The Best Australian Stories

by Black Inc.

  She, of course, was wide-awake, having lounged all day in her cabin.

  The next morning she got up at six-thirty and supervised the breakfast team. Soon her hair hung in damp tendrils from the rising steam, and the smell of hot bacon fat clung to her clothes. The plates were no sooner empty than the kids bolted outside, out into the grey English light. All morning a drizzling rain fell across their faces and the day seemed endless, but by eleven she was mustering the lunch team and before long it was dinner again. Tom supervised the working of the canals and operating the locks; she ran the kitchen with the kids on roster and they cooked up a storm.

  On the morning of the third day they glided into the dock of a small market town, a grim settlement of iron footbridges and tall black chimneys, and she and a party went on a shopping expedition to buy fresh food and an adequate frying pan. With a decent frying pan, she explained, you could cook almost anything, and she found herself drifting deep into a relaxed discourse on the properties of heat and cast iron, and the kids humoured her by feigning interest. It was another dull, chilly morning with a threatening bank of grey cloud in the sky and they pulled their beanies down low over their foreheads so that they looked like a tribe of alien dwarfs. Soon they found a shop that sold cabbages, cauliflower and kale and, to her amazement, a small quantity of zucchini. At another she bought three bottles of chocolate sauce to be hidden away for a special occasion. The kids wanted to know why she bought so many vegetables and she told them it was an Australian custom.

  *

  One morning, as she stood at the sink bench with her back to them, unwrapping the sliced bread for the breakfast toast, she found herself smiling at the punchline of an obscene joke she was pretending not to have heard, and she realised that in just a few days she had become comfortable with them, and they with her. There were two especially, Yusuf and Ruth, who had become her lieutenants in the kitchen, both able to anticipate and direct the others. Ruth was black, had a wild falsetto voice and amused them all by yapping out an unending stream of profane commentary. She appeared to have no concentration whatsoever but her air of insouciant incompetence proved to be deceptive, for she exuded a natural authority that made the others jump. This meant she could be left in charge of the kitchen, or what passed for one, at least for short spells. Yusuf was a quiet, conscientious boy with sad eyes who worked with intense and methodical concentration, as if the least mistake would see him consigned to Hell. And then there was Terry. Terry was another black kid with whom she had struck up a kind of bantering camaraderie as he made sporadic raids on the kitchen, at Tom’s instigation, for supplies for ‘outdoors’. He was big for his age, a muscular boy with a swaggering demeanour and a dark glare of ferocity in his eyes which, in another place and at another time, might not be good news. Already, at thirteen, he had been up before a children’s magistrate on a charge of grievous bodily harm. But for now he was Tom’s lieutenant on the cut. One night Terry confided in her that his surname was Nelson and that his parents, in all seriousness, had christened him ‘Admiral’. ‘But anyone call me that, Miss, they get a buncha fives.’ At some point in his childhood – ‘dunno when’ – he had re-named himself Terry, and since he refused to answer to anything else the name had stuck. Thereafter she could not help but think of him as The Admiral, and it became a joke between her and Tom, a rare joke for the privacy of the bat cave.

