by Julia Jones
He wasn’t scared as he walked along the muddy path that led past the sluice and round the top of the creek. He wasn’t on a Quest either. He was a practical person setting out to get some information, keeping it simple – like his dad would.
The crowing faded into silence as he walked along the river wall. The tide was high and shiny but the gulls and ducks weren’t busy yet. They were mostly floating in their ripple circles, waiting for the ebb.
The emergency halogen lamps in the Phoenix Yard had all been turned off. Anyone could see the yellow and black hazard tape and read the message: Do Not Enter. Luke could see the mobile crane with a yellow boat in its slings. He could see the yard manager sitting on a pile of sleepers and drinking tea as if he’d been sitting there all night.
The manager saw him. “Y’re Bill’s boy?”
“Where’s my dad?”
It came out like a sort of croak.
“Police been trying to get your step-mum but they said you was all away. Then someone mentioned Bill was expecting one of his lads for the week. So I thought I’d stay around, in case you showed up. And check whether anyone was planning on collecting this.” He pointed to some small damp garment beside him.
“WHERE’S…MY…DAD?”
Luke didn’t mean to shout.
“Hospital. Boat came down on him. Ribs and legs. Don’t worry, he ain’t dead.”
Luke’s mouth had dried up.
“You’re not with anyone, then?”
Luke shook his head.
The manager stood up. Picked up the bit of clothing. “You’ll want to go to the hospital. See him for yourself. Would you come with me in the van?”
Luke nodded. Of course he would. It was only that he couldn’t speak.
The manager seemed to understand. He held out his mug for Luke to take a sip of the warm sweet tea.
“I’ll fetch the keys. Someone broke the winder last night but they weren’t thieving. You’re sure there’s no-one I can call?”
Luke shook his head again. He still didn’t know what he would say to Lottie.
His dad was coming out of the operating theatre. It had been an emergency procedure to lift the crushed ribs off his lungs and they’d set his legs at the same time. There had been two surgeons and it had taken several hours but they said it had gone okay. Luke couldn’t see him yet because he had to be taken to intensive care until they were sure he’d come round safely.
“Then he’ll need complete rest and sleep. No upset or disturbance.”
The ward sister looked stern. Luke had managed to talk a bit in the van but now his mouth had glued itself shut again.
“I reckon we don’t mind waiting,” said the yard manager, whose name, Luke now knew, was Derek. “It’ll set Bill’s mind at rest to see his boy.”
“Are you Luke?” said the sister. “He was asking for a Luke before they took him down.”
Luke felt his eyes fill up. This long night. His dad had wanted him.
“Perhaps you’ll tell him that Luke’s here and he’s okay,” said Derek. “We’ll get ourselves some breakfast and be waiting.”
“I ought to call Rev. Wendy,” Luke managed.
“Vicar? He ain’t that bad.”
“She’s a sort of carer. She’ll know what I should say to Lottie. I’ve got my phone with me but I switched it off when I left Dad’s boat and they’ll find missed calls from before that. Lottie’s my step-mum. If she knows I phoned Rev. Wendy she’ll take it better.”
“We’ll call her from the café. Get some tea and sausages inside us and come back here to wait for your dad.” He looked over to the ward sister who looked up from her desk and nodded.
Later, when they were sitting in a side ward, Derek pulled a grubby garment from a plastic bag and showed it to Luke. It was the thing he’d had with him when he’d been waiting in the yard and it was a navy blue blazer.
“Found it after they’d taken him away. Didn’t notice it at first. Thought it was a bit of old rag. Must have been underneath him.”
“It’s a school blazer. It’s from Fitzgerald School. I go there and so does my sister.”
“Went there myself forty years ago. This un’s got a name in it.”
He showed Luke the neatly sewn tape.
“ ‘Angela Vandervelde.’ She’s even in my class. Except she usually isn’t cos she gets sent out. She’s called Ants. I think she’s Special Needs.”
