by JH Fletcher
Later that day he surprised her, head bowed, cheeks wet, cradling in her lap blue shards of broken pottery. It troubled him more than ever, but the moment passed.
2
Charles was six, seven, ten. He was one with the other boys, the town, at home within the only world he had known. The future claimed him in the bright-sailed fishing boats snubbing and rocking in the harbour.
Always — always — there was the sea. The indigo summer blaze of the waves, the grey winter storms, sank their salt fingers into his heart. Sanette watched, greyer than ever, helpless against the urgent life that was pushing her, remorselessly and inevitably, aside.
Wally Bart, the foreign soldier who had brought Colin to her, had survived the war. As he had said he would, he had married his Jeannine. The little shop had been flattened in Ludendorff’s last advance so they, too, had come to the coast where Wally, a farrier by trade, had found work with the local blacksmith. Always adaptable, he had picked up the lingo quickly. As an out-and-out foreigner for which he could, in time, be excused, he was more acceptable to the locals than Sanette, the Frenchwoman whom they believed considered herself a cut above the rest of them.
Wally and Jeannine were her only friends in a life that had come, more and more, to resemble a shrine to a man who would not have recognised himself had he turned up on the doorstep. She liked to talk about Colin as she had invented him and of the glorious times the four of them had shared amid the concussion of the shells.
‘Glorious times?’ Wally rubbed his chin. ‘Dunno ’bout that.’
Sanette would have it no other way. ‘How can it have been anything but glorious? It was the war that brought my Colin to me.’
And took him away again. But Wally knew when to keep his trap shut, on that subject at least.
‘How’s young Charlie going?’ he asked, to divert attention.
‘His name is Charl …’ Sanette very much on her dignity.
Wally was not to be intimidated. ‘His dad was a mate of mine,’ he said. ‘I know how he’d have said it. How much English does the kid speak, eh? I’ll tell you: not a word. What would he have had to say about that?’
Which pulled a snooty response. ‘Why should he need to speak English? This is France, and he is French.’
‘Half Aussie,’ Wally corrected her.
‘France is his home. I, myself, do not speak English. I wish him brought up French.’
It was a sentiment with which Jeannine, good Frenchwoman that she was, fully agreed. As she was inclined to do, she gave Wally a glare, which Wally, as he was inclined to do, ignored.
‘What’s the point of all this then?’ Gesturing at Colin’s photograph and the way Sanette chose to live her life. ‘Col was an Aussie. He spoke English. That time you first met him, he couldn’t speak a word of anything else. How can Charlie take after his dad if he don’ even speak his language?’
Later, Jeannine got after her husband for saying such things, but Wally was unrepentant.
‘Sanette’s got to make up her mind. Either she wants Charlie to grow up like his old man or she doesn’t. Hell,’ he said with mounting indignation, ‘he might even want to visit Oz himself one of these days.’
Jeannine looked fondly but pityingly at this foreign husband with his bull-like sensitivities. ‘That is why she does not wish to do it. She is afraid she may lose him. If he speaks only French, there will be less danger.’
‘Maybe. But Col’s got rights, too.’
‘Colin is dead.’
‘Not while I’m around he’s not.’
3
Eyes screwed up against the leaping brilliance of the flames, Charlie stared at the orange-glowing object Wally was hammering, tap-a-tap, twisting it this way and that in the pincers’ heavy claws. ‘What is it?’
‘Bit of iron.’
Tap. Tap.
‘Gunna be a boat, though. When it’s finished.’ Eyes fixed on the fire-red shape of the partially fashioned metal, Wally spoke in French, all flat vowels and kangaroos, then repeated it, deliberately, in English.
Charlie stared at him. ‘Qu’est-ce que vous dites?’
‘I said it’s gunna be a boat.’
‘I heard you. But afterwards?’
‘I said it again. In English.’
‘Why?’
‘Because you’re half Australian, and English is the language they speak in Australia.’
‘I am French.’ Challenging with Gallic force.
‘Only half.’ Tap, tap, tap, tap. ‘Course,’ casually, ‘maybe you’re not smart enough to learn.’ His brawny arm wiped sweat from his flame-shadowed face. ‘Is that the problem?’
Charlie was on his dignity at once. ‘There is no one to teach me.’
‘There’s me.’
Tap-a-tap. Tap-a-tap. Tap.
He soused it in a gush of hissing steam.
‘There you go …’
Charlie stared at the metal shape, black now, from which the heat still rippled. Wally’s words had made him uncomfortable and he was quick to criticise, if only to get his own back. ‘It doesn’t look much like a boat.’
‘But it will be.’
‘A real one?’
Wally laughed. ‘A model. But it’ll sail. Or should.’ And scuffed the boy’s head with his heavy hand.
‘Where will you sail it?’
‘Not me,’ Wally corrected him. ‘You.’
Charlie did not dare believe, although he wanted to. ‘You’re making this boat for me?’
‘Too right,’ Wally said in English. ‘You’d be doing me a favour,’ he added casually.
‘How?’
‘If you learnt English, we could speak it together, once you got the hang of it. There’s times I miss it. You could help me out.’
