Five

 

Aranga-vaa, in the half-circle of islands known as Dampier’s Bracelet, which was the southernmost point where the buccaneer-explorer voyaged in his travels round New Guinea and New Britain, lay to the south-east of New Caledonia, to the south-west of Fiji and equidistant between the two. It was a crescent-shaped scrap of land that had once been the tip of a volcano before the sea had flooded in and filled the crater, and at one side it had been eroded by the waves so that the island now rested in the emerald of the ocean almost like a horse-shoe through the ends of which the Pacific rollers, driven by the South-East Trades, burst in a storm of green water and flying spray.

Its bay was broken into smaller inlets where the rain and the sea had washed away the soil and, above the water, the highest point of the mountain peaks lofted almost to a thousand feet in steep pinnacles of rock which, after halfway, became almost bare of undergrowth like a boy growing out of his clothes. On the lower slopes, the palms, the kauri pines and the feathery casuarinas were tinted with rusty lichens and backgrounded by evergreen leaves that were greasy-looking and as spatulate as an artisan’s fingers. Into this humid undergrowth the light filtered through creepers that hung in lace-like curtains, and through the twisted arches of roots which stood up like the flying buttresses of some savage cathedral. Nearer to the lagoon, where the undergrowth was not so thick, there was the flash of rich blooms in the sunshine, the scarlet of hibiscus and poinsettia, the pale gold of candle flower and the wax white of frangipani. The peacock wings of butterflies added to the confusion of colour and scarlet-tufted birds dipped long beaks into crimson bells. By the water’s edge kingfishers flashed like darts of blue flame and bronze-green lizards basked on the rocks.

Into this sunburst of loveliness, the Tina S erupted like a matronly old dowager thrust through a shop door at sales time. For a wild minute, with the swells becoming more mountainous as the sea bottom grew shallower near the reef, the racing waves swooped at her stern and lifted it high. The ears of her crew were filled with the clamorous dissonance of the surf as the old boat strained every plank in her rush for the entrance through the sizzling waters, then they crashed, with the sea boiling over the gunwales, into the silence of the lagoon.

Still staggered by the fury of the surf, Willie stared round him in the sudden stillness and his mouth dropped open with awe as the Tina rolled serenely up the lagoon in the early morning light, clawing her way in the slack breeze to where the foliage and the flowers kissed the water in sun-bright circles by a dark coral beach.

All about them, as they left the surf behind, was the silence, the moribund, unchanging silence of a forgotten island.

“Cripes!” He watched a sooty tern as it slanted down astern of them towards the sand, mewing as it fell in lonely echoes that called back to them from the shores. “It’s a beaut’. It’s a smasheroo.”

While he stood staring at the island, he heard Frankie’s voice shrieking at him from amidships. “OK,” she was shouting. “Have ’em down, Dreamy,” and he hurried after her to the yards and the Tina’s sails rattled to the deck with a screech of pulleys that echoed round the hidden valleys of Aranga-vaa, then Frankie galloped past him like an awkward young colt to let go the anchor.

“You always let ladies do the work, you big-footed drip?” she demanded.

Willie grinned sheepishly and hurried to help her.

“OK, Wishbone! Get yourself out of it and let a man come.”

He finished winding the anchor cable round the winch and took up a position in the bows again, gazing upwards, his feet in a puddle of water from the chain.

“Come on, softy,” Frankie begged. “We haven’t finished yet.”

“Do you know what we got to do?”

“Sure I do. I been doing it on me own since I was old enough to spit.”

“OK, do it a bit longer then. Now, run away, I got things to think about.”

Willie was still standing in the bows, staring at the shore, when Joe came forward from the squat wheelhouse.

“The memory don’ go so far wrong, eh?” he commented gaily, his hands working up and down over the stained patches on his pants. He stared at the tooth-like spires above them. “I read into that ole atlas things that ain’t there.”

He pointed towards the land. “We row a line ashore,” he said, “and make fast to the trees. Then we warp her in close and put out some more lines, then when the tide drop she stand on her keel like the juggler with the ball on his back-a-side.”

