Free Death of a Whaler by Nerida Newton Page B

pastel house, Flinch puts the kettle on and brews himself a strong cup of tea. An easterly rips through the open door of the kitchen, sweeping sand and dirt from the bare patches of yard into the house. Flinch gets up to shut it, as Audrey would have ordered him to do had she been there. She hated the wind, said it got up her nose, so she kept all the doors and windows shut, even through the stifling wet summers. She was erratic when it came to cleanliness, polishing the silverware and turning the tins in the pantry label-out one week, leaving plates to grow mouldy in the sink and lying in bed unwashed for days on end the next.
    Flinch had learnt to watch her carefully, trying to gauge a pattern. But she was always a step ahead of him, and began shaking him awake in the middle of the night, asking him questions that he could never answer correctly. Once, when he was about nine years old, he had yelled back at her and she had slapped him so hard across the cheek it had sent him reeling. But it was she who collapsed on the floor, sobbing, and he spent the rest of the evening with his arm around her, trying to piece her back together. She was just better at the game.
    The anger always brewing in her had surfaced in fits, sudden and violent. It made her hands shake. Dark moments of insecurity slid rapidly into a black hole of emotion and she yelled at him the same words, over and over. Bastard Idiot Bastard Bastard Bastard. Until he felt the words were tattooed all over him and that people on the street could read them on him as well. He wore her love and hate of him like a mismatched pair of socks, never knowing which would be exposed at any one time, knowing the other was always there even if it was not apparent. Understanding that either way, something about him just wasn’t quite right.
    Bitterness had kept her strong for a long time, but in the end she’d just decayed. The year after Nate’s death, cancer ripped through her body like a fire in a forest, leaving the singed flesh melted over her bones.
    â€˜Typical,’ she had croaked, and stopped breathing. They didn’t try to resuscitate.
    The day after she died, Flinch had scrubbed every square inch of the house and shoved open the windows and doors, shattering the dried-up nests of hornets and dislodging a long-abandoned bird’s nest. The scent of the ocean filled the house and Flinch could hear the waves and the cries of gulls when he lay in his bed on the long, languid mornings that followed her death. He had left the house open for an entire week, only relenting and closing the front door after one of the goats wandered in and started chewing at the corner of his newspaper while he was reading it.
    In the late afternoon, despite a frowning grey sky, Flinch takes his fishing rod and drives down to Tallow Beach. The threat of an oncoming storm has stirred up the ocean, the surf frothing like a rabid dog. The easterly has washed thousands of bluebottles onto the shore. They hem the tide line like glistening beads. Flinch decides against casting his rod. He sits on the sandbank, listening to the surf seethe, and sees in the distance a single black hump rise out of the water in an arc, then the creamy underside of a fluke raised vertically out of the water, like a signal for something bigger than himself.

SEVEN
    To Flinch, his life is not a seamless continuum as other people’s lives seem to be. There is no progression. No evidence of that cycle of birth, schooling, job, marriage, children, retirement. That path of an average life, which ends with long pointless days drinking cold beer from ten in the morning until nightfall, and the odd weekend fending off the grandkids. The job-done-well-enough period to which most of the town’s blokes aspire.
    In Flinch’s life there is the moment that cuts through his existence, separating it into two sections, neat as an axe through a block. The before and after periods. He sees examples of before