At the Lake

by Jill Harris

  ‘He didn’t have a go at you this morning, did he?’

  ‘No! I told you: I just fell off my bike.’

  Barney changed the subject. ‘I wonder if Rosie and Tommy will come with their mother tomorrow.’

  They finished the jigsaw before bedtime. Simon read for a while before turning out the light. He lay on his side staring out at the pale sheen of starlight on the lake and the black mass of the hills behind. A morepork called mournfully, the sounds floating across the water like the opening notes of a song. Simon’s arm throbbed slightly and he found it hard to get comfortable.

  His mind kept replaying bits of what had happened. ‘I’m good at hurting kids’ — he could hear the light, rather high voice vividly. He felt the grip on his neck and saw the squinting eye looking in the wrong direction. Then came the pain of his arm being twisted behind his back. ‘You need some help’, and the foot shoving him forwards.

  Simon was scared all right. He had spent most of the day thinking about how to avoid bumping into Lewis and his dog. But there were other feelings and thoughts as well: resentment at Squint’s intrusion into his holiday, curiosity about all the security at the yard, wanting to tell Barney about what happened, and uncertainty about what to do about Jem.

  He could do nothing — just let Jem go off on his own to the yard. If Jem got hurt, nobody could blame him. Much as Jem got on his nerves, though, he didn’t think he could just leave him to it. But if he did tell Jem, it would be as good as telling Barney. Then Squint would come after him. He shivered.

  His mother would be pretty upset if Jem got hurt. Probably his dad, too. He might even come home from Australia.

  While his arm was in a sling, he could go on stalling, but after that Jem would wonder why he wouldn’t go to the yard with him.

  His eyes closed.

  Something woke Simon. He pushed himself up on his elbow and listened. The usual noises of the night came in through the open window — the subdued cluckings, the rustlings, the proprietary calls of the moreporks. He stared into the darkness. Nothing. He lay down again. But there it was again: tiny sounds of stealthy movement outside. His heart pounded — Squint had come for him! He scrambled out of bed and slammed the window shut. The next moment a huge dog, illuminated from below, pushed his muzzle against the glass and pulled his top lip back from his white fangs. Simon gasped aloud — it was almost a groan. Then a hand appeared and pulled the dog back and the light was redirected: Squint Lewis was looking through the glass. He smiled cruelly and mimed cutting his throat. Simon gave a short, strangled cry and stumbled away from the window. In the dark he backed into a body. A hand gripped his arm and he screamed.

  The light came on. Barney looked down at Simon. ‘What’s going on?’ He sounded annoyed.

  Simon pointed to the window. ‘Out there!’ he gasped. ‘Looking in!’

  ‘Show me,’ said Barney, moving towards the door.

  ‘No! No! Don’t open the door!’

  ‘What did you see?’

  ‘A huge dog! He pushed his teeth and nose against the glass. And a man. He smiled and pulled his finger across his throat!’

  Simon was shaking.

  ‘Come on, get back into bed,’ said Barney. ‘You’ve had a nightmare.’

  ‘No! I’m not going near the window.’

  Barney sighed. ‘OK, get into my bed. I’ll sleep here.’

  Simon scuttled down the passage. Barney walked over to the window. Simon had been jittery all day, no wonder he had had a bad dream. But when Barney looked through the window, he saw a patch of slobber on the glass and decided not to open the door after all.

  7

  ‘My name’s Rose!’

  ‘I think you saw Squint Lewis and his dog last night,’ Barney said over breakfast. ‘He’s no respecter of private property — he roams all over the place at night shooting rabbits. He probably took a short cut through the garden and decided to be nosy about who was in the house. When he saw you were awake, he decided to give you a fright.’

  Simon was silent. From the moment he had woken, the terror of the night had ambushed him. He couldn’t even be safe in his own bed. That was the message he was supposed to get, he thought.

  ‘He’s a nasty piece of work and a law unto himself,’ Barney continued. ‘Keep away from him. Don’t go up to the house-yard on your own, either of you.’

  Jem sat wide-eyed, looking from Barney to Simon. To think he had slept right through it.