Willie was still gaping at the green slopes that rose to tremendous peaks which finally pierced the clouds, pointing heavenwards like the ruined spires of some gigantic natural monument, all his self-satisfaction gone in a feeling of minuteness before their immensity.

“What’s biting you?” Frankie demanded, approaching them, wiping her wet hands on her trousers.

Willie indicated the island with a helpless gesture, at a loss for words to express what he felt. “Dinkum, I’ve never seen anything like this before.”

“Well, you see plenty more,” Joe said. “Across the Pacific are many places like Aranga-vaa.”

Willie hardly heard him. He was gazing upwards again.

All the pleasure he had felt that he had bullied and persuaded them to fall in with his plan, had got them aiding his escape, had dwindled to a feeling of humility of which he had never thought himself capable.

As they had skirted the Great Barrier Reef and turned east for the New Hebrides in the early days out of Brisbane, he had thought he had seen all there was of beauty – coral beaches bright as parched ivory, with the jade sea threaded like lace through the nigger-heads of coral, an archipelago of tree-crammed shores where the birds hovered in black clouds that blotted out the sun – godwits, dotterels, warblers; and terns milling in their thousands like scraps of flung paper.

With Frankie, the child of the harbours and the beaches, to hang over his shoulder and whip up his sluggish enthusiasm as she shouted with excitement over each new miracle, Willie had long since lost his first blasé air of indifference until, days before they had made their present landfall, his jaw was hanging open with honest awe at the sights about him.

From Efaté they had bustled south to Eromanga and from Eromanga to Aneityum, then south-west between the Loyalties and Mare to the coast of New Caledonia and the Isle of Pines, doing the trip by the longest route but in the shortest hops so that land was never too far away if the struggling old Tina showed signs of giving up the ghost, as she very nearly did once when they ran ashore on a sandspit south of Mare and they all had to go over the side and shove her off again. From New Caledonia they had headed out into the Pacific again towards Matthew Isle and Hunter Isle, with Joe watching his rigging with anxious eyes and Rosa guarding their rations like an old hen with her chicks; and Frankie, with her experience of the sea’s fringe, dragging Willie off along every deserted beach they landed on, in search of eels, shellfish and shrimps, poking in rock pools down by the shining water’s edge where their footprints were desecration’s among the tide-strewn weeds and the tiny triangular marks of the gulls.

The beauty about them seemed to Willie to increase as they travelled and as he threw off the bitterness which, fed by ugly factory buildings in Sydney and old sad houses, had grown on his youth like a fungus. There had been a following wind all the way, which had made their work easier, and the sea had been calm with long slow swells lifting them gently so that they had seemed to be in an unreal world of light and movement. Islands in the distance had been green lifting rocks splashed with foliage and overhung with banks of cumulus they could see long before they raised the land out of the sea. They had been escorted for the greater part of the way by bands of hunting porpoises and, as they closed the islands, they saw huge man-o’-war birds circling the thousands of smaller fry that milled in the air, forcing them to drop the fish they had caught and, cheered on by Frankie’s yells of encouragement, poaching them as they fell, glistening like drops of living water to the sea.

But now, all the things they had seen, all the teeming life that had crowded about them, seemed to have been caught up between the two long arms of the bay in Aranga-vaa. All the silence was here, all the peace – and for the first time in his life Willie was becoming aware of peace.

He started out of his thoughtful mood as Frankie grabbed his arm and pointed to the trees. “Look,” she squealed. “I seen something moving. What is it, Willie?”

“It’s a pig,” he said. “It’s a pig, Joe!”

“Sure, it’s a pig.” The old man shrugged. “Only wild pigs and rats live on Aranga-vaa. Ain’t enough soil for anything else.”

Rosa came forward to join them, thrusting them apart, wiping her face in the humid heat that snatched at their breath and brought the sweat to their bodies. “Well,” she said. “You going to stand all day, staring? We got jobs to do, haven’t we?”

