‘Wait!’ a voice sounds out from the darkness. ‘Stop!’
It isn’t Melissa.
It also isn’t, as I’d been secretly hoping, Inge, come to demand that we abandon this clearly foolhardy mission.
‘Tricia?’
‘Hi!’ she pants, resting her hands on her knees for a few moments and hacking up any residual tar that may conceivably be lurking after a lifetime’s dedication to Marlborough Lights. ‘Hang on!’ She holds up a hand, head still between her legs, heaving before one almighty hock brings up the last of the sputum. ‘Bear with me … There, that’s better. Right …’
‘Are you OK?’ Melissa looks concerned.
‘Fine, fine.’ Tricia waves a hand, struggling to get her breath back as she coughs one more gravelly and alarmingly ‘productive’ cough before carrying on. ‘S’OK, I’ve got another lung if I need it! Inge said you’d probably be here, thought we should clear the air …’ Tricia doesn’t elaborate on whether it’s her or Inge who’ve been doing the thinking. ‘So, here I am!’
I’m glad she’s thinking about speaking to me again. And I want to make it right. But now? Really?
‘You know, Tricia, I’m very, very sorry about last night, but I just need to talk to my sister right now. Do you think you could give us a moment?’
The damp has now seeped to my underwear.
I knew I was going to get a wet bottom again. I just knew it …
‘There’s nothing you can say to me that you can’t say in front of Tricia,’ Melissa says briskly.
Is she kidding?
‘I know you’re angry with me, Melissa,’ I start, then add, ‘and you, Tricia,’ before turning back to my sister. ‘But if we could talk, just the two of us … ?’ She leaves me hanging so I try Tricia again. ‘And if you could go back to the house, Tricia—’
‘Why don’t you go back—’ Melissa starts.
‘Sorry?’
‘You go back! If it’s an issue, Alice.’
Oh, it is an issue …
‘Just leave, if that’s what you want to do, Alice,’ Melissa goes on. ‘You’re good at that: leaving …’
My mouth hangs open as I struggle to respond. It’s like a workshop in passive aggression. She’s turning into ME … I’ve created a monster!
‘All right, I get the picture,’ I tell her. ‘Pass-agg correspondent, Alice, here – reporting for duty. I understand that you’re pissed off with me, but I’m not going anywhere.’
‘Well, neither am I,’ says Melissa.
‘Or me,’ Tricia adds, before looking around doubtfully. ‘Mostly because I’m not sure my body can take another rain-lashed run today …’ she says, before stumbling towards the boat ‘for a sit down’.
‘Right.’ This is not how I pictured my grand reunion scene going. ‘And Inge doesn’t mind?’ I try a different approach. ‘Everyone taking off like this? Before supper?’ I’m still hoping to dissuade both of them by appealing to their better natures – or their stomachs. I also can’t help thinking about how cross I get when I’ve prepared food back home and everyone buggers off to do something else instead.
‘Nope.’ Tricia lifts up a leg, exposing her gusset, and I get a bottom in my face as she flings a limb overboard with surprising mobility for a woman in her … fifties? Sixties? ‘Magnus cooked and it was all a bit … brown. We ate a little, then Inge said we were free to go off and do whatever we liked. Whispered that she’d leave some bread and cheese out for us later.’
I won’t lie: the thought of this cheers me immeasurably, despite our current predicament. My world is threatening to fall apart and I’m excited by cheese? I’ve definitely changed.
‘Then Inge went off to bath the kids. And Magnus. Which was peculiar …’ Tricia adds, looking troubled by the recollection, as though now utterly cured of her crush from earlier in the week.
‘Well then, that’s settled,’ says Melissa smartly.
‘Will you even tell us where we’re going?’ I ask, but she shakes her head.
‘Need-to-know basis only. Trunk out, Dumbo,’ is all she says.
‘So you just want us to row with you to the middle of Scandi-nowhere?’
‘No,’ she corrects me. ‘What I want is for you, Alice, to get out of the boat and go home. But since that’s not happening, I’m going anyway. OK?’
‘OK,’ I mumble.
‘Right then. All aboard!’ she calls out, as she dips an oar in the water and instructs me to do the same.
