Juneau: Wisdom Tree 4 (8 page)

She laughs. ‘
Bueno
.'

My right leg sparks with pins and needles when I stand. I keep a hand on the roof to steady myself as the feeling returns. Hope and my father are out of the car, focussed on the restaurant, on lunch.

The Twisted Fish is a mud-coloured building with a stone chimney. I can see diners inside, most of them in their forties. One of them, bald, with a neat ginger goatee, holds a glass of white wine to the window to scrutinise it in the natural light.

‘Oh, Tim,' my father says. ‘Lunch.' He reaches for his bumbag. ‘The sushi. It's on me.'

‘You really…' It's much easier just to take the money. We've staged this pantomime before—offer, decline, insistence, rebuttal, no really, well okay then. ‘Thanks.'

He folds several notes and hands them to me.

‘Looks nice.' I nod in the direction of the restaurant. I would crack a joke in Spanish if it was in me to do it. ‘Make sure to take the muesli bar into account with your insulin dose.'

He gives me a glare that's nowhere near as subtle as he means it to be, but he manages not to tell me to mind my own business.

‘I'd better give you the…' My hand starts miming an insulin injection before I can stop it.

There's a pencil case in the backpack with his testing kit and insulin pen. It's below a jumper, his iPad and the snacks, but I get to it eventually and hand it over.

‘Show me the picture,' he says, noticing the iPad being overturned in the search. ‘The one from the ball.'

He gives himself a full minute to look at it. The breeze gusts. The rain will be here any time.

‘Thank you,' he says as he hands it back to me. ‘For this morning, I mean, not just for showing me that.' He smiles. His face looks old, worn. His skin has almost no elasticity left. ‘I didn't know what we might find.' He looks down at his feet, at the gravel and the shallow puddles. He sticks his hands in his pockets and lifts his head, his eyes on me, but on my chest more than my face. ‘My greatest fear was that Thomas had died alone, in some horrible way. Starving in the wilderness, killed by a bear. But I think he was happy. Not for very long, but happy. I think I can believe that.'

Now he looks me in the eye. He wants it confirmed.

‘I think so, too.' I can say that honestly. ‘Maybe some people weren't suited to Dorset farm life back them. Maybe a frontier was a better fit, away from the usual expectations.'

‘I had him pegged as lonely, and in the end he wasn't. For months at least. They came here, they found each other.'

His voice cracks and he looks past me, in the direction of the
Radiance
, or the oncoming rain. He thrusts his hands deeper into his pockets.

‘Yes,' he says. It sticks on the way out. He coughs. He pulls his hand from his jacket and checks his watch. ‘Midday. You should meet the others.'

‘Yeah.' I turn around to check the car park, but there's no minibus yet. ‘Three thirty, remember? Boarding?'

He smiles. ‘I remember. And Hope has a date with a piñata at three. So…'

I thank Hope for everything she's done and they make their way to the door of the Twisted Fish, which is opened for them by a young woman. The toe of my father's boot clips the step on the way in, but he corrects himself and keeps walking.

At the bus stop there's one bench seat under cover, and I take it before the rain comes.

At a row of nearby ticket booths selling tours, a vendor shouts to a pair of Japanese tourists, ‘If you take the city bus you will miss your cruise ship.' They happily give him a thumbs up and say, ‘Cruise ship, yes.'

Somewhere not far away, a minibus is on its way back from the huskies, a few minutes late already. Inside the Twisted Fish, my father and Hope are at a window table, possibly the best in the place for the view of the ships and the cold waters of the Gastineau Channel over
which Thomas Chandler came all those years ago. My father is shown a bottle of wine by a staff member. He scrutinises the label and nods. I have heard him, dozens of times, criticising the drinking of alcohol with lunch. ‘It wrecks your entire afternoon,' he's said.

The wine is poured for him to taste. He sniffs it, tries some and nods again. The waitress says something that makes both Hope and my father laugh, like two people who have just found a good time, quite unexpectedly, and are set on making the most of it.

I move to the end of the seat and turn around, to look towards the road for the bus, to leave my father and Hope to their lunch.

There is green cemetery grass sticking out of my boot tread. At the far end of the wharf, the cruisers are waving their arms at the rain and starting to run. On Mount Roberts, the cloud
drops lower and lower and still the cable cars go up, vanishing into it, as if I'm dreaming them and the dream is turning them into mist.

1

GOTHAM

2

VENICE

3

VANCOUVER

4

JUNEAU

5

NOHO

Nick Earls
is the author of more than twenty books for adults, teenagers and children, including novels such as
Zigzag Street
,
Bachelor Kisses
and
Analogue Men
. His work has won awards in the UK and Australia, among them a Betty Trask Award for
Zigzag Street
and a Children's Book Council of Australia Book of the Year Award for
48 Shades of Brown
. His books have appeared on bestseller lists in both those countries and in the Amazon Kindle Store. Two of his novels,
Perfect Skin
and
48 Shades of Brown
, have been adapted into feature films and five have been adapted into stage plays.