That night we rowed in pairs. We laid Murack by the stern sheets and though he moaned a little as we lifted him, he hardly roused. I took an oar with Tomas, Joe with Mac, the four of us cramped in along the last, long seat towards the stern. The skipper organised two other groups of four to row along the middle one and up by the prow, and we forced ourselves to work, pulling rhythmically against the heavy darkness. All the time, it seemed to push us backwards, taunting us to labour on, to make it through another never-ending night and greet again the disappointing dawn. Mick and four of the others were not rowing and would take over later and as they were quiet, I assumed that they were sleeping. The rowers did not talk much either. It took all our strength and concentration to keep in time, to keep on heaving against the weighty blackness of the sea. The only sounds, above the drop and swish of water, were the steady thud and chink of oars as they were pushed and pulled against the rowlocks and the low, pained grunts of struggling men.
‘Stop! Stop a minute! Stop!’ Mick was suddenly up and on his feet, waving his arms about and hollering down the boat at all of us. ‘Stop your oars! Can you hear them? I hear breakers. I swear I can hear breakers!’ In an instant, we were still, trying to hold back our panting breath and stay the blood which still pounded in our ears after such an effort rowing. Some of us stood up as if the added height might improve our hearing and transfixed, we waited, staring out into the layers of darkness.
‘I don’t hear ’em,’ Big Sam whispered, after several minutes. ‘You imagined it.’
‘Shhh!’ snapped Mick. And again we waited, listening so intently that I began to think I could hear the minutes, on wisps of shadow, passing softly by. ‘There. There, you hear it?’ breathed Mick.
‘Yes! Bloody hell, yes! I thought I did. Just then,’ Captain Edwards broke the spell and moved excitedly across to Mick.
‘Shh! Wait. Listen… listen.’ Fraser murmured and again we stopped, stock-still, concentrating all our thoughts on picking up the long desired sound of waters somersaulting in the shallows and racing up the shore to land.
‘I can hear it!’ yelped Billy suddenly. ‘You? You must’ve heard it then?’ He turned to Clarie beside him and Clarie began to nod thoughtfully, as if wanting to agree but still considering.
‘We should stop here,’ Billy cried, grasping Captain Edwards’ arm and shaking it. ‘We can’t risk going on, surely! We must have made it!’ He turned towards the rest of us, already celebrating. ‘We must have fucking made it!’
‘Now just hold on. Just wait a second,’ Fraser’s voice came calmly from the prow. ‘I haven’t heard anything yet.’ He looked towards the skipper. ‘Are you sure?’
‘I thought I did… before. I can’t hear it now,’ the captain said, less certain.
‘I can,’ insisted Mick, ‘just above the breeze. It’s not just the waves, it’s different. I’m sure of it.’
‘I think I can,’ Clarie said slowly, tilting his head to one side, face screwed up in concentration.
I looked at Joe and eyebrows raised, nodded the question at him. He made a wry face and shrugged uncertainly.
‘We should put down the sea anchor. Sit it out here tonight. We can’t risk drifting off away from it, if there’s land.’ There was doubt behind the captain’s voice, and this was more of an appeal directed towards Fraser than a decision.
‘If there’s land. We’ll lose time.’ Fraser, sighing, looked up towards the noncommittal stars as if they might, by some unlikely act of graciousness, provide the answer. ‘We’re so low on water,’ he said as if to himself as he rubbed a slow hand across the roughness of his jaw.
‘We won’t need the fucking water if there’s land,’ pushed Mick, convinced. ‘And there was those birds. Maybe they weren’t frigging Carey chickens. C’mon!’ he looked around from one face to the next, willing all of us to take a chance and believe in it. ‘We must stop here!’
The prospect was too tantalising to ignore. We pulled up the oars, threw the sea anchor over and then lay awake. Initially, I was all too relieved to give up rowing and flop down beside my seat to sleep, but night is cruel and darkness is a fiend that feeds on fear. Could Mick really hear the breakers or had he been beguiled by the cold, sardonic sea? I tried to hear it, the all-elusive sound of curling water, hurrying forward towards the sands before finally flicking over in a frenzied crush of foam. I thought I could, but then I couldn’t and then I heard it once again.
