Zenith (4 page)

He’d be safer still if he was where he should be once the curfew bell has rung – inside his ramshackle barge shack, tucked up in his bunk. But Tuck’s never one for doing what he should. So he hauls himself up on to the shack roof, his bad ankle jangling with pain, and scans the dark
decks of the barges, just in case the Salter is lurking somewhere. But the decks are quiet and still.

He’ll stay up here until his heart and his breathing calm. Ma doesn’t want to hear him huffing and puffing. She knows fine well what he does. How else does he get his hands on all those extra rations of lamp oil, the baskets of smoked oysters and crabs, the best catch of the sea every day, not to mention those gluggets of seagrape beer Ma likes so much? Patching bridges and roof shacks? He’d earn grit for that. Great at fooling herself, is Ma. Her mind shuts snap-hard as an oyster shell if there’s something she doesn’t want to know. It’s not the deaths that made her like that; it’s just the way she is. But she never used to guzzle a glugget of seagrape bitterbeer every night.

She’s had a good glug tonight, he can tell; she’s snoring like one of the old dogs that snooze around the lagoon. The noise rattles the shack roof. Tuck knots his windwrap tight around him and lies on his back with only the blanket of the night sky above.

Better off up here.

He’s still there when a slice of sunrise, thin as a wire, prises open his sleep-locked eyes. Tuck thinks he’s in his bunk, turns away from the light, rolls off the roof and lands with a crash among the two buckets of looted eels he’s forgotten he left outside the shack the other night.

‘Urth!’ he curses.

Landed right on his bad ankle too.

‘Tuck?’

Ah, now Ma’s up. And the buckets are spilt, the eels splattering on to the deck.

‘Sodden
Urth
.’

‘Tuck!’

There’s a weary creak of wood as Ma struggles out of her bunk. She fiddles with the broken window latch, the one she’s been asking him to fix for many a moon, and pushes the shutters open.

‘Whassall the racket?’ she croaks, rubbing bleary eyes. She spies Tuck among the spilt eels. ‘In the name of The Man! You’d better catch those eels, Tuck, before I grab you by the neck and . . .’

Tuck doesn’t wait to hear what she’ll do. He runs a string of curses through his teeth as he limps along the deck of the barge, crashing into neighbouring shacks, tripping over fishing gear, seaweed stacks, pot plants and all kinds of junk, trying to catch the tail end of an eel.

He’s just about to close his fingers on one when next-door’s cat darts between his feet and trips him up. Now he’s flat on his face, his bad ankle on fire, and it’s too late.

The eels slick down a drain. Tuck hears the slither and
plop
as they escape back into the sea.

No eels, a few crumbs of salt in his pocket, a druxy ankle and there’s no one to blame but himself.

The cat knows she’s in for it and tries to slink into the eel bucket. Tuck kicks the bucket and grabs the cat’s tail, yanks it hard in revenge. The cat gives an outraged yowl.

‘
Tuck
.’

‘Oy, cut the racket out there!’ yells Arthus, the old grump from the next shack. A window shutter rattles open and Arthus’s walrussy head looms out. ‘What a dubya. That’s what you are, boy, a true dubya.’ Arthus surveys the mess Tuck has made and pulls the shutter closed again with a whack.

Tuck gets to his feet. From his own shack there’s an outburst of wheezy coughs. No wonder he goes out looting. It’s better than staying in this dump, getting yelled at
and listening to Ma’s snores and wheezes, night after night.

Tuck limps back to his own shack. The dawn light glints in his Ma’s eye. With her beaky nose, pale face and nest of greying hair, she has the look of an orange-eyed gull. A gull with its nest on its head.

‘Sorry, Ma.’

‘A sorry excuse for a son, thass what you are, Tuck Culpy.
Phut – wheez
. All that creaking on the roof – you been up there all night again?’

Tuck shrugs.

Ma gives him a glinty glare. ‘You can just set off early and find yourself some work ’cause there’s no dinner now, is there? You just kicked it back in the sea. I never know how we’ll live from one day till the –
phut wheez
– next.’

A fit of cough-wheezies halts her.

