The Gulliver Fortune

by Peter Corris

  "How long have we got?"

  "A few months."

  "I hope it's a good few. I'm looking at a lot of work here, and we're going to need some luck. Gulliver must have done a deal with the authorities. It happened in those days. The Board of Trade took over from the Emigration Commissioners in 1872. I suppose Board of Trade blokes could talk to Home Office people. That is, there was a connection to the police."

  Ben swallowed whisky. "What the hell are you talking about?"

  Jamie ran his tongue over his cleaned teeth. If this is it, he thought, I'm still better off than I was. He cleared his throat. "John Gulliver and his family emigrated to Australia in 1910," he said.

  Jack,

  Stephen,

  Georgia

  1

  Southampton, January 1910

  The rain beat down hard and cold as John Gulliver waited with his family for the call to board the Pacific Steamship Line's 16,000-tonner Southern Maid, bound for Suez, Colombo and Australia. The Gullivers, as steerage passengers, were the last to be called. The iron roof above their heads leaked and Edward, the youngest at ten years of age, squealed when a cold drop fell on his neck.

  "It's terrible cold, Ma," Susannah said. "Will we get hot supper on the ship?"

  "Your mother doesn't know, girl," said John Gulliver, "and no more do I." He looked fondly at his daughter, whose dark eyes and tangle of almost black hair reminded him that his own father had been called Tom the Gypsy'. He raised his voice as his son Jack darted out into the rain. "Be a pity to break your neck on those cobbles right here, young Jack, and never see the land o' sunshine."

  Fifteen-year-old Jack had left shelter to get a closer look at a woman. She was strolling along holding a large umbrella in such a way as to protect her from the wind-driven rain but not to conceal her from Jack. She was tall and wore a long dark coat trimmed with fur. Her hat was fur-trimmed also and her boots had high heels that caused her to walk with a swaying gait on the greasy cobbles. Jack could see her bold, bright eyes and painted face. His excited breath steamed in the cold evening air.

  "Jack!" John Gulliver called. A whore down to see her sailor off, or one of 'em, Gulliver thought. He looked at Jack as the boy ran back. I was the same at his age and for a good few years after. And it was whores that brought me down in the end.

  Gulliver looked up at the grey, leaking sky and let his gaze wander across the masts of the few sailing ships drawn up at the docks. The stately clippers were far outnumbered by steamships with their funnels, cargo winches and bulky outlines. The roofs of the warehouses and sheds that fringed the wharves were salt-stained and slick with rain. Smoke rose from braziers used by the chestnut roasters and from a pie and peas stall at the end of the long, open shed in which the steerage passengers waited. The greasy, soapy smell of the sea water hit his nose and he seemed to hear the whole city roaring around him. I'll not see it again, Gulliver thought. I know I won't, nor any of us, most likely.

  "We're near dead with the cold, John," Catherine Gulliver said. "Could you not find out what's happening?"

  Glad of the action, Gulliver pushed through the squatting, grumbling people towards the end of the shed. He had to step out into the rain at times to keep moving forward and he pulled his cloth cap down and turned up the collar of his coat. He was a big man, over six feet tall and built wide. His full beard, reddish brown with a good deal of grey in it, gave him something approaching distinction, and his clothes, heavy coat, over a serge suit, woollen scarf and strong boots, were in better condition than those most of the passengers wore. He was used to authority and he asserted it. He pushed through to where he could see the ship through the mist and rain.

  The pie and peas man raised his ladle. "Bit for you, mate?"

  "No," Gulliver said. "No thanks. How long can they keep us waiting?"

  "As long's they please. They've got the quality to board first."

  "The quality!" Gulliver's derisive snort brought a plume of steam from his nose. He knew about the quality, knew what excited the gentlemen and some of the ladies. What pictures, what words.

  "Say it quiet-like, mate," the pie seller said. "I've heard they drops Marxians overboard at night."

