I don’t have time to be thinking up names for a blessed dog, John said.
She loved to sunbathe. Pouring bonelessly past me in the early mornings as I danced in the wheelhouse. Fitting herself to the angled plane of sunlit floor. Moving as she needed to stay in the light and warmth. She’d be on the floor before I got the door fully open. Stretching out the length of herself, pushing out her straightened legs and smacking her lips.
I kept a bowl filled with water on the boat at all times.
So Sunny maybe.
Don’t give the dog a bad name, John had said.
In the light she was red really, and I took to calling her Red. Privately at first and then out loud, because I had to call her something. It was a name for a dog in a kids book, for a too good to be true dog.
In the forest she ran with light-footed, pitter-patter steps, her ears back and down, white-tipped tail held between her hind legs. Holding herself low to the ground, as though she were permanently ducking under a three-bar gate. Run ahead, turn and lie down with her head between her white socks, eyes fixed on me until I reached her, and then she’d take off again.
She would try and work any group of standing crows. Blocking their escape except for the direction she wanted to move in. The crows hopping away sideways. Red circling, pushing them where she wanted them to go until she had sufficiently annoyed the birds into flight. Many of the crows looked a bit rough-faced and battered from their war with the parakeets for nesting spaces and food.
Red panting in the heat. The valleyed tongue hanging down. Wet and thick. Still she worked the phantom stock. Driving ghost sheep, a retinue of insects fizzing in the light that surrounded her. Slobber darkening the ground in repeated patterns.
Joined at the hip, Adam said, when we came into the camp.
Parakeets in the treetops made a jungle din.
Red let Adam rough her up with his big hands. When he was finished she stood up and shook herself, one ear turned inside out, a little dazed, her coat dusted with seeds and stalks and dry earth. The mother dog stood up. Black and white. A bit woolly looking. She stretched and walked over to Adam. The big youth blew on her snout and she loudly snapped her jaws at him. Adam got on the ground and they started wrestling.
Adam dusted himself off and went into his shelter, the mother dog following. When they came out Adam was carrying a huge bag of dry food under one arm and a big metal bowl in the other. The dog had her head raised to the bag of food. What looked like a soup ladle was sticking out the back pocket of Adam’s work trousers. Adam banged the ladle against the metal bowl. The ringing echoed through the forest.
The dogs loped in to the camp like cowboys called for breakfast, Red leading the way. Adam fed the dogs, talking to them, his hands always making contact. The dogs ate from the communal bowl and when they were finished Adam filled the bowl with water and the dogs drank noisily. Splashed water made a dark circle on the ground.
You love it here, I said.
Don’t like being inside, he said, and scratched his arm and looked at the ground where the dogs were now lying down, bellies swollen with food and water.
Ha!
Simple as that, I said.
Adam held his hands cupped at waist level and looked at me.
When my mum and dad went on the piss, he said, they’d lock me in my room with some biscuits and maybe a Fanta, a Coke. Sometimes dad would forget the drink, so I couldn’t eat the biscuits. Got too thirsty. But I’d eat them in the end. If I was there long enough. Course then I’d get so thirsty I thought I’d go crazy. Do anything. Tried drinking my piss once.
The dogs dreamed. You had to listen if you wanted to hear the quiet sounds that came to us in the clearing. Not just the birds but the soft air making the leaves rattle. Water noises.
Adam took the offered roll-up. Green eyes shining from out of his scarred face.
No toilet in there, Adam said. Had to go in a corner. Shit too. Summer. Imagine. Days sometimes. I used to see how long I could last and still hope they wouldn’t come back.
Smash a window? I said. Get help?
Thought it were normal, Adam said, his eyes wide. Thought every kid got locked up.
How’d you get away?
Dad picked a fight with the wrong blokes. Tough town. Squaddies. Multiple stab wounds. Came to tell mum, arrested her instead. Took me away. Made Old Bill sick when they found me and saw the room I was in.
A magpie flew into the camp, making short, clacky calls. I looked for its mate.