‘Rubbish, Ma,’ says Tuck. ‘We’re doing all right. Had a good glug of seagrape last night, didn’t you, eh? And a nice basket of smoked oysters? Keeping you in luxury, I am.’

But she’s decided, as the neighbours are no doubt listening in now he’s woken them up, to pretend to be a proper Ma.

‘D’you think I sailed across the ocean in a bottle? Think I –
phut-phut-wheez
– fell out of the sky? I know what you get up to. You wuzzn’t on that roof all night, Tuck Culpy . . .
wheeez
. . . hanging out with a no-good lot of curfew breakers, thass where you were. Be a good lad now and knuckle down to some steady work, eh?’

Ah, he’s sick of her. Sick of looking after her and getting no thanks. Sick of her gorging on whatever he brings home then moaning about how he got it. And most of all
he’s sick of the strange guilt she somehow drums up in him, just because he’s alive and the others died.

Last year’s summer fever wiped out boatfuls of gypseas all over Pomperoy. It killed his little sister Beth and Grumpa, Ma’s old Da. They’d hardly recovered from Tuck’s own Da’s death the year before, from a bone-rotting sickness he caught while raiding one of the toxic ships that ghost the oceans, ships full of scrap metal, oil and chemicals left over from the old world. Da was on a scavenge scoop for bridge metal and wire, but he ended up scavenging his own death.

He’d known the risk. That’s why he wouldn’t take Tuck.

Now Da and the others are gone, there’s only Tuck left to look after Ma. Though they both survived the fever, Ma is a wretched shadow of her old self. Tuck knows he’ll never be able to mend the great big rip in her life where little Beth and Da and Grumpa once were. All he can do is bring her home the fruits of his ill-gotten loot.

Ma’s still grumbling. ‘If there’s one thing I want before I –
phut-phut PHUT
– lie down here on my bunk and die, it’s my son anchored and settled in a rock-solid trade.’

Tuck almost laughs at the show Ma’s putting on for the neighbours. Urth’s sake, how can he settle when the world’s all hurling and wheeling, when the windsnap in the rigging is loud as thunderclaps day and night, when the boats are in a tug of war with the chains that bind the city together against an ocean that’s set on tearing it apart?

‘In the name of The Man, Ma, gimme
peace
.’

Wheeez.

‘Go back to sleep,’ he mutters. ‘I’ll go find some work.’

Tuck clambers back on to the shack roof. His ankle’s
still sore, but he tries a leap and lands, light as a cat, on one foot, on the roof next door.

But Ma’s still going. He’s a disgrace, she’s yelling, always away out leaving his poor mother to fend for herself. One day he’ll come back and she’ll have died, she will, in a corner, all alone.

But the wind’s against her. Soon she’ll be right out of his ears.

Without a dodgy ankle, it’s easy to leap and scuddy across the boat shacks. They’re crammed close with rubbery roofs, good for foot-grip, made from tarred strips of sea-scavenged tyres. Today, Tuck tries to leap and land on his good foot. Eyes of The Man, who cares about a foot? He’s alive! He might’ve been gutted like a fish by a Salter and ditched in the sea last night.

Pomperoy is the shape of a flat fish.
The Grimby Gray
is one of the wrecked, rusty barges crammed with shacks at the city’s tail end. The lagoon around the oil rig in the middle, where Tuck is headed, is its pumping heart.

At the edge of
The Grimby Gray
, Tuck hops across the wire suspension bridge (built by his own Da and branded with the Culpy crescent) that connects to the neighbouring barge. He clears that, and the next. Now he’s in the huge region of Doycha, a motley maze of small boats. It’s said that Doycha has a thousand bridgeways, but Tuck knows there are exactly eight hundred and forty-one.

He leaps from boat to boat, laughing whenever he earns a yell. Every so often his ankle throbs too hard and he sits down on a roof or hobbles on to a swaying bridge
for a rest, but cuts back to scuddying across the boats as soon as he can. They give him a straighter route than the bridgeways that link the boats. Though he could map a track across the bridgeways blind.

