Home Boys

by Beckett, Bernard

‘Someone died, I saw it.’

  ‘You dreamed it.’

  ‘That’s the other thing. Mary scares me.’

  ‘She’s a big fat woman, that’s nothing to be scared of,’ Dougal scoffed. His mood had darkened now, and Colin knew he was being blamed for it. But you couldn’t ignore it. You couldn’t just pretend.

  ‘She says she has dreams too, and she says that I came here for a reason.’

  ‘Then she’s crazy as well as fat, cos that’s just crazy talk.’ Dougal fixed him with a black stare, even darker in the dim light, daring him to disagree.

  ‘I know that. I know it is. But I’m scared of crazy people. And she said something about being careful of Ron. I don’t know what it meant, but it is frightening.’

  ‘It’s only frightening if you’re frightened,’ Dougal replied, like that was enough to end any argument.

  ‘So you think we should stay here?’

  ‘Of course we should.’

  ‘For how long?’

  ‘As long as we like. Gino says they’ll let us go out on the boats soon. Imagine that. I’ve never been on a fishing boat. It’s gotta be better’n milking cows doesn’t it?’

  ‘I’ll do you a deal then,’ Colin proposed.

  ‘What sort of deal?’

  ‘Tell me what happened, back in the valley. Tell me about the Grey Man, then I’ll stay with you.’

  ‘You’ll stay with me anyway,’ Dougal replied. ‘You’re too soft to leave by yourself. Anyhow, there’s nothing left to tell.’

  With that the lamp’s wick drew off the last of the oil and the room spat and flickered into darkness. As Colin’s eyes adjusted the window above the bench glowed an eerie grey.

  ‘Don’t worry.’ Dougal spoke softly now, as if he could read Colin’s mind. ‘He won’t follow us here. We’re safe now. Blood brothers.’

  ‘Blood brothers.’

  * * *

  For the next two weeks it felt to Colin as if Dougal might have been right after all. Perhaps life in this little fishing community was brilliant. The weather cleared and the short days remained bright. The hours were packed with quickly established routines. Colin and Dougal were taught how to mend nets and fillet fish, stack wood and clean gear, collect shellfish, sing songs and drink beer. It was hard work, but not like the Sowbys had been hard. Here the warm glow of exertion never got to burning, and although Colin and Dougal kept mostly to themselves, the other people were friendly enough and never ignored them.

  Colin watched for warnings, trying to read any signs that might appear, but hard as he looked there was nothing he could see, or at least understand. The only vehicles to pass their way, over the narrow track that was half bogging-down sand and half axle-shattering rocks, belonged to the farms further around the coast, or their own truck, returning from its daily run to the fish market, laden down with fuel or groceries, or late at night on a Saturday, an hour to the minute after the pub had closed its doors. Colin felt as far from the world as he could be, and he began to see the cliffs that rose up above the baches as friends, their bulk protecting far more than it threatened.

  There was something interesting happening with Gino that Colin couldn’t quite explain. Although he was always happy, and always looking for a way to shortcut a job, or turn it to a game, he wasn’t as popular as Colin expected. It wasn’t that people were unfriendly to him exactly, but there was a look in their eyes that Colin caught sometimes, when they watched Gino walk by, and a coldness in their voices when they talked of him, if they didn’t think Colin was listening. It was men mostly, especially the younger ones. There were four of them, all strangely similar in appearance given that Colin had been told they were not related. Not big, but strong; hard-looking, chiselled by the same cold wind. ‘We’ll look like that too,’ Dougal joked, ‘if we stay too long.’ Glen, Alan, Scott and James. And if Colin thought some of the others had reservations about Gino, there were times he would have said these four hated him. But if Gino noticed it he didn’t seem to care, and so it joined the procession of facts that are allowed to slide by, without snagging on comment or significance. Like the continuing night-time disappearances. Twice in the next fortnight Gino slipped out without explanation, and both times Colin heard him creeping back in some hours later, and settling into his creaking hammock.