  As for the others in her kitchen, these were her foot soldiers. They worked with varying degrees of competence and liked to lose themselves in chopping and stirring or in trying to remember exactly how to set a formal table: ‘Which way do the knives go again, Miss?’ (meaning, do the blades turn in or out?). They were thirteen and still wearing the last traces of their childhood grace: in another two years – less – they would be fully in the grip of their hormonal demons. But as they worked now over the sink or the chopping boards they breathed in an oasis of calm. The girls gossiped about bands and fashion; the boys talked endlessly of football. They told her about their lives, about their custody arrangements and which parent they got on with best (those who were lucky enough to see both). Some boasted of older brothers with convictions, embroidering the feats of gangs in their area. There was a casual violence in their lives (‘Yeah, well, he gets a bit carried away, my dad’) which bled into the landscape of their jokey narratives, and they swore at one another with habitual venom. Tom had described them as little bastards in the classroom yet they were prepared to work hard on the locks, scampering from barge to embankment in their earnest efforts to assist him. They seemed almost touchingly determined to get it right, and on those occasions when they mucked up were abashed with contrition. Away from home they were surprisingly generous and forgiving, as if, in that temporary capsule on the water, they could suspend their grievances, pack away their resistances and sail on; enlightened pilgrims who had left their burdens behind in the old country. Of course, they were still in the old country, but they were on the water, and being on the water made it different. From Tom’s stories it seemed that in the classroom they were like caged animals; tormentors. Out of it they were gracious, mature, forgiving and funny – but only, she knew, on the boat. Off the boat it would be different – they would be skiving off for cigarettes and alcohol and any drugs they could afford, or steal. But the narrow boat was like a floating desert island. Here on the cut their space was finite, their roles were defined, their options few. And yet they were happy. And why? Because for a short time they formed a community; they belonged to the boat. For ten days they were water gypsies, living with a horizon that was always, but slowly, moving.

  Often enough she escaped from the kitchen to amble with them along the tow paths, and when they began to bicker dangerously she would distract them with hair-raising tales from the Australian bush, a landscape they imagined as more perilous than any remote planet and teeming with lethal wildlife. Her shark stories went down particularly well, not that she had ever seen a shark outside of an aquarium – nor did she know anyone who had – and she realised that in her tales she was constructing a mythical landscape, like something from Gulliver’s Travels, or The Water Babies. Some other world that was hot, white and ferocious. She also guessed that this proximity to the monstrous would enhance her mystique, and with it her authority.

  Sometimes the scene by the tow path was bucolic, with local boys fishing by the canal, a church spire in the distance or a quaint early pumphouse with dome and Ionic columns, and a water mill beside. In other parts they glided through a landscape of iron bridges and tall brick chimneys; the water stained a metallic orange from mine seepage, the dour Gas Street Basin in Birmingham and, later, the giant cooling towers of a power station flaring into the sky. She liked both landscapes, was entranced by their strangeness: so different from the wide plains and the diamond-white light of home. She even became resigned to the weather, the unexpected beauties of the English gloom. The gates and beams of the locks were painted in tar and white-washed to make them visible in fog. On one misty day their ghostly outlines loomed up ahead with a kind of eerie beauty that made her think of hobgoblins, and later that evening from out of the fog she saw the startling image of an eye painted on the bow of a strange boat, gliding into her vision like some disembodied Cyclops.

  Not surprisingly, on the first night of fog the kids wanted to have a séance. At first Tom was dismissive and scoffed at them. Then to her surprise he relented and let them fiddle about with a glass for an hour, but they talked and fidgeted too much to be able to spook themselves, to generate any satisfying frisson. And because he had worked them hard, they were tired. At curfew they collapsed into their bunks with barely a murmur of protest.

  Not long after, she and Tom embraced avidly in the gloom, their bodies rocking on the hard floor while the smells from outside wafted in over their skin … diesel from off the oily water … fresh-cut grass by the embankment … the dank, alluring smell of moss along the stone coping. In the early hours of the morning the wind came up so that the narrow boa
t began to knock against the brick walls of the canal … and she woke, and listened with a sense almost of enchantment.

  On the Wednesday there was some kind of scuffle on the bank between Yusuf and a kid named Joel. She had taken an instinctive dislike to Joel, a weedy little smart alec who sniffed all the time. There was something about him that got under her skin, his ratty little body, his sour, acrid smell, the way his hair stood up in unwashed spikes. He seemed always to be following her around, mimicking her accent and forcing on her his clumsy attentions so that she had to restrain herself from giving him a shove. That morning Joel had spat on Yusuf and the two of them grappled and slipped together all the way down the grass to the edge of the water. Tom had to stop abruptly while halfway through turning the lock and in the act of looking away cut his thumb badly on a piece of loose tin. He swore and shouted at the two boys as he strode toward them, muttering as blood oozed from the gash. She half expected this incident to stir them all up into factional warfare, to render them seething and unmanageable. But no. Abashed at Tom’s discomfort, shamed by his stoic patience (wary, as well, of the black look in his eye that underwrote that patience), they tiptoed around for the rest of the day and tried to make it up to him.

