The Bloody Rosie

The Bloody Rosie

Leo Cappèl

Copyright 2015 by Leo Cappèl

Smashwords Edition

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Table of Contents

Before the amateur boat builders moved in, Woolshed Boatyard was part of a small farm, a pocket of green wedged in between Auckland suburbs and the mangroves of Kopu Creek. Most of the old farm has since been subdivided, the paddocks and orchards replaced by streets full of houses, by a school, a superette. In the hollow next to the subdivision the housing company has built a cat food warehouse and a factory of fibreglass bathtubs. Not so visible of course, but clearly recognizable by the smell.

Beyond the factories, hidden by a cluster of old, weathered trees, stand the large tin sheds of Woolshed Boatyard. The sheds may not be very impressive to look at, but the yachts inside certainly are.

A long boat ramp full of potholes leads down from the Boatyard to the waterfront. At the bottom of the ramp a cluster of yachts is tied up, snug in their mud berths, each with her own one-plank-wide jetty.

I live on one of those yachts.

It is difficult to imagine anything more different from the ancient village in Switzerland I grew up in, but it suits me. I am a spoon-maker by trade, learned the old craft as an apprentice back home. I learned the craft and was expected to work and behave exactly like generations of spoon-makers before me. Here I can be free.

Today I am enamelling the emblems on a set of silver teaspoons for an orchid-growers club. ‘Take your time,’ was their secretary’s instruction. ‘We like your work and we are not in a hurry.’

He should not have said that. Take my time? Now it is even more difficult to keep my mind on my work. I just can’t stop looking out of my port-hole.

Out there the first ducklings of the season potter around between the mangroves. The tide is out and the ducklings leave a pattern of tiny tracks in the mud. Maybe I could use a pattern like that on the handles of my next series of spoons?

Sometimes people tell me our creek is dirty, ugly even, but I like it here, it fascinates me. I don’t even mind the large steel sewer pipe high above the water that connects our side of Kopu Creek with the other shore. When I look up I can just see it.

Two young girls come walking across the pipe from the other end to feed the ducks.

Spring is early this year. Normally we would still have our potbelly going, but it has turned rather warm and muggy. My tiny enamelling kiln also seems to throw out twice as much heat as at any other time.

Two more colours to go.

I am daydreaming, forget to take a spoon out of the kiln in time and the red enamel has gone black around the edges. Dammit, I should have known better, red is a tricky colour at the best of times.

It is quiet on the yard. I suddenly realize that I had been listening for hours to the high, whining sound of an angle grinder, and now it has stopped. Time to knock off.

Near the top of the boatyard is a small shed we call our social club. I don’t know what it was used for when this was still a farm, bags of fertilizer maybe, or chicken feed? Whatever it was, it has long since gone. We have put in a large old fridge, two wooden benches, a kerosene heater and on the wall a print of a three master sailing ship. Our social club.

Every day after work we meet here for a beer and the latest gossip.

Ian has beaten me to it. He sits there, beer in his hands and a cheerful grin on his face. ‘Hi Eric, how’s life?’ he asks.

‘Oh, I don’t know, Ian. I felt kind of lazy today. Move over, will you?’

‘Why move over? The place is just about empty.’

‘Because I want to sit next to the fridge. I have to cool down.’

Ian looks at me, frowning: ‘What’s up, Eric?’

I get my beer out of the fridge, put my money in the old shoebox, kick one of the small cushions off the wooden seat and sit down. Away from the fridge after all.

‘What’s up? Nothing much actually, come to think of it. It’s just that I’ve been peering into that red-hot kiln for hours, I burned the very last spoon of the series and Fiona has been away at rehearsals all day, so I even had to make my own lunch.’

‘You poor sod. You do have a rough life, don’t you?’

‘Yeah, too right.’

Slowly some of the others come trickling in, Jonathan and Helen first. Jonathan looks filthier than ever, except for the white patches around his eyes from his safety goggles. It must have been him using that angle grinder all day.

Helen gets her daily diet-coke. She makes herself comfortable in the far corner, looking cool and clean. Helen works at the bathtub factory up the road and always takes a shower as soon as she comes home. Her hair is still damp.

