Making Shore

by Sara Allerton

  We tied it round his torso and up under his armpits and then pushed him in, despite his plaintive cries. We dragged him a little way, straining, through gritted teeth, to hold him at that angle from above. Tomas got up to help us hold the rope. ‘Okay, enough!’ Joe grimaced, just as I thought I could not stand it any longer, and we heaved him back up and in. We were exhausted. Dehydrated and weak from lack of food, we dropped down, panting with the effort. He was wet but he was cleaner. We left him in his clothes, which we knew would dry out quickly, and let him lie there, covering him with Joe’s old pullover, talking across him quietly until he fell fretfully to sleep.

  The days passed more silently now within the boat. The lethargy brought on by lack of water and therefore food was multiplied a hundredfold beneath the sun’s perpetually unblinking gaze. From dawn to dusk, she held us in her vicious thrall, pushing us beyond endurance, petrifying our withering bodies in her blank and scathing fire. Various odd items of clothing swathed about our heads and the meagre shadow cast by our stunted sail gave no relief. The little shade the sail afforded moved by the hour around the boat, and tempers flared when some men tried to shuffle round a little more, for just that fraction longer underneath it. The boundaries we had almost unconsciously drawn up around tiny individual territories had become completely unnegotiable; there was no changing them. Every man protected and defended his with narrow eyes and mouths slit with savagery, with threatened fists and, if necessary, with a knife. Through the night, though, forced into forbearance, people had to shift to let the rowers work. This was done with slightly better grace for as the sun went down, relinquished from the grip of the tormenting heat, petty irritations abated and rationality gained ground.

  It was short-lived. Bad-tempered irascibility, brought on by lack of sustenance and raw fatigue, exacerbated by unbearable temperatures in the close constraint imposed by the limitations of each space, simmered dangerously, constantly, just below the surface, erupting, quick and vicious, over the least suggestion of a slight or the most innocuous provocation. And so we lay about, holding on in desperation, wrung dry, as the callous pounding of the sun leeched the very last from us in sweat and breath and animation.

  The glassy-eyed, featureless face of the ocean conceded nothing. I spent hours with my head upon my arms along the boat rim, burning, limp and listless, watching for the slightest change in her expression, trying to glean some small significance that might imply the time and nature of our redemption. I saw the slate grey turbulence of her waking, her broiling blues in acknowledgement of the midday sun and I watched the silver sleekness of her evening robes slither rippling into the heart of night. In my mind, I spoke to her, bargained with and beseeched her that she might give us up, show mercy and deliver us before too long to the safe haven of the shore. She gazed back at me, reflective but incurious.

  From the outset of our misadventure, we had taken to the water from time to time, swimming close, keeping company with the boat, simply to relieve the heat, the petty irritation, the perpetual, grinding boredom. The sea had then offered cold, refreshing comfort and some small relief snatched from our close confinement. But the last time – and I would not try again – I had lost my nerve. Though venturing not much further than I ever had, the boat suddenly seemed an awesome distance at ten yards. The waves loomed up, larger than I remembered, pushing me back, insisting on carrying my body off, away from the tenuous thread of my existence. My heart lurched in sudden panic as I felt my body falter in a weakness I had only just begun to recognise, while the torpid languor of my mind and limbs struggled, working in slow motion as I flailed to make up ground. Once, I tried to cry out for help but the rush of water to my mouth prevented any sounding. Effectively, it gagged me. I made it back, shaking and unnerved, and I did not mention it. But the oblique sense I’d always had of my affinity with the ocean had been damaged and, no longer feeling able either to read or understand her, I shrank from trusting her.

  The incident stripped me further of a confidence I’d scarcely been aware of, the presumptive faith I’d always taken in the reliability of my mind and of my body. As the strength of each exhausted, their symbiotic marriage failed and I lost control of both. Physically incapable of doing any more during the day than lying prone, suffering, stupefied by the sun, my mind began to shift and slide around the blurry edges of reality. Hallucinations began to harass me. The boat would spin, the faces of my companions distort and blur in garish colour while their voices varied in extremes of volume, startling and discordant. I saw land just off the boat side, long grasses flattening and bobbing at the wind’s command. I heard and smelt the rain. But most disturbingly of all, and I could not shake it off, I sometimes saw the disembodied head of Colin McGrath. He leered at me, smirking, shining beads of sweat dripping down his forehead. Quivering with soundless laughter, he would whisper words I could not at first make out. Gradually, very gradually, as his appearances became more frequent, his voice became more strident and I heard the self-congratulation in his tone: ‘Won’t last five minutes at sea,’ he said.