  ‘What’s wrong with Simon? Is he still getting over his fall?’ he had asked his grandfather when Simon didn’t come out for breakfast, and Barney told him what had happened. Jem had gone straight in to Simon to find out more, but Simon had muttered ‘I don’t want to talk about it’ and turned his back.

  Jem could see Simon was still pretty rattled. It just made him all the more curious.

  But Barney didn’t seem to be paying it too much heed. ‘Make your beds and get your stuff off the floor while I do the dishes,’ he ordered. ‘Mrs Lewis likes a clear run.’

  A clear run! Simon looked around. Every shelf, every corner and most of the table were cluttered with his grandfather’s stuff: newspapers, books, papers, jars for pens, plastic screw containers, fishing lures, stones, bits of driftwood, framed photos (there was one of his mum when she was three), Gran’s pottery, a vase of dried reeds and grasses, jigsaw puzzles, games and the laughing-fish doorstop he used to try to hook with his toy fishing line. ‘I can put my hand on whatever I want,’ Barney was inclined to say in a firm voice whenever Simon’s mother got that look on her face. Don’t change anything! Simon would urge him silently.

  ‘Will Rosie and Tommy be coming, too?’ asked Jem.

  ‘Don’t know.’

  Jem’s solution to the mess in his room, which had developed by the morning after they arrived, was to sweep everything into his suitcase, close the lid and push it under the bed.

  Simon was more orderly — he had already worked out which drawers were for which items and it was largely a matter of transferring things from bed and floor to the right drawers. ‘You are a love,’ his mum would say to him when he tidied up his room like this at home on Saturday mornings so she could do the vacuum cleaning. Simon felt a sudden pang of longing to see her.

  They had pretty well done the job when they heard a car coming up the drive. Doors slammed, and a moment later Barney was saying ‘Hello, Alice. And hello, Rosie, Tommy; welcome to my place — I don’t think you’ve been here before.’ Barney poked his head through the kitchen doorway and called the boys.

  Jem was in the kitchen in a flash. ‘Hurray!’ he said enthusiastically to Tommy. ‘Come down to the jetty and I’ll show you the kouras. Have you got your togs?’ He turned to Mrs Lewis. ‘It’s really safe: the bottom’s sandy ’til the end of the jetty and the weed doesn’t start ’til much further out.’

  Barney smiled at Mrs Lewis. ‘Maybe you’d like to check it out yourself.’ And they all set off for the jetty, leaving Simon and Rosie behind.

  ‘I s’pose you can’t swim with that thing on your arm,’ said Rosie. ‘Did you really fall off your bike or was it something else?’ She stared at him challengingly.

  Simon returned her stare. ‘It’s my business.’ But he felt the blood rush into his face

  She was the first to drop her eyes. ‘Yeah,’ she said, ‘I guess.’

  Simon broke the awkward silence by suggesting they make a start on the new jigsaw puzzle, and they went into the sitting room.

  ‘We’ve got a Star Wars one and a Historical Britain,’ he said. ‘Which one shall we do?’

  Rosie inspected them. ‘Well, it’s either castle walls or all that dark sky … I reckon space ships are more interesting than turrets and woods and fields.’

  So they tipped the pieces out onto the card table and had started turning them over when Mrs Lewis returned. ‘Barney’s working on the boat,’ she announced. ‘I’ll start on the bedrooms and leave the sitting room ’til last.’

  Simon and Rosie
worked in silence for a while, their stiff beginning softening into a friendly silence. It didn’t take them long to get the edge pieces in place and, although they tended to work on their own corners of the picture, they pushed towards each other the pieces they saw would be useful.

  Simon had to tell himself firmly that Rosie wasn’t her father and she had probably suffered far worse things from Squint than he had. He was torn between wanting to talk to her about it and knowing he couldn’t talk to anyone. He nearly took her outside to show her the footprints and snapped garden plants which he had found that morning underneath the sun porch windows.

  ‘Those are your father’s footprints,’ he wanted to say. ‘He stared through the window last night, with the dog. He was trying to scare me.’ How would she respond? Actually, it would be mean to put her on the spot like that. Maybe people were always saying things to her about her father, as if she could do something about it.

  So, instead, he went into the sun porch and took out some chocolate from his holiday stash.

  ‘Is that your room?’ asked Rosie.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Nice how it looks over the lake.’

