by John Harris
He was jolted from his thoughts as he heard a footstep on the deck. Quickly, he jerked the dozing Frankie to life and began to talk in a loud voice about nothing at all. But Rosa had seen them clearly against the night sky starting guiltily apart.
She lowered her heavy body to the deck beside them with a wince. They smiled at her, but her first words brought fear to Frankie’s eyes and removed Willie’s grin as they drew back the thoughts he tried so hard to avoid.
“They’re after us, Willie,” she said. “They got everything but the Navy out.” She spoke slowly, oppressed again by the feeling of being harried, chivvied from island to island with their meagre shelter and meagre sources of food, and she saw Frankie’s hand creep into Willie’s.
Joe looked accusingly at them. “That bloke been on the radio,” he said. “I wish you’d never mended it.”
“What happened?” Frankie asked. “What did they say?”
Rosa told them, leaving out nothing.
“Only place they aren’t,” she said, “is here.”
“We got trouble,” Joe chipped in gloomily. “We certainly got trouble. And all-a time the weather don’t get no better. I get scared to look at that old barometer.”
Rosa spoke thoughtfully. “Why couldn’t we go to America?” she asked, her mind already seeking new routes of escape. “They’d leave us alone there. We could all start afresh.”
“Ain’t no good, Mama,” Joe said. “These sails won’t stand up to a trip like that. We’re bucking the trades all-a way. Besides, we have to stop in at the Marquesas for water – and they’re searching the Marquesas. He say so.”
Willie sat still, his back against the quivering mast, feeling the life of the boat as she pushed her blunt nose through the water. “Well,” he said slowly, “if they’re every place else but here, the best thing for us to do is stay where we are.”
“Ain’t much around-a here to keep us alive,” Joe observed gloomily and, as though to give weight to his words, his bulging stomach uttered an arpeggio of discontent.
“Where there’s plenty to keep us alive, there’ll be plenty of people,” Frankie pointed out.
“That’s true enough,” Willie agreed.
“You afraid of people, Christopher Columbus?” Joe asked with heavy sarcasm.
“You don’t think they’d organize a search like this,” Willie said without turning his head, “just for an old tub and a couple of old people who owe a few quid, do you?”
Joe became silent, then he looked up sharply and said, “What-a you done that it’s so important you got to be found?”
“Enough to make it important.”
Willie felt Frankie’s fingers clutch his tightly in encouragement, and when he offered no further explanation and Joe persisted, Rosa hurried the old man below.
“Ain’t no good shutting me up like I got the clamp on the mouth,” he protested vehemently. “That boy, he is no good. You see him with little Frankie – cuddling and mushing.”
“I saw him.”
“She was holding his hand.”
“I know. She’s growing up fast. But he’d never harm her, I swear.”
Rosa began to light the stove to boil a kettle. In her mind was still the fear that had appeared in Frankie’s eyes at her news, and the hope when she had mentioned America, the disappointment when Joe had pooh-poohed the idea. For years she had tried – not entirely successfully – to pass on her faith and her own limited learning to a child who had come too late to be completely within her control. She had seen her grow up only partly schooled and wild as the gulls that flew across the beaches and shores she loved so well. For years the warm maternal giving that was in Rosa had been quenched by the death of her son under the guns of the Japanese in the Java Sea, and she had not had the strength nor the youth to rouse it again for Frankie. But now, as she remembered the look in her eyes, the look of a newly adult woman, that affection sprang again like a fresh fountain.
“Rosie,” Joe was saying, “they want the American Navy and the French Navy and the British Navy and the Australian Navy and the New Zealand Navy and every goddam’ navy that ever was to look for him, then he done something bad. Real-a bad.”
Rosa turned on him furiously, slamming the kettle to the stove top with a ringing clang.
“Shut your trap, you spineless old booby,” she stormed. “Or I’ll fetch you one with this.”