Beyond Doycha, he zigzags a route along the bridges that run between the rusted hulks of the ferries and take him into the higgledy squalor of Yewki. At last, he reaches the wooden walkways that surround the central lagoon. In the middle of the lagoon is the huge oil rig, the city’s anchor and fuel source, linked by the five suspension bridges that radiate from it like the spokes of a great wheel.

All around the lagoon the market gondolas are being loaded up. By the time the sky has lightened the lagoon will be thronged with gondolas, each one piled with a harvest from the ocean or the sky: seafood and scrap metal, plastic and driftwood, birds and eggs. Tuck is overtired and achy. The buzz of the market workers irritates like a swarm of flies round his head. Creeping round the empty city after curfew is what he loves. Especially the lagoon.

Sometimes, deep in the night, strange winds whirl around the boat masts and upset the lagoon with scents of somewhere else. They fill Tuck with curiosity and send prickles down his spine. The restless ruffles inside him only calm when the wind flies off across the ocean and the lagoon smoothes to black glass.

Tuck knows about glass. He even owns a bit. It belonged to Grumpa. The fragment of glass is the shape of a raggedy, three-cornered boat sail and just fits into the creases of his closed hand. Once sharp enough to cut him, Tuck has rubbed the jagged edges smooth by scraping the Culpy crescent, his Da’s trademark, into the wooden walkways around the lagoon. The power of the glass is
that it can show you your very own self. And, better still, if you catch the sun’s rays inside it, you can train it to make fire.

It’s a mirror
, Grumpa told him.
My old mum called it a looking-glass. Everyone used to have them, some big as your face, even as big as your whole self. First thing you’d do in the morning was take a look in your mirror, brush your hair and your teeth, have a shave.

Grumpa would look wistful. The idea makes Tuck laugh. He can’t imagine waking up and staring at your own face instead of rushing out to fish or load up a gondola or seal a leak in a rusted boat. Not that Tuck does any of that, himself.

He likes to look in the mirror, though it only shows his face in bits. Long, sun-bleached hair that blows across his face. Gypsea eyes, a deeper blue than his faded windwrap, narrowed by sharp winds and blades of sun. Weather-tanned cheeks, scoured by salty air. His Ma’s mouth. His Da’s strong nose.

Grumpa told strange stories of how people once lived fixed to the Earth. He’d always use the old word, no matter what Ma said.

Earth
, he’d insist, rounding out the word.
Not Urth. Earth! A good old word. It’s you youngsters who’ve made it a curse.

It’s you oldsters who cursed it, Da would mutter, just too low for Grumpa’s crusty old ears. Tuck could hear, but Da would never explain what he meant.

Tuck never could get his head around the idea of Earth. A world steady underfoot? That didn’t shift to the dance of the ocean? Even the word
Earth
is odd. It always made him snigger when Grumpa said it, all proud and
defiant, because Tuck couldn’t think of it as anything other than a curse.

There were cities, Grumpa would tell him, and he’d rub his watery blue eyes. Great cities with homes and shops and tall buildings fixed to the Land. The cities would stretch on and on, but the Land stretched further, as far as you could see. You’d have to walk for days until you reached the sea. Before the fuel ran out, he added, you’d just jump in a car or a plane and go anywhere you wanted, anywhere in the world, in no time at all.

Cars and planes? What are they?
Tuck wanted to know.

A plane, Grumpa explained, was a boat with wings that flew across the skies like a giant bird. A car was a boat that travelled across Land. People lived in houses fixed to the Earth. Tuck has taken the biggest rock he ever dredged up with a catch of fish, held it in his hand and tried to imagine Land as a rock bigger than the whole of Pomperoy. He has even tried to imagine it stretching as far as the sea. But he can’t.

Sometimes he wonders if Grumpa dreamed it all up.

Yet some people say there is still Land. Once, during a bad outbreak of sickness, one of the boats unchained from the rest and set out to sea. It was so long gone that everyone thought the family was lost. Many moons later the boat returned. Only some had survived and they were wounded and stunned with fear. They told a tale of a fiery island where a ferocious people live. A place where water thunders from the sky and boils up from the earth, they said. The ground runs with molten rivers and people bake to stone under a summer sun that burns day and night.