  ‘Yeah. Have some chocolate, Rosie.’

  ‘My name’s Rose!’ she snapped in a raised voice.

  Simon looked at her in surprise. ‘But everyone calls you Rosie.’

  ‘I hate it! Rose is a lovely name, a dignified name, and Rosie’s … sort of … sort of a … kind of a … little kid’s name. I want to be a Rose, not a Rosie.’

  ‘Rosie’s friendly,’ said Simon. ‘People are being friendly when they use it.’

  ‘No, they’re just trying to make up for—’ Rosie broke off as her mother came into the room. ‘Let’s get morning tea,’ said Mrs Lewis.

  She made coffee and Simon poured glasses of orange juice. Rosie buttered some malt biscuits, and Simon went down to the jetty to call the others.

  They all sat around the table. Jem chattered away about what he and Tommy had been doing, although Tommy said nothing. Mrs Lewis and Rosie were also silent. Barney made the odd comment. Simon felt strange about sitting around a table with three other people who were probably as scared of Squint Lewis as he was. He wanted to say outright: ‘Squint beat me up yesterday. Is that what he does to you?’ Could you just say things straight out like that or did you have to lead up to them? Besides, when Squint heard where they’d been, wouldn’t he put on the pressure for them to tell him what had been said?

  Mrs Lewis was ready to clean the sitting room, so Rosie and Simon had to stop doing the jigsaw. Tommy had already taken Rosie’s hand and was pulling her towards the jetty, so they all went along. Tommy told Rosie about what he and Jem had been doing earlier: jumping off the end of the jetty and swimming back to the lake edge, and wading around underneath the jetty looking for kouras. He and Jem got into the water again and searched for a koura to show Rosie. Tommy found one, and Jem scooped it into a tin where it tried to climb up the slippery side with its curved front pincers and stubby side legs.

  ‘It’s just like a very small, black crayfish,’ said Rosie. ‘Can you eat them? Does it hurt if they nip you?’

  ‘Put your finger in and find out,’ challenged Jem.

  ‘People do eat them,’ said Simon, ‘though I never have.’

  Rosie put her finger into the tin, but the koura was only interested in avoiding it. Jem tipped the animal back into the water and it scuttled away into hiding.

  After that, Simon and Jem showed the others around: the runabout in the boatshed beside the jetty; the path through the rhododendrons edged with pumice balls they had made last summer; the small summer-house that used to be the dairy, ‘when our house was a farmhouse’ explained Simon; the bay on the other side of the point, which they shared with the Masons — ‘you can see the rock where we swim,’ Jem pointed out; the stile they climbed to walk out to the end of the point.

  By that time, Mrs Lewis was calling them because she had to go home. As they walked to the car, Rosie turned to Simon. ‘We had a good time. Tommy hasn’t had that much fun for ages. Me neither. We mostly stick around home or go to the Masons’.’

  ‘I’ll show you the swing next time,’ Jem was saying to Tommy.

  The Lewises drove down the bumpy drive in their red car.

  ‘Was it so bad having them?’ Barney asked Simon.

  ‘No,’ said Simon slowly, ‘it was quite good.’

  8

  ‘Hang on to the anchor rope!’

  By the time Simon and Jem were out of the house, Barney had moved the runabout from the boatshed to the jetty. It was tied up, motor idling, on the other side from the dinghy.

  At breakfast he’d said, ‘We’ll go to the store this morning and stock up on supplies.’

  Jem loved his grandfather’s boat. ‘Nothing flash’ was how Barney always described the white and yellow-varnish clinker boat. It was named the Cynthia after Gran, but everyone just called it Cynnie. Or Sin Bin, which was a joke, except that Jem didn’t know why.

  Simon would look at him with lip curled: ‘You might get it when you grow up a bit.’

  The boat was always spick-and-span with a place for everything.

  ‘Why is the boat always tidier than the house?’ Jem once asked.

  ‘Because the word’s “shipshape”,’ replied Barney, ‘not “house-shape”, and your life might depend on it.’

  Jem checked it out. The fishing rods, net and tackle box were stowed in the bow cubby, together with the life-jackets. He could see the green bucket with worms. So they might do some fishing. Simon wouldn’t be able to, though. Ha, ha! he thought — for once he might be the first to catch a trout.