“She’ll have worse than Special Needs from me if she’s got anything to do with that boat coming down.”
The double doors opened and two porters pushed a bed into the room. A nurse walked beside the bed wheeling a tall stand with a monitor and a load of drips going into the arm of a body in a gown. The head was tipped back and the eyes were shut.
Luke felt as if his heart stopped. A sensation of breathlessness and a complete terror that he couldn’t explain. There was a sort of cage on top of the body and sheets over that.
“Dad?”
Bill’s eyes opened and he saw Luke.
“A’rright?” he breathed.
“Yeah, yeah, I’m all right Dad. You?”
“A’rright.” His eyes shut and he opened them again with an obvious effort. “A’rright now.”
Rev. Wendy spent a long time talking to the ward sister. Then she made the first phone call to Lottie. She explained about the accident and the operations Bill had had. She told Lottie that he was likely to stay in hospital for several weeks at least. There didn’t seem much point in abandoning their holiday unless Bill’s condition worsened. At the moment he only needed to lie still and be cared for with the minimum of stimulation. He found it hard to speak and got distressed at the thought of them coming home because of him.
“He knows how Liam feels about that football match,” agreed Luke. “And Lottie with her new album. They only got there in the middle of last night. I mean of course they’d want to come home but that’d make him feel bad.”
Rev. Wendy sighed. Then she squared her thin shoulders and did her best to smile.
“We’ll collect your luggage from the boat and you can come back to the vicarage with me.”
“No!” said Luke. That sounded rude. “I mean no-thank-you-very-much-for-asking but I need to be with Dad. This was our holiday. I can sleep on Lowestoft Lass. I did last night.”
Why had he said that – with the werewolf and the pumpkin heads and that Force Eight cockerel next door?
“There’s other people living in the boats,” he said. “Like next door and that. And I’d only be there in the evenings and at night cos I’m booked on a kayak course every morning and I’d be visiting Dad after. If I slept back at Bawdsey, it’d be much further.”
Wendy and Gerald were okay and baby Ellen was sweet but he definitely didn’t want to spend the rest of his half-term in Erewhon Parva vicarage. Been there, done that. Not ever again.
He was surprised Rev. Wendy didn’t say no straight away. She should have done. She said in that case it was a problem and she was going to have to ring Lottie again to talk about it. Couldn’t he think of a school friend he could go to?
Luke had met some good mates since he’d been at Fitzgerald. They went round each others’ houses, played on each others’ X-boxes and PS3s, sometimes went biking.
“I ain’t never allowed to be on my own. And Lowestoft Lass’s exactly like a house. She’s my dad’s house.”
“These children and their boats! I can’t understand it at all. There’s Grace Everson close by…she’s a sensible woman. I wonder what she’d say?”
Rev. Wendy was talking to herself but she still hadn’t blown him out. This was amazing. Luke put on his most pleading face. He really wanted to stay – even though he didn’t. Last night in the wood had been like he was under a bad spell. Maybe he needed to give it a rerun. Exorcise all them spooks.
; There was a faint noise from the shrouded figure that was Bill – as if he was trying to agree? Rev. Wendy noticed it too. Did she look…relieved?
“You know we’d said we’d always Be There for Luke – or for any of the children.” She was talking directly to his dad, even though his eyes were shut. “And of course we meant it. And we will…Be There. But Gerald and I haven’t had a holiday for years! And Ellen. Such an unexpected blessing at our age. So tiring…with six parishes. The diocese have offered a few days’ retreat by the sea in Whitby. After the All Saint’s vigil and a combination Year’s Mind service. Not easy to please all the congregations. Brought forward from the Sunday by special permission. Incorporating additional prayer into the morning services. Graveyard intercessions. Packed and ready to leave. Though not too late to withdraw, of course.”
“Oh yes! I mean no.” Luke hadn’t a clue what she was on about but he reckoned he got the gist. “You didn’t ought to withdraw, Rev. Wendy. Ellen’s got to be looking forward to Whitby.”
