by Julia Jones
The tide was beginning to trickle in over the mud. Helen had not been able to discover precisely what Elsevier and her mother had planned.
“We learn from the actions of the past,” Hendrike stated. “And from the daring of our forbears.”
The past. People trying to blow each other up for being the wrong religion. That’s what these stupid English were celebrating wasn’t it? Helen’s head ached and her face burned and she wanted to cry. She couldn’t stand the cheerful people offering her chocolate and baked apples any longer. She slipped away and went to sit in the quiet space between the fishing boat and Drie Vrouwen.
“Oh, hi, are you wishing you were on the water?”
It was the irritating girl.
“I can’t wait until I have another chance. I was in a kayak this afternoon and it felt totally special. I’ve never felt like that before. If I wasn’t in so much trouble I’d be begging my parents for a kayak. I’d even go back to the lessons. Except I don’t suppose they’d have me. But anyway I’m in trouble so I’ve got to keep quiet.”
“Trouble?”
“With the police and the boatyard and the insurance company and my parents of course. But at least I’ve made it up with the man.”
“What man?”
“Mr Whiting, Luke’s father. My new friend Luke. I’m with him here this evening. We were invited. I never get asked to anything. But he seems to have gone off somewhere. I haven’t seen him for a while. There was an old man came in a fur coat and ate sausages but then Luke said he had a stomach ache. My dad’s not very well either. He’s gone really strange. As if he’s seeing things.”
Helen felt a flash of anger. Her mother just couldn’t resist, could she? She hadn’t used nightcap, she’d sprinkled fly agaric powder into the soup with all those beautiful fresh mushrooms that Helen had picked that morning. Okay, they needed to make sure that the next-door neighbours were out of action but she didn’t have to poison them.
Hendrike came up behind her at this moment. She was carrying her empty cauldron and breathing heavily.
“What are you doing here?” she demanded. Close up Helen could see that her face was flushed as if she’d been standing too close to the bonfire.
“I’m sorry mother. We were talking. Some people aren’t feeling very well.” She felt it was safer to speak in English.
“That will be the fault of the boy and his sausages.”
The red-head had caught the contempt in Hendrike’s voice. She was squaring up to her. “Luke’s my friend. Don’t talk like that.”
“So,” Helen intervened, “we were discussing water and how calm it makes people feel.”
She noticed that the dinghy, which belonged to the fishing boat, had been moved over to Drie Vrouwen. She didn’t know why.
“You are in the wrong place, daughter. I think you have forgotten the time. Soon there will be fireworks. I will take care of this child. She may like to move a small vessel for me.”
“Oh yes please,” said the red-head with a ridiculous skip.
“There.” Hendrike was beaming. With her white hair in those twin buns and her portly figure and the large white apron she’d chosen to wear this evening, she looked like every dear old housewife from every child’s picture book that featured houses made from gingerbread and trays of rosy apples and poisoned fairings. “I’ve got a proper helper now. You’ll paddle very carefully won’t you, my dear?”
The girl was jiggling on the spot, her mouth slightly open and her wide eyes bright. She was an idiot thought Helen. The sort of idiot who’d carry your drugs bag through customs if you asked her nicely.
I don’t like the person I’m becoming.
“Goodbye daughter.” Her mother’s lips continued smiling but Helen recognised the tone. She had no choice. She left.
***
It was quiet on board Ra’. Quiet and sad and comfortingly familiar. Peter knew every cleat and handhold on this boat and all the different sounds she could make when her hull moved against the water. He knew that Ra’ was dying. She lay where she’d been thrown when the hurricane came raging over southern England, uprooting trees, breaching walls and tearing boats from moorings. Peter had tried to put things right but the damage was too great and he was already old.
When had he been born? Too long ago. Before Ra’ herself had been built by that Englishman, escaping with his Russian woman.
Peter had been an observant, interested child. He’d followed them around, listening to their strange accents and odd behaviours. When they had built their yacht and left, he promised himself that, one day, he too would sail to England.
And here he was. Together with Ra’ – the scraps that were left of them both.
The English thought that he was Russian. Even the kind Maroosia who let his yacht remain where the storm had thrown her and who gave him food and work and his small hut and the cat to keep him company. Even Maroosia assumed that all the Northlands, all the countries along the southern shore of the Baltic Sea were somehow…Russian!
Peter knew that Maroosia had much to think about. She had a mother to consider as well as the farm and the moorings. He never ceased to be grateful for her kindness so he never tried to explain the size of her mistake. To confuse Russians with the neighbours they invaded!
Peter had suffered too much fighting. He wanted to end here on his boat or in his hut among his books. There was no Vanya.
The tide filled the space inside the wrecked yacht until she wallowed for a moment deep below her waterline. Then it retreated and she lay back with a wooden sigh.
Peter had made a mistake. He couldn’t remember what it was: the facts had gone; only the feeling remained. The worry of his mistake had pushed him from his hut and sent him to Ra’ for comfort. He sat wedged in the angled cockpit, his old bones huddled inside his wolfish fur.
