Although he was supposed to be head of the family, it surprised Charlie little that what his father brought home remained a mystery to them all.
Charlie Boat by Ben Ockrent
Everyone knew what New York looked like. Especially from a boat that should have passed the Statue of Liberty on its way in to dock. For him to have mistaken this for that was unimaginable. For him to have had them all disembark here, onto this pier, without the Statue of Liberty, was a failure of such catastrophic proportions it defied belief. In fact, so prone was his father to errors of such outrageous magnitude, Charlie was beginning to wonder if he wasn't soft upstairs. It was a suspicion he wouldn't have to wait long to confirm.
'Of course they'd come off the boat!' Charlie yelled at his father as they walked up the hill towards the city. 'How else had we come to be approaching the border control from the direction of the sea?' That they could have arrived here via any other means was a physical impossibility, it's true. And, as far as Charlie was quite rightly concerned, for the man sitting behind the desk in the dark blue uniform to have been asking them how they'd come to be here, made no sense at all. They'd all come off the boat, every last man, woman and child standing there that day in the dock. That they'd come off the boat was beyond doubt. But sure enough, 'boat' was the answer Charlie's father had chosen to give to the indecipherable question that came from the foreign tongue of the man sitting behind the desk in the dark blue uniform. And 'boat' was the word the man wrote down on the cardboard sheets with the stamps. And thanks to one more error from Charlie's father, the family name, it would seem, was now Boat.
With the meagre savings they'd brought with them all but spent on the deposit for their one bedroom flat, they all of them wasted no time seeking employment. Between taking care of Charlie's two younger sisters and tending to the flat, Charlie's mum gathered pennies washing laundry for the gentiles next door. When they weren't at school or in the one bookshop in town that would permit them to pass an hour improving their English from the literature on the shelves, Charlie and his older brother sandwiched their days in the workshop of the clockmaker's shop, mending watches. Which left just Charlie's dad unaccounted for. And although he was supposed to be head of the family, it surprised Charlie little that what his father brought home remained a mystery to them all.
Every morning he would leave the house with his small cardboard suitcase: 'collecting', he would say, though quite what no one knew. When pressed once by Charlie's older brother, Charlie's father told them it mattered not what he was collecting, but why. When asked by Charlie's older brother why he was collecting, Charlie's father told them he was collecting so that he might form a complete set the likes of which the world had never seen before. And that once he had collected a complete set the likes of which the world had never seen before he would go out into the world and sell it, the whole collection in it's entirety, so that they might become rich and continue on their journey to New York once more.
Days turned into weeks, week months, months years. Charlie's younger sisters grew older and eventually began attending school themselves. With them occupied during the days, Charlie's mother was able to launder more. Her services spread from the gentiles next door to include their friends and, eventually, the friends of their friends, too. Charlie and his older brother continued to mend watches before school, but with their mother laundering by day, Charlie was free to spend his entire evenings in the bookshop instead. His English by now impeccable - better even, some said, than many of the native boys - his time in the shop was dedicated not merely to learning the linguistic meanings of the words in the books but the meanings of the books themselves. Driven by the failures of his father, his softness, his flaws, Charlie consumed those books, committed them to memory, devoured each and every last word, phrase and page. With a head full of bookshop, Charlie lost all interest in school and with good reason, for there was little any school could teach him he hadn't already taught himself. Charlie didn't need school, he needed money for the family for the holes left by his father and he set about finding ways he might get them some.
With the final book in the self-improvement section returned to its place at the end of the shelf, Charlie burst into the near-pitch black hallway of their stone-floored tenement block. Springing upstairs three steps at a time, he launched himself into the one bedroom flat at the top of the very top flight, only to find the rest of his family waiting: his two younger sisters, his mother, his older brother, all in a ring around his father, who sat clinging to his suitcase, smiling. 'I've done it.' Charlie's father said. 'The set is complete. Tomorrow I will head out into the world to secure our fortune.' Charlie wanted to laugh. His 'set'? As Charlie well knew there was nothing more in that suitcase than the clothes his father had brought over in the boat. 'Secure our fortune?' Charlie thought to himself. 'We let him out that door and he's never coming back!' And with that realisation in mind, Charlie turned from his father to the rest of his family, each of their eyes now bright with hope, their collective breath held, not a blink between them. 'We deserve the name Boat,' Charlie thought finally to himself: 'We're at sea.' And he turned back to his father for the last time.
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Ben Ockrent's first play, The Pleasure Principle, was staged at the Tristan Bates Theatre in 2007. He is currently writing a new play for the Tricycle Theatre, has an original sitcom in development with BBC3, and was recently nominated as a Broadcast Magazine 'hotshot' for 2009.
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Wednesday, 7 October, 2009
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