Making Laws for Clouds

by Nick Earls

  ‘We walked, mate. We walked, as we should have, and then we got slung out. To make it official. And we got the ban on talking to each other until further notice and all of that. They had to send out the right signal and . . .’

  ‘This is so cool. It’s like a movie. A movie from America, ’cause in a lot of European countries you could still be in the play after that. After doing it. With Tanika Bell . . .’ He lets out a big sigh. And why wouldn’t he? ‘Tanika Bell . . .’ He rolls his eyes and clenches his right hand into a shaky fist. ‘What was it like? How much room is there, like, in a woman? Generally speaking.’

  ‘Wayne . . .’

  ‘How about that? All that practice by yourself downstairs in your hammock at night, and finally . . .’

  ‘Yeah, righto. You know, I think this is “The X-Files” episode where some really ugly alien penetrates your dreams and rips you in half trying to get out of you. Rips you open like a zipper with its razor sharp claws, and your guts just pour out like lumps of fresh roadkill. Like a bag full of dead cats. Slopping all over the floor like chunks of whales sliced up by big Japanese knives. But it won’t happen unless you fall asleep, of course, Wayne.’

  Wayne shuts up. Shuts up and his eyes bulge and his upper lip gets quivery and it’s like there’s a big lump of something pushing up against his throat from down inside. But something more like tea than like an alien.

  ‘Kane, I’m bad with that stuff,’ he says eventually. ‘You know I’ve got a very active imagination. It’s in one of my school reports, in the maths bit. You’ve seen it in writing, you bastard.’ There’s a scratching sound above us, a possum running over the roof. Bad timing. ‘What’s that noise? That noise outside?’

  ‘Dunno. Could be the alien, ripping a few sleepy possums apart for practice. Or maybe it’s not. I guess we’ll see. Those of us who dare to fall asleep tonight.’

  ‘Now wait a second. With “The X-Files” . . .’ Wayne’s getting a bit wobbly with the talking now . . . ‘with “The X-Files” when there’s that light and they come to get you . . .’

  ‘Wayne, remember I said we could only watch the show if we didn’t have to have the talk about aliens again.’

  ‘Yeah, but what if, like, really truly . . .’

  ‘Okay, Wayne. There are no aliens. Or if there are, they’re basically grey and peaceful and kind of globular in the head and just here to check a few things out.’

  ‘Kane, even the quiet aliens take your temperature using your butt. I’m not stupid.’

  ‘There are no aliens. I made up that stuff with the ripping and your dreams. You were doing that breathing that gives you a turn, so I had to slow you down a bit. Now, back on the subject of the other thing, I knew we’d get to it some day, and maybe this is the day. To start with, the question of room and the female parts. Let me just say first, man to man and in a respectful way, it’s not like you’re rattling a sausage around in a lunch box . . .’

  I don’t know where to begin with Wayne and sex, but I figure I’ve got to start off mechanical to get his attention. Well get nowhere with a lecture on ‘clean thoughts of meaningful attachment’. I can’t tell him that, with Tanika Bell, it’s not just about the bit where you roll your eyes back and get shaky. It’s about the two of you taking in the night sky, shutting everything else out for a while, shutting out all the crap in the world. It’s about the minutes or even seconds when there’s no one else, and she gives you one of those looks that no one else gets. And she says just a few words that will get you through the crap, and that’s what it’s about.

  thursday

  With the first coat, the wood soaks up the paint and makes it look like a bad job – makes the Stella Maris look patchy and us look like the amateurs we are.

  It’s hot and I stink and my legs itch from the grass from Whipper Snippering for the council. There’s been some rain lately and the grass has gone mad, meaning lots of cutting and lots of seeds, and the seeds tunnel down into your socks and bug you all day.

  Some days, I just want Harbo’s boat finished. And I want these people to treat me better and talk to me like they used to. There’s fornication all over this coast, and plenty of people keep right on doing it. I’ve done the right thing since Christmas, and they should give me a break.

