Getaway

by John Harris

  Rosa sat peeling potatoes on the after deck with Frankie, who was nominally in charge of the ship, for Joe and Willie Keeley were still below, having spent half the night on deck in a rain squall repairing the main boom which had cracked when the Tina had got the wind on the wrong side of her and gybed, almost sweeping the indignant Joe into the dark water alongside.

  Bitterly aware that odd jobs had never had a habit of cropping up while the Tina had been quietly gathering weeds at the wharfside in Sydney, the old man lay back on the iron bed in the cabin below, chewing a match, all he had to replace his long-vanished cigarettes, and watched the bright pattern made on the deckhead as the sun slanted up off the surface of the water and shone through the port in patches. He thought gloomily of how he had had to crawl out of the blankets in the darkness to saw a plank into strips and lash them round the cracked spar in a splint until it could be replaced, fighting against the buffeting of the spray which, every time the Tina had plunged her snout into the ink-dark seas, had whipped over in low vicious curves that rattled like hail against a jib wind-driven to the hardness of a sheet of metal, chilling him to the marrow and making his face raw with salt water. He had finally lost his temper with the job, he remembered, for too many years of laziness had taken away his native fortitude, and the derisive smile on Willie Keeley’s face at his fumbling had infuriated him.

  He studied the baroque and not very accurate front-porch barometer which had shared pride of place with Georgie’s picture ever since Joe had stamped ashore in a half-drowned fury after being caught beyond Sydney Heads in an unexpected gale that had stripped the canvas from the Tina’s poles, and noted with satisfaction that it had risen a couple of points. As he climbed sullenly out of bed, he wished their ancient wireless set, whose flat batteries could pump out only a breathy wheeze, were able to cheer him with a little dance music to sing to, and, dragging on his shirt, his fingers still aching from the previous night’s work, he heaved himself on deck.

  “Nice job you made of it, Pop,” Frankie said immediately, indicating the spar.

  “I don’ do it,” Joe growled. “Mister Willie fix it. I don’ see so good, so he take the serving mallet off-a me and do it for me.”

  His eyebrows performing gyrations on his forehead, he peered at the cracked boom and picked at the tallow he had applied. Willie’s lashing, though inexpert, was secure.

  “Mama,” he said in grudging tones. “That kid is a born sailor. We are only a few weeks out and he is taking the jobs off me.”

  “I saw him do the shrouds two days ago,” Frankie put in. “He got ’em in a knot like a Queensland hitch at first but he sorted it out in the end.”

  “When we set off,” Joe went on, “it is Joe Salomio who is doing all-a work while he stand around like Lord Tom-a-Noddy and smoke cigarettes like he don’ want to spoil his fancy suit. Now he does all-a work and I stand around.” He patted the splinted spar. “It is all done up good just like rabbit-stew. It wasn’t his fault she gybe.”

  “She wouldn’t-a gybed if I’d had her,” Frankie boasted.

  “We wouldn’t-a keep having to stop talking if you don’ keep interrupting,” Joe said without turning his head. “It could happen to anybody. It might happen to me. But he learns fast. I think we are lucky in some ways. If we’re going to do this crazy thing, at least it’s good to have someone young and strong with us.” He paused thoughtfully. “But I don’ like this trouble of his. You think he has any more guns and things?” He closed one eye at Rosa, crooked his forefinger and pulled an imaginary trigger once or twice.

  “Think he has, Mama?” Frankie looked up, full of hopeful anticipation.

  “I know he hasn’t.” Rosa picked up another potato. “I’ve been through all his pockets. I found a knife – a home-made one – and threw it overboard. He hasn’t said nothing.”

  “A knife?” Frankie sat back. “Mama, has he got any more of them things? If he’s in trouble with the police, shouldn’t we tell somebody?”

  “If we tell somebody, they’ll find the boat.”

  Joe looked at Rosa, his eyes wide as he thought of the grubby thumb-breadths he had used to calculate current and drift and the maze of figures in which he regularly lost himself on the back of the ancient charts.

  “Mama,” he said sadly. “They find-a this boat, they are cleverer than Salome Joe. Yesterday, when I work out where we are, I find we are sailing down Bourke Street and heading straight for Riley’s Bar.”

