Or precious millilitres of his blood. They want that too. Spun in their centrifuge and ogled under their microscope. Held trophy high. Stored exhibit deep. Refrigerated into longevity.
Wanted it one day a few years back when he hadn’t been in Lorne long and he was out surfing off the point between the pier and the beach and he dropped down the front of eight foot of seriously travelling water, he called it, onto his tri-fin and tri-sliced his head open. Water exaggerated the blood all down his face and neck and chest until he looked like he was turned inside out. All the other surfers were yelling at him. Man, get off the water. You look like slaughter house five, get out of here. You’re a dinner gong for Great Whites, piss off. You need stitches. Go, man. Get some beach.
Thaw stayed sitting there on his blood-covered board, looking at the red marbling into the clear green water. Saying softly down at the blood across his stomach and thighs, ‘Man, I’m bleeding. I’m bleeding. In broad daylight.’ Not moving. Ignoring the shouts of the other surfers. Ignoring them through escalating stages of viciousness until, one by one, they shake their heads and paddle in to shore. Not wanting to be floating out there in that spread of blood.
Until they’re all sitting on the beach furious. With one of the best swells of the year coming at them, organised in perfect easy-to-read sets. And Thaw’s out beyond the break. Paddling back off it. Bleeding into it. The sea to himself and the high probability of sharks.
But what turns up for Thaw’s blood isn’t sharks. It’s authority. It’s maybe justice. It’s cops, anyway. Within ten minutes they’re leaning on the rail of the Lorne Surf Life Saving Club with Thaw big in their disc of binocular vision. Senior Sergeant Mal Lunn and Constable Scott. Talking to the magically close him. Come on in, boy. Come on in. You’ll attract yourself any number of Noah’s Arks out there. You’re bleeding a burley trail, boy. Come on in.
They wait. They make the drink machine cough up a free Coke and free Solo by shuffling their feet back and forward at its base and zapping it with static electricity by way of their car keys in a place only the knowledgeable and righteous know it needs to be zapped. And they wait sipping. Wait watching, while the LSLSC rig a motor onto an inflatable to send it out there.
Word goes through the town. Jean and I wait out on the deck at our place. Knowing there’s nothing we can do. Wandering up and down its length swearing. Returning always to the Tasco Moonbuster on its tripod there aimed down through the blue gums at him in the surf. It bringing him so close we can keep track on his fits of shiver and his shades of pale and see his MOTHER tattoo standing out black on his skin.
*
He’s done some things. He’s told Jean and me stories about carnally knowledgeable girls he’s had in the shelter sheds of their schools. He’s told us about wheat-belt wives whose groceries and infidelities he’s delivered right onto the linoleum of their kitchen floors. And told us what terrible dermatological damage 1950s lino can wreak on a man’s knees, and unveiled those knees and shown us the white islands on his skin there that look very much like birthmarks but he insists are housewife and kitchen scars by telling us, ‘Fucksakes. You wouldn’t know. If you never were a grocery boy you wouldn’t know how a forty-year-old lino and a ten-year-old marriage can add up to third-degree burns on a grocery boy.’
And he’s told us how a man of his acquaintance who deserved to be hit on the head with a star picket and killed outright for what he was doing to his wife got a tickle in his throat at the last minute and got bent over by that throat tickle into a painful sounding cough as the star picket his head deserved came down and so got hit on the neck with a star picket instead and got left in a wheelchair instead, from where, anyway, he couldn’t do to his wife what he had deserved the star picket on the head for and the outright death for in the first place.
So he’s done some things. But not, probably, the thing the cops want his blood for or want his semen for or want a hank of his hair for or want his spit for. Not the thing they want to drown him about.
Only one time did I ever ask about that girl whose memory and whose justice is in need of Thaw’s DNA. It was New Year’s Day. Mid-morning and we were coming out of our deep drunkenness into what promised to be our deep hangovers. On the beach waxing our boards half-heartedly for a small break that was edging along the rocks. I was angry with him for making a pass at Jean the night before when we were at a New Year’s Eve party in Wye River. He and Jean were dancing together and he was holding her in close by her hips, grinding into her, and he asked her didn’t she want to feel what it was like to fuck a man whose orgasm could kill. A man whose angry tool, he called it, was a known method of euthanasia. Only me twirling past with a schoolgirl’s arse in my hands for balance and eavesdropping his offer and dumping him flat on his back with a shove to his face stopped Jean from answering his question, which, given her inquisitive nature, was a lucky eavesdrop on my part.
So we’re on the beach waxing our boards. No conversation between us. Me still angry about the night before and thinking that him wearing his silence around town like a fashion item is no longer an option if he’s going to mouth-off when he gets drunk. So I throw my wax down into the sand and ask him, ‘Did you kill that black girl?’
And he drops his wax into the sand and looks away from me out at the skinny waves edging along the rocks and studies them so hard and so long I almost expect to be able to look out there and see that black girl struggling and screaming. Until I have to ask him, ‘Well?’
‘I had a hand in it,’ he tells me. ‘I made it possible. Organised the event, I suppose. Was the impresario. Got her alone with us white men by chasing off with red heelers anyone who was black and who loved her.’ Two sets of waves later he’s still staring out there at whatever he sees of what happened to that girl, or maybe just at the waves themselves.
‘But you want to know if I killed her,’ he says. ‘Actually killed her. Well,’ he says, ‘steal some hair off my pillow and take it to the cops. Then come and tell me if they want the rest of me.’
I took this to mean he outright didn’t know if he’d killed her or not. Was left in a darkness by alcohol like the rest of us were left in a darkness by not being there. And after we assumed, Jean and me, that he didn’t know whether he’d done it or not we went ahead and assumed he hadn’t done it.