  ‘Jem, you can cast off.’ Barney hoisted himself onto his high seat behind the steering wheel.

  The boys fastened their life-jackets — Barney said he was too old to get used to wearing one. Jem untied the ropes fore and aft before stepping off the jetty onto the foredeck. He wound them around the cleats and moved to the stern. Barney slid the throttle forward out of neutral and the throaty growl of the outboard grew louder. They headed out beyond the inlet, the bow bouncing up and down over the choppy waves.

  Jem watched the avenue of bubbles from the propeller behind the boat grow wider and wider until they dissipated even as new ones formed. Simon watched the jetty getting smaller and smaller. His mind buzzed like a bumblebee trapped against a window. He couldn’t see how to get out of the trouble he was in. Even on the lake he was scanning the horizon for other boats.

  The wind whipped through their hair as the runabout picked up speed. The growl turned to a roar. Gradually the opposite shore came closer, and in the lee of the hills the wind dropped to a breeze. Barney throttled back and the boat slowed.

  ‘This isn’t a bad spot for brown trout,’ he called to Simon as he steered the boat parallel to the high bank with its overhanging ferns. Simon could see the green columns of weed reaching up to the light where the lake bed rose sharply. The boys stared intently into the clear water, watching for shadowy movements among the weed where a trout might lurk. At that moment, the sun came out and edged the ruffles of the wavelets with gold.

  Simon’s heart lifted. He raised his head and caught his grandfather watching him. They grinned at each other. It’ll be OK, thought Simon. Somehow.

  ‘We’ll put out a line along here on the way back.’ Barney opened the throttle again. They cruised along quite close to the lake edge, passing the familiar landmarks: the rocky knob with the track worn into the soft stone which they ran down before jumping into the water, and the ledge for scrambling back up; the shallow cave where there was just enough room to tuck the dinghy in at night to see the glow-worms; Lightning Point, where the blackened tree still stood, just a bit shorter than the year before; the small, sandy cove where Maori Track came out. This was the wild side of the lake, where dense bush covered the steep hills. Stands of pongas lightened the sombre green.

  Bush gave way to farmland, more caves and coves, then the beach
with the big launching ramp where the ‘new people’ came after Christmas with their speedboats, ‘spoiling it for the rest of us’ Barney would grumble. The long jetty by the store was a bit further on. A few metres out, Barney cut the speed right back, then put the throttle into reverse and the boat glided gently alongside the jetty, bumping against the old tyres. Jem, at the ready, leapt out and fastened the lines to the bollards, fore and aft.

  ‘You’ve used the wrong knots,’ said Simon. ‘What a retard!’

  ‘It’s fine, Jem,’ said Barney after checking the knots. He glanced at Simon’s arm. ‘You’re not much use to us at the moment.’

  They walked along the jetty to the store.

  ‘Gidday, Barney. How y’ doing? The usual? Plus extra for the boys?’

  Bill Sanders started filling a carton. He threw in a large bar of chocolate with a wink at Simon. ‘You can pay me with fish,’ he said, ‘though your grandfather’s idea of fishing’s a laugh — from a boat, using worms. Should be a law against it.’

  ‘You’re a purist,’ replied Barney. ‘Anyway, he’s already learning to cast from the bank, so you’ll be able to tell him all your best spots.’

  He tucked the mail down the side of the carton.

  ‘He won’t do much casting with his arm tied up like that. What’s it for?’ he asked Simon. ‘Trying to get out of your share of the chores?’

  Barney stepped in. ‘You’d better throw in three ice creams — might be the only food we get all day,’ he grinned.

  They strolled back to the boat. An aluminium dinghy with an outboard motor was heading fast for the jetty.

  ‘Let’s hope he stops in time,’ said Barney. ‘That’s Squint’s boat — looks like he’s got the kids with him.’

  Simon stopped in his tracks, his heart-beat suddenly loud in his ears.

  ‘Into the boat, you two,’ said Barney. ‘We’ll say hello to the kids later. Right now we need to get this stuff stowed away. Put it in the bow, Jem; and you help him if you can, Si.’ He stood watching the dinghy come alongside. Squint tied up and stepped up onto the jetty.