Lying there in the swaying blackness, the only constant the silent stars, I could imagine that I might hear so many things: the clattering of breakfast plates muffled by my pillow, Father calling out my name to rouse me, my mother’s bright but tuneless hum. Could I really hear the breakers?
I must have dozed, for when I opened my eyes again the light was coming. Joe was not lying across from me as he usually did and so sitting up, shivering and numb, I looked around. He was up in the prow, standing in the shadow of the dawn, next to Mick. They were not talking. They were looking out across the miles of undulating grey before them, no longer scouring, but in an attitude of contemplation. Joe’s hand was on Mick’s back, high up between his shoulder blades, so that his fingers curled a little at Mick’s neck. It conveyed a calm and simple understanding. And so I knew there was no land.
Murack was already dead. Tomas woke and found him, stiff and staring, and so he screamed, long and hard and raw, beyond control. All the wretched anguish of his soul, at that which every one of us was being forced to suffer, struck me in that scream, sounding through the depths beneath my being and thrusting me up close to share his horror. The hairs on the back of my neck and on my forearms stood on end and I sat still, sickened with the fear of it. He screamed until Mac grabbed and shook him angrily, pushing him away from Murack’s corpse. Unnerved, none of us knew how to help him and so we busied ourselves with the morning’s water and kept away. Tomas sat alone, by the mast, wide-eyed and yet unseeing, until Joe, hands in pockets, ambled over and tried to talk. Getting no response, he leaned against the mast-shaft and in his own discomfort began to hum softly to himself.
There was nothing left on the boat that we could use to weigh Murack’s body down and so we dropped it over and watched it float away. With limbs splayed out upon the shifting waters, it rocked aimlessly behind the boat, shifting on the waves one way, then another. As the boat began to move away, his body lurched and rolled at the disturbance of the water in our wake. I turned away. It was too hard and I did not want to see.
Forced to persist in an existence so abhorrent, so beyond all that I could bear to comprehend, I felt my mind begin to fray. I struggled to maintain the sequence of my thoughts that fractured and fragmented, and for short periods in the daylight hours, I lost all sense of time, perspective and even purpose. Unsteadied by such harsh reality, the foundations of my being faltered and I found myself doubting my ability to endure. I feared for it, I feared that I would give up wanting it.
But Joe was there and he insisted on it. Twice, he brought my water ration to me, when I, half-delirious in the heat and soused in sleepy semi-consciousness, failed to notice that it was time. Sometimes, slipping under would have been so very easy but he refused to let me go. He talked to me; he made me listen. He talked of getting home, of who was waiting. He painted pictures with his words of the life we both had yet to live. He talked to me about his marriage and he smiled at Maggie’s pleasure in my acquaintance. And when his mouth became too dry to talk, he sat on by me, humming quietly. He insisted that I took an interest, that I believed with him in the beauty of what seemed scarcely possible out here, in this barely floating boat on the timeless and unending ocean. And it was Joe who got me up to watch the porpoises.
‘C’mon,’ he said, ‘get up. You should see them. You wouldn’t believe, so close to us, that they could be so energetic, so full of life. They’re playing, Cub! Remember that?’
For two long days, they came and danced and dived around us, leaping out between the waves, turning and spinning in the gleam
ing pearls of lustrous spray, before racing off ahead to double back and best us once again. They seemed to revel in their athletic bodies, glory in the sun and sea, take delight even in our lifeless company.
Big Sam knelt down by the boat’s side and leaned out, as far as he could manage, waggling a ship’s biscuit to and fro in his hand. He began to tut and click encouragingly.
‘Jesus, what the fuck d’you think you’re doin’?’ Billy, thick with heat, had woken up and, turning to try to find a more comfortable position, had noticed Big Sam’s efforts.
‘If we could get one near enough, we could kill it. One of us could stab it. Or what about that spanner? Mebbe bash it.’ Sam’s eyes were wild, fervent with the thought of it. He gurgled manically. ‘We could eat it.’
