changes.

  The day came when Ken was informed by a Bridge Street insider that his chances of getting his acting inspector status made permanent were zero. He drove to the Rozelle warehouse ready to sign the agreements and join, as director and shareholder, Boatwear Bushgear Ltd., his fellow directors Harold and Margaret Wells, Graeme Sawtell of Balmain Working Sails, and Whisker Martin of Whisker Martin’s Walking, Camping, Climbing and Kayaking Cavern.


  Just before signing, though, Linton Simmons took Ken aside and told him he’d better think over what he’d listed as assets for Gerry Tubman, the bank manager.

  ‘House, car, library,’ said Ken. ‘That’s about it.’

  Linton penciled-in a missing asset. ‘Ketch, Rattler.’

  ‘She’s my heart and soul,’ said Ken.

  ‘How long since you sailed her? You’d better settle wages outstanding with Wes or he’ll have a good case.’

  ‘Wages outstanding?’

  Ken put the phrase in quotes and ran a fingertip along his smooth lower lip above his softly bearded chin. He’d thought of wages outstanding as merely a bit owed, leading to a graceful gesture, a signalling of personal largesse to be made when he was ready. Not this legal dog bite. Not the complete value, surely, of Rattler.

  ‘What you should know, Ken,’ said Linton, wagging a finger, ‘is that Wes doesn’t want to bring it up with you because he trusts you to bring it up with him.’

  ‘Judy’s been chewing his ear,’ said Ken.

  ‘No doubt,’ said Linton. ‘But this is about what you promised him, back when we were hardly more than kids.’

  ‘If I did, I must have, if you say so, hell,’ said Ken.

  ‘You did, you cunning old bastard,’ said Linton. He reminded him of the day it was said. Ken squirmed. No fudging.

  Linton had a figure estimated that was in excess of what anyone would pay for an ageing ketch done to high standards, let alone one that still had final work to be done.

  ‘Take Rattler to sea and smash her for the insurance,’ said Ken in a nightmare to an autonomous other Ken, who lived in his unconscious mind furtively and dangerously. The pirate Ken had laid waste to the VJ fleet once, in the name of Uncle Joe Stalin versus the fleet of pea-brained Menzies’ voter’s kids. Ugly Ken had given the finger to a research maths PhD in the name of classroom teaching. Made a mess of his first two marriages by loving his own charm best. The pirate Ken had known, all through the crazed obsession of the teaching machines, that really they ranged far outside what was achievable this side of utopia but were entirely defensible as an ideal. Over the Moscow boycott Ken had gone on and on defending a crumbling bunch of bullies.