Two Tides

Craig was the full-time trucker and I worked weekends with the other girls in the store. The day that I came to work in hardware was the day that Craig became a kind of luminary in the timber yard. He shredded an order sheet in his customer’s face, screamed, ‘Don’t you treat me like this shitty job is the only thing that makes my life worthwhile, you smug prick,’ and then destroyed $600 worth of cement-board sheeting under the wheels of the delivery truck as he drove away with his middle finger out the driver’s window of the cab. The ill fit of his leather working glove augmented the length of his finger by a withered inch where the glove sat thick and high on his hand.

This small detail, coupled with the fine Marxist flavour of his short speech, transformed the incident into an iconic protest, a movement on behalf of all the dirty timber boys who worked hard hours for a poor wage. He swiftly turned his celebrity to his advantage. He came to work blind drunk and slept through whole afternoons in the shade of the cab. He shaved each pallet-load of whatever he thought easiest to steal. He clocked false hours on his time card and often left inexplicably in the middle of the day, vaulting the fence and stuffing his red uniform into the scrubby tussock behind the gate. I think he only stayed on as a trucker to steal the diesel. Every morning he drove the truck home to his garage to siphon it into his own van, and when the van was full he filled whatever vessel was closest until the truck’s tank ran close to dry. Every possible container in his garage was brimful of stolen diesel. There were drums and cans and barrels and buckets and jam jars lined up along his worktop bench. I even saw a sardine can – tiny, holding less than quarter of a cup.

The timber boys saw all of this and didn’t rat on him once, even when they had to pick up the slack, or mop his sick, or cover for a lie. This was partly in recognition of Craig’s heroic act of retail justice: he was a rebel darling now, and stood apart. But it was mostly from compassion, because everyone had heard the whisper that Craig was having trouble at home.

I was working weekends while I finished up with film school at the Newtown Polytech. When I took the job I’d just lost a lover for the first time. I was bitter. I drank a lot and cut my hair. I found in Craig a sympathetic streak of rawness, a muted anger, a grieving nostalgia that I thought I shared.

Craig said, ‘I see a woman with a tattoo and I think, she’s walked a little to the wild side. She’s got spirit. I see a sense of adventure there.’

I said, ‘It was stupid and now it’s there for good.’

He turned my arm over to look at the bird again. ‘All adventures are stupid,’ he said. ‘Anyone with any sense, they stay at home.’

Later, when I had spent more time at the yacht club, I came to understand that he spoke like a sailor. He talked often about mystery, and belief, and the deep and hallowed cradle of the sea. We were drunks together. I listened while he talked about his life, all the things he wanted and all the things he didn’t have. He talked about the solo journeys he was planning, ten days to Fiji, three months to the bottom of Cape Horn. The parachute sail he wanted to buy, the anchor he couldn’t afford. His depth sounder was broken. His mainmast needed to be stripped. His voice was always wistful. He talked about death by drowning, his brothers, his boys.

On the mainmast, each shackle was stamped with a stainless-steel tag that identified the lines: spinnaker, mainsail, jib. The stays and the halyards ran underneath the windshield and tied off on the two cleats behind the plastic sheeting, the main halyard on the starboard cleat and the jib halyards on port, so if the weather was foul and Craig was manning the boat on his own he could haul the sails without leaving the tiller. That was the first thing I noticed: the Autumn Mist was rigged for a solo crew.