  "Rubbish. Anyway, I'm not a Marxian, I'm . . ." He stopped. What am I? he thought. Not a voluntary emigrant, that's for certain. The smell of the hot peas was delicious, London was delicious but the police and magistrate had made the terms clear—he left England or he went to gaol. They'd stripped him of nearly every penny into the bargain, leaving him just enough for his family's passages. And he couldn't have paid that much, he was ashamed to acknowledge, without the assistance offered to immigrants by the government of the state of New South Wales.

  "Give me a scoop," he said.

  The pieman had a stack of tin cans beside the stall; they were dented, much used and badly washed. He wrapped one in a square of newspaper, filled it with hot peas and handed it to Gulliver. "Thrippence to you, guv'nor, and good luck to you in Orstralia. There's a farthing back on the tin."

  Gulliver paid, took another look at the ship and saw two men advancing towards the shed. Brass buttons gleamed through the mist. He hurried back to his family. "Here's peas for you, my darlings, and I'm happy to say something's happening. I saw the Admiral of the Fleet himself coming towards us."

  "John." Catherine Gulliver smiled. Her husband always provided and he had good news more often than bad, until recently when he'd had the worst news of all. He'd been uncharacteristically gloomy for a time and she was glad now to see him back at his joking. She held the can of peas carefully to the mouths of each of the children and tipped it slowly so that they got their share and no more. Jack moved her hand and sucked hard and the tin was suddenly empty.

  "You're a greedy one, Jack," his mother said. Jack shrugged. His keen eyes had spotted a pocket knife hanging on a leather thong from a man's belt. The leather was old and frayed. Jack thought that a sudden jerk, perhaps when everyone started to move towards the ship, might not be noticed.

  Carl Gulliver, small, fair and quiet, sat on the bag he had packed himself. He was prepared to carry it as far as he had to although it was heavy. Probably, if Jack suddenly vanished as he usually did, he'd end up carrying Jack's bag too. John Gulliver observed his small, serious second son. Every day was an adventure to Jack; Susannah was still caught in the dreams of childhood and Edward seemed younger than his ten years. But Carl worried him. He reached out, took the empty tin from his wife and gave it to the boy. "Here, Carl. Take this to the pieman and you'll get a farthing. You can buy a farm with it in Australia."

  "Thank you, Pa," Carl said. "We're moving now. I'll get it as we go past the pie stand. Mother, we're off!"

  The crowd was heaving up and moving slowly forward. The rain fell harder and the people in the lead hurried, heavily burdened, towards the Southern Maid. John Gulliver held Edward's hand in his left and a heavy suitcase in his right; Susannah twined her fingers in the fringe of her mother's shawl; Carl shouldered his bag and shuffled forward, looking for the pieman. Jack opened the flap on his canvas bag, judged the distance, waited for the jolting that came when someone ahead stopped suddenly, and tugged. The pocket knife disappeared into his bag; he closed the flap and moved out of sight behind his father.

  As Catherine Gulliver left the shelter of the roof and felt the rain fall on her bonnet, the baby inside her moved. She almost stopped but forced herself to blunder on through the rain. She hadn't told her husband she was pregnant; she'd confirmed it with a doctor in Camden Town, paid him his fee and ignored the veiled suggestion that he might be able to help her out of her trouble. It was trouble, one she couldn't visit on her husband in the midst of his business difficulties. He was fifty-seven and such a vigorous man that it was not surprising, but she was near forty and past the age, she'd thought.

  She looked up at the towering mass of the ship. It was painted a dark colour, red perhaps, but she could see things—rails, lifeboats, doors—picked out in cream. She closed her
eyes and prepared herself for the slow shuffle up the steep ramp to the steerage deck. The bundle she was carrying cut into her narrow shoulder. She was a small woman, not physically strong, but Catherine Riebe Gulliver had never let any adversity beat her yet and adversity was something she'd seen plenty of. Living more comfortably in recent years, she had grown a little stout. This had distressed her at first but now she was grateful for it. Her condition would not be as noticeable as in the days when she was slimmer. She was, she calculated, not much more than four months gone; the voyage would take two months. She would bear her child in the new country, in the sunshine. She hurried forward and rejoiced when she felt her feet on the boards. England was behind her.

