When the Night Comes Page 14

  “Joy to the World.”

  Christmas Eve.

  There were biscuits and cakes and puddings on the counter in the kitchen, but people were still eating the savory food on the table. We had to wait. We had to be patient. My brother told me he was going to have a piece of everything all on one plate.

  “Even the rice pudding?” I asked.

  He squashed his nose up, thinking. “Maybe not that one,” he said.

  He didn’t like rice, and he didn’t like nuts. There were almonds in the rice pudding. I had watched Bo making it with milk and cream and almonds and sherry and sugar. It smelt like fresh custard. Like vanilla ice cream.

  He’d made some kind of hot red wine for the adults that was full of spices. Cinnamon, nutmeg, Christmas spices. He said that there were twenty-five ingredients in the recipe, but the only one that was important was the bottle of rum.

  He’d come back on Icebird with the others and they were tired. They were wrecked. They had only the clothes they were wearing and nothing else. Mum went to Target and bought them all underwear and T-shirts and they had to stay at a hotel until they had been interviewed for the inquiry about the accident. Once that was over they were free.

  Now we waited for Nella to come back. To see how bad the damage was. To see what would happen.

  Bo found my brother and me standing by the piano. He said he had a present for us each and they were waiting in the living room.

  “It’s Christmas Eve,” he said. “This is our Christmas. You have to open at least one present.”

  My brother put his plate down on the piano lid. There were still two pieces of cheese left but cheese didn’t matter now that there were presents.

  We didn’t have a tree. The empty and cleaned fireplace was where the presents and Christmas decorations were. A few presents, a few decorations. Silver and red tinsel.

  Bo handed my brother a wrapped-up box. Something inside hit the sides when my brother shook the present. It sounded like a jigsaw puzzle. He ripped the paper open. It was a Lego set.

  His face busted open into a smile.

  “Thanks,” he said. He went to shake Bo’s hand.

  Bo smiled, shook his hand. “You’re a real little gentleman,” he said.

  I held my present. It was rectangular and heavy and I opened it carefully. I undid the clear sticky tape and didn’t tear the paper. My brother looked away from his Lego set then.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  It was a book. An iceberg on the cover, close up with icicles hanging down trying to reach the cold water below. Antarctic Australia.

  “Nella’s in there,” Bo said. “And Thala. All her sisters.”

  Full color pages of ice, of light—of king penguins huddled together on Macquarie Island. And red ships forging through the ice.

  “I hope you like it,” he said.

  The music stopped. I heard the phone ringing. I had the book in my hands.

  Bo walked to the door, to the sunroom.

  “They’re going to scuttle her,” someone yelled.

  “She’s on fire!”

  Everything was loud then, people shouting, asking questions.

  I stood in the corner of the sunroom. I saw Leo in a chair and he had his head in his hands.

  “It’s not true.”

  “It can’t be right.”

  Someone said, “Those bastards.”

  “She’s on fire!”

  Fire.

  My brother came and stood by me.

  “What happened?” he asked. I told him I didn’t know.

  “Maybe the ship sank because of the accident,” he said.

  I said, “I guess so.”

  “But why is there a fire?”

  I didn’t know.

  Everyone was talking in Danish, and the only words I could understand were “fuck” and “bastards” and “five thousand meters down.”

  Five thousand meters down in the dark.

  There were more phone calls. New people arrived and some people left. Our front door stayed open.

  Everyone was smoking and the room was thick with it. My eyes burned. Mum told my brother to go to bed and he looked at me.

  “What about the cakes?” he asked.

  “Maybe tomorrow,” I said.

  “I won’t be able to sleep,” he said, but he did. He fell asleep quickly.

  Mum didn’t notice that I was still up. She was hugging her friend Rose, and they were crying. I went outside on the back deck to get away from the smoke. To get away from the feeling of the room.

  I stood out there and looked at the sky. It was still light and the night was clear. The stars were coming out, translucent and golden. Planets far away. Mars and Venus and Mercury. The moon was rising, just a tiny crescent. A sliver. I breathed in the air. It was summer.

  Bo came out and closed the glass door behind him. He had a can of beer in his hand, the one with the black swan on it. That was his favorite. He didn’t drink any, he just held it there.

  His face was still and I could not think of one thing to say. We stayed like that, looking up at the sky, listening to the low hum of voices coming from inside.

  “Did she sink?” I asked.

  He lit a cigarette, exhaled. “I don’t think she was going on her own. They filled her with water. I think it must have taken a long time.”

  His voice went strange, then he turned away.

  She could hold no longer.

  I thought about five thousand meters down. Five whole kilometers down from the surface, how dark it would be down there, how cold.

  Bo wiped his nose with his sleeve, took a drag of his cigarette, and something inside me broke.

  His voice came like clouds drifting over the night sky.

  “She’s not there,” he said. “Not there. Don’t think of her down there.”

  She’s not there.

  THE LAST PARADE

  We stood in the silence as a small tug the color of used-up grease turned in and moved toward the place where Nella Dan should be.

