Zenith

by Julie Bertagna

  The cat knows she’s in for it and tries to slink into the eel bucket. Tuck kicks the bucket and grabs the cat’s tail, yanks it hard in revenge. The cat gives an outraged yowl.

  ‘Tuck.’

  ‘Oy, cut the racket out there!’ yells Arthus, the old grump from the next shack. A window shutter rattles open and Arthus’s walrussy head looms out. ‘What a dubya. That’s what you are, boy, a true dubya.’ Arthus surveys the mess Tuck has made and pulls the shutter closed again with a whack.

  Tuck gets to his feet. From his own shack there’s an outburst of wheezy coughs. No wonder he goes out looting. It’s better than staying in this dump, getting yelled at and listening to Ma’s snores and wheezes, night after night.

  Tuck limps back to his own shack. The dawn light glints in his Ma’s eye. With her beaky nose, pale face and nest of greying hair, she has the look of an orange-eyed gull. A gull with its nest on its head.

  ‘Sorry, Ma.’

  ‘A sorry excuse for a son, thass what you are, Tuck Culpy. Phut – wheez. All that creaking on the roof – you been up there all night again?’

  Tuck shrugs.

  Ma gives him a glinty glare. ‘You can just set off early and find yourself some work ’cause there’s no dinner now, is there? You just kicked it back in the sea. I never know how we’ll live from one day till the – phut wheez – next.’

  A fit of cough-wheezies halts her.

  ‘Rubbish, Ma,’ says Tuck. ‘We’re doing all right. Had a good glug of seagrape last night, didn’t you, eh? And a nice basket of smoked oysters? Keeping you in luxury, I am.’

  But she’s decided, as the neighbours are no doubt listening in now he’s woken them up, to pretend to be a proper Ma.

  ‘D’you think I sailed across the ocean in a bottle? Think I – phut-phut-wheez – fell out of the sky? I know what you get up to. You wuzzn’t on that roof all night, Tuck Culpy . . . wheeez . . . hanging out with a no-good lot of curfew breakers, thass where you were. Be a good lad now and knuckle down to some steady work, eh?’

  Ah, he’s sick of her. Sick of looking after her and getting no thanks. Sick of her gorging on whatever he brings home then moaning about how he got it. And most of all he’s sick of the strange guilt she somehow drums up in him, just because he’s alive and the others died.

  Last year’s summer fever wiped out boatfuls of gypseas all over Pomperoy. It killed his little sister Beth and Grumpa, Ma’s old Da. They’d hardly recovered from Tuck’s own Da’s death the year before, from a bone-rotting sickness he caught while raiding one of the toxic ships that ghost the oceans, ships full of scrap metal, oil and chemicals left over from the old world. Da was on a scavenge scoop for bridge metal and wire, but he ended up scavenging his own death.

  He’d known the risk. That’s why he wouldn’t take Tuck.

  Now Da and the others are gone, there’s only Tuck left to look after Ma. Though they both survived the fever, Ma is a wretched shadow of her old self. Tuck knows he’ll never be able to mend the great big rip in her life where little Beth and Da and Grumpa once were. All he can do is bring her home the fruits of his ill-gotten loot.

  Ma’s still grumbling. ‘If there’s one thing I want before I – phut-phut PHUT – lie down here on my bunk and die, it’s my son anchored and settled in a rock-solid trade.’

  Tuck almost laughs at the show Ma’s putting on for the neighbours. Urth’s sake, how can he settle when the world’s all hurling and wheeling, when the windsnap in the rigging is loud as thunderclaps day and night, when the boats are in a tug of war with the chains that bind the city together against an ocean that’s set on tearing it apart?

  ‘In the name of The Man, Ma, gimme peace.’

  Wheeez.

  ‘Go back to sleep,’ he mutters. ‘I’ll go find some work.’

  Tuck clambers back on to the shack roof. His ankle’s still sore, but he tries a leap and lands, light as a cat, on one foot, on the roof next door.

  But Ma’s still going. He’s a disgrace, she’s yelling, always away out leaving his poor mother to fend for herself. One day he’ll come back and she’ll have died, she will, in a corner, all alone.

  But the wind’s against her. Soon she’ll be right out of his ears.

