Making Laws for Clouds (7 page)

‘Yes. Good. Well, I'll be twenty minutes and then I'll be back. Twenty-five at the outside. And Mr Harbison'll be here the whole time. So keep at it.'

‘That's the plan. See you in twenty.'

He keeps looking up at me, as if he's about to say something more, but I haven't done one new thing wrong so he has to go. He turns round at the gate. What's he looking for? Fornication in a matter of seconds up on a plank in Brown's Slipway? I give him a wave. I'd shout out to him, something friendly about twenty minutes, but there's a circular saw going over at a boat nearby.

So I wave and I smile and I let him know that it's me who's looking at him as much as the other way round. He nods – that's all I get for my wave – and he leaves.

The bus pulls away, and I watch it go.

I paint, towards the bow. Twenty minutes isn't long so I paint quickly, starting with a band of second coat running along just below the deck.

Around the bow, on the other side, I can hear a brush tapping on the rim of a paint tin when the sawing's stopped. Boots sliding along a wooden plank with the small sideways steps of a painter.

I get closer to the front and I can see a trestle round there, lined up with mine, and the end of a plank sticking out. Then a foot, an ankle, another foot, a calf. Tanika Bell. Then the other ankle, a knee, a thigh. Fifteen minutes, fifteen minutes at least. That's how long Mr Bell's been gone.

I load up with paint, push further forward, load up again and push till the brush is dry, right to the edge of the bow.

‘Beat ya,' Tanika says as her brush hits mine and pushes it away.

We each take a step towards the water, and we're standing on our planks face to face. She's got paint in her hair, like I knew she would, and a daub of it on her forehead.

‘Hey worker,' she says. ‘Who would have thought these things got so narrow at the front they just ran out? It's not like the back at all.'

‘No, if we were at the back we'd still be miles apart. No wonder they call it the stern. There's no fun there.' Okay, my stern joke isn't brilliant but I might as well get something out of it.

‘You must be hot in the sun,' she says. ‘Even round this side it's so hot I'm sweating like I'm having my own wet T-shirt contest.' She pulls her shoulders back and of course I stare right at her front. ‘Ha, made you look.'

‘Well, you were making certain claims. I had to see if the evidence stacked up. About the sweating.'

‘So, how'd I go?'

‘I don't think you want to know. I think I should be painting. I think you did fine. It's a hot day. You stacked up. You sweated, quite a lot. Actually, I think
I might be going from “clean thoughts of meaningful attachment” to something altogether less appropriate and possibly deeply lustful.'

‘Sure, I get that too.'

‘We've got to, um . . .'

Tanika Bell's shorts are creased at the front from bending, and most of her T-shirt's wet and there's sweat above her upper lip and down her neck. She's smiling, smiling the way she did the night we left the nativity play and before word got out. And that's not the same as the regular smile people get from her on the bus. There's a subtle but definite difference.

We should have known there was going to be trouble. I think we did know, back at her place that night. But we didn't have our stories straight, and you're not supposed to have a story anyway.

‘Mr Harbison's gone for some smokes,' she says. ‘He reckons they might sell them at the fish and chippie next door.'

‘And he's a slow old walker at the moment, Harbo. It must be frustrating the heck out of him. It could take him ages.'

‘Ages. Yeah, ages.'

She spins the brush in her hand but it's spiky with drying paint and none of it comes off.

A bus horn honks at the gate. Tanika ducks back behind the bow.

‘That wasn't twenty minutes,' she says. ‘That wasn't even eighteen.'

And there's another of those careful tapping sounds as she dips her brush and takes the extra paint off and gets back to work.

Tanika told her father that the nativity play just wasn't her thing. That's what she said to him later that night, after we ate sausages on their deck and she drove me home and then went off to fill the bus with carollers who were finishing their stint at a shopping centre. I don't even know which shopping centre and I don't know exactly when and where she spoke to her father, but she tried to play it down, as if it wasn't such an issue to change your mind about being in the play. It only made him ask around. Apparently he was worried she wasn't fitting in, since they're relatively new in town.

