The Tankermen Read online

  ‘You doubled on a bike before?’ Jed asked him casually, handing him a black and red full-face helmet.

  ‘Not since I was really little.’ Finn tried not to listen to his five-year-old self screaming with happy terror as he and his dad burned down the dirt road along the Hogarth Range, the cool air pushing hard into his chest.

  ‘It’s a breeze,’ said Jed. ‘Just remember to lean the way I lean when we’re cornering, that’s the main thing.’ He fastened the strap of Finn’s helmet for him.

  Any residual doubts Finn might have had about Jed dissolved in his relief at having someone so massive and confident to hold onto as they whirled through the night. But he wasn’t used to being so close to other traffic, unshielded by the door of a family car, or to having a wheel spinning between his feet, perched on tiny pegs—he was afraid his heels would somehow get caught and chopped up. The padded helmet was no comfort when his ear was just a metre or so from a roaring semi trailer. Jed, of course, rode on completely unfazed, and unreachable inside his own helmet.

  Finally the road dropped away in a curve down to Bondi, and Finn relaxed enough to take in a view of the near-deserted, floodlit beach before they were down among the shops, nosing around for a place to park. He tried to steady his knees as he got off the bike and fumbled with the helmet strap. Jed lifted his visor and grinned out. ‘How’d you go?’

  ‘Fine,’ said Finn through a dry throat.

  They walked along past the shops for a little while, Finn calming down after the ride, Jed idly watching the other people who strolled along in loose, bright-coloured summer clothes. It was a different crowd from the Cross—fewer dead-beats and weirdos, more wax-heads and bodies-beautiful. Finn looked around him with the eyes of a tourist in a foreign land.

  Jed bought fish and chips, waving aside Finn’s money. They crossed the road and went down to the beach to eat, the traffic noise gradually becoming obliterated by the sound of the light surf throwing itself on the sand. They sat on the beach and stared out to sea as they ate, to where the lights of the freighters, anchored offshore, gleamed like low stars.

  ‘This is the life, hey mate?’ said Jed, leaning back on his elbows. ‘Whatever happens, you can always come out here and let the sea wash away your worries.’

  Finn nodded and filled his mouth with chips.

  ‘So what are your worries?’ Jed asked.

  Finn turned and found himself being looked at very curiously. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Why’d you decide to leave home? Your old man beat you up or something?’

  Finn grinned, shook his head and took some more chips to delay having to talk.

  ‘Your old lady beat you up?’

  Finn chewed and swallowed. ‘Nah, Mum and Dad broke up years ago.’

  ‘Ah. And you live with which one?’

  ‘Both. They take it in turns to have me for a year.’

  ‘Yeah? I thought most families had a sort of every-second-weekend arrangement.’

  ‘Yeah, but my mum lives up north. She got the holiday house, up near Casino, when they split up, so I go up there every second year.’

  ‘That’d be okay. I could handle that. So when do you swap over?’

  ‘Round New Year, usually.’

  ‘Very neat. So you’re about to head off again, hey? Or should you be up among the bananas with your mum?’

  ‘I should be with my dad. It’s actually my mum’s year for me, but she dropped me at Dad’s early, this time.’ Finn could hear the resistance in his voice, the way he was holding back. He didn’t feel much like explaining all this right now.

  ‘So why aren’t you home at your dad’s?’ Jed’s voice was curious but distant. It didn’t matter to him—he needn’t see Finn ever again if he didn’t want to. The fact that he was bothering to ask made Finn feel a bit strange—he wasn’t in the habit of discussing himself.

  ‘My dad has this other kid, and another wife now. He’s not all that interested in me.’

  ‘You reckon?’ Jed looked closely at him. ‘What’s the stepmother like?’

  ‘Okay. Friendly enough, I guess. It’s just that I don’t matter much to her, you know? When I see her with her kid, she acts different to the way she acts with me.’

  Jed sat up and brushed the sand from his elbows. ‘Different how?’