They all gazed back at her defensively, then, as though that had been their intention all the time, they hurried to lower the dinghy into the water that shone like a sheet of glass over the enchanted world at the bottom of the lagoon. Willie climbed into the boat, his eyes aware of the fish that slid beneath them in gaudy layers down to the coral sand and the ink-blue rocks of the bay, and they began loading a heavy mooring rope, coiling it in serpentine loops in the stern. With the water lapping at the gunwales, they began to row towards the shore, Willie’s eyes fixed again on the tremendous spires of Aranga-vaa, while Frankie sat in the stern paying out the rope with flat splashes into the water.

“How long you reckon we’re going to be here, Willie boy?” she asked him, no longer awed by the aura of wickedness and cruelty that had seemed to hang about him at first.

“Dunno.” Willie’s eyes were still on those gigantic towers of rock and he spoke over his shoulder to her. “Few weeks, I reckon.”

“How long will it be before we go home? – to Sydney, I mean.”

Willie turned at last. “Gaw, I don’t know. Years mebbe. Why, you going to miss your boy friends?”

“I’ve got no boy friends,” she said angrily. “I don’t want boy friends. I’ve no time for that sort of thing.”

Willie grinned. “Scrawny bits like you always talk big like that, Wishbone. But they all come round in the end. You’ll end up by going all gooey like the others and getting married and having kids. My sister was just the same.”

“Nobody would want to fall for me,” she said, suddenly quieter. “I’m too skinny. I got no shape and me hair’s straight.”

“Come off it, Wishbone,” he encouraged. “You’re only a kid yet. There’s plenty of time.”

She looked up, her heart full of friendliness to him for his encouragement. “You reckon, Willie? You reckon I will?”

“Sure you will. Why not?”

“It’d be nice to have some feller fall for you, I bet. Somebody nice like on the pictures.”

“Or maybe a dirty big sailor like my sister got, who comes home drunk and knocks you about.”

Her face fell, her dream shattered, all her friendliness dispersed by his thoughtless comment. “He’d better try it, that’s all,” she said in a low voice. “I’d fetch him one with the fry-pan.”

By midday they had two lines made fast ashore and, with the anchor still out to kedge themselves off, had warped the Tina into position. By this time, she was resting on her keel on the dark sand and the dirty copper oxide above the waterline was beginning to grow in breadth.

“So–” Joe looked round him with satisfaction “–now we sit down and rest.”

“Rest?” Rosa turned on him. She had taken off her dress to help with the pulling and the under-skirt that stretched across her broad frame was moist with perspiration and spotted with water. “Tomorrow, they might arrive to take her away. There’s no resting yet…”

The look in her eyes forced Joe to his feet again and she moved to where Willie had spread their few poor tools on the cabin top and was trying to sharpen the chipped chisels and straighten the ancient saws.

“You going to manage?” she asked hesitantly, still a little dubious in his presence. His anger she could answer with its own kind, but his willingness to fall in with the plan left her puzzled and worried. “You got enough tools?”

Willie grinned, eager to be started. “All we’re short of,” he said, “is a decent cross-cut, some sharp edges, a plane, a mallet, a spokeshave, some nails that aren’t bent, a carpenter’s bench–”

A new spasm of doubt crossed Rosa’s face. “Can we do it?” she asked.

“Sure we can. We’ll manage without ’em, that’s all.” He gave her an encouraging grin that did her heart good and bent to work again while Rosa watched him, hope rising higher in her breast.

Long before the tide had completely receded, she had driven them over the side into the water and set them scraping the bottom, and by the time the sudden darkness came, most of what they had to do had been finished, and they climbed back aboard, weary and filthy and covered with the slime and weeds that had dripped from the hull.

Joe sat on the cabin top, slumped in weariness, more exhausted than he could ever remember, his blank eyes seeing warm seats on the wharfside at Woolloomooloo and the knife-backed cat hunting the sooty sparrows. Stretching his aching muscles, he looked forward to a comatose day of doing nothing, a dream from which he was rudely jolted by Rosa’s next words.

