Getaway

by John Harris

  “Nothing,” Rosa said calmly, beginning to pick up the mugs. ‘It’s Joe. He slipped. Knocked the coffee pot outa me hand. That’s all. Ain’t that right, Joe?”

  “Sure,” Joe agreed gloomily, spluttering and gasping on the deck. “Sure, that’s-a right.”

  “We got a bit excited,” Rosa went on in a flat voice.

  “Excited? What is there to be excited about?”

  “We’re going to America. I’ve decided.”

  “What?” They almost fell into the cabin.

  “Whatever happens, we can’t do no good here.”

  Joe sat among the debris of the washing-up and gaped.

  “But, Mama–” Frankie stared at her “–we’ve hardly any money left.”

  “So what?” Rosa stood with a mug in her hand, hardly seeing them. “We’ve come all this way without any money. Why shouldn’t we go the rest of the way? We’ll find somewhere like Panama. They’ll have us. They’ll not ask questions. Or somewhere in South America. There’s nothing to lose.”

  “Mama–” Joe managed to speak at last “–I won’t go.” He jumped up, showering dishes and water to the deck. “All that way. We never get back to Sydney again.”

  “What difference does it make? We’ll get by. We can pick up water and stores in Aiotea or Apavana. We can scrounge. We can pinch if necessary. Then we can head for the Galapagos. We’re nearly there then.”

  Willie turned to her, noticing the lines of strain on her features.

  “Mama,” he pointed out gravely. “We’re taking one hell of a chance.”

  “Willie–” Rosa’s flat voice suddenly seemed more cheerful and buoyed up with hope “–if we stay here, we’ve no chance. You’ve no chance. You know that. Let’s risk it. I’m old. Joe’s old. It doesn’t matter what happens to us. But you and Frankie are young. If you’ve fallen in love, God help you, we got to do something for you. Let’s go where you’ve got a chance together. Let’s try and give you both some future.”

  Her shoulders were stooped and weary with thinking and Frankie put her arms round her and hugged her impulsively.

  “When, Mama? When are we going?”

  Rosa looked up and forced a smile. “Now. Soon as we can. I’m not fussy.”

  Willie studied her, then a grin spread across his face.

  “OK, Captain Mama,” he said. “Now!”

  He swung her into his arms and planted a noisy kiss full on her lips and almost danced up the ladder with Frankie.

  Joe turned to his wife as they were left alone together, shuffling towards her on weighted feet. “Rosie,” he said very slowly, “you don’ understand. You ain’t never understand. We ain’t no sails. We ain’t got nothing for a trip like that. We’re right in the hurricane season, and that old glass she don’t look so good again. We drown.”

  “OK.” Rosa seemed indifferent to her fate. “We stay here, we starve. We go to America, we drown. What’s the difference. Let’s go to America.”

  Part Three

  One

  When the Boy George slipped out of the lagoon where she had left her stumps of mast on the white beach, she had changed her rig again. Taking the hint from the radio description of their boat, they had this time left off the mizzen mast and thought it wiser to do away with the bowsprit, so that she had regained her old squat appearance.

  They were all leaner and more tired and the sun had burned them black. Like their ship, they had a poverty-stricken look about them now, for there was no longer any slack they could take in. There was no longer any possibility of replacing their needs beyond the last few pounds in Willie’s money belt. Everything was desperately short and the only way they could replace their rotten canvas and frayed cordage was to resort to theft.

  But suddenly there was hope in the ship again. The feeling of being harried that had grown on Rosa as they jumped from islet to islet, running westwards before the breeze, had diminished now that they had turned east and north. Ahead of them, when they had cleared the Marquesas, there was only sea and where there was only sea Rosa felt safe in spite of their poverty.

  Frankie was still in a cloudy wonderland of delight full of dropped dishes and misplaced cutlery and joyous whistling over the washing-up, but Willie was inclined to be silent and uncommunicative; buoyed up by Rosa’s hope but awed by the tremendous task they had set themselves.