  THE MAN IN THE MIDDLE

  Without a dodgy ankle, it’s easy to leap and scuddy across the boat shacks. They’re crammed close with rubbery roofs, good for foot-grip, made from tarred strips of sea-scavenged tyres. Today, Tuck tries to leap and land on his good foot. Eyes of The Man, who cares about a foot? He’s alive! He might’ve been gutted like a fish by a Salter and ditched in the sea last night.

  Pomperoy is the shape of a flat fish. The Grimby Gray is one of the wrecked, rusty barges crammed with shacks at the city’s tail end. The lagoon around the oil rig in the middle, where Tuck is headed, is its pumping heart.

  At the edge of The Grimby Gray, Tuck hops across the wire suspension bridge (built by his own Da and branded with the Culpy crescent) that connects to the neighbouring barge. He clears that, and the next. Now he’s in the huge region of Doycha, a motley maze of small boats. It’s said that Doycha has a thousand bridgeways, but Tuck knows there are exactly eight hundred and forty-one.

  He leaps from boat to boat, laughing whenever he earns a yell. Every so often his ankle throbs too hard and he sits down on a roof or hobbles on to a swaying bridge for a rest, but cuts back to scuddying across the boats as soon as he can. They give him a straighter route than the bridgeways that link the boats. Though he could map a track across the bridgeways blind.

  Beyond Doycha, he zigzags a route along the bridges that run between the rusted hulks of the ferries and take him into the higgledy squalor of Yewki. At last, he reaches the wooden walkways that surround the central lagoon. In the middle of the lagoon is the huge oil rig, the city’s anchor and fuel source, linked by the five suspension bridges that radiate from it like the spokes of a great wheel.

  All around the lagoon the market gondolas are being loaded up. By the time the sky has lightened the lagoon will be thronged with gondolas, each one piled with a harvest from the ocean or the sky: seafood and scrap metal, plastic and driftwood, birds and eggs. Tuck is overtired and achy. The buzz of the market workers irritates like a swarm of flies round his head. Creeping round the empty city after curfew is what he loves. Especially the lagoon.

  Sometimes, deep in the night, strange winds whirl around the boat masts and upset the lagoon with scents of somewhere else. They fill Tuck with curiosity and send prickles down his spine. The restless ruffles inside him only calm when the wind flies off across the ocean and the lagoon smoothes to black glass.

  Tuck knows about glass. He even owns a bit. It belonged to Grumpa. The fragment of glass is the shape of a raggedy, three-cornered boat sail and just fits into the creases of his closed hand. Once sharp enough to cut him, Tuck has rubbed the jagged edges smooth by scraping the Culpy crescent, his Da’s trademark, into the wooden walkways around the lagoon. The power of the glass is that it can show you your very own self. And, better still, if you catch the sun’s rays inside it, you can train it to make fire.

  It’s a mirror, Grumpa told him. My old mum called it a looking-glass. Everyone used to have them, some big as your face, even as big as your whole self. First thing you’d do in the morning was take a look in your mirror, brush your hair and your teeth, have a shave.

  Grumpa would look wistful. The idea makes Tuck laugh. He can’t imagine waking up and staring at your own face instead of rushing out to fish or load up a gondola or seal a leak in a rusted boat. Not that Tuck does any of that, himself.

  He likes to look in the mirror, though it only shows his face in bits. Long, sun-bleached hair that blows across his face. Gypsea eyes, a deeper blue than his faded windwrap, narrowed by sharp winds and blades of sun. Weather-tanned cheeks, scoured by salty air. His Ma’s mouth. His Da’s strong nose.

  Grumpa told strange stories of how people once lived fixed to the Earth. He’d always use the old word,
no matter what Ma said.

  Earth, he’d insist, rounding out the word. Not Urth. Earth! A good old word. It’s you youngsters who’ve made it a curse.

  It’s you oldsters who cursed it, Da would mutter, just too low for Grumpa’s crusty old ears. Tuck could hear, but Da would never explain what he meant.

  Tuck never could get his head around the idea of Earth. A world steady underfoot? That didn’t shift to the dance of the ocean? Even the word Earth is odd. It always made him snigger when Grumpa said it, all proud and defiant, because Tuck couldn’t think of it as anything other than a curse.

  There were cities, Grumpa would tell him, and he’d rub his watery blue eyes. Great cities with homes and shops and tall buildings fixed to the Land. The cities would stretch on and on, but the Land stretched further, as far as you could see. You’d have to walk for days until you reached the sea. Before the fuel ran out, he added, you’d just jump in a car or a plane and go anywhere you wanted, anywhere in the world, in no time at all.