“Tomorrow,” she said, “we will start painting.”

It took them longer than they had expected to daub the hull of the Tina. Without the assistance of a cradle or ladders, reaching was difficult and they had to lash brushes to boathooks and roll rocks across the shifting beach to stand on. By the time they had finished, another day had gone by and they were smothered with white paint.

“She don’t look like the same boat,” Rosa commented as she studied their work. “She’ll sail faster, too.”

“She won’t sail so slow, you mean,” Frankie corrected, peering through the splodges of paint on her face. “She didn’t ever sail fast.”

The following morning, assisted by Joe, who was swearing gloomily in Italian and good Australian, Willie set about knocking the box-like structure of the wheelhouse to pieces, setting the dust flying from long neglected corners and harrying the lurking cockroaches into the sunshine. Later, with the wheelhouse almost demolished, they rowed ashore in the leaking dinghy to search out a suitable pine tree for the new mast, while Rosa stripped off her frock again and sat down on the cabin top with Frankie to pull the sail to pieces, a back-aching job that tired their eyes and broke their nails.

By lunchtime, Joe had selected his tree and while he returned aboard to finish the wheelhouse, Willie felled it and began to trim it to a stout straight pole.

Ashore, where the foliage shielded him from the breeze that wafted in from the sea, the heat was intense and the flies swarmed about him, belabouring his head blindly as they buzzed around his hair. The bay was still and the land reflected mirror-like in the water. Above the spires of rock, the sky matched the grandeur of the island with a mass of cumulus that rose, blue meadow on golden mountain, high above the lagoon. Joe had stopped his hammering and was lying to recover his breath in the shade of the awning they had rigged on the foredeck with their shabby blankets. Apart from the occasional sound of a parrot crashing through the undergrowth and the plop of a fish, the place was clothed with the noisy silence of dead places that was a little breath-taking when the cries of the sea-birds were not echoing off the hills.

From the first day he could remember, Willie had heard the revving of trucks and vans in the streets about his home or the roar of sirens from the docks. Even at night buses ran right alongside his bed and the sound of the ships had come over the rooftops into his room. Aranga-vaa had a stillness, a sense of being poised in time, that made him want to hold his breath.

Rosa called him eventually for tea and, jerking out of the mood, he slipped into the water and swam to the Tina.

“Ready for a cuppa, chum?” Frankie shoved her head through the cabin hatch and greeted him with a tin mug as he climbed over the side, then promptly disappeared again like a jack-in-a-box.

“You don’t forget nobody, do you, Ma?” Willie panted, wiping himself on his shirt.

“You’re doing all the work, son,” Rosa said seriously. “You need all the food.”

He glanced at the pile of clippings by the cabin top where she and Frankie had sat all day with the sail.

“How’s it go, Ma?” he asked eagerly, pleased at the progress they had made.

“Fine.” Rosa straightened her back to hide her tiredness. “I’ll soon have it undone. We’re going to need all the canvas we’ve got.”

As they sat back from their meal on the untidy table below the hurricane lamp, Willie wiped his mouth, mellow with a feeling of well-being, full-stomached and lethargic in the heat. He glanced at Joe picking his teeth with a match, and Frankie sprawled over the inevitable magazine, then for no reason at all his mind drifted comfortably back home, and he was pulled up with a jolt as the picture shattered and he saw the police at the doors in Surry Hills, questioning, prying, levering every one of his secrets from its hidden corner.

He was immediately obsessed by a sense of urgency and he stood up and began to collect his tools again. “I’m going to drill the deck for a new mast,” he announced. “Coming, Joe?”

Joe looked up as Willie stripped off his shirt. “You only just-a finish one job,” he pointed out. “Why you think God give you a backside? Don’ you ever sit down?”

“Ain’t tired.” Willie paused with one foot on the ladder. “I’m going for a swim when I’ve finished.”