He found out we left together in the break. He knew he was onto something. And the most interesting rumour people had already come up with happened to be the truth, so we just had to cop it then. By the next rehearsal it was probably common knowledge, and talked about by everyone there other than Steelo, Wayne and the baby Jesus.

And Mr Bell told Tanika that their family had
responsibilities, and the church was his job. All that kind of stuff. Responsibilities and disappointment – we got to hear a lot about them and they're two things I've known about for years, so I'm not sure I needed it, to be honest.

On the bus on the way home tonight after working on Harbo's boat, the two of us sit in our regular seats, four rows apart with all the other seats empty, and no one says a word. Mr Bell keeps checking me out in his rear-vision mirror. After a while I get sick of it and I give him a wave, since that strategy's working for me today. He pretends there's a bug on the mirror and wipes it with his thumb. He drives through a red light.

‘Dad,' Tanika says, telling him off like the back end of a boat. ‘There's no hurry.'

There's practically no limit to ‘stern' jokes, that's what I'm thinking.

Stormy
. That boat was trouble. ‘Trouble from the start,' that's what Mum said. ‘Should have been called
Trouble
.'

I don't know though. We had good times on the
Stormy
. And Mum thinks a lot of things are trouble. The problem with trouble is that she's just too used to
it. Most things are trouble for her, unless they categorically aren't. Fungus in your creases, movement, humidity – trouble, every one. Advertising, Wednesdays when the money runs low, the way people talk these days. All trouble.

I'm putting on more white paint and the
Stella Maris
is coming up well. They fitted the new stove today, so Harbo's inside tinkering around with it. Trouble? That could be trouble. The last time Harbo got his hands on a stove he burned a hole in the side of the boat and sank it. Harbo plus gas plus a naked flame – and my mother thinks fungus is something to get stressed about.

‘There's nothing fresher than new paint,' he says when he's back on the ground and he's wandered round my way. ‘I had that on a calendar once, from an old auntie in England. “Fresh as new paint at Whitby” it said, and there was this harbour full of fishing boats. I had the picture up on my wall for years. Here, give me one of those brushes and I'll do some of the low-down bits.'

He's got a new bandage now and there's more room for his fingers to move. Not a lot more, but enough for him to keep hold of the handle. He slaps the paint on in great sweeps, round about waist high since he can't bend down much further.

‘You're doing a good job there,' he says, exactly when it's obvious to both of us that he's twice as quick.

But it doesn't seem to take long for his hand to start to hurt, and he has to stop.

‘Bloody thing,' he says. ‘Ten minutes of painting and it's no good any more.'

‘That'd be ten minutes more than yesterday, wouldn't it? And about half a boat more too.'

‘Yeah, well, I've had practice.'

‘Burned a few in your time, have you?'

He laughs. ‘Parked them under too many fireworks displays, maybe. I'm always where the excitement is. You don't have to do all this you know.'

‘It's no problem.'

‘No, mate, you should be off doing what young people do. “Raging” – isn't that what they call it? You shouldn't be hanging round here like it's some penance.'

‘Penance? I'm hanging round here to work on your boat. No one's making me. And you'd do the same.'

‘Yeah, maybe I would, I don't know. But I appreciate it. You and your friend, you're doing a lot. She said she'd be driving Mrs Vann and the Skerritts home in a while and coming back to do some more, and that you'd probably be up for it too. She said I should put it to you. Like yesterday. But you don't have to.'

‘I know I don't have to. I know all that stuff.'

I nearly go off at him then, but I don't. He's
probably just embarrassed that he can't do more. In which case he shouldn't have said penance. He shouldn't have brought that kind of thing into it. This is not a religious deed. I'm painting his boat because he can't paint his boat. I'm painting his boat because it's a good thing to do. I haven't done some deal that says however many hours of painting gets me off the hook for something.

