She stopped, fiddling with an earring. ‘She said what?’
‘That it had been a pleasure,’ he repeated.
‘And then she looked at you?’
‘Yep.’
‘How did she look at you?’
‘What do you mean, how did she look at me?’
‘Well, was it a look or a Look?’
He thought about it. ‘I don’t know. Maybe it was a Look.’
‘And then you said what?’
‘Well I didn’t know what to say, did I?’
Jackie groaned in despair and whacked him over the head with a spatula. ‘You great nurk, that was it! That was the come-on and you missed it!’
‘How is a Look a come-on?’
‘What did you expect her to do – wrap her legs around your waist and say “Take me now, Big Boy”?’ He resumed scrubbing glumly, and she drifted out again but returned a few moments later, hopping on one foot while doing up a shoe – one of her self-confessed ‘slut-pumps’. ‘Next time she shows, you have to ask her out,’ she decided.
‘No, I’ve buggered it now, haven’t I? A girl like that – she’s never going to go out with a bloke like me.’
‘Not if you keep coming out with self-pitying crap like that, she’s not.’
‘Thank you for your support. I shall wear it always.’
Jackie stopped wrestling with her shoe and seized him in a fierce hug from behind. ‘Listen, big bruv,’ she said. ‘You are a six-foot-one security guard who looks a bit like Ben Affleck in a flattering light, likes kids and can sometimes hold a conversation which isn’t about sport. Admittedly you can’t cook to save your life, but that just proves you’re not actually gay. There are thousands of women in this city who would throw themselves at a bloke like you, believe me. I can still set you up with one of the girls from work, if you like.’
‘No bloody fear. I ended up needing stitches last time, remember?’
‘Suit yourself.’ She gave him a peck on the back of the head and breezed away in a cloud of Ange Ou Demon, singing La-Gaga’s “Born This Way” cheerfully off-key.
Later, when his nephews were tucked in, he fired up Jackie’s laptop and googled She Shall Be Called Woman. It had been painted by George Frederick Watts, who was apparently considered to be one of the greatest Victorian artists, and was supposed to be the central of three paintings depicting the creation, temptation, and eventual repentance of Eve. Steve had no idea how this helped him at all, except that maybe it gave him something to talk about to the woman in the blue dress.
But over the next few weeks he was never able to quite bring it up.
She came by at precisely the same time each Friday, giving him a polite smile and a little nod of recognition as she passed his desk, went upstairs to commune with Eve, and then left. She never lingered to examine any other artworks, and she never stopped to chat, and each time that he failed to start up a conversation with her made it harder the next time. He may well have made a good first impression, but at the moment he was performing a painfully slow crash-and-burn all of his own. This, he was sure, would have continued until the painting returned to the Tate and she disappeared from his life forever, except that she crashed first.
Chapter 2
Bobby Begins
1
The raft surged up from the deeps end-first and shot high in a plume of spray before crashing back down with a hard, flat slap which echoed across miles of empty sea. A naked man clung to its leading edge, wreathed in green ribbons of dripping kelp, coughing, choking. Moments later, a small flotilla of debris popped up around the raft, but by that time he’d already passed out.
2
First: the sun.
Filling the sky, hammering blood-red light through his flimsy eyelids, thundering heat onto his exposed back until it seemed that his very bones groaned with the weight of it.
Then: the raft.
Creaking as it tilted beneath him, rough and splintered against his face, sloshing and stinging-wet with brine. He smelled salt and baked wood.
Raising his head, he opened his eyes and immediately regretted it. The sun kicked back a million blinding fragments like a plain of broken glass stretching to the horizon. He groaned, screwed his eyes shut again, and rolled over onto his back, feeling the raft’s gentle rise and fall as his motion disturbed it.
He lay there for some time as the seawater dried to a crust of salt on his flesh and the kelp stuck to him like strips of glue-paper. Finally he decided to experiment with the concept of sitting up.
So far so good.
He tried squinching his eyes open bit by bit and found it easier this time.