“You like to get finished?” Joe asked quickly, his eyes bright and suspicious. “It is important?”

Frankie looked up from her magazine, watching them.

“Sure, it’s important,” Willie said. “We don’t want anybody to recognize the Tina, do we?”

“That is more important for you than it is for us, eh?” Joe’s eyes were blank and innocent again as he probed.

“No, why should it be?”

“I ain’t ever seen you sit down. That’s all. You got the ants-in-the-pants.”

“Aw, leave him alone, Pop,” Frankie said. “Leave him be. He’s doing no harm wanting to work.”

In his sense of resentment at the labour he had been forced into, Joe was trying hard to pick a quarrel. “I ain’t ever seen nobody work like him,” he pointed out loudly. “Only Fred Pellevicini when he pinch his brother’s dinghy and paint it to look like some other guy’s. He work like that.”

Rosa rounded on her husband, her hands full of pots. “It helps us all, don’t it?” she said. “Mind your own business.”

Frankie watched her father subside into muttered grumbling, then she slid out from the table, wiping her hands on her pants. “I’ll give you a hand, Willie,” she said. “I’m coming now.”

When they had gone on deck, Joe looked up at Rosa. “Mama, that boy drive too hard. There is something inside him.”

Rosa slammed the dishes into the washing-up bowl. “Of course there is,” she said. “Something that’s not inside you: energy.”

Joe’s face wore a sulky expression. “Men who have that drive inside them are dangerous men, Mama.”

Rosa slapped the dishcloth after the dishes. “Or successful men,” she snapped. “Angelo Carpaccio’s got that drive. He’s successful. He owns two boats and an office with a telephone, and will own three boats and an office with a telephone before long. And he’s only thirty-one. Robert Rossi’s got it. He owns two boats – one of them this one.”

The mention of Angelo Carpaccio and Robert Rossi made Joe feel homesick. He glanced through the porthole and saw only trees and the tangled greenery of the undergrowth across the water. Running his fingers through his hair, he shuffled in his seat as he compared it with the Sydney streets and the little office of Angelo Carpaccio. He licked his lips sadly, almost tasting the drinks he was in the habit of receiving there from time to time. “Mama, we are a long way from home,” he said.

“And a good thing, too,” Rosa replied, sensing his thoughts. “No bars.”

“Mama, suppose-a this young man decide to kill us both and run away with the boat?” Joe’s eyes rounded with agitation at the thought. “He could do-a the bunk and take Frankie. She is only the kid. She talks through the top of the head. She is enthusiastic. She is all we got, Mama, and with her he would know enough to sail the Tina now.”

Rosa stopped with a handful of wet plates, and stared at the bulkhead in front of her, her face, shadowed in the growing dusk, suddenly doubtful and worried. “He wouldn’t do that,” she said.

“Why not?”

Rosa forced away her doubt and smiled, flattering him. “He’d run her ashore,” she said. “He don’t know his way around like you do, Joe.”

Joe indicated the atlas on the table. “He has the atlas,” he said sarcastically. “The wonderful atlas that tells us where the islands is and where the reefs ain’t. Mama, I don’ like it.”

“There’s too much you don’t like,” Rosa burst out, erect, matriarchal and commanding. “You don’t like work. You don’t like responsibility. You don’t like risk. That’s why we’re here now. That’s why we’re hiding like a lot of criminals. Now shut up and go and help on deck.”

When Willie had finished his work, he sat with his feet swinging over the side of the Tina, fiddling with a piece of wood shaving between his fingers. Frankie had her back to the mast, her knees under her chin. The palms ashore were profiled against the sky and every star in the heavens was reflected clearly in the lagoon in a firmament of diamonds. The amethystine night was loaded with the eddies of warm air that swung the island scents across the lagoon towards the cooler salt smell coming off the sea. From ashore came the snuffle of a rooting pig and the honk of the nightbird and, above them, the thin insect piping from the trees.

“Willie,” Frankie said suddenly. “You married?”

