Gin is Nobody's Friend for Long

Why I Stole Your Life

Mary’s father, the Dutch sailor who raped her mother, has returned to the small port of Broxholme. It put her mother into such a fearful state that she and her 8-year-old brother are now planning to kill him

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Gin is Nobody’s Friend for Long

Bedtime comes fast when Ma hits the gin. Not for her sending us. We send ourselves. First thing, she gets friendly, all ‘cm-ere’, all ‘av-a-cuddle’. She wants to croon to us, especially the baby songs, the ones we don’t remember though she says they were our favourites. For maybe an hour she is the ma she might have been before she got hurt and hard from being, as she says, ‘the widow of a living man’. But even though gin opens her heart and makes her loving for a time, what else is stored behind that loving is not worth staying for, and we don’t tarry on her lap. We squirm off, and duck the loosely curling arm that tries to catch us as we pass, to clear the table and do our chores as fast as a couple of ants. You start the yawning, I catch it like the measles, and we find ten ways of saying how very tired we are before taking ourselves off to bed. Once she starts drinking, the past will come winding out of her, and before too long she’ll tip over the point where she loves her darlings and find the point where she hates our fathers: yours for going to sea, and mine for visiting land. And we are the only bits of them she can hit with her tongue or her clog.

We’re up in the rafters by the time the blazing starts and when splinters of the words come through the floorboards and spear me, you put your arms around me and say,

‘She don’t mean nothing. Don’t listen, Tyke.’

Then after a time she goes quiet, which is gin’s final blessing, the honey after the sting. You slide out of bed and stand there listening. Fully dressed, because you had no thought of going to sleep. The Dutch ship weighs anchor tomorrow, and you’ve a man to send to his judgement.

‘She’s snoring,’ you say. ‘Go to sleep, and I’ll see you in the morning.’

‘Wait,’ I say, and something sits me up like a jack-in-a-box. Even though I’m scared to see a murder, I’m more scared to wait for you, not knowing the where and the what and the how, and afraid you might not come back at all. Suddenly it seems worse to be left not knowing than to know more things than a child should see and know, even if that means I must help you to murder.

‘Well, hurry up and put your scrags on,’ you say. Who knows what time he’ll be too drunk to care?

A tiptoed creep across the parlour and a gentle click of the door and a run-and-duck through the streets and we’re crouched at the back door of the Blue Anchor. A man so tattooed he looks bruised stumbles out to the jakes, putting his hand out to the doorpost to steady himself. He turns to shout something to his friends, and though I don’t know the words, they sound like what you called Dutch. Still crouched, you peer round the door.

‘Is my father in there?’ ‘Must be,’ you say. ‘Though I can’t see him. You have a look.’

We change over. A fog of tobacco smoke. There are not enough stools and two men are leaning on the table. Another is sitting drunkenly in another man’s lap and they’re laughing like donkeys. One is on the floor, his two hands in prayer making a pillow for his head, eyes closed, peaceful as a babe. All of them at the table are a-ragging and a-roaring in their own language, the same as all seafaring men will do with a whole lot of rum inside them. Mister Lampard says they’re so used to being unsteady at sea they must make themselves unsteady on land too. Then I see him, the man said to be my father. Lifting a tankard, the forearm with its five-bar gate.

‘He’s in there,’ I say. ‘The one with his foot on the sleeping man.’

You check again.

‘Good,’ you say. You pull out the note tucked in your shirt, smooth out the creases. I already know what it says. You read it to me that afternoon. It says ‘I have been watching you from afar. Would you spend the night with a lonely young woman before you go to sea? Follow the boy, he will lead you to where I am waiting. Emerald.’

‘Who is Emerald?’ I asked and you said, ‘It is a whore’s name I think.’

You peer in again and I peer with you. John Crappin is standing by them now. He has brought them another large jug of ale, and two bottles of I know not what. He is collecting their coins. Silver is good, no matter whose head is on the shilling.

‘Now?’ I ask.

‘Not with John Crappin there. He mustn’t see me.’

So we wait and we wait, and duck out of the way behind barrels when anyone comes out to use the jakes. We are small enought to be hidden in the dark.

Then the moment comes and you are gone so quickly that it makes me jump when you are back again.

‘He has the note,’ you say. ‘Once we’re gone, follow after us. But don’t get too close. And don’t let anyone see you.’

You hop off down the path and wait there in the darkness. Just the line of your shoulders lit by the moon. I peer round the doorway. My father, and the man next to him, stare into the note like it is a well. Can they read? I remember your mime and wonder whether you did it already. My father screws up the note and bounces it off the head of the sleeping man. I look to you at the gate, but I know I shouldn’t raise my voice. So I tiptoe down the path and whisper,

‘He screwed it up and threw it on the floor.’

