by John Harris
Joe laughed harshly. “This ain’t-a no match-a-stick of a mizzen. This a big pole. We can’t lift a big pole with the hands and the backs.”
“Oh, hell, man,” Willie said irritatedly. “You always look for the things we can’t do first. We can hoist it up somehow.”
“I am too old for lifting and straining.” Joe sat down heavily on the cabin top. “I get sick in the belly. Rosie, I done it once. I’m too old to do it all again.”
“Pop–” Frankie put her arms round the old man’s neck “–come on, just try once more.”
“Joe,” Rosa pleaded, “just a little more. We’ll think of something then. Just a little more, though, so we can get out of here.” She turned to Willie. “Can we get to the other side of the lagoon? And can we fix her without having to pay for a boatyard?”
Willie looked serious, then he grinned. “Mama,” he said “the days when we could afford a boatyard have been gone long since. The money’s getting low now, you know.”
Rosa sighed. “OK,” she said. “If it’s like that, we’ll do it on our own.”
Willie dropped below and bent over the engine. For a long time it refused to start but eventually its reassuring cough cheered them. With aching muscles, they heaved up the anchor and began to move slowly across the smooth water, Frankie in the bow with the lead line searching for sudden shallows or the purple shadows of the niggerheads. Several times they had to retrace their course as they ran against banks of rock and finally, while the trees were still two hundred yards away, the engine spluttered and died abruptly.
“Fuel’s gone,” Willie said.
“We go,” Joe replied, his spirits rising a little. “Still we go.”
They ran on under their own way for a while longer, having to lower the dinghy and labour over the oars for the last hundred and fifty yards. Fortunately for them, the deep water ran close inshore and they were able to anchor again within a few yards of the trees.
“Done it,” Frankie yelled gleefully. “We’ve done it.”
While Willie and Frankie went ashore, Joe set about clearing the deck, untangling the ropes and wire and flaking them along the planking. They had none too much spare rope now and no spare canvas, so Rosa carefully folded the sails and put them below in the cabin with the sail needle and palm and resin on top of them. Then, between them, they secured with a heaving line the broken mast they had heaved inboard and levered it into the water again to float alongside, sweating at the effort, Rosa’s clothes straining across her broad back as she laboured to help the grunting, unhappy Joe.
Meanwhile, ashore in the dying wind, Willie had cut down two young trees slightly more than half the length of the proposed mast and skidded them down the beach to the water’s edge.
“Now we can make sheer-legs,” he grinned at Frankie as they stood ankle-deep in the shallows. “Hoist ’em up tomorrow. Day after, we can cut a mast and use the sheer-legs to drop it in place.”
They sat on the beach to eat the fruit they had found and drink the milk from the coconuts the squalls had brought down.
The wind had disappeared completely now and the clouds had cleared and the last of the sunshine was falling in jade greens and salmon pinks on the curling breakers that rolled up outside the reef. Over the spit of land, they could see the stump of the Boy George’s mainmast touched to gold.
Aphrodisiac scents sighed in to them from the meadows of the sea weighted with salt spray, finally losing themselves over the lagoon where the terns still plummeted down after fish.
Willie sniffed the air and lay face down on the sand to stretch.
“It’s going to be hot tomorrow,” he said. “Hell, kid, we’re going to sweat.”
Frankie stretched out alongside him, twitching her ragged pants straight. “Think we shall do it, Willie?” she asked with desperate anxiety. “Put her to rights again, I mean.”
“Sure we shall,” Willie said confidently. “We’ve done it once. We’ll do it again.”
Frankie frowned doubtfully, then she smiled at him. “If you say so, Willie, I reckon we will. You’re smart with boats. You ought to do well with a boatyard.”
Willie turned towards her, his face close to hers, his bare shoulder brushing her sleeve. “I’d have to work hard, kid,” he said. “No time for anything but work.”
“I’d wait, Willie.”
“You’d have to wait a long time. You’d be old like you said.”
“Would you mind, Willie?”