Willie answered without moving his head. “Me? Married? Not on your life, kid. I got better things to do.”

“OK. No need to roar like a grampus at me. I only wondered.” She paused, trying to be casual. “You got a girl, Willie?”

“I had dozens. You can always get girls when you got money to spend.”

“Money wouldn’t fetch me.”

“You’re not a girl. You’re only a kid. But you’ll learn as you grow older.”

Frankie studied her thin knees showing through the blue material of her jeans, and her bony ankles below their frayed turn-ups. The possibility of romance coming to someone as skinny as she was seemed very remote, she had to admit, and she was consumed with jealousy.

“If I was a man and I thought a girl was only after me for me dough,” she said, “I’d drop her like a hot brick. And if I was a girl and he started telling me how much he’d got I’d tell him where he could stuff it.”

“You fancy romance or something?” Willie asked, and she became silent, shamed by his derision. All the discomforts of making-do, of putting-up-with and going without on the Tina, all the vulgarities of the dockside and the hoarse hilarities of life had buffeted her without harming her, and underneath her self-confident raucous exterior there was an inarticulate naivety that came from being on the threshold of maturity. The film magazines she devoured were only a defence against the more brutal aspects of life, adding a scrap of colour to the little world she lived in behind the curtains of her bunk.

She answered Willie cautiously. “’Course I don’t fancy romance,” she said. “But you can’t buy everything for money. You can’t buy love and you can’t buy happiness. You’re happier now than you were when you came aboard in Sydney. And it ain’t spending money that’s made you happier because you ain’t spent any.”

Willie turned and stared at her for a moment, startled by the wisdom of what she said and shocked to realize how right she was.

In spite of the ache in his arms and back, the ache of hard work, something he had never experienced before, he felt content, but he was puzzled to know the reason for it, for contentment was a new sensation to him, something that had never come to him when he had gasconaded round the alleyways of King’s Cross with money in his pocket. He tried to put it down to the fact that his escape had been accomplished successfully, though he knew that could not be the only reason.

He was still working for his own salvation and no one else’s, and he knew that every drop of sweat he shed brought him a little longer freedom. It had even crossed his mind several times to desert when their work was finished, up-anchoring when the others were ashore, and sailing the boat single-handed. The chance of failure would be no greater that way than it would be with them on board, and he was not afraid to try. But there was something in their need and the way they relied on him that shouldered the thought aside every time it rose to the surface. When it had first crossed his mind, he had felt that deserting them would not hit them too hard because, like himself, they had been brought up in an untrusting world; but the more he thought of it, the more he had doubts about it and even, to his surprise, about his own ability to make the break, for he gained too much happiness with them and too much satisfaction from Rosa’s praise.

He knew she was the driving force behind everyone else. He had seen her too many times to doubt it, standing by the stove in her old felt slippers as though she were ashore and not in the heaving interior of an old boat, wedged against the bulkhead for safety, one eye on the swinging hurricane lamp that circled dangerously near her head, her fingers all the time on a handhold; tired because she found the movement of the boat hard on her feet and because her muscles were stiff with trying to keep her balance. But, for all her weariness, there had never been a complaint out of her. While everyone else on board was grumbling about the conditions or the weather or the food, Rosa had been like a rock, often unspeaking, rarely bad-tempered and never swerving in her decision to continue.

The few tit-bits on his mealtime plate had been provided from their monotonous diet at her expense, he knew quite well, while she stood – inevitably at the stove – to eat so that he shouldn’t see what was before her. She had washed the only shirt he possessed and persuaded him to put it on in the evenings – “Because it suits you,” she had said. “You’re young and brown and it’s so white.” She saw that he had tea to drink in the hot mid-morning when he was thirsty – and had even rowed the teapot ashore when he was working there and Frankie was too busy.

There was something in her sturdy generous spirit that was prepared to give so long as Willie was prepared to do likewise, prepared to ignore his secrets so long as he was willing to help. Her attention had touched him in a way that had made him feel foolish and over-emotional when he had first experienced it, and there was something in her confidence that had sparked off an unexpected zest for life that made him more than willing to work.