He slept and woke. The day had passed and the light was fading. Peter looked across the small, deserted lagoon towards the flood wall and the sluice. His eyes were still good at a distance. He watched the cloaked stranger who was waiting there and he wondered.
He couldn’t find the right words to wonder with so he left Ra’ and felt his way back across the planks. Then he walked round the wall to the sluice.
The stranger had gone. Peter watched the water backing up along the stream, spilling over into the reed beds and slowly raising the inland water level all the way to the bridge near the pub where he used to go in the days when he had a little money in his pocket.
He’d forgotten what the pub was called but he began to remember the heavy taste of English beer and the good fellowship of shanty singers. Scraps of tunes came dancing into his head. The days in the north when they’d held hands and sung, refusing to be sent home by tanks and bullets. Long ago and far away.
When Peter had forgotten why he was standing at the sluice, he set off to find the man on the fishing boat. A man whose name he couldn’t recall but who owned a concertina and would sometimes make music with him if they met in the evening when the day’s work was done.
***
Luke hurried to fetch Peter fat sausages in a roll. Said yes to onions and slathered them with mustard and tomato sauce. He really couldn’t see that it mattered whether the old man had paid five pounds or not. He’d miss his own sausages and fill up on the soup if anyone made a fuss. He told Mr Vandervelde that he should talk to Peter: that Peter had lived in Russia and that he had a hut full of books. This seemed to go quite well though Peter kept glancing round as if he was looking for someone who wasn’t there.
Ants had run off. Maybe she thought Peter was a werewolf – or maybe she couldn’t stand still any longer. He’d never known such a fidget. And it was like she was obsessed with the kayak. Kept telling him that it was the best thing that had ever happened to her and that it was going to change her life.
When he asked why, she said it was the
water. It slowed her up, she said; she could feel it like she couldn’t feel air. It slowed her mind and gave her time to think.
Whatever.
Luke was beginning to wonder whether he was feeling quite okay.
Hendrike was carrying two pepper pots in the pockets of the large white linen apron she’d put on for the evening. Most people were offered a shake of pepper with her delicious soup: only the near neighbours of Drie Vrouwen were allocated the alternative – a personal cocktail of dried and powdered fungi that could produce a range of disabling reactions.
Some people assumed, with embarrassment, that they’d had too much to drink: others, that something they’d eaten had not been properly cooked. Suspicion had fallen on Luke’s sausages. Hendrike told people that she’d noticed they’d been lying open in his wheelhouse since Friday.
“In Holland, where I come from, we would keep them in a fridge.”
So that’s where you should have put them for him, thought Helen, hating her mother even more.
“Poor lad, he’s learning his lesson the hard way,” said someone who was kinder and not sick. “Who’s for a trip to the Lion when we’ve finished with the fireworks? Beer didn’t last long.”
“I don’t think I’m going to be able to drive us home,” Ants’s father gasped at her. His face was sweaty and he smelled of vomit. Helen could only pray that Hendrike had had enough sense left to be sparing in her doses.
“I want you to take my phone and ring your mother and say we’ll be staying here for the night. Can you do that Angela? She’s not to worry and we’ll be home in the morning. Young Luke and I are going to pool our sorrows.” That was a bad choice of word: his stomach heaved as he spoke.
***
The man who sang shanties wasn’t there. There was a boy who kept apologising and saying that he didn’t have a mother and he did like stories. There was another man who talked as if he was giving a history lecture. There was food which was hot and very good indeed. The witch-woman was offering soup. Peter knew better than to accept that.
Then the man and the boy had disappeared and the fireworks began. He hated fireworks: they stirred distant memories of gunfire. Bursts of killing in city squares, from the windows of houses and around street corners. Rockets which brought death with a whistle or mortar bombs which delivered it with a distant flash.
Peter hoped his new friends had taken shelter. He hurried back into the trees; you were always safer in a forest. The gunfire soon finished and he saw other people beginning to make their way along the path that led along the edge of the wood and beside the reed beds. Back towards the main road and the pub. He wondered whether they were refugees.
CHAPTER NINE
Bonfire Night III
Wednesday 5 November, fifth of the waning moon
Peter, Luke, Helen, Elsevier
The front gable of the pub was illuminated and the letters of its name cast soft shadows on the creamy plaster. Light leaked from behind the thick curtains of the downstairs bar; cars hurried past with their headlights blurring in the damp air. Some vehicles turned in to park; doors opened and shut; sounds spilled briefly onto the empty pavement.
Peter could only see the lion. It gleamed from the darkness, blood-red and menacing. He began to feel the motion of an unknown vessel, to hear the thud of cannon balls and to smell the acrid stink of gunpowder. The monstrous figurehead was bearing down on him. He must take cover.
A gust of laughter blew out from the saloon bar. There was someone making a speech, telling jokes, playing to an audience. Perhaps a recruiting officer whipping up enthusiasm for war? Peter trembled. He was an outcast, a sick man, haunted by old violence and treacheries, not fit to tell a story to a child. The boy had been right to run from him.
He couldn’t go near that door or risk being seen from the window. If he stepped out into the road again he would put himself within range of the warship.