  Despite the promises they weren’t invited out on to the boats, although Gino got more time on the water now the boys were able to do many of his other chores. Ron and Mary continued to run the entire operation, and although people often swore and tempers rose quickly, Colin never heard anybody disobey either of them. He couldn’t tell if it was fear or respect, or even if those two things were different in a place like this. Mary would always smile at him when they passed, and ask him how things were going, but there were no more strange conversations, which Colin was most glad of. No more dreams either. It was as though they belonged to another time and another place, and the more Colin came to believe that, the more he relaxed, just like Dougal was relaxing, and began to believe that this was a place where a man could grow to be happy.

  But empty spaces never stay that way for long and while Colin’s sleeping dreams had disappeared, his waking dreams became all the more insistent. Much of the work was repetitive and it lent itself to such diversions, and every dream he constructed was built about the same simple idea. Her name was Veronica.

  Veronica, who had entered his head that very first night by the fire, and would not leave. It was a new feeling for Colin, strange and a little uncomfortable, and not the sort he would choose to tell anybody about. The way he felt himself blush every time she walked past, and would have to turn away. The way his speech changed whenever he knew she was listening, even though he tried to stop it happening. The feelings that played in his stomach when he imagined being close to her, the way every other priority in his life had shifted down one place, to leave a space at the top for her.

  And it was stupid, he knew it was. To start with, she was the daughter of Ron and Mary, and you would have to be stupid to do anything that might upset them. And she was older than him, three or four years at least, and at least three times as beautiful too. And it wasn’t as if she was without choices, because Colin watched her closely enough to realise that when she walked across the beach his weren’t the only pair of eyes she took with her.

  Once Dougal caught him staring and teased him about it, but Colin denied it, and refused to talk to him for the rest of the afternoon. This was his secret alone, his own painful, impossible excitement.

  EIGHT

  Veronica

  IT wasn’t unusual for Mary to come into their bach in the morning. So when she took Gino aside and whispered to him, the same as she had that very first morning, Colin thought nothing of it. She turned to the boys, who had hurriedly completed their dressing while her back was turned, with the news.

  ‘Dougal, today Gino will be taking you out on the boat with him.’

  Colin saw the smile spread across his friend’s face, and felt a dull pang of jealousy. It wasn’t that they might think Dougal more capable of the task, probably he was. He was stronger than Colin, and quicker to understand an instruction. Colin saw little point in caring about such things, which caring would never change. It was the way Dougal looked across at Gino, the way it would be the two of them, sharing another new adventure, building another secret that would turn to stories they would tell and Colin would only hear. But the feeling didn’t last.

  ‘Colin, I want you to help Veronica with collecting the agar today. It’s thick on the morning tide and it’s a good day for drying it. We’ve already taken the frames down. She’s waiting for you on the beach. Get yourself going.’

  The simple allocation of a job, like a hundred more before it, nothing more, but the sound of it held back Colin’s breath; her name scraped against his nerves, and he was afraid he would be trapped there forever, unable to move, while outside she waited. And he knew that nothing would be the same again. There was another look the
n, darting from Gino to Dougal and back again, but Colin hardly saw it, and gave no thought to what it might mean.

  ‘Um, alright then,’ he said, feeling clumsy as he spoke, as if his tongue had swelled up inside his mouth. His feet felt heavy as he turned towards the door.

  ‘What about your breakfast?’ Gino asked.

  ‘Nah, I’ll be okay. I’d better get going.’

  There was laughter from inside as he closed the door, but Colin barely noticed. Already his mind had turned towards the possibilites of failure. There would be others there. Collecting and drying the seaweed was a big job, and he’d heard it said agar provided them with almost as much money as the fish. It wouldn’t be left to just the two of them if a good harvest had washed ashore. And they would ignore him, or worse treat him like a child. He’d be embarrassed at their jokes, which would make them laugh even harder, and it would be better, so much better, if he did not go at all. Better if he kept Veronica for his dreams, where it was never this way.

