When the Night Comes Page 8

  “That’s tough,” I say.

  He shakes his head. “I’m going to bloody start digging us out tomorrow. I’m going to get a shovel and bloody dig us out.”

  Down in the mess, we eat like we haven’t eaten for days. The food tastes so good—the warm salty gravy and the crisp roast pork, the acid of the cabbage, all going down together well.

  I wash up our dishes and put the leftover food away. I feel the need to go lie down. My feet heavy, my eyes half-closed—suddenly drunk and only thinking of bed.

  I fall into my bunk, kick my boots off to the floor. Four AM tomorrow will be the start of a new working day. I will be myself again. But today, I had been someone else. A passenger. A boy. I had been free. Something hard and heavy fell away—crumbled, turned to dust out there on the football field.

  Sleep.

  Sleep.

  Let me sleep.

  MS Nella Dan

  VOYAGE 2, 1986/1987 SEASON

  27th December 1986

  POSITION: 63° 26.000’ S, 120° 5.000’ E

  CAPTAIN’S NOTE: Vessel surrounded by ice. Japanese icebreaker Shirase Maru arrived after breakfast. They will attempt to tow us to a clear lead.

  * * *

  They gave us a bag of apples. They broke us out of the ice.

  I waved good-bye to them on their huge ship, the Shirase Maru. They even had a tennis court on the aft deck. A tennis court.

  I bite into an apple—cold, crisp—and the sound of my teeth sinking through the skin makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up. My mouth fills with the sweet liquid—so familiar. I chew and chew, my eyes closed.

  Just an apple—an apple.

  But I have never tasted anything so necessary to me.

  Apples, always there on the trees and in the cupboard. Apple in so much of the food I love. I won’t forget this now.

  Seven weeks without one, and out of everything missing, out of everything gone, this is what I’ve missed, what I thought about, the most.

  The cold, crisp taste of an apple. My teeth sinking through the skin.

  MS Nella Dan

  VOYAGE 2, 1986/1987 SEASON

  8th January 1987

  POSITION: 45° 8.000’ S, 142° 33.000’ E

  CAPTAIN’S NOTE: We continue on schedule for our arrival in Hobart at 09:00 tomorrow.

  * * *

  His cabin door remains open.

  I pass it six times a day, maybe more, but I never look in. I look ahead—eyes straight ahead. I pass by quickly. But tonight, I stop at his door. I don’t know why. I don’t know, but I stand there. I look inside.

  My eyes grow accustomed to the light and outlines become solid. Soren’s system of mess. His clothes, his boots, his books and magazines all over the floor. His bed unmade, the duvet hanging off the side.

  He always said that he didn’t need to clean up because he knew where everything was and if he moved things, he wouldn’t be able to find anything. On the way from Denmark, somewhere near the equator on the Indian Ocean, Klaus told him to clean up his stinking cabin. We had only been gone for about three weeks. But Soren said that it wasn’t a mess. He said it was a system.

  “I know where everything is. If I need a pen I know exactly where one will be.” And he picked up a pair of trousers that were in a ball on the floor and there, underneath, was a pen.

  “See!” he said.

  Klaus shook his head and told him to clean up, but he was smiling, maybe even laughing about the pen. It was impossible to stay mad at Soren.

  I step inside. I sit on his bunk.

  His survival bag is by my feet, open with some of the contents spilling out. It makes me smile because it should be in the cupboard, tightly closed—In Case of an Emergency. We have to take it with us to drills, when we stand outside on the helideck, freezing, smoking cigarettes and waiting for our names to be called so we can go back inside.

  Opposite me, on the built-in desk, secured by towels rolled up and jammed in on either side, is the CD player he bought in Hobart. Black and shiny and new—AKAI written in silver.

  “You have to come and listen! Listen to the quality!” Soren would say.

  We’d squeeze in. He’d put on “Money for Nothing” by Dire Straits and we would stand and listen.

  “Doesn’t it sound amazing? So much better than tapes!”