  Everyone around me had flowers, carnations—red and white—and in the stillness a Danish flag was draped over the wharf. It rested down and touched the black water.

  I didn’t have a carnation. I had a rose, thick red like blood. It was from our front garden, a late rose—one that should not have been there but was.

  A man stood alone at the very end of the wharf and began to play the bagpipes. It was a song I didn’t know, but it hit me all the same, the feeling of it. The sound echoed out and went right through me like I was made up of nothing but air.

  People from the crowd stepped toward the water, almost one by one, and threw their flowers down—a sea of color. The pipes stopped playing, but I held on to my rose.

  I couldn’t let it go.

  The tug came closer and the sound of her engines took away the heavy silence. The water pulsed and the flowers bobbed. Some went under, sank down below the surface and were gone. The crowd pushed forward then. There was noise, shouting. Someone right near me yelled out, “Shame!” and the sudden jolt of it shook my frame. Others joined in and a growling “Boo” rose up, met the crew of the tug as they docked.

  Bo was standing back from the crowd, his eyes down. Maybe they were closed, I don’t know, but the booing stopped and when I looked back to the tug, Nella Dan’s captain had his arm up in a wave. A firm hand like he was saying, It’s not their fault.

  People were just happy to see him then. People began calling out, “Hello—hey! Welcome home.”

  I saw Benny on the trawl deck, his face tired, his face still, and Nella was gone and no amount of yelling would ever bring her back.

  I walked up the wharf, away from the crowd.

  I let go of the rose and watched it float away on an invisible current.

  Red Rose, Red Heart, Red Ship.

  EARLY MORNING

  I got up early and everyone was still asleep. Everyone except Bo. He was sitting at the table looking out of the big glass windows.
The sky was dark purple, just light. A thin slice of time between night and day, and nothing was real yet. Nothing had begun.

  Bo was smoking a cigarette. He put it out in the full glass ashtray and smiled at me when I sat down at the table, but his eyes were heavy and gray and I could feel the weight of him there in the room.

  I am afraid of the darkness, knowing it will come.

  There was room for me there at the table but still I held myself so tightly on the edge of the chair that my legs went numb from the strain and from the cold.

  I was always cold, even in the summer. He was leaving in a few hours.

  Bo lit another cigarette and for a second it felt like the flame and the glow and the taste of the smoke in my mouth made the room warmer. I felt sleepy, heavy.

  “I like your name,” he said. “Isla is like island. My home is all islands. We are islands in the water and ships are like home. There isn’t a kid who hasn’t spent time on ships or ferries or boats, even in the big cities. Being on the water is part of our life.”

  I nodded. I wanted to ask him what he was going to do now, if he would go and work on another ship. I wanted to ask if he would ever come back here.

  “Things don’t always work out like we hope,” he said.

  I knew that he was talking about Mum, that there were things in her life that I would never know, never understand. She was her own person—light and dark.

  “We will watch the sun rise, you and I,” he said, and as the sky began to turn violet, I nodded and felt brighter. I swung my legs free under the table and there was space. I made a pact there in the silence between us. A pact to stay awake—to be awake and not sleeping when he left so that he wouldn’t be alone.

  The sun came and lit up the face of West Hobart and Bo spoke so quietly that I could barely hear the words and yet they were there in the room with us.

  “I wish that I could stay.”

  His words went in. They went in somewhere deep and settled down inside of me, but I did not know then that he meant forever. That he would like to stay and live with us forever.

  I did not know that then.

  I started to shiver, just slightly, and he told me to go and rest in bed for a while.

  “I will see you before I go,” he said.

  I got up and walked through the door to the living room. I stood still and watched him as I had done so many times through the glass. His white T-shirt, his rounded shoulders, the way he leant down slightly to one side.

  He did not turn around. He did not look back at me, but I knew he could feel me there.

  The distance between our worlds so much smaller in that moment.

  MIXED CANDIES

  Mum sent me into a chemist in the city to pick up a prescription.

  The pharmacist behind the counter was short and he was going bald but only right at the top of his head. He took the prescription slip out of my hands. I told him it was for my mum.

  “It’s Joseph,” he said. “Joseph Balinski,” and he looked at me. “Your brother was good friends with my son.”

  I remembered then. I remembered that Tom Balinski’s dad was a pharmacist.

  “How is your brother?” he asked.

  I told him that my brother was out in the car and I could go and get him if he liked, but that I had to be quick because Mum was double-parked. Joseph clapped his hands together and told me he would love to see him.

  “I would love that,” he said.

  Outside, Mum had found a proper parking spot just a few meters up the street. I opened the door and told my brother that Tom’s dad was inside and that he wanted to say hello. He didn’t move.

  “Go on, love,” Mum said.

  My brother stared at me. Eventually he got out of the car and walked behind me slowly. I could hear his school shoes dragging on the pavement.

  Inside, he blinked his eyes against the bright lights. He was polite. He said hello and Joseph was shaking his hand and saying, “Wow! Look how tall you are. I can’t believe your hair is still so curly.” Joseph was smiling. He was really smiling.