‘Isn’t that what they say on trains?’ I ask. She gives me a look that tells me it’s ‘too soon’. So I shut up and row.
Tricia is also silent, though this has less to do with picking up on the tension and more to do with still being out of breath from her exertions. But she takes on the rudder with surprising ease and an aptitude that suggests she’s done this before. As though she may even know where we’re going.
The water is choppy and the boat rocks, far more than it had earlier.
A storm. There’s definitely a storm brewing.
It’s harder to pull the oars through the water, too, and the volume of the rain – in both senses – makes it difficult to use our senses as Inge instructed. Water, I observe, is noisy – both the stuff underneath us, lapping occasionally over the side of the boat, and the icy droplets currently being tipped on our heads. My overriding sense is ‘cold’ but I still row for all I’m worth and we move in jerks, further and further from the shore.
‘OK, let’s get the sail … err … going,’ Melissa says, having forgotten some of the lingo. There follows a discussion with Tricia about the best ways of doing this alongside some gargling sounds and yelps. I had resolved to stay well out of it, keeping my head down and concentrating on the task allocated to me: ironically as the ‘muscle’ of the operation, rowing with both oars while the others are preoccupied with the giant white sheet. But I allow myself the scarcest of glances up when the cries begin to sound more pronounced, more water-logged and more desperate. Looking around, I’m alarmed to discover that these sounds aren’t coming from inside the boat at all.
‘Can you hear something?’ I ask, worrying now.
‘What?’ Melissa looks at me, crossly.
‘Nng—help!’ a stifled voice can be heard, just, above the tumult.
‘Someone’s out there!’ I peer into the nothingness, scanning the water for … I’m not sure what.
Tricia leans over the side to get a better look. ‘I think she’s right …’
Melissa squints into the black water, then bellows. ‘ARE YOU OK?’
‘N-no,’ is all that can be heard by way of response.
‘Bloody hell …’ I murmur.
‘WHO’S THERE?’ Melissa shouts out.
Nothing. No human sounds can be heard now, and I wonder whether perhaps we have been experiencing a collective auditory hallucination.
That or whoever it was is no longer above water …
‘Hello?’ I try, again, tentatively.
‘Help!’ the voice, gulps. ‘It’s me! I can’t …’ The speech gets drowned out once more but not before we spot a body in the water, struggling.
Thirteen
‘It’s me!’
‘Who’s “me”?’ There’s no answer, but the body continues to thrash about.
‘Do you know,’ Tricia starts, ‘it sounds a little like—’
‘Margot?’ Melissa frowns into the darkness.
‘Yes!’ Tricia exclaims. ‘Is that you, Margot?’
‘Ye—’ the lashing creature yells before getting a mouthful of water and going under. It resurfaces, bobbing, then attempts a, ‘Yes!’
‘Oh my God!’ Tricia squeals.
‘It IS Margot!’ Melissa processes this new development.
‘Don’t just stand around looking,’ I shout. ‘DO something! Melissa, can you get the sail going to move us any faster? And Tricia, doesn’t that thing turn us around?’ I gesture to the ‘boaty steering wheel’ that I latterly remember is called a rudder a
nd start rowing with all my might to accelerate a change of course. It isn’t easy, and the sea is rougher than usual, the wind having got up considerably so that it now appears to be blowing from all directions. The current is strong and the tide is going out, so we’re drifting away from shore, even without my poor efforts with the oars.
But we’re not that far out, I calculate. No casual swimmer should be struggling to this extent …
We get close enough to the spluttering, bedraggled figure for me to extend an oar and tow her in. But the effort of staying partially afloat has exhausted our youngest trainee Viking and she’s a husk of her former self.
‘Are you OK?’ I ask, hauling Margot’s torso over the side, then assisting with the clambering on of those never-ending legs.
‘Mmm-nnnn …’ She can only manage a shiver in response, teeth chattering, so I go into medic mode. We take it in turns to rub her hands and feet, in danger of turning into pruned slabs of ice far more quickly than the rest of ours are. There’s nothing dry to wrap around her and we’re all pretty wet from the rain, so the only thing I can think of to stave off hypothermia is human contact.
