by John Harris
“You start cutting her about–” Joe leaned back, smug in his knowledge “–she start to sag like a old lady’s bloomers.”
“Aw, Pop,” Frankie shouted, suddenly as keen as Willie. “We could soon fix that.”
“Yes, shut up, you old donkey,” Rosa said. “Go on, Willie. I like what you say. It sounds good.”
She made her voice sound enthusiastic though she was not deluded by Frankie’s excitement or blind to the opportunism in Willie’s voice. She knew his plans were only for his own benefit, but she decided to play a waiting game and profit as much from them as she could, for they fitted in well with her own plans to hide the Tina S.
Willie had turned towards her, reaching out for support.
“Look, Ma, these islands have got radio these days, haven’t they? That puts ’em one up on us. Right. They’re looking for one mast and no bowsprit–”
“But suppose they see a ship with two masts and a bowsprit?” Frankie ended, waving her arms while Willie grinned at her. “How about that? What’ll they see then?”
“A bloody ole hodge-a-podge,” Joe said happily. “With the knobs on.”
Willie ignored him. The romance of the idea was beginning to take hold of him so that his young face was flushed with an enthusiasm that seemed to remove all the bitter lines there. “We can make another sail, can’t we?” he asked. “We can fiddle this one some way to make it fit, surely.”
“Sure,” Rosa said enthusiastically. “We’ve got needles and sailmakers’ palms and plenty of twine.”
“OK, then, if we do that, what we got then?”
Joe looked at Rosa, paused with his mouth open as he thought twice about his reply, and said, “We got a yawl, I reckon. A funny yawl, but a yawl allasame.”
“Right. These German raiders in the war – you’ve read of ’em in books – they rigged up dummy funnels and put fires in ’em to make smoke. They put up extra masts and built extra cabins and things.”
“Then people thought they were something else,” Frankie went on excitedly, almost like an echo. “Why can’t we?”
“We ain’t no German raider,” Joe said. “That is why.”
Willie began to get angry at last and his voice began to rise. “Listen, you old dope, we don’t have to be a German raider to do it, do we?”
Joe stared back at him, blank-eyed and innocent-looking and Willie went on furiously. “Listen, you got more blow than Dingo Dick. If we want to disguise this old tub, there ain’t no reason why we shouldn’t, so stop getting in the way.”
“Ain’t no call for shouting,” Rosa said quietly and Willie stopped abruptly.
“Sorry, Ma,” he apologized, his voice dropping. “Only he kept on–” he swallowed his anger, seeing it would get him nowhere. “Listen, I was apprenticed to a carpenter until – well, once I was. I can do it with a bit of help.”
“She look a damn’ queer rig.”
“What the hell does it matter so long as it helps?” Rosa suddenly lost patience with her husband’s deliberate baiting and Joe blinked as she changed sides in the argument just when he had firmly believed she had come round to supporting him again.
Willie hurried on, eager to get her help while she still favoured him. “We just got to find somewhere quiet to lie up and repaint her,” he pointed out. “And get a tree or something for a new mast.”
“And another for the boom you cracked,” Joe added, thinking of the hard work it entailed. “Also, as we ain’t enough to do, we should scrape her bottom while we’re at it.”
“Good idea,” Rosa said. “It hasn’t been done for years. She’ll sail faster then.”
“I’ll get the scrapers out,” Frankie announced eagerly. “I know where they are.”
Joe glared at Rosa as his sarcasm rebounded on his own head. “Sure,” he said bitterly. “And put on a new keel. And paint the bilges. And fix a new engine.” He paused and went on with a deeper weight of sarcasm. “But this is a great deal to do and there are only four of us. In the boatyard are riggers, carpenters, boat-a-builders, sail-a-makers, painters, labourers–” he reeled off the trades on his fingers, happily watching the odds mounting against them, until Rosa interrupted.
“We’re not in a boatyard,” she said angrily. “We’re here. And all we want to do is repair her–”
“And maybe a new mast,” Frankie put in.
“OK, a new mast. And there are only four of us. Better start thinking of somewhere to do it. We ain’t all day.”
