Juneau: Wisdom Tree 4 by Nick Earls Page A

up the view, but I know he’s imagining the 1890s, placing tents and shacks from black-and-white photos in the scene.
    I hold my spot behind him, making them walk around me, giving him time.
    From the top of the ramp, modern Juneau looks Nordic, like Narvik or Tromsø, but the mountains are even more present here, more of a force, muscling right up against the buildings and herding them into a cluster at the edge of the water. Everything I can see of the city is made small by the peaks behind it, the government buildings low concrete cubes with windows dotted in, houses more compact versions of the same shape, built to box in the heat.
    The Norwegian fjords were the site of my only other cruise so far, with Lauren before the kids came along. That was three days, though, and this voyage is a week, with Juneau day five and Ketchikan to come. We are not natural cruisers, not inclined to consign ourselves for days on end to decks full of the same Midwest Rotarians, retired franchisees and other jokey spenders oftheir kids’ inheritances. From the moment we boarded in Vancouver, the five of us have moved in close formation through the Radiance of the Seas , but despite that conversations strike up at the lifts, the buffets, even the hand sanitiser stations. They are a gregarious people, cruisers, and not deterred by closed body language.
    â€˜So, where you guys from?’ Our accent is usually their way in. Lauren is best placed to take it from there. She does small talk well and never lets it get past medium-sized. I’ve been waiting for them to ask if I’m on vacation, backing away with that question in mind, but of course they all just assume it. Can you take a vacation from nothing?
    â€˜You brought your dad along,’ they say instead. ‘Great.’
    And then my father says, ‘I brought them along,’ every time, in that clipped tone of his that suggests it should be obvious. And he lifts hischin and draws his bony shoulders back inside his oversized tracksuit top, and they misread him as some eccentric patriarch, throwing his fortune at his family and gifting them exotic locales. No family is that simple, though it was his idea, and he did insist on paying.
    We have never holidayed with my father before, not even for a weekend. If Thomas had stayed on that farm in Dorset, we would not be here now.
    It could have been my sister Jenny and her family here with our father, but she’s indispensible at the hospital, the way she tells it, and I can’t say that’s not right. It could have been our brother Rowan, but he has court dates in his diary well in advance. I am not here as my father’s firstborn or most favoured, but as his most available.
    I have a second interview for a job as soon as we get back, a position managing some assetsat the Saint Lucia uni campus. It’s a couple of rungs down from the job I am qualified to do there and might have applied for at a better time.
    â€˜That’s good, Tim,’ Lauren said when I told her they wanted to see me again. ‘Of course they should want you.’ No eye contact. ‘They’d be lucky to get you.’ No congratulations.
    Her response was perfectly on the money, as usual. Congratulations would have killed me. Congratulations would have been right if I’d scored the job twenty years ago, one step after starting out. I am not an easy person to help through failure, but who is, really?
    Lauren, Sam and Hannah have their backs to Juneau, waiting for us to disembark. Sam’s hands are in his jacket pockets and he’s looking at his foot as it draws broad wet lines out from a puddle. Hannah is wearing her beanie and matching gloves, even though it’s at least as warm as a Brisbane winter morning and theynever leave her wardrobe there. Minimum eleven, maximum thirteen was the forecast on the daily briefing sheet that was slid under our cabin door some time before dawn.
    She waves at her