  ‘Tanika – you know, Joe Bell’s daughter,’ Harbo says to me on his next inspection tour, and I think I’m in trouble. I think some of my sins of thought might have become sins of word while I wasn’t concentrating. ‘She was saying she thought she’d hang back a while this evening and do some more of the other side. Not that I’m trying to push you into staying, but she reckoned she’d get her dad to drop all the others off and then come back for her. And maybe you if you were up for it, but . . .’ Not trouble at all. The opposite of trouble. ‘Anyway, there’ll be a second run happening. For the two of you if you aren’t doing anything. If you don’t have plans.’

  ‘Just painting plans.’

  ‘Well, if that’s . . .’

  ‘Harbo, is there no one else you can yack to? I’m a busy man. Someone’s got to give this baby a second coat.’

  He laughs and says, ‘Good on you,’ and I keep pushing the brush along the timber, focusing on the job and not the turn things are taking.

  Tanika Bell. Tanika Bell and me working on the boat, and practically no one else around. If we worked all night till it was finished, maybe we could just push it into the water and leave. Cruise the high seas.

  ‘I should have brought beer,’ he says. ‘I should have brought a cold beer or two to pass up to you right now.’

  ‘Hey, I’m on the job. You can buy me as many beers as you like when we’ve got you back in the water.’

  ‘I’ll tell Tanika you’ll be staying then?’

  ‘Sure. Actually, it’d be good if you could tell Mr Bell when he gets here with the bus. It’s, you know, a passenger issue.’

  ‘No worries.’

  No worries at all.

  Mr Bell gets here right on time and Harbo meets him at the gate. I dunk the brush in the paint again and slide it along the wood. I paint like a quiet machine, I look like a worker, I think only of Tanika Bell. The sun’s getting low but it’s still hot on the back of my shirt and the sweat’s running down my chest. The second coat looks better than the first. This time the timber stays white and looks painted.

  Towards the front the boat narrows, and Tanika’s somewhere just over there on the other side, working away in the shade, loading up her brush with white paint and doing plank after plank. Like me.

  I can imagine just how she looks right now, trying to keep her hair out of her face and getting flecks of paint in it, blowing it out of her eyes the way I’ve seen her do, tucking it out of the way but it doesn’t stay. I know her from watching her, not recently but last year. I suspect I remember more about Tanika Bell than they think I do, and this isn’t over.

  Mr Bell goes round the back of the boat, with a look on his face that lets me know why they call the back part the ‘stern’. There’ll be talk going on round there. I keep painting, taking the new white paint right to the top of the hull where the blue trim’s going to go. I keep painting and looking straight ahead at the timber, as if it’s the only thing on my mind.

  ‘Kane.’ It’s Mr Bell, back already. But he hasn’t said my name in a while – that’s what takes me by surprise. ‘Kane, just clarifying this evening’s movements.’

  ‘Sure, Mr Bell.’

  I turn around and he’s looking up at me with the sun glinting from his sweaty head. He’s got his hand up to his face and he’s squinting, even though the sun’s behind him. It’s the white paint that’s making him do it. The glare of the sunlight from the white paint.

  ‘You see the difference with the second coat?’ I figure a comment related to the job could be a good choice. ‘The wood just soaks the first one right up, so I thought I’d stay on and do some of the second. At least give myself some sense of accomplishment.’

  ‘Yes. Good. W
ell, I’ll be twenty minutes and then I’ll be back. Twenty-five at the outside. And Mr Harbison’ll be here the whole time. So keep at it.’

  ‘That’s the plan. See you in twenty.’

  He keeps looking up at me, as if he’s about to say something more, but I haven’t done one new thing wrong so he has to go. He turns round at the gate. What’s he looking for? Fornication in a matter of seconds up on a plank in Brown’s Slipway? I give him a wave. I’d shout out to him, something friendly about twenty minutes, but there’s a circular saw going over at a boat nearby.

  So I wave and I smile and I let him know that it’s me who’s looking at him as much as the other way round. He nods – that’s all I get for my wave – and he leaves.

  The bus pulls away, and I watch it go.

  I paint, towards the bow. Twenty minutes isn’t long so I paint quickly, starting with a band of second coat running along just below the deck.