  There was a quiet determination in the way he did his work now, quite different from his early eagerness of the days of Aranga-vaa. He had chanced one night on Rosa praying before the crucifix in the cabin, silent and shapeless in her old clothes, the well-darned heel of her stocking showing where her slipper had sagged away from her foot. He had never seen anyone so still before and as he had watched he had caught his own and Frankie’s name among the muttering and it had dawned on him she was praying for them. He crept away, scarlet-faced with embarrassment that he had witnessed her agony. He had seen her praying before, saying a decade of the Rosary each night without fail, and more when she was troubled by the shape of events, but it had never occurred to him that she might want to pray for him. It made him shrivel inside with shame that he had once considered deserting her.

  Only Joe was unhappy. He knew his limitations and he was uncertain of his ability to withstand that tremendous journey from the Marquesas to the Pacific Coast of America, even provided the Boy George could withstand it, something he also had grave doubts about.

  It was his very experience that frightened him, for while the others could see only the promise, Joe could see only the dangers, and he retired into a shell of moroseness that grew as they put more miles between them and home. There was nothing of the pioneer left in Joe and the memory of those sunny walls in Sydney, instead of diminishing with the miles, grew stronger. In his heart was a searing desire for revenge, a sweeping longing to assert himself that was born not so much of personal dislike of Willie as of homesickness and sea-weariness; of jealousy and envy and the scourgings of discomfort he had always associated with Willie’s arrival on the boat. And at the back of it all was a sense of frustration and resentment. The knowledge that five hundred pounds were almost within his grasp and could not be reached left him with a feeling of anger against the others.

  The atlas was frayed at the edges now with Joe’s anxious fingering and the out-of-date charts were stained with grease-spots and the rings made by cups of tea. They had to rely entirely now on their fishing lines for meals, for the islands around them were too populated for safe calling. How they would replenish their canned food, Rosa had no idea, for she felt pretty certain there could be few people of any intelligence who had not heard of them by this time.

  At night they watched the deck for the flying fish which had flung themselves into the sail and expired on the planking, and at dawn searched for the pattern of gulls’ wings against the pale skies as they mewed over the mullet that chased the fleeing smaller fry. In the evening they sought the dark irregular patches that meant shoals to Joe and listened for a sound like the patter of a rain squall on the surface of the sea which indicated fish feeding below the weeds and spawn that stretched in a mile-wide avenue from horizon to horizon.

  With salt pork on a meat hook, and a dog chain for a trace, and with Joe shrieking advice from the wheel – “Work him away from the big-a ones. It make ’em cross and they forget to be clever” – they caught a dolphin from the group that accompanied them and watched, faintly shocked at their own cruelty, as it gasped out its life on the deck, its colour changing in shimmering waves from blue-green through every colour of the rainbow and back again; and once a wolfish shark that splintered the boat hook and crushed a bucket with its leaps.

  From time to time, they took the risk of putting ashore on one of the smaller islands for the daintier inhabitants of the lagoons and the crabs which they grabbed from behind while their pincers clacked away like castanets. Finding a paradise where the sky was black as nesting birds rose, they lowered the dinghy and helped themselves to eggs, and even fledglings, pic
king the young boobies and bosun birds from the nests with ease.

  They continued to run eastwards, Joe uneasy as he watched for the signs of another storm – the too-lovely sunsets and sunrises, the haloes round the sun and the moon, the lines of cirrus radiating from a point over the horizon where the centre lay, the sultriness and the heavy swell with no wind to account for it. Several times they had to put about and waddle over the horizon as they saw the tips of an inter-island schooner’s masts in the distance, and once they passed close enough to a passenger ship bound for Auckland to see the colour of the flag on her jackstaff. But the great ship was sufficiently indifferent to the tiny wooden craft to fail to investigate her, and their presence went once more undetected.

  The barometer had dropped another two points and the wind was growing again when they sighted the peaks of Aiotea to the north and east of the Tuamotus and almost on the fringe of the Marquesas. There had been a slight upward flick of the glass and a wind change, then it had started to blow hard once more.

  “Mama,” Joe said, “she go down again. Soon she come out at the bottom. We oughta to stand near to shelter.”