He searched her face, while her eyes followed his, her lips half-open, moist and young.
“No,” he said with a firmness that made her feel humble and uplifted at the same time. “No, I wouldn’t, Frankie. It wouldn’t make any difference to me how you looked.”
“Oh, Willie!” Frankie gazed adoringly at him and, twining her arm tight round his, she hugged it. “Willie, I do love you–”
She was startled by the depth of the passion she felt, and a little frightened for, though she was ready for love, she was not yet old enough to understand this exultant singing thing that stirred her to her very soul and soared over all the difficulties that were in their path.
She lay back on the sand, fingering the little cross he had given her, and stared at the sky that shone in fading blue slits through the tattered banners of the palms curving out from the shore.
“I never knew being in love was like this,” she whispered. “I’ve seen Mama and Pop – you can’t imagine them being in love and holding hands, can you? I’ve seen other people fighting and bawling. Or I’ve seen ’em going down alleys looking kind of shifty. I never realized being in love was beautiful. It seems so natural here, Willie, to love someone.”
Willie leaned over her. “You’ve grown up, Frankie,” he said quietly. “Your face’s changed even. You look prettier.”
“I am prettier,” she said confidently. “I feel prettier. You made me prettier, Willie.”
She put her arms round his neck. “Willie,” she asked, “do you ever feel frightened?”
“Sometimes,” he said feelingly.
“About us, I mean. Sometimes, I can’t bear to think about it – like it’s all going to break and fly to pieces in my hands.”
Willie smiled at her, gently, indulgently, and she went on, trying to put her feelings into words.
“Every night I pray,” she whispered, “that we’ll find somewhere safe. Not an island – I’m so sick of islands and sea, Willie – but somewhere where there’s no one to come between us. No police, nobody who knows anything about you. Somewhere we can feel we don’t have to go on running, where we can grow up and get married and live like human beings.”
Willie was silent and she went on as though, having released her feelings, they were flooding out of her unchecked.
“What’s the use of all this hard work,” she asked, “if we’ve got no happiness? I don’t want to take any chances about might and maybe and perhaps. I want it now. So I’ve got something to remember in case anything horrible happens.”
Willie frowned. “I wish I could give you some happiness, Frankie, but – hell, I’m in no position to give anybody happiness. All I can do for you is take it away.”
She put her fingers gently on his lips, and rubbed her cheek against his shoulder, then she lay back and stared steadily at the sky again. “I said just now,” she murmured, not looking at him, “how it was beautiful to be in love. But sometimes it’s awful too, Willie. It is for me. It makes me awful scared. Oh, Willie,” she said. “There seems to be so little time.”
She held him to her fiercely and her voice grew stronger with determination as she began to feel things with a woman’s instincts and cast off finally and irrevocably her childhood indecision and doubt.
“So little time, Willie,” she whispered. “Don’t let’s waste it.”
It was another day before they got the stump of the old mast out. The tumbled waters outside the reef had calmed to long swells and the lagoon lay still and torpid on the windless ocean, so that
the four on the Boy George sweated as they worked, in their nostrils the odour of sun-baked coral. Joe and Rosa took turns on the winch handle that heaved the rope through the apex of the sheer-legs, while Willie laboured flat on his face in the suffocating bilges, knocking out the wedges and chocks that held the stump secure to the notch in the keel, with Frankie stretched out behind him to pass him tools. It was heart-breaking work under the floor-boards but at last they could move the stump in its socket, and several days later – panting days that exhausted them – the new mainmast was secured.
“She look once more like Captain Salomio’s pride and joy,” Joe said proudly, staring up at the long straight pole piercing the sky. “When Noah build his ark, he ain’t got nothing on you, Willie.” And to Rosa’s delight, they heard his breathy tenor struggling with Vesti la Giubba –
The others were infected by Joe’s happiness. “We’ll have a feast tonight,” Rosa said. “I’ll open a tin of steak – we’ve not got so many left – and some fruit. Peaches – how’s that?”