  Cars and planes? What are they? Tuck wanted to know.

  A plane, Grumpa explained, was a boat with wings that flew across the skies like a giant bird. A car was a boat that travelled across Land. People lived in houses fixed to the Earth. Tuck has taken the biggest rock he ever dredged up with a catch of fish, held it in his hand and tried to imagine Land as a rock bigger than the whole of Pomperoy. He has even tried to imagine it stretching as far as the sea. But he can’t.

  Sometimes he wonders if Grumpa dreamed it all up.

  Yet some people say there is still Land. Once, during a bad outbreak of sickness, one of the boats unchained from the rest and set out to sea. It was so long gone that everyone thought the family was lost. Many moons later the boat returned. Only some had survived and they were wounded and stunned with fear. They told a tale of a fiery island where a ferocious people live. A place where water thunders from the sky and boils up from the earth, they said. The ground runs with molten rivers and people bake to stone under a summer sun that burns day and night.

  Since then the Pomperoy gypseas have stayed anchored to the rig, safe from the terrors of Land. This patch of ocean is home. An unbroken horizon means security and peace. Tuck’s gypsea heart beats to the rhythm of the waves. The spirit of the ocean dances in his soul.

  Now, he strolls the walkways around the lagoon that is the bustling heart of Pomperoy. A richly patterned windwrap catches his eye.

  That windwrap is a beauty. It belongs to his friend, Pendicle, and was sewn by his clan of industrious aunts. Tuck would do anything to have a windwrap like that. Instead of the Prender family emblem he’d have the Culpy crescent, a sharp silver moon, emblazoned on its back.

  Pendicle is with his father, doing the early-morning stocktake of the Prenders’ gondola fleet. Each boat is stocked with a jumble of old world goods, dredged up from the ocean. With a bit of ingenuity, any piece of junk can be crafted into something new. Tuck waves at Pendicle, but the look on his friend’s face warns him not to get any closer, at least not until Pendicle’s father has gone. Tuck is no longer welcome anywhere near Prender property, not since they discovered he’d been looting their stock.

  Pendicle has been keeping a cool distance for a while now. Tuck knows he pushed his luck too far when he tried to loot Pendicle’s mother’s plush sealskin boots. He’d been eyeing them up for a while, maybe for his own Ma or maybe he’d trade them for gluggets of seagrape beer. He’d have shared the beer with Pendicle, of course. Tuck might be sly as a rat but he’s not mean. What he hadn’t planned on was Pendicle’s Ma sneezing in her sleep so hard she woke herself up, just as Tuck was grabbing the sealskin boots from under her bed.

  He feels bad about that. Just a bit, though. It’s not as if Pendicle and his family are hard up, like Tuck. Yet he, Tuck reminds himself, wasn’t always hard up. When Da was alive the Culpys had a plush enough home-boat of their own. Da’s burial boat had hardly burned itself out on the ocean when a gang of Salters put a knife to Ma’s throat and stole their boat. If it happened now, Tuck knows what he’d have done to those druxy Salters. But back then he was still a scared boy, so they ended up in a slum shack on a barge.

  A shot of envy hits Tuck as he watches Pendicle with his father, one of the city’s most powerful men. He is a striking man, with a strong brown face and his dark head covered in elegant furrows of plaits. His windwrap, like Pendicle’s, is emblazoned with the Prender family emblem; an old world sign for power, Pendicle claims, though to Tuck it looks like an oily eel wrapped around a fishing rod.

  But his Da, Tuck reminds himself, was once just as important. He was one of the best bridge-builders in Pomperoy. With hair as bright as winter sunshine and his windwrap with the Culpy crescent on its back, Jack Culpy was a striking man too. Da used to take Tuck along when he met the Prender brothers at the Oyster Bar; Tuck and Pendicle would play among the gondolas of sea junk while the men argued about bridges and oil.

  Way back when Pomperoy was still at war with itself, the Prenders grabbed a share of the rig’s oil. By the time the other gypseas had burned themselves out with pirating and wanted to be safe and settled instead, the Prenders had set themselves up as one of the city’s oil families. Now they’re one of the richest clans in Pomperoy. What does a bit of looting matter to them?

