The Dragon Raft Read online

  Mum looked at me in an anxious way. Then she looked at Dad in an even more anxious way. But Dad was just stuffing his face.

  I said, “It was wrapped up in a fishing net. It would have become exhausted and drowned. But we saved it. Me and Billy and Sally, we saved it.”

  I might as well have been speaking Chinese. No one appeared to understand what I was saying. I went on, “We tried to cut it free, but the net was too tough. In the end we had to unwrap it. They’re big. Dolphins are big—unwrapping them isn’t easy.”

  “There will be no more wasting time with that raft,” Dad said. These were the first words he’d spoken all evening.

  “It’s not a waste of time,” I said.

  “I’m not arguing, Walter,” Dad said. “There’s plenty to do at home. Your schoolwork has been awful.”

  “No, it hasn’t.”

  “Don’t contradict me.”

  “My schoolwork is not awful. I got the best marks in the class for my history assignment. Coming top is not awful.”

  “There will be no more time wasted with that damn raft. If Billy wants to waste his life, ruin his clothes and maybe drown himself, that’s his look out. But you are forbidden to join him. I am not going to discuss this any further.”

  Dad stood up from the table and walked out.

  “Mum?” I said, appealing for help.

  “Do as your father says, Wal. That awful contraption has taken over your life. It is best you leave it to Billy.”

  “You don’t mean that,” I said.

  “It’s what your father says, Wal.”

  I went to my room. I lay on my bed. In my head I had a raging argument with my parents. I won the argument, I won it hands down. But it is easy to win an argument when it is all in your own mind. Winning those sorts of arguments might make you feel better, but they don’t change anything. “What we need is action,” I muttered to myself. “Get real, Wal.”

  I lay on my bed, looked at the ceiling and decided to take my own advice, I was going to get real. I’d had enough. I was out of here. I was off to the Whitsundays, I was going to check out the icebergs, I was going adventuring and I wasn’t coming back. I wasn’t coming back for years and years. Maybe when I was a millionaire I’d sail back into Barker Inlet in my millionaire’s yacht, just to see how the decrepit old folks were doing. I set the alarm for midnight and put it under my pillow so it wouldn’t wake anybody else.

  But I needn’t have bothered with the clock. I didn’t sleep. I lay in the dark and remembered when I was little. Things had been easier then. Once Dad and I had had a good time. I couldn’t remember how old I’d been—four or five, maybe. We’d gone to the butterfly park near Murray Bridge. We’d wandered round the park looking at butterflies, there were clouds of them. There was one big butterfly with bright blue and black wings. I remembered it was huge and sparkled in the sunlight. It landed on some sort of bush, but the bush was too high for me to see the butterfly properly, so Dad picked me up and sat me on his shoulders. I sat there and just gazed at the butterfly until it flew away. But Dad didn’t put me back down on the ground, I stayed on his shoulders for hours, just looking at the butterflies. Well, maybe it wasn’t for hours. Maybe it was only for a few more minutes. But I could remember being happy—happy to be with Dad. That was the only time I could remember. In the half-dark I felt the bulk of the alarm clock under my pillow and I knew that that visit to the butterfly park had been a long time ago. There was no going back. I pulled the clock out from under the pillow. It was eleven thirty. The house was quiet. I switched the alarm off, got dressed in total silence and crept on bare feet to the kitchen where I gathered as much food as I could and packed it in a plastic watertight container. Then I left the house and walked quietly away towards the bait and tackle shop. I stopped once to put my sneakers on.

  There was a full moon, for which I was grateful. The water in the channel sparkled, the bait and tackle shop looked like an old castle, black and gloomy in the moonlight. And there was a stiff breeze blowing in the right direction. Actually it wasn’t so much a breeze as a wind. For a moment the moon was covered by clouds. I looked up—they were charging across the moon’s face at a fair rate of knots. I climbed down onto the raft and stowed the provisions I’d taken from the fridge in the cabin. I placed the lanyard of my waterproof torch around my neck, raised the sail, untied the rope and I was away.