Joe prodded himself furiously with a fat forefinger. “What-a you think I am?” he demanded. “King-a-Kong? You think I got the muscles of an ox?”
The argument that followed went on for some time before Joe’s resistance was finally beaten down, and Willie grinned with triumph as he admitted he knew a place.
“You mighta got away with it, Pop,” Frankie said, “if you’d tied Mama up and locked her in the engine room. Only I reckon you’d have got a ear bitten off in the scuffle at least. You got to do as she says.”
Joe looked bitterly at the others. “We’ll go to Aranga-vaa,” he said flatly, oppressed by the thought of all the work that lay ahead of them. “If we can find it,” he added more cheerfully, thinking of the uneasy courses he had drawn off with a piece of wood for a ruler and the times he had tried unsuccessfully to gauge their speed with Lucia’s alarm clock and a bucket on the end of a line, the occasions he had prayed at night for a guiding light or a marked buoy to turn up and give him a position. “We can give Vila a miss – except-a perhaps for the paint – and run back towards New Caledonia and turn east. We got to avoid the big places but we got to stay near to land in case we sink. Port doctors and Customs ain’t-a no good to us. Already, they ask too many questions in Noumea. We can lay up in Saddle Bay. It will be very hot. We will kill ourselves with work. We bury each other on the beach.”
Rosa tossed her potato into the bucket with a plop and stood up, quite unmoved by Joe’s prophecies of disaster.
“What are we waiting for, then?” she said, smiling.
Frankie skipped to the yards, followed by Willie, and as they strained together the great mainsail jerked up and filled out with the breeze. From the wheelhouse, Joe looked over his shoulder at the sun and spun the wheel until the shadows swung across the deck and lay athwart-ships. Then he glanced at the erratic old compass and headed the ship in a southerly direction.
“I get the atlas,” he said. “And the 1907 charts and the shipping company adverts, and lay off a course. Another line. Over more reefs. Mama, we come through this, I keep off the booze for ever.”
Five
Aranga-vaa, in the half-circle of islands known as Dampier’s Bracelet, which was the southernmost point where the buccaneer-explorer voyaged in his travels round New Guinea and New Britain, lay to the south-east of New Caledonia, to the south-west of Fiji and equidistant between the two. It was a crescent-shaped scrap of land that had once been the tip of a volcano before the sea had flooded in and filled the crater, and at one side it had been eroded by the waves so that the island now rested in the emerald of the ocean almost like a horse-shoe through the ends of which the Pacific rollers, driven by the South-East Trades, burst in a storm of green water and flying spray.
Its bay was broken into smaller inlets where the rain and the sea had washed away the soil and, above the water, the highest point of the mountain peaks lofted almost to a thousand feet in steep pinnacles of rock which, after halfway, became almost bare of undergrowth like a boy growing out of his clothes. On the lower slopes, the palms, the kauri pines and the feathery casuarinas were tinted with rusty lichens and backgrounded by evergreen leaves that were greasy-looking and as spatulate as an artisan’s fingers. Into this humid undergrowth the light filtered through creepers that hung in lace-like curtains, and through the twisted arches of roots which stood up like the flying buttresses of some savage cathedral. Nearer to the lagoon, where the undergrowth was not so thick, there was the flash of rich blooms in the sunshine, the scarl
et of hibiscus and poinsettia, the pale gold of candle flower and the wax white of frangipani. The peacock wings of butterflies added to the confusion of colour and scarlet-tufted birds dipped long beaks into crimson bells. By the water’s edge kingfishers flashed like darts of blue flame and bronze-green lizards basked on the rocks.
Into this sunburst of loveliness, the Tina S erupted like a matronly old dowager thrust through a shop door at sales time. For a wild minute, with the swells becoming more mountainous as the sea bottom grew shallower near the reef, the racing waves swooped at her stern and lifted it high. The ears of her crew were filled with the clamorous dissonance of the surf as the old boat strained every plank in her rush for the entrance through the sizzling waters, then they crashed, with the sea boiling over the gunwales, into the silence of the lagoon.
