by Earls,Nick
‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘I could ask. I could definitely ask.’
The camera window has a date and time stamp in one corner. It’s on Brisbane time, 5.50 am tomorrow. I check my watch.
‘It’s ten to twelve.’
‘Already?’ My father looks at the ground, at the weeds and dark soil, and takes a breath. He lifts his head, turns to Hope, and says, ‘Do they give you a lunch break?’
She laughs. ‘I’m a volunteer. And the museum’s not even open today. I can take lunch until Wednesday if I want to. Well, maybe not till Wednesday. I have my granddaughter’s birthday party at three. I made the piñata.’
‘Well, good.’ He smiles.
He puts one hand on his bumbag. For a moment I wonder if he’s about to start pulling money out again, but it’s an unconscious gesture.
‘It’s on me,’ he says. ‘I’d like to eat Alaskan salmon in Alaska, but I’d like to eat it somewhere that does it well.’
‘Oh, sure,’ she says. ‘You got to know the right place.’
My father turns to the grave one last time, gazes at it long and hard and then says, ‘Okay.’ He lifts his shoulders and looks off through the trees, as if making a deliberate effort to reset his focus.
He steps past the nearest upright headstone and starts to make his way to the path. Hope is beside him while I’m still packing the backpack. He says something that makes her laugh, but there’s a car revving beyond the trees and I don’t hear it.
When I reach them, the conversation seems to be on salmon again, or still. It’s my father talking, mostly.
‘Is there somewhere near the cruise ship terminal that does good salmon?’ I ask Hope as soon as there’s a chance. ‘We have to meet the others there at midday, near the Mount Roberts cable car.’
‘Oh, yeah,’ she says over her shoulder. ‘There’s the Twisted Fish. It’s good, for sure.’
‘Is there any chance they do sushi?’
She thinks about it. ‘No, I don’t think so.’
My father makes an ‘Mmmm’ noise. ‘I’m sure Hope can point out a good sushi place on the way there.’
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘I can point out two.’
‘Kenny’s on Front,’ she says, though the name is plainly visible on the tall yellow timber building, above a sign billing it as a ‘wok and teriyaki sushi bar’. ‘Best way from the wharf is to come down Franklin, then Front is the first left after you see the Alaska Hotel on the right.’
My father says nothing. He doesn’t even turn to see what Kenny’s looks like. Hope has parked to show me where it is, down a side street. I pull out our Juneau tourist map and crease it to mark the location.
Hope flicks her indicator and the Subaru moves back into the traffic. She drives us to the end of Main Street, past City Hall with its massive Tlingit creation-story mural. The first of the big ships, the Statendam, appears to our right. We turn onto Franklin at the Red Dog. There are still some cruisers about, still mooching, pointing, posing for photos, not buying precious stones, though many have probably gone on excursions or to the olde time frontier shows that were among the Juneau options on the cruise company’s website.
I’m picturing a live version of the photos in the studio window further down the block—Wyatt Earp, bad guys with droopy moustaches stealing bags of nuggets and dust, bursts of ragtime piano, a hooker with a sassy mouth and a heart of gold. I can see them in a period theatre, hands held across the stage for the final bow, gold glitter flung out over the audience, heavy burgundy curtains shuddering across and closing. The curtains from 1896, from the ball photo.
If that’s how it goes, it will be because it’s what the cruisers want, and no local should have to take the rap for that. For putting on a show, entertaining, filling seats and keeping actors in work. Even if they’re ducking the story—the thousands of small, hidden stories—of an Alaska that’s more beautiful and more stark, infinitely more interesting.
We have glimpsed it, my father and me, two cruisers among the thousands in town for the day.
Thomas Chandler, Stanton Harper—they had less than a year.
My right foot is starting to go numb. I twist in the seat, but I can only move an inch or so. I shift the weight of the bag from my right thigh to my left as much as I can.
We pass the wharves. The Radiance of the Seas runs the length of two large car parks, its hull a fresh, clean white in the muted light. The sun has gone again. There is rain in the west. Cable cars swing as they leave the Mount Roberts Tramway building heading for the sky, most of them empty.
We turn immediately after the entrance to the minibus area, into a smaller restaurant car park. It has the usual Juneau array of utes and four-wheel drives, all wearing sprays of grime and bug remains. One spot is occupied by rusty lobster traps piled on top of each other. They are ugly enough to be the real deal, not for show. We are exactly level with the bow of our ship.
There’s a rush of cool, briny air when I open the door. I lift the backpack out and prop it against the car. The queasiness of the drive hits me as the breeze catches the sweat on my scalp and face.
‘It’s been good every time I’ve eaten here,’ Hope says to my father, taking a critical look through the windscreen at the Twisted Fish. ‘So, I hope it’s good today.’
‘I’m sure it will be.’ He glances her way and smiles. ‘Mi hablo mucho esperanza.’
She laughs. ‘Bueno.’
