Zenith Read Online Free

end of an eel.
    He’s just about to close his fingers on one when next-door’s cat darts between his feet and trips him up. Now he’s flat on his face, his bad ankle on fire, and it’s too late.
    The eels slick down a drain. Tuck hears the slither and plop as they escape back into the sea.
    No eels, a few crumbs of salt in his pocket, a druxy ankle and there’s no one to blame but himself.
    The cat knows she’s in for it and tries to slink into the eel bucket. Tuck kicks the bucket and grabs the cat’s tail, yanks it hard in revenge. The cat gives an outraged yowl.
    ‘ Tuck .’
    ‘Oy, cut the racket out there!’ yells Arthus, the old grump from the next shack. A window shutter rattles open and Arthus’s walrussy head looms out. ‘What a dubya. That’s what you are, boy, a true dubya.’ Arthus surveys the mess Tuck has made and pulls the shutter closed again with a whack.
    Tuck gets to his feet. From his own shack there’s an outburst of wheezy coughs. No wonder he goes out looting. It’s better than staying in this dump, getting yelled atand listening to Ma’s snores and wheezes, night after night.
    Tuck limps back to his own shack. The dawn light glints in his Ma’s eye. With her beaky nose, pale face and nest of greying hair, she has the look of an orange-eyed gull. A gull with its nest on its head.
    ‘Sorry, Ma.’
    ‘A sorry excuse for a son, thass what you are, Tuck Culpy. Phut – wheez . All that creaking on the roof – you been up there all night again?’
    Tuck shrugs.
    Ma gives him a glinty glare. ‘You can just set off early and find yourself some work ’cause there’s no dinner now, is there? You just kicked it back in the sea. I never know how we’ll live from one day till the – phut wheez – next.’
    A fit of cough-wheezies halts her.
    ‘Rubbish, Ma,’ says Tuck. ‘We’re doing all right. Had a good glug of seagrape last night, didn’t you, eh? And a nice basket of smoked oysters? Keeping you in luxury, I am.’
    But she’s decided, as the neighbours are no doubt listening in now he’s woken them up, to pretend to be a proper Ma.
    ‘D’you think I sailed across the ocean in a bottle? Think I – phut-phut-wheez – fell out of the sky? I know what you get up to. You wuzzn’t on that roof all night, Tuck Culpy . . . wheeez . . . hanging out with a no-good lot of curfew breakers, thass where you were. Be a good lad now and knuckle down to some steady work, eh?’
    Ah, he’s sick of her. Sick of looking after her and getting no thanks. Sick of her gorging on whatever he brings home then moaning about how he got it. And most of allhe’s sick of the strange guilt she somehow drums up in him, just because he’s alive and the others died.
    Last year’s summer fever wiped out boatfuls of gypseas all over Pomperoy. It killed his little sister Beth and Grumpa, Ma’s old Da. They’d hardly recovered from Tuck’s own Da’s death the year before, from a bone-rotting sickness he caught while raiding one of the toxic ships that ghost the oceans, ships full of scrap metal, oil and chemicals left over from the old world. Da was on a scavenge scoop for bridge metal and wire, but he ended up scavenging his own death.
    He’d known the risk. That’s why he wouldn’t take Tuck.
    Now Da and the others are gone, there’s only Tuck left to look after Ma. Though they both survived the fever, Ma is a wretched shadow of her old self. Tuck knows he’ll never be able to mend the great big rip in her life where little Beth and Da and Grumpa once were. All he can do is bring her home the fruits of his ill-gotten loot.
    Ma’s still grumbling. ‘If there’s one thing I want before I – phut-phut PHUT – lie down here on my bunk and die, it’s my son anchored and settled in a rock-solid trade.’
    Tuck almost laughs at the show Ma’s putting on for the neighbours. Urth’s sake, how can he settle when the world’s all hurling and wheeling, when the windsnap in the rigging is loud as