  Colin rounded the last of the baches and saw her standing alone, empty wool bags at her feet, looking his way and smiling. Colin half smiled back, looked to the ground and blushed, and cursed his feet as they half skipped towards her, like a small child approaching his sister, who had promised to take him to the park.

  ‘Hello Colin.’

  ‘Hello.’

  The crashing of the waves on the steep shore behind them mocked Colin’s silence and he felt his face burning hotter than the weak sun.

  ‘Is there something wrong?’

  ‘What? No, nothing. Nothing’s wrong. Ah, Mary, I mean your Mum, sent me down to help with the agar. Is that what you’re doing?’

  ‘Oh good.’ She smiled again. He’d watched the exact same expression before, as many times as he’d dared look, but never so close up, and never directed straight at him.

  It seemed to settle on her face so easily, the turn of her lips and the shine of her eyes, and although Colin tried his best to smile back, he could tell from the way his muscles tensed that the trying was all she would see.

  The expression turned to puzzlement for a moment, and she looked as if she was about to say something, but whatever it was she changed her mind, and her face with it.

  ‘Right, well the frames are set up farther down the beach. I guess we should get going, it’s a little walk.’

  ‘Are the others already there?’

  ‘What others? No, it’s just you and me. Come on.’

  She turned and walked off down the beach, towards the south where, after a small deep bay of sharp rocks and crashing swells, the coastline opened out into a broader sweep, and Colin followed. Colin had only seen it once before, from the hills above, when he and Dougal first arrived. Since then, all his tasks had led him to the north. As soon as they rounded the last bend, where above them to the right a squat lighthouse sat on a ledge cut out of a mass of rising rock, the difference was clear. The cliffs, which had previously pushed hard up to the water’s edge, as if ready to tumble at the slightest encouragement, here pulled back across a gentle rise of stones and grass. The cliff face, now the lighter grey of soft clay, held its line for almost as far as the eye could see, losing detail as it merged with the dark rise of mountains to the west. Above the cliffs could be seen the rich rolling green of farmland, as if the cliffs were a slow breaking wave, bringing with them the flotsam of fences and cows, milking and fertiliser. And Colin saw it all, bright against the pale blue of the sky, and a sense of forboding swept up his body, tickling at his vertebrae then sending a spasm to his throat. Dougal and he hadn’t come so far; they weren’t so isolated. Whatever it was that was still happening out here, they were only a bend in the coastline from being part of it.

  Veronica stopped and waited for him to catch up, and touched his elbow with her hand, and the past seeped back into its cracks.

  ‘Look. Isn’t that beautiful?’ She had turned him so he was facing out to sea, and now standing beside him pointed towards the snow-covered Kaikouras, which rose up from the curve where the sky touched the sea.

  ‘Yeah,’ Colin replied, although not in the way beauty has of making your mouth go suddenly dry. Not beautiful like standing there, with her so close he could smell her, and the warmth spreading out from the point where she still held his bare elbow, was beautiful.

  ‘I’m going to go there one day. Soon I think.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Look at all the water. All that between me and them.’

  And she smiled and was moving again, before Colin could ask who ‘them’ was, or why it would be good to be so far away, or if he could come too, if she thought she might like some company.

  She walked quickly, the same way everybody seemed to in this place, and Colin had to hurry to keep near her. The sound of sea-smoothed rocks moving beneath his borrowed boots filled Colin’s head, and with it the picture of Veronica, who was so easy to watch. Colin had thought about walking alongside her, but she hadn’t asked, or slowed to make it happen, and anyway he would have nothing to say, and close up the silence would turn to pain. She was dressed the same as any of them, heavy jersey and dark trousers tucked into thick-soled rubber boots, but there was nothing the same about her. The hint of shape beneath thick material, the rhythm of her walking, the tangled texture of her hair, Colin saw every detail, and felt all the more inadequate.