  With the constant grind of the engines and the ocean smacking the hull, we could not really hear the difference. We were just being polite, I guess, or just happy to listen to music together. Happy to be crammed in a cabin that wasn’t our own. A change of scenery from the Frozen Inn or from our own tiny cabins. A different song. A different space. Something new.

  But Soren only had two CDs. The Wall and Brothers in Arms.

  I lean over and press the power button. There is a bass sound that I feel in my chest and the red light comes on. Then a song starts up, loud and getting louder. I grab the headphones that are on the floor and plug them in. I pull them over my ears. I close down the outside world.

  I listen. I lie back on Soren’s bunk and close my eyes. It’s so loud, it almost hurts, but I don’t want to turn it down.

  Blasts of full color, details bright and bursting. A whole orchestra, a choir, a band, all there in the headphones—all there in my head. Inside of me—sounds I have heard but never felt, and I am lost, floating high on this giant wave. The words reaching into me. The words. Pink Floyd—“Comfortably Numb.”

  “It’s the new thing,” he said. “The sound. The real business!”

  I looked at the stereo.

  “It’s so much money,” I said.

  Soren gave me that look. “What the hell are you saving for anyway?”

  I shrugged. My house was old, needed a lot of fixing, but that’s not what I said. I told him that maybe I’d like to stay here for a while. Stay for a bit.

  “Travel?” he said.

  I shrugged again. “Maybe just stay here.”

  Soren rolled his eyes then. I knew what he was thinking. There was a whole world of women out there and I hardly knew this woman, this place. It was too soon.

  “I just have this good feeling,” I said, but he wasn’t really listening. He was staring at the black shiny stereo that had this new sound inside of it.

  We carried it out of the shop and all the way down to the wharf. He told me I could have his old stereo.

  “It’s better than your piece of shit,” he said.

  I told him to give his to Erik and Jonas. They didn’t have anything in their cabin. Anyway, I liked my old tape player. It never chewed up my tapes and it was good enough. It would do.

  “Okay,” he said. “You can stay in the past while the rest of us move into the future.”

  I told him that he didn’t have any CD things to put in this new machine. He laughed at that. But when we got to his cabin he was serious. He looked at me.

  “Maybe you should take a chance,” he said. “I guess sometimes you just have to say, fuck it! Life is short. I guess you could stay here for a bit—see how it goes.”

  The last half of the song is just the thick bass, the lead guitar pulling the melody right out, lifting it up onto another level—the melody soaring to the horizon.

  I let go of my body, of the ship, of this earth.

  I can see for all of time.

  “You were right, Soren,” I say. “It’s the real business.”

  THE SNOWBALL

  Bo and the crew threw snowballs at us when Nella came home. She had been stuck in ice for seven weeks. There was cheering and people were hugging and kissing. Some people were crying.

  Everyone on board had missed Christmas. New Year’s. January.

  There was a news crew there. They filmed the snowballs, the celebration, and it was on the ABC news that night. The reporter said it was the longest besetment of modern times.

  Bo saved one snowball for us. He put it in my brother’s hand.

  “Ice, all the way from Antarctica,” he said.

  My brother t
old him about the day it snowed and how we got the day off school and made snowballs in the street and had a toboggan made from a tray, but it busted halfway down the hill.

  Bo smiled, but on the way home in the car he stared out the window and was quiet. Mum told us that he had lost his friend while they were away, that he had fallen down and hit his head very hard. He was a man who’d worked in the galley called Soren.

  I remembered him. He was the man who lifted my brother up and gave him the box of chewing gum. I wanted to ask if they buried him in the ice, if they left him behind, but I didn’t ask. I looked across at my brother. He had his eyes fixed on the snowball in his hand.

  “Did you run out of food?” he said.

  Bo didn’t answer for a while; then, when he did, his voice was quiet. Far away.

  “We had enough food. We can last for a very long time. But we ran out of beer. And we ran out of apples. I missed them.”

  My brother looked at me. He whispered, “I wouldn’t miss apples.”