Still staggered by the fury of the surf, Willie stared round him in the sudden stillness and his mouth dropped open with awe as the Tina rolled serenely up the lagoon in the early morning light, clawing her way in the slack breeze to where the foliage and the flowers kissed the water in sun-bright circles by a dark coral beach.
All about them, as they left the surf behind, was the silence, the moribund, unchanging silence of a forgotten island.
“Cripes!” He watched a sooty tern as it slanted down astern of them towards the sand, mewing as it fell in lonely echoes that called back to them from the shores. “It’s a beaut’. It’s a smasheroo.”
While he stood staring at the island, he heard Frankie’s voice shrieking at him from amidships. “OK,” she was shouting. “Have ’em down, Dreamy,” and he hurried after her to the yards and the Tina’s sails rattled to the deck with a screech of pulleys that echoed round the hidden valleys of Aranga-vaa, then Frankie galloped past him like an awkward young colt to let go the anchor.
“You always let ladies do the work, you big-footed drip?” she demanded.
Willie grinned sheepishly and hurried to help her.
“OK, Wishbone! Get yourself out of it and let a man come.”
He finished winding the anchor cable round the winch and took up a position in the bows again, gazing upwards, his feet in a puddle of water from the chain.
“Come on, softy,” Frankie begged. “We haven’t finished yet.”
“Do you know what we got to do?”
“Sure I do. I been doing it on me own since I was old enough to spit.”
“OK, do it a bit longer then. Now, run away, I got things to think about.”
Willie was still standing in the bows, staring at the shore, when Joe came forward from the squat wheelhouse.
“The memory don’ go so far wrong, eh?” he commented gaily, his hands working up and down over the stained patches on his pants. He stared at the tooth-like spires above them. “I read into that ole atlas things that ain’t there.”
He pointed towards the land. “We row a line ashore,” he said, “and make fast to the trees. Then we warp her in close and put out some more lines, then when the tide drop she stand on her keel like the juggler with the ball on his back-a-side.”
Willie was still gaping at the green slopes that rose to tremendous peaks which finally pierced the clouds, pointing heavenwards like the ruined spires of some gigantic natural monument, all his self-satisfaction gone in a feeling of minuteness before their immensity.
“What’s biting you?” Frankie demanded, approaching them, wiping her wet hands on her trousers.
Willie indicated the island with a helpless gesture, at a loss for words to express what he felt. “Dinkum, I’ve never seen anything like this before.”
“Well, you see plenty more,” Joe said. “Across the Pacific are many places like Aranga-vaa.”
Willie hardly heard him. He was gazing upwards again.
All the pleasure he had felt that he had bullied and persuaded them to fall in with his plan, had got them aiding his escape, had dwindled to a feeling of humility of which he had never thought himself capable.
As they had skirted the Great Barrier Reef and turned east for the New Hebrides in the early days out of Brisbane, he had thought he had seen all there was of beauty – coral beaches bright as parched ivory, with the jade sea threaded like lace through the nigger-heads of coral, an archipelago of tree-crammed shores where the birds hovered in black clouds that blotted out the sun – godwits, dotterels, warblers; and terns milling in their thousands like scraps of flung paper.
With Frankie, the child of the harbours and the beaches, to hang over his shoulder and whip up his sluggish enthusiasm as she shouted with excitement over each new miracle, Willie had long since lost his first blasé air of indifference until, days before they had made their present landfall, his jaw was hanging open with honest awe at the sights about him.
From Efaté they had bustled south to Eromanga and from Eromanga to Aneityum, then south-west between the Loyalties and Mare to the coast of New Caledonia and the Isle of Pines, doing the trip by the longest route but in the shortest hops so that land was never too far away if the struggling old Tina showed signs of giving up the ghost, as she very nearly did once when they ran ashore on a sandspit south of Mare and they all had to go over the side and shove her off again. From New Caledonia they had headed out into the Pacific again towards Matthew Isle and Hunter Isle, with Joe watching his rigging with anxious eyes and Rosa guarding their rations like an old hen with her chicks; and Frankie, with her experience of the sea’s fringe, dragging Willie off along every deserted beach they landed on, in search of eels, shellfish and shrimps, poking in rock pools down by the shining water’s edge where their footprints were desecration’s among the tide-strewn weeds and the tiny triangular marks of the gulls.