  The channel was a moon path between the two causeways. Something went splash. A fish? A bird? It was too dark to see. I didn’t have time to wonder. I was holding the rudder, it felt alive in my hands. The sail billowed. I was moving fast. I passed the black bulk of the dredger that had been working in the channel for the last week. I held a course straight down the middle of the channel.

  As soon as I’d cleared the mouth of the causeways I set sail for Point Grey using the channel markers as my guide. There were cormorants asleep on the tops of the markers. I could see the lights of a container vessel moored at the wharf in Outer Harbour. The giant crane was in action. It was lit up with a blaze of lights. There were guys there working in the middle of the night. They’d be dazzled by all the light. Even if they looked in my direction they wouldn’t be able to see me. For a moment I wanted to change course, to sail over to the wharf, tie the raft up safe and sound, talk to the guys unloading the containers. But I wasn’t turning back now. I kept on going, out into the waters of Gulf St Vincent. Slowly I swung the raft round.

  I was sailing side on to the wind now, the waves were breaking against the drums, splashing over the deck. It was a good job I’d bought my wet weather gear (an old plastic jacket that Tony had given me). I set sail for the south. Next course change: Backstairs Passage. And then the Southern Ocean. And then the world, the whole wide world.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  I never did get to the Southern Ocean, never felt the long ocean rollers coming up from Antarctica. There was more than enough action in Gulf St Vincent that night. And my raft wasn’t the only vessel to feel the anger of the sea.

  I didn’t have a watch with me, so I don’t know what time it was when the wind really started to get up. They told me afterwards that there was a cyclonic depression centred south of Kangaroo Island. I suppose there was. All I knew was that the wind slowly changed direction and increased in speed. So did the raft. I’ll say this for her, she rode the waves like a champion. The deck was constantly awash, but that didn’t matter, the water just slid back into the boiling sea as quickly as it came on board.

  I thought it would be a good idea to let some of the wind out of the sail, so I grabbed a length of rope and managed to tie the rudder in position. This gave me a minute or two to scramble up to the mast and lengthen the ropes that held the corners of the sail. The sail promptly went almost horizontal, streaming out in front of the raft, flapping and cracking like gunshots. The wind was so strong that the raft hardly appeared to slow down. The water surged and bubbled around the rudder.

  I saw the lights of a tanker coming up the Gulf. Then the lights disappeared as the raft went down into a trough between the waves. A moment later, there was the tanker again as the raft was lifted high by the water. I reckoned I needed a safety harness. I didn’t have one on board, but I had a length of rope. So I tied one end round my waist and the other end to bit of the raft’s frame.

  We raged through the blackness of the night, me and the raft. Hours—don’t ask me how many hours. I was too busy keeping her running straight and true before the wind, making sure I wasn’t washed overboard. I suppose if I’d stopped to think about things, I would have been scared witless. As it was, I simply had too much to do. I remember thinking it was a good job it was mid-summer and the wind and the waves were warm. The weather was wild and fierce, but it wasn’t freezing.

  So what was I really doing? Did I really think I was running away from home for good? Did I actually think I could go down to Antarctica and look at the icebergs? I was just a kid on a homemade raft for pete’s sake. And I wasn’t stupid, I knew
the raft’s limits, and I knew my own limits and I’d only taken enough food and water for one day. It’s hard to say what I thought I was doing. Maybe I was just trying to make a statement: I’m sick of being pushed around, sick of being told everything I do is not good enough, sick of not being appreciated, sick of not being loved. Yeah, I reckon that’s what I was doing. But who was I making the statement to? Did I reckon Mum and Dad would change because I ran away to sea in the middle of the night? Probably not. Maybe I was just making the statement to myself.