Adam opened his large, heavy hands and looked at them. When they took me from that room, he said. I thought I was saved. Little did I know. Hah! Every room they put me into afterwards, they locked me in!
What happened?
In the end? I got big. Big so they couldn’t hold me. Fucked off. Here I am. If they could see me now, he said, and laughed and spread his arms.
The dogs came into his embrace.
Adam looked at me.
My old man never even tried to get sober, he said. Swore up and down he would, but he never tried.
Don’t make me out to be anything, I said. The last bender I went on lasted twenty years and nearly killed me. I wouldn’t survive another one.
Lights still shining on John’s boat when I finally made it back. I called out, knocked on the cabin door with the flat of my hand.
You did not walk onto a boat uninvited without good reason and never at night.
Not twice, John said.
The old man had a ten-pound lump hammer behind his cabin door.
Never used it and don’t expect to use it, he’d said. Not with the dog here now. But you never know.
John had lots of reasons to sit up nights.
Two ships torpedoed out from under him during the war. Spent a night and a day up to his chest in the bone-cold Atlantic. Fuel burning all around.
Planes firing at us from above, he said. Men screaming, on fire, going under. Sharks and who knows what below.
The old man was holding an ancient-looking scuffed tennis ball.
Where’s the dog? he said.
She’s here, I said. Go on Red.
The dog jumped up on the sofa and nuzzled into John.
He chucked the dog under the chin and ruffled her ears.
If I drop the case, John said, my lawyer says they’ll give me money.
Who, I said, the care home?
They call it compensation. Blood money. They want to buy my right to vengeance.
How much? I said.
Enough to stay here, John said.
That’s good, isn’t it? I said.
A thump as a bird landed on the boat. John threw the tennis ball underhand but hard at the ceiling and caught it as it bounced and came down. Red’s head going up and down as she followed the ball. I looked at the photographs, the records and books. One missed catch and there would be damage and the dog going wild but John Rose believed in himself and what he was doing.
What do you know about loving somebody? the old man had said when I asked him what he was going to do. I sat in the wheelhouse with just the moon for light and I couldn’t think of an answer though the boat seemed empty with Red not there.
The pale places in the sky grew larger, and the wide river appeared out of the dark, soft grey at first, then shining to reflect the rising sun. Fragile colours blooming so that the dog and I, standing in the bow, in the join between sky and river, were bathed in immense peach and golden washes. The sunrise and the image of the sunrise. Sounds – waking voices, birdsong, the indefinite, mysterious sounds made by creatures who lived on or under the water – all these echoed across the river. Softly we were reached by the edges of the hot day to come. The river becoming a dazzling plain on which the floating bridge seemed a mirage.
Come on, I said to Red.
Lush elderflower along the riverbank.
In the forest by Michael’s stones I found a new young tree, grown from a whip or unbranched shoot. A disc on the tree identified it as a Western cedar.
The forest green. Following the dog, the low sun showing through different trees made the ground cover a shifting iridescence, hazy with flying insects. I thought I heard grasshoppers. Treetops moved against each other making a sound like surf.
The light directed just so to reveal the small tree otherwise invisible against its giant neighbours.
A ceramic heart. ‘MV + AK’.
When crushed, the leaves of the Western cedar have a scent like pineapples.
Way above me, in that small measure of it I could see between the swaying treetops, wheeling crows cut slow black patterns in the sky. An arrow whizzed past my head. Red barked.
I whirled round. The kids were up with the sun.
Danny and his friends hunted each other among the trees near the water. Bows made from cut lengths of PVC piping. Tight string keeping the piping arced. Arrows made from sticks, young tree stems, found bamboo, anything that would fly, the heads softened with felt pads. Danny fired another arrow that bopped against my heart. I fell to the ground with a great death yell that scared Red.
I am des-troyed! I cried, Is zis ze end for Terry Blackheart, ze legendary French trapper?