  Too many days went by. Seven or eight. Seven by Joe’s notches. Seven tortured days of battling with the blatantly uncompromising sun and seven dispiriting nights, taking turns to row through the blank, negating darkness to find, at dawn, the same. The same unyielding skyline, the same endless chasm of rolling water.

  ‘We missed them! We’ve bloody missed them.’ Mick finally said it. He turned away, grim-faced, from the brittle glimmer of the cold morning sun that crept up slowly, setting the eastern rim alight. He was brave enough to verbalise the fears we’d all been nursing for a day or more. The rowers stopped one by one and turned to look at him. No one spoke. In the half-light, the sun’s pale rays caught each face, anxiously peering eastwards, and painted them a lifeless white. Except for Mick’s. He stood with the rising sun behind him, his face still bathed in shadow. Others stood too then, cold and cramped, but startled up by Mick’s bald statement of a suspected truth that none of us had been willing to concede. By our earlier reckoning, we should have landed on the Canary Islands two days ago. ‘It’s been too long. We’ve missed them,’ he repeated, looking from one face to the next as if he hoped one of us might contradict him. A cold clutch of familiar fear stole shadowlike across me, lightening my insides and tightening hard within my throat. I had been determined not to think it, to ignore its possibility, and now Mick had let it out.

  ‘How the fuck can we have missed ’em? We can’t have bloody missed ’em.’ Billy threw down his oar in exasperation and got up. ‘We’ve kept our course. We’ve used the stars. Fucking hell, we’ve used the bloody compass.’

  ‘I don’t know how we’ve bloody well done it, but we have,’ snapped Mick. ‘We’ll just have to turn around and go back to find ’em.’

  ‘It’s that bastard in the U-boat. He told us wrong,’ Murack, gruff and bleary-eyed in the stern, still had not forgiven our enigmatic benefactor for the unforthcoming cigarettes.

  ‘He did not. Of course he didn’t. What the fuck would be the point of that? We’ve just gone past them. If we turn round now, it won’t take us long to find ’em.’ Mick tried again, this time looking to the captain for his support. ‘We must be fairly close.’

  Billy, casting round to place the blame, then turned angrily and, jerking his head towards the skipper and Clarie in the prow, shouted down the boat at Joe, ‘Give them the bloody compass, will you? At least they’ll know how to bloody use it.’

  Joe had been standing quietly by his oar listening to the struggle between panic and persuasion rising in Mick’s voice. At Billy’s challenge, his face, stark in the white light of dawn, registered anger for one second, though he recovered quickly; he replaced it with a raised eyebrow and, putting his hands into his pockets, he smiled wryly and shook his head. ‘Not sure it’ll be that much use to ’em at this point, Bill. Seems we don’t actually know where the bloody hell we are.’

  ‘We’re close, I’m telling you, I know we are. We must be
. We can’t be bloody that far off,’ Mick insisted. ‘Captain? We should stay round here to find ’em?’

  ‘All we know, Mick, is that we’re fucking well not where we should be,’ Billy yelled, frustration at Mick’s unwarranted conviction compounding his fury. ‘In fact, we could be bloody anywhere! Fuck knows how far we’ve bloody drifted. There’s been no wind. We make fuck all progress in the night. The bloody currents’ve probably taken us miles off where we bloody should be. Jesus! We probably haven’t even reached the bastards yet.’ Suddenly struck by the implications of his own analysis, Billy flung himself heavily back down onto his seat and, cradling his forehead in his hands, he rubbed his eyes with the heels of his palms. ‘All we actually know, you stupid bastard, is that we’re fucked!’

  The captain sighed and shook his head slowly, ‘I’m sorry, Mick, but Billy’s got a point. We’ve no idea how close we are, if at all. Could well have drifted while we’ve not been rowing and who knows how far we could be from them now. There’s no way of telling. But whether we’ve actually gone right past them or not, we’ve no other choice but to push on now for Africa.’

