The Best Australian Stories (50 page)

‘Geez, you're a stupid cunt, Sean.'

Madame Bovary
. Quite a good read, better than she had expected. And in its way – a way that would make her smile later when she recalled it – it was the right book at the right time. Because there was a particular moment about four-fifths of the way through the novel – she was almost to the end of it – when suddenly she recognised this absurd, selfish, narcissistic woman, Emma Bovary. This drivelling romantic sensualist pining for the glittering life of the cosmopolitan centres. It was her! It was her, Kirsten, here on this hideous boat with these clamouring children whom she could not escape. And she felt a sudden surge of shame at her behaviour; her moodiness, her remoteness, her seething discomfort.

All afternoon the boat meandered on, gliding its way along the narrow canal. It was late afternoon and beyond the bargemaster's cabin where she had read all day in a half-light she could sense the grey English day deepening into its evening gloom. She read on for another half hour, until the final page, and then she put the book aside.

What am I to do now? she asked herself, and the answer came back to her, soundlessly. She got up and stepped from the bat cave onto the deck. Outside it was dark, save for the bright light from the main cabin which illumined the drab water.

The children scarcely registered her entry, though Tom did, looking suddenly alarmed, as if he suspected she might be about to throw a tantrum.

For a moment she stood there, taking in the scene. The kids appeared to be in the early stages of preparing dinner. There was a mysterious pale powder, a sickly mustard-green colour, spilled across the wooden table and in patches on the floor, and she realised, after a perplexed moment, that this was packet soup out of some giant caterer's pack, a large circular tin that stood by the sink and was labelled ‘Asparagus'. The floor was still wet from the leaks in the roof and the powder had begun to congeal into little clots and stick to the boots of the kids whom Tom had rostered on for cooking. One of them, a girl, was measuring water from the pump into a battered old aluminium soup pot, and even this she was doing clumsily, somehow managing to spill even more water onto an already damp floor. Kirsten looked at this child, fumbling with her ladle, and realised there was no escape, nowhere to go, no way to leave the boat.

‘Here, let me do that,' she said.

Over the next hour she marshalled them into some kind of order, giving them the simple jobs they could manage, like peeling things, setting the table, opening cans. The entire store of food for the trip had been bought by the absent husband and wife who had made the journey in previous years. To Kirsten it was almost unrecognisable junk but she read the instructions on the back of everything and because she could cook it wasn't hard to figure out what to do with the base ingredients, even something so indescribably repulsive as a packet of Trix lard, a little square of paste-coloured suet encased in a garish foil wrapper. By seven she and the team under her supervision had prepared a three-course meal and belatedly they sat down at the long wooden table to packet asparagus soup with sliced white bread and margarine, sausages and mashed potato with tinned peas and tinned carrots followed by a huge jam tart with pastry made from the lard and thick, sticky ‘ jam' from a caterer's tin in which no trace of fruit could be discerned. Oh, yes, and custard made from a bright yellow powder. The children ate with gusto and declared it one of the best meals they had ever had. She could scarcely believe this, but sitting with them and listening to their jeering, good-humoured jokes, watching them scoff and guffaw and poke one another, she found herself ambushed by a faint flush of well-being, somewhere around the first bite of jam tart – which, considering its origins, was better than might have been expected. Later, in the bat cave, as they snuggled into the double sleeping bag, Tom turned his back on her and went instantly to sleep. Fair enough. She thought she might be rewarded with a word of praise, of mere acknowledgement even, or failing that, some kind of embrace. But no. Over the washing-up she had looked at him, sitting at the long wooden table, wearily playing blind poker with a group of them and trying to keep up with the boasting and the rowdy banter, but he was dog-tired, pale with exhaustion from the effort of the first day and the workings of a lock system he'd never before set eyes on. At nine-thirty he had risen and enforced a strict curfew, and because the kids were tired they had offered only token resistance.

She, of course, was wide-awake, having lounged all day in her cabin.

