Read Online Making Laws for Clouds by Nick Earls - Free Book Online

honks at the gate. Tanika ducks back behind the bow.
    â€˜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 hadresponsibilities, 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.
    â€˜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.
friday
    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 toit. 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.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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