  Finn didn’t want to say. The words rattled around in his head. Sometimes she hugs him so tight he can hardly breathe. It doesn’t matter how disgustingly he behaves, she always looks at him as if he were a big present she was really excited about opening. ‘Just different. Like with me she’s kind of shy. Especially when I first get there. By the time Christmas rolls around we’re usually getting on okay, but then I have to go, don’t I?’ He didn’t want to go on about the Christmases tainted with everyone’s New Year plans that never included him, with that air of relief about his going. Christmas was the low point of the year. It signalled upheaval, another round of adjustments to make, different ones each time.

  ‘Why don’t you stay there?’

  ‘I couldn’t stand it. My dad goes on at me all the time. “What are you going to do, son?” Like, what am I going to do with my life—I’m not even fifteen and he wants me to have my career all mapped out. “You don’t want to close off your options, do you? What are you aiming for? What’ll you do in Year 12?” Geez, I couldn’t give a stuff. That’s two years away! I don’t wanna think about it! But he’s so organised, you know? That’s the way he did it and that’s the way he reckons I should do it. But I’m just a different kind of person.’

  ‘What, you mean you’re slack? Just kidding,’ grinned Jed. ‘Yeah, I know what you mean. It’s hard with fathers. When I started getting into bikes I gave my dad a few heart attacks with accidents and that—nothing serious. I was pretty lucky, really, considering what an idiot I was at the beginning. Now I tell him, “Hey, look, I haven’t had even a little bingle for years now. Stop worrying, will you?” But he won’t—he’s always hassling me to buy a car, always telling me the same old stuff about how dangerous bikes are, as if I didn’t know.’

  ‘It’s like they can’t stop themselves,’ said Finn gloomily.

  ‘So why don’t you stay up north with your mum?’

  ‘Hah!’ Finn lifted his head and fought to pick out the dark block of a container ship on the horizon. ‘She wouldn’t be able to jaunt off overseas then, would she?’

  ‘Bit of a butterfly, is she?’ Finn could hear Jed smiling.

  ‘When I’m there we live like the poorest people on earth. She gets the pension, and works part-time and doesn’t tell Social Security, and scrimps and saves and counts every cent so that when I’m not there she can hop on a plane to Turkey or Asia or to stay with her friends in America. It makes me sick! It’s like when I’m there it’s not her real life—she’s just looking forward to when I’m gone so that she can go off and have some more adventures. I’m just useful because she can get the pension when I’m there. Some mate of hers offered to take her to Thailand for a month, so she just up and off-loaded me on Dad and Janet, three months early.’

  Finn shifted on the sand, aware that he was only painting the blacker parts of the picture. Once he got used to it, the freer life at his mum’s was definitely the one he preferred. Up there his time out of school hours was entirely his own, and he could wear grotty clothes and leave his room as chaotic as he wanted. He liked that, and the slower pace of things away from the city, and the way his mum would throw together some crazy meal out of whatever was in the fridge, or give up altogether and take him out for a pizza. She wasn’t as mean as all that. It wasn’t so much that she was the problem . . .

  ‘Like, I missed out on exams, which was okay, but I couldn’t get into school down here for the last few weeks, and I just felt like I was under Janet’s feet, like I was a big inconvenience to everybody. Anyway, I decided I’d get out, stop bothering them all.’

  Finn threw a chip to a seagull that had been standing glaring at him for a while. Waves gathe
red themselves up and fell over on to the sloping sand.

  ‘You don’t reckon they’re bothered now?’ said Jed.

  ‘I bloody well hope they are,’ Finn muttered.

  His mother’s face was always sun-browned. It grew leaner, and she cut her brown hair shorter, every year. At the international terminal it had been mere stubble. He’d felt a jolt of betrayal watching her happy face. She’d kissed him, and Richard and Janet, too, she’d been so glad to be going. Then she’d gone behind the partition separating travellers from stay-at-homes. Finn had wanted to watch the plane take off, but his dad had said it was a ‘waste of time’, and Alex had been throwing tantrums every three minutes because Janet wouldn’t buy him any sweets, so they’d gone home. No-one had said anything in the car all the way; Finn could feel the familiar awkwardness among them, thick and sticky in the air. He’d felt as if he had the word INTRUDER tattooed across his forehead.

  ‘How long’ve you been gone?’

  ‘Since the beginning of November.’

  ‘About three weeks. They’ll have given you up for dead, maybe.’

