Getaway

by John Harris

  “So–” Joe looked round him with satisfaction “–now we sit down and rest.”

  “Rest?” Rosa turned on him. She had taken off her dress to help with the pulling and the under-skirt that stretched across her broad frame was moist with perspiration and spotted with water. “Tomorrow, they might arrive to take her away. There’s no resting yet…”

  The look in her eyes forced Joe to his feet again and she moved to where Willie had spread their few poor tools on the cabin top and was trying to sharpen the chipped chisels and straighten the ancient saws.

  “You going to manage?” she asked hesitantly, still a little dubious in his presence. His anger she could answer with its own kind, but his willingness to fall in with the plan left her puzzled and worried. “You got enough tools?”

  Willie grinned, eager to be started. “All we’re short of,” he said, “is a decent cross-cut, some sharp edges, a plane, a mallet, a spokeshave, some nails that aren’t bent, a carpenter’s bench–”

  A new spasm of doubt crossed Rosa’s face. “Can we do it?” she asked.

  “Sure we can. We’ll manage without ’em, that’s all.” He gave her an encouraging grin that did her heart good and bent to work again while Rosa watched him, hope rising higher in her breast.

  Long before the tide had completely receded, she had driven them over the side into the water and set them scraping the bottom, and by the time the sudden darkness came, most of what they had to do had been finished, and they climbed back aboard, weary and filthy and covered with the slime and weeds that had dripped from the hull.

  Joe sat on the cabin top, slumped in weariness, more exhausted than he could ever remember, his blank eyes seeing warm seats on the wharfside at Woolloomooloo and the knife-backed cat hunting the sooty sparrows. Stretching his aching muscles, he looked forward to a comatose day of doing nothing, a dream from which he was rudely jolted by Rosa’s next words.

  “Tomorrow,” she said, “we will start painting.”

  It took them longer than they had expected to daub the hull of the Tina. Without the assistance of a cradle or ladders, reaching was difficult and they had to lash brushes to boathooks and roll rocks across the shifting beach to stand on. By the time they had finished, another day had gone by and they were smothered with white paint.

  “She don’t look like the same boat,” Rosa commented as she studied their work. “She’ll sail faster, too.”

  “She won’t sail so slow, you mean,” Frankie corrected, peering through the splodges of paint on her face. “She didn’t ever sail fast.”

  The following morning, assisted by Joe, who was swearing gloomily in Italian and good Australian, Willie set about knocking the box-like structure of the wheelhouse to pieces, setting the dust flying from long neglected corners and harrying the lurking cockroaches into the sunshine. Later, with the wheelhouse almost demolished, they rowed ashore in the leaking dinghy to search out a suitable pine tree for the new mast, while Rosa stripped off her frock again and sat down on the cabin top with Frankie to pull the sail to pieces, a back-aching job that tired their eyes and broke their nails.

  By lunchtime, Joe had selected his tree and while he returned aboard to finish the wheelhouse, Willie felled it and began to trim it to a stout straight pole.

  Ashore, where the foliage shielded him from the breeze that wafted in from the sea, the heat was intense and the flies swarmed about him, belabouring his head blindly as they buzzed around his hair. The bay was still and the land reflected mirror-like in the water. Above the spires of rock, the sky matched the grandeur of the island with a mass of cumulus that rose, blue meadow on golden mountain, high above the lagoon. Joe had stopped his hammering and was lying to recover his breath in the shade of the awning they had rigged on the foredeck with their shabby blankets. Apart from the occasional sound of a parrot crashing through the undergrowth and the plop of a fish, the place was clothed with the noisy silence of dead places that was a little breath-taking when the cries of the sea-birds were not echoing off the hills.

  From the first day he could remember, Willie had heard the revving of trucks and vans in the streets about his home or the roar of sirens from the docks. Even at night buses ran right alongside his bed and the sound of the ships had come over the rooftops into his room. Aranga-vaa had a stillness, a sense of being poised in time, that made him want to hold his breath.

  Rosa called him eventually for tea and, jerking out of the mood, he slipped into the water and swam to the Tina.