Joe stared at her as he sat down. Bad temper from Rosa was something he was used to, and threats were nothing new to him, but Rosa with tears running down her cheeks was something he hadn’t seen for many years.
Five
The following evening, when Willie was alone on watch and Frankie was grumbling over the dishes, slapping dirty water all over the galley floor in a noisy protest, Rosa left Joe sitting in sulky silence in the cabin, wishing he had tobacco for his pipe and a schooner of beer.
“Or even home-made wine,” he pleaded out loud. “I don’t argue at that. Sometimes I drink it. Even methylated spirits. I never drunk it before but I try now, Lord.”
Rosa sat down beside Willie in silence and for a long time neither of them spoke. The Southern Cross swung over their heads and the light from the sky illuminated the spars. Only the slightest of breezes sent the long slow swells lifting across the sea, their curves gleaming under the stars. About them was the incredible silence of loneliness and great spaces – with just the faintest undertones of moving water and the chuckle of the wave against the Boy George’s bow. Once they heard the mew of a gull across the darkness and knew they were not far away from land, where the birds shifted uneasily in their sleep on the spits of rock and sand.
When Rosa finally spoke her voice was hesitant. “Willie,” she said quietly. “You and Frankie: what’s going to happen?”
Willie looked round at her without speaking and, encouraged, Rosa went on. “You like her, don’t you, Willie?”
Willie nodded slowly. “More than that, Mama, I reckon. She’s a nice kid.”
“That’s all she is, Willie,” Rosa said, a plea in her voice. “A kid.”
“I know that, Mama,” Willie answered stiffly, a touch of pride in his tones. “You got nothing to blame me for.”
“I know, Willie. I’m not complaining. But she’s all I’ve got now.”
“I know that too, Mama. She’s too good for me. I try to keep away from her, only it’s not so easy. When she’s got her mind set on something, she takes a lot of shifting off it. You know that. And this is only a small boat. Mama–” he turned towards her “–I declare to me God I’ve only kissed her. That’s all. I know what you feel about her. And I know what I am. I wouldn’t saddle her with that lot,” he ended bitterly.
He sat in silence for a while, then he looked up at Rosa again. “How about putting me off on the first decent-sized island we touch?” he suggested. “I’ll be all right and they’ll let up on the rest of you then.”
There were tears in Rosa’s eyes as she replied. “You’d starve to death,” she said. “And Frankie’d get so skinny with grieving you’d not see her sideways. No, Willie, while the boat sails, you stay with us.”
“Joe doesn’t want me.”
“Joe hasn’t been asked.” Rosa folded her hands in her lap, listening to Frankie singing in a croaky monotone above the clash of dishes in the galley. The breeze blew a wisp of hair against her face and she felt she could reach up and touch the swinging stars, and her soul soared out to them, praying for a little happiness in a life that had not tasted much of it.
“Willie,” she said after a while. “What did you do that’s so bad all these people is out after us?”
Willie sat with his hands in his pockets, feeling the cool wind on his back, watching the sea sparkle with phosphorescence on either side of him, throwing its glow on the bulge of the sail.
“I was a silly cow,” he said after a while, not moving his head or changing his expression. “I killed a bloke.”
Rosa sat motionless, shocked a little but not sur
prised, then she shook her head. “That was bad,” she said. “What happened?”
Willie shrugged, unhappy and harried as all those uneasy memories began to chivvy him again. “I dunno. I was having a cuppa coffee in this dive when these two come in. Big car they had. Him and a little sheila, both smelling of money. He’d had one or two. He said I was looking at his girl–”
“Were you?”
“Sort of. She was pretty. Prettier than you ever see ’em round King’s Cross or Surro. I couldn’t take me eyes off her. He saw me and started getting noisy about it.” Willie spat in disgust over the side. “The silly cow, making all that fuss about a sheila. In the end, he tried to draw me one off and I did him. He started it. Dinkum he did, Mama. He went down like a log and I ran. I didn’t wait to see. I took their car.”
“But that was a fair fight.”