He’d never been to Whitby. Never heard of it. It could be orc-infested Mordor for all he knew.
“Thank you Luke,” Rev Wendy beamed. She’d have seen straight through him in the old days. “But even for Ellen’s sake I couldn’t leave you to sleep on your own on that…boat.”
“Donny does,” Luke began. His friend Donny lived full-time on a Chinese junk but he had his mum there with him and often his uncle too.
A small moan. Bill was part of this conversation, but only just.
Rev Wendy carried on. “You’ll remember Mrs Everson?”
The old lady in the green beret who Donny reckoned was a leprechaun and who always turned up exactly when she was needed?
“Her daughter, Miss Grace Everson, lives very close to Fynn Creek – on Merlesham Hill. It’s a working farm but I believe she also has involvement with the moorings. Possibly she might be willing to take responsibility? I think we could ask. As it is an emergency and only for a few days. She might even offer a bed.”
Luke knew who she meant. Big lady with a rowing dinghy. She’d shouted at him once. He didn’t want to sleep on her farm though. He wanted to stay on Lowestoft Lass.
“What d’yer think, Dad?”
Bill nodded. He definitely did and Rev. Wendy saw it too but it was obvious that he was drifting off to sleep again and Luke knew, without the nurses telling him, that it was time for them to leave.
***
Saturday was Helen’s only good day of the week. It was the day she was allowed to attend the River Wall Rowing Club. She could also have gone to the club on Sundays and Wednesday evenings but Hendrike thought that Helen might attract attention if she attended too often or did too well..
“Elsevier believes in excellence,” Helen sometimes dared to say. “Elsevier wishes us to show that we haven’t all gone soft. Elsevier tells me to train and to succeed.”
She hated Elsevier but she’d say anything to get away from the barge. She ran for an hour every morning before Hendrike was awake. Leo the cockerel got her out of bed and she made sure she was back before her mother noticed she’d been gone.
It was amazing that Hendrike could sleep through Leo’s crowing. Helen couldn’t. No matter how late she’d been made to work, or how angrily she’d cried herself to sleep when her mother had spent the evening drumming or chanting or taking the powders that sent her…somewhere else, Helen’s eyelids flew apart at his first note and she was off the barge almost before he’d taken breath for the second.
Leo was shut in a coop in Drie Vrouwen’s forepeak with the hatch cover closed but somehow he still knew when it was dawn. Helen had learned to trust him. She was footsure as she ran up the steep hill through the towering black trees with the sound of his crowing behind her. She knew that when she reached the lane and turned east towards the river there would be paleness. Then, as she ran past the church and the farm and sped out into the maze of tracks that led towards the main river, there would be greys and mauves and pinks. Or violets, oranges and every shade of red. A kaleidoscopic light-show every morning, just for her.
East was sunrise. East was home. East was where they’d point the barge.
Helen filled her lungs with the fresh damp air and imagined the morning when they would be motoring along some shimmering pathway on their return journey across the sea. She hardly noticed which of the tracks she chose. They all took her to the river wall where she ran until she reached the broken section.
In Holland this would have been repaired but not here in England. The wall had obviously been down for years. The river had come though and several hectares of grazing land were salty and unusable. The English were lazy. They didn’t appreciate what they had. It was even possible that Elsevier was right – though only on this single point.
Soon she’d be measuring her strides along a line of willow trees or poplars, saying hi to kids outside their houses and catching her breath to smile at cyclists. She’d be back with her friends and her rowing team. So much lost fitness to regain before next racing season…
But for now she had only Saturdays on this muddy English river. Helen treasured every rhythmic moment that she bent and stretched with the weight of her long oars.
The River Wall Club was near the Phoenix Yard. Helen saw the Do Not Enter signs and people pausing to ask one another what had happened.
She didn’t stop. Her mother had checked the yard some time ago when they were looking to steal a dinghy trailer. She’d discovered that their security was good and that their neighbour, the man on the scruffy wooden fishing boat, worked there.
