Alone on a Wide Wide Sea

  One January Night

  I suppose there were about a dozen of us working in Mr Dodds’ boatyard, including Marty and me, and by and large we were a pretty close-knit team. One or two came and went, but for the most part, people liked it and stayed. And that was largely because Mr Dodds treated everyone right. The money wasn’t great – you could certainly earn more elsewhere in the fancier boatyards – but with Mr Dodds you got to build the whole boat, and best of all you got to sail it too. We had job satisfaction – that’s what they call it these days.

  Once a boat was finished, Mr Dodds would ask two or three of us to take her out on sea-trials. He would often come along too. Everyone got his chance, but not everyone wanted to do it. Marty and I did though. Any opportunity to go out on sea-trials, and we’d take it. We were seasick of course, but after a while we’d find our sea legs and our sea stomachs, and once we’d settled into it, it was raw excitement – hard work we discovered – but always a pure pleasure.

  So, thanks to Mr Dodds, both of us got to know boats from the keel up, from the inside out. We built them and we sailed them too. And when we sailed we learned from Mr Dodds how to sail in harmony with the wind and the sea. He told us once that it was living at sea, surviving at sea, that taught him all he knew about boat-building. You have to understand the sea, he said, to listen to her, to look out for her moods, to get to know her and respect her and love her. Only then can you build boats that feel at home on the sea.

  Every time we went out on a new boat with Mr Dodds, I learned that each boat we built was different, had a personality of her own. Once she’s in the water she becomes a living creature, a unique creature. You ride her like you ride a horse. You have to know all her little quirks and fancies and fears, how she likes to ride the waves, how she likes to dance with the sea. That’s what sailing is, a dance, and your partner is the sea. And with the sea you never take liberties. You ask her, you don’t tell her. You have to remember always that she’s the leader, not you. You and your boat are dancing to her tune.

  I’m not sure how much Mr Dodds ever actually told us of all this. He was just about as monosyllabic out at sea as he was back in the boatyard. But one way or another we picked up his sailing philosophy and his boat-building philosophy, and it’s stayed with me ever since. Everything I learned from him about the sea, about boats, has proved right. He was my sailing mentor, my tutor of the sea, a fine man and a fine seaman. The best.

  He must have thought well of Marty and me too, because after about two or three years – Marty would have been about twenty-one by now, and I was seventeen – he called us up into his office and told us he thought we were ready to do one or two longer trips now, and on our own, just the two of us. We were young, he said, but he’d taught us well,he’d prepared us. A lot of the others didn’t want to do the long trips – most of them had families to go home to. From now on he didn’t just want us to trial his boats, he wanted us to deliver his boats to their new owners. As a result, Marty and I went all over – across to Hobart, up to the Whit Sunday Islands, and three times over to New Zealand.

  It was on one of those New Zealand trips, to Auckland, that Marty first put an idea into my head, an idea that’s been there ever since. We were sailing just off Dunedin. “You know what?” he said. “If we wanted we could keep going all the way to England. We could go and find your sister. You could find Kitty.”

  We never did, of course. But the idea stayed with me. Meanwhile, I was being paid for what I loved doing best, and I was doing it with my best friend on earth. Ninth heaven now. The two of us were becoming sailors through and through. And about that time, and partly because of the sailing I think, I stopped thinking of Marty as my elder brother, my bigger brother. The age difference between us that had meant so much at one time, and even set us apart a little for a while when we were younger, all but disappeared. On board the boats there was no skipper. We worked alongside each other, with each other, not younger and older brothers any more, but more like twins. We seemed to know instinctively what the other was thinking, what he was about to do. Our world had been the sea world for so long now. We’d shared so much. We’d been shaped by the same teacher.

  Once a year for a couple of weeks’ holiday we’d go back home to Aunty Megs, usually at Christmas. Sadly Henry wasn’t around any more, but Barnaby was. Donkeys live longer than wombats. Barnaby still wouldn’t ee-aw however much we tried to make him. We’d sit on the verandah the three of us together, and watch the sun go down, and we’d tell her all about the places we’d been and the boats we’d sailed. And on our last night we would all three of us recite The Ancient Mariner, for a few verses each until we finished it. When we had to leave at the end of the holidays, we never wanted it to end. We never wanted to come away.