But now he’s out there in the water. Bleeding. Maybe drowning. And we’ve got to ask ourselves all over again why he won’t come in and give up his blood.
Jean’s staring down at him through the Tasco Moonbuster. ‘He’s weak,’ she tells me. ‘White as a ghost.’ She starts to cry and goes and gets a bottle of Stoli from the fridge and we drink it in shots in between trips to the Tasco Moonbuster and Thaw out there bleeding.
They don’t want him to come in. In case he’s innocent. They want to drown him. Jean sweeps the Moonbuster along the beach over the crowd looking out to sea. Over the mothers there craning their necks out to sea and over the school kids there throwing their frisbee and over the holiday-makers there who have whitened their noses with sun cream on even this dullest day and over the men there curious enough to be thigh-deep in white water as they scan the swell for whoever is bleeding out there. ‘This is mediaeval,’ she tells me. ‘This is a witch drowning.’ And says at me, who hasn’t got use of a Tasco Moonbuster at present and can’t check anything long-distance, ‘Check those people. Those ghouls. Those people.’
The Lorne Surf Life Saving Club send out their rubber ducky and they insist he gets in. He refuses. Knows them to party with and knows them to surf with. And just looks them in the eye now and tells them, ‘Fuck off, Rick. Fuck off, Dennis.’ They threaten and beg. But they come in without him. There’s a crowd on the beach watching by this time. Villi is sitting in the shallows howling and won’t fetch the sticks teenagers throw for him and won’t eat the chicken bones people bounce off him.
At dusk Thaw is still out there. Lying down now. Weak. Paddling with his hands but not with his arms, just enough to keep beyond the break. The cops are eating Dinner Packs from Bill’s Chook Event. Getting him central in their binoculars between drumsticks. Saying the silly bastard will go unconscious and drown if the lazy fucking sharks around here aren’t interested. Not even bothering to send a boat of their own. Knowing he’d refuse to get in it and knowing they’d have to force him in it and knowing that would render their evidence inadmissible.
The crowd on the beach is restless for something uniformed or sharkskinned to take a hand in proceedings. Arguments break out about what actually attracts sharks. The young and scientific opting for electric impulses given off into the water by working muscles. The old and the fishermen and the deeply Australian knowing it’s blood. The water borne reek of leaking life.
By the time it’s dark everyone has maybe seen a dorsal fin that’s keeping them on the beach horrified. And can maybe make out on the blackening sea a paleness that is maybe Thaw. Glimpses of it between the flattening waves.
Jean goes down with a length of rope and brings back Villi. She’s had her half-bottle of Stoli and shouts at the crowd, ‘You fucking ghouls,’ and shouts at the cops, ‘You fucking arseholes.’ And the crowd look at her like she’s a madwoman and one or two of the men thigh-deep in white water call out, ‘Show us your tits.’ And the two cops lower their binoculars and look at her, and Mal Lunn puckers his lips and squirts some spit back and forward between his incisors and then raises his binoculars again and looks out to sea again.
Jean loops the rope over Villi’s head and drags him away whining and digging his paws into the sand and shaking his head trying to slip free.
Next day Thaw turns up sixteen-stitched and jovial in Waterborne where the surf people eat vegetarian and say nothing, then talk about the surf, then say nothing again. They’re angry about his marathon bleed into the best waves of summer. They’re demanding, ‘What the …?’ He holds up his hand and looks away from them out to sea and then turns halfway back to them and looks at them out of one eye until their questions have ended. Then he asks loudly, ‘Haven’t you people heard of the link between fear and sexual excitation?’ And raises his eyebrows and asks, ‘Eh?’ And looks from unamused face to unamused face and tells them anyway, ‘The explanation is this … after I cut my head the fear of sharks gave me a fat,’ he grabs the crotch of his jeans to show just where he got the fat. ‘Amazing, but there it is. There it was. In my Speedos. And then I looked in at the beach and there’s this crowd gathered there … seem all to be watching me, in full knowledge of my fat, or something. So of course a shy bloke like me isn’t going to walk up onto a crowded beach that prominent in his Speedos. So I stayed out there. Waiting for the fat to go. Waiting for the crowd to go. Neither of which would.’ He looks at them then sitting hunched over health food not smiling at his joke and not saying anything. Waiting for the real explanation.
So he tells them there’s real scientific data proving a number of emotions can lead to the state of sexual excitation … fear being among them. Then he laughs and tells them he never expected shark-scare could make for such a highly rampant old fella or he and the girls of his teens would have been watching Jaws One, Two and Three instead of all those Long John Holmes videos from under his father’s sofa.
The other surfers just shake their heads and stay angry and ask what the fuck was really going on. Thaw tells them, ‘The erection. The Speedos. The embarrassment.’ They look at each other and at Thaw. They don’t laugh. They bite deep into lentil-burgers and suck their faces concave on peach smoothies. They stay angry and wondering and swear they’ve surfed with him for the last time.
And because he lives with me people ask me, What’s going on with Thaw? Bleeding out there like that. And the cops hovering. What?
Soon they come to know the cops are always hovering when there’s a chance at some of Thaw’s blood, or a hank of his hair or some of his spit or jism.
The cops have, Thaw says, tried to get spit from him by enraging him in argument. Have tried to get blood from him by enticing him into brawls. Have tried to get jism from him using undercover female officers in late-night bars and no underwear whatsoever.
What they want, says Thaw, is my D and my N and my A. And they’re damned frustrated at not being able to take it. At having to wait ’til it falls from my person of its own accord. At having a Godfucking Labor government master that won’t let them take people’s DNA by force.
DNA will tell the world, the police say, whether Thaw is a bad, bad man … or that other variety … a plain unknown quantity.