My right leg sparks with pins and needles when I stand. I keep a hand on the roof to steady myself as the feeling returns. Hope and my father are out of the car, focussed on the restaurant, on lunch.
The Twisted Fish is a mud-coloured building with a stone chimney. I can see diners inside, most of them in their forties. One of them, bald, with a neat ginger goatee, holds a glass of white wine to the window to scrutinise it in the natural light.
‘Oh, Tim,’ my father says. ‘Lunch.’ He reaches for his bumbag. ‘The sushi. It’s on me.’
‘You really…’ It’s much easier just to take the money. We’ve staged this pantomime before—offer, decline, insistence, rebuttal, no really, well okay then. ‘Thanks.’
He folds several notes and hands them to me.
‘Looks nice.’ I nod in the direction of the restaurant. I would crack a joke in Spanish if it was in me to do it. ‘Make sure to take the muesli bar into account with your insulin dose.’
He gives me a glare that’s nowhere near as subtle as he means it to be, but he manages not to tell me to mind my own business.
‘I’d better give you the…’ My hand starts miming an insulin injection before I can stop it.
There’s a pencil case in the backpack with his testing kit and insulin pen. It’s below a jumper, his iPad and the snacks, but I get to it eventually and hand it over.
‘Show me the picture,’ he says, noticing the iPad being overturned in the search. ‘The one from the ball.’
He gives himself a full minute to look at it. The breeze gusts. The rain will be here any time.
‘Thank you,’ he says as he hands it back to me. ‘For this morning, I mean, not just for showing me that.’ He smiles. His face looks old, worn. His skin has almost no elasticity left. ‘I didn’t know what we might find.’ He looks down at his feet, at the gravel and the shallow puddles. He sticks his hands in his pockets and lifts his head, his eyes on me, but on my chest more than my face. ‘My greatest fear was that Thomas had died alone, in some horrible way. Starving in the wilderness, killed by a bear. But I think he was happy. Not for very long, but happy. I think I can believe that.’
Now he looks me in the eye. He wants it confirmed.
‘I think so, too.’ I can say that honestly. ‘Maybe some people weren’t suited to Dorset farm life back them. Maybe a frontier was a better fit, away from the usual expectations.’
‘I had him pegged as lonely, and in the end he wasn’t. For months at least. They came here, they found each other.’
His voice cracks and he looks past me,
in the direction of the Radiance, or the oncoming rain. He thrusts his hands deeper into his pockets.
‘Yes,’ he says. It sticks on the way out. He coughs. He pulls his hand from his jacket and checks his watch. ‘Midday. You should meet the others.’
‘Yeah.’ I turn around to check the car park, but there’s no minibus yet. ‘Three thirty, remember? Boarding?’
He smiles. ‘I remember. And Hope has a date with a piñata at three. So…’
I thank Hope for everything she’s done and they make their way to the door of the Twisted Fish, which is opened for them by a young woman. The toe of my father’s boot clips the step on the way in, but he corrects himself and keeps walking.
At the bus stop there’s one bench seat under cover, and I take it before the rain comes.
At a row of nearby ticket booths selling tours, a vendor shouts to a pair of Japanese tourists, ‘If you take the city bus you will miss your cruise ship.’ They happily give him a thumbs up and say, ‘Cruise ship, yes.’
Somewhere not far away, a minibus is on its way back from the huskies, a few minutes late already. Inside the Twisted Fish, my father and Hope are at a window table, possibly the best in the place for the view of the ships and the cold waters of the Gastineau Channel over which Thomas Chandler came all those years ago. My father is shown a bottle of wine by a staff member. He scrutinises the label and nods. I have heard him, dozens of times, criticising the drinking of alcohol with lunch. ‘It wrecks your entire afternoon,’ he’s said.
The wine is poured for him to taste. He sniffs it, tries some and nods again. The waitress says something that makes both Hope and my father laugh, like two people who have just found a good time, quite unexpectedly, and are set on making the most of it.
I move to the end of the seat and turn around, to look towards the road for the bus, to leave my father and Hope to their lunch.
There is green cemetery grass sticking out of my boot tread. At the far end of the wharf, the cruisers are waving their arms at the rain and starting to run. On Mount Roberts, the cloud drops lower and lower and still the cable cars go up, vanishing into it, as if I’m dreaming them and the dream is turning them into mist.
1
GOTHAM
2
VENICE
3
VANCOUVER
4
JUNEAU
5
NOHO
Nick Earls is the author of more than twenty books for adults, teenagers and children, including novels such as Zigzag Street, Bachelor Kisses and Analogue Men. His work has won awards in the UK and Australia, among them a Betty Trask Award for Zigzag Street and a Children’s Book Council of Australia Book of the Year Award for 48 Shades of Brown. His books have appeared on bestseller lists in both those countries and in the Amazon Kindle Store. Two of his novels, Perfect Skin and 48 Shades of Brown, have been adapted into feature films and five have been adapted into stage plays.