“I like walnuts,” he said. “I like to eat them when I walk.”
I thought about how my brother and I would use a rock to smash the walnuts open against the concrete steps at the back of the house and the pieces of nut would shatter and mix with the shell if you hit them too hard with the rock.
“How do you open them?” I asked.
“Ah,” he said, and he held one in his hand. “It is very simple. See how one side, this pointy side, is all closed up?”
I nodded. The pointy side was sealed very tightly.
“But here on the other side, the round side, there is this spongy bit where the walnut hangs on the tree.”
I could see it. A dark vein between the two halves of the walnut shell.
“Like a skull,” I said.
“Yes,” he said. “A little skull.”
He got a pocketknife out from his jeans. Shiny silver—stainless steel.
“My father gave me this knife,” he said, “a long time ago,” and he pulled the sharp blade out from its tight hiding space. He held the walnut in one hand and pushed the knife into the soft cork vein with ease. Then he twisted the blade. There was a cracking sound, the nut opening—two halves there in his hand.
He held up the open half. “A little brain,” he said.
The nut sat in one half of its shell in one whole piece, unbroken—complete. He took the nut out and gave it to me and I chewed up the warm taste. The creamy flesh tinged with the acid of the thin walnut skin, and together those tastes were delicious.
“I think we cannot be stopping now,” he said, already cracking open another nut and eating it whole.
“When I was at school, I used to steal walnuts from my neighbor. He had three big trees in a row. He was an old man called Emil. Maybe he was crazy, I don’t know. I never saw him collect any of the nuts, but it was wrong to take them. I knew that. I’d eat them on the way to school, using this knife. I couldn’t stop eating them once I started.”
Bo passed his knife to me.
“You try,” he said.
I picked up a walnut and held it in the palm of my hand. The knife felt heavy and warm and I slid the blade in carefully, the way Bo had shown me. I twisted the knife, my whole wrist turning with it, and there was a crack, the shell came apart. The two halves were perfect, but the inside of the shell was dark. It was empty.
There was nothing there.
I looked at the space where the nut should have been. I turned my head and looked up at Bo.
“Oh,” he said, and he took the shell out of my hands, inspected it closely. “The fairies ate that one.”
He handed me back the two halves of the shell.
“You should keep it,” he said. “Good luck.” He winked at me.
I looked at the shell again. I didn’t know if it was true or not, if a shell could be good luck, but I put it in my pocket anyway. I kept it.
The next one I tried had a nut inside, but it split in half with the shell. It looked like a little heart. A skull with a little heart inside.
“Walnuts are very good for you,” Bo said. “Very good.”
He smiled and cracked open another. We sat there and ate as many as we could find, twenty or more, one by one, until all around us were opened walnut shells in perfect halves.
THINGS I LOVE
We didn’t have a lawn mower. Once a month the man from next door would mow our backyard. He liked mowing, he said. He would always do it early on a Saturday morning. I didn’t mind because I was always up. My brother and I would get up early to watch the cartoons. They finished at 9 AM, so if you didn’t get up, you missed them. After the cartoons came hours and hours of sports shows.
Mum would stay in bed and she wouldn’t get up even though the sound of the lawn mower was very loud and would have woken her.
Bo stood by the back door and watched the man mow.
“Isn’t it great?” he said to me when I came outside. I nodded but I didn’t know why. I didn’t know what was great. When the man finished and left our yard, Bo ran down the concrete steps and got down on the grass. He rolled around, over and over, and when he stopped rolling he lay on his belly in the middle of the lawn.
My brother came out to see what was happening and we walked down the steps and stood at the edge of the grass together. He was already sniffing and my eyes had started to itch with all the bits of grass in the air. Bo put his face to the earth, breathed in deep, and he stayed like that for ages. When he looked up, the grass had made imprints on his face and he said, “I love grass!” It made us laugh, we didn’t know why. “I love it,” he said again and he rolled over and got up. His white T-shirt was all stained by the freshly cut grass.
“I feel like I haven’t smelt grass since I was a boy.”
“I get hay fever,” my brother said and he rubbed his eyes, then started to sneeze. Bo took us inside and he washed my brother’s face with a hot washcloth.
“Do you think your T-shirt is wrecked?” my brother asked when he had stopped sneezing. “Mum says grass doesn’t come out.”
Bo looked down at his stained T-shirt, brown with dirt and green with grass.
“It’s perfect,” he said. “My T-shirt is perfect.”
A BOX OF CHEWING GUM
It was something special to go on Bo’s ship. It was something I had imagined, looking at all the ships that were at the wharf and thinking that I’d love to see what it was like inside. Sometimes there were open days for navy ships, but they were not like Nella. They were gray and clean and organized. Compartmentalized.
Mum took us down to the wharf on a Sunday. It was the day before Bo was leaving again for Antarctica. For Casey.
Nella Dan was waiting for us when we got there, all bright and warm. Inside, she was bigger than you expected. There were stairs and many floors and cabins and corridors and outside decks and undercover decks and showers and bathrooms and places to eat and places to sit, and all of them felt cozy and comforting and lived-in and loved. It was like she came from some other time and some other place. A place much better than here.
