When Louise looked at her watch and said, “Imagine if Whiskey knew what we were doing,” Charlie knew something was wrong, but when she undid his belt and put her hand inside his boxer shorts, he didn’t care, he didn’t care. The feeling of Louise’s hand wrapped around his penis was so intense, so consuming, that he didn’t even care when the door opened and he saw Whiskey standing there, with Claire behind him.
“Don’t stop, it doesn’t matter,” Charlie groaned, feeling himself only seconds from ejaculating. But as soon as the door was closed, Louise pulled her hand away and, seeing the look on her face, Charlie understood what he had taken part in.
It had all been for Whiskey. Louise wasn’t interested in Charlie at all. Now that Whiskey had caught her with Charlie, caught her going farther than she had with him, Charlie might as well have not existed. She didn’t even look at him while she put on her bra and straightened her clothes. Charlie didn’t care that he’d been set up, that Louise had used him. Those twenty minutes he had spent with her had been the best twenty minutes of his entire life. What he couldn’t stand was that this moment, this triumph, was not his own. That even when he had overtaken Whiskey, it was Whiskey who had helped him to do it, so the triumph, as always, was Whiskey’s.
Echo
In the lead-up to their departure from England, Charlie had convinced himself that somehow, in Australia, where everything was upside down, there would be some kind of role reversal in which suddenly he, Charlie, would become the popular one, the funny one, the one everyone remembered, and Whiskey would be the one left on the sidelines. Part of him knew it was nothing but wishful thinking, but another part of him clung to it. It was what pulled him through those months before they left England, months in which most of his childhood was donated to charity and what was left was packed into cardboard boxes, ballast for the ship that would take them to Melbourne.
x x x
The Spirit of the Deep sailed from Southampton on a September day so glorious it made Charlie’s father wonder out loud why they were leaving.
“It’s like this every day in Australia,” their mother reminded them, but it did not make them feel any better as they stood on the deck, watching England slide away.
“Let’s go and find our room—get settled before dinner,” their mother suggested.
“They’re not rooms, Elaine. They’re cabins,” Charlie’s father said.
The stairwells and walkways were crowded with people, all heading in the same direction. Charlie traipsed behind his parents, thinking of the Titanic, wondering how they would ever find their way back to the deck if the ship were to sink.
“We must be beneath the waterline now,” Charlie’s father said excitedly when they reached C deck.
“One more floor to go!” their mother said in her fake cheerful voice.
“One more deck, Elaine, one more deck.”
“I thought only the luggage was underwater,” Charlie muttered to Whiskey.
“And the animals.” Whiskey smirked.
“Here we are!” their mother said at last, opening the cabin door.
Charlie peered inside. There were two sets of bunk beds separated by a miniature washbasin, and a tiny wardrobe between the end of the beds and the door. Charlie doubted whether there was enough space for all four of them to stand up simultaneously.
Their father ducked through the door, closely followed by Whiskey. “Port or starboard, Whiskey?” he said, gesturing to the bunks.
“Which is which?” Whiskey asked, climbing up a little ladder to claim one of the top bunks.
“Hell if I know!”
“I didn’t realize the windows would be covered up,” Charlie’s mother said, sitting on one of the bottom bunks.
“Portholes,” Bill corrected her.
“Since when do you know so much about boats?”
“It’s a ship, Elaine, not a boat.”
“Why couldn’t we fly to Melbourne, like normal people?” Whiskey said.
“This is the experience of a lifetime,” their mother said, as if she was quoting the brochure, but she did not sound entirely convinced.
There was a knock at the door. A man in a burgundy uniform stepped into the already overcrowded cabin. “I’m your steward, Sanju,” he said, smiling. “I’m here to make your journey comfortable, so please don’t hesitate to ask me if there’s anything you need: sheets or towels, a cup of tea or coffee. I have a little galley halfway along this corridor. You’ll find me there most of the time. Do you have any questions so far?”
“How many passengers are on board, Sanju?” Charlie’s father asked immediately. Charlie couldn’t remember the last time he had seen his father so excited.
“Two thousand three hundred, sir, give or take a few.”
“Where’s the bathroom?” Charlie asked. He didn’t need to go to the bathroom, but he didn’t think he could stand to spend another minute crammed inside that cabin. He’d had enough of his family already. He wondered if it was possible to develop instantaneous claustrophobia.
x x x
Charlie was woken by the ship’s PA system, belting out a jaunty hornpipe. The cabin was pitch-black.
“Why are they playing that bloody music in the middle of the night?” Charlie heard his father say from the bunk below.
Charlie turned on his reading light, looked at his watch. “It’s six o’clock,” he said.
“Why are they waking us up so early?” Whiskey groaned.
Whiskey, like their mother, was not a morning person.
“Breakfast, I suppose,” Bill said, already wide-awake, rolling out of bed and standing up, his face appearing suddenly next to Charlie.
“Why would we want to eat breakfast at six o’clock?”