  He told us that his family was fine and that his wife was pregnant. Twins.

  “It has been so wonderful to see you,” he said to my brother. He told us to come back again soon.

  “We would love to see you, my wife and I,” he said. “We would really love it.”

  My brother nodded. He said good-bye.

  But out on the street in the gray light I saw his face, hard like stone. He sat in the back of the car and stared out the window, as if no time had passed since I had run to the shop with my pocket money to get my brother some sweets because I didn’t know what else to do.

  HERE STANDS A PHONE BOX

  Lansdowne Crescent and the rain came down now.

  I knew every step of that curved road. Every single step. The street was empty like always. A ghost town—a dead town. And even though I could feel the rain and it was wetting my hair and making it stick to my face, I didn’t even care about it. But when I got to the phone box, I opened the glass door and went inside anyway, into the stale-smelling cubicle with the concrete floor, with torn phone books, and half-rubbed-off graffiti written in black marker on the walls.

  I stood there in the phone box and leant up against the glass. I watched the rain fall. I could feel the cold come up from the ground now that I had stopped walking—now that I was still. I picked up the heavy gray receiver, held it there against my ear. It was working, the phone. I could hear the dial tone purring down the line from somewhere far away.

  I thought about Bo. Perhaps on another ship somewhere, traveling up to the east coast of Greenland. Or maybe he was at home sleeping on his little island. A place I didn’t have a complete picture of.

  Then I thought about that film, Local Hero. It’s about a man from a big city in the USA who works for an oil company. He is sent to Scotland, somewhere really remote and beautiful, a small fishing village by the sea. It’s his job to buy the whole village and turn it into an oil refinery. Everyone wants to sell their land. The people who live there all want to be rich, except one man who lives in a wooden shack right on the sand of the beach. He says he has no need for the money. He says he has all he needs.

  The man from the USA spends a long time in this village trying to get this one man who lives on the beach to sell. He tries everything. He spends weeks trying. And somewhere along the way he starts to change. His insides change. He stops shaving and wearing suits. He spends time collecting shells on the beach. He starts to forget about time.

  But he gets sent home very suddenly and he doesn’t even get time to say a real good-bye. He has to leave in a helicopter and look down at the village and the beaches from above and watch it fall away underneath him.

  When he gets back to his modern apartment in the big city, it is night and he looks out at the bright lights of the skyscrapers from his high-rise balcony. He looks out and he thinks, Is this my home? This place? I don’t remember who the person was who lived here. I don’t think I know him.

  There is one last scene in the film—a shot of a phone box. It’s the red phone box in the small fishing village in Scotland. It is early morning, I think, fog is coming down and it looks cold. The street is empty. And quiet.

  The camera stays on the phone box and the empty street for a long time—in silence. The silence goes on as the camera stays still, zooms in slowly toward the phone box. Then the phone starts to ring. It rings out clean and loud, calling out. And it keeps on ringing. The phone just keeps on ringing, and you want someone to answer it. You want someone to run over and pick up the receiver because you know it is the man from the USA calling. You know he is calling to say, I am coming home.

  THE PACKAGE

  A small package by the door, all brown tape and paper. A package with my name on it, my first name and then the address, Allison Street, West Hobart.

  It had a round ink stamp on it, red with two penguins standing side by side and underneath them the words Macquarie Island.r />
  I took the package inside, put it on the table in the sunroom. I sat down on a chair and I started to carefully undo the brown tape.

  Inside was a letter in an old, used envelope—someone’s name had been crossed out in blue pen and mine was written above it. There was something else wrapped in more paper, more tape. Something round.

  A roll of film in a black plastic canister.

  A roll of film.

  Isla,

  I am leaving this with the postmaster so it will come with the next ship.

  Maybe it will get there when you need it most.

  We are fine. The captain lost a tooth and there are some bruises, but mostly we are fine. It was a bad storm, with wind and rain and a swell that whipped up out of nowhere, but we all made it to shore on the LARCs. Everyone did a great job.

  Today the ocean is a lake, both sides of the island so calm, asleep. Three days like this—it is so strange! If only we’d been one day late, if we’d stayed out doing the marine survey, if only we’d been delayed in Hobart . . .

  These thoughts go on and on. What if?

  We sleep in the mess, or where we can fit. People here have been so kind and they try to keep our minds off things, hot showers and food, a few good home-brew beers. But it is there always, this bad feeling—Nella is there, stuck on the rocks, and we can’t go out to her, even to get our things. She is just there, but we can’t go.

  I was sure I could hear her bell in the night, just softly—calling me. Such a sad sound! I don’t know if I have ever heard such a thing. Maybe I was dreaming, I don’t know, but I went outside because I could not stay there anymore feeling like that.

  Outside it was clear, the sun already up—3 AM. No wind, almost no sound. Something very strange for this island because there is always wind. Always the sound of the water and the wind blowing in the grass and getting in your ears. I went along the path and I could see Nella there, on an angle, stuck on the rocks. I kept walking toward her, but then I turned away. I could not look at her stuck there, so I went down a path I hadn’t been on before.