  He spat out his splintered match stick and faced Rosa once more. “Mama, he is getting inquisitive. Last night, he ask me again where we are going.”

  “What you say, Pop?”

  “I tell him when the squall blow itself out we make for Efaté and pick up water at Vila. I guess that don’ satisfy him, though. He’ll want to know some more.”

  He stopped abruptly as they heard Willie whistling below in the engine room and they looked at each other and became silent, waiting for him to appear.

  As he put his head out of the hatch, a shoal of flying fish broke surface in front of him in a flash of silver and blue, and he stared thoughtfully at the surface of the sea where they had disappeared. Willie was still a little surprised at the miracle of fish that took to the air – something he had never entirely believed in until a week or two ago, something that had given him as much of a shock when he had first seen it as had the first porpoises and the first piggy-eyed shark and the first wandering sperm whale that had surfaced near enough to expel its watery breath across the deck – things he had only seen in pictures before, without the vitality of life.

  He hoisted himself on deck, trying to smooth the creases out of the cheap trousers he still wore with the jersey Rosa had loaned him, and glanced casually at the other three sitting together on the stern. He was no longer the frightened youth he had been when they set off. With every day that came and went, with every mile that passed astern of them, his confidence grew. The feeling that he was cleverer than the police, which had taken such a dip into fear in Sydney, was growing again and he was beginning to suspect he was more than a match for this slow-thinking, slow-moving old couple and their stringy daughter who were helping him to escape. Once more he felt he was master of his fate, the old Willie Keeley of the street corners and the dance halls, the Willie Keeley he had always imagined himself to be.

  The seasickness which, to Frankie’s unrestrained glee, had prostrated him for the first few days, had passed now and he could look her in the face and eat and, with eating and a steady stomach and legs that could balance against the roll of the boat, he felt better and stronger. The sunburn that had peeled the skin off his arms into raw patches had subsided too and even the cramped locker they had given him to sleep in, bare of decoration beyond the plain boards and the inert useless mass of the engine with its dulled copper pipes, had lost its first choking narrowness and even managed a surprising comfort and privacy he had never known in the tenement house he had lived in ashore.

  Lighting a cigarette, he moved aft and sat down alongside the others, breathing deeply at the scented air. He couldn’t remember a time before this when he hadn’t been able to smell the wrack of traffic and the odour of garbage cans and old houses.

  Rosa watched him dragging at the cigarette and squinting into the glare of the rising sun, her eyes blank as a curtain across her thoughts.

  “Tea below,” she informed him casually, picking another potato out of the bucket.

  “It’ll do later.” Willie got to his feet again and walked along the deck, preoccupied with his thoughts, then as he came to the mast, he turned and faced them.

  “Listen, Ma,” he said. “Where are we heading?”

  Frankie glanced at her mother and Rosa looked up slowly at Willie, her mind in a panic at the question.

  “Efaté,” she said cautiously. “Put in at Vila. Joe fixed the course.”

  “Then where from there?”

  “Malekula.” Rosa answered cautiously. “Ambrim. Espiritu Santo. I can’t say.
”

  “Don’t you know?” Willie persisted.

  Rosa put down her potato and wiped her hands on her frock, performing the unimportant movements with exaggerated care to give her time to think. “What you want to know for?” she asked.

  Willie threw away the half-smoked cigarette and faced her squarely. “When I came aboard here, you said you wanted a passenger. Now you don’t even know where you’re going.”

  Rosa’s eyes became opaque and guarded. “You said it didn’t matter. You said you weren’t bothered.”

  “I’m not. But I’ve been watching you the last two weeks. You’ve never done any trading. You’ve got no cargo. You just dodge around. I’ve seen you poking about with that old atlas of yours trying to decide where next. I’m not blind. I’m not growling either, mind you. I’m a lucky bunny. I wanted a trip and I got one. But where are you going? What’s on, Ma?” He leaned over her threateningly, one hand on the cabin top to take his weight, his eyes cold in his brown face, his blond hair falling over his forehead.