“Well, there’s two thousand people, aren’t there? We can’t all have breakfast at once. Someone has to be in the first sitting,” Bill said cheerfully.
“Why us?” Whiskey complained.
“Because we’re in the cheap seats, boys. That’s the way the mop flops. Now up you get. It takes so bloody long to get there—if we don’t look lively, all the bacon will be gone.”
Charlie slid down from his bunk, landing in the suitcase his dad had dragged out from beneath the bottom bunk.
“Watch out, Charlie!”
“Shhh,” his mother said, clamping the miniature pillow over her head.
Charlie clambered out of the suitcase, struggled into jeans and a T-shirt in the cramped space at the end of his bunk.
“I wonder what the weather’s going to be like,” Bill said, rummaging through his suitcase.
“It’s a cruise, Dad. It’s sunny every day,” Whiskey said sarcastically, pulling on yesterday’s clothes without getting out of his bunk.
“What about Mum?” Charlie asked when they had finished shuffling around each other.
“She’ll live,” Bill said.
x x x
“Where do you think we are, then?” Whiskey asked his dad when they went out on the promenade deck after breakfast.
“We’d be somewhere along the French coast, I suppose, heading for the Bay of Biscay.”
“I didn’t realize it would be so cold,” Charlie said.
“That Atlantic breeze is certainly nippy,” Bill said.
“I wish I’d brought my sweater up.”
“Well, go down and get it.”
“I can’t be bothered,” Charlie said. “It takes too long.”
“You’re right about that,” his father said. “By the time you get back, the sun will be out, and you won’t need it anymore. It’d be handy if we could communicate with your mother—get her to bring us something warm—if she ever emerges.”
“Maybe they’ll let you use the PA system,” Whiskey joked.
“We could do with your old walkie-talkies,” their dad suggested.
“Do we even have them anymore?” Whiskey asked Charlie.
“I doubt it,” Charlie said. “I don’t remember packing them, anyway.”
“Your mum probably threw them out years ago, knowing her.”
“Bummer,” Whiskey said. “They would have been great.” He made a crackling sound, held an imaginary walkie-talkie to his mouth. “Deck to cabin Delta 12. Sweater required urgently, over.”
Charlie laughed, crackled back. “Delta 12 to deck. Can you repeat that command? Over.”
“Sweater,” Whiskey said. “Sierra—Whiskey—Echo—Apple—”
“Alpha,” Charlie corrected him.
“Whatever.” Whiskey shrugged. “Sierra—Whiskey—Echo—Alpha. What’s ‘T’?”
“Tango.” Charlie didn’t even have to think about it.
“Tango—Echo.” Whiskey stopped again.
“Romeo,” Charlie finished for him.
“SWEATER. Roger that. Over and out!”
They laughed.
Bill looked mystified. “I never did understand how you boys managed to remember that gibberish.”
x x x
It did not take many days for Charlie and Whiskey to exhaust the ship’s entertainments: at fifteen, they were too old for the children’s activities and too young for the adults’. Once the novelty had worn off, Charlie grew tired of swimming, and of table tennis, which Whiskey almost always won. They had watched Ferris Bueller’s Day Off in the ship’s cinema so many times that they could quote entire scenes verbatim. They had even worked their way through the board games in the lounge, Yahtzee, Monopoly, and Guess Who?, games they had long since outgrown but that filled a few hours in which they had nothing better to do.
Charlie tracked their progress on a map so small that their entire journey was barely longer than his index finger. Through the blue-black reaches of the Atlantic they crawled, following the coast of Portugal as it curved toward the Mediterranean Sea, through the Strait of Gibraltar and south of Sicily to Crete, where they spent the day. Then there was the slow and eerie journey through the narrow Suez Canal into the Red Sea, a day in Djibouti, and then at last into the Indian Ocean.
From Djibouti to Perth, Western Australia, took a whole week, seven long days in which there was nothing to see from the promenade deck except water and sky, water and sky, and if it weren’t for the huge waves, slapping relentlessly against the hull of the ship, Charlie would have sworn they weren’t moving at all. The deck was bare, the dining room empty; everyone was seasick, sweating and moaning in their cabins until the whole ship smelled of vomit and disinfectant. Charlie found himself curiously immune to the rough seas, wandering the stairwells and walkways alone, wondering if they would ever see land again.
One day Sanju took pity on him and led him off for an unofficial tour of the bridge.
“Ask how deep it is,” their father said from his bunk when he found out where Charlie was going. Even in the midst of his seasickness, he was still collecting facts about the voyage.
Charlie could have spent all day in the control room. He was fascinated by the navigational instruments, the vast panel of buttons and switches and levers, the screens that flashed and beeped constantly, continually updating their speed, their latitude and longitude, the temperature of the air outside, and the surface temperature of the water, the direction and speed of the wind. When Charlie asked about the depth, the first officer showed him the echo sounder equipment, explained how it sent a beam of sound through the water to the ocean floor and gauged the distance by the time it took the echo of that sound to return.