  ‘Maybe. That suits me,’ said Finn, trying to decide whether the container ship was moving or not. Jed looked out to sea too, his gaze shifting around on the water but not really seeing it.

  ‘Did you want to spend Christmas with your mum?’

  Finn felt his voice threatening to choke up. ‘I didn’t want to spend Christmas with either of them!’ he said loudly, knowing it wasn’t true. He wanted to spend Christmas with both of them, for once. It didn’t have to be just him and them; he wouldn’t mind if Janet and Alex and some of his mum’s friends were there too. It wasn’t as if he wanted the impossible, which was his mum and dad getting together again. He knew that’d never happen. Whenever they were all three together, his dad couldn’t stop giving his mum advice, on everything from planning for her old age to turning taps off properly. And his mum always overreacted and flared up—somehow she had never learned Finn’s technique of letting the words wash past unheeded. Finn just wanted to have them both in the same house for a while, so that when he was fed up with one of them he could go and spend time with the other. Maybe if they were just in the same city, being with one wouldn’t mean the other one being totally out of reach.

  ‘D’you reckon you’ll go back?’ Jed crumpled the empty fish-and-chip box.

  ‘I don’t know. Some time, maybe. I’ve got enough money to last about six weeks longer.’ Until after Christmas. He’d spoil their Christmas for a change.

  ‘Might be an idea to let ’em know you’re okay. Write to them or something.’

  ‘I guess.’ Finn stirred the sand at his toes.

  Dear Gran, How are things up there? Pretty good down here. Hey, looks like the McIntyres are about to hit the wall, doesn’t it? It was only a matter of time, though—didn’t we both see it coming? I mean, with that fight they had right after the wedding, you just knew something was being set up. I would like to get up and see you before Christmas, but I don’t know. They’re keeping me pretty busy down here. We’ll see. Thinking of you, Donny XXXX

  Dear Donny, I am getting Sarah to write this for me, to tell you they are really looking after me here, they know how to take care of a person. When Stella put me in here at first I was resentful, but I have been here nearly a year now and really I’m impressed how well they do their job, never looking down on a person.

  (Your Gran’s just fallen asleep. She was rapt to get your postcard as always. We’re all glad to hear you’re doing OK. A bit surprised about the new address, though. What’s going on?—S.)

  ‘Wanna swim?’

  Finn looked up, startled. ‘What, now?’

  ‘Yeah!’

  ‘You’re joking! I’ve got no swimmers.’

  ‘What’s wrong with your underdaks—got holes in ’em, have they?’

  Finn looked up at Jed and grinned back. ‘You’re nuts,’ he said, and pulled off his T-shirt.

  Jed’s body looked large and pale in the white light that spilled from the promenade. He didn’t seem at all self-conscious, though, and that made Finn feel easier about picking his way down the sand after him in nothing but bright purple underpants.

  The water started off cold, but by the time they’d dived through the surf it felt mild and comfortable. Finn’s skin relaxed in gratitude at being washed all over, and when his feet lost contact with the sand he gave himself up to the suck and rock of the water, floating on his back and looking up at the stars.

  Jed dived and surfaced a few metres from him, his face looking bigger under his slicked-down hair, his beard and moustache glittering.

  ‘It’s creepy when you dive,’ he called out. ‘You can’t see anything. You don’t know what’s out there!’

  ‘Man-eaters, man!’ yelled Finn. ‘Stay up on top and keep real still!’

  ‘Right!’ Jed sank backwards and his big white toes bobbed up and broke the surface.

  Finn would have felt euphoric if he hadn’t been a bit nervous about people coming along the beach and pinching their clothes. He had to keep kicking himself up out of the water to see over the breaking waves. Also, he wasn’t quite sure, but he thought he could smell something familiar, something off, every now and then.

  ‘Can you smell something bad?’ he asked Jed.

  ‘Nope, but I wouldn’t be surprised if I did. The water can get pretty foul out here.’

  ‘Even with the new outfall so far out in the sea?’

  ‘Yeah. You get the same muck washing in; it’s just broken down a bit further. Seems clean enough tonight, though.’

  ‘Yeah, it looks okay.’ But there it was again, a putrid, gassy smell, not quite strong enough to make his stomach turn over, but bad enough to spoil the salty green sea-smell.