  Bo turned around in his seat.

  “You would miss them if you didn’t have them for so long. You would miss them,” he said.

  My brother made his eyes wide, like he hadn’t meant to say that, like it was something only meant for me. He went back to watching the snowball. It was shiny and had started to melt on the surface, but it was packed so tight and still so cold that it was not dripping yet. My brother had his sweater pulled down between it and his skin but his hand must have been getting very cold.

  “If I put this in the freezer, do you think it will last?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Bo said. “Yes. We will put it in a plastic bag and put it in the freezer. It will last.”

  As soon as we got home my brother ran into the kitchen and got a sandwich bag out of the drawer. He put the snowball in the bag and clipped it shut. Bo put it in the freezer for him.

  “Anyway, don’t worry. We leave again very soon and I can get you some more ice anytime. I can get you as much as you need.” Bo looked at him then. “I missed your birthday,” he said.

  My brother told him that he had a party and it was great, and Bo said he was sad to miss that.

  “I will make you a cake. We can still have a cake even if it is late. We can have a cake for your birthday and a cake for the New Year.”

  Mum told us to go and look at the Women’s Weekly Children’s Birthday Cake Book and I knew that they wanted to be rid of us, so we sat in the dark living room, huddled on the floor, and I tried to listen to what Mum and Bo were talking about in the sunroom. I tried hard but I couldn’t hear properly.

  When my brother had narrowed the cake selection down to three possible choices, the ones with the most icing and candies that he liked, Bo came in and said that he was going to try to sleep for a little while. He said he had not had much sleep for a long time and he suddenly looked very tired. I could see the hollows of his eye sockets, and his eyes were not gray and they were not blue. They seemed to be no color at all, like they had been washed out to nothing.

  My brother said, “Good night. See you in the morning,” even though it was morning. Even though it was only 10 AM.

  “See you in the morning,” Bo said. Then he turned to me.

  “You know what is a nice cake for the New Year? Chocolate-hazelnut-cherry cake.”

  I had never even heard of a cake like that before, not ever, and I couldn’t even imagine what it would be like.

  THE CAKE

  The cake was like a castle, a fortress—with turrets made of chocolate curls dusted with powdered-sugar snow. There were layers of cake and between them were ground hazelnuts and cream and dark cherries that had come out of a can Bo got from the ship. He let me drink a bit of the juice that the cherries were in—it was sweet and rich and it stained my lips purple.

  It took Bo a long time to make the cake. It seemed very complicated and there were lots of different parts to it. He didn’t seem to mind how long it took. When the cake part was ready to go in the oven, Bo made himself a coffee and poured it into one of our glasses that was actually a small Vegemite jar. I don’t know why he didn’t use a cup—he must have liked the small glass, because he always used it when he was at our house.

  “I miss coffee,” he said. “The way it tastes at home.”

  He took a sip, a taste, then held the small glass up to the light coming through the window.

  “No matter how hard I try, it’s not the same as at home. It should be the same—it’s the same coffee and I make it the same. But it does not taste the same! This is some kind of problem. A mystery. Maybe it is the salt in the air, or because I am in the south, where everything is going backward all the time. I don’t know. It is some kind of mystery.”

  Bo wouldn’t let us watch him finish the cake. He told us it should be a surprise, so I went and watched TV with my brother until it was ready.

  Bo carried the cake out to the sunroom. There was one candle already lit, burning bright, and it made the dusted icing glow and sparkle.

  “Yes, I think this is my favorite type of cake,” he said when he put it down on the table. “It’s like being in the forest in the winter when the trees go to sleep, when the light isn’t so bright and the river begins to freeze, then the snow is coming more and more, and everyone has their Christmas lights in the windows night and day, shining out, and you can smell spices in the air from all the special Christmas baking.”

  And I could taste it—the dark rich earth of a forest filled with rabbits and deer, snow gently falling.

  A fairy tale.

  TIME

  Bo sat in the sunroom under the light.