  ‘What?’ Mick exploded. ‘You’re joking, aren’t you? You can’t mean it! You said yourself we’ve no idea how close we are! Africa? It could be fucking miles! You must be out of your friggin’ mind!’

  Captain Edwards eyed him apprehensively. ‘Mick, we might row around in the middle of this little bit of ocean for days, weeks, and never find the Canaries now. For a start, the bloody boat’s so low in the water, we could pass within ten miles of one of them and still not bloody see it. But if we head east for Africa, we’re sure to hit the coast at some point. We can’t miss that.’

  ‘We’ll never make it!’ Mick shrieked. ‘We haven’t got the water. We haven’t got the strength. It could take us days. You’ve no idea how long. You’re fucking mad. We haven’t got a hope in hell. Look at us!’ He waved a frantic arm towards the ghostly faces staring at him through the fading remnants of the night. ‘We’ll all be dead before we get there.’

  ‘With all due respect, sir, he’s right.’ It was unlike Clarie to speak out against the skipper but he looked aghast, as much by Mick’s assessment as by the captain’s new proposal. ‘We haven’t got enough water. We can last two, maybe three more days on what we’ve got. If we stick around by here, we might strike lucky and happen upon one of the islands before we run out. But Africa?’ He shook his head and glanced up across at Mick. ‘Even if Mick’s right and we’ve gone past the islands, then the water we’ve got left might just last us till we get there. If we’re lucky. But if we haven’t even reached ’em yet, if we’ve been drifting, and we turn east,’ he clicked his tongue and looking down, folded his arms. ‘It’s gonna be one helluva lot longer than a couple of days. We’ll never make it.’

  ‘Then we’ll have to cut the ration and pray that Mick is right,’ the captain shrugged impatiently. Frowning, he began to work the knuckle of his wrist across his brow. ‘One tablespoon of water at every meal. It will keep us all alive. Just. The inner Canaries are less than a hundred miles from the coast, and if we’re in the right vicinity we’ll have enough. But if we stay here we could go round and round in circles and never find the land we’re after. There’s an awful lot of ocean and they’re very small Canaries. We just can’t risk, with what we’ve got left, missing them again. Hell, we can’t even assume that we’ve actually got anywhere near them!’ He shook his head and throwing up his hands, appealed from one face to the next, ‘No. We have to head east now towards the coast. It’s the only chance we’ve got. Fraser, what do you say?’

  Fraser’s vote would swing it, we all knew. And he would carry Mick. But he was slow to answer. He was prudent and he was shrewd: he could not be rushed. He knew, probably as well as we did, that he was about to decide our fate one way or the other. As he deliberated, I looked around the faces that were watching him expectantly.

  The sun’s light was good enough now to show up every hideous detail. A week’s worth of wasting had taken its toll. Layer upon layer of sunburn had darkened every feature, and scorched by overexposure, noses, brows and ears had blistered into crusted, yellowing sores. Leathery skin racked taut and painful over protruding bones before collapsing, flaccid, into sunken eye sockets and hollowed-out crêpe-paper cheeks. Lips, no longer lips, but merely fraying, puckered slits around gaping holes, had cracked and split and cracked again, ensuring any movement of the mouth was a stinging torment. Scratchy hair cropped up in scrappy patches and skinny necks showed every sinew. And their eyes. Their eyes looked wider, hounded. Ringed in red, they strained. They strained with hope and hatred, with horror and also with despair.

  If Fraser chooses Africa, I thought, not all of these will make it home with Joe and me. Some are old, some are weaker. We would not all survive it. Some won’t live much longer on such little water. And it looked more than likely now that our water would run out before we reached the land, a land that, given that we no longer had any real idea of our position, could turn out to be hundreds of miles away. Which of them, I wondered, would not be with us? Obtusely taking refuge in the complacency of youth, my mind refused to countenance the possibility that it would be Joe or me, or both of us, who did not make it. That I had influenced his decision to stay upon this lifeboat was undeniable: the other had most probably made land by now. And I knew the secret solace that alone sustained his spirit, the imperative that demanded his survival: Maggie’s heart depended on it. The recurrence of these burdening thoughts, if we were to face an even greater journey, unsettled me entirely. It bound him to me further, and the idea that he was more at risk because of me made the loss of him unendurable. We would suffer with the rest of them, but somehow we had to be exempt from the most obvious conclusion to our increasingly perilous situation.

