When the Night Comes (17 page)

MS
Nella Dan

VOYAGE 3, 1986/1987 SEASON

20th March 1987

POSITION:
67° 2.000' S, 62° 9.000' E

CAPTAIN'S NOTE:
Holding position in Horseshoe Bay—at anchor. Icebergs with the occasional growler. Pack ice.

The last of the ingoing Mawson wintering team was transferred ashore this morning. We will leave for Hobart at 18:00.

A man stands on the deck in the low light as we pull away from Mawson. I cannot see his face. I cannot know what he is thinking. He stares out at the place that has been his home, all he has known for more than a year. Months of darkness and months of light. He watches it all get farther and farther away—the ice cliffs and the mountains behind the base, the landscape of frozen earth, of rocks, of white, of silence—knowing that he will never return. Knowing he will never see it again.

Soft snow begins to fall, one of the rarest things to happen here in this desert. I go inside. I leave him be.

I
watched Bo out there through the glass door. He was in a world of his own. And all around him were tiny sparrows. They got so close, like he was one of them. Like they were not afraid of him.

One bird was young, its feathers all fluff, and I saw how he made sure it got some bread too. No matter how much the bigger birds pushed it and bullied it, he made sure it got some. It even took a piece of bread right from his fingertips, and it stayed by him as it ate. It stayed near.

He turned and saw me then. I opened the door carefully, tried not to disturb the birds, but they flew off as soon as I stepped onto the deck.

“I keep thinking about my rowboat,” he said. He still had bread in his hand, and he was tearing off little chunks, rolling them tight between his thumb and forefinger. “It's sitting on the beach with the winter there. I have been away a long time.”

He put the rolled-up pieces of bread in a line on the railing, but he kept one piece in the middle of his palm—his hand resting, flat and still.

I stood next to him, carefully, not touching. We stayed silent and eventually the sparrows came back, even the baby one.

“They have been watching us,” Bo said, very quietly.

The brown sparrows feasted on the rail, their bodies always moving, their eyes looking for danger. They ate all the bread and flew away as quickly as they had come. But one stayed. One stayed on the rail. It had seen the bread on Bo's palm. It walked up and back, up and back, its
little head turning, twitching. It got closer and closer and finally walked right onto Bo's hand.

It stood there for the briefest moment, looked at us, then it took the bread up in its beak and flew away.

“The brave one, he gets the prize,” Bo said. He rubbed his hands together.

The sun was shining but the sky was open and clear, the sun so far away.

“I will go home to my island,” he said. “I will check on my house, maybe paint my rowboat. Then I will come back with
Nella
. It's not very long.”

We went inside and I thought about his island, where the houses were made of wood and not stone, and you could ride your bike from town to town along the coast, the sea always there. The Baltic. And you would never get tired riding because there were only a few small hills. Not like here.

“It's not long,” he said again. “I will come back.”

T
here is this song called “Going Home” by Mark Knopfler. It's from the movie
Local Hero
.

It starts off slow. You can hardly hear it, just acoustic guitar gently plucking out the melody, some soft kind of sounds in the background, like the sea and the wind and the open sky all there inside the song. Calling. It's haunting and wanting and saying good-bye.

Then it builds up, becomes electric, and the guitar echoes metallic—still soft, still slow, but when the drums start the song becomes hopeful—joyous, like a victory march.

Look at all that's happened. Look at all that's changed.

We sat in the car in Kingston, parked on the side of the road on a bend, and watched
Nella Dan
sail away.

I got out and walked to the edge as far as I could. Below me was a steep drop, a cliff—rocks and trees and then the water. Mum turned the stereo right up and the music moved like mist in the air across the water—reaching out to the little red ship.

I hoped Bo knew we were here, that we were watching, saying good-bye. I thought I should wave in case he could see us, but that was stupid because he wouldn't be able to. He would be in the galley, already working. He would be inside, busy.

Mum had made him a tape and maybe he had it on. Maybe they were playing it in the galley. Maybe he was listening to the same song.

I knew he really liked it.

The first time he heard it in the car he said, “I know this song. Yes.”

He told us that he went to see Dire Straits in Copenhagen before he came here, and they ended the concert with “Going Home.”

“Great song,” he said. “
Nella Dan
's song.”

The song finished and
Nella
was a long way out, the Derwent no longer a river but the sea. And when I looked at her, she looked so happy heading out to open water. Going home. Going home and leaving us behind.

There were rafts of birds sitting on the water out there, shearwaters—brown-black masses of them—and when I turned back to the car, Mum was crying.

I waited for a while before I opened the door. My brother asked if we could go and get breakfast at a café. It was something we never did, something we had never done. I don't know where he would have got the idea from. My brother could still surprise me sometimes.

But it made Mum smile.

“Okay,” she said. “We'll go to a café.”

We drove to a place in Sandy Bay, right near the beach. They had so many things on the menu, but mostly they had lots of different types of pancakes. Pancakes with blueberries, pancakes with bacon and eggs, pancakes with baked banana and maple syrup.

My brother's serving had so much whipped cream on top that he had to dig a tunnel through the cream to get to the pancakes. He was full after about ten mouthfuls, and he seemed genuinely sad to leave so much behind. He'd tried his best but the pancakes had won.

We both knew that we would probably never go to that café again.

It would take six weeks for Bo to get home. He would have one month off, then go to his house, be on his island and walk along his beach. He would check his rowboat and he would paint it, orange and blue.

He would take it out on the water, go fishing. He would fall asleep in the sun on the long summer days when the light was always there. And why would he ever want to come back here?

M
r. Wilkins liked to use the blackboard. There was a brand-new whiteboard next to it on the long front wall of the science lab. It was much larger and cleaner, but Mr. Wilkins always used the blackboard.

He could write so fast in chalk, faster than any teacher I had ever seen. He was determined. It was a dance—his arm moving and his hair moving, chalk dust flying. Sometimes the piece of chalk would snap in half with his intensity, but he'd just keep on going as if he hadn't noticed the chalk break.

When the piece got too small, he would chuck it behind him, not with any malice or force, just with enough energy to throw it over his head and get it to land where we were sitting. We would try to catch the chalk without getting off our stools, and if we did he would say, “Good catch,” without turning around, his arm still moving, his body blocking most of what he was writing.

A few words here and there at the edges.

Particles

An electric circuit

Ohm's law

Testable hypothesis

Then he would finish, the piece of chalk motionless between his thumb and finger. He would stand and read what he had written, then slowly step aside.

The great unveiling.

Sometimes there were equations. Sometimes a lesson plan or a grand new topic like
The Laws of Thermodynamics!
Sometimes it was a story or a poem, something that seemed not to relate to physics at all. Once it was even a joke.
Why is Osmium the greatest name for a heavy metal band? Because it is the heaviest and hardest metal on the periodic table.