“I’d got a knife,” Willie muttered.
“The one I threw overboard?”
“Yep. That was the one.”
“You stuck it in him?”
“He shouldn’t have kept coming at me,” Willie said quickly, his voice high with indignation. “He wouldn’t leave me be. I stopped him, that’s all. It was fair enough.”
“Not with a knife.”
“No,” Willie said more calmly. “I reckon not.” He thought for a while before continuing. “Don’t know what made me do it, Mama. Honest, I don’t.”
“What would your mama say?”
Willie laughed bitterly. “She wouldn’t care. It never worried her if I didn’t come home for days.”
“What about your pop? Wouldn’t he leather you?”
“Always out. Always in the bars. He wouldn’t notice.”
“Why did you carry a knife round with you?”
“The other blokes did.”
“Did they stick them in people?”
“Not much. In fact – no, they didn’t.” Willie didn’t resent her questions and was trying to answer them as truthfully as he could. “We all flashed ’em around a lot. We used ’em to carve our initials on trees and fences. We often said we’d stick a bloke but we never did – only me. Silly cow, I was. Sometimes, we got a bloke in a corner and cut his tie off or ripped his suit up a bit if he was one of the other crowd, frighten him a bit, make his pretty clothes look bad, but we never stuck anybody.”
“Only you did.”
“Yes, I did.” Willie seemed depressed and for the first time angry. “Hell, I dunno why though! I just did.”
“I reckon,” Rosa said with a weighty finality, “that it wasn’t your fault.”
Willie looked up at her, grateful for the reassurance to his crowded spirit. “Honest, Mama? You reckon I’d get off if they caught me?”
Rosa hesitated before replying, choosing her words carefully. “I dunno about that,” she said, and Willie’s shoulders drooped again. “We’d better take no chances. But I reckon if your mama’d been good to you and your pop’d helped a bit, you wouldn’t have carried that knife and then it wouldn’t have happened. My Georgie never carried a knife. I’d have larruped him if he had. Once I caught him lying to me and I lammed the living daylights outa him.”
She was silent for a while. “Willie,” she went on at last, “I hope they never find us. I hope we go on for ever.”
“That’ll be fine for Frankie,” Willie said bitterly. “It’ll be a smashing way to spend her youth.”
“I’d thought of that,” Rosa said. “But we can worry about that later. She’s content enough. Listen to her singing. This is all she’s known. Why should she want anything else when she’s happier now than she’s ever been? I reckon I still hope they never catch us.”
Willie drew a deep breath. “We can’t do it, Mama,” he said. “Some time it’s got to stop. We haven’t the money.”
Rosa sat up straighter as his words brought to her for the first time the inevitability of their defeat. From nowhere she remembered a film she’d once seen about people trying to escape from the Nazis in the war. She hadn’t entirely understood the significance of it then, but now she began to understand the emotions of a hunted people and their wretchedness at having nowhere to rest.
“Willie,” she said slowly, “I wish we could find some place – somewhere nobody knows us – somewhere we could be still. So we don’t have to keep moving all the time. I’m not complaining, but it’d be nice to have a home again instead of this old boat. I get to feeling so cramped. I get sick of climbing over things and the ladders get me joints. And the cooking in old bits of wood in a can to save kerosene. I’ve not cooked anything decent for ages, it seems. And there’s Frankie, falling out of her pants and nothing to change into.”
She stopped dead, as she realized her wish for stability and security was becoming a complaint that contradicted her wish to go on, and she stared at her feet, blinking rapidly as the tears crowded into her eyes.
“I reckon it’s my fault,” Willie said quietly. “If I hadn’t been with you, you might have all got clean away. They wouldn’t have chased you. And Frankie wouldn’t be acting the way she is.”
“You’ve done all right, Willie,” Rosa said quickly. “And Frankie’s come to no harm. She’s just grown up a bit, that’s all. If it wasn’t for you, we wouldn’t have gone on so long as we have. I guess all we’ve done is spend your dough and get in the way.”