Puzzled by his feelings, he stood up abruptly and threw off his shirt.

“I’m going for a swim, Wishbone,” he said. “Coming?”

“Sure!” Frankie scrambled to her feet, as willing as he was to exchange her troublesome thoughts for movement. “Last one in’s a sissy. I’ll go over the other side.”

They poised on the rails and dived out into the reflected stars, and as they struck the night-dark water, the picture there, with its inverted trees and mountain peaks and the glimmer of the yellow moon lifting over the rocks, shattered like a smashed mirror and dissolved into spreading ripples that caught the light in golden arcs…

When Rosa came on deck, she saw a glow of light in the engine room and laboured down the ladder to see what was happening.

Willie, his arms black to the elbows with old rank grease, sat on a box staring at the grimy pieces of the engine he had spread across the floorboards, while Frankie sat on the rolled and ragged blankets of his bed, her hair in long damp rat’s-tails, her chin on her hands, watching Willie with an absorbed look.

“This is a nice mess,” Rosa said, looking at the oil-black nuts and bolts. With Joe’s words still in her ears, she turned to Frankie. “What are you doing down here?” she demanded.

“Nothing, Mama,” Frankie said. “Only watching Willie.”

“And what have you been telling her?”

Willie grinned. “That the sea’s made of ink and the moon’s made of green cheese. Come off it, Ma. She’s able to look after herself and she’s got more sense than you credit her with. She likes talking to me, don’t you, Wishbone?”

Frankie nodded, her eyes fixed cautiously on Rosa.

“She’s a kid,” Willie went on. “I’m a kid too, if the truth’s known. Mebbe that’s it. She gets sick of old folks all the time. Give her a break, Ma. We’re doing no harm. She only wants company.”

Rosa had to admit the truth in what he said and she held back the rebuke on her lips. “OK,” she said. “I’m not saying anything, am I? But it’s time she was in bed and not poking about down here.”

“Scared I’ll make a pass at her, Ma?” Willie tormented.

“I’d hit you with a spanner if you did,” Frankie said quickly.

“I’m not scared of anything like that,” Rosa explained. “I’m scared she isn’t getting enough sleep. She looks like a skinned rabbit. She’s outgrowing her strength–”

“Mama, I’m not a child!”

“So long as I’m looking after you, you’re always a child. Now get off to bed.”

As Frankie crawled unwillingly up the ladder to the deck, Rosa turned to Willie.

“OK,” she said. “Now what’s going on? What are you doing?”

“Making the engine go.” Willie looked up again and grinned. He had been secretly investigating it for days, working on it when they thought he was asleep. Useless, the engine seemed only a barrier in his path, for he didn’t trust sails alone. Working, it could be an asset if the time ever came for it to be used.

“Just poking about,” he added, seeing no further point in hiding his activities. “Seeing what’s wrong with it.”

“It’s no good,” Rosa pointed out. “It hasn’t gone in a blue moon and even if you make it go, we’ve got no fuel.”

Willie indicated a drum propped against the engine.

“I bought that in Vila with the paint,” he said. “I didn’t tell you. That’s enough to start her.”

Rosa frowned. “Starting her’s no good when we can’t afford any more fuel to keep her going.”

Willie grinned. “Never mind. It’s something to do.”

Rosa suddenly looked interested and moved closer. “You can really make it go?” she asked.

“Sure.” Willie smiled. “Dead easy. Just a question of time. It’s an ordinary marine engine. Like any other. 1925, by the look of her, I reckon. Ain’t much compression and the cylinder walls is worn. And there’s one or two things cracked and missing here and there and the usual leaks. But I’ve got a vice down here and a few tools. I can do it. Plenty of horse-power. Bags of guts. And a big screw, Mama. Piece of cake, it is.”

“You know all about engines?” Rosa leaned over him, watching his sure fingers.

“Sure. Motor cars mostly, but there ain’t a lot of difference.”