The beauty about them seemed to Willie to increase as they travelled and as he threw off the bitterness which, fed by ugly factory buildings in Sydney and old sad houses, had grown on his youth like a fungus. There had been a following wind all the way, which had made their work easier, and the sea had been calm with long slow swells lifting them gently so that they had seemed to be in an unreal world of light and movement. Islands in the distance had been green lifting rocks splashed with foliage and overhung with banks of cumulus they could see long before they raised the land out of the sea. They had been escorted for the greater part of the way by bands of hunting porpoises and, as they closed the islands, they saw huge man-o’-war birds circling the thousands of smaller fry that milled in the air, forcing them to drop the fish they had caught and, cheered on by Frankie’s yells of encouragement, poaching them as they fell, glistening like drops of living water to the sea.
But now, all the things they had seen, all the teeming life that had crowded about them, seemed to have been caught up between the two long arms of the bay in Aranga-vaa. All the silence was here, all the peace – and for the first time in his life Willie was becoming aware of peace.
He started out of his thoughtful mood as Frankie grabbed his arm and pointed to the trees. “Look,” she squealed. “I seen something moving. What is it, Willie?”
“It’s a pig,” he said. “It’s a pig, Joe!”
“Sure, it’s a pig.” The old man shrugged. “Only wild pigs and rats live on Aranga-vaa. Ain’t enough soil for anything else.”
Rosa came forward to join them, thrusting them apart, wiping her face in the humid heat that snatched at their breath and brought the sweat to their bodies. “Well,” she said. “You going to stand all day, staring? We got jobs to do, haven’t we?”
They all gazed back at her defensively, then, as though that had been their intention all the time, they hurried to lower the dinghy into the water that shone like a sheet of glass over the enchanted world at the bottom of the lagoon. Willie climbed into the boat, his eyes aware of the fish that slid beneath them in gaudy layers down to the coral sand and the ink-blue rocks of the bay, and they began loading a heavy mooring rope, coiling it in serpentine loops in the stern. With the water lapping at the gunwales, they began to row towards the shore, Willie’s eyes fixed aga
in on the tremendous spires of Aranga-vaa, while Frankie sat in the stern paying out the rope with flat splashes into the water.
“How long you reckon we’re going to be here, Willie boy?” she asked him, no longer awed by the aura of wickedness and cruelty that had seemed to hang about him at first.
“Dunno.” Willie’s eyes were still on those gigantic towers of rock and he spoke over his shoulder to her. “Few weeks, I reckon.”
“How long will it be before we go home? – to Sydney, I mean.”
Willie turned at last. “Gaw, I don’t know. Years mebbe. Why, you going to miss your boy friends?”
“I’ve got no boy friends,” she said angrily. “I don’t want boy friends. I’ve no time for that sort of thing.”
Willie grinned. “Scrawny bits like you always talk big like that, Wishbone. But they all come round in the end. You’ll end up by going all gooey like the others and getting married and having kids. My sister was just the same.”
“Nobody would want to fall for me,” she said, suddenly quieter. “I’m too skinny. I got no shape and me hair’s straight.”
“Come off it, Wishbone,” he encouraged. “You’re only a kid yet. There’s plenty of time.”
She looked up, her heart full of friendliness to him for his encouragement. “You reckon, Willie? You reckon I will?”
“Sure you will. Why not?”
“It’d be nice to have some feller fall for you, I bet. Somebody nice like on the pictures.”
“Or maybe a dirty big sailor like my sister got, who comes home drunk and knocks you about.”
Her face fell, her dream shattered, all her friendliness dispersed by his thoughtless comment. “He’d better try it, that’s all,” she said in a low voice. “I’d fetch him one with the fry-pan.”
By midday they had two lines made fast ashore and, with the anchor still out to kedge themselves off, had warped the Tina into position. By this time, she was resting on her keel on the dark sand and the dirty copper oxide above the waterline was beginning to grow in breadth.