The next morning she got up at six-thirty and supervised the breakfast team. Soon her hair hung in damp tendrils from the rising steam, and the smell of hot bacon fat clung to her clothes. The plates were no sooner empty than the kids bolted outside, out into the grey English light. All morning a drizzling rain fell across their faces and the day seemed endless, but by eleven she was mustering the lunch team and before long it was dinner again. Tom supervised the working of the canals and operating the locks; she ran the kitchen with the kids on roster and they cooked up a storm.

On the morning of the third day they glided into the dock of a small market town, a grim settlement of iron footbridges and tall black chimneys, and she and a party went on a shopping expedition to buy fresh food and an adequate frying pan. With a decent frying pan, she explained, you could cook almost anything, and she found herself drifting deep into a relaxed discourse on the properties of heat and cast iron, and the kids humoured her by feigning interest. It was another dull, chilly morning with a threatening bank of grey cloud in the sky and they pulled their beanies down low over their foreheads so that they looked like a tribe of alien dwarfs. Soon they found a shop that sold cabbages, cauliflower and kale and, to her amazement, a small quantity of zucchini. At another she bought three bottles of chocolate sauce to be hidden away for a special occasion. The kids wanted to know why she bought so many vegetables and she told them it was an Australian custom.

*

One morning, as she stood at the sink bench with her back to them, unwrapping the sliced bread for the breakfast toast, she found herself smiling at the punchline of an obscene joke she was pretending not to have heard, and she realised that in just a few days she had become comfortable with them, and they with her. There were two especially, Yusuf and Ruth, who had become her lieutenants in the kitchen, both able to anticipate and direct the others. Ruth was black, had a wild falsetto voice and amused them all by yapping out an unending stream of profane commentary. She appeared to have no concentration whatsoever but her air of insouciant incompetence proved to be deceptive, for she exuded a natural authority that made the others jump. This meant she could be left in charge of the kitchen, or what passed for one, at least for short spells. Yusuf was a quiet, conscientious boy with sad eyes who worked with intense and methodical concentration, as if the least mistake would see him consigned to Hell. And then there was Terry. Terry was another black kid with whom she had struck up a kind of bantering camaraderie as he made sporadic raids on the kitchen, at Tom's instigation, for supplies for ‘outdoors'. He was big for his age, a muscular boy with a swaggering demeanour and a dark glare of ferocity in his eyes which, in another place and at another time, might not be good news. Already, at thirteen, he had been up before a children's magistrate on a charge of grievous bodily harm. But for now he was Tom's lieutenant on the cut. One night Terry confided in her that his surname was Nelson and that his parents, in all seriousness, had christened him ‘Admiral'. ‘But anyone call me that, Miss, they get a buncha fives.' At some point in his childhood – ‘dunno when' – he had re-named himself Terry, and since he refused to answer to anything else the name had stuck. Thereafter she could not help but think of him as The Admiral, and it became a joke between her and Tom, a rare joke for the privacy of the bat cave.

As for the others in her kitchen, these were her foot soldiers. They worked with varying degrees of competence and liked to lose themselves in chopping and stirring or in trying to remember exactly how to set a formal table: ‘Which way do the knives go again, Miss?' (meaning, do the blades turn in or out?). They were thirteen and still wearing the last traces of their childhood grace: in another two years – less – they would be fully in the grip of their hormonal demons. But as they worked now over the sink or the chopping boards they breathed in an oasis of calm. The girls gossiped about bands and fashion; the boys talked endlessly of football. They told her about their lives, about their custody arrangements and which parent they got on with best (those who were lucky enough to see both). Some boasted of older brothers with convictions, embroidering the feats of gangs in their area. There was a casual violence in their lives (‘Yeah, well, he gets a bit carried away, my dad') which bled into the landscape of their jokey narratives, and they swore at one another with habitual venom. Tom had described them as little bastards in the classroom yet they were prepared to work hard on the locks, scampering from barge to embankment in their earnest efforts to assist him. They seemed almost touchingly determined to get it right, and on those occasions when they mucked up were abashed with contrition. Away from home they were surprisingly generous and forgiving, as if, in that temporary capsule on the water, they could suspend their grievances, pack away their resistances and sail on; enlightened pilgrims who had left their burdens behind in the old country. Of course, they were still in the old country, but they were on the water, and being on the water made it different. From Tom's stories it seemed that in the classroom they were like caged animals; tormentors. Out of it they were gracious, mature, forgiving and funny – but only, she knew, on the boat. Off the boat it would be different – they would be skiving off for cigarettes and alcohol and any drugs they could afford, or steal. But the narrow boat was like a floating desert island. Here on the cut their space was finite, their roles were defined, their options few. And yet they were happy. And why? Because for a short time they formed a community; they belonged to the boat. For ten days they were water gypsies, living with a horizon that was always, but slowly, moving.