“But you said you were a carpenter’s apprentice. Apprentices don’t own cars.”

“Other people do.”

“And they let you drive?”

Willie glanced up and a smile spread across his face again.

“They never knew,” he said.

Rosa frowned, shocked. “You mean–?”

“I pinched ’em, Ma. I pinched ’em and sold ’em again. Did ’em up in an old shed and made ’em look different. There were a lot of us in the game. It’s nothing new.”

“That was dishonest.”

Willie scratched his nose with an oily finger that left its dark smudge on his skin. “Yeah, I reckon it was,” he admitted.

Rosa stared hard at him, thinking of her daughter, anxious that she should not learn too much about Willie’s life.

“You been telling all this to Frankie?” she asked.

“Sure, why not?”

Rosa felt a spasm of anger. Frankie was a wild creature, living always in her dockside life on the edge of crime, but she was still, because of Rosa’s influence, untouched by it.

“You shouldn’t have told her. She’s a good girl and the less she knows about that kind of thing the better.”

Willie looked seriously at her. “You got her wrong,” he said. “You got her all wrong. She’s too old to tread on. She asks questions and she knows more about what goes on than you think. Ma, she’s pretty smart with a spanner. I dunno where she learned but if I get this engine going, you’ll be able to thank her for a lot of it.”

Rosa was at a loss what to say. She looked quickly round the engine room. “You happy, son?” she asked unexpectedly. “You look it.”

Willie stared back at her, conscious of the similarity of what Frankie had said, and tried again to sort out the unfamiliar emotions that had begun to come upon him. He grinned briefly and endeavoured to reply honestly. “Yes, Ma, I reckon I am – under the circs. Are you?”

Rosa smiled. She suddenly realized how like her son he looked – daring, impertinent and touched with the same spirit of adventure that had sent Georgie off to join the Navy. “Sure,” she said. “I’m happy.”

But her face looked taut and for some reason he couldn’t have explained, Willie raised his voice to a ring of enthusiasm because he knew it would cheer her up. “I’m learning to speak Italian,” he said gaily. “Just like Joe. Frankie’s taught me. Listen: Uno, Due, Tre, Quattro, Cinque – Lunedi, Martedi, Mercoledi. Days of the week, see? I’ve learned to put on a whipping. I can sew canvas and I can splice a rope. I’ll learn to splice wire soon. It’s a piece of cake being a sailor, Ma.”

Rosa’s eyes clouded as she thought of her son for whom being a sailor had not proved a piece of cake, and he stopped as he saw her expression.

“Ma, what’s wrong? You worried about something?”

Rosa sat down on a box, her heavy face troubled. She pushed Georgie to the shadows at the back of her mind with an effort as she answered. “It’s too easy,” she sighed. “Everything’s gone so well. I get scared.”

“Take it easy, Ma,” Willie urged. “Save your breath for worrying when it comes bad.” He peered at her in the yellow light. “You tired, Ma? You look it.”

Rosa’s relaxed face tautened and she forced a smile. “A little bit. We’ve worked hard and I don’t sleep so well.”

“Thinking too much?”

“I reckon so. I keep thinking of Frankie. The Tina sails all right, but them sails of ours look pretty tatty and I wouldn’t like to run into a hurricane with her on board. Still, like you say, I’ll take things as they come. We mustn’t think of not succeeding. We’ve got to succeed. Tommy and Lucia are depending on us succeeding. And that means it’s up to me. Frankie ain’t very old and Joe’s not so young as he was. He gives up more easy.”

“I’ll help, Ma.”

“I know you will. Joe told me how clever you’re getting about the boat.” Rosa stood up and touched his cheek affectionately. “You’re a good boy, Willie.”

Willie glanced up at her. “Not really, Ma,” he said soberly.

He watched her heave herself up the ladder and, alone once more, he sat without moving. Then he put his hand on his cheek where Rosa’s fingers had rested and stared at the grimy pieces of the engine spread along the floorboards with wide puzzled eyes.