‘Blow!’ you say. You go back up the path, I follow like a lamb, and we both of us crouch back down by the barrels. But even as we stop there we can see the sleeping man, no longer asleep, has picked it up and is uncrumpling it. He starts reading aloud in broken English.

‘I have been watching you from afar.’

There is chuckling at the table. Some of them must know English. My father’s brow crunches. He doesn’t know why they are laughing. Someone tells him the joke he is missing. The woken man is laughing so much he can no longer speak and my father snatches the note out of his hand, half tearing it. Then, staring at it, he seems to remember he cannot read, and offers it back, prodding him to read more, and someone else to translate. When the woken man gets to ‘Emerald’, my father leaps out of his chair and bellows ‘Emerald! Emerald!’ and something I don’t understand but can guess means ‘I’m coming!’ because he is clutching his hand to his heart like it is so painfully full of love and that it might burst if he doesn’t contain it, and the whole table roars with laughter. Only then do we realise that he is about to burst out into the night, and you are not in your position by the gate.

We are saved by my father wheeling on his heel by the door to perform an elaborate and wobbly bow to his shipmates. By the time he has unfolded himself and turned himself in our direction you are once again a shadow standing at the gate. He locates you in the darkness, managing the English word ‘Boy?’ before stumbling past, blind to anything but the beacon that will lead him to a woman. His bulk blots you out of my sight for a moment. Then you are a shadow running down to the harbour, and he is stumbling after you.

I am a second shadow, flickering along behind the both of you. His journey is made difficult by the booze. As we approach the waterfront, he is laughing and calling for you to slow down, and the moonlight gleams wickedly on the sea. You’re heading for the yard where the sailcloth is boiled with tar, tallow and ochre until it is a baked crab red. Then winding along the narrow side of the shed. I’m only steps behind my father now. He is snorting through his nose like a bull. He shimmies the bulk of him down the same narrow passage by the side of the dyeing shed, the water twinkling below like a thing waiting to be fed. And as he rounds the corner of it, you do as you said you would: a rope secured to a mooring loop under the harbour wall pulls tight across his path at ankle height, and he trips.

But not quite into the water. With the instincts of a sailor whose body is practised at holding him out of the waves, he has grabbed hold of the rope.

The oaths that come out of him in a flurry of Dutch, I am glad not to know. His body, heavy from sinning and sodden with booze, is dangling over the water. Can he swim? He calls to you — ‘Boy! Boy!’ — and you step out from the darkness warily. ‘Boy!’ he says again. His hands grip the rope. He jerks his head to the side in a motion that asks you to come to his aid. Is he too drunk to know that the rope was pulled tight by your own hands? You stand unmoving.

‘Boy!’ he says, angrily now, and then something in Dutch that cannot be good, with a kick of the tongue and a dark trapdoor at the end of it. Perplexed, you glance at me, and his head swivels round. You have given me away. A grin spreads over his face like ants on bread.

‘Ha!’ he says. ‘Svay!’ And seeing confusion cloud my face, ‘Two!’ He turns his attention to me now, cranking his head to the side. ‘Come!’ he says thickly.

I hesitate. His eyes are twinkling like the water behind him, dark and mischievous. I have seen those eyes in the backs of spoons. Does he see this too, our family likeness? Is that why he is beckoning me towards him? The father who wishes to get a closer look at his child? His smile is unfathomable. I take two steps towards him and you shout ‘Stay where you are!’ but too late: a hand clamps round my ankle.

‘Run, Tyke!’ you say, and I try to pull away, but cannot free myself. You stare, wide-eyed. Now my father grins more fiercely. His eyes darken. He is stronger than he seemed, hanging on the rope with only one hand, and me with the other, but he cannot heft himself back onto solid ground without releasing me. I look into your face, and it is white as if it had seen Millicent Peeler’s ghost. But before I can so much as take another breath you have stepped back, vanishing into the darkness.

‘Mark!’ I cry, and your name echoes back off the cliffs. My father jerks my foot towards him and I crash onto my tailbone and then, as he jerks again, I’m flat bang on the back of my head — a flash of lightning, a sharp pain. I’m staring up the sky and the sky is staring back at me with its millions of eyes, and I can see deep, deep into that forest of nothing at all. Though he’s let go of my foot, though he’s grunting and hauling himself up, there is a buzzing in my ears, louder and louder, and I can’t lift my head, I can’t speak. You roar out of the darkness, blurring through my vision with a huge iron hook in your hands, and the last thing I hear is a splash.

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