‘It’s a flaming porpoise, not a fucking dog! They eat fish, you fucking moron!’ snarled Billy. He rolled back over and, hunching up, closed his eyes. Big Sam, however, was not to be discouraged but the porpoises just laughed at him, leaping and diving before his hand, rejoicing in their liberty, a yard or so beyond his reach.
‘You know, people think that they are mermaids,’ Joe said to me, as we cramped up by the boat’s edge, our heads cradled sideways along thin and shrivelled arms. ‘That old sailors, desperate for a woman’s company, saw them in the distance and thought they’d seen a mermaid.’ He sounded wistful and I looked at him. He was sitting quietly. Still. I had realised that his capacity for movement, so previously irrepressible, had gradually declined and I had reassured myself with the thought that it was only to be expected. But I had never seen him so absolutely still; in body, so defeated.
I did not reply. I did not tell him that he had reminded me of a story that my mother used to tell me when I was small. About the mermaids who came before a storm. How they swam before a ship about to wreck and how they sang so sweetly of delights beneath the fathomless deep. Their singing bade the ill-fated seamen on, seducing them, consoling them with promises of the pleasures they were now destined to enjoy.
I closed my eyes and waited for the evening and the lifting of the sun’s relentless scourge. Then I hoped I might find more comfort in the revival of my more rational self.
That night, while we were rowing, I was distracted from the steady thrust and slacking of the oars, by a slight scuffle from behind. In the darkness, intent only on the rhythm of the rowers, their heaving breath and the mild slapping of the waves protesting at our inoffensive progress, I was deliberately oblivious to all else. It meant I did not have to think.
So I was slow to turn. But as I did, Jack’s voice broke out hoarsely, cutting across the boat’s hypnotic motion, and rousing me from the numbness of my mental isolation. ‘Moses. Hey, Moses! Whatcha doin’? Moses?’ His tone began to rise in panic, ‘Where the fuck d’you think you’re…? Moses! Don’t!’
I glanced over my shoulder quickly and in that single instant caught the fleeting impression of Moses’ arcing body, black and crescent-shaped, emblazoned momentarily across the shining, perfect circle of the moon. She was full and low and luminous, the shattered shafts of her reflection densely scattered on the water, breaking up the blackness with an ever-shifting constancy of light.
Moses had dived, soundlessly, into the sea. He slipped between the welcoming waves without disturbance to the surface; no noise, no ripple, no change. The waters welcomed and enveloped him, closed above him as if he had returned where he belonged and should never have been away. Jack scrambled up and clamoured after him, scrabbling at the ledge to get up on to it, screaming out his name into the silence and the darkness. ‘Moses!’ he shrieked, high and raw and hollow. Joe, still seated, turned around and grasped at him, catching on and pulling at his trouser leg, but Mick was quicker, getting him by the shoulders and pulling him back, forcing him to stay down. ‘Moses!’ Jack, struggling to free himself and desperate, howled again. The name carried far across the watery wastes, echoing into nothing. There was no answer save for the soulless lapping of the night.
When I closed my eyes to sleep in the months and years that followed, sometimes I felt the ceaseless rocking of the boat; smelt again the sickening, salty smell of fear and heard the whisperings of the waters. But always, always, when I closed my eyes, I saw Moses’ body, its graceful arc, slashed dark across the beauty of the moon.
Jack suddenly gave it up and fell into Mick who tried to hold him up but could not bear his weight. He dropped him down and Jack crumpled into the bottom of the boat. He began to cry. This time, uninhibited, thick, dry sobs, which caught in his throat and stopped him breathing so that the scarcely intelligible words of his grief came out between each clutch at breath: ‘He saw things… said he saw things… the playin’ fields at home… his father callin’ him… he weren’t right, he weren’t himself… should’ve stopped him… should’ve known he weren’t right.’ His voice broke up and he folded in upon himself, tucking his arms in across his chest and doubling over, head tilted inwards so that he rocked upon his knees, to and fro, in the cold, filthy water, which continued to seep constantly through the wooden floor.
The rest of us