‘Do you mean like a group hug?’ Tricia looks surprised when I suggest this and even Melissa eyes me with incredulity.
‘Yes.’ I sigh. ‘I suppose I do.’ So they oblige. There is a unanimous dereliction of duties as we all surround Margot like penguins huddled in the Antarctic. We stay like this for a good fifteen minutes until our youngest member is marginally less frozen. The experience seems to embarrass Margot almost as much as it does me, and when we finally release her from our collective embrace, she can only manage a nervous smile.
‘So, what happened?’ I ask, in as gentle a voice as I can manage.
Margot, tucking wet tendrils of hair behind her ears as if her life depends on it, looks mortified.
‘Were you, like, drowning?’ Melissa gets straight to the bones of the matter and I notice Margot stiffen, though this could be the cold.
‘You seemed to be really struggling,’ Tricia narrates, obligingly, ‘almost as if you couldn’t …’ She leaves the sentence hanging, until Margot drops her shoulders and opens up her hands so that her palms are facing upwards in a rare moment of vulnerability.
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘I was … I mean. And no, I can’t …’ She speaks without full stops. ‘But then, four-time America’s Cup winner Dennis Conner can’t either and it’s just never been a problem before … I just … didn’t think it would get deep so quickly …’
‘What? You can’t swim?’ Melissa is keen to clarify. Tactfully or otherwise.
‘No,’ says Margot, looking down. ‘I can’t.’
None of us are quite sure what to say, but my inner monologue runs something like this:
Margot can’t swim? Margot can’t swim!
Margot has a flaw? Margot has a flaw!
As I said, I’m not proud.
‘So, why were you in the water … ?’ Tricia looks at her as though she is deranged. Which, to be fair, we might all be by this stage.
‘I … I didn’t want to be left behind,’ says Margot, once she’s got her breath back, ‘with Magnus and all the brown food, I mean. I wanted to join in. See what you were all up to. Not be left out …’ The rest of us exchange a look. ‘Well?’ Margot asks, with a final cough up of seaweed mixed with mucus. And brown food. Probably. ‘What have you all been up to?’
‘Oh, nothing much,’ I say, instinctively, sensing my window for a heart to heart with my sister about her illness slamming shut.
‘That’s not quite true,’ Melissa corrects me.
‘It’s not?’
Really? She wants to do this here? She wouldn’t even tell her own sister that she has cancer – but now Melissa wants to discuss it in front of a couple of women we’d never even met this time last week?
I must have really let her down.
‘No!’ she goes on. ‘You were going to apologise, to Tricia. Again. For snooping. And generally being an arse—’
‘I don’t think I said that last part—’ I start, but Melissa fixes me with such a glower that I hear myself agreeing. ‘Yes, that’s right.’ I’m still being punished – justifiably – so I offer an: ‘I’m extremely sorry, Tricia.’
‘That’s OK,’ The older woman gives a small shrug, adding, ‘I wanted to explain how things ended up like that, anyway. You know, Doug, gin-in-a-mug-at-noon … That’s why I came.’
‘Right.’ I nod. ‘Yes’.
‘And where are you going?’ Margot asks Melissa, quite reasonably. I look to my sister, who feigns blissful oblivion in the face of the question that’s just been posed and merely squints into the driving rain.
I try to follow her eye line, squeegeeing water off my forehead with my free hand in the hope that I might be able to actually see something between drips.
Nope, nothing.
So I echo Margot’s line of enquiry. ‘Yes, Melissa, where are we going?’
‘Where are any of us going?’ she replies, echoing Magnus’s infuriating response from day one.
I’m not buying what she’s selling …
‘Yes, yes, but specifically? As in, now?’ I ask, as a sizeable swell sways and spins us. ‘We all seem to be headed there, so isn’t it only fair you let us in on where “there” is … ?’
Melissa sucks her teeth and makes a face like a mechanic informing you that they could fix your car, but that it’ll cost you. ‘I’ll be honest; I’m not sure any more.’
‘What?’ I say sharply.
‘Well,’ my sister goes on, ‘in all the kerfuffle of Margot’s rescue—’
‘Sorry.’ Margot sniffs.