  I had to keep the raft running in the same direction as the wind, but the endless howling of the storm and noise of the waves was almost hypnotic. After a while I found I could remain alert to the needs of the raft with one part of my mind, and drift off into my imagination with another part. I was on a sort of automatic pilot. I remembered that time when Dad was in prison. I was a bit younger then, of course, but I remembered it was the only time in my life I’d been able to talk to Mum. We’d had these long days and evenings in which neither of us had been anxious about Dad, about what he was going to say or do. There was no need to be anxious, the guy was in jail. I remember I said something to Mum one evening about how happy I was.

  Mum looked troubled and said, “You should try to stay happy when Dad comes home.”

  “How can I do that, Mum? If I’m happy, Dad tries to stop me.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “Yes it is,” I said. “You know it is.”

  “Your father didn’t have a very happy childhood himself.”

  “Well, that’s no reason for him to try and make me miserable.”

  “He doesn’t try to make you miserable, Wal.”

  “Well he might not try,” I said. “But that’s what he does.”

  Mum was quiet for a while and then she said. “I think your father is afraid that if someone is happy, it can’t last. Something always happens to spoil the happiness. And then things become twice as bad as they were before. It’s because....because you don’t just get depressed because things are rotten. You get depressed because you used to be happy and now you’re not.”

  “So it’s best to stay miserable all your life, because if something nasty happens, you are miserable already and nothing’s changed?”

  “I think that’s what your Dad feels, Wal. Something like that.”

  “Then he’s mad,” I said.

  “No. A lot of people think like that.”

  “Then a lot of people are mad.”

  “You’ll understand when you are older, Wal.”

  “What is there to understand, that I don’t understand now?”

  “You’ll find out when you are older.”

  I remember thinking that maybe Mum was mad as well. How was getting older going to make me understand that everybody ought to be miserable all the time? A bigger wave than usual came up behind me and lifted the raft half way to the sky—at least that’s what it felt like. Up on top of the wave the wind seemed twice as wild. Then the wave moved on and the raft sank back into the sea with a lurch. In the hollow the wind dropped for a few seconds. It was like the eye-of-the-storm, a tiny bit of peace and quiet. Maybe that’s what those months when Dad had been in jail were: the eye-of-the-storm.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  And then I saw the light. It was feeble. It came and went. There was some guy flashing a torch. I thought he must be on a boat sailing without navigation lights. You’re not meant to do that: sail around at night with no lights on your boat. True, I had no lights either, but I’d had to leave in a hurry. I peered into the darkness, trying to see the other boat. I wanted to avoid a collision. The light flashed again, it was right down at water level. The light wasn’t on a boat. There was some madman in the middle Gulf St Vincent swimming around with a waterproof torch. You meet some nutters.

  Then it hit me. The guy had been washed overboard. That’s why he was swimming around miles from land in the middle of a storm. I would have to rescue him. And I’d only get one chance. If I missed him, there’d be no turning back for another try. If I turned side on to these waves, I was a goner.

  I strained my eyes in the darkness. The light flashed. I changed course slightly, aiming for the place where the flash had been. What if the guy didn’t see me coming? What if I ran him over? My own torch was on a string round my neck. I grabbed it and shone it straight ahead. I looked for the answering flash, but there wasn’t one. Maybe the guy was facing the other way. He would be, wouldn’t he? He’d be keeping the back of his head to the wind. I had an idea. I raised the beam of my torch slightly and shone it at the sail. This would give the guy in the water a better chance of seeing me if he turned his head. The sail was higher and there was a lot of it. The dragon’s head breathed fire in the torch light.

  Suddenly I saw the guy’s light again—he was waving it wildly. He’d seen me and he wasn’t very far away. He was slightly to one side. I changed course as much as I dared and aimed straight for him.

  Everything happened very quickly. A wave broke over the raft. The guy grabbed the side. I saw him briefly in the torchlight. Then I had to drop the torch and scramble over to him, abandoning the rudder. I grabbed his wrist. The sea dragged at him. I almost went overboard myself. I was flat on the deck, holding the guy with one hand, trying to hold onto the deck with the other. Too late. The guy grabbed me with both hands. I lost my grip. I went over the side. The water engulfed me. I grabbed at the guy. He was wearing a life jacket, which was more than I was. There was a violent tug at my waist.