  To his surprise, Rosa agreed to running in to Aiotea, having first reassured herself from their sparse literature that it was only thinly inhabited. What he did not realize was that her worries were growing to the point when the desire to communicate them to someone else had become intolerable, and her whole feminine soul itched to send a letter to Lucia.

  Flat grey clouds like sheets of lead across the sky were closing overhead as the Boy George approached the island. A strong wind kept punching her over on her fat round beam as it came squalling out of the east. Lines of white spray like veins began to appear on the blackish surface of the sea, and they had to hang on to ropes and spars as they moved about.

  Slanting lines of rain were blowing across the deck and the wind tugged at their clothes and beat at their faces like angry little fists. The bow rose from the troughs of the sea dripping like a dog after a swim.

  “Mama,” Joe said, climbing on deck to where Rosa sat with Frankie alongside Willie, who was handling the wheel. “Mama, it is down another point.”

  It was still raining next morning when they entered Taio Bay, the landlocked entrance to Aiotea. The spire-like peaks of the island were hidden in mist and the tall palms waved and twisted to the dictation of the wind. There was a violent current running as they sidled round the barrier reef that hid the entrance to the bay, and the Boy George lurched and staggered as Joe held her to the lee side of the cliff to avoid being flung by the gusty wind on the rocks at either side. Beating up the harbour was not easy work, but at last they dropped anchor off a flat beach of black coral sand that added to the gloom.

  Taio was a forbidding place which seemed under the brooding influence of the hidden towers of rock that rose above the mist. Little light came into the bottle-necked lagoon and the whole place had an atmosphere of darkness and neglect and a sad stagnant silence broken only by the mourning cries of the birds. There were signs of a once-thriving community, for there was a wooden jetty and a group of native houses straggling along the beach, but most of them, with the fatalism of a dying race, had been allowed to sag into decay, palm fronds jammed into the bad patches of the silver-grey thatch.

  They had dropped anchor before they became aware of another ship sheltering under the lee of the land, a trim little vessel from which at that moment a rowing boat was heading in their direction, manned by a couple of Fijians and directed by a white man who lounged in the stern.

  “Name’s Seagull – Harry Seagull,” he said as the boat bumped alongside. He grinned up at them with a gap-toothed grin. “I’m the original deep-sea kid. I been sailing these waters since I’m a nipper. Cut me teeth on a marline-spike. I’m on me way to Nukuhiva for passengers. When my boys seen you come in they let out a squawk like a ship’s siren. Ain’t anybody ever comes in here but me. Howja find her?”

  “Just took a chance,” Willie said cautiously, leaning over the side, while the others watched nervously from behind him.

  “Ain’t that queer?” Seagull reached up and hauled himself on deck. “That’s how I found her years ago. Just took a chance. I’m as lost as a fish in a whale’s belly and I drop in here outa the blow. People here then, though. All work in Papeete now. Rather dig in the stores than dig in the earth. Eat canned salmon outa tins instead of fishing in the sea.”

  He glanced round him at the scarred decks and the new mast and frayed sails. “Pleased to see you nohow. Crook weather. Ain’t seen weather like this since 1928. Ships in here then make it look like a regatta in Sydney Harbour. Me, I got so drunk I daren’t wake up. What ship are you?” He looked hard at Joe as he spoke.

  “Boy George, Auckland,” Willie said as Joe’s voice stuck in his throat. “My name’s Green. Theirs is Howard. She’s their daughter. They’re my passengers.”

  “You don’t look old enough to have passengers,” Seagull said critically, with the contempt of the old and experienced for the very young. “You ain’t got the marks of the pot off your behind.”

  “Just goes to show, don’t it?” With Frankie half-hidden behind him, clutching at his sleeve, Willie stared back at Seagull unsubdued. This was the kind of conversation he knew how to handle.

  Captain Seagull looked them up and down, taking in their shabby clothes, Rosa’s gaunt bulk and Frankie’s huge eyes that seem to fill her small face. “Had a rough passage by the look of you,” he commented. “Me, I don’t like bad weather. I’m all for peace. Ever since I had the blue-green heeby-jeebies in 1917. Lost your mast by the look of you.”

  “Yeah. We ran aground. Had to stand in and rig a new one.”