‘Jesus Christ. What is this?’
He was in the middle of nowhere. Three-hundred-and-sixty degrees of complete emptiness, with nothing to break the ocean’s monotony or soften its desolation. There were no clouds, and by some trick of the atmosphere not even a clear horizon, so that he found himself staring into a scintillating, featureless void. Where was he – the middle of the Pacific? It might as well have been the bloody Sahara Desert. The absence of anything to fix his sight on and give him some perspective was beginning to give him a weird kind of vertigo, so he gave that up and concentrated on his immediate surroundings.
The raft was just wide enough for him to lie across it spread-eagled, which meant that each time he moved, it rocked alarmingly. It was made of bare planks crudely nailed together and was steaming as the sun dried it out.
He started by peeling away as much of the seaweed as he could reach and examined his body like a confused demon which had mistakenly possessed the wrong host. Not too flabby, but not exactly athletic either. It also looked like he’d been in the wars: a long crescent-shaped scar curved across his left side below the rib-cage. It seemed to be quite old, but not infected, which reassured him slightly but didn’t do a thing to allay his confusion over the fact that he had no idea how he’d got it. When something bad enough to produce a scar like that happened, you remembered it. He was no psychiatrist, but he knew that much. Then again, maybe he was a psychiatrist. Maybe he was a bloody yak-herder, for that matter.
It suddenly occurred to him that he didn’t know what he was. What did he do for a living?
Shit, what was his name?
He panicked then and leapt up, screaming for help and scanning around frantically for any sign of human habitation – an island, a boat… even just another plank of wood would be some comfort. He would probably have screamed himself hoarse but then his actions made the raft buck violently – he lost his balance, pin-wheeled for a second, and pitched over the side.
The shock of cold water brought him to his senses. Spluttering, he grabbed for the raft’s edge, missing it, arms and legs churning the water desperately until he realised that he was actually treading water. So apparently he could swim. Fairly useful thing to know, given the circumstances. He held his position for a moment, liking the sensation of having control over something, and then struck out for the raft, quickly recapturing it. As he did so, something bumped his shoulder, and his attention was drawn to the surrounding flotsam.
There was all manner of junk in the water with him. Fragments of wood and tangles of rope, seaweed, boxes, buoys, random oddments of clothing, plastic bottles, beach buckets-and-spades, and something which looked bizarrely like half a deck chair. There was no sign of where any of it had come from, but already this kind of thing had ceased to surprise him. The object which had bumped into him was a large travelling trunk of the kind used back in the ’30s heyday of grand ocean liners; it was covered in labels and rode low in the water as the contents threatened to sink it. With some careful counterbalancing and manoeuvring, he managed to get onto his raft, but only then did it occur to him to check if it was locked. Sod’s Law that he’d gone to all this trouble and then would be unable to open the bloody thing.
To
his surprise, the catches popped smoothly, and he tipped the lid back.
He’d been right: it was a gentleman’s steamer trunk, though its contents were outrageously archaic. He found shirts, cufflinks, trousers and braces; a dinner jacket and shoes polished to a mirror shine; and a paperback novel called A Tender Death by somebody called Nicholas Brannigan. Never heard of him. Its cover featured a semi-clad femme fatale draped over the hood of an Oldsmobile with all the fins and streamlining of a Flash Gordon rocket, and the inside cover was inscribed in a woman’s handwriting: ‘To Robert, Armfuls of Love, Adriana’ along with a bright red lipstick smooch.
Was he Robert? Was all of this his? It felt like it was from an entirely wrong era, but how could he know for sure?
Underneath everything else he found a shaving kit, some black liquorice, a packet of Craven-A cigarettes which looked like they were smoked by someone out of an Agatha Christie novel, and – bingo! – a small, pearl-handled pen-knife.
Experimentally he lit one of the cigarettes, and nearly choked to death, coughing until his eyes streamed.
‘Factoid number two’, he gasped. ‘Not a smoker.’ He tossed the packet – no loss there – but kept the matches. Twenty-seven matches in the box. And how exactly did you light a fire on a wooden raft? It was like that joke about the Eskimo: you can’t have your kayak and heat it.