“Tell your dad,” he said, “that the deepest part of the Indian Ocean is the Java Trench, four and a half miles deep, give or take a few feet.”
x x x
Lying in his bunk that night, listening to the drone of the engine, Charlie remembered something his history teacher, Mr. Carr, had said on the first day of the school term the year before.
“Battle of Hastings, what was the date?” he had asked before they had even opened their notebooks. Hands had gone up cautiously, dreading the outcome; surely they weren’t getting tested on the first day of term.
“Henry the Eighth’s wives: What were their names? How did he get rid of them?” Hands went up; hands went down.
“Who. Thinks. That. Makes. History?”
There was a sigh of relief. All hands went down. Not a test—a rhetorical question. In fact, not even a question but a paragraph, each word a separate sentence, with the same meaning: how little you know. Mr. Carr rolled the blackboard down to reveal the quote he had written there, read it aloud to make sure no one missed it: “History is nothing more than the thin thread of what is remembered, stretched out over the ocean of what has been forgotten.”
“Until you understand that,” Mr. Carr said, “you’ll never be a historian.”
Charlie had written it down, because he was that kind of student, and on that ship, so far out to sea that there was not a single thing on the horizon in any direction, he remembered it and understood it for the first time. And as they crossed the Tropic of Capricorn, Charlie became a historian of his own life. Surrounded by twenty-eight million square miles of water, Charlie spun the thread of what he wanted to remember and discarded the rest. Into the endless ocean went all the things he wanted to forget, right back to the moment of his birth, so afterward he would refuse to allow himself to remember the fact that defined him—that it was Whiskey who was born first. Over the side of the ship he threw the runner-up rosette he had been wearing for fifteen years, imagined it sinking to the depths, spinning slowly in the great darkness until it reached the ocean floor, miles below.
The ship was a no-man’s-land. It was neither the past, nor the future, no longer England, and not yet Australia, but a buffer zone between the two—exactly the place for Charlie to effect his transformation. Lost at sea, he found himself, the all new Charlie Ferns: rebel, daredevil, joker.
x x x
Due to an administrative glitch, Charlie was placed in the grade below Whiskey at their new school in Melbourne, so their mother went early with them on the first day to straighten things out. They were ushered in to see Mr. Balzarelli, whom the secretary called the principal and their mother referred to as the headmaster. Balzarelli was a short, balding man who was overfamiliar with their mother and not nearly apologetic enough for the mistake that had been made. His excuse was that they had never had twins at the school before and that the secretary, who was not the shiniest apple on the tree, had been confused by the paperwork. He winked at their mother as he said this, but their mother, who had been more tense than usual since they arrived in Australia, did not look impressed. Balzarelli changed tack then, saying that though they were now definitely in the same year, they had been assigned to different homerooms. He explained that they always separated siblings in order to promote a bit of healthy competition on sports days and the like. Whiskey rolled his eyes at this; their mother said nothing. There was a brief, awkward silence, and then outside the office, Charlie heard a siren wail.
“Thar she blows,” Balzarelli said with visible relief, and he stood up to shake their mother’s hand.
x x x
“Mum gave Balls-of-Jelly a hard time, didn’t she?” Whiskey asked when they caught up after the first two classes.
“What?”
“The principal, Balzarelli.”
Charlie laughed.
“What was your homeroom like?” Whiskey asked.
“It was okay,” Charlie said. He had always gone to a school where he knew at least half the students in his grade, and he had felt awkward and self-conscious through every minute of his first two hours at this new school.
“How was yours?” he asked Whiskey.
“The usual crap,” Whiskey said, as though he started new schools all the time, as though he were some hardened serial expellee. “They
made me stand up and introduce myself.”
“Did they ask you why you moved to Australia?”
“Yep.” Whiskey laughed. “I told them it was because my dad was having an affair.”
“You’re such a dick, Whiskey. Why did you say that?”
“What did you want me to say? My dad got offered a great job; it was a momentous step in his thrilling career as a boilermaker and an exciting opportunity for our whole family. I’m sure no one wants to hear that crap. So who’s your homeroom teacher?” he asked, changing the subject.
“Mrs. Blighty,” Charlie said sullenly.
“What does she teach?”
“She’s the librarian. Why? Who’s yours?”
“Miss Kemp. She’s the phys ed teacher.”
Charlie noticed he said phys ed, not PE, which was what they’d always called it before. Charlie made a mental note to add to his collection: elastic bands were lackies, sunglasses were sunnies, phys ed was PE.
“Apparently she’s a lemon,” Whiskey added.
“What’s a lemon?” Charlie asked.
“A lezzo, a dyke—that’s what they call it.”
“Who told you that?”
“A guy in my homeroom. Asked if I wanted to go up to the football field at lunchtime, kick a footy around with his mates.”
“They play soccer?” Charlie asked hopefully.
“Aussie Rules.”
“But we don’t know how to play Aussie Rules.”
Whiskey & Charlie Page 4