Chapter 16 – The Waiting
Elin remembered winters best as a little girl. She lived in a town in the far north of Sweden, a place where for the summer the sun barely set. In the winter the sun barely rose, making a low circle about the white covered hills and, for a month, never rising at all. Then it was just a glow appearing on the southern horizon around the time they ate their family lunch for an hour or two. In this chill winter half-light her father would take her out to walk across the snow on days when the cold was not extreme and a winter blizzard did not blow.
There was something magical in the half light, a place of imagined beings which lived in the half shadows, glimpsed but never quite seen. At these times he would tell her stories of her Nordic ancestry, of gods and warriors, indomitable spirits who could survive in this land and, when the winter ice was gone from the fiords, these brave souls would sail out in their ships to raid and gather resources for their families, sometimes they would discover new and unknown places, even whole new worlds. These legends lived on in her mind far beyond her childhood. They gave her a soul filled with wanderlust and, as she grew from a child to a woman, that restless soul ate at her.
In the rest of Elin’s life things changed too as she grew, though these memories had blurred edges. Around when she was ten her mother got really sick. They tried treating her and all her hair fell out. She got better for a while but got sick again. This time she never got better.
Elin remembered that awful cold day, coming into winter, when they stood around the hole in icy ground, throwing in gifts and bouquets of flowers. Her mother’s body was wrapped and placed in a small boat, the boat her mother and father had sailed in together around the lakes and fiords of Sweden and Norway, from when they had first met as two children in the local village school. Then the boat and her mother were covered in icy dirt. Her father spoke of how her mother could sail the boat over wide oceans, a new warrior queen.
Her mother, Elle, was the love of her father’s life. Their family was her, a brother and a little sister, along with her parents. They had all been very happy until her mother got sick.
Both her father and mother loved the early Norse customs. So, on that sad day, following the way of their warrior ancestors from time immemorial, they had done their own boat burial. Her father had dug a huge hole, it had taken him days. Then he had placed his Elle and the much loved boat together into the ground, so the boat could carry her into an afterlife where her father had a dream of meeting her again when he made his own journey. It was what he had promised her as she lay dying and he had faithfully fulfilled his promise.
The years that followed had been hard and lonely years for them all; their mother’s bright smiles and golden hair had lit up all their lives and her absence was a great hole.
But life had continued on. They had moved a year later to Stockholm, where her father had got work in a factory. Elin had moved from the village school to a big school in the city and got good grades. But all her friends, family and teachers said that Elin had a restless soul, a sort of wanderlust, endlessly dreaming of the Viking legends and how she could in some part recreate them in her life to come. She had taken her mother’s looks, not in totality, but the golden hair and the blue eyes were the legacy. Her sister had the rest of her mother’s face, the chin and nose; Elin’s were stronger, like her father’s. But Elin was striking in her own way if not a full classic beauty. And she could sense the power it gave her to make her way in the world.
She had her first man when she was fourteen, a teacher in her school. She had stayed behind after lessons; working away at her desk, she could feel something inside her drawing her to him. He was married but young and handsome, and she wanted to know what this boy girl thing was about. He had come up behind her as she sat at her desk and, after initially putting his hands on her shoulders, he had fondled her breasts. She was a willing participant and had encouraged his advances. They had ended on the carpet in the classroom, with blinds drawn and doors locked to keep any curious passers-by out. It happened a few more times before she moved on to other pursuits. She learned that moving on from people was easy to do, even though they shared her body none got deep into her soul, to the place of her dreams.
After that she experimented with other men and a couple of women, learning how to pleasure her body and theirs. One of her girlfriends got her a prescription for the pill which she had then taken religiously as she did not want any babies spoiling her adventures.
But these events were only brief encounters, something to meet her physical needs. Mostly she lived in her mind and dreamed of Viking gods and goddesses, travelling with them to places where none had ever been before. She did not know how she would satisfy this wanderlust but it was there and she would not let it go and settle for an ordinary life.
At University she enrolled for History and Archaeology with a focus on Norse Studies, but also with a strong interest in natural history, the plants and animals of the Arctic Kingdom. Then, at University, she began to read about the great whaling adventures of the Nordic and Icelandic seamen, covering all the world’s oceans to bring their bounty home. It was not she wanted to kill whales, but the sense of adventure and sailing into danger brought passion to her soul.
Instead she soon became captured by a modern variant, the need to protect the masters of the ocean, those magnificent creatures of the deep from the new commercial marauders. She realised that there was nothing courageous in the new steel sided ships, with explosive harpoons, which killed with no risk to the sailors. So different from the way of her distant ancestors of the longboats, when the contest was something of bravery and equality; where only the few most skilled hunters succeeded and returned. The seas were a fitting graveyard for those who failed with brave hearts.
One day, when her lectures were out, she was wandering aimlessly around the docks. She saw a Greenpeace ship was here, in Stockholm, taking on provisions. She struck up a conversation with a crewman on the gangplank. He told her this boat was seeking to disrupt the commercial whalers of the modern day, and to protect the world’s oceans from their depredations. On impulse she enlisted, she was already a competent sailor of small boats, it was an ongoing pleasure she had shared with her father in his later years. Her only regret was the leaving of her father, for whom she kept alive her mother’s image, but she would live on in his memory as a Viking queen of old.
