When the Night Comes (19 page)

A
dvanced math—my hardest class.

I tried hard to focus, to take the problems one at a time, but they ran at me and began to blur. I could feel the pressure, the clock ticking. There was never enough time. I wasn't smart enough for advanced math and I didn't know why I was in the class.

Halfway down the page.

There was a girl sitting behind me. I didn't know her very well but she tapped me on the shoulder. She had something in her hand—a Kit Kat.

“Have a break, have a Kit Kat,” she said.

I didn't know what to say. When I looked over, Mr. Anderson was staring absentmindedly out the window, his fingers entwined in his well-groomed blond beard.

I heard the scrape of a chair. Books slapped down hard on the desk next to mine and the girl sat down in the empty seat. Mr. Anderson looked over but he didn't move. He didn't seem to care.

“My name is Charly,” she said. “Charly with a
y
because
ie
is stupid.”

She opened up the Kit Kat wrapper and the foil caught the sunlight coming through the window. I heard the snap of the Kit Kat fingers and she passed me half, still in the foil.

“Thanks,” I said. I went to say my name but she said, “I know who you are.”

Her hair was messy, light brown, and her eyes were the color of a soft sky.

“Ladies?” a voice said. Mr. Anderson was standing in front of us. “Finished already?”

“No,” Charly said, smiling, “but we have
almost
finished and we need a break. We need sustenance!”

She pronounced the word
sustenance
slowly, carefully, emphasizing the
ance
. It made me smile, almost laugh, but I held it in. I kept my mouth tightly closed. Mr. Anderson just stood there.

“Finish and hand in your work by the bell. Keep the noise down.”

“Yes, sir!” Charly said. She started to eat her Kit Kat fingers. I ate mine too.

“Kit Kats are the best,” she said and I nodded. I had never had one before. It tasted good. The milky chocolate and the wafers and the lightness in my mouth.

Charly finished her two fingers and rolled the foil up in a ball.

“Don't you just get sick of it?” she said.

I didn't answer. I wasn't really sure what she meant.

“I just get sick of it. I've got to get out of French. I'm thinking of failing the exam on purpose and then they might let me do typing instead.”

“Typing is good,” I said. “And woodwork.”

“I wish I was in woodwork,” she said. “How did you wrangle that?”

“I'm not sure,” I said. “They just let me.”

“I'm in the science-math stream—plus French.” She rolled her eyes then. “I'm just sick of math, nine hours of science a week, the early starts and all of it. It's all just a big production!”

I had never even thought about it. I had always just finished everything even when it meant I had to stay up until 2
AM
trying to keep on top of it all at home.

“Mr. Anderson, he's cool. But you know, what if, say, like Mrs. Crawford said finish this, and we said no. I mean, what's the worst that could happen? What could she do? Yell and scream and jump up and down, and tell us we don't deserve to be here, but she couldn't really do anything. You ever met the principals?”

I had once. They were Quakers, and when you went to their office they made you tea and gave you a biscuit.

“I've been sent there heaps and they always just tell me to try my best and try not to make the teachers mad.”

I liked the way she talked. The way she wasn't scared.

“Sometimes I just get really tired of it,” she said again. And she looked tired like I did, had bags under her eyes like me. We were only in Year 7, we were only thirteen years old, and we were already tired of it.

I looked at the clock. There was only ten minutes left of class. Charly must have seen me look at the clock.

“I've finished,” she said. “Copy mine if you want.”

I didn't know how she had finished all the problems so fast. Maybe she was some kind of genius, but I didn't want to slip behind so I did the rest of the problems as fast as I could while Charly sat back, hands behind her head, beaming out revolution.

M
r. Wilkins told us a story over forty-five minutes of the homeroom meeting because it was raining and freezing, and even though the open gym was covered by a concrete roof, the rain was coming in sideways at such an angle with the intense wind that it was no good. It was an inside day. It was a day where kids would try to find a place to eat their lunch under some kind of cover, under the awning of the library, or the covered stairwell leading up to the science labs, or the corridors that ran between the buildings.

There were lots of days like that. Antarctic days.

Mr. Wilkins said he'd tell us a story about the sea if we liked. So we stayed inside.

“What's the most dangerous thing about being at sea?” he asked.

“Storms!” a girl called Mary said from down the back.

“Wrong!”

“Big waves?” Nicholas Perkins said.

“Wrong!”

Silence.

No one could think of anything, or they were too afraid to say something stupid, like me. My mind was going round and round. I couldn't think, I couldn't look at Mr. Wilkins. I kept seeing darkness, cold dark water. I could feel it. I was sinking, heavy in the night, being pulled down. I thought about coming here on the ferry in the dark, how the big waves
had sounded like they could tear the ship apart. I thought about rounds of oil on the surface of water—slick and shiny, fuel, diesel. I thought about fire. Fire burning on the water. But I didn't say fire, I opened my mouth and said, “Land.”

Mr. Wilkins jumped up from his desk.

“Good girl,” he said. “The most dangerous thing about being at sea is the land.”

Sounds came from the room, groans, pushed-out breath that said,
How the hell are we meant to know that?

