The Tankermen (18 page)

‘That’s lovely though, Don,’ said Sarah. ‘What made your dad change his mind, though? I thought your parents didn’t get on.’

‘Well, Dad got sick just before Christmas,’ said Finn, pausing slightly in wonderment at all the things he was leaving out of the story, ‘and when he was getting better he went through a kind of crisis—you know, “What am I doing with my life?” type of thing. And Mum had seen this house ages
ago, and it just came on the market at the right time. It was like we were
meant
to take it! Not to mention Mum and Janet getting on like a house on fire.’

He grinned.
Thick as thieves
, he heard his father complain.
I turn my back and my two wives get together and start conspiring against me.

Who better, to know what’s best for you?
Janet had said, winking at Finn.
Now just sign this contract, Richard my sweet, so we can get this whole thing moving.

‘Goodness, all that happened pretty quickly!’ said Sarah.

‘I know. We were lucky.’ Finn took another biscuit from the tin.

He surveyed the jungle-fringed lawn. He knew it so well, this view, but it was all different now. His eyes were different, his brain behind the eyes. Everything peaceful, everything restful and natural, was now something that he had helped save. These people on the verandah, sipping tea and crunching biscuits in the summer-heavy afternoon, owed him and his mother, Janet, Jed and the police their lives—for how long would it have taken the tankermen to colonise the seas, to set up putrefaction chambers along the coast, to start collecting people and animals for processing? A tanker rolling in at the gates of Greenlawns . . . a cold dart of leftover fear shot down Finn’s back at the thought.

They were gone, he told himself, remembering the charge going out of the tanker under his very hands, the rock-face becoming solid again. FinCom had been coordinating the testing of seawater all over the world, and there was no evidence of the tankermen’s presence. The contamination around the Sydney beaches had become diluted; the division and multiplication of the cells had slowed and ceased. Unless the tankermen sent in another team, set up another pilot project, safety had returned. Finn had gone over all this time
and again with all the people who’d been there. At the hospital, he had repeated his story with each of the tankermen’s victims, as soon as they were healthy enough to begin asking questions. He had worked with the police, with his father, with Janet and Stella, with Jed—not to mention the psychologists, a dozen or so curious scientists and a politician or two—combing through the details of the events, trying to make sense of them.

‘In the end, it
doesn’t
make sense,’ Jed had said, letting his head fall back on to the pillows. ‘It can’t—to us, anyway. It’s like trying to read a slug’s mind, or a rock’s. Those guys just operated on a completely different wavelength to us. They were a different species—they were after different things.’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Stella had said. ‘They’re only doing what we do, trying to make the world safe for themselves, and populating it. It’s only natural, isn’t it, to want your own species to continue?’ Finn had felt her thin fingers stroking his scalp through his hair.

‘Maybe,’ said Jed. ‘Don’t know if I like being compared to a giant ant.’

They’d all laughed, and like all the laughter since their escape it had been subdued, dampened by the knowledge of what they had narrowly avoided, and of the numerous people who hadn’t avoided it.

‘You’ll never exactly recover,’ the counsellor had said. ‘It’s like going through war—the nightmare stays with you to some extent. It’s not always in your conscious mind, but it will surface from time to time, less and less as the years go on. Right now it’s a difficult time, but you’ll weather this, and life will go on.’

Finn did feel weathered, like a ship that had fought its way through a hurricane: his sails were shredded and his masts were broken. He felt he was sitting right where he belonged:
on the verandah of a rest home, attended by nurses. But he had his new home, too, where everyone but Alex knew what he had gone through. On nights when bad dreams disturbed him he could go into the room where his father lay recovering. Even in the dim light from the window, it was easy to see how the flesh was beginning to soften the angles of his skull, how his silvered hair shone with Janet’s care. And Alex, too, who had slept through everything, was helping to heal them with endless games, irrepressible chatter and the way he innocently took life for granted—he was an anchor to steady Finn in the sudden, unnerving calm, a charm to deflect past horrors. Finn had seen every one of them, Jed and his mother included, looking at Alex in the same way, realising why they had gone through what they had gone through. Their own lives might be changed forever by what they had seen and what they could now fear, but everyone else’s lives could go on unaffected. No more bereavements, no more mysterious disappearances, no more weapons fizzing in back lanes, no more putrid vapours wafting over the sea. No-one else need feel their fillings sing with the strange charge of a tankerman, or hear the lid of a collection-coffin clang shut.

‘Happily ever after’ wasn’t exactly the phrase that came to mind, but Finn had hope, that some day their lives would return to something like normality—that his mother and Janet would lose the circles of haunted sleeplessness from around their eyes, that his father would regain the strength to put out his arms and hold Finn against his reconstituted body, that Finn himself would shed this aged feeling, this sense of his eyes being webbed by experience. He wanted to be a kid again, safe for a while among his reunited family. He wanted to go up on the Range with Jed and take the bike along the dirt roads, whooping at the speed, at the rush of fresh wind and the freedom from care.

‘More guests!’ Barney was saying. Finn’s mother’s ute was driving in at the gate.

‘That’s your mum, isn’t it, Don?’ said Janine.

‘Sure is. She’s come to pick me up.’

‘That big bloke, is he her boyfriend? And who’s the little boy? Look at him, jumping up and down in his seat like a yoyo!’

Finn laughed. ‘“That big bloke” is my mate Jed. He’s up here on holiday.’ Finn raised an arm to return Jed’s wave. ‘And the little one’s my half-brother, Alex. Jed and my mum are helping look after him while Janet takes care of Dad.’

‘Talk about cute,’ said Sarah, as Alex, released, powered up the lawn. ‘Look at those curls!’

‘I’ll introduce you, as soon as he’s wound down a bit,’ said Finn, standing up and heading for the steps.

He ran across the clipped kikuyu grass, getting up momentum. Then he did three cartwheels and a forward flip, landing a metre short of Alex.

‘Wow!’ said Alex in awe.

A thin patter of applause drifted down from the verandah.