Mum says come and have something to eat later, the boy said, standing over me with a padded arrow in his hand, his white hair falling into his face. Not dirty so much as wearing the marks and signs of the outside places – the forest and the muddy foreshore – where he spent all his time. Clothes worn yesterday and tomorrow. Jeans that stood up by themselves, a second skin.
The raiding party moved on. I had seen them firing their arrows uselessly at the big white launches and cruises that, more and more, were seen on our stretch of river.
Red licked the hand that smelled of pineapples.
Spent the day making designs for posters and flyers. When John came back from wherever he’d been, tired, not speaking, he took the dog with him, and I went to Stella’s barge.
There was an open porthole above the stove and Stella’s face, turned to me when she spoke, was lit pale honey by that small portion of a summer’s evening the opening allowed to enter, so that the skin on her face was both a radiant and reflective surface, lined around her grey-blue eyes. Wheat coloured hair piled and tied loosely on the top of her head. The curved nose and thin lips that gave a suggestion of a bird, so light that you only thought about it when she was gone, and trying to remember what she looked like.
Choo-Choo the deerhound lay on the floor next to Danny. Now and again the boy absently curled one of the dog’s ears around his finger. First one then the other. Couldn’t bring Red over because the long grey dog would go mad.
Stella was wearing a grey sweatshirt that was too big and she had to keep pushing the sleeves up her arms and out of the cooking pot. The sweatshirt would fit somebody twice her size. Black combat trousers and black polyurethane clogs. She wore a Casio digital watch, and old-looking gold earrings and a gold chain that she had told me belonged to her grandmother.
For dinner there was veggie curry and rice. We ate and afterwards I washed up and Danny helped me dry the dishes. Stella and Danny disappeared for a bit while she put him to bed. I sat with the deerhound’s head in my lap.
Choo-Choo, Stella said.
The dog unfolded, stood, shook itself, and followed us up top.
We sat under red clouds, in the navy folds of river and sky.
The boats all around variously dark or lighted. The differently shaped roofs. Flat, pitched, wide, narrow.
Radios playing. People talking. The sound of water endlessly moving. Meeting solid matter, the hulls and sides of boats, and being interrupted by that. Glop. Night bird sounds. The skating whoosh of a swan landing on water.
Stella took the cigarette from my mouth, took a puff and put it back.
The grey deerhound flew across the boats and jumped down onto the island. She disappeared into the darkness.
Can you tell me about the wolf mask? I said.
Stella looked at me. Took the cigarette back and smoked until it was finished.
Kids don’t want to be different, she said. It was a tough few months for Danny before we came here. Top of that he has to start a new school. Some kids started on Danny. Names. Feral. Must have heard the word somewhere. Parents. Danny doesn’t know what it means. But he doesn’t say anything. Doesn’t want to worry me. Tells Michael, and Michael brings him the wolf mask. God knows where he got it from.
Feral means wild, Michael tells Danny. Free. Escaped. Bears are feral. Lions and tigers. Everything that lives in the forest and the river. The finches and blue tits and robins that come when it’s time for spring.
Michael was what, fifteen. Then he gives him the mask. Wolves are feral, he says.
Feral meant gone wild, as far as I knew. So Michael was wrong but he was right, too.
Must be tough for Danny, I said, now.
It’s tough to keep losing, she said.
When we came here, she said, I left a lot of debt behind. Left Danny’s dad, tried to make a life. Get all the things for Danny. Place to live. The phones, the screens, the games. Got swallowed up. Had to run or lose my son.
All right.
Stella’s not even my real name.
My ex is dangerous, she said.
She rolled her sleeve up past her elbow and I could see an old break, where the skin was not smooth but almost violet and tightly swollen over a bone that had been left to heal by itself and not set properly.
Never heard the word no in his life, she said.
What did you do, before?
Human resources, she said. I was an office manager. Danny’s father was my boss. He beat me, whored around. For years.
Go to the cops?
Richard plays golf with the police, she said. So we ran. You’re Danny, I told him. Day one. Don’t answer to anything else. Don’t answer the phone unless it’s me. Don’t let anybody in. Call me mum or Stella. Danny wasn’t even ten. He goes, OK Stella, just like that.