Charlie was tempted, but there was a problem. ‘I do not think my mother will like it.’
Exactly what Wally had hoped he would say. ‘Oh well, that’s it then. Mustn’t offend your mother, must we? Pity, though.’
Charlie was not just French, he was also a boy. ‘On the other hand —’
‘Leave it to you,’ Wally said.
That night Wally repeated the conversation to Jeannine, who was outraged.
‘How could you do such a thing? And behind Sanette’s back?’
‘You’d better warn her then.’ But grinned at her, knowing it was too late for warnings.
‘What are you up to?’
Wally was the picture of innocence. ‘Me?’
Jeannine did not believe him. To punish him, she went ahead and warned Sanette, as her wretched husband had suggested. Serve him right if Sanette pinned back his ears for him.
Predictably, Sanette was furious. She could not wait to get her son alone. ‘French is not good enough for you, is that it?’
Charlie was indignant. ‘I never said that!’
‘I forbid it! You hear? I forbid it!’
Which was all it took.
The next day, watching as the iron carcass of the model boat took shape in the forge, Charlie said, ‘This business of the English …’
Wally watched the boat and not the boy. ‘What about it?’
‘Will you really teach me?’
4
Wally finished the boat, planking the iron frame with strips of elm that he begged from a mate, fitting the mast and shrouds.
Knowing herself defeated, Sanette had already given up her opposition; as a reward, Wally asked her if she would help him by making the sails from his design.
‘God knows if it’ll work, though …’
It did. He taught himself to sail it first, then, after he’d got the hang of it, he taught Charlie. Saturday afternoons they went down to the harbour together, to sail their boat amid the fishing vessels. All the time they spoke English to each other, haltingly at first, then more easily, until, by the time Charlie reached his thirteenth birthday and the toy boat had become a thing of the past, his command of the language meant that conversations with Wally had long ceased to be
conducted in anything else.
The instruction did not stop at English. As soon as Charlie was fluent enough, Wally started to talk to him about his father: the real man rather than the creature of his mother’s imagination that was all Charlie had known before. He talked to him about Australia. One day he introduced him to the Cloud Forest.
‘The Cloud Forest? What’s that?’
‘Tell you the truth, I’m not entirely sure. It meant a lot to your dad, though.’
Charlie’s imagination was snared by the riddle of this unknown thing his father had brought with him all the way from Australia to the battlefields of France.
‘The Cloud Forest,’ he repeated with satisfaction. ‘It sounds well, but I do not understand what it means.’
‘It was a place he’d been to. But I reckon it was a lot more than that.’ Wally was floundering. ‘Reckon it was what kept him sane.’
Which was more perplexing than ever. ‘What do you mean, sane?’
‘Plenty of blokes went mad; all of us, maybe. It was the only way to survive: to cut loose from what was happening around you. If that’s what madness means,’ he offered, limp as old celery.
So that Charlie got onto that, too, and nothing would serve but that Wally should dredge up from their hiding place the memories he had wanted to bury forever, of the war and what it had been like for the men who had stood thigh deep in mud, in the endless-seeming trauma of bombardment, terror and death.
‘You weren’t ever clean,’ Wally said. It seemed a forlorn offering to set against the melodrama of shell and fire fights. ‘I remember that, most of all. You were covered in lice. There were huge rats. Bodies, everywhere. Stink. It got so you despised yourself for being alive.’
Charlie contemplated the incomprehensible, but was not to be distracted for long. ‘And the Cloud Forest?’
‘A place your dad discovered on top of some mountain in the north of Australia. It’s hot up there, tropical, but he told me this place was all ferns and streams and coolness, right up on top of this mountain. But, like I said, it wasn’t just the place, it was the idea of it that mattered to him.’
Charlie, struggling with thoughts that tangled him like ropes, could come up only with a question.
‘An idea of what?’
‘A place of magic, maybe. There were times when you needed a bit of magic.’
‘It sounds as though he found heaven.’
‘Dunno ’bout that.’ Wally shied nervously, uncomfortable with metaphysics. ‘But I know it was important to him.’
There Wally would have left it, but the mystery of the inexplicable had taken root in Charlie’s heart and was not to be dismissed. Again and again he returned to it, worrying it like a sore that would not heal, driving Wally half mad with his questions. There were times when a bloke wished he’d kept his mouth shut.
There was no one else in the small town to whom Charlie could talk about it. There was no library, not that Charlie was one for books. He tried the schoolmaster, who did not wish to discuss the absurdities that might exist — that very probably did exist — in a country so uncivilised and far away.
‘Cloud Forest?’ He spoke angrily, such ideas not permitted in Monsieur Gironde’s shuttered world. ‘How can you waste your time with such nonsense? When you are surrounded by the glories of France?’
Not that Monsieur Gironde was altogether surprised. What could you expect? A child with such a background? For which the mother, most emphatically, was to blame. Not that it stopped him taking it out on the boy. He set him to weed the cabbages in the schoolhouse’s vegetable garden, as a penance.