Bo made us lunch and we sat with the crew at their table. They put cushions on our chairs so we could reach. And we were like tiny people, like fairies, and everything was giant. The glasses of milk and the liter bottles of beer and the slices of dark bread and cheese. A man called Soren, who had long yellow hair, drank a whole liter of milk right out of the carton and then he burped loudly and laughed. It made my brother laugh too. He really laughed.
Later, when we had finished lunch, Soren lifted my brother up high off the ground so that he could see all the boxes of duty-free candies and chocolates that were stacked on top of a tall storage cupboard. Soren told him to choose whatever he liked in a thick accent that was deep and rolling and happy. I saw my brother’s hands grab an orange box. I saw his eyes, how big they were. When Soren put him back down on the ground, my brother looked up at him and asked if it was okay. Soren patted him on the head and said something in Danish. Then everyone laughed and the crew all patted my brother as they passed by, as they went back to work.
We walked home from the wharf with Mum, and my brother held the box tightly all the way. It was a box of a hundred packets of Wrigley’s chewing gum, and even though I had never seen my brother eat chewing gum before, I knew he still couldn’t believe his luck.
He looked at me and he told me that I could have half, that we could share the chewing gum. That’s how things were between us.
MS Nella Dan
VOYAGE 2, 1986/1987 SEASON
29th October 1986
POSITION: 56° 39.000’ S, 147° 14.000’ E
CAPTAIN’S NOTE: Making good speed on the way to Casey, and planning for the resupply continues.
* * *
They come out of the soft gray
White with clean black lines
Albatross, gliding clear
They turn with no effort and rarely beat their wings
Meters of soft feathers stretched out
<
br /> Yet against the endless water on all sides
They look small
Four AM and even though there are many of us in the galley, we are quiet—half-sleeping. Still separated by the solitude that night brings. It takes time to readjust.
But we are focused. Busy. One task and then another.
Coffee in my cracked cup, black and bitter. It pulses through me, fills my empty stomach, and my thoughts quicken. My eyes moisten and blink and I am rising up. I am coming into the working day.
The working day.
Leo has been here for hours already baking. The life of a baker. The galley warm with the smell of bread, with the smell of pastries coming out of the oven to be cooled and glazed. He always gives us one if we want it, the custard inside still hot. You have to be careful or you will burn the roof of your mouth and then enjoy nothing for the rest of the day.
Sweetness in the air and now there is sweetness in my belly. I feel the sugar pushing my blood around my body. Soon the air will be thick with the smell of bacon frying. Black pudding. Salt and butter and meat and eggs.
We prep for the breakfast rush. We will not eat again until it is over and the cleaning is done. Peel and boil and mash the potatoes ready for the potato cakes. Cut up the grapefruits, open and slice the tinned pears, put out the cereals that the Australians like to eat. Cornflakes, sultana bran, muesli with milk. Then the sliced cheeses, the ham, the smoked salmon.
Five-thirty AM already. The seamen are up and thermoses of coffee have been set out for them. They have their coffee and then start work. At seven they will come back in, hungry for their cooked breakfast.
The mess boys have overslept. They are young, seventeen. Just boys. They fight the heaviness of sleep and lose. Heavy bones, the weight of all that growth needing rest and fighting the morning. Always fighting.
Erik finally appears, his uniform crumpled and a little stained, his hair sticking up. He does not speak but leans up in the corner near the ovens, his eyes squinting with the fluoro light.
Klaus tells him to go and fix his hair and then get the breakfast room set up and to wake Jonas up “for Christ’s sake!”
Erik leaves the galley, stomping slowly, and reappears in a few minutes with his blond hair wet from being slicked down with water.
“Jonas is coming,” he says.
I smile at him and he smiles back, his awkward front teeth squashed together. He is trying to grow a moustache but his hair is too fine and he is too young and it looks like there are crumbs left behind on the top of his lip, which you want to wipe away. But he is a good kid, and he works hard and mostly he does not complain. And every one of us knows exactly what it feels like to be seventeen, on your first ship, working fourteen-hour shifts, so very far away from home.
Aalborg Harbor, Denmark
3rd July 1986
I can hear a woman crying. I turn. A young man—a boy—is standing tall. A mother holds on to him for dear life, her arms in a thick brown coat around his sides.
“It’s too far,” she says. “It won’t be safe.”
He doesn’t answer. He is looking down at the concrete. Maybe he is embarrassed—maybe he is trying not to cry, I don’t know.
Why do you have to go?
I was sixteen, leaving. My first ship. My grandmother had packed food and a thermos of coffee for the ferry. She held on to my face, held my cheeks so hard it almost hurt. She looked into my eyes and told me I had promised I would never go.
“You said you hated the sea,” she said.
I could never explain to her in a hundred years that everything inside of me had changed and that I had to go now and that I did not know why.
The boy takes a small step back and the mother lets him go.
“It will be fine. I will be fine. I promise,” he tells her.
The woman covers her face with her hands now. I can see how she shakes. The boy leans over and speaks softly into her ear. I cannot hear the words. Maybe he is telling her not to worry. Maybe he is telling her that he loves her. That he is sorry for leaving.