  “Ready for a cuppa, chum?” Frankie shoved her head through the cabin hatch and greeted him with a tin mug as he climbed over the side, then promptly disappeared again like a jack-in-a-box.

  “You don’t forget nobody, do you, Ma?” Willie panted, wiping himself on his shirt.

  “You’re doing all the work, son,” Rosa said seriously. “You need all the food.”

  He glanced at the pile of clippings by the cabin top where she and Frankie had sat all day with the sail.

  “How’s it go, Ma?” he asked eagerly, pleased at the progress they had made.

  “Fine.” Rosa straightened her back to hide her tiredness. “I’ll soon have it undone. We’re going to need all the canvas we’ve got.”

  As they sat back from their meal on the untidy table below the hurricane lamp, Willie wiped his mouth, mellow with a feeling of well-being, full-stomached and lethargic in the heat. He glanced at Joe picking his teeth with a match, and Frankie sprawled over the inevitable magazine, then for no reason at all his mind drifted comfortably back home, and he was pulled up with a jolt as the picture shattered and he saw the police at the doors in Surry Hills, questioning, prying, levering every one of his secrets from its hidden corner.

  He was immediately obsessed by a sense of urgency and he stood up and began to collect his tools again. “I’m going to drill the deck for a new mast,” he announced. “Coming, Joe?”

  Joe looked up as Willie stripped off his shirt. “You only just-a finish one job,” he pointed out. “Why you think God give you a backside? Don’ you ever sit down?”

  “Ain’t tired.” Willie paused with one foot on the ladder. “I’m going for a swim when I’ve finished.”

  “You like to get finished?” Joe asked quickly, his eyes bright and suspicious. “It is important?”

  Frankie looked up from her magazine, watching them.

  “Sure, it’s important,” Willie said. “We don’t want anybody to recognize the Tina, do we?”

  “That is more important for you than it is for us, eh?” Joe’s eyes were blank and innocent again as he probed.

  “No, why should it be?”

  “I ain’t ever seen you sit down. That’s all. You got the ants-in-the-pants.”

  “Aw, leave him alone, Pop,” Frankie said. “Leave him be. He’s doing no harm wanting to work.”

  In his sense of resentment at the labour he had been forced into, Joe was trying hard to pick a quarrel. “I ain’t ever seen nobody work like him,” he pointed out loudly. “Only Fred Pellevicini when he pinch his brother’s dinghy and paint it to look like some other guy’s. He work like that.”

  Rosa rounded on her husband, her hands full of pots. “It helps us all, don’t it?” she said. “Mind your own business.”

  Frankie watched her father subside into muttered grumbling, then she slid out from the table, wiping her hands on her pants. “I’ll give you a hand, Willie,” she said. “I’m coming now.”

  When they had gone on deck, Joe looked up at Rosa. “Mama, that boy drive too hard. There is something inside him.”

  Rosa slammed the dishes into the washing-up bowl. “Of course there is,” she said. “Something that’s not inside you: energy.”

  Joe’s face wore a sulky expression. “Men who have that drive inside them are dangerous men, Mama.”

  Rosa slapped the dishcloth after the dishes. “Or successful men,” she snapped. “Angelo Carpaccio’s got that drive. He’s successful. He owns two boats and an office with
a telephone, and will own three boats and an office with a telephone before long. And he’s only thirty-one. Robert Rossi’s got it. He owns two boats – one of them this one.”

  The mention of Angelo Carpaccio and Robert Rossi made Joe feel homesick. He glanced through the porthole and saw only trees and the tangled greenery of the undergrowth across the water. Running his fingers through his hair, he shuffled in his seat as he compared it with the Sydney streets and the little office of Angelo Carpaccio. He licked his lips sadly, almost tasting the drinks he was in the habit of receiving there from time to time. “Mama, we are a long way from home,” he said.

  “And a good thing, too,” Rosa replied, sensing his thoughts. “No bars.”