  The seaweed had come ashore on the high tide, and now two hours after the turn, had collected in a glistening red line at the point where coarse dark sand gave way to larger stones. The first job was to construct the drying frames, which had been left as a jumble of netting and fence posts farther up the beach. Veronica gave the instructions and Colin concentrated on working as quickly and efficiently as he could, certain every lapse would somehow count against him. They used large stones as mallets, to get the posts in, and rolled the netting across the tops between them, at waist height.

  Then Veronica took Colin down to the seaweed and showed him which was to be collected, and which left, and how best to separate the two. He watched and listened carefully, and smiled too often, so that he was sure he must have appeared simple. He wondered if there was some sentence which he could use which might unlock a conversation, but all he could think of was, ‘You’re good at explaining’, so he kept silent instead, and squinted into the sun which sat just above her head.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Veronica asked him.

  ‘Yeah why?’

  ‘No, nothing. I just thought you looked like you were about to ask something. Is there something you wanted to know?’

  ‘No, you’re good at explaining.’

  ‘Right. Good. Well, um, let’s get going then, they’ll be expecting the bags to be full when they come back for the racks.’

  ‘How long will that be?’

  ‘Not until late in the afternoon, when the boats are back in.’

  ‘So we’ve got all day then?’

  ‘Don’t look so happy about it. You’ll be sick of it soon enough.’

  They worked side by side all morning, crouching in the wet sand at the high tide mark, separating out the usable seaweed and then carrying it by the armful up to the frame where they spread it out to dry. They didn’t talk. Colin decided it was better to let Veronica take the lead in such things and she seemed to be happy enough keeping to herself. Once she came across to where he was working to show him an unusual shell, and another time she caught him looking at her and smiled, and that was enough. Colin listened to the constant pounding of the waves, slowly wearing down the coastline, and dreamed that they might be doing the same thing to the wall between the two of them, that stopped him from talking or making her laugh. He told himself to be patient, but he was aware of the way the shadows were slowly lengthening, as the sun worked its way across the sky and their time together became past.

  ‘You hungry?’ Veronica asked.

  They had finished covering the last of the frames and were checking the first line of seaweed to see if it was dry enough
to pack in the bags. Colin hadn’t eaten since the night before.

  ‘I’m all right.’

  ‘I’ve got some sandwiches here, that Mum made, if you want one.’

  ‘Only if you don’t want them all.’

  ‘I won’t eat all these. Look.’ She produced a square package, wrapped in newspaper, which she folded back to reveal a pile five or six deep of compressed white slabs.

  ‘Just jam.’

  ‘That’s okay. I like jam.’

  She gave him half and he attacked them without thinking, not until he realised she was watching him, with a smile stretched close to laughing.

  ‘Thought you weren’t hungry.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘What are you sorry for?’

  ‘Nothing. I, I was eating them too quickly wasn’t I?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’m not your mother.’

  ‘I know you’re not.’

  ‘No, I meant, oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean …’

  ‘No, I know you didn’t.’

  ‘Yeah, but still …’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘Do you miss being there though?’ Veronica asked.

  The story of the boys’ origins had circulated through the village quickly enough. She sat down next to him, like they were friends at school, swapping stories and sandwiches, and the closeness of her changed his answer.

  ‘No, I don’t. I like it here.’

  ‘You’re a strange one you know,’ she said between chewing. Colin looked at her skin. It was the same dark colour as her mother’s. Not brown exactly, but not white either, and smooth. Her eyes were the darkest brown, so it was hard to see where the pupils began, and her mouth was wide, and elastic, equally suited to talking or chewing or smiling, or like now, all three. ‘You’re not like the others.’

  ‘What others?’

  ‘I don’t know. The other boys.’

  ‘The men you mean?’ Colin asked. There was no one in the village his age, and the children were too young for the comparison to make much sense.