  Rosa looked steadily at him and for a moment there was silence except for the creak of the rigging and the chuckle of the bow-wave, and Willie began to bluster in his sense of inferiority before her calmness. “I don’t like being kept in the dark,” he said loudly. “I reckon I can look after myself.”

  “Yes,” Frankie pointed out immediately. “You use a gun.”

  Joe’s frightened eyes flashed in her direction but Frankie was staring aggressively at the boy, defying him to try any anger.

  “All right,” Willie was saying defensively. “All right. I’ve not got the gun now though, have I? Your Ma threw it overboard. I lost it, didn’t I? I’ve not complained since.” He turned to Joe. “Right. Now tell me what you’re up to.”

  “Up to?” Joe’s innocence was too good to be true. “We are up to nothing.”

  “Come off it, you old bum,” Willie said, his voice rising and gaining confidence as he felt he was on sure ground. “Don’t give me that. Why didn’t we go alongside at Noumea? Why did we stand off and take on water with the dinghy and petrol cans? God, I got sick of rowing backwards and forwards. Why all them fibs you told that bloke about our papers? Why did we sneak off before daylight when he said he’d come back? Why did we keep clear of Port Patrick on Aneityum when we saw those yachts there? Why did we go to the far end of the lagoon at Lady Austen Island and get our food from the coons instead of going to the store where the white blokes were? Why do we always go the little places where there’s nobody? We ain’t been anywhere of any size yet?”

  “You want to go somewhere big?” Frankie asked.

  Willie swung round on her. “Too right I do,” he said quickly. “But I’m not complaining. I just want to know what’s on.”

  Rosa sighed deeply and picked up the potato and the knife again. Joe’s jaw hung open as he waited to see what she would do.

  “We aren’t going nowhere,” she said at last.

  “Not going nowhere!” It was Willie’s turn to stare.

  “No.” Rosa’s shoulders had slumped. “We’re dodging a bloke in Surry Hills. That’s all.”

  “The cops?”

  “We owe some money. We can’t pay.”

  Willie laughed. “Dinkum?” he said. “Is that all?”

  “It’s enough, isn’t it?” Frankie demanded.

  “If we don’t pay,” Rosa explained, “we lose the boat. It’s all we got. So we’re hiding it.”

  Willie laughed again with relief at the thought of the Sydney police searching the streets of Surry Hills for him. “Well, aren’t I a silly cow?” he said. “I never guessed. I don’t want to go ashore. I’ll go with you – wherever you go. Listen–” he looked excited “–I got a bit of money on me. Not much, but a bit.” He was silently thanking his lucky stars he had had the sense to carry his money about with him instead of putting it in a bank or hiding it like some of his cronies did. It would come in useful now and Willie was prepared to pay for safety, prepared to spend to prolong his flight. “It’s only a few quid, mind,” he went on cautiously, eyeing them sharply one after the other for a sign of greedy interest. “But it’ll help. I don’t want to meet people no more than you do.”

  “Why?” It was the first word that Joe had spoken for some time and it came out like a whipcrack, with Joe’s dark eyes, wide and expressionless, resting fixedly on Willie’s face.

  Willie waved a hand airily, his features blank and uninformative. “Oh, nothing! Something like you. I owe a bit of money, sort of. Bloke wants to dong me for not giving it him back.”

  “You pinch it?” Frankie asked disconcertingly.

  “Not exactly. Just a debt. I hadn’t enough to pay him. That’s all. So I nipped off. I’m dodging him. Like you.”

  “You gotta to dodge him all this way?” Joe asked. “Two-three thousand miles.”

  “He’s a tough bloke, this one, and I’m not dodging no more than you are.”

  Willie stared defiantly back at them, his eyes reflecting the bright water, but as Joe opened his mouth to ask another question Rosa laid a hand on his shoulder and put a question herself.

  “You’re willing to go anywhere?” she asked.

  “Anywhere you like. Why not? I got all the time in the world.”

  “You got no job?”

  “Nope. I’m just kinda enjoying myself. Never been on a boat before. Except on a ferry across to Manly. Didn’t realize it was like this. You get used to the quiet, don’t you?”