  “Mama, suppose-a this young man decide to kill us both and run away with the boat?” Joe’s eyes rounded with agitation at the thought. “He could do-a the bunk and take Frankie. She is only the kid. She talks through the top of the head. She is enthusiastic. She is all we got, Mama, and with her he would know enough to sail the Tina now.”

  Rosa stopped with a handful of wet plates, and stared at the bulkhead in front of her, her face, shadowed in the growing dusk, suddenly doubtful and worried. “He wouldn’t do that,” she said.

  “Why not?”

  Rosa forced away her doubt and smiled, flattering him. “He’d run her ashore,” she said. “He don’t know his way around like you do, Joe.”

  Joe indicated the atlas on the table. “He has the atlas,” he said sarcastically. “The wonderful atlas that tells us where the islands is and where the reefs ain’t. Mama, I don’ like it.”

  “There’s too much you don’t like,” Rosa burst out, erect, matriarchal and commanding. “You don’t like work. You don’t like responsibility. You don’t like risk. That’s why we’re here now. That’s why we’re hiding like a lot of criminals. Now shut up and go and help on deck.”

  When Willie had finished his work, he sat with his feet swinging over the side of the Tina, fiddling with a piece of wood shaving between his fingers. Frankie had her back to the mast, her knees under her chin. The palms ashore were profiled against the sky and every star in the heavens was reflected clearly in the lagoon in a firmament of diamonds. The amethystine night was loaded with the eddies of warm air that swung the island scents across the lagoon towards the cooler salt smell coming off the sea. From ashore came the snuffle of a rooting pig and the honk of the nightbird and, above them, the thin insect piping from the trees.

  “Willie,” Frankie said suddenly. “You married?”

  Willie answered without moving his head. “Me? Married? Not on your life, kid. I got better things to do.”

  “OK. No need to roar like a grampus at me. I only wondered.” She paused, trying to be casual. “You got a girl, Willie?”

  “I had dozens. You can always get girls when you got money to spend.”

  “Money wouldn’t fetch me.”

  “You’re not a girl. You’re only a kid. But you’ll learn as you grow older.”

  Frankie studied her thin knees showing through the blue material of her jeans, and her bony ankles below their frayed turn-ups. The possibility of romance coming to someone as skinny as she was seemed very remote, she had to admit, and she was consumed with jealousy.

  “If I was a man and I thought a girl was only after me for me dough,” she said, “I’d drop her like a hot brick. And if I was a girl and he started telling me how much he’d got I’d tell him where he could stuff it.”

  “You fancy romance or something?” Willie asked, and she became silent, shamed by his derision. All the discomforts of making-do, of putting-up-with and going without on the Tina, all the vulgarities of the dockside and the hoarse hilarities of life had buffeted her without harming her, and underneath her self-confident raucous exterior there was an inarticulate naivety that came from being on the threshold of maturity. The film magazines she devoured were only a defence against the more brutal aspects of life, adding a scrap of colour to the little world she lived in behind the curtains of her bunk.

  She answered Willie cautiously. “’Course I don’t fancy romance,” she said. “But you can’t buy everything for money. You can’t buy love and you can’t buy happiness. You’re happier now than you were when you came aboard in Sydney. And it ain’t spending money that’s made you happier because you ain’t spent any.”

  Willie turned and stared at her for a moment, startled by the wisdom of what she said and shocked to realize how right she was.

  In spite of the ache in his arms and back, the ache of hard work, something he had never experienced before, he felt content, but he was puzzled to know the reason for it, for contentment was a new sensation to him, something that had never come to him when he had gasconaded round the alleyways of King’s Cross with money in his pocket. He tried to put it down to the fact that his escape had been accomplished successfully, though he knew that could not be the only reason.

  He was still working for his own salvation and no one else’s, and he knew that every drop of sweat he shed brought him a little longer freedom. It had even crossed his mind several times to desert when their work was finished, up-anchoring when the others were ashore, and sailing the boat single-handed. The chance of failure would be no greater that way than it would be with them on board, and he was not afraid to try. But there was something in their need and the way they relied on him that shouldered the thought aside every time it rose to the surface. When it had first crossed his mind, he had felt that deserting them would not hit them too hard because, like himself, they had been brought up in an untrusting world; but the more he thought of it, the more he had doubts about it and even, to his surprise, about his own ability to make the break, for he gained too much happiness with them and too much satisfaction from Rosa’s praise.

  He knew she was the driving force behind everyone else. He had seen her too many times to doubt it, standing by the stove in her old felt slippers as though she were ashore and not in the heaving interior of an old boat, wedged against the bulkhead for safety, one eye on the swinging hurricane lamp that circled dangerously near her head, her fingers all the time on a handhold; tired because she found the movement of the boat hard on her feet and because her muscles were stiff with trying to keep her balance. But, for all her weariness, there had never been a complaint out of her. While everyone else on board was grumbling about the conditions or the weather or the food, Rosa had been like a rock, often unspeaking, rarely bad-tempered and never swerving in her decision to continue.

  The few tit-bits on his mealtime plate had been provided from their monotonous diet at her expense, he knew quite well, while she stood – inevitably at the stove – to eat so that he shouldn’t see what was before her. She had washed the only shirt he possessed and persuaded him to put it on in the evenings – “Because it suits you,” she had said. “You’re young and brown and it’s so white.” She saw that he had tea to drink in the hot mid-morning when he was thirsty – and had even rowed the teapot ashore when he was working there and Frankie was too busy.

  There was something in her sturdy generous spirit that was prepared to give so long as Willie was prepared to do likewise, prepared to ignore his secrets so long as he was willing to help. Her attention had touched him in a way that had made him feel foolish and over-emotional when he had first experienced it, and there was something in her confidence that had sparked off an unexpected zest for life that made him more than willing to work.

  Puzzled by his feelings, he stood up abruptly and threw off his shirt.

  “I’m going for a swim, Wishbone,” he said. “Coming?”

  “Sure!” Frankie scrambled to her feet, as willing as he was to exchange her troublesome thoughts for movement. “Last one in’s a sissy. I’ll go over the other side.”

  They poised on the rails and dived out into the reflected stars, and as they struck the night-dark water, the picture there, with its inverted trees and mountain peaks and the glimmer of the yellow moon lifting over the rocks
, shattered like a smashed mirror and dissolved into spreading ripples that caught the light in golden arcs…

  When Rosa came on deck, she saw a glow of light in the engine room and laboured down the ladder to see what was happening.

  Willie, his arms black to the elbows with old rank grease, sat on a box staring at the grimy pieces of the engine he had spread across the floorboards, while Frankie sat on the rolled and ragged blankets of his bed, her hair in long damp rat’s-tails, her chin on her hands, watching Willie with an absorbed look.

  “This is a nice mess,” Rosa said, looking at the oil-black nuts and bolts. With Joe’s words still in her ears, she turned to Frankie. “What are you doing down here?” she demanded.

  “Nothing, Mama,” Frankie said. “Only watching Willie.”

  “And what have you been telling her?”

  Willie grinned. “That the sea’s made of ink and the moon’s made of green cheese. Come off it, Ma. She’s able to look after herself and she’s got more sense than you credit her with. She likes talking to me, don’t you, Wishbone?”

  Frankie nodded, her eyes fixed cautiously on Rosa.

  “She’s a kid,” Willie went on. “I’m a kid too, if the truth’s known. Mebbe that’s it. She gets sick of old folks all the time. Give her a break, Ma. We’re doing no harm. She only wants company.”

  Rosa had to admit the truth in what he said and she held back the rebuke on her lips. “OK,” she said. “I’m not saying anything, am I? But it’s time she was in bed and not poking about down here.”

  “Scared I’ll make a pass at her, Ma?” Willie tormented.

  “I’d hit you with a spanner if you did,” Frankie said quickly.

  “I’m not scared of anything like that,” Rosa explained. “I’m scared she isn’t getting enough sleep. She looks like a skinned rabbit. She’s outgrowing her strength–”

  “Mama, I’m not a child!”

  “So long as I’m looking after you, you’re always a child. Now get off to bed.”