Mostly the clothes fitted him. They made him feel a bit like a shipwrecked Noel Coward, but that sun was still going to kill him unless he did something about it soon, and then he could turn his attention to the trivial matters of food, water, and figuring out where the fuck he was.
3
He managed to construct a crude shelter by jamming a piece of driftwood upright between two planks of his raft and then draping one of the large dress-shirts over it like a tent, anchoring out the shirttails with the shoes. It was only just big enough to shade his head and chest, but it was something. What with all the clambering in and out of the water to fetch things, he’d worked up a thirst which he could do nothing about, and as he lay in its meagre shade he was aware of the prickling dryness in his throat every time he swallowed. It was only going to get worse, but that wasn’t the thing that scared him the most.
Every time he stopped working or let his mind wander, it drifted back to the glittering blue emptiness of the world and he found himself slipping into something like a trance. Just staring into the void. It was exactly the same as whenever he tried to remember anything about his life: beyond the last few hours, there was only a drifting blankness which threatened to drown him if he pushed too far into it. Several times already he’d paused in the middle of doing something to find that too much time had passed while he’d zoned out. How much time, he couldn’t tell because he didn’t have a watch, and this made it worse because he couldn’t be entirely certain that it was happening at all. Was the sun lower than it had been? He had no way of knowing.
By this time most of the flotsam had either sunk again or drifted out of reach.
Drifting.
When he looked again, the sun was definitely a lot lower in the sky.
Fuck. Get up, get moving, do something. Don’t just lie here, waiting to die. Who cares if you’re dehydrating? There’s no use conserving energy if you’re not going to do anything with it, is there?
He fashioned a crude fishing spear by carving a barbed point into the end of a length of wooden pole, and busied himself unravelling a length of coarse rope, plaiting the strands into half a dozen fishing lines, while for hooks he dug nails out of the raft with his penknife and bent them painfully by hand. The only thing he could remotely imagine using for bait was chunks of liquorice; he just hoped the fish hereabouts had a sweet tooth. He hung them like driftlines from the raft’s four sides and on a sudden inspiration peered closely to see what they did. Slowly, all the lines settled at the same slight diagonal.
He was moving. There was no wind pushing him; he was in a current, however weak it was. This meant he now had a forward, a backward, and very possibly a destination.
‘Yes! Yes!!’ Somehow the fact that he wasn’t completely dead in the water elated him. He did a little dance – and stopped that in a hurry when the whole raft again threatened to capsize. The sun was setting by now, hanging huge and orange above the horizon. If his guess about the angle of the deadlines was right, he was heading roughly south. Now there was really nothing to do but settle back and wait.
His stomach growled loudly.
‘Get used to it, mate,’ he growled back.
4
He tried reading some of ‘A Tender Death’ while it was still light, but he couldn’t really get into it and instead found himself returning again to the inscription and its crimson smooch. Several items in the trunk – and indeed the trunk itself – were initialled with R.A.M.J., which he decided stood for Robert Andrew Michael Jenkins, because why not? Double middle-name, probably from an old family, certainly well-off to judge by the expensive clothing. Robert was a young man, though, given his liquorice, his cigarettes and his penchant for sleazy noir fiction. Bobby, not Robert. Younger son of the family, perhaps given a junior position in the Foreign Office thanks to Daddy’s Old Boy network; hence the well-travelled trunk, which was how he’d met Adriana – Russian name – the kind of girl who read books like this and wore bright red lipstick. Definitely not the sort of girl one took home to Mummy and Daddy, and you could bet there was a nice girl at home – most likely the daughter of one of Daddy’s business chums – who was waiting dutifully at home for Robert (she would never call him Bobby) to go out and Make His Name, whereas what he was really doing was gadding about the world screwing saucy foreign chicks. Go Bobby, you dog.
Spinning these fantasies in his head allowed him to fall asleep without fearing the blank emptiness which awaited behind his eyes.