  “Nice job you done.” Seagull’s sly blue eyes ran over the Boy George as she jerked to the tug of her anchor in the eddies of the wind. “Reckon you lost more’n your mast. You’re all new topsides, ain’t you? Sure was tough.”

  “It was a bit,” Willie agreed and Frankie marvelled at his calmness. “We got to get some new canvas some time.”

  “I got enough canvas aboard to make a parcel of your boat and send her through the post. I got enough to make a nightshirt for the Almighty. Always carry canvas since I tore out my ass-end on the reef near Lady Musgrave Island. Had to patch her with my best suit and shirts and go ashore in Brisbane in a pareu and a screwpine hat.”

  “We’ve got to wait a bit for canvas,” Willie said thoughtfully. “We’re short of cash. But we want supplies. Not much. Beans. Tinned milk. Flour. Fuel for the engine.”

  “I can do that. You row across after me. I’ll fix you up.”

  “Don’t go, Willie,” Frankie hissed. “Don’t go on your own.”

  “Thought we’d get ’em at the store there.” Willie indicated the shore, distrusting the gleam in Seagull’s eyes.

  “Don’t go there. Rob you of your pants. Steal your eye-teeth. You leave it to me. I’ll fix you up. I fix everyone up. Ten-cent store of the South Pacific they call me. Just come in from Papeete and freshly filled up. I can give you enough fuel to take you from here to the Pearly Gates.”

  “They got a post office here?” Rosa interrupted, clutching the grubby letter she had written to reassure Lucia in Sydney after their long silence that they were still alive, the letter which told of their severance with the old life, the letter which, if the weather were against them, might well be the last she would ever send.

  “I’m the post office,” Seagull lied. “I put it on the weekly trading schooner. Meet her in Nukuhiva. Goes back to Papeete. You come across to my ship and I’ll give you everything you want. I got the coffee on. Come and have a cup.”

  They exchanged glances and, in spite of Frankie’s whispered protestations, finally lowered their dinghy and followed across the dark, rain-ruffled water towards the Teura To’oa. Climbing aboard, they tramped noisily across the wooden decks towards the old man’s cabin, where Frankie glared at the colourful and bulging nudes torn from magazines which plastered the bulkhead
s, her dislike mixed with a certain amount of envy.

  “Blow coming up,” Seagull commented. “Warnings out. You want to anchor over there in the shelter of that spit. Safer there.”

  “We aren’t staying,” Rosa said at once.

  “Find it damn’ difficult getting out of that bloody bottle-neck with the wind coming in like this. Blow you inside-out. Blow you into splinters. Blow you into rags.”

  “We aren’t staying,” Rosa repeated firmly. “We got to get on.”

  Captain Seagull pushed a bottle of gin across the table. Only Joe bothered to pour himself a drink – a quick one, which he refilled immediately.

  “Where you heading?” Seagull asked, his eyes alert and suspicious.

  Rosa hesitated, her mind congealed with panic. Willie looked at her quickly as she paused, and jumped into the conversation again. “Okahé,” he said.

  “Cargo?”

  “Passengers.” Willie indicated Rosa, Joe and Frankie.

  Seagull didn’t believe him for a minute. He knew enough of Flynn’s business to have suspected immediately who they were.

  “What you going there for this time of the year?” he asked.

  “See their grandson.” Willie interrupted again before Rosa could reply. “Ain’t seen him yet. Son lives there. Engineer. Radio. They’ve chipped in to make this trip. Doing it on the cheap,” he ended as though to explain their condition.

  “You’re telling me.” Seagull stared at them unwinkingly. “Wasn’t no radio engineer on Okahé last time I was in there.”

  “Musta missed him then,” Willie said with a hard grin. “Been there some months now.”

  “Didn’t even know there was enough radio to have an engineer.”

  “Just shows what you can miss, don’t it?” Frankie chipped in. Seagull ignored her and studied Willie shrewdly. “How long you been sailing?” he asked unexpectedly.

  Willie’s hesitation was only momentary. “Since I stopped wearing bibs,” he said. “Know it inside out.”

  “You weren’t on the wheel when you came in.”