  Later in the bat cave Kirsten expressed her surprise at this display of contrition. ‘I thought they were supposed to be hard cases,’ she whispered as they lay on their sleeping bag in the dark.

  ‘They are.’ He sighed. ‘I think it’s the boat. They haven’t been half as much trouble as I feared they might be. The boat seems to be having a soothing effect on them.’

  Yes, she thought. It was the flow. The endless flow.

  ‘Also,’ he added, ‘it’s their age. In another year, they’ll be impossible. Terminal cynicism will have set in.’

  ‘I won’t come next year,’ she said, laughing.

  ‘Neither will I.’

  On Good Friday it was her birthday and, as it happened, Terry’s birthday as well. Tom had told the kids and they organised a surprise party. Tom bought a cake at the little town where they stopped the day before and they hid it under Ruth’s bunk. After dinner – spaghetti bolognese at Terry’s request and a Caesar salad (or what passed as one) for her – she and Terry blew the candles out together. There were ten candles, though he was fourteen and she twenty-three. Then the kids presented her with a gift bought from a whip-around of their pocket money. It was a small pyrex casserole dish with blue cornflowers on it because she was ‘such an ace chef’. At this point Tom allowed himself an ironic smirk and she knew exactly what he was thinking. Then one of the smallest and, at school, most troublesome of the boys, Patrick, a scrawny boy with protuberant ears, stood up from his bench and leapt onto the table. The cutlery went flying in all directions and a bowl fell to the floor and broke but no-one seemed to care, least of all Tom. With a half smile of anticipation he was looking up at Patrick, who had broken out into a wild patter, a kind of high ululating sound, half yodelling, half keening, as if he were speaking in tongues. In fact he was mocking them, mocking them all in a semi-coherent rant of cruel mimicry. It seemed he had prepared for this moment (with Tom’s collusion?) spraying his words over their heads like verbal confetti. And when this went down well he launched into his Elvis impersonations, and he was such a natural, so manically gifted in either mode, that they all surged as one to the edge of hysteria, drunk with laughter. Two of the rowdier boys scruffed one another and began to whoop and bray, while the more self-conscious boys like Yusuf shook quietly and blushed at their own mirth. Kirsten laughed so hard she had a coughing fit, while around her the exuberant girls, led by Ruth, clutched one another and shrieked so piercingly that the drab narrow boat seemed to vibrate into the stillness of the countryside. Even Tom guffawed into his beard.

  Curfew was approaching and Kirsten wanted to do something; it was unthinkable that after such a good time they should all just fall into their bunks without ceremony. She stood up and rummaged around for the new frying pan, and the chocolate sauce she had stashed away, and she set about making flapjacks for supper. At the first sight of these the kids swooped on her, and the mixing and the pouring and the frying seemed to take forever, because of course there were so many of them, and they wanted to eat and eat and eat; wanted the night to go on and on until they were comatose with a fullness they rarely felt.

  When Patrick’s turn came he dipped his fingers into the sauce and daubed his face in brown chocolate streaks, flapping his arms and legs and whooping around the cabin like a lithe little demon.

  *

  Their last night.

  It had been a hard day on the locks and the kids were subdued, almost sombre. ‘They know they’re going home,’ Tom muttered, as he settled into the sleeping bag, ‘and they’re not looking forward to it.’

  Jesus, I am, she thought. She was looking forward to a hot shower. But the kids seemed to be in another space altogether. A few of them were sullen, angry even at the prospect of having to leave the boat.

  In the middle of the night she was woken by a tap on the door. Tom was a heavy sleeper. He didn’t stir. ‘Who is it?’ she called in a pronounced whisper.

  ‘It’s Ruth, Miss. It’s Joel. He’s acting all funny.’

  When she entered the main cabin she couldn’t see the boy at first and shone her torch into the corner behind the table. There was Joel, curled up in a foetal ball on the damp floor, keening in a low, shivering moan.