‘Perhaps that will keep your mind off such nonsense …’
Charlie, the hot sun burning the back of his neck, surreptitiously pulled out half a row of cabbage plants and decided he’d stumbled on something important. Monsieur Gironde had been so mad that there had to be something to Wally’s story. Not even the schoolmaster would have responded in such a way had the Cloud Forest not existed. For the first time he came to believe in its reality. He had believed before, but in the idea; it had excited him, providing a lead to the man whose sombre features stared from the parlour wall and who, until now, had been a nothing to whom reverence must nevertheless be paid. Now, he had knowledge. Monsieur Gironde had convinced him that the Cloud Forest was more than an idea: it really existed. It could be seen, and touched.
I can find my father there. I can go where he went. I too can stand amid the ferns and running water, in the silence of that far place.
How he would ever manage to do such a thing he had no idea, but the thought burnt like a flame in his mind, and did not go away.
In the meantime, however, he had a life to lead. Cloud Forests were all very well, but everyday concerns, inevitably, had priority.
There was retribution for the wilful destruction of the cabbage plants, for which Monsieur Gironde’s sister had had plans. ‘Such wickedness …’
There were the complications of growing up. His mother was no help. Sanette, so warm and earthy once, had dried and would not have talked to her son about such matters even if he’d had the courage to ask her about them. Instead, he explored the increasingly warm and exciting subject with Emil and Jean and a handful of other boys. With them he looked surreptitiously at girls. He enjoyed the consciousness of sin. They talked big to each other of what they had seen and knew, the dragons of their imagination leaping out of their eyes as they lied to each other about this, and this, and this …
There was a woman with a name, a well-earned name, some would have said. La Belle Babette was known in the fishing fleet. It was a name more flattering than deserved, Babette big rather than beautiful, with a body built to last. The gossips said it was just as well, the things she made it do.
Come evening, she patrolled the harbour — big woman, gaudy dress, yellow hair — laughing raucously with the fishermen as they brought ashore their baskets bright with fish. The younger men chatted her up, fancying their chances; the older ones spoke less, but with their sideways glances stripped the clothes from her pouting breasts.
Babette …
She lived in a rancid little shack by a stream, no more than a metre wide, that emptied over a brick weir into the harbour. It was a place of moisture and nettles, of rubbish chucked carelessly outside the door, of cool and fecund earth. To this place Babette returned, sometimes alone.
The boys spied on her. They didn’t see much: only the figure of this fisherman or that, blue-jerseyed arm about her waist. After the wooden door had banged shut, the boys crept close. They tried to peer through the keyhole but it had been stuffed up and all they got for their pains was the occasional sound of voices and laughter, and once what sounded like a quarrel.
They had barely time to hide before the door was flung open, projecting into the gathering darkness a flicker of candle flame, while Babette stood with hands on hips, figure black and ferocious against the light, and a scrawny man, older and smaller than her normal customers, scurried painfully on bare feet over the sharp-edged stones, his boots in his hand.
‘I told you I don’ do that.’ Babette’s voice followed him like a blare of trumpets.
She slammed the door, while in their hiding place the boys pretended to each other that they knew what she’d been talking about. The nudging elbows, the sniggers, fooled none of them; they all knew they’d have run a kilometre if she’d so much as looked at them.
One day she did.
Her latest visitor had left and Babette was alone. For some reason she had left the door ajar. Through the gap, the yellow light fell like a spear across the rubbish-strewn ground, the glint of water trickling over the slimed weir.
The boys looked at each other, round-eyed in the darkness. ‘Well?’
They nodded. They were scared but no one was going to admit it; now it had come to the point, they were more scared of not doing it, and of each other’s sneers.
‘Come on, then …’
They stole over the coarse grass t
owards the door. Each step took hours off their lives but they got there in the end. The shaft of light drew them closer. Again they looked at each other. All wanted to be the first to spy inside Babette’s shack; none of them wanted it. Charlie was the biggest, so it was his right and duty to go first. He eased forward and flipped an eyelash around the edge of the door.
‘Well?’ Emil’s whisper cut the darkness behind him.
‘Be quiet!’
‘See anything?’
‘No.’
Because he hadn’t dared look properly. All he had seen so far was the light and the door’s edge. No help for it; for the sake of his reputation, he couldn’t back off now. He took a deep breath and leant forward. The light fell across his face. He could see a chair, the corner of what looked like a bed, a dress hanging from a hook …
The door swung open. Babette, big and terrible, fists on hips as they had been when she had driven off the old man, stared down at him like a thousand ogres.
He would have run but fear paralysed him. Babette’s meaty arm lifted him upright as easily as picking an apple off a tree.
‘What do we have here?’ Babette asked the night.
Behind him Charlie heard a scuttle and rush of feet as the others fled.
‘Shoved off, have they?’ Babette’s voice matched her dreadful appearance. ‘Left you to face the music?’
‘I was just passing —’ Charlie said.
‘And thought you’d take a quick squint at me while you were doing it?’
Babette laughed, suddenly and unexpectedly, and the next moment had taken her hand from his collar. Charlie was free. His instinct was to run; his feet had already started moving when Babette grabbed him again, once more laughing her rich and fruity laugh.