Jonathan drinks his beer standing in the doorway. He marks his monthly booze-bill on the wall, and forces open the one and only window before sitting down. ‘Ah,’ he says, ‘that’s the way to wash the steel dust out of your throat.’ He stretches his legs, leans back as far as he can. ‘At least I finished grinding between those bloody bilge keels. The rest I can do standing straight up. I feel like a bloody pretzel by now.’

He picks up an old bottle top and throws it at a faded bit of last year’s Christmas decoration still hanging from the ceiling. As usual he misses.

‘If we’d had a bilge-keeler that time we were fishing off the Chatham Islands we could’ve just beached her. We wouldn’t even have got our feet wet.’

Ian groans: ‘Come on, Jonathan, we’ve heard that story before.’

So? Then I’ll tell it again. You landlubbers have to learn somehow.’ Jonathan makes himself more comfortable yet and uses his empty beer can to demonstrate how close inshore they had been fishing when their engine failed.

‘We know, Jonathan,’ says Ian with an exaggerated sigh. ‘We know and the storm kept pushing you towards a dangerous lee shore.’

‘Too bloody right, Ian.’ Jonathan ignores the sigh. ‘So we put the tender overboard and stowed as much gear in it as we could. The radio, G.P.S., radar, all that stuff. And then we opened the seacocks and scuttled her.’

‘Scuttled the tender with all your gear?’

‘No, you fool. We scuttled the bloody fishing boat. That was the only thing we could do, otherwise we would have lost everything. Don’t you understand? Under water she’d be safe until we could get her lifted again. We rowed ashore in the tender.’

‘I don’t believe a word of it. I don’t believe you’ve ever been off-shore even.’

‘Why, you . . . ‘

‘Then why didn’t you just put down your anchor?’

‘What? In that storm? And break the anchor chain and see the bloody boat drift onto the rocks and break up and maybe even drown ourselves as well? You must be mad! No, scuttling was the only safe thing to do. Will you have seacocks in your boat?’

‘Slow down, Jonathan. Sure I’ll have seacocks, dozens of them.’

‘Hell, Ian, I’m serious. You yachties don’t really understand the sea. You ought to sign up for a couple of seasons as deckhand on some fishing boat and . . . ‘

‘Jonathan, drink your beer.’

Jonathan burps, the fridge starts to rumble and everyone begins to talk at the same time.

Ian reckons that we are bound to get a thunderstorm, as it is getting even muggier than before, so Henry pulls a face and says something unrecognizable. He insists that it is a Seminole swearword. Henry is almost white-blond and as far as we know has no Seminole or any other Indian blood. Actually, we know next to nothing about him, except that his wife is still in Florida, earning the money for the fibreglass yacht he is building here. Henry has been glassing all day and does not want any rain coming in through the many holes in the roof of his boatshed.

Helen gets herself another diet-coke. ’How’s Fiona getting on with her rehearsals, Eric?’ she asks me. ‘Will everything be ready in time for the opening night?’

I had wanted to ask Ian when he would be ready to join the two hulls of his cat together, but turn round instead to answer Helen that Fiona’s rehearsals seem to go surprisingly well and that they had fewer panics than with most of the other plays she has been in. ‘Just as well,’ I go on, ‘as the dress rehearsal will be this Friday already. Opening Saturday night. And the week after she starts rehearsing for the next play.’

‘Pretty full schedule,’ says Ian.

‘Should work all right,’ I tell him. ‘Fiona is used to it. But I wish I could have been in that play myself. I miss the stage.’

‘You, a spoon-maker, on stage?’

‘Sure, why not? I’ve been in a couple of plays before. That’s how I met Fiona. Maybe I’m just an amateur, but I got hooked on the stage. And on Fiona.’

‘Says you,’ comes a voice through the window. ‘Says you.’

‘Hi Fiona,’ a whole chorus from inside. ‘Come in.’