  Around the bow, on the other side, I can hear a brush tapping on the rim of a paint tin when the sawing’s stopped. Boots sliding along a wooden plank with the small sideways steps of a painter.

  I get closer to the front and I can see a trestle round there, lined up with mine, and the end of a plank sticking out. Then a foot, an ankle, another foot, a calf. Tanika Bell. Then the other ankle, a knee, a thigh. Fifteen minutes, fifteen minutes at least. That’s how long Mr Bell’s been gone.

  I load up with paint, push further forward, load up again and push till the brush is dry, right to the edge of the bow.

  ‘Beat ya,’ Tanika says as her brush hits mine and pushes it away.

  We each take a step towards the water, and we’re standing on our planks face to face. She’s got paint in her hair, like I knew she would, and a daub of it on her forehead.

  ‘Hey worker,’ she says. ‘Who would have thought these things got so narrow at the front they just ran out? It’s not like the back at all.’

  ‘No, if we were at the back we’d still be miles apart. No wonder they call it the stern. There’s no fun there.’ Okay, my stern joke isn’t brilliant but I might as well get something out of it.

  ‘You must be hot in the sun,’ she says. ‘Even round this side it’s so hot I’m sweating like I’m having my own wet T-shirt contest.’ She pulls her shoulders back and of course I stare right at her front. ‘Ha, made you look.’

  ‘Well, you were making certain claims. I had to see if the evidence stacked up. About the sweating.’

  ‘So, how’d I go?’

  ‘I don’t think you want to know. I think I should be painting. I think you did fine. It’s a hot day. You stacked up. You sweated, quite a lot. Actually, I think I might be going from “clean thoughts of meaningful attachment” to something altogether less appropriate and possibly deeply lustful.’

  ‘Sure, I get that too.’

  ‘We’ve got to, um . . .’

  Tanika Bell’s shorts are creased at the front from bending, and most of her T-shirt’s wet and there’s sweat above her upper lip and down her neck. She’s smiling, smiling the way she did the night we left the nativity play and before word got out. And that’s not the same as the regular smile people get from her on the bus. There’s a subtle but definite difference.

  We should have known there was going to be trouble. I think we did know, back at her place that night. But we didn’t have our stories straight, and you’re not supposed to have a story anyway.

  ‘Mr Harbison’s gone for some smokes,’ she says. ‘He reckons they might sell them at the fish and chippie next door.’

  ‘And he’s a slow old walker at the moment, Harbo. It must be frustrating the heck out of him. It could take him ages.’

  ‘Ages. Yeah, ages.’

  She spins the brush in her hand but it’s spiky with drying paint and none of it comes off.

  A bus horn honks at the gate. Tanika ducks back behind the bow.

  ‘That wasn’t twenty minutes,’ she says. ‘That wasn’t even eighteen.’

  And there’s another of those careful tapping sounds as she dips her brush and takes the extra paint off and gets back to work.

  Tanika told her father that the nativity play just wasn’t her thing. That’s what she said to him later that night, after we ate sausages on their deck and she drove me home and then went off to fill the bus with carollers who were finishing their stint at a shopping centre. I don’t even know which shopping centre and I don’t know exactly when and where she spoke to her father, but she tried to play it down, as if it wasn’t such an issue to change your mind about being in the play. It only made him ask around. Apparently he was worried she wasn’t fitting in, since they’re relatively new in town.

  He found out we left together in the break. He knew he was onto something. And the most interesting rumour people had already come up with happened to be the truth, so we just had to cop it then. By the next rehearsal it was probably common knowledge, and talked about by everyone there other than Steelo, Wayne and the baby Jesus.

  And Mr Bell told Tanika that their family had responsibilities, and the church was his job. All that kind of stuff. Responsibilities and disappointment – we got to hear a lot about them and they’re two things I’ve known about for years, so I’m not sure I needed it, to be honest.

  On the bus on the way home tonight after working on Harbo’s boat, the two of us sit in our regular seats, four rows apart with all the other seats empty, and no one says a word. Mr Bell keeps checking me out in his rear-vision mirror. After a while I get sick of it and I give him a wave, since that strategy’s working for me today. He pretends there’s a bug on the mirror and wipes it with his thumb. He drives through a red light.

