When the Night Comes Read online

I sat down. There was some kind of fishy smell—strong and thick and rotten. On the table, Leo’s open sandwich. Black bread and slimy gray fish with silver skin, glistening and wet. Pickled. Leo took a big bite. Some of the sauce got caught in his moustache. He winked at me, held the bread and fish up close to my face.

  “Want to try?” he said, grinning.

  I shook my head, tried not to breathe. He wiped his moustache with his hand, ate the rest of his sandwich in two bites. One. Two. Gone.

  Bo came over and put my sandwich down, bread with havarti cheese, but the fish smell was still in the air and up my nose, and I could taste it in my mouth. Leo watched me eat.

  “We have herring every day,” he said. “Every day. It makes us strong,” and he flexed his bicep. His arm was like a golden tree trunk.

  He picked up a bottle of beer and popped the lid right off on the corner of the table—bang! The lid flew across the galley and landed on the floor.

  “Skål,”  he said and he lifted his bottle in the air, took a big swig.

  I took a bite of my sandwich.

  “I make good bread,” Leo said.

  It was true. He made good bread. I had never had bread like it. There was always the smell of warm bread on the ship. The smell of bread and something roasting in the oven. The smell of melted butter. The smell of diesel. The smell of hot greased-up engines.

  “So,” Leo said. “School holidays?”

  I nodded.

  “I used to love holidays. No school forever, it felt like, but then it would be there again. School!” He took another swig of beer.

  I nodded again. I didn’t want to tell Leo that sometimes the holidays were a bit boring, and there was nothing to do. I never had any money, and sometimes it was a bit lonely. I just walked around a lot.

  I looked over at Bo. He was busy making dinner for the crew, preparing a small roast beef. It looked good.

  “I spent the whole of school drawing cartoons,” Leo said. “I got into so much trouble!”

  He got something out of his pocket. A small notebook. He pushed it over to me, opened it up and turned it the right way so I could look at it properly.

  “Our next T-shirt,” he said.

  A cartoon of Nella Dan with a trawl net behind, and inside the net was a moose wearing sunglasses, a moose with big antlers. Its face was looking out through a hole in the net, looking very surprised, and underneath it said MOOSE HUNT 1987.

  I smiled when I saw the drawing. I smiled at Leo, but he looked at me very seriously, his face perfectly still now.

  “It’s no joke,” he said. “It is in protection of the rare sea moose. You never know when you might see one.”

  He finished off his beer and stood up, a giant man suddenly, his head almost touching the ceiling.

  “Well, I’ll be seeing you, little moose hunter,” he said, and he winked at me. He took the notebook and put it back in his pocket. He said something to Bo in Danish, then he made a “Moooooooooose, mooooooooose” sound, and he walked out of the galley.

  Bo put the meat in the oven, wiped his hands on a tea towel.

  “They can serve themselves when it’s done.”

  The ship was mostly empty. Everyone was out seeing friends, eating Chinese food, walking, driving, lying in the sun somewhere.

  “Let’s walk,” Bo said.

  We walked. Up through St. David’s Park and across the outskirts of the city to where the hills began. The quick way, which was the steep, almost vertical route up Molle Street, where the houses clung to the sides and looked unnatural and strange, one side taller than the other, the pavement at a forty-five-degree angle to the front door. Old stone houses, leaning out.

  “Hills!” Bo said, winded and breathing hard.

  “I hate them,” I said. They burned my legs, made me tired. The wind whipped up and down the streets, wind off the water and cold wind from the mountain.

  “But you are lucky,” Bo said, when we were almost at the top. “Hills are good.”

  We stopped walking, caught our breath. Bo looked back at the city.

  “From the top you can see everything.”

  I looked down. It was a stone city. Old stone, carved out of the earth long ago, and now it felt like a fortress.

  Looking at the town from a distance, looking down from the top of West Hobart on the steep narrow streets that I would walk every day, it was like there was no time here. Like the town was frozen—still—the scene almost exactly the same as it would have been a hundred years before.