‘Thanks kids, but not today.’ She runs both hands through her long black hair, yawns. ‘I’m pooped. They had to sort out the lights today. Those spots are killers. I’m going straight home and put my feet up. Coming, Eric?’

The tide has come in, making it a lot cooler on board.

‘Sorry to drag you home like that, Eric, but you know that new French take-aways?’ Fiona bustles about, wipes the big kauri table, gets a couple of plates out of the galley locker and the pottery goblets we use for wine.

‘At the top of Ponsonby Road? Don’t tell me you got take-aways again?’

‘I’m celebrating. They have decided they’ll put on the Good Woman early next year and they promised me I can be Shen Te! Imagine me getting a part like that!’ She ducks back into the galley. We don’t have any wine, but she comes up with a bottle of ginger beer, pours it out like champagne.

‘Sounds great! Who is that good woman?’

‘Eric, you’re a peasant! Surely you have heard of The Good Woman of Setzuan? That famous play by Brecht? Anyway, I brought you some galantine, and you’re supposed to eat it cold.’ Fiona carefully unwraps a foil parcel.

‘Looks like meatloaf in jelly to me.’

‘As I said before, Eric, you’re a peasant. This is French galantine, the real thing! Only I couldn’t afford the rest of the dinner, so I just bought a French loaf to go with it. Would have been far too muggy for a big hot meal in any case.’

‘Fair enough. But now tell me, what’s the story with that good woman play? Why plan for that now already?’

‘Well, you know, the Good Woman needs a big cast, very big. They expect to have to take on several amateur actors as well. So they’ll advertise an audition and they’ll need more spread-out rehearsals and someone will have to write music for the songs and heaven knows what else. It’ll be about four months before we can be ready.’

‘You think I’ll have a chance to get in too?’

Fiona smiles: ‘I wouldn’t know, don’t raise your hopes too high. I’ve got no say in that anyway. But I’ll see if I can get you the script. They’re bound to have a copy in the library. See what you think of the play first.’

‘If the play is going to be on a stage, then I’ll like it.’

‘Eric, you’re not only a peasant, you’re nuts too. And you don’t make sense.’

Sunset finds us sitting on deck. Just a few deep red clouds, not a sign of Ian’s thunderstorm. Even the steel pipe above our heads looks almost beautiful in this light. Most of the yachts moored around us are dark, only two, both at the other side of the boat ramp, show lights behind the port-holes.

On the shore, beyond the mangroves and the wattle trees, half a dozen caravans and an old bus are parked, seemingly forever. Further in, the shower block. Boatsheds, ramshackle affairs of corrugated iron and sheet plastic on telephone poles, are scattered in between without apparent plan. And right at the far end, near the road, stands the woolshed, the only building left over from the original farm. Malcolm and Judy, who now run the boatyard, have their little office in the front. One corner has been converted into a sort of ships chandlery of second hand boating gear, and the rest of the building is sometimes rented out as lofting floor.

Seen in this half-light, and before the mosquitoes chase us down below again, it is easy to get quite sentimental about the old Woolshed Boatyard.

Chapter 2

The typical Woolshed Boatyard resident operates on two totally unrelated financial levels. He will readily go and pay well over a thousand dollars for an anchor windlass. However, if you offer him a good second hand retread tire for his van for only twelve dollars, he will hesitate and postpone it until he needs the van to buy timber for his boat. But try to give him a set of curtains for his caravan. He will turn you down flat. Imagine having to buy curtain wire and hooks to hang those free curtains. Waste of money.

There are only two people on the whole yard who have different priorities. Jonathan, much to Helen’s despair, spends more on his monthly booze-bill than most others on rent, food and the car combined.

‘I can stop any time I’d want to, but why should I?’ he’ll tell you whenever the subject comes up. ‘It’s not as if I’m some bloody alcoholic! And as long as that idiot family of mine over in England keeps sending me my regular checks I’ve got to spend it somehow. Look, I’m the last bloody remittance man in the whole of Australasia. I’ve got to keep that tradition going.’

The other exception is Ian. He lives in the most expensive caravan we have ever seen, a custom-built monster of thirty two feet long. True, he did not actually buy