Hendrike didn’t like men. She’d tried getting friendly with this one in case she could witch him into helping them. He wasn’t rude but he obviously wasn’t interested. He only wanted to work on his boat – every evening and most weekends as well. Her mother had decided he was there too often. She made a poppet with a woollen hat and a workman’s jacket and began sticking pins in it so he’d fall ill and stay out of their way.
Then last night…
Helen needed to get away. Needed to be in her boat and sculling. Needed to escape her own thoughts.
There were so many people talking and staring, that it was hard to manoeuvre the fragile racing shells out from the boat house and down the slipway. The coach asked one of the other girls to help her.
“And you?” Helen said, after they had carried her boat to the water’s edge and she was trudging back for her oars. “Do you need a lift?”
“I’m good thanks. Gonna wait a bit. See who else shows up.”
“Why are there all these people today?”
The other girl shrugged. She was chewing gum. Shifted it from one side of her mouth to the other.
“Some accident in the yard last night. A guy got hurt. Maybe killed. I dunno.”
She didn’t sound bothered.
“This man, do you know his name?”
“Nah.”
Helen didn’t ask any more questions. If the English didn’t care what had happened to their neighbours, why should she?
She didn’t want to remember…when Leo had pecked a pattern of wheat and pumpkin seeds that had seemed to spell success…the drumming and the fumes … “Sabbat! Sabbat!”
When her mother had crushed the poppet under the runestone Elsevier had given her. Smashed it down on the fragile effigy. Again and again.
It was all stupid. You could buy runestones on the Internet. The man had slept okay on board his boat. Must have. He’d switched his wheelhouse light on. And turned it off this morning.
Helen fitted her sculls into the oarlocks and lifted her boat gratefully onto the river.
***
“Would you like the dog with you?”
“A dog? With me? On dad’s boat?”
“Some people like dogs. Other people don’t.”
“I do! I would. Never had a prope
r dog. Had a tamagotchi once. Out of the church jumble. Liam dropped it in the bath.”
“This one’s a terrier. Patterdale cross. Your friends found him. Nice little chap now that he’s decided to calm down. Barks though. Not always a bad thing.”
That was about the longest bit of conversation Miss Grace Everson had done so far. She was the lady he’d reckoned she’d be. Untidy hair and a red face. She seemed to have forgotten the day he’d thrown a pebble and hit her dinghy while she’d been sitting outside the pub drinking beer. She’d listened to Rev. Wendy, looked at Luke and nodded. He could sleep at the farm. Or she’d keep an eye on him down on the boat. Feed him if he wanted. She was sorry to hear about the accident, she said. Not odd at all, the lad wanting to stay near his father. There were two women on the boat next door. Both Dutch and kept themselves to themselves but the girl spoke English reasonably well.
“I used to be frit of dogs,” Luke added. “But not any more. Except Lottie’s booked me into a kayak course at the swimming pool from Monday and I couldn’t take him to the hospital.”
“No. You couldn’t.”
“But would he sleep with me at night? I could bring him back in the mornings and collect him at tea.”
“You could do that.”
“That’s very kind of you, Miss Everson. And you’ll introduce him to the neighbours. A mother and daughter? Providential!” Rev. Wendy looked anxiously at her watch. “I’m sorry I have to leave now. I’m offering a Year’s Mind vigil to follow the All Saints service. Candlelit for the six parishes. Not all the church wardens are convinced…Are you sure you don’t want to come with me, Luke? I’ll be late but Gerald can find something extra for supper. And there’ll be Ellen. And the bird …”
“Hawkins! What’s happening to him?”
Rev. Wendy reddened slightly. “We couldn’t have gone on holiday without…He and Ellen are quite inseparable. Providentially the hostel was brought to understand our position. Then we found a travelling cage for a very reasonable donation and Gerald’s packed his favourite toys. As well as food. He’s so discriminating.”