  The houses the same.

  The streets marked out the same.

  Only the smoke from chimneys moved, rose up.

  A dog barked, a car passed by. Small movements—small things almost invisible and silent in the big picture of time. They didn’t make a dent.

  All else was static—stuck.

  It had never been cleared away, what sadness people left behind.

  Not by fire or flood.

  By earthquake or by demolition.

  It was all still here, waiting and heavy.

  The old stone city was stuck, and we were all here, trapped inside.

  “I like to walk,” Bo said.

  MS Nella Dan

  VOYAGE 2, 1987/1988 SEASON

  8th October 1987

  POSITION: 56° 52.100’ S, 125° 24.100’ E

  CAPTAIN’S NOTE: Heading to Davis for personnel changeover and resupply.

  * * *

  Sun streams through the porthole and the light touches my face, my skin. I stay there, still for a moment. I close my eyes.

  I know it’s cold outside, the air like ice. But here in the galley with this light pouring in, I can imagine that we are somewhere warm.

  I am home on my island, and it is summer.

  I’ve had time to make a cake after lunch. A sponge and it’s cooling on the rack. I will add the jam and whip up the cream and then maybe go sit out on the trawl deck for a while.

  Erik is watching a video in the expeditioners’ mess, some American comedy, and I can hear him laugh every now and then, really loud. It makes me smile, hearing him like that. He always watches a video after lunch when everyone is gone. He says he can’t sleep on his break.

  “It just makes me more tired to lie there in my bunk listening to Jonas sleep for an hour,” he says. “And I like films. They make me feel like I’m still part of the world.”

  We have a pile of videos and the expeditioners usually put one on after dinner. All sorts, horror, action, James Bond.

  Sometimes I watch for a few minutes in the evening, but I can never concentrate. I don’t have a mind for TV.

  Erik appears in the galley.

  “Movie over?” I ask. He shakes his head, nods toward the service counter for the mess. I poke my head through. An expeditioner is standing in there.

  “Hi,” I say. “Did you miss lunch?”

  He turns, looks a bit green.

  “Seasick?” I ask.

  “No,” he says. “I’m fine.”

  He walks forward, comes over to the counter.

  “You’re just in time for some cake,” I say.

  I pour some cream in a metal bowl and start to whisk. I look over at Erik sitting in the booth, feet up on the table. I tell him to put on some fresh coffee.

  “Coffee?” I say. “Tea?”

  “Tea would be great,” the man says. “My name is Robert. Rob.”

  I stop whisking and shake his hand.

  “Bo,” I say.

  He sits down on one of the stools. He has black hair and brown eyes, looks about thirty.

  Erik brings over a cup with the tea bag still in it and a jug of milk.

  “Erik was watching a video,” I say. “Do you mind if he keeps watching?”

  “Oh yes—please. Sorry to interrupt.”

  Erik grins. “There’s only ten minutes to go.”

  I keep whisking. I’ve always loved to thicken cream like this, with the power of my wrist, with skill and a light hand.

&nbs
p; “You’re good at that,” Rob says.

  I nod and it’s done. It’s ready.

  I spread out some red currant jam and then spoon out the cream on one of the sponge layers. Rob takes out his tea bag and puts it on the saucer.

  “Sugar?” I ask but he shakes his head.

  I cut into the cake—two slices, two plates. Rob sips his tea. He looks at the slice of cake.

  “It’s my wife’s birthday,” he tells me.

  “Oh,” I say.

  Rob smiles but it’s strained and his eyes are small. He takes a forkful of cake, swallows.

  “Do you get to call home much?” he asks.

  “No,” I say. “On the ship it’s very expensive and it eats all the wages. The satellite phone.”

  He nods, has another sip of tea.

  “Sometimes it’s worse to call,” he says, and he looks at me. “I mean with the delay and the short time and everything.”

  “Sometimes a letter is a good idea,” I say.

  “Yes,” he says. He eats some more cake.