  He spent a few minutes paddling, trying to see if there was a slick on the surface of the water, experimentally tasting and spitting out water. ‘Let’s go in,’ he said. The smell had unsettled him; he didn’t like to think what he might be swimming in.

  They bodysurfed in to the beach, the sand grazing Finn’s chest as the wave carrying him slowed. They stood on the wetter sand-slope, shaking off water and letting the warm air dry them. Finn had a sour taste in his mouth; he spat a few times, but it wouldn’t go.

  ‘Let’s go and find a bubbler,’ he said when they were dressed. ‘I’ve got to wash my mouth out.’

  ‘Cheapskate.’ Jed tossed the fish-and-chip box at Finn’s head. ‘Let me shout you another can of something. And let’s see if we can find a pizza somewhere.’

  ‘Geez, you eat a lot,’ Finn said wonderingly. Jed could never afford to feed himself on ten dollars a week.

  ‘Gotta keep my strength up, mate.’ Jed picked up the box again and they headed up the crumbly sand, carrying their shoes. Behind them, the ocean went on quietly seething.

  3

  Second Sighting

  Finn woke groaning from a very bad dream. It was one of those pursuit dreams he often had, moving fast through a disorienting series of elevator rides, train journeys, staircases and streets, with something unnameable catching him up gradually as he went.

  This time it caught him. He spun round to face it, but saw nothing but the red fizz of a weapon being fired full into his chest. He felt it thunk into him and begin to burn there like acid on his skin; it would eat through his ribs to his heart, he knew, and then devour that too.

  He sat up, one side of his face coated with beach sand. The morning sun hung just above the horizon behind a thin veil of cloud. Its light made the beach into a cratered wasteland, sending out a long shadow from every half-buried drink can and scrap of paper. Down along the water-line a few solitary runners were passing back and forth.

  Finn’s head thumped. How could two cans of soft drink produce such a howling hangover? But worse, his chest still burned where his dream-enemies had shot him. It hurt to breathe.

  He lifted his T-shirt. ‘Crikey Moses!’ Long red welts striped the skin of his chest where it ha
d scraped against the sand last night. In some places they had lifted into nasty yellow blisters; he touched one of them gently and gasped at the pain.

  ‘Yeow! Hey, Jed!’ He leaned over to give the sleeping biker a push. ‘Look what’s happened to me!’

  Jed snapped awake as if Finn had switched him on, all systems go. Finn faced into the sun and lifted his shirt again, and Jed did a double take. ‘Where’d that come from? You looked okay last night.’

  ‘Don’t know. I feel shocking, though. My head hurts, my bones hurt and my guts don’t feel too great either. And those scratches sting like crazy.’

  ‘It looks pretty bad. You should go to a doctor.’

  ‘It’s poison, I reckon. It’s in the water.’ He felt chilled, remembering the tankerman in his protective suit, remembering the whiffs of foulness he’d caught on the waves as he swam last night. ‘And I reckon I know who put it there,’ he said, swallowing a nauseous feeling and letting his shirt drop over the damage.

  ‘Yeah?’ Jed was doing a quick check of his own skin.

  Finn told him about the tanker, about the disgusting smell. He felt his skin creeping as he talked, and the patch of fire across his chest.

  Jed scowled. ‘You should report them, mate. Did you get their number?’

  ‘I can’t remember seeing any licence plates, as a matter of fact.’

  ‘Yeah, I guess they wouldn’t be that stupid. Reckon you could catch ’em at it again?’

  ‘I don’t know. It could’ve been a one-off dump, or maybe they just cruise around, going to different locations each time so people don’t get suspicious.’ Finn lay down, not caring if his hair got filled with sand. ‘I feel revolting,’ he said, and started to shiver.

  ‘Come on, man. There’s one of those 24-hour medical places up on the main drag. Let’s go there and get you checked out.’ Jed helped Finn to his feet and put his heavy leather jacket around his shoulders.

  Finn walked up the beach feeling very peculiar, as if he were only just in control of the various parts of his body. At the foot of the steps he pulled up short. ‘What’s that?’ He pointed down at the sand, not trusting himself to bend and look.