“Just listen to the story,” Mr. Wilkins said.

The wind came in under the door and through the gaps in the old window frames and it felt as if it even came through the old, thin glass itself. The wind came in and blew through our hair and we pulled our gray blazers around ourselves a little tighter as Mr. Wilkins sat back on the edge of his desk and talked about leaving the cold of Tasmania behind and sailing his yacht toward the bright sun.

“My girlfriend and I were never going to come back,” he said.

There were tropical islands and the long coast of South America. Coconuts collected from beaches and pierced open with a screwdriver. There were crabs as big as small tables to eat and juice squeezed from raw sugarcane to drink, and all of it was bathed in sunlight, pure and warm and sparkling—the water calling to them to move on. Keep going. The Caribbean waiting on the other side.

During the long wait at the Panama Canal, their tiny yacht was dwarfed by supertankers, by reefer ships, by the giants of the sea that moved goods around the world. Incredible ships, as big as islands, manned by hundreds of humans working day and night, moving around the earth in nonstop motion, never staying anywhere for long. Moving, moving. The earth spinning on.

Finally they got their turn at 4
AM
, and in the dark they began the
series of locks. A pilot came on board to steer them, friendly, funny. Two deckhands as well, sleeping on the deck. Then they were through. On the other side. They had left the Pacific and were on the Atlantic side. Luminous green water. White sand. It was bliss.

They slowed down, planned to move around the hundreds of islands over as many months as it took. In no hurry, they were where they were meant to be. They were taking it all in.

And on a whim, with the shadowy mass of Cuba just visible when they looked hard at the horizon, Mr. Wilkins asked his girlfriend to marry him. It had not been planned. He'd never wanted to marry. It was a stupid thing really. They were fine as they were. They were happy and the sun shone down on them. But he did it anyway, he grabbed her up in his arms and said
I want to marry you.
And she said
Yes.

They drank a bottle of champagne in the sun, one that had been in the fridge, given to them by a friend when they pulled away from the dock and down the Derwent River. All that time ago—a lifetime. A world away.

When the night came they were heading slowly for Cuba. Steady. Mr. Wilkins's girlfriend went to sleep but Mr. Wilkins stayed up and checked the course every fifteen minutes, knowing they were heading in the right direction, heading straight for where they were meant to be going. The path clear. He set an alarm for every fifteen minutes just in case he fell asleep.

“I woke to a terrible screeching sound,” he said.

There was not even time for them to get their life jackets on, the yacht went down so fast. In twenty seconds, they were in the water. In the water in the dark. Complete darkness with only the stars above their heads. But they could stand. They were standing on a reef, but they could see nothing.

They clung to each other there in the dark, the water swirling and
moving around them, and they stayed, not ever speaking, just clinging to each other and trying to keep their feet touching the rock—the reef, this earth. Just before the sun rose, after the longest night, they saw land just fifty meters ahead. They followed the reef all the way to the small spit of sand. An island, a cay, very small, but land.

Their yacht was only ten meters down under the water, broken in half almost, but there. Mr. Wilkins was able to get bottles of water, the first-aid kit and the flares out from inside the punctured cabin, and he and his girlfriend sat on the beach and set off the flares. They sat waiting on the beach, not clinging to each other now.

Knowing it was over.

After the rescue, Mr. Wilkins's girlfriend flew to Los Angeles and Mr. Wilkins traveled down through South America. They didn't see each other for five months. When they did, it was like they were strangers. When they did, there was nothing there. It was like it had all happened to two other people, like it had been a movie they had watched on a plane. Easily forgotten—lost in time.

The bell rang and I was sitting in an old building at school. Hobart. Tasmania. I could feel the wind and the cold again and it was time to get up and move to my next class. Advanced math.

“Just a crazy dream,” Mr. Wilkins said quietly.

A dream.

T
he house was quiet. The house was dark. I stood in the hallway and listened for the TV.

“Hello?” I said.

My brother was on the couch in the living room, just sitting there in the dim light.

“What's wrong?” I asked.

He didn't say anything.

I let my heavy schoolbag fall off my shoulder and it thudded on the ground.

“Is the TV busted?”

He shook his head, then got up off the couch and walked into Mum's room. It was off the living room, and only big enough to fit her bed. There were no windows, just four stone walls and a small built-in wardrobe.

I watched my brother open the wardrobe door and get out the white wooden box where Mum kept her special collection of fifty-cent pieces. The paint was chipped in places, on the corners and along the sides, and underneath the paint, the wood was dark and warm and red. Inside, the coins moved across the bottom of the box and clunked into the sides.

“I didn't mean to do it,” my brother said, and he handed me the box. He looked like he might cry, or maybe he had been crying—the way his cheeks were a bit red, a bit puffy.

I opened the latch and lifted the lid. There were nine coins inside. Nine silver fifty-cent coins. There should have been fifty-three. I had counted them many times. I knew the total came to $26.50 but Mum said they would be worth more than that one day. She told me the one dated 1966 was already worth $11 because it was the first year of this kind of coin. But she didn't want to sell it. She was going to hold on to them all until they got to their top value.