  I can hear Erik laugh at the movie. I shake my head and roll my eyes. Rob smiles.

  “I thought I’d call for her birthday but she got upset, and it was hard to hear.”

  I taste my cake. The jam is not too sweet, just like summer at home. Not too sweet—just right. I wipe my mouth.

  “I heard some good advice once, from this old-timer. I think he’d done three winters at Casey. He told me that when you call home, ask them how they are right away. Say, ‘Tell me about your day. What have you been doing?’ Then just listen. You only have a minute or two to call on the satellite and you are somewhere exciting and have lots to tell them—about penguins and blizzards and icebergs—but they are at home and doing all the daily tasks to keep things going. They are sacrificing so that you can be here. So, ask them first.”

  Rob looks down at his last bite of cake.

  “I will try to remember that,” he says.

  “More cake?” I ask, but he puts his hand up.

  Erik walks in. “That was a good movie,” he says.

  Rob stands up. “Thanks for the cake,” he says. He looks better, not so green.

  “Anytime,” I say.

  I take the plates and his cup and put them in the dishwasher. I stand there and look out of the porthole. I think about the times my father would call from ports, from Melbourne, from Norway, from Hull. He would tell me about the albatross and about the whales, about life on the ship and what the crew would get up to.

  Amazing stories, and I loved them. But the time would run out and he’d have to go. “Be good for your grandmother,” he’d say, and the phone would go dead.

  I would hold the receiver in my hand, hold it right up against my ear for a long time.

  “Papa?” I would say, “Papa?” because I always had so much to tell him. I always had so much I wanted to say.

  There was never enough time.

  BY HEART

  I don’t like cooking much,” I said.

  Bo looked up at me but he said nothing. His hands kept on cutting the carrots and celery in perfect time.

  “I’m not very good at it.” I twisted the tea towel in my hands over and over, until it was long and thin and tight.

  Bo finished chopping. He stood tall, hands on his hips.

  “I started to cook when I was very young,” he said, “maybe even before school, I don’t know. I had my grandmother there to help me. To teach me. My grandmother taught me how to cook.”

  I thought about my grandma. My grandparents’ second-floor flat was steamy with the salty smell of butter. Sunday lunch. In the small kitchen, my large grandmother stirred the thick soup, and I could hear it bubbling.

  Bread dumplings in the metal steam pan ready to be cooked, the dark pieces of crusts checkered the white doughy bodies.

  Our job was to set the table. My brother and I would get the plates and knives and forks and glasses and we’d carefully lay them out on the dining-room table.

  It was a green wooden table covered with a lace crocheted tablecloth that came from a country far away, a place I had never been to, but that was alive and real in that flat. The walls were lined with tapestries of the old city of Prague. The bridge, the castle and the cobblestone streets. Dark, quiet. Standing forever.

  My grandmother’s old-fashioned dresses, her beehive hairstyle and her kind, soft accent. She was from a place far away, a place lost in time.

  Bread dumplings and svíčková—a thick vegetable soup, sometimes with a cut of meat cooked whole in the soup and sliced later.

  The soup was poured over the bread dumplings, and they absorbed it like sponges.

  Food for winter.

  Food for snow.

  Food to put fat on your bones.

  “What do you make?” Bo asked.

  I put the tea towel down on the counter and got out the Women’s Weekly Cookbook from the cupboard. I picked through the pages.

  “I can make this one.” I showed him Savory Mince. “And this one.” Russian Potato Salad with Egg.

  He took the book from my hands, studied the pages—the pictures. His face was blank but slowly he began to smile.

  “Seems like you don’t like feta,” he said.

  There were notes written in pen next to the recipes that I had made so that Mum could get the right ingredients. Under the Greek salad I had crossed out feta and written NO!  in capital letters.

  “Greek salad is very interesting with no feta!” Bo said.

  He turned the page. Winter Casserole. I had crossed this one out altogether. I had gone over it with pen in lines and lines so that you couldn’t read the ingredients or anything or even see the picture. I had blacked it out.