  Then one January night just after we’d come back from staying with Aunty Megs, our world turned upside down. We’d have both been in our early twenties by then. One way or another, it’s been upside down most of my life ever since.

  Thinking back, we should have read the signs. Just before Christmas, Mr Dodds had laid off a couple of the blokes, and he hadn’t been himself for some time. He’d been hiding away in his office, hardly showing himself. I thought he was probably just preoccupied with some new design – we all did. But there was no Christmas bonus that year, and no Christmas party in the boatshed either. We knew the boat business everywhere was going through a hard time, but we didn’t realise just how hard until that January night.

  I was asleep on No Worries when it happened. Marty had gone out for his last nightwatchman’s check around the boatyard. It must have been about midnight, I guess. The two of us always took it in turns, and Marty was on duty that night. All you did was walk around the yard with a torch for half an hour. It was a routine neither of us liked much, but for doing it we were living on No Worries almost rent free, so we couldn’t complain.

  The first I knew of it, Marty was shaking me awake. I could see the flames straightaway through the skylight. I thought at first it was the boat that was on fire. When we got up on deck of No Worries you could see the whole boatyard was on fire from end to end. By the time we got down there, the fire fighters were already there. There was nothing they could do, nothing anyone could do. Luckily there were no boats inside. They were all out on the apron or in the water. Marty kept saying over and over that he’d only been down there an hour before and checked the place. He couldn’t understand it. I saw Mr Dodds standing there still in his pyjama tops watching his whole world going up in flames before his eyes.

  The police took Marty and me in and questioned us separately. I told them what I knew, which was nothing of course, except that each of us would go out last thing on alternate nights to check the boatyard, that we’d shared the nightwatchman duties for years and years. When they asked me whose turn it had been that night I told them that it had been Marty’s. It was only after I’d said it that I realised what they might be thinking. I regretted it at once. But it was too late.

  They arrested Marty that night on suspicion of arson. They wouldn’t let me see him either. When I told Mr Dodds what the police had done, he just looked at me, then turned away without saying a word. It wasn’t at all the reaction I had been expecting. I’d never known him to be heartless before. I couldn’t understand it.

  It turned out they were dead right about the arson, just wrong about Marty. I was wrong about Mr Dodds too,couldn’t have been more wrong. He walked into the police station the next morning, and confessed to it all. Brilliant designer and boat builder that he was, good and kind man that he was too, it seemed he had got himself into a serious financial mess. It was an insurance scam. The poor man was trying to save his shirt. But once he’d heard they’d arrested Marty, he couldn’t go through with it. Like I said, he was a good man. But they sent him to prison for seven years. Marty and I went to visit him, but they told us he didn’t want to see anyone. We never saw him again. We tried again and again but he refused to see us every time.

/>   So that was the end of the boatyard, the end of the good times, the happy times. One night was all it took for our whole world to fall apart. That one night in a prison cell for Marty was a night he never got over. I never got over it either. I felt I had betrayed Marty, that I’d locked him in that police cell as sure as if I’d turned the key myself. I told him how bad I felt but he never blamed me. “Forget it,” he said. I couldn’t. Marty was never quite the same after that night. Nothing was.

  An Orphan Just the Same

  They let Marty and me live on for a while on No Worries. By day we’d be out looking for work in other boatyards. But times were hard. There was just no work to be had in any of the boatyards in Newcastle or Sydney, nor anywhere else so far as we could discover, and boat-building was all we could do. Letters came from Aunty Megs saying we could always come home for a while if we wanted to, that there was always a place for us there, and plenty of work too. I can’t believe how stupid we were not to have taken her up on her offer. I remember reading her letters over and over again, trying to decide whether to go. But for all sorts of reasons, Marty and I decided against it. He said, and at the time I thought he was right about it too, that you should never go back, that it’d be like giving up. And we both loved the sea, loved boats. We were determined to find work that kept us near the sea, or even on it preferably.