  ‘Skipper’s right,’ Fraser said eventually. ‘Might never find ‘em if we stay round here. Can’t miss the coast of Africa. We should go east.’ Mick started swearing, Clarie too. Others waded in, voices shrill with fear and panic at the prospect of a journey which might take us to the very edge of life, to death. Yet risking the alternative seemed almost certain to do just that, and Fraser had decided. ‘We should go east,’ he said again, more firmly.

  Later, under the tortuous misery of the midday sun, Moley threw down his tin of water in demented anguish. He shouted. For days he had been drinking from the sea and feverish now, his mind, seeping at the edges, misgave under the pressure of our change in circumstance.

  He stood up, alarmed, and raved at Fraser and then the captain, ‘We ain’t never gonna make it. Of course we ain’t. We ain’t never. Canaries are round here somewhere, they can’t be fucking that far off. Africa! You’re fucking mad. We ain’t never gonna make it.’ Before any of us could stop him, he started lurching, making towards the back end of the boat. In the stern, he got unsteadily up on the ledge. Without warning or a backward glance, he threw himself into the water. He began to swim away.

  Slow in the heavy heat, half-awake and uncertain for some seconds that what we had just witnessed had actually taken place, we all sat staring at the empty space where Moley had been standing.

  Mac, the nearest to his point of exit and the quickest to react, stood up and, swaying to the rhythm of the boat, started shouting after him, ‘You stupid bastard. You stupid fucking bastard! Get back here.’ Moley took no notice and kept on flailing forwards, taken on the waves in bursts and falls away from us. Tomas, Joe and I staggered to our feet, squinting blindly after him into the glaring sun. From prone to standing in such hammering heat, it took some effort and some moments after to feel steady.

  ‘Moley, what’s the use? Come back! Moley! You’ll die. You’ll never make it!’ Joe yelled after him.

  ‘Ah, let him die,’ Mac said, suddenly impatient, sitting down again. ‘Let him go if he wants to. Stupid fucker.’

  ‘We can’t just leave him. Turn the boat around,’ I shouted, not daring to take my eyes away from Moley’s slowly reced
ing head and shoulders, which as he crested each wave would disappear from view until the next one brought him up, into our sights again. I stood, hesitating, appealing to those behind me, those nearer to the oars, without actually looking at them. Eventually though, their lack of action forced my attention away from Moley and back into the boat.

  Some, still seated, were watching Moley’s progress with detached disinterest while others had lain down again and closed their eyes. Unmoved.

  ‘We’ve gotta help him. Look at him! He’ll drown,’ I yelled. ‘Turn the boat around!’ I began to move frantically up towards the centre of the boat, stepping on and over others, trying to seek out Captain Edwards’ eye. He at least, standing next to Clarie in the prow, was watching Moley’s struggle with the sea. He saw me come stumbling towards him and held my gaze just long enough for me to register his resignation of the responsibility for Moley’s fate. And then he dropped his eyes and also sat back down. No one had the energy, the inclination even, to exercise concern or care.

  ‘Mick! Mick?’ I swung around, beseeching, to the right, to where Mick usually could be found. I felt desperate. I could feel the pricking behind my eyes that as a child had come to me with panic or with anger, even fear. As if the abandonment of Moley somehow meant the abandonment of our humanity; the people we had been, stripped bare and to the bone, surrendering to those we’d now become, self-preserving, cold-eyed and pitiless. I was not ready to let it go.

  ‘Mick!’ I cried again. But Mick was sitting bolt upright, looking out determinedly across the ocean, away from me, away from Moley. He would not hear me.

  I turned back, winded by their indifference, by the heartless lethargy that had settled over them, transforming them into lesser men.

  By this time, Moley was twenty, maybe thirty yards away. He disappeared between the drop and sway of the waves for longer and we could not now hear his intermittent cries. I scrambled back towards the stern, ready to try alone, but Joe, reading the intention in my eyes, stepped across in front of me. He did not try to stop me but he looked into my face. Impossible to ignore, his was fraught with all the agony of thwarted courage. His eyes, grief-stricken by unaccustomed impotence, decried the striking weakness in his body that prevented him from doing that which he felt, with all his spirit, compelled to do.