  “Try to eat some, love,” Mum said.

  Big fat chunks of beef sat on my plate—glistening with fat, chunks of carrot, chunks of potato. Mum’s casserole. I ate the potato and then I made myself eat the carrot.

  I put a piece of beef on my fork and ran it round and round the rim of my plate to get the gravy off so I could see the fat. Three times round, rings of orange-brown gravy like a racing track around my plate. I held the piece of beef up in the air. I could smell it.

  I looked up and Mum was staring at me with that vacant look.

  “Please,” she said.

  I closed my eyes and put the piece of beef in my mouth, tried to chew, but I gagged and the beef came out of my mouth still pretty much in a solid cube. My brother looked at me. He hadn’t eaten anything at all.

  Mum was standing on the other side of the counter, her hands by her sides.

  “Try,” she said again softly.

  But then the door opened and Dad was home. He put his briefcase down and took his jacket off and then he came and sat down next to us at the counter. Mum got his plate out of the oven, full of brown casserole—it looked a little bit dry. He looked at it but he didn’t pick up his fork or knife, he just picked it up and hurled it across the room. The plate flew past my mum’s head. Some of the casserole spun off onto the floor, but most of it splattered on the cream wall and the plate smashed into a million tiny pieces. Bits of beef and carrot and potato slid on the wall and slopped down.

  “I’m sick of this,” Dad said as he got up and put his jacket on, picked up his briefcase and slammed the front door behind him.

  Mum started to cry and my brother and I sat there until the food was really cold, the beef congealed in the brown sauce, and we kept on sitting there until one of our dogs came over and started to lick the floor. Mum said, “No, no, sweetie,” and got the dustpan and a cloth from under the sink and started to clean up the shards of white plate and the globs of brown gravy.

  “I think this needs to go in the rubbish bin,” Bo said, and dropped the book in the white swing-top bin. My eyes must have opened wide, because then he said, “Well, we won’t tell anyone we did that. It will just be lost.”

  He put his hands on his cheeks, pulled a face.

  “Oh, where could it b
e? Where could that wonderful cookbook with such exciting food be? We are lost without it!”

  I looked at the bin. I was worried about how I was going to manage to cook without the recipes.

  “Food comes from here,” Bo said, and he put his hand on his chest. “Good food you know how to cook from . . .” and he looked up to the ceiling, maybe searching for the words in English. “By heart,” he said.

  He picked up a pen and the message notepad that was next to the phone and handed them to me.

  “You write. My English, not brilliant for writing,” he said. Then he said, “Your mum is doing her best. I know that.”

  I looked down at the pad. I drew small circles on the paper, all in a line. I heard the words he said.

  “What about meatballs with pasta? Or a simple omelet with cheese and spinach and bacon. Pan-fried chicken with herbs. That’s easy.”

  My brother came in and wanted to add hot dogs to the list. Bo laughed at that. He told my brother that it was very important to know how to make Danish hot dogs.

  “You never know when you will be needing them!” he said.

  Bo also put the ingredients for pancakes on the list.

  That afternoon Bo taught me how to make a simple pancake batter, one that was foolproof and good, and I didn’t worry at all while I was making it. I didn’t worry about how it would turn out or if I’d done it wrong. I just stayed there in the kitchen with Bo, while he finished off his vegetable soup.

  He told me that when he is cooking, he is a happy little bear.

  I made the pancakes and my brother said they were good. Not as good as at the café but good all the same.

  MR. WILKINS

  In the middle of physics, Mr. Wilkins started to cry.

  No one spoke or moved. There was just the sound of Bunsen burners, the hot hissing of them as we all sat there in our white lab coats.

  I tried not to look at Mr. Wilkins, but I was looking at him.

  “I’m leaving,” he said quietly. “I’m going to become a doctor.” He looked down at the floor, his brown hair flopped over his forehead. He wiped his eyes with his hands.

  “I’m going back to university in New South Wales and I won’t be a teacher anymore.”