by John Harris
As Frankie crawled unwillingly up the ladder to the deck, Rosa turned to Willie.
“OK,” she said. “Now what’s going on? What are you doing?”
“Making the engine go.” Willie looked up again and grinned. He had been secretly investigating it for days, working on it when they thought he was asleep. Useless, the engine seemed only a barrier in his path, for he didn’t trust sails alone. Working, it could be an asset if the time ever came for it to be used.
“Just poking about,” he added, seeing no further point in hiding his activities. “Seeing what’s wrong with it.”
“It’s no good,” Rosa pointed out. “It hasn’t gone in a blue moon and even if you make it go, we’ve got no fuel.”
Willie indicated a drum propped against the engine.
“I bought that in Vila with the paint,” he said. “I didn’t tell you. That’s enough to start her.”
Rosa frowned. “Starting her’s no good when we can’t afford any more fuel to keep her going.”
Willie grinned. “Never mind. It’s something to do.”
Rosa suddenly looked interested and moved closer. “You can really make it go?” she asked.
“Sure.” Willie smiled. “Dead easy. Just a question of time. It’s an ordinary marine engine. Like any other. 1925, by the look of her, I reckon. Ain’t much compression and the cylinder walls is worn. And there’s one or two things cracked and missing here and there and the usual leaks. But I’ve got a vice down here and a few tools. I can do it. Plenty of horse-power. Bags of guts. And a big screw, Mama. Piece of cake, it is.”
“You know all about engines?” Rosa leaned over him, watching his sure fingers.
“Sure. Motor cars mostly, but there ain’t a lot of difference.”
“But you said you were a carpenter’s apprentice. Apprentices don’t own cars.”
“Other people do.”
“And they let you drive?”
Willie glanced up and a smile spread across his face again.
“They never knew,” he said.
Rosa frowned, shocked. “You mean–?”
“I pinched ’em, Ma. I pinched ’em and sold ’em again. Did ’em up in an old shed and made ’em look different. There were a lot of us in the game. It’s nothing new.”
“That was dishonest.”
Willie scratched his nose with an oily finger that left its dark smudge on his skin. “Yeah, I reckon it was,” he admitted.
Rosa stared hard at him, thinking of her daughter, anxious that she should not learn too much about Willie’s life.
“You been telling all this to Frankie?” she asked.
“Sure, why not?”
Rosa felt a spasm of anger. Frankie was a wild creature, living always in her dockside life on the edge of crime, but she was still, because of Rosa’s influence, untouched by it.
“You shouldn’t have told her. She’s a good girl and the less she knows about that kind of thing the better.”
Willie looked seriously at her. “You got her wrong,” he said. “You got her all wrong. She’s too old to tread on. She asks questions and she knows more about what goes on than you think. Ma, she’s pretty smart with a spanner. I dunno where she learned but if I get this engine going, you’ll be able to thank her for a lot of it.”
Rosa was at a loss what to say. She looked quickly round the engine room. “You happy, son?” she asked unexpectedly. “You look it.”
Willie stared back at her, conscious of the similarity of what Frankie had said, and tried again to sort out the unfamiliar emotions that had begun to come upon him. He grinned briefly and endeavoured to reply honestly. “Yes, Ma, I reckon I am – under the circs. Are you?”
Rosa smiled. She suddenly realized how like her son he looked – daring, impertinent and touched with the same spirit of adventure that had sent Georgie off to join the Navy. “Sure,” she said. “I’m happy.”
But her face looked taut and for some reason he couldn’t have explained, Willie raised his voice to a ring of enthusiasm because he knew it would cheer her up. “I’m learning to speak Italian,” he said gaily. “Just like Joe. Frankie’s taught me. Listen: Uno, Due, Tre, Quattro, Cinque – Lunedi, Martedi, Mercoledi. Days of the week, see? I’ve learned to put on a whipping. I can sew canvas and I can splice a rope. I’ll learn to splice wire soon. It’s a piece of cake being a sailor, Ma.”
Rosa’s eyes clouded as she thought of her son for whom being a sailor had not proved a piece of cake, and he stopped as he saw her expression.
“Ma, what’s wrong? You worried about something?”