  Those months we trudged the harbours and boatyards of Sydney looking for work took their toll on us both, but on Marty in particular. He was always the one who had kept me going through our most difficult times, ever since we were little. Now he just about gave up. I was the one who had to get him up in the morning when he wanted to just lie there. With every fruitless day, with every rejection, I watched him sinking deeper into the silence of despair. I tried to pull him out of it, to joke him out of it, tried to keep him positive. But it was no good.

  Every night now he’d want to stay out drinking late. Time and again I had to drag him out of bars, and more than once he got into fights, usually over some girl. Drink did that to him. It didn’t make him happy; it made him angry. Money, the little we had saved, was fast running out. Worse, I could feel that the two of us were beginning to drift apart. Before we’d always done everything together. But now he’d go out in the evenings on his own. I could tell he didn’t want me around. We never fell out, not as such. He was just going his own way and there was nothing I could do about it.

  There was one morning when I couldn’t get him out of bed no matter what I did. So I left him there and went off job hunting on my own. As usual I didn’t find anything, but I was gone all day. When I came back home to No Worries in the evening, Marty had gone. I thought he’d gone out drinking, that he’d be back later. Even when a couple of policemen came the next morning, early, and woke me up, I wasn’t that worried. I just thought he’d picked another fight and ended up in a police station for the night. I recognised one of the policemen – he’d interviewed me on the night of the fire.

  I was half-asleep when they told me, so I didn’t really understand, not at first. It was about Marty, they told me, and I had to come with them. I still couldn’t understand. “We’ve got a witness who saw it happen,” said the policeman I had met before, “someone who knew him. But all the same, we need you to come and take a look.”

  Then they told it to me straight. Marty had been drunk. He’d been doing the dinghy dance, leaping from boat to boat in the harbour, messing around. He’d fallen in, and just never came up again. They’d tried to find him, but it was dark. Then this morning a body had been found. I’m still trying to believe it happened. Even now, all these years later, the shock of it and the pain of it goes through me every time I think of it.

  They took me to see him in the hospital. It wasn’t Marty. It was just his body. I felt nothing then. I tried to feel something; I stayed there with him for hours. But you can’t feel emptiness. They brought me back to No Worries, and I found Aunty Megs sitting on her suitcase waiting for me. It was the strangest thing. She’d woken up a couple of nights before and had known at once that we needed her. When I told her, all she said was, “I’m too late then.”

  There were just the two of us there for Marty’s funeral. We buried his ashes up on the hill where the bushmen had left us that day, where Aunty Megs had first found us. I recited a few verses from The Ancient Mariner, ending with the line I knew he loved most of all: “Alone on a wide, wide sea”. I’m glad I did that, because that poem is not just about a sea voyage, it’s about the journey through life, and about the loneliness of that journey. It was the right thing to read.

  Aunty Megs took me in again. She took care of me all she could. But now there were two spirits in that house with us, Mick and Marty. She had photos of them on the mantelpiece, side by side. But they were omnipresent, particularly, I remember, when we were sitting in silence together as we often did of an evening.

  So much was the same. But so much wasn’t. Henry’s hole was still there under the verandah steps, still full of his beloved hats. Barnaby wandered the paddock shadowing Big Black Jack. The two had clearly become quite inseparable. But Aunty Megs’ old horse had gone.

  Aunty Megs and I still did everything the three of us had always done together. She didn’t have the cows any more, just one nanny goat for her milk. But we still went up to the main road to rescue the orphan marsupials, her little fellows. We still kept them in the compound, and from time to time we’d make the long journey up to Marty’s hill, as we called it now, to see if one or two of them would go back to the wild.

  I had never been quite sure of Aunty Megs’ age, but she must have been about seventy-five or eighty by now, and I’d have been in my late twenties. As the years passed she stayed just as active in her mind, just as spirited. But as she said, her “poor old body doesn’t work like it should”. She didn’t go out walking much these days. Her legs pained her. She never said anything much about it, but I could see it. She moved more slowly, more stiffly.