  Frankie gave a hoot of laughter. “You feel crook or something?” she asked. “You weren’t so happy a while back when you were fetching up over the stern.”

  Willie grinned at her for the first time – in a way that dispersed his tense expression. “No,” he admitted, “I wasn’t. But I feel fine now. Don’t know why I never thought of going to sea. It’s not half bad.”

  Rosa was watching him shrewdly as he spoke, her mind busy.

  “Look–” Willie lit another cigarette and, occupied with his thoughts, offered one to Joe – for the first time – and the old man snatched at it avidly “–how long you hoping to keep up this dodge?”

  “Long as we can,” Rosa said. “Why?”

  “Well, they’ll get you quick if you’re not careful. Will they follow you?”

  “Shouldn’t think so. We ain’t worth following. But if they recognize us, they’ll probably try and impound the boat.”

  Willie thrust his hands in his pockets and stared over the water, a little startled as he always was to find there was nothing else in sight but the lifting sea. Then his brain became busy with thoughts of what he had left behind in Sydney and the desperate need to lie low. Into his mind raced scraps of stories he had read – mostly in pulp magazines and newspapers – and he whirled round on Rosa, his eyes glowing.

  “Listen, Ma,” he said. “Why not make her look like some other boat so they don’t recognize her.” He gestured at the empty swinging horizon. “There’s all this to hide in. Why not do it properly? Repaint her for a start. They’re looking for a grey ship. Let’s paint her white.”

  “We repainting her for us or for you?” Frankie asked.

  Willie evaded the question. “We can even paint a new name on her,” he said. “Big. So they won’t miss it if they look.”

  “Where we get the paint?” Joe asked.

  “Anywhere. I’ll buy it.”

  “That’s what I mean. I don’t got no money.”

  Willie ignored Joe in the excitement his plans roused in him. “Let’s fix another mast up, too,” he suggested.

  “Another what?” Joe almost fell off the cabin hatch in his surprise. “Don’t we got enough with one?”

  “Aw, Pop,” Frankie said irritatedly. “Give him a chance, can’t you?” She was watching Willie now, listening carefully, her whole attitude tense and interested.

  “Listen, man,” Willie urged. “You got to box clever when they’re after you and a bit of flannelling’ll help a lot. Put up a new mast, like I say.�
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  “First puff of wind, it fall down,” Joe prophesied with a pontifical solemnity. “Mizzen masts always fall down.”

  “Shut up for a minute, you old fool,” Rosa said, leaning forward, her eyes bright. “Go on, Willie.”

  Willie turned to her, reluctantly admiring her for her eagerness. “Listen, Ma–” his young face was alive now and in its excitement had lost its hardness “–why can’t we make this boat look different?” He turned to Joe again. “What is she? What sort of boat? What kind?”

  Joe considered. “She’s a mongrel,” he said. “She got a bit of a cutter in her. Only she ain’t a cutter. If she’d got a bowsprit, you call her a sloop. Yeah, a sloop.” He shrugged. “Only she ain’t got no bowsprit.”

  “Well, why can’t we have a bowsprit?” Willie had scooped the nautical term into his vocabulary immediately.

  “Yes, Mama–” Frankie had begun to fidget with excitement as the idea caught her imagination “–I’ve read stories like this. Why shouldn’t we have a bowsprit like Willie says?”

  “And why shouldn’t we put up a mast at the back end?” Willie added.

  Joe shrugged again. “The main boom come round,” he pointed out. “Like last night. Bic boc. Down come the new mast.”

  “Aw, Gawd!” Willie stared at him in disgust. “Ain’t you helpful? Can’t we shorten the boom?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?” Frankie turned to her father quickly.

  “The sail is then too big.”

  “Cripes!” Willie’s voice was rising in its impatience. Irritatedly, he saw Joe’s objections only as obstacles to his escape. Now that the idea was fixed in his mind, he was eager to translate it into fact. His eyes bright with excitement, he leaned forward towards Joe, his attitude vaguely threatening, trying to enforce the acceptance of his idea, not only with his words, but with his eyes, his whole being. “Listen, pally, can’t we cut a bit of it off?” he asked.