The future from the bottom of a boat
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 12: Hot Air
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Andrew Belk
WITHOUT OARS, THEY LAY OVER THE BOW AND DOG PADDLE THE PUNT out through the anchored yachts. They whisper the names and ports of origin of each as they pass. Deb says, "Ella Angel, Vancouver." She says they should name their boat "Freedom" because they got it for free. Tracey thinks about all the water that passed under the Ella Angel as she crossed the world to get to their lake. She pictures a wave gently passing underneath the long white hull. She pictures the wave continuing across the ocean, carrying whales and dolphins and fish and turtles. She watches it duck the hard steel of a black coal ship then gently caress the rotting wood of a refugee boat. She watches it enter through the clean inlet waters and travel across the lake towards the shallows behind the estate. She sees the wave relax, eyeing a gentle shore break, lining up a pudgy boy in an inner tube for one last fling. She watches the cooling inlet of Collie 3 reach out and grab it. Drag it through the turbines and spit it through the outlet. Devoured. Ragged. Drowned.
Tracey lines up the bow with the green and red flashing buoys that mark the channel. She knows the tide is running in. If she can get the punt into its flow it will carry them across the lake. Even though the bus trip along the spindles of the shore is fifty kilometres, in a straight line it is less than ten. They can drift that in the three or four hours before the tide turns. Once they bump ashore they can walk the boat along the edge, or maybe come back later with some oars. Tracey tells Deb to sit up the back. She leans long over the bow and digs her arms deep into the cold black water. With Deb holding her ankles, she pulls them forward with strong butterfly strokes. When she eventually feels the overwhelming pull of the channel she lines up the lights of the Collie 3 smokestacks and lets the lake take over.
THE GIRLS FIND THE MOST COMFORTABLE POSITION IS LYING ON THE FLOOR with their heads at opposite ends and their legs resting on the middle seat. They take it in turns to sit up and check they are drifting toward the stacks – at first every few minutes but now, trusting the drift is good, only occasionally. Low down inside the boat, her promise to her sister kept, the lake bed safely rising and falling below, Tracey dares to think about tomorrow.
She doesn't want to go back to school. She doesn't care about the assassination of Francis Ferdinand or the volume of a cone. She doesn't want to sit all day on plastic chairs, rote memorising what teachers copy from books. She doesn't want the constant hard invitations of boys driven dog wild by puberty. She doesn't want to work at Collie 3. She doesn't want to be in admin. She doesn't want to walk between those filthy stacks each morning. She doesn't want to get off the bus while it is still the 363.
Tracey knows she is supposed to want something but doesn't know what. Her only inkling comes from a foreman at Collie 3. Yesterday, he had given her a lift in a new car with a light top and dark windows. He told her he had bought it for himself as a thirtieth birthday present. He told her that was because he was making thirty thousand dollars a year. He told her not many blokes did that – made thirty thousand a year by the time they were thirty. "I could buy and sell your father," he told her. "The Deville is the biggest car you can buy," he said.
He bet her five bucks that if she lay on the back seat and stretched out she wouldn't be able to touch the sides.
Tracey thinks about how she is halfway to thirty. She thinks about how rust from the gutter bleeds the word "ill" onto the bricks above her bedroom window. She thinks about her father's swollen hands turning valves and her mother's blue-vein legs hosing shit. She says, "By the time I am thirty I am going to be making thirty thousand dollars a year."
Deb tries to picture her sister in fifteen years. It will be the year 2000. It is further than she can imagine. Deb doesn't like to think about the future. As far as she can tell, it is already history. "Probably the world will end before then anyway," she says.
Tracey's small happiness falls from her. It sinks to the bottom of the lake and is pulled apart by crabs. Like her, Deb is smart – a dangerous thing in a place where being too clever will get you smashed in the face as routinely as being too dumb. Tracey has watched with sadness this summer as Deb has come to know the truth. It has fallen to the big sister to help the little sister make the transition from bliss. It has been Tracey who has nursed Deb through nightmares of skeleton babies starving to death – their mother cleaning by night when offices are abandoned and reeking toilets are vacant. It is Tracey who has soothed the harsh screams of atomic bomb blasts – their father asleep from television and beer by nine o'clock. It is Tracey who has cradled the eight-year-old and kissed her back to sleep after frantic questionings about black smoke from the Collie stacks and global warming and the lake rising to take them while they sleep.
Tracey tells Deb the world isn't going to end. She tells her that by the year 2000, society will be very highly advanced. So advanced babies will not starve to death. So advanced atomic bombs will be dismantled. So advanced there will be no black smoke. She tells her that in the year 2000 society will be so highly advanced little girls like her won't have heard of starvation , won't have nightmares about pollution, won't know the terror of thinking they can be blown apart. She tells her that in the year 2000 the estates will have fences you can trust.
Deb listens as her sister gently talks of the future. A world of peace and happiness and robot dogs. Soon there is only the sound of Tracey's breathing and the soft lapping of waves on the hull.
Deb is too excited to sleep. Tomorrow she will start Year Three. She sits up and checks the drift. Her red hair has turned wild from the salt air and sits huge and bouffant on her small freckled head. The drift is good. They are headed for the stacks. ♦