  ‘Dad,’ Tanika says, telling him off like the back end of a boat. ‘There’s no hurry.’

  There’s practically no limit to ‘stern’ jokes, that’s what I’m thinking.

  friday

  Stormy. That boat was trouble. ‘Trouble from the start,’ that’s what Mum said. ‘Should have been called Trouble.’

  I don’t know though. We had good times on the Stormy. And Mum thinks a lot of things are trouble. The problem with trouble is that she’s just too used to it. Most things are trouble for her, unless they categorically aren’t. Fungus in your creases, movement, humidity – trouble, every one. Advertising, Wednesdays when the money runs low, the way people talk these days. All trouble.

  I’m putting on more white paint and the Stella Maris is coming up well. They fitted the new stove today, so Harbo’s inside tinkering around with it. Trouble? That could be trouble. The last time Harbo got his hands on a stove he burned a hole in the side of the boat and sank it. Harbo plus gas plus a naked flame – and my mother thinks fungus is something to get stressed about.

  ‘There’s nothing fresher than new paint,’ he says when he’s back on the ground and he’s wandered round my way. ‘I had that on a calendar once, from an old auntie in England. “Fresh as new paint at Whitby” it said, and there was this harbour full of fishing boats. I had the picture up on my wall for years. Here, give me one of those brushes and I’ll do some of the low-down bits.’

  He’s got a new bandage now and there’s more room for his fingers to move. Not a lot more, but enough for him to keep hold of the handle. He slaps the paint on in great sweeps, round about waist high since he can’t bend down much further.

  ‘You’re doing a good job there,’ he says, exactly when it’s obvious to both of us that he’s twice as quick.

  But it doesn’t seem to take long for his hand to start to hurt, and he has to stop.

  ‘Bloody thing,’ he says. ‘Ten minutes of painting and it’s no good any more.’

  ‘That’d be ten minutes more than yesterday, wouldn’t it? And about half a boat more too.’

  ‘Yeah, well, I’ve had practice.’

  ‘Burned a few in your time, have you?’

  He laughs. ‘Parked them under too many fireworks displays, maybe. I’m always where the excitement is. You don’t have to do all thi
s you know.’

  ‘It’s no problem.’

  ‘No, mate, you should be off doing what young people do. “Raging” – isn’t that what they call it? You shouldn’t be hanging round here like it’s some penance.’

  ‘Penance? I’m hanging round here to work on your boat. No one’s making me. And you’d do the same.’

  ‘Yeah, maybe I would, I don’t know. But I appreciate it. You and your friend, you’re doing a lot. She said she’d be driving Mrs Vann and the Skerritts home in a while and coming back to do some more, and that you’d probably be up for it too. She said I should put it to you. Like yesterday. But you don’t have to.’

  ‘I know I don’t have to. I know all that stuff.’

  I nearly go off at him then, but I don’t. He’s probably just embarrassed that he can’t do more. In which case he shouldn’t have said penance. He shouldn’t have brought that kind of thing into it. This is not a religious deed. I’m painting his boat because he can’t paint his boat. I’m painting his boat because it’s a good thing to do. I haven’t done some deal that says however many hours of painting gets me off the hook for something.

  Something. Bugger them. I have the right to have feelings about Tanika Bell. Look at her – the way she stands, the way she talks, the way she paints and drives the bus when her dad’s busy and shows her sweat off only to me. I want her style, I want to talk to her for hours, I want to put my hands on her again. But respectfully, of course.

  Okay, it’s not all about Harbo and good deeds. It is about that, but it’s not all about that. And I’d still be here working on Harbo’s boat if the Bells had never come to town. That’s what I do, what we do. It’s one of the better things about this group of people. Even Mrs Vann comes to help out, and she’s next to useless.

  Soon enough, Tanika rounds the others up and they’re off. She leads them across the yard, tossing the keys in the air and catching them again, and she stops at the gate and looks back at me. She waves in a way that her dad never could, not even at the best of times, and she shouts something. There’s an angle grinder going, so I only catch some of it but I know what she’s saying. She’ll be twenty minutes, twenty-five at the outside.