When the Night Comes (15 page)

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.

T
he 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.

B
o 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.

T
here 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.

“I don't like to make French onion soup,” he said. “So many onions! It tastes so sweet, but it comes from pain!”

I had never had French onion soup. I didn't know what it was. I didn't like the sound of it, but when Bo's eyes were clear and he had washed his hands and set the big pot on the gas ring, he added a whole packet of butter and the smell of the onions gently sweating in the butter made me change my mind about the soup.

There was garlic, lots of crushed garlic, and then more butter. Stock from another pot, clear and brown, that Bo ladled in, and then red wine, a big spoonful of flour. A pile of herbs, like little trees tied together with string, and then Bo stirred. He stirred until the mixture bubbled and then he put the lid on.

The smell was sweet and sour, warm butter and salt and onions.

Bo washed his hands again, wiped them on a tea towel. He stood opposite me, hands down on the counter.

“When I was just a mess boy, maybe seventeen, on my first ship, I had to do lots of the prep in the galley. Cutting onions was one job I always had. I always hated this job! My eyes used to really weep. I could hardly even keep them open. There were no portholes to open in the galley, because it was low down, somewhere under the waterline—by five or six onions I could not see. I would have to keep stopping. I would take so long to just cut the onions. I would get yelled at every time.

“One day, one of the cooks told me that if I wanted to cure myself of onion sting, all I had to do was rub onion in my eyes hard for about thirty seconds. He told me, ‘You will cry and cry but after, you will never cry again!'

“The cook who told me this didn't mean to be nasty—in fact he was a nice man. He never imagined I would be stupid enough to do it. He felt
so bad. I think he almost cried when he saw me. When we got to Gothenburg in Sweden two days later, he took me to a bar and bought me lots of drinks. Anyway, my eyes swelled up and closed so that I could not open them at all. I was like this for hours. The first officer told me I was an idiot. He washed my eyes out with water and gave me strong painkillers that put me to sleep.

“I was very young. I never had any reason to doubt what people told me. That was how I grew up—on my island you knew most of the people nearby and they knew you and you trusted what they said. I knew that I would have to toughen up a bit after that, get a bit smarter. I learnt a good lesson.”