Something. Bugger them. I have the right to have feelings about Tanika Bell. Look at her – the way she stands, the way she talks, the way she paints and drives the bus when her dad's busy and shows her sweat off only to me. I want her style, I want to talk to her for hours, I want to put my hands on her again. But respectfully, of course.

Okay, it's not all about Harbo and good deeds. It is about that, but it's not all about that. And I'd still be here working on Harbo's boat if the Bells had never come to town. That's what I do, what we do. It's one of the better things about this group of people. Even Mrs Vann comes to help out, and she's next to useless.

Soon enough, Tanika rounds the others up and they're off. She leads them across the yard, tossing the keys in the air and catching them again, and she stops at the gate and looks back at me. She waves in a way that her dad never could, not even at the best of times, and she shouts something. There's an angle grinder going,
so I only catch some of it but I know what she's saying. She'll be twenty minutes, twenty-five at the outside.

If Tanika Bell was driving the bus, you should expect community singing. By which I don't mean ‘Kumbaya' – I mean those cheery songs about the bus driver. People should just burst out and do it. That's how they should feel. But it doesn't happen. Her dad spoils it, turns the driving of the bus into a dreary thing. He slouches across the yard as if he's on his way to pay a parking fine, so everyone takes a serious approach to transport.

These people, simply, undervalue Tanika Bell. Tanika Bell is a bright light regularly hidden under a bushel by this crowd. To them she's the girl who got sacked from being a Magus for doing it with Kane. The girl who got sacked even though we walked first, and who will be forever banned from nativity plays and maybe also the three-legged race at the church fete. That's what they think of her, probably. That's my guess, because I'm pretty sure what they think of me. Three-time shepherd, one-time near-Magus, gone. And I reckon I know them well enough to be pretty sure that our three-legged-racing status is in doubt. That's how far this goes – all the way to a stupid picnic months in the future.

She should drive the bus wearing a cap. She would look hot in a cap. And maybe boots. Is there
such as thing as bus-driver boots? They'd go at least up to your knee, wouldn't they? And be black and shiny? And if there's any mucking up, Miss Tanika takes you down the back and sorts you out.

Yep, they'd go for that at the Blessed Virgin at Wurtulla.

Tanika Bell and thigh-high shiny black boots. Classify that thought under seriously lustful, my friend. That's what I tell myself, as if I'm doing Father Steele's job since he's not around. But it's just a fashion garment, Father, I'd tell him. It's what all the young folk wear when they go out raging. Harbo, mate, where did you get that old word from?

Paint goes on, white on white. Fifteen minutes of it, more. This must be the last coat for this part of the boat.

Where is she?

I take a look around, in case the bus is back. There's been some fire in the hills today and the sun's going orange as it gets down closer to them, settling in the smoke. I can see along a couple of canals from up here, big houses like castles with their own jetties, and new developments inland, new canals. And I can see past the beachfront apartment blocks to Mount Coolum, and over the fence and through the she-oaks to the beach, though there's not much of it with the high tide. That'd be enough for me. If we could sit
down there and just be left alone to watch the sea getting dark, that'd do.

Just us, once the families have folded their umbrellas and had their last fight about getting out of the water and packed up their stuff and walked off up the sand. And we'd talk, in a way we can't talk here. And it'd be night soon enough, and I'd sit on Tanika's left side so that the light from the unit blocks and maybe the moon would be there on her face, for only me to see. That'd do.

I could, in all honesty Father, forsake the bus-driver boots. Most of the time.

When Tanika gets back, Harbo's on the deck doing something that looks very like farting around. Fidgeting and looking into the distance like a sentry with wrapped-up hands and no real idea who the enemy is. Like someone Joe Bell's had a quiet word to. Maybe, maybe not. Tanika goes straight to her side of the boat.

Harbo sticks his head over the rail. ‘I'll be inside, if you need me,' he says. ‘Not that I think you'll need me.'

So I paint. I paint and I edge my way to the right, to the bow. She's waiting when I get there.

‘So, hi,' she says.

‘Hi. How's your side coming along?'