Now she was a deckhand, unpaid but fed, out for fame and glory as they ran their campaigns to harass and disrupt the whalers of the world. It began in the Arctic and soon moved on to the north Pacific, focusing on the Japanese Scientific Kill. Then it moved to the Antarctic, a place she fell in love with from her first glimpse of the ice covered Antarctic Peninsula, teeming with its penguins and seals, and countless flocks of birds, with its backdrop of ice in all its myriad colour tones.
Most of these boats took on provisions or were based out of Australia or New Zealand and soon she came to regard these places as her second homes. It was on one of these stopovers, when she had three weeks in Port Melbourne with nothing in particular to do, that she decided to go and see the inside of what she had been told was a vast empty continent. The night train was leaving soon for Adelaide. She bought a ticket on impulse, the way she had made most decisions in her life
Her plan was to go the whole way across to Perth, then explore around there. She had heard that Albany, to the south, was a famous whaling town. She put a post card in the mail to her father, telling of her plans, while waiting for the train to depart at Southern Cross Station.
In Adelaide she spent a day walking around the town. While it was a nice quaint city with spacious parklands and attractive old buildings it did not really excite her. She wanted to see the outback, the real place far out past wherever civilisation ended. She found out there were tours running to the heart of the inland, places with names like Marree, Coober Pedy and Lake Eyre, largest salt lake in the world. This seemed a much more interesting plan. She decided she
was happy to make her own way without all the tour things added on. A coach was leaving for Coober Pedy at half past seven tonight, due in just after six the next morning. That was good; she could sleep on the bus at no cost as her funds were limited.
Next morning, in the early dawn, she collected her backpack from the bus and walked up town in Coober Pedy. She was ravenous and decided to treat herself to a big plate of cooked breakfast before she checked out the town. Walking along the main street she found an early opening cafe.
It had one other guest who was starting a big plate of bacon, eggs and sausages, with a couple tomatoes and mushrooms on the side. The food smelt and looked delicious.
She sat down at the table next to his. When the waiter came she pointed to this man’s plate and said, in her best and politest Swedish English, “I would like one meal just like that plate, if you please. I am not sure what you call it.”
The man eating looked up and fixed her with a weather beaten smile. “Oh, you just call it ‘The Works’. Bacon, Egg and Sausage with the works, but most locals just call it ‘The Works’. I promise it is as good as it looks.”
He talked to her with a distant smile, his eyes crinkled up around the edges. He was looking both at her and way past her, but with a burning intensity for both her and the other place. She felt something grab in the pit of her stomach that she had never felt before.
It was not primarily sexual through there was that mixed in, it was a basic primal attraction, an almost mindless ‘fatal attraction’, as she had once seen in that movie. It spoke of danger.
She had lost count of the number of men she had shared her body with over the years. If she felt in the mood and they felt in the mood it was something she did when the moment was there. She liked the feeling of a man thrusting with abandon, body out of control, as she clawed at his back, and sometime bit him, as she thrust back. No doubt she would do it with this man. She knew already this part would happen between them. It would be good and wild, the way she liked it.
But it was more, something much sharper; it was the element of buried danger that excited her. Taking up with this man would be going past life’s safe places. She gone past life’s safe places in her travels and in the physical ordeals she had put herself through. But she had never done it with a man.
It was almost predatory, both of them as looking at the other like two hungry carnivores eying off the other to feast on, the female spider and her mate, except in this case the mate was her equal or more in threat. Her sixth sense told her this man was dangerous, seriously dangerous, though not in a callous way. But he was disregardful of danger to him and to others and of the consequences which may follow his actions. She had heard of bored sailors playing Russian roulette with a loaded pistol. It was somehow akin to that. They would take the shot; some would survive and some not. She now grasped that in doing this death dance with others lay the supreme thrill; a place she had eternally searched for in a tame world.
All this passed through Elin’s mind in a fraction of a second as she appraised her co-diner.
Breaking from his intense gaze she held out her hand, cool and polite. “I am Elin, how are you?”
He responded with a firm and callused hand. “Name is Mark, Mark B for short. I am what folks round here call a local to the Outback, that is anywhere out the back of Australia.”
“I am from Sweden, though I think of myself as more of a Norse Viking warrior from an earlier time, as my father was always telling me stories of our Viking ancestor heroes,” she said.
Mark gestured, “Why don’t you join me, be my Viking Goddess?”
She moved her chair to his table.
They ate with muted conversation. It was what came after that mattered for them both. He shared his food with her as she waited for hers. In return she shared her food with him. Their hands and knees brushed in passing. She felt a thrill and she knew he felt it too.
When they had both finished he said. “My truck is out the back. I have worked here in a mine digging for opal for a month but this morning I am up early to travel. Tonight I will be 900 kilometres north of here, up in western Queensland at a place called Birdsville. To get there I must go round Lake Eyre, a huge salt lake, then cross a big desert full of stones. Will you come with me? I sense that you, like me, are an adventurer who takes life as it comes.”
She said, “I have been waiting to make this journey for a long time. I think I have been waiting for you to find me. Yes, I will come.”