Free Making Laws for Clouds by Nick Earls

up.
    â€˜It’s getting dark anyway,’ he says. ‘And I’ve worked out how to boil water on this bloody thing. I’ve made us a pot of tea, so get yourselves up here.’
    The cabin looks different this evening, but it’s been a while since I’ve seen it. It’s not a shell any more,and there’s a mixture of old things saved from the fire, new things just brought in and the mess of unfinished work. But he’s been tidying it, as much as he can, stacking the tins of varnish at one end and making space for the three of us to sit.
    â€˜I hope you don’t mind your tea Chinese style,’ he says. ‘There’s no fridge yet, so nowhere to keep milk.’ He starts pouring, and then stops to sniff the spout. ‘Smells like lapsang souchong. The teapot was here in the fire and maybe it’ll take a while before it stops smelling smoky. Hope the tea’s okay. Here, give it a try.’
    He hands me a mug and I taste it. ‘Seems fine, good. A bit different, but I’m pretty much used to Bushells, Australian-style – white with one. I don’t know much about the lapsang kind.’
    He gives Tanika a mug as well, and takes a sip at his own.
    â€˜Yuk, it’s foul,’ he says, scrunching his face up. ‘Can’t even make bloody tea any more. Smells like a firework and tastes bloody worse.’ He puts the mug down and leans back in the bench seat, easing his body back slowly as though his healing burns need careful handling. ‘Still, we’re getting there I suppose. Not that you two aren’t giving me headaches along the way, putting in all this hard work turning the old tub into something rather deluxe and making me feel like a guilty old bludger.’
    Tanika laughs. ‘Don’t feel guilty, you old bludger.’
    â€˜It’s the “deluxe” bit that’s the real problem of course. How am I going to look, an ugly old mongrel like me, skippering something spiffier than the yacht club commodore’s? He’ll think I’m putting on airs, getting above myself.’
    He pulls his shoulders back and goes for a serious snooty face and sits with his head half-turned, like the boring portrait of a retired admiral. Or as close as Harbo could ever get. Not too close.
    â€˜So how long have you two been an item then?’ he says, like it’s a regular question, the next thing to get to after talking about boat repairs and the feelings of commodores.
    A hot mouthful of bad tea gets stuck in my throat.
    â€˜Depends how you look at it,’ Tanika says, since one of us has to answer him. ‘We don’t always get to see a lot of each other. It’s a bit complicated. A month maybe. But it feels like longer to me. Longer in a good way, like it’s good that it feels longer, if you know what I mean.’
    â€˜Yeah,’ he says. ‘Yeah, I know what you mean. Some things, if they feel right, they feel like they’ve been around a while already, hey? You just didn’t notice them before. You know, you’re lucky, you two. I never got to be a teenager, not in the way you can be one now. I was off on ships from when I was thirteenor fourteen and most of those months felt pretty long, and not for the best of reasons. I think it sort of stunted my growth socially. That “girl in every port” lark’s not what they say it is. I was a shy kid, but. Maybe that was part of it.’
    We didn’t have enough of a plan. That was the problem. We left the rehearsal, we drove back to her place, we ate the sausages and we checked out the night sky. And there was this weird mixture of excitement and the fear of what was coming next. We should have had a plan, but we didn’t. Not that we would have lied. We would just have been very careful with the truth. We would have let it out on our own terms, but that’s not how it ended up happening.
    â€˜The others’d get as much rum in