The weather began to deteriorate again as they ran further north into the Tuamotus. Heavy rain squalls came pounding down on them from the south-east and as there was little wind apart from these, they had to make the best use of them.
“I don’ like being around here,” Joe said uneasily. “Too near to dark and I don’ know where we are.”
“Oughtn’t we to shorten sail?” Willie asked as he shinned down from the masthead where he had climbed to watch for reefs.
“Maybe,” Joe looked over his shoulder, steering by ear alone. “But we oughta get outa here a bit. Too many reefs and she won’t claw off.”
It was dark before they were aware of it and the old boat was pitching badly, plunging into the swells and shuddering as she threw off the weight of water. Then with a crack like the rattle of artillery, a new squall was upon them and the flapping sails filled and the Boy George tore north-west as though all the devils in hell were after her, lurching from crest to crest of the cross-swell, the main boom whipped to the full extent of the sheets. The wind was still blowing from the south-east and the Boy George was yawing heavily as they ran along a mile-long cluster of coral rocks that lay just under the surface of the water, smashing the waves into flying splinters of spray.
“Push her to starboard,” Willie shouted. “She’ll thrash herself to bits.”
“No,” Joe shrieked back, his head cocked for the sound of waves on an open shore. “We got-a too near the reef. Don’ let her fall off, Frankie.”
“No, Pop,” Frankie shouted from the wheel. “I got her tight.”
Not quite certain of what they were doing, Rosa was staring from one to the other from where she clung on by the mast.
“If we’d only got charts,” Joe wailed, “instead of old MacGillicuddy’s pipe-lighters.”
“Charts won’t help us now,” Willie said tautly. “It’s too late for charts.”
They could only huddle on deck and stare at the surf rushing closer, then Willie noticed the reef with its pounding foam was passing more and more towards their quarter and he began to shout with excitement.
“By Christ!” he yelled. “We’re going to scrape past.”
The surf was roaring in their ears, throwing up gouts of spindrift to the sky, and Willie was actually yelling that they were safe when there was a tremendous crash and all four of them were flung to the deck as the Boy George shuddered to an abrupt halt. The weight of the wind in her sails flung her masts forward and, with a crack that sounded above the noise of the sea, the mizzen mast snapped off short and the top half of the mainmast came smashing to the deck.
The bowsprit they had rigged lay at forty-fiv
e degrees to the scudding clouds, and the stern was almost under the waves that washed over Frankie where she was lying by the wheel. The boat was moving slightly to port and starboard still but she seemed to be tightly held by the reef beneath them. The upper half of the mainmast, still secured by the shrouds, hung over the ship’s side, hammering at the planks and covering the deck with rope and canvas that flapped wildly in the wind.
By the time Rosa had picked herself up from the deck, Frankie was already scrambling across the wreckage, clawing at it frantically with bleeding fingers.
“Willie!” she shrieked. “Willie! Where are you? Mama, for God’s sake, he’s overboard!”
Joe was struggling to his feet now and clambering up the wet deck after her.
“We don’t never ought to have come out here,” he shouted as he started to drag at the wreckage. “This ain’t like fishing off Sydney Heads.”
“He’s here,” Frankie shrieked. “I got him. Oh, Pop, hurry!”
The agony in her voice tore Rosa’s heart apart and she scrambled after them and helped heave the debris across the deck. Blinded by the rain and buffeted by the stinging blows of the canvas, they got Willie out, dazed but unhurt, and as soon as he came round, he saw the wreckage and struggled immediately to his feet.
“The engine,” he said. “Let’s get the engine going.”
He was slithering crab-like across the deck to the engine-room hatch when Joe stopped him dead with a shout.
“Get-a this lot clear first,” he said. “Or we get her round the propeller.”
Frankie was diving for the axe when Rosa’s yells pulled her up short. “Not overboard! Not overboard! We’ve got no more sails!”