‘’S’OK.’ Melissa nods. ‘But in all the kerfuffle and the penguin hugging … I may have lost track of which direction we should be aiming for. Or which direction we’re currently in … Or even—’ and here she winces slightly ‘—what direction we should take if we wanted to go back …’
As my stomach nosedives – a sensation increased ten-fold by the pitching of the boat – I can almost feel the collective anxiety ramping up. Each of us in turn looks around, to verify Melissa’s concerns and see … nothing. No lights, no land, nothing.
We’re in foreign waters. We’re lost. We’re wet. And we’re cold. Unimaginably, face-achingly, cold.
The moon is faint, a slim crescent partially obscured by clouds that also cloak any helpful stars we might be otherwise able to navigate by.
If any of us actually knew how to navigate by stars, that is. Although Margot’s probably done a Duke of Edinburgh taster course in this somewhere along the line …
What she hasn’t done, apparently, is ‘basic swimming’ and none of us have our ‘how to find your way home safely in the middle of a storm at night’ Brownie badge.
‘So we’re lost?’ Tricia asks, sounding scared. She’s answered by a distant brattle of thunder.
‘We might just be,’ Melissa admits. ‘What? It was a very long group hug!’ she adds defensively, wiping rain off her face with a sleeve as the boat keels and rocks in the squall.
‘Right …’ I have no idea what to do next.
What would a Viking do? I wrack my brains but draw a blank. My sister misinterprets my silence as hostility.
‘Oh yes, I know what you’re thinking,’ she tells me. ‘You’re thinking, “Melissa’s fucked up again”, that it’s all my fault—’
‘That’s not what I was thinking—’
‘That I’m the irresponsible one, next to “perfect Alice” who never does anything wrong—’
‘No! Honestly, I wasn’t—’
‘Are we going die?’ Tricia interjects, lips now a blue-ish tinge and hands fluttering at her throat.
‘No,’ I tell her, with as much authority as I can muster. ‘We are not going to die.’
‘Well, we’re all going to die eventually,’ Melissa deadpans, then catching my expression, adds: ‘What? Spoiler alert, but none of us are getting out of this alive.’
‘Fine, but no one is going to die now,’ I insist, addressing my sister directly. ‘And listen, I never claimed to be perfect! I don’t know where you got this from—’
‘From you! You’ve always had this rule book the rest of us haven’t seen copies of and have no hope of living up to!’ Melissa goes on. ‘You were always the one who got fussed over when we were little! Petted by Mum, driven to violin lessons—’
‘Oh, I learned the violin, too!’ Margot pipes up. ‘And the cello …’
Shut up, Margot! But she goes on wittering something about musical grades as Tricia starts up again, too, until it’s as though we’re all immersed in our own private conversations. Our own private hell.
‘I find it helps to keep talking when I’m worried,’ Tricia goes on, looking around her into the darkness, fear leaching into her voice now. ‘You know what they say: once a broadcaster, always a broadcaster!’ She laughs nervously as my sister continues her diatribe:
‘Do you know what it was like growing up not being as clever or thin or as “gifted” as Mum wanted me to be? As you were? I grew up terrified of taking up too much space. Scared, even, of bumping into people in the street – ducking and weaving out of people’s way. All the time. It was knackering. Once, I decided not to move out of anyone’s way for a week and bumped into 200 people. Rammed right into them – because no one held open doors for me or stepped aside to let me pass or drove me to VIOLIN LESSONS!’
I had no idea that the violin had been such a big deal. I can only recall making an extraordinary, strangled sound until Mum and Dad eventually agreed that I was so prodigiously untalented that I should stop. That it ‘might be best’ to ‘focus my efforts elsewhere’. For everyone’s sake. What I somehow failed to notice was a younger sister watching longingly and waiting for the day it would be her turn to take up the stringed instrument and get that one-on-one parental attention. A day that never came, once tragedy struck and Dad descended into his decade of mourning.
‘Why didn’t you tell me any of this?’ I demand now.
‘I shouldn’t have had to!’ Melissa retorts. ‘You should’ve seen something was up.’
‘But you looked … fine,’ I tell her.
Gone Viking Page 26