  But she could ride all day though, and it wouldn’t bother her a bit. On the contrary, she was happier up on a horse than anywhere else. She told me once that God had given her four legs to gallop with and a tail to whack the files with, that he’d just made a big mistake with the rest of the human race, that’s all. And gallop she did too. Nothing she liked better. She said it made her feel alive. And I knew what she meant, because that’s exactly how I’d felt out sailing with Marty on Mr Dodds’ boats, with the wind in my face, and the sails straining above me and the salt spray on my lips. My longing for the sea never left me.

  Aunty Megs had a good quick end, the best you can have, the doctor said when he came. She’d gone out with her torch to check her family of animals in the compound as she always did in the late evening. I was sitting, stargazing on the verandah when she came back. She sat down beside me, and said she thought she smelt rain in the air. Then she fell silent. I thought she’d gone to sleep – she’d often do that out on the verandah on warm evenings. And in fact that’s just what she had done. She’d gone to sleep, but it was the long sleep, the final sleep.

  The whole town came up to Marty’s hill the day she was buried, and there were dozens of bushmen there too. I don’t think I quite realised until then just how much she was loved. I put her ashes next to Marty’s, a photo of Mick with them. When everyone left I stayed up there and recited the whole of The Ancient Mariner for them both. As I walked away I felt like an orphan all over again, a grown-up one maybe, but an orphan just the same.

  Things Fall Apart

  If there’s one part of my life I’d like to forget entirely it was the next fifteen years or so. I suppose you could call them my years in the wilderness. I shan’t enjoy writing about them, but I’ve got to do it. Like it or not, I can’t just miss it out. Luckily for me, quite a lot of it is lost in a fog of forgetfulness. Perhaps that’s what happens sometimes. Perhaps it’s an automatic survival system that helps you muddle through. Maybe the memory just says: that’s enough. I’m overloading with
pain here and I can’t cope, so I’m switching off. But it doesn’t switch off entirely. So you remember, but thankfully only dimly, through the fog. Sometimes, though, the fog does clear, and you see the icebergs all around. You can hear them groaning and grinding and you just want to sail through the field of icebergs and out the other side, or you just long for the fog again. I’ll tell you about the icebergs now. And like most icebergs are, they were unexpected and very unwelcome.

  After Aunty Megs died I stayed on living at the Ark, doing what she’d done, living as we’d always lived. I didn’t need much in the way of money. I had milk and eggs and vegetables. I lived a bit like a hermit. I rarely went into town and no one came to see me. I wasn’t unhappy, not even lonely.

  But then of course I wasn’t alone. I had the animals, and like Dr Doolittle I talked to them. I think I talked to Big Black Jack more than I ever talked to anyone else all my life. He was probably over thirty years old by now, so I didn’t ride him much any more. We’d go out for walks, the three of us – Barnaby, Big Black Jack and me. He’d walk beside me, his whiskery old face close to mine and we’d talk. Well, I’d talk. And I talked to the family of animals in the compound as well. Aunty Megs wouldn’t have approved of it of course. You talk to them, you only gentle them she’d said. Gentle them and they won’t survive in the wild. But they seemed to like me talking to them, and they went off when I released them just the same, and most of them didn’t come back. So it was fine. Everything was fine, for a short while at least.

  Then the strangest, saddest thing happened. I went out into Big Black Jack’s paddock one summer morning, early, carrying a bucket of water to fill up their trough. I did it every morning, and usually Big Black Jack and Barnaby would come wandering over for a pat and a few words, and a drink of course. This particular morning they didn’t come. So I went looking for them. I found Big Black Jack lying stretched out dead on the ground, with Barnaby standing over him, his head hanging. It took me all morning to bury Big Black Jack, Barnaby watching me all the time. He never drank a drop after that, never ate a thing, just stood by where I’d buried Big Black Jack and pined away. He was dead within a couple of weeks.