  Tuck walks up on to a swaying arm of the Middle Bridges. He’d better steer clear of the Saltmarket at the head of the lagoon. The bridges are the highest point in Pomperoy, apart from the rig. Tuck looks across the city to the ocean beyond. When he’s overtired, like he is now, he sometimes gets spooked by a thought. What if a great storm uprooted the rig and unanchored the whole of Pomperoy? What if the boats were then tossed across the ocean until they slipped over the edge of the world?

  The old people say the world is round. Even if the city’s anchors failed, the boats would just keep floating round and round. You couldn’t fall over the edge because there isn’t an edge. If that’s true, thinks Tuck, why don’t things fall off? What keeps the sea on the underside stuck to the Earth?

  Tuck yawns and shivers inside his windwrap as he looks at the line of the ocean where it meets the sky. It looks like an edge to him.

  Once, people thought they knew the world. Not any more.

  No one even knows if there are other gypsea cities, like Pomperoy. The only signs of life upon the ocean, though there’s plenty underneath, are lone refugee boats, lost and adrift, ripe for raiding. But even they’re more dead than alive, full of bones or rotting corpses.

  Wind scuffs the lagoon and a popple sea threatens, but soon the water is as sleek as a seal again. Way up on the oil rig’s chimney stack, The Man in the Middle beams down on Pomperoy, his face aglow in the rising sun.

  Years ago, The Man surfaced in the lagoon. A couple of kids spotted the large plastic board with its smiling face. They fished it out of the water and ran home with it to their boat. The very next day the sickness that had struck the city left the family’s boat. The Man was taken to a neighbouring boat where a mother and her baby were sick almost to death. Once again he seemed to chase the illness away. So they carried The Man across one of the arms of the Middle Bridges to the oil rig in the heart of the lagoon. They hung the face of The Man high on the chimney stack of the rig so that he could watch over the whole of Pomperoy and keep it safe.

  None of the old people believe in The Man. Bit of plastic junk, they say, and ramble about a chicken called Kentucky that people used to eat, before the world was sea. But the old people tell so many tall tales about the past, no one knows what’s true and what’s not. Anyhow, the Kentucky name stuck to The Man and The Man stayed on the rig as the luck-keeper of Pomperoy.

  When Ma named baby Tuck after The Man people said it was barefaced cheek. Ma, being Ma, didn’t care. But look, they say, what happened to the Culpy family when they took The Man’s name. Jack Culpy died a horrible death, followed by his father and the little girl. Then Tuck and his Ma end up in a slum shack.

  Tuck’s name has r
uined his family. That’s what everyone thinks. Tuck hears the whispers and they make him want to run. So he does, every night. Runs from the blame and the guilt, runs from his own lousy, wrecked life. Runs and leaps the whole of Pomperoy, looting as he goes, and only calls it a night when the flocks of Great Skua fill the dawn skies over the city, and call him home by name, tuk-tuk, tuk-tuk.

  The Great Skua’s cry makes him itch for their wings. He’d like to fly free of Pomperoy, soar all across the oceans and see what the world is. Tuck would rather risk a salt-knife at his throat than settle for a life of patching boats or mending bridges. It was bridging that killed Da in the end. If Tuck’s going to gamble his life, it’ll be for something more than a coil of bridgewire.

  Or a pocketful of salt, come to that . . .

  When the idea hits, Tuck stops breathing. It’s either the best loot he’s ever thought of, or the worst.

  A fearful excitement zips through him, right down to his fingers and toes. Does he dare?

  Great Skua, he dares!

  Tuck’s doubts about The Man’s power have been growing for many a moon. For eleven moons, to be exact. Ever since Tuck stood on this same bridge and promised The Man he’d change his name, never glug another beer ever again, he’d do anything, anything at all, whatever The Man wanted, if only he’d save little Beth and Grumpa from the deadly fever that was burning them up. But The Man did nothing at all.

  In nightmares, Tuck still sees their burial boat, blazing on the black sea like a dying sun. The sound of Ma screaming is seared into a corner of his mind.

  And secretly, in the depths of his heart, Tuck hates The Man.

  Last night, in his panic, he broke his own sullen promise never to ask The Man for another thing as long as he lived. He begged to be saved from the Salters. And he was. Did The Man do that? Or was it just a scrape of ordinary luck? Well, the idea that’s ripped through him might reveal once and for all whether The Man is just a bit of old junk like Grumpa said – or not.