Willie was looking sombrely at them and Rosa caught his uneasiness.
“What’s the matter?” she asked. “Something wrong?”
Willie nodded. “Sure is, Mama,” he said. “I been wondering how to tell you. I got to looking over those cans we stored in the bilges while I was down there. The sea water’s got into em – the lot. There ain’t one that ain’t blown up like a dead cow.”
They stared at him, stunned. “We got no canned stuff left?” Rosa said.
“Not a one, Mama.”
Joe threw up his arms, his enthusiasm dispersed immediately. “And we don’t got no money either. That-a finish it. I want to go home.”
“Shut up, you old fool,” Rosa said. “We’re not beaten yet.”
“No–” Joe eyed her unhappily “–but we ain’t so far off now.”
Their meals from then on were sparse affairs and Joe, as he miserably wiped the grease from his plate with a piece of bread, scraping up the last flavour of fried pork, was in a rebellious mood and ripe for revolution.
They had already cut down the tree that was to become the mizzen mast when the radio, weak with failing batteries once more, brought them Flynn’s new message. The chirp of the loudspeaker had brought them a little cheer in their isolation and they listened to the announcer’s cheerful voice, eloquent of comfort, with a feeling of friendliness. Then, first in French and then in English, he began to give out the message which had been specially prepared for them by Flynn.
Joe was catching cockroaches, a regular job of his when they became too bad, solemnly parading about the cabin with a tray bearing the kerosene stove held near the cracks in the ancient deckhead, so that the cockroaches, yellow and rustling from twenty years of crumbs and scraps of crayfish, tumbled out in scorched, dead dozens.
He lowered the tray slowly and listened, one fat hand on his hip, his eyes round, his stomach protruding through his worn vest.
“They know where we are,” Frankie said, putting down the dog-eared magazine she had read a hundred times now. “I bet they’ve known all the time.”
Rosa’s reaction was just as Flynn had expected. “We’ve got to get away from here,” she said.
Joe slammed down his tray. “Where the hell-a we go to?” he demanded furiously. “Always we go. I get sick of going.” He sat down on an upturned bucket and began to sulk.
“We’ve got to head towards the Societies,” Willie said. “They seem to be everywhere else.”
Rosa sighed, thinking nostalgically of the crowded streets of King’s Cross, shabby, faded, noisy, but never refusing them shelter. Like all women, she needed security and the absence of roots was undermining her confidence.
“Whichever way it is,” she said, “there’s one thing – we can’t stay here.”
“I like it here,” Joe said angrily. “It is fine here. We might as well starve-a to death here as some place else.”
While they were arguing the announcer was still talking, unheeded until they were pulled up short by his next statement.
“With the Salomios on the rerigged Tina S is a man whom the Sydney police wish to interview. He is William Keeley, of Sydney, and a reward of five hundred pounds has been offered to anyone who can give evidence of his whereabouts–”
Willie leaned over quickly and switched off the radio. Frankie watched him, her face tragic.
“OK,” he said bitterly in the silence which followed, his features robbed of their youth. “Now you know for certain that it’s me they want, not you.”
“You musta done something big if they pay-a that much just to find you,” Joe commented.
“Shut up,” Rosa said sharply, remembering her brief conversation with Willie, that monosyllabic discussion that had told her so much about him and yet so little.
“Listen,” she went on. “Why can’t we go to America?”
“Mama, I told you once. Because we ain’t-a got the stores. We ain’t-a got the boat for a trip like that.” Joe had turned towards her, stamping his foot to impress his points on her. “Because we aint-a got the sails.”
“Can’t we try?” There was hopelessness in Rosa’s tones as she pleaded with him.
“No, Mama. For a trip like that, you gotta to have money. You gotta to make preparations. Two-three months.” He shrugged. “You gotta to have a boat – not a old string-a-bag like this one.”
Willie had been watching them as they argued and as Rosa turned away, defeated, he stood up. “I’m going on deck,” he said flatly. “I got a lot of clearing up to do.”