  In a dismissive gesture she patted Ruth on the shoulder and nodded in the direction of the bunks at the far end. Then she moved towards the boy.

  ‘What’s the matter, Joel?’

  The boy looked through her.

  Again she asked, and again, but he would not reply, nor would he respond to her requests that he return to his bunk. Even when she crouched beside him and looked directly into his eyes he continued to stare ahead with a glazed expression, his arms locked around his sides. It occurred to her then that she should wake Tom, that the situation might be beyond her, but Tom had a long drive ahead of him the next day and it was worth at least one more try. So she began quietly, so the others couldn’t hear, to talk coaxingly to Joel; about the trip, about what a good time they had all had and how it was a pity to spoil it now, about how, whatever was bothering him, he could talk to Tom in the morning and she was sure that Tom would be able to help in some way. All the while she could feel the chill from the damp floor-boards rising up through the soles of her feet, through the thin skein of her thermals and into the small of her back. Her feet were turning numb. Damn this kid, she thought. She would try a more forceful approach and if that didn’t work she would have to send Ruth for Tom. Squatting on her haunches she grabbed hold of his arms and attempted awkwardly to raise him to his feet, but with a sudden jerk he twisted to one side and then fell back against the wall of the cabin so that his head made a dull thud against the wood. For a second or two he lay there and then, like a puppet, he sat up as if in shock, with one hand held gingerly to his head.

  Kirsten was relieved to see that he was conscious. ‘Will you get back into your bunk now, Joel?’

  The boy shook his head.

  This was too much. ‘Ruth!’ she hissed. ‘Bring me the blankets off his bunk.’

  Soon two outstretched arms were handing her a mound of grey blankets, disgusting army-ration serge for those without sleeping bags. She disentangled a blanket from the pile and laid it across Joel.

  What now? She couldn’t possibly leave him here like this. There was only one thing to do and that was to snuggle into the corner against him and draw the other blanket around her.

  The boy made no resistance. Indeed, he had become calm. Before long his breathing slowed and deepened and she knew he was asleep.

  Good, she thought, and allowed herself a slow exhaling sigh. Thank you. Thank you, God. It was their very last night and all they had to do was get through it without further mishap. There were so many things that could have gone wrong, and hadn’t, and she had played her part w
ell, all things considered, all natural obstacles taken into account … and with this thought she settled beneath the blanket, her head drooped and she began a slow drifting into sleep, but not before she caught a glimpse of herself as a figure from one of those sentimental prints of the kind that had hung in her great-grandmother’s house. ‘Young maiden comforts orphan in the night’.

  And she felt almost virtuous. She was cold, she was uncomfortable but she had done a good deed.

  What woke her was the sound of the splash.

  It wasn’t loud, but instantly she knew what that sound meant. She opened her eyes and glanced instinctively to her left where Joel had been sleeping, but the corner of the boat was empty. As she flung back the sliding door of the cabin she shouted, ‘Tom! Tom!’ and glanced hastily up and down the narrow deck. Then she saw him, a shadowy figure flailing in silence by the edge of the lock and seeming to sink before her eyes. ‘Tom!’ she shouted again, and at the moment of shouting leapt from the deck of the barge.

  The icy shock of the water rose up through her blood like voltage.

  Later it would seem as if at that moment she were lifted off the deck by some blind force, for she had no sense of agency, of any operation of will. She simply leapt into the black water and grabbed hold of the lump that was rising up to the surface. At first she thought Joel might be unconscious but the minute she grasped hold of him he began to howl and writhe. Fortunately he was puny, but he bit her on the left hand so that for a moment she lost her grip and had to struggle – treading water all the time – to lock her right arm around his skinny neck. And still Joel fought her, lashing out with his feet. It was a full moon, and an eerie lambent glow bathed the canal and surrounding fields in a ghostly sepia gloom. Those few moments when they thrashed around in the dark chill of the English countryside seemed like an eternity until, in a sudden moment of apprehension, she understood that the boy wanted to die.