When the Night Comes (10 page)

Dad told me not to tell Mum I'd done it on the bike. He told me to
just tell her that I caught my leg on the fence or tripped on the gravel. I don't remember getting home to the dark brick-veneer farmhouse, but when Mum got home with my brother my leg was bandaged and I never even had to lie because Dad said, “She hurt her leg but it's all fine now.” Mum never even looked at the bandage. She just walked into the kitchen and started cooking dinner.

“Imagine the scar is a picture that you like,” Bo said. “Like a tattoo. Any picture. It has been drawn on your leg and only you can see it. Only you can imagine what the picture is.”

I looked for a long time, and I tried hard not to cry, because I couldn't see any picture there. I couldn't see anything.

“It must have hurt very much,” Bo said.

“Yes,” I said.

When my leg was better, Bo said, “Shall we kill the cactus?” He had a big knife, one of his sharp knives from the ship.

We walked down the back steps to the yard.

“You go first,” he said, and he offered me the knife, but I didn't take it.

With one swipe, he cut the cactus in half. Then in half again, and again.

He killed the cactus, cut it up into little pieces. And later, when he had gone, I hacked into the earth with the pointy end of one of the cricket stumps and made sure that every root, every fiber of that cactus was gone so it would never grow back again.

Birds call down the morning

I feel it lift off me, the weight of darkness

It is a new day

“The light gets more every day,” Bo said.

I looked out from the sunroom to the purple sky, and it was such a relief to see it—the light. The day coming.

I sat close to Bo at the table, without touching. I wanted to tell him that I was afraid of the darkness. I wanted to tell him but I stayed silent.

We were still.

“Yes, the light comes more and more every day,” he said again. “A minute in the morning—a minute in the night.”

Minutes of time, two minutes a day.

Two minutes and two minutes and two minutes, until the birds start to sing at 4
AM
and I wake with them.

I thought about before, my brother and me in that small attic room. Sometimes I could not tell if I was asleep or I was awake but we would be there in the dark and my brother would ask me if it was morning or night. I could not tell, and I was not brave enough to move, to get up and look behind the thick curtains. It was always so cold, the air, the room. The night pressing down on us both.

I would wait and listen, wait to see if I could hear birds in the yard. I would strain to hear them in the silence, and finally they would come—a soft call. A wave would wash over me.
It's all right now—the morning is coming. We are safe.

My brother and I would get up, get out of that small attic room, and we would put on lots of clothes to keep warm and go down to the kitchen. We'd sit at the round green wooden table that was like my grandmother's but was not my grandmother's.

We would wait for Mum to wake up.

Bo's eyes turned to me, but I could not look at them. I could not show him all the fear that was there inside of me. So I kept looking out the window, at the morning, at the day. And he started to talk. He started to tell me about the sea.

“As we move south on the water, I lose track of the sunrise. At first I say,
Yes! I will watch every sunrise. Every one.
Then after five days, ten days, depending on the speed we are traveling and how far south we have come, the sun pops up when I am not ready. I wake at three
AM
and it is already there. I feel cheated then. I feel lazy and think,
How have I let myself miss it?

“But after weeks, time starts to go completely. We are just working,
Nella
going on and on. Sometimes the sun is always there. Sometimes it goes down for a small rest, a few hours. The days at sea become one giant day. There are just tasks. Simple tasks. Sleep. Make coffee. Wash the roasting pans. Refill the sugar. Defrost the lamb. Cook the soup. Make the eggs—fried, poached, scrambled. Then sleep and then tasks. Sleep, then tasks.

“My mind stops always thinking, stops worrying. Then I just am. I am just there. I am just a man. Working. Part of the ship. This kind of family. I do not have time to worry.”

I looked at Bo then, his face calm, talking about his life at sea. I looked at his eyes, gray and blue with movement like the water was there inside of them.

All the things he told me, I wanted more than anything.

M
y brother watched Leo.

Watched the large hands covered in flour stretch out the sticky pastry in long, thin strips. Leo shaped it, made small rounds and filled them with custard. He made larger pastries too, ones that were shaped in loops that folded around each other. Then he piped in the custard, so fast and with such precision, and I could smell the sweet almond smell—the custard shiny and yellow with egg yolks.

When I looked up at the tall man, at Leo, he was on autopilot. He could have had his eyes closed, because his hands knew the way. They were independent from him somehow, working steadily—loop and loop and loop and cut. Loop and loop and loop and cut.

When they were finished, the pastries were like crowns, emblems of power. Sweet dough loops of magic. Almond flakes, marzipan, more custard, egg wash.

Leo took the full tray and slotted it in the oven near the top. I could feel the heat on my face all the way from across the galley. He took another tray out, a hot tray—the pastries on it all golden and sun-kissed, the custard bubbling. He set it down on the stainless-steel counter, looked at my brother and winked.

“Now we taste!” he said.

My brother's face burst open into a smile. He moved closer to the counter, a few steps, but I stayed where I was. I watched Leo cut two
pastries in half. The custard inside moved like lava—slow and thick—and it pooled on the tray. Leo put two halves on a small plate, pushed it toward us. I knew my brother was staring at the plate and that his small hands were holding on to the edge of the counter, but I kept my eyes on Leo. I watched his face, saw the way he looked down at the pastries—his work. Content. He breathed in, picked up one of the cut halves and took a bite.

Leo's eyes closed then. He chewed and chewed, then swallowed. He wiped his mouth with his hand and said a word, just quietly—a word I didn't know, a Danish word,
sólskin
, and when he opened his eyes he was looking right at me.

“Sunshine,” he said, “like sunshine.”

My brother looked at me, his hand already reaching out for the plate. I moved closer.

That first bite. Crisp buttery flakes, sweet warm custard oozing—sharp marzipan and almond. The eggs, the sugar, the crunch of pastry—made with big hands. Made with skill and care. Made for breakfast—to start the day—to greet the sun. A magic loop of pastry.

The light coming through the porthole made the whole galley fill with yellow. I breathed it in.

T
he wind started to blow ice when I was halfway home from the shop. I hadn't noticed the streets until then, until the cold wind made my face raw. All I could think about was the white paper bag of mixed candies I had in my hand.

They were for my brother.

He'd just sat there on the floor in his school uniform, one gray sock pulled up to his knee, the other scrunched down around his ankle, when Mum came in and burst into tears and told us about Tom Balinski. About how he had been hit by a car on the way home from school.

About how he was dead.

He didn't cry, my brother. I didn't see him cry. I only saw his body shake—just a shudder, like something very small had collapsed inside his bones.

The accident was on the news. Flashing lights reflecting off a fallen schoolbag, the emblem of a waratah flower with the Latin words that meant
No Man Is an Island
shining out in the dark. The man on the TV got it wrong, because he said it was a high school boy who had been hit by a car and died from his injuries on the way to the hospital. But it wasn't a high school boy. It was a small boy.

A boy just as small as my brother.

Tom had come to my brother's birthday party three days before. He was like an angel with his white hair and blue eyes—his skin so pale. Not
see-through like mine, just creamy and pale. He gave my brother a really huge pencil case. It was all the bright colors in stripes and I knew my brother really liked it because he carried it around with him for a long time after the party, after everyone had gone. And he carefully put all of his pencils and pens inside and put it in his schoolbag ready for school the next day. Monday. Then there was Tuesday and then there was Wednesday.

The day Tom Balinski died.

I was on the bus and I had seen Tom and my brother walking out of the school gate together. My brother got on the bus and he waved to Tom and Tom waved back—his hair bright against the gray sky and the gray of his uniform. I remember that it started to rain as the bus pulled away.