Seen the new tree, I said, by the stones?
She hadn’t, too busy, so I told her.
Good for her I say, said Stella.
Alexandra?
I’ve never believed in any conspiracy, she said. It was just a terrible accident. Awful for Alexandra, what was she, sixteen? A baby. Alex Kaplan got her out because he could. Did what a father should. The kids were sweethearts, for God’s sake. Poor girl was probably traumatized. Nobody’s seriously suggesting she had anything to do with what happened.
Not even Gene? I said.
Poor Gene, she said. He’s heartbroken. Couldn’t do what Kaplan did. Protect his child. The police won’t leave him alone. Angry because he’s full of love. You never saw him before.
Gene’s got Perseis, I said.
The skin around Stella’s neck flushed pink.
Perseis walks around feeling sorry for herself, she said. She did that even when Michael was alive. God, I sound like a real bitch. But she never listened to Michael.
Perseis had come to my boat a day or so before with an invitation, a crown of wildflowers in her short dark hair. Wearing a green tabard dress tied at the waist with a golden cord that trailed almost to the ground, and square-toed scuffed boots. Going from boat to boat, handing out cards. Her progress set the boats see-sawing. She was high, protected for as long as that lasted. She said my name as though she thought I’d been waiting a long time to see her. Maybe it’s also true that for her the world was a place filled with people who would not look her in the eye.
A fast boat roared downstream, its fringing wake high and wide.
Before Michael went away Anthony used to take him all up and down this river, she said.
Anthony Waters? I said.
Anthony would do anything for me, she said.
Perseis played with the golden cord. She put the cord in her lap and felt the cut end, then brushed it against her palm.
When she looked at me directly she seemed to see something only she could see, hear sounds only she could hear. I could smell
her. The funk of her. Thick and coppery like blood and salty like tears. I could smell her but I’m not sure she was there. She was with Michael, I think. I expect she always was. How she imagined it would be. Maybe she and her son were with Anthony Waters. Putting things right that never could be put right.
I took one of the printed cards. A wood engraving. Forest interior characterized by depth and texture and a clear sense of pattern. Ducking my eye under low dark ash branches to get to the lighted clearing beyond. Crude only because the maker did not have access to proper engraving tools but had improvised with who knows what to gouge and cut the lines.
Celebrating Michael Vincent on the back. Date and time.
We’ll do this every year, she said. A coming together. To remember Michael and hope for his return. Anthony was very good to have the cards printed.
I realized that Gene had probably been called Gene from boyhood, and was not his real name.
I’m a little scared of John Rose, she said, giving me another invitation. Would you mind?
I took the extra card. Far as I could tell John didn’t like her. A damned hippy with ideas. John would look at her and see nothing but bad news and worse memories. I thought all this without knowing a single thing about what happened. I was some detective.
We went back below. Danny has bad dreams, Stella had said.
How was the meeting? I said.
A lot of anger. Can’t pay, won’t pay. I don’t think Kaplan’s a monster but what he’s planning will ruin lives and destroy this community. The resistance is strong.
What if you have to leave? I said.
Where to?
Somewhere else.
There isn’t anywhere else, Stella said.
Stella pushed up the sleeves of the too-big sweatshirt.
All I had to do was kiss her.
Whenever the tide changed, you could feel the heavy bulk of water pulling underneath your feet. I could feel it now. Leaning almost to hold my stance. Slack ropes tightening. I could hear fenders groaning as the bound houseboats were subject to the change in the volume and direction of water.
As though we were slowly being pulled loose. The boat and the three of us and the deerhound, asleep again now, and the jars of sumac and mint and nettle seeds on Stella’s shelves, Danny’s open box of crayons and coloured pencils, the painted jug full of sweet peas and forget-me-nots. The home-made red-and-white checkered curtains. I straightened a ladle and then a metal spoon hanging on hooks by the stove, and when I let go the ladle and spoon swung a few degrees towards upstream.
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