When the Night Comes (4 page)

G
etting on the ferry was different every day. It depended on the tides. When the tide was high, the water lapped up on the concrete and tried to wet our feet, tried to grab our legs, and the ferry had to pull up right against the concrete because most of the jetty was underwater. It was hard to get on the ferry then, and Peter would pull us all on board, one by one.

Sometimes we were late for school because it was rough and the crossing was slow. When it was
really
rough, when there were whitecaps and waves, we would play a game where you had to stand in the middle of the ferry with your feet together and your hands up in the air not touching anything. You had to try not to fall down. Whoever could stand like that for the longest time would win the game. I really liked that game—I liked the feeling of balancing high up on the water, of moving with it, like you were part of the ferry, like my body was part of its body, sailing on the cold water.

When the tide was low, the ferry couldn't pull right up along the wharf and had to stop at the very end of the jetty. It sat low in the water and we had to jump from the jetty down to the deck. Sometimes it was slippery. Sometimes it felt like a long way to jump—a leap of faith. My brother really hated that.

The only time it was easy to get on the ferry was when it was mid-tide.
When the tide was perfectly in the middle of low and high, when everything was balanced.

Mid-tide made us all relax. When it was a mid-tide you knew it was going to be a good day. I would always hope for mid-tide, but it didn't happen that often.

The water was different every day and mid-tide came when you least expected it.

W
e were near the outskirts of the city and my brother wasn't walking slowly like usual—his blue sneakers were right there, keeping up with my white ones. I kept my hand on the money in my pocket, on the twenty-dollar bill.

It was so much money.

Mum had never even asked for change or anything, and I didn't know how much movie tickets cost, but I was sure that there would be some money left over for a drink or maybe something to share, like popcorn.

I didn't mind going with my brother. He was keeping up and I knew that he was probably smiling. I didn't look across to see. I could just feel him there, and that was good.

We saw a movie called
Beat Street
. My brother chose it and it was the best movie I had ever seen. It was full of music, full of dancing. There was only one scary bit when one of the main characters got electrocuted on the train tracks near the end. I had never seen a film where anyone died before. He left behind a young baby.

He was a graffiti artist and he had painted some great work on the gray walls of the busted-up city in the movie. Somewhere in New York. Maybe the Bronx. A big city made of bare concrete.

He made the city look better.

After the movie, the walk back home wasn't so long, it wasn't tiring. We were carried along by the energy of the movie, the music, the freedom. At the old sweetshop on Hampden Road, we stopped and looked in the window at all the jars of flavored sweets. Jars and jars filled with bright pink and green apple drops, red-striped sticks of candy, soft yellow squares coated with powdered sugar. My mouth watered.

My brother turned away from the window. He told me that he was going to start doing graffiti, not on walls or anything, just on paper.

“Maybe in a notebook.”

He was quiet then, until we were near our street.

“I can't draw very well,” he said and looked down at his sneakers. “But maybe I can do this and it doesn't matter. Maybe I can just do it and no one can say it's wrong.”

I ran my hand along the fences as we walked, the picket fences, the brick walls. Bees hovered above a lavender bush, and there were roses a color I'd never seen before. Almost pink and almost violet but not quite either—just somewhere soft in between.

“No one can say it's wrong,” I said.

When we got inside there was a giant in our house. He was sitting at the kitchen table, his chair pushed out so that his long legs could fit. Mum was sitting opposite him, her chair close to the table, her small yellow teacup in her hand with the matching yellow saucer in front of her.

My brother and I stood by the door and Mum said, “This is Bo.”

The man stood up. “Hello,” he said in a deep voice. “How was the movie?”

My brother walked over to the table and sat down.

“We saw
Beat Street
,” he said. “It was excellent.”

There was a plate of biscuits on the table. Scotch finger. My brother was looking at them. I don't know where they came from. We didn't have any biscuits that morning.

I put my hand in my pocket, felt the change that was there. I pulled it out. One bill and a few coins. I walked over and put it on the table near Mum. I could feel the man looking at me.

“Say hello,” Mum said.

“Hello.”

“Hello, Isla,” the man said.

I don't know how he knew my name or how he knew Mum, but when he sat down again, I tried not to look at him, but I did look at him, at his face, and his eyes were gray-blue like the sea.

O
ut in the garden, I showed Bo the walnut tree. He smoked a cigarette.

“I like walnuts,” he said. “I like to eat them when I walk.”

I thought about how my brother and I would use a rock to smash the walnuts open against the concrete steps at the back of the house and the pieces of nut would shatter and mix with the shell if you hit them too hard with the rock.

“How do you open them?” I asked.

“Ah,” he said, and he held one in his hand. “It is very simple. See how one side, this pointy side, is all closed up?”

I nodded. The pointy side was sealed very tightly.

“But here on the other side, the round side, there is this spongy bit where the walnut hangs on the tree.”

I could see it. A dark vein between the two halves of the walnut shell.

“Like a skull,” I said.

“Yes,” he said. “A little skull.”

He got a pocketknife out from his jeans. Shiny silver—stainless steel.

“My father gave me this knife,” he said, “a long time ago,” and he pulled the sharp blade out from its tight hiding space. He held the walnut in one hand and pushed the knife into the soft cork vein with ease. Then
he twisted the blade. There was a cracking sound, the nut opening—two halves there in his hand.

He held up the open half. “A little brain,” he said.

The nut sat in one half of its shell in one whole piece, unbroken—complete. He took the nut out and gave it to me and I chewed up the warm taste. The creamy flesh tinged with the acid of the thin walnut skin, and together those tastes were delicious.

“I think we cannot be stopping now,” he said, already cracking open another nut and eating it whole.

“When I was at school, I used to steal walnuts from my neighbor. He had three big trees in a row. He was an old man called Emil. Maybe he was crazy, I don't know. I never saw him collect any of the nuts, but it was wrong to take them. I knew that. I'd eat them on the way to school, using this knife. I couldn't stop eating them once I started.”

Bo passed his knife to me.

“You try,” he said.

I picked up a walnut and held it in the palm of my hand. The knife felt heavy and warm and I slid the blade in carefully, the way Bo had shown me. I twisted the knife, my whole wrist turning with it, and there was a crack, the shell came apart. The two halves were perfect, but the inside of the shell was dark. It was empty.

There was nothing there.

I looked at the space where the nut should have been. I turned my head and looked up at Bo.

“Oh,” he said, and he took the shell out of my hands, inspected it closely. “The fairies ate that one.”

He handed me back the two halves of the shell.

“You should keep it,” he said. “Good luck.” He winked at me.

I looked at the shell again. I didn't know if it was true or not, if a shell could be good luck, but I put it in my pocket anyway. I kept it.

The next one I tried had a nut inside, but it split in half with the shell. It looked like a little heart. A skull with a little heart inside.

“Walnuts are very good for you,” Bo said. “Very good.”

He smiled and cracked open another. We sat there and ate as many as we could find, twenty or more, one by one, until all around us were opened walnut shells in perfect halves.

W
e didn't have a lawn mower. Once a month the man from next door would mow our backyard. He liked mowing, he said. He would always do it early on a Saturday morning. I didn't mind because I was always up. My brother and I would get up early to watch the cartoons. They finished at 9
AM
, so if you didn't get up, you missed them. After the cartoons came hours and hours of sports shows.

Mum would stay in bed and she wouldn't get up even though the sound of the lawn mower was very loud and would have woken her.