There were firework displays in the nearby towns: shellbursts, rockets and small arms fire. Peter was trapped. He huddled backwards into a shadowed nook between the bow-window and the pub wall. He hunched down and pulled his fur coat round him. His blood was slow and fear felt very cold.
The last buses passed but didn’t stop. Cars became occasional. The distant fireworks subsided into drifting smoke. The speech-making from inside the pub had subsided into rhetorical questions and cheerful agreement. Peter began to wonder whether it was safe to move.
A fire engine came screaming by. It paused opposite the pub and turned left down the narrow lane towards the Fynn Creek moorings. Now people were running out from the open door, shouting to each other. Most crowded into cars. They too headed down the narrow lane.
Then all the lights went out.
Peter must take this chance. He must start back now to Ra’ or to his hut.
There was a dark shape immediately beside him. A flaring match beneath a broad brimmed hat. Another, smaller shape hurried across the road, pulling something.
Peter pressed himself against the wall. They had no idea he was here. A low trailer with wheels pushed up beneath the lion. A gun carriage?
Ropes thrown up and round. A muttered command. Both figures pulling. The lion toppling down and onto the limber.
It was captive.
Peter struggled for words. The war beast trussed and bound.
The two figures ran with the gun carriage as neatly as if they’d been trained. Peter followed. He’d lost the ability to think for himself.
There was a single lamp-post still burning on the bridge. A moment of high risk. Peter pressed himself into a prickly hedge and watched without understanding as the two figures paused to wrap a tarpaulin tightly round their prize. They tipped one end of the trailer up against the orange-tinted sky. The bundle slid from sight.
One figure ran on. The other…vanished.
Peter stood a while. He thought he might have had a dream. He wasn’t sure if the dream had been the sound of cannon or the dark shapes hauling down the war beast from the wall and dumping it. Maroosia was angry when cars were burned and abandoned beside her fields or sacks of rubbish left in gateways. He had found old cookers or fridges in the wood.
There were brambles in the hedge and blackthorn twigs. They clutched his fur like greedy fingers. By the time he had set himself free there were candles behind the windows of the pub and beams of torchlight questing in the car park. He should go back to his hut. Genia would not have been offered any supper. Genia was quite capable of getting supper for herself but she would not be pleased about this.
***
Luke and Mr Vandervelde were holding the high bulwarks of Lowestoft Lass. They were staring at the flames and wondering what to do.
It was hard to think clearly when every step made you want to topple over. Luke felt that his head and his body had got disconnected somehow. Lowestoft Lass’s friendly grey deck would every so often seem to tip sideways from under his feet and the griping stomach pains were so sudden and so…productive.
Fire. How could this be?
“You should stay in your cabin,” said the Dutch woman next door. “You’re no use here. I haf called the fire-fighters and you may prevent them from their work.”
“I’ll watch out,” said Angel, nervously. She couldn’t have done anything to cause this, could she? It was sort of the direction where she’d paddled that dinghy.
“I am telling my daughter to stay in the cabin. She will not be seen. I will not haf her in this danger.”
The fire was at the far end of the line of moored craft. One rogue firework, not properly ignited? A rocket perhaps, caught by rigging as it fell?
The beginnings of a breeze were blowing in the wrong direction.
“Buckets,” thought Luke. They were using buckets already.
“Does your…have a hose?” asked Mr Vandervelde, weakly. He was agitated and sweaty a
s well as sick.
“The fire is not coming here,” said their next door neighbour. “I make certain of it. You go away to your beds.”
She was gazing at the flames as if she was mesmerised. Angel could hear her muttering under her breath. Then she began to swing her arms forwards and upwards, almost as if she was conjuring.
Miss Grace had driven down from the farm in her Land Rover. She had never liked fireworks. They upset all the animals. And for what? So people could watch good money going up in smoke and run around in the dark like barbarians. Where was everyone who should be here? All gone drinking at the Lion.
She attached a long hose to the nearest of the standpipes. Luke followed dizzily as she stamped along the decking, unrolling the hose behind her. Mr Vandervelde stayed near the tap, holding on to it.
Their jet of water was a disaster.
“There’s petrol there!”
Petrol floats. The flames from the first dinghy were washed swiftly onto the next small vessel, a tiny wooden cruiser with a gas bottle in its aft locker. The bottle exploded.
Hendrike swelled with joy. Her research was exploding into life before her eyes. Fireships were the guided missiles of the seventeenth century. Manoeuvre them into position and let them to wreak havoc. The colour, the sound, the searing destructive power. She began to hyperventilate.
“Are you okay?” Angel asked her.
“Heilige vlammen! Kracht van der Leeuw!” She grasped the last rags of her sanity. “I go to the cabin. To calm my daughter.”
Now they needed to make a firebreak – a gap between the blazing small boats and the rest of the vessels. Miss Grace was untying warps, cutting them if necessary. Luke, Angel, Mr Vandervelde couldn’t get the un-burned boats away. The flood tide was still running, pushing them against the pontoon. Luke’s fingers were thumbs, his balance was precarious. Mr Vandervelde was retching uncontrollably.
Angel was bewildered: Miss Grace exasperated.
“We need to tow them off. I wish I had Margery here”