Often enough she escaped from the kitchen to amble with them along the tow paths, and when they began to bicker dangerously she would distract them with hair-raising tales from the Australian bush, a landscape they imagined as more perilous than any remote planet and teeming with lethal wildlife. Her shark stories went down particularly well, not that she had ever seen a shark outside of an aquarium – nor did she know anyone who had – and she realised that in her tales she was constructing a mythical landscape, like something from
Gulliver's
Travels
, or
The Water Babies
. Some other world that was hot, white and ferocious. She also guessed that this proximity to the monstrous would enhance her mystique, and with it her authority.

Sometimes the scene by the tow path was bucolic, with local boys fishing by the canal, a church spire in the distance or a quaint early pumphouse with dome and Ionic columns, and a water mill beside. In other parts they glided through a landscape of iron bridges and tall brick chimneys; the water stained a metallic orange from mine seepage, the dour Gas Street Basin in Birmingham and, later, the giant cooling towers of a power station flaring into the sky. She liked both landscapes, was entranced by their strangeness: so different from the wide plains and the diamond-white light of home. She even became resigned to the weather, the unexpected beauties of the English gloom. The gates and beams of the locks were painted in tar and white-washed to make them visible in fog. On one misty day their ghostly outlines loomed up ahead with a kind of eerie beauty that made her think of hobgoblins, and later that evening from out of the fog she saw the startling image of an eye painted on the bow of a strange boat, gliding into her vision like some disembodied Cyclops.

Not surprisingly, on the first night of fog the kids wanted to have a séance. At first Tom was dismissive and scoffed at them. Then to her surprise he relented and let them fiddle about with a glass for an hour, but they talked and fidgeted too much to be able to spook themselves, to generate any satisfying frisson. And because he had worked them hard, they were tired. At curfew they collapsed into their bunks with barely a murmur of protest.

Not long after, she and Tom embraced avidly in the gloom, their bodies rocking on the hard floor while the smells from outside wafted in over their skin … diesel from off the oily water … fresh-cut grass by the embankment … the dank, alluring smell of moss along the stone coping. In the early hours of the morning the wind came up so that the narrow boat began to knock against the brick walls of the canal … and she woke, and listened with a sense almost of enchantment.

On the Wednesday there was some kind of scuffle on the bank between Yusuf and a kid named Joel. She had taken an instinctive dislike to Joel, a weedy little smart alec who sniffed all the time. There was something about him that got under her skin, his ratty little body, his sour, acrid smell, the way his hair stood up in unwashed spikes. He seemed always to be following her around, mimicking her accent and forcing on her his clumsy attentions so that she had to restrain herself from giving him a shove. That morning Joel had spat on Yusuf and the two of them grappled and slipped together all the way down the grass to the edge of the water. Tom had to stop abruptly while halfway through turning the lock and in the act of looking away cut his thumb badly on a piece of loose tin. He swore and shouted at the two boys as he strode toward them, muttering as blood oozed from the gash. She half expected this incident to stir them all up into factional warfare, to render them seething and unmanageable. But no. Abashed at Tom's discomfort, shamed by his stoic patience (wary, as well, of the black look in his eye that underwrote that patience), they tiptoed around for the rest of the day and tried to make it up to him.