  I could see his back through the glass of the living-room door, his shoulders rounded in his white T-shirt. He didn’t seem to feel the cold. He was smoking a cigarette. I watched him for a while—maybe it was for a long time, I don’t know. It was the middle of the night and everyone was asleep. Everyone except for me and Bo.

  I opened the door from the living room to the sunroom. I walked in and stood at the table and Bo looked at me, his eyes dark.

  “I can’t sleep,” he said and he lit another cigarette.

  He was leaving again in a few days. It was hardly any time—no time. Getting stuck in the ice had put everything out, the whole schedule for the summer. Everything was different now.

  “No matter how long I sit here,” he said, “I cannot decide. Should I send his watch home, or keep it safe here with me?”

  I wasn’t sure if he was asking me, and I didn’t know the answer. I sat down quietly on the chair next to his.

  The watch was on the table, an old-fashioned one, like the watch my grandpa wore. Only his was gold and a gift for twenty-five years of service at Smiths Industries, where he’d made clocks and watches and airplane black boxes. Soren’s watch didn’t look like it was gold, but it had a nice clean face, and it looked like a good watch. One that would last for a long time.

  Bo picked it up and held it. It looked small in his hand.

  “When we got him ready,” he said, “when we took him down to the freezer and wrapped him up, I took the watch from his wrist. He wore it so tight, always. There was a mark on his wrist where he wore it. He never took it off—he was afraid to lose it. It was his father’s watch. He always wore it, for all the time I knew him.”

  Bo put his cigarette out. He rubbed his forehead.

  “I don’t know why I took it, but I couldn’t leave it. I didn’t want it to stop ticking.”

  He turned to me and smiled then, a strange smile.

  “When I hold the watch in the palm of my hand like this,” and he showed me his open hand, the face of the watch right in the center, “I can feel the ticking through my skin—and it’s like the heartbeat of a little bird when you hold one, a pulse that you might miss if you are thinking about other things. If you are not concentrating. And I keep thinking, shouldn’t a watch be more fragile than a man?”

  Bo wiped one of his eyes with the back of his hand and then he wiped his
nose too. He looked up at me, blinking—maybe decided now.

  “Soren was my good friend,” he said. Then he got up. He said it was no good sitting here in the night, the two of us. He said that if we had some hot chocolate then maybe we would feel like sleep again. When he left the room and went into the kitchen to heat the milk in the little black saucepan that he had bought especially because he said our saucepans were terrible and he couldn’t make anything right with them, I carefully picked up the watch from the table. It was warm from being in Bo’s hand.

  I closed my eyes so I could feel the ticking there against my palm—like the heartbeat of a little bird. But no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t feel it. I couldn’t feel the cogs of the watch moving inside.

  ONIONS

  There was a pile of onion slices on the counter, a pyramid of them—thin and see-through. Bo looked up at me but his hands did not stop moving. He kept slicing onions, running them back and forth quickly against a large metal slicer. He was slicing so fast, the sunlight through the porthole caught the particles of onion juice in the air, and there was a whole rainbow of it there in the galley.

  Bo’s eyes were puffy and red and my eyes started to water. The acid of the onions was like a wall, invisible but there all the same.

  “Go and stand near the sink,” Bo said, still slicing. “Look down into the hot water.”

  The metal sink was half-full of steaming water and I leant over it. I could feel the warmth of the steam against the skin on my face. It felt good.

  “Stare into the water. Try not to blink.”

  I stared down, my eyes wide, until the water became blurred and the edges of the sink rounded and then were gone altogether. Then there was just a body of water—my eyes staring down into a moving body of water.

  I blinked. The onion sting was gone. I stood up, my nose running.

  Bo was on the last onion. He finished quickly, then slid the pile of sliced onions into a huge metal pot. It was blackened and dented on the outside, but shiny bright on the inside. He wiped the counter down, wiped down the slicer, and then stood over the sink of water. He blinked his eyes. Huge tears squeezed out and they ran down his cheeks but he did not wipe them away.