5
He woke in the night, convinced that he’d heard somebody walking around on his raft. The sky blazed with constellations he couldn’t name, and a half-moon spilled shivering light over the endless desert of water. Under the open sky, the temperature had dropped alarmingly, and he found himself shivering – and listening to something bump and slither invisibly around him. Then his head cleared of sleep fully, and he realised that the sound wasn’t coming from around him but underneath him.
There was something under the raft. He froze, listening. Very slowly, he reached for his fish-spear and drew it close. Keeping flat, he crept on his belly to the edge of the raft and peered over.
The sea was alive with movement.
Fish. Millions of fish. Billions, possibly. Shoals, schools, platoons and battalions of fish. For as far as he could see, they seethed and glittered in numbers so vast that he had mistaken them for the surface of the ocean itself. They seemed crammed together so thickly that he fancied he could walk out across them. He tried to say something, but thirst stuck in his throat like barbed wire and his stomach goinged painfully, and he remembered what he really should be doing with them. He hefted the spear.
Never mind that it was night – he could have been blind, armless and chucking the thing with his teeth and still have been able to catch his own body-weight in fish; they were that densely packed. In the end there was simply a practical limit to how much he could pile up on the end of the raft before they started slithering and thrashing off each other and back into the water. Still, gutting and cleaning them in the dark with only a small, blunt pen-knife was a different matter entirely. In the end, the fact that it was dark probably did him a favour, because it prevented him from properly seeing what he was eating.
Sushi. Just keep telling yourself you’re eating sushi.
It was the first food he’d eaten in nearly twenty-four hours (minus some liquorice), and it went some way towards dealing with his thirst too, and he fell asleep again with a strange feeling which might have been hope.
6
And as he slept, the dream
-fish of the Tourmaline Archipelago nourished not just his wounded flesh but also his parched spirit, making him as whole as they could with the fragments they found.
7
Bobby Jenkins was woken up by a godawful racket, stinking of fish guts and feeling generally like shit. For a moment he wondered why everything was so bright and why the bed was tilting to and fro beneath him – had he got drunk and ordered a hammock from the ship’s purser? Then he remembered where he was and sat bolt upright. This caused the flimsy shelter to collapse around his head, and in his panic to fight free he very nearly plunged into the ocean again.
‘Really must stop doing that, old man,’ he admonished himself.
When he pulled his head clear and stood, a cloud of seagulls scattered, protesting, from the pile of fish which they’d been fighting over at the end of his raft. His fish.
‘Oh no you bloody don’t…’
Bobby had never read ‘The Old Man and the Sea’, because if he had he’d have realised the futility of his actions. Every time he beat one bird away with his spear at least half a dozen more swooped in from a different direction and made off with more of his breakfast, and the only thing he’d achieved by the time they’d stolen everything was to have salvaged a handful of sardines in his pockets, which he guarded fiercely as he retreated to the shelter, watching them squabble over the final scraps.
As it turned out, that was the highlight of his day.
He washed in the ocean and had a shave – because standards were standards even if one was dying slowly of dehydration in the middle of nowhere – but only a few hours after sunrise the temperature was so high that he could do little more than damp down his shelter, curl as much of himself inside as possible, and doze in the heat. He read a little but couldn’t concentrate very well; the words kept blurring. If he dreamt, the dreams evaporated upon waking.
By late afternoon, he had a raging headache and his throat felt like it was coated with sand all the way down into his gullet. His lips were cracked dry, and when he tried to lick them, his tongue felt fat and sluggish. At least he was still producing saliva, but without anything to wash food down with, the prospect of eating raw fish was even less attractive than before. When he peed, it was dark yellow and stank. Why was he bothering to prolong his own torture like this? More than once it occurred to him to simply get the whole sorry business over with by jumping into the sea. Oddly, at no point did he consider praying. The fact that he was moving at whatever painfully slow speed now seemed like the final crushing irony rather than anything to celebrate.
Tourmaline Page 2