  The rope. My homemade safety harness. I’d forgotten about that. I was being pulled along behind the raft. And the guy and I were hanging on to each other. Spluttering. Choking on seawater.

  I don’t know how long it took us to get back onto the raft. But we did it. There were rope burns on my hands. My guts felt like they’d been squeezed by a boa constrictor. I was half drowned, gasping. But I was back on deck and so was the other guy. He was lying beside me coughing.

  “Don’t ever drink, mate,” the guy yelled at me above the wind.

  “Drink?” I yelled back.

  “The demon rum,” the guy yelled. “I had a few.... You know, we’d won the race. We were celebrating on the way back.... Went on deck for a leak. And then.... There was this big wave.”

  I don’t know how long the guy had been in the water. But one thing was obvious: he was still drunk. I don’t think he quite understood what was happening.

  “Go and hang out in the cabin,” I shouted. “It’ll stop you getting washed overboard again.”

  “Cabin?” the guy said, sitting up and looking around. “Holy Cow! What is this thing?”

  “My raft,” I said. “She’s the Dragon Raft. Now get into the cabin. I’ve got to steer.”

  “You’re that crazy kid,” the guy shouted. “One of those crazy kids.”

  There was a flash of recognition. The last time I’d seen this joker he’d been wearing a towel round his neck and waving an angry beer can at me and Billy.

  “Yeah, I’m one of the crazy kids,” I yelled back at him. “And you’re the bloke who reckons this is a heap of junk.”

  “Changed me mind,” the guy shouted. “I reckon this is the Royal Yacht. Where are we going?”

  “South,” I yelled.

  “Wherever,” the guy said and half stumbled half slipped over to the cabin. He was lucky to get there without going overboard again.

  I got the rudder under control and looked around. The sky was slightly lighter to the east. Daybreak was coming. The torch was still on its lanyard round my neck. I flashed it at the cabin. The guy was safe enough. He was out of it, sound asleep, slumped against the side of the crate like a giant drowned rat.

  He slept for three or four hours. When he woke up he wasn’t drunk anymore and he said his name was Jim. I handed over the steering to Jim and collapsed in the cabin myself.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  I slept for hours. I reckon I must have dreamed at some stage, because Billy and Sally we
re on the raft.

  “What did you run away for?” Billy said.

  “I couldn’t take it any more,” I said.

  “Things aren’t that bad,” Sally said.

  “I’m trying to tell Dad something,” I said.

  “When I want to tell people stuff,” Sally said, “I talk to them.”

  “There’s different ways of talking,” I said.

  I think that’s how the dream went. Dreams are hard to remember.

  * * * * * * *

  When I woke up, another two drums had gone. The raft was even lower in the water and tilting to one side. A couple of the deck planks had come adrift and water was splashing up through the gaps. The mast was leaning at a mad angle. But the wind had dropped a bit and the cliffs of Kangaroo Island were plain to be seen. The waves smashing against the cliffs were also plain to be seen. There were no clouds, the day was full of bright sunlight. I was stiff and sore from the way I had been sleeping in the crate. I grabbed the plastic box with the food and drink and crawled across the deck to where Jim sat steering.

  “Breakfast,” I said.

  “Lunch is more like it,” Jim said.

  “What time is it?”

  “Lunch time. What have you got?”

  I opened the box and we ate everything in it in a few minutes.

  “We can’t land on those cliffs,” I said.

  “We’re on course for The Pages,” Jim said. “The current is pushing us in just the right direction. Another hour, I reckon.”

  “That’s if the raft doesn’t totally fall apart.”

  “Fingers crossed,” Jim said.

  For a while neither of us said anything. Then Jim said, “Were you in trouble at home?”

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  “Did you run away to sea? Is that what you’re were doing?”

  “Something like that,” I said.

  “I ran away once when I was a kid,” Jim said. “Nothing as dramatic as a raft in a storm though. You’ve got more style than I had.”