Rosa watched him go in silence and as Frankie made to follow, she caught her by the arm.
“You hear that?” she said, unbalanced by the worry crowding in on her. “You hear what he said? He’s on the run. The police are after him. Why did you go and fall for a boy like that? Whyn’t you pick a decent boy? Now what do you think? – after you hear that lot.”
“Mama–” Frankie’s eyes were big and surprised, “–I knew. I knew all the time.”
“You knew? How did you know?”
“He told me so himself.”
“When?”
“Weeks ago. One night on deck. It don’t make any difference.”
“You little fool!” In her distress, Rosa swung her daughter round savagely and sat her on the spare bunk. “What good can come of it? You’re only a child.”
“You weren’t much older when you married Pop,” Frankie said firmly, jumping up again. “Lucia was only seventeen and a half. I’m old enough to marry anyone. And, anyway, I promised I’d wait. I promised I wouldn’t get in his way while he was getting himself some money.”
“You did, did you? You’ve been talking it over – you and him?”
“It was my fault,” Frankie cried. “I started it. Don’t go on at Willie. He hadn’t anything to do with it. He told me to go away. He kept on telling me. But I didn’t want to. Mama, I don’t ever want to go away from him. And I’m not going to let you make me.”
She stared back at Rosa defiantly, prepared to do battle for the thing she believed in, for the first tender thing that had ever arrived in her wild young life.
Rosa looked haggardly at her daughter, then she turned slowly aside and Frankie flew up the ladder after Willie.
Joe watched his wife for a moment, then, taking advantage of what he thought was an argument in his favour, he leaned forward and spoke in an insistent whisper as Rosa wearily began to sweep the neglected mugs from the table to the tin she used for washing up.
“You hear that, Rosie?” he said. “Five hundred pound reward. No wonder he buy stores. No wonder he change the boat – two masts,” he snorted. “No wonder he always keep on working. Five hundred pounds, Rosie. Five hundred pounds.”
“So what?” Rosa kept her back to him so that he shouldn’t see the misery in her face. She knew what he was going to say even before he said it.
“Five hundred pounds, Mama. That pay off the boat and give us something in hand. We live comfor
table on that till Tommy grow old enough to take her over. We ain’t a chance, Mama. You know we ain’t. I get hungry. We all get hungry. We got nothing left. No money. Soon we have no food.”
“I don’t want no blood money.” That ingrained instinct in Rosa that came from living all her life in the dock area, that instinct that told her all policemen were enemies, made her stand against the infamous suggestion that she should inform on one of her own kind.
“If you don’t shut up,” she went on, “I’ll hit you with the coffee pot.”
Joe sat back on his bucket silently. He was sick of hard work and sicker still of their diet of bananas and coconuts and fish, and even sicker than that of the absence of anything stronger to drink than the brackish water from the tank.
“Mama,” he whispered softly. “All we gotta to do is send the letter – the cable – anything. We could put in somewhere on some excuse and get one of the islanders to take-a the letter to the nearest radio. Give him the half-a-nicker for his trouble. I know where he keep it. I’ve watch where he put it. I’ve seen it–”
“I suppose you’ve helped yourself too?” Rosa swung round from the washing-up tin and glared at him so that he jumped.
“No, Rosie. Honest-a-true. But I know where he keep it. We can take-a the quid or so.”
“Judas,” Rosa spat at him. “Informer! Thief! One more word, that’s all. Then the coffee pot.”
Joe shrugged and slumped against the bulkhead, scowling. “Mama,” he muttered. “He is the criminal, isn’t he? Perhaps the murderer. There is nothing wrong in telling the police about that–”
He rolled backwards off his bucket with a howl as the coffee pot came round in a sweep and hit him at the side of the head, showering him with luke-warm coffee. The bucket shot from under him with a clatter and as his behind hit the floor he roared again, then Rosa flung the whole tin can full of greasy water, mugs, plates and all, across him.
Willie and Frankie put their heads in at the hatch, in alarm at the shouting.
“What’s happened?” they demanded.