  The Southern Maid was forty years old. A coal-burning vessel with steam turbine engines, she was, in the language of sailors, 'a fair bitch.' She rolled in heavy weather, was slow to respond to her controls and the hammering of her screw was accompanied by a clanking and grinding metal that tore at the nerves. Many searches and inspections had failed to reveal the source of this sound.

  None of this yet concerned the Gullivers as they settled into the quarters they would occupy for the next eight weeks. The hundred and ninety-three steerage passengers had been allotted space which was half that given over to the seventy-five second-class travellers, who had less room overall than the thirty people in first class. John Gulliver and family were packed tightly into a cabin that had four bunks and scarcely enough floor and locker space to hold their baggage. Jack threw himself on a lower bunk, rolled against the wall and feigned sleep. Like his mother, Jack exulted at being aboard ship. He'd worked for six months at the printing trade and hated it. He hoped for better in Australia, but it was not Jack's way to display exultation or hope.

  John playfully pushed Edward onto the lower bunk opposite. "You and the young'un down here, Kitty. I'll go aloft and Susannah and Carl'll have to top 'n' tail above you. If Jack snores everyone's allowed to throw a boot at him."

  The children laughed as they settled in, falling over their feet and banging their heads when the ship gave unexpected slow lurches. Carl tugged at the bolts that held the porthole closed.

  "It smells, Pa," Susannah said.

  "Pretty soon it'll smell of coconuts and ivory and you'll see great white whales the size of St Paul's." John Gulliver looked down at his wife's pale, narrow face. She had long features, blue eyes and light hair, and he admired every inch of her. For the first time he realised that intimacy would be impossible between them for the whole of the voyage. At home, in the large comfortable house in Golders Green, they'd made love more nights than not and sometimes in the day when the opportunity presented. "Are you all right, Kitty? You look . . ."

  "I'm tired, John. Why don't you take Carl and Susy and find out about the meals? I'll take a rest here with Edward."

  "I'm not a baby," Edward said, but he curled himself up on the bunk. Jack turned over, swung his feet free, narrowly missing Carl, and went out of the cabin. John Gulliver spoke to his back. "Jack, it's cabin ten, mind."

  "I learned to count at school," Jack shouted.

  Gulliver shrugged and made pushing gestures to Carl and Susannah.

  Catherine took off her boots and stretched out on the bunk. The cabin was gloomy and she felt rather than saw a pile of thin, rough blankets near her head. She pulled one over herself and the boy and cradled her head on her arm. She felt the baby kick again, harder. She heard a commotion in the corridor and from time to time the clatter of boots on the iron staircase outside the cabin. But she dozed. Close to real sleep, she opened her mind to thoughts of her own parents, Johann and Ilsa Riebe, who had left Germany to come to England for reasons they had never told her. Her father had worked for a succession of pottery manufacturers in the Midlands. The Riebes had moved frequently and Catherine's schooling had been much interrupted. She recalled mean houses and poor food and being taunted at school for her poor English and thick German accent. But eventually Johann Riebe had prospered. She remembered the fields around the town and the flowers in their last and largest garden.

  She had first seen John Gulliver as he worked on a barge moored in the canal near her father's house. Stripped to the waist, brown in the summer sun, he had entranced her. He unloaded cargo, the muscles in his body flexing. He whistled as he swung the heavy boxes down. He saw her watching him and she was drawn to him by a force that she still felt every day. When the barge moved north on the canal three days later, she was aboard.

  She wrote to Johann and Ilsa from the first town, but she knew that their concern would not amount to tearing grief. Catherine was eighteen years of age and had three brothers and two sisters: Riebes enough.

  It was strange to think that she had started life with John on a boat of sorts. And here she was again on the water with him, except that they had the children. Hers had not been an easy life. John Gulliver had worked hard at a variety of trades, always permitting them to live decently by not making a surplus until he had established the mysterious business that had brought them such prosperity.

  Catherine Riebe spoke unaccented English now, but she had never learned to read or write the language well. They had moved house abruptly after John had given out the bad news that he was ruined. She had never read the newspaper reports. Her husband's rise and fall remained mysterious to her.