I’m sorry.
Forgive me.
My grandmother. She kissed my cheek, turned away from me and walked with her slow, serious walk, the walk she had her whole life. I watched her go. She did not wait for the ferry to pull away and she did not look back, not even once.
I was alone then. I saw my island, a place I had never left on my own, become very small and then disappear altogether into the vast Baltic Sea. I went inside and sat down on a plastic chair and I did not look outside again for the many hours it took to reach the huge wharf outside of Copenhagen. I had made my choice.
Someone nudges my arm. It’s Soren, standing next to me. He rubs his hands together. “Here we go,” he says. “Antarctica!”
I walk up the gangway, look back to see the boy kiss his mother on the cheek and then run, all long arms and legs, until he is standing right behind me.
“Hi,” he says.
“Hi,” I say, and I can see his lip quiver ever so slightly. He tells me his name is Erik.
I look at his face, at the way his hair hangs over his forehead, and how his teeth are long like horses’ teeth. I want to tell him that by the time we reach the equator, the crew will be a tight family unit, the ship our island—and home will not be such a painful thing to think on.
I shake his hand. “Hi, Erik,” I say.
MS Nella Dan
VOYAGE 2, 1986/1987 SEASON
1st November 1986
POSITION: 61° 59.000’ S, 118° 9.000’ E
CAPTAIN’S NOTE: Today King Neptune arrived to anoint those who had not traveled below 60 degrees south. The bergy bits and icebergs are getting more prevalent as we edge our way closer to Casey.
* * *
Bits of ice hit the hull of the ship, like giant hailstones on a tin roof—clip, clip, clip. The ship crunches through small patches of ice. Cape petrels and snow petrels glide outside my porthole.
I fall asleep in my bunk to the sound of the ice against the ship.
I am tired. I feel the heaviness in my face, in my bones. Even Soren keeps asking me if I am all right. It is the bags under my eyes.
We are only a day from Casey but the ice is getting thicker—multiseason ice all joined together—and we slush through at a slow speed. When I lie in my bunk I can hear the ice pushed right up against the hull, the ship quaking with the strain of the engine working overtime to give us enough push.
Sometimes there is a scraping sound of a sharp piece, a growler—scratching Nella—hurting her. No matter how tired I am, that sound always wakes me. It is like I have known it all my life. Like the howl of a wolf. It is one of those sounds that wake every cell in my body and say, Be alert. Wake up!
But then it is past and my muscles relax, my heart slows down. I think, Maybe I should just get up, make some coffee. Then I am fast asleep again—out cold. There are no dreams, no twilight, just my alarm going off suddenly when I least expect it. A ringing from far away—getting louder and louder. A sound that won’t go away.
STANDING IN THE PHONE BOX
With a handful of twenty-cent pieces in my pocket, my brother and I would walk from our house on Mona Street down along Francis Street to the main road, to the phone box there.
I never saw anyone else use that phone box for all the time we lived in that house. But we would use it, every second Sunday. We’d both squeeze in and shut the folding glass door behind us, and I’d have butterflies in my stomach and maybe my brother would too. Maybe I was scared and maybe he was too.
He’d hold the receiver and I’d put three twenty-cent pieces in and dial the number—the area code for Victoria and then the seven numbers that came after.
My brother would say, “It’s ringing!” and hold the phone up to me like the receiver was burning his face. He’d look worried, so I’d take it from him.
When someone picked up on the other end, three small beeps would come down the line, then a “hello.” It would be Dad’s voic
e and I’d get a shock, then I’d say, “Hello—it’s me,” all while my brother watched me to see if it was okay. If I was okay. To see if we were in trouble or not.
“How’s school? How’s your brother?”
“Good. He’s fine. He’s here. I’ll put him on.”
When my brother took the receiver, I’d put in the remaining twenty-cent pieces, hear them slotting down the metal insides of the phone.
Time would go fast then. The time would run, and the phone would start to beep and we’d say, “We have to go,” and say good-bye. Dad would say, “I’ll just keep talking until the phone cuts off?”
Sometimes that would feel like ages and sometimes it would be no time at all, and then he was gone, ripped away, and it was just my brother and me standing in the phone box with the phone beeping because the call had been cut off.
Dad was gone. He was far away and we lived on an island now. We’d hang the phone up, open the door and walk home together, without talking.
THE WHITE VAN
I waved good-bye to Peter and we stepped off the ferry.
“See you in the morning,” he said.
The wood of the jetty was slippery with green slime. It was rotting, and we had to be careful. I didn’t know what I would do if I fell in, if my brother fell in. Sometimes there were huge orange starfish all the way down on the concrete bottom. Starfish bigger than my head. But mostly you couldn’t see anything but the dense surface, watch the sludge and rubbish circle around, taste the rank smell of it in your mouth.
The water at the wharf was never able to wash itself clean.
My brother asked if we could go past the boat park, but I just wanted to walk home the quickest way, and not go all the way around the headland. I told him he could go on his own.
“You’re old enough, aren’t you?” I said.
When the Night Comes Page 3