The Tankermen (4 page)

‘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 gathered 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.

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 had 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.

‘What?’

‘That shiny thing.’

Jed crouched and drew in his breath. ‘Can you believe it?’ he muttered.

‘What is it?’ Finn felt a twinge of his dream-fear.

‘You remember those kids who were sitting up here in the middle of the night, carrying on like idiots? Well, they’ve left a little souvenir.’ He picked up a piece of cardboard and started carefully scooping sand aside. When Finn could bring himself to focus properly he saw three hypodermic syringes, planted, needles up, in a neat row.

‘Careful, don’t spike yourself, Jed.’ Finn’s voice was about to start wobbling, and he tottered up the stairs unable to watch any longer. He was afraid he might throw up, or cry. The world felt full of ill will, and he wished briefly that the poison would kill him so that he could escape from it all.

He sat on the top step slowly brushing sand from his
clothes, feeling transparent and weak. Jed’s jacket was a comforting weight; he put his arms in the sleeves and then rolled the cuffs back so he could tie his shoelaces. Concentrating on little mechanical tasks kept the worst queasiness at bay.

Jed retrieved a newspaper from a nearby rubbish bin, carefully wrapped the syringes and dumped the parcel back in the bin. Then he turned to Finn ‘You okay?’

Finn looked up at him. Without his jacket Jed didn’t look so tough and cool; he looked almost like a family man in his black jeans and check shirt, especially the way he looked at Finn, as he might bend down in concern over a very small child. Finn gulped and shook his head and looked hard at the beach, blinking.