  Jack worried and frightened her sometimes; Carl made her feel safe, Susy reminded her of John himself when young and the boy asleep beside her was strong and healthy, which was all you could ask for at ten years of age. And the next one? Who could say?

  She was asleep when the lines were cast off and the Southern Maid eased away from the dock. Even the throbbing of the engine and the thrashing of the screw did not wake her.

  2

  Jack Gulliver discovered sex two weeks after the Southern Maid left Tilbury; he also confirmed his own opinion that he could whip anyone his own age and size, in a fair or dirty fight. There was virtually no contact between the passengers in the different classes on the ship, but these barriers were much less observed by the children. True, the young second-class and steerage travellers saw virtually nothing of the children in first class on the upper decks, but they mixed freely among themselves.

  Trudie Peel was sixteen with green eyes and red hair. She was a Londoner who had lost her virginity three years before, to one of the many 'uncles' who had moved in briefly with her mother. To Trudie the word 'father' was an abstraction, but 'uncle' was all too real. From the second uncle she had extracted a sovereign as the price of her silence and over the three years she she had accumulated a fair number of sovereigns which she had spent mostly on clothes. If Hester Peel, barmaid and chanteuse, had noticed that her daughter was often better dressed than herself, she made no comment. She made a point, instead, of leaving her douche bags where Trudie could not fail to see them. Trudie's latest 'uncle' was taking them to a new life in Australia.

  Trudie first noticed Jack when she saw him stealing extra food in the dining hall. Jack had no right to be in the second-class dining room, but there he was, big for his age at five feet eight inches tall, strongly built with thick dark hair falling into his eyes. He calmly loaded a plate with bread and meat, sat down, ate a little and transferred the rest to his pockets. When a steward asked for his ticket, by which he meant a wooden token the passengers were supposed to carry at all times, Jack crossed his eyes, allowed saliva to dribble from his mouth and played the idiot.

  "Seen that," Trudie said. She joined Jack by the rail where the boy was seated, wrapping the food in newspaper.

  Alarmed, Jack looked around to see a handsome girl with a big, exciting soft mouth. "Going to tell?" he said.

  "No. What's it for?"

  "To sell to the pigs in steerage. Bloody little bread back there an' the soup's thinner an' all."

  That was the start. A few days later Trudie lowered her drawers for Jack behind a pile of dirty clothes in the ship's laundry. There was a salty, sweaty smell from seamen's jerseys and so
cks in his nostrils as he crouched down, unbuttoned his flies and let her guide him. He would remember that smell and the hot, sweet rush through his body for the rest of his life. It was over too soon and the girl held him and put his hand to her small hard breasts and he was soon ready again and it went slower. Trudie moaned with him this time and hooked her legs around him, drawing him further and harder into her.

  Jack and Trudie spent every possible minute together. It irked them that they could not eat or sleep together. Jack continued to steal and sell food, with Trudie's help. He was busy with a variety of schemes—selling diluted ship's rum which he got from the few teetotal crew members to the thirsty passengers, assisting the hard-pressed second-class stewards in return for a share of their tips, manufacturing cigarettes from the long butts to be had from a first-class steward for a fee. When a challenge to Jack's possession of Trudie came from a lanky, rawboned Scot, Jack thrashed him with his fists and boots late one night in the crew's quarters. Trudie collected at the door and Jack won six pounds in bets. He also shared a bunk that night with Trudie. Jack was having a good voyage.

  John Gulliver observed something of his, son's activities but he kept his counsel. He'd been a violent, headstrong youth himself and he expected Jack was running true to form. In many ways it was better to have selfish, moody Jack out from underfoot so that he was able to tend to the rest of his family. The younger children settled well into the ship's routine. Carl had won entry to the library—not available to steerage passengers according to the rules, but the boy's persistence had previled. He pored over books, fact and fiction.

  "Did you know the Suez Canal was opened in 1869, Pa?" Carl said as the male Gullivers were taking the sun on a cramped platform above the lower deck.

  "I did not, son. Is that a fact? And how deep is it?"

  Carl studied his book and looked up, disconcerted. "It doesn't say."

  "Well, there's something for you to find out. Ask one of the sailors, maybe. We'll be there in a week or so, I expect."