Rosa sat down on a box, her heavy face troubled. She pushed Georgie to the shadows at the back of her mind with an effort as she answered. “It’s too easy,” she sighed. “Everything’s gone so well. I get scared.”
“Take it easy, Ma,” Willie urged. “Save your breath for worrying when it comes bad.” He peered at her in the yellow light. “You tired, Ma? You look it.”
Rosa’s relaxed face tautened and she forced a smile. “A little bit. We’ve worked hard and I don’t sleep so well.”
“Thinking too much?”
“I reckon so. I keep thinking of Frankie. The Tina sails all right, but them sails of ours look pretty tatty and I wouldn’t like to run into a hurricane with her on board. Still, like you say, I’ll take things as they come. We mustn’t think of not succeeding. We’ve got to succeed. Tommy and Lucia are depending on us succeeding. And that means it’s up to me. Frankie ain’t very old and Joe’s not so young as he was. He gives up more easy.”
“I’ll help, Ma.”
“I know you will. Joe told me how clever you’re getting about the boat.” Rosa stood up and touched his cheek affectionately. “You’re a good boy, Willie.”
Willie glanced up at her. “Not really, Ma,” he said soberly.
He watched her heave herself up the ladder and, alone once more, he sat without moving. Then he put his hand on his cheek where Rosa’s fingers had rested and stared at the grimy pieces of the engine spread along the floorboards with wide puzzled eyes.
Six
Rosa was awakened by the sound of feet on the planks above her head and the thump of a hammer. Guiltily conscious of over-sleeping, she sat up abruptly and threw on her clothes. As she hoisted herself up into the sunshine, she saw Willie already at work, cutting a hole in the deck with a chisel. Frankie was rattling the pots in the galley in a discord of discontent, eager to be in the sunshine among more exciting chores, and even her whistle had a plaintive note of frustration in it to mellow its piercing quality.
The land quivered under the wavering lines of heat, the thick foliage, mounting rank upon rank up the jagged slopes, oppressive in the stillness. Among the darker green Rosa could see the flare of hibiscus and the ivory of frangipani and, like a jewelled thread running down the slopes, here disappearing among the tremendous leaves, there reappearing over rocks, the little stream that ended in a warm pool above the beach where they had taken it in turns to squat naked with a piece of coarse soap, revelling in cleanliness and an abundance of water, after days of hoarding it on the run from Efaté.
Rosa pushed back her hair and stood by Willie, watching him.
“It’s good to see young muscles,” she said shyly. “When I was young I liked to work. Do you?”
Willie’s forehead puckered. “I never did before, Ma. Dinkum I didn’t. But I like this work. I reckon it depends on what you’re doing. Being apprentice to a carpenter in a factory ain’t much bottle but this is kind of different.”
He straightened up. “Not far to go now,” he said. “Then we can shove the pole in.” He sighed. “After that we got to do the boom – we’ll have to burn the wood off the hoops. It’ll take time, Ma.” He ended on a despairing note. “A lot of time.”
“All’s going fine.” It was Rosa’s turn to encourage. “We’re already looking like a different ship.”
“Just wait.” Willie’s enthusiasm leapt up again like a quick flame at her
words. “She’ll look like the Queen Mary when I’ve finished. I’m going to take that old exhaust stack from the deck and shove it out through the stern somewhere. It’ll help us look fast. Then we got to give her a fresh name. What we going to call her?”
Rosa sat on the cabin top to consider, blinking in the sun that came up off the water and dappled the mast. “It’s got to be a nice name,” she commented. She looked up, her expression gentle and a little sad and proud. “I had a son,” she said. “He was killed in the war. His ship went down in the Java Sea. He wasn’t much older than you. I always remember him like you. His name was Giorgio. Joe chose it but I always called him Georgie so that when he grew up he wouldn’t have an Italian name like Angelo or Giuseppe. So that he’d be more Australian and people wouldn’t pick on him. Then, if he wanted, he could have altered his other name from Salomio to something good like Smith or Green.”
She paused, staring at the deck between her feet. “But he didn’t want to. He didn’t care. He was a good Australian and a good Salomio. I’d like to call the boat George.”
“George?” Willie was more moved than he thought he could be. “George,” he repeated thoughtfully. “That’s a funny name for a boat. Wait a minute, though. I’ve heard of Girl Pat and Boy Fred. Why can’t we have a Boy George? That’s a good name for a boat.”
Rosa smiled at him. “Sure. That’s a good name. Let’s call her the Boy George.”
The timbers of the Tina S were old but they were tough and the tools were blunt and it wasn’t until the following day that they were ready to step the mizzen mast. As Rosa watched Willie lifting the pole into position, hindered rather than helped by Frankie, while Joe stood in the background shouting excited instructions, she felt thankful that they had him on board. He was doing in a day what would have taken Joe a week to do, and the job was better done when it was finished. Joe had all an old man’s irritation with details and already Willie was learning fast about ropes and tackles and pulleys and he had a soaring enthusiasm that had withered years ago in Joe, an enthusiasm that had not seemed possible in the scared, boastful youth they had first met in Sydney.
Not pausing to rest, he scrambled below while Rosa and Frankie worked at the sails, and, with Joe to sit and draw lines and crosses and offer noisy arguments full of staring eyes and waving arms and waggling fingers, about why what they were doing was impossible, he lifted the floorboards to make a step in the keel for the base of the mast, and the boat rang to the muffled thuds of his hammering. They had fixed the pole in place, with all its lifts and stays rigged, by the time darkness fell.
“There you are,” Willie said, standing back, the sweat streaming down his face. “What about that?”
“It is lovely,” Joe said with heavy disgust as he headed to the cabin. “Now we are nothing no more. We ain’t a yawl. We ain’t a cutter. We only look like a Christmas tree.”
More than a week had passed before they had rigged the bowsprit and the new booms – a week of sweating over the fire they had built ashore, straightening the iron bands they had burned off and reforging them to fit the remade spars, of beating out new ones from the stanchions of the old wheelhouse, a week of scorched clothes, fried faces and burnt hands. All of them laboured over the fire, Frankie leaping in and out of the bushes, fetching wood, running herself ragged in her enthusiasm. Rosa, in her underskirt, worked the improvised bellows; and Joe, his face streaming sweat, held on to the hot iron with a pair of home-made tongs while Willie toiled with the hammer.
It was a hard job, their bellows constantly breaking, their hammer barely heavy enough to forge the iron, so that Willie had to put all his strength behind it as he brought it down. And all the time, the intense humid heat of the clearing where they worked caught the sun and wrapped them around with the gagging closeness of the forest.
“Go easy, kid,” Willie warned as Frankie, purple-faced and perspiring, her black hair plastered to her forehead, dumped an armful of wood alongside him. “Don’t knock your silly self up. Or who’s going to do the washing up?”
“Willie the Drip,” she grinned, darting off again.
For a while, with the Tina turned inside out, they tried sleeping ashore in a lean-to of oars, canvas and palm fronds, but the night noises scared Rosa and the insects nearly drove them frantic, and finally they returned aboard to sleep among the shavings and the sawdust and the snippets of canvas and sail twine, and the ubiquitous cockroaches which their rerigging had made more active. Their bodies were bruised and weary with bending, their minds numbed with the noise of their own labour, and dizzy with the sunshine that smote like a sledge-hammer on their backs or, rebounding from the decks and the water, thrust like red daggers under their eyelids.
But, as the work proceeded and the decks were cleared of debris, even Joe’s grumbling changed to snatches of song in a cracked tenor that was breathy with lack of use, and finally to an enthusiastic spurt of energy as he saw the end of all the hard work.
They finished repainting the cabin top and varnishing the new spars in three days. Then, while Joe held the dinghy steady, Willie carefully painted her new name on her stern. The old man’s tongue worked between his lips and his eyebrows moved on his forehead in sympathy with the brush as Willie struggled over the lettering.
“That’s good,” he said, when they sat back. “That’s a good name. He was a good boy, Georgie.” He turned and addressed the lagoon. “You seen the Tina S?” he asked, spreading his hands. “The Tina S?” he answered himself shrugging hugely. “I ain’t seen the Tina S.” Another shrug. “Only a big new ship called the Boy George.” A vast stretching of arms to encompass a liner. “A big, fine new ship with two masts and a bow-a-sprit. She was sailing for Tonga and the Society Isles.”
Willie looked up quickly. “Why we going there?” he asked.
Joe grinned. “Because Captain Mama decide it is a long way from here and we can dodge into the Tuamotus if they get-a too close to us.”
“What it like there?”
“Plenty islands. Plenty people. Plenty drink. Plenty food. Plenty girls. You like girls?” Joe winked slyly.
Willie grinned and, glancing at the lettering on the Tina’s counter, dabbed on a final speck of colour with his brush and sat back to examine the effect. “Well, she’s finished,” he said.
They rowed away to stare at the reincarnated boat and admire their efforts. She had a patched appearance because of the fresh wood they had used, but the deckhouse and the exhaust stack had disappeared and the bowsprit for which Joe had already spliced and rigged the stays gave her a rakish look.
“She look-a funny now,” Joe said thoughtfully, resting on the oars. “From the beam, she look fast. Then when you row round the stern and see her fat-a behind, she look as slow as an old sow in the family way.”
“She’ll do,” Willie said, satisfied with their work. “Now, all we got to do is stock up on food.”
“Perhaps from the store that ain’t here? Perhaps from a refrigerator ship or something?” Joe indicated the empty lagoon sarcastically.
“No, you stupid old Wop, you. From what lives ashore. I’m getting sick of tinned food and we’ve got to make our stores spin out. They’re going down too quick. We’ve got to start catching some of our tucker.”
Joe slapped his chest, his good temper dispersed immediately as he suspected Willie of deliberately finding jobs for him. “Ha! So now, in addition to toiling like-a slaves on deck, we have also to find time to go looking for food.”
Willie snorted. “Why not? We’ve got all day. All you do is stand around offering advice with your mouth flapping open like a barn door.”
“I knock-a down the wheelhouse,” Joe exploded, waving his arms as though wielding an imaginary hammer so that the dinghy was in danger of overturning. “I splice-a the ropes and rigging till my fingers ache.” His hands worked an invisible spike. “I row-a the boat.” He heaved an imaginary oar. “What else do you want?”
“It’s not a hard job, Joe – sitting on
your puss, holding a fishing line.”
“I don’t want to sit all day on my bum-a,” Joe said, suddenly defiant. “Too much I am told what to do. By you. By Rosa. By Frankie even. Go here. Go there. Do this. Do that. I am the captain of this ship. I shall do as I please.” He glanced at Willie’s face and, oddly, it reminded him of Rosa’s with its darkening expression and he was seized with a sudden panic at the certain realization that she would never be on his side if she were brought into the argument. “OK,” he said, deflating abruptly. “I don’t go, Rosa will find out. So I go. It is easier.”
Willie took pity on him. “It’ll be a change after the work,” he said. “We’re going to be busy between us. I’ve seen wild pig ashore. We ought to try and get one.”
“How we kill ’em? Chase ’em till they drop-a dead of fright. Because–” Joe eyed Willie sourly “–I guess the wild pig can run faster than Salome Joe.”
Willie grinned. “We’ll shoot ’em,” he said.
“What you shoot with? You lost your gun.” A gleam of spite shone in Joe’s eyes as he spoke and Willie flushed in a way that made him seem young and frightened again.
“Who said anything about a gun?” he asked. “There’s a bit of sheet steel in the engine room. Maybe I can fix up some arrows with it. I’ve seen some saplings ashore that’ll make crackerjack bows. I could fetch a pig down if I hit it in the right place. I can do the rest with a knife. I can sharpen one up and put a point on it.”
“You pretty smart at making weapons.” Willie had so completely thrown in his lot with them, Joe felt safe in making the dig.
Willie gave him a long look. “Maybe I am at that,” he said. “And maybe it’ll be useful to you now. I bet you wouldn’t sneeze at a bit of fresh meat.”
The following day, Rosa watched them climbing into the dinghy, Willie carrying the deadly little arrows he had fashioned, a big bow strung across his bare burly shoulders, and while Joe dozed off-shore in the dinghy, waiting for porgy and mullet to bite, a black dot on a surface so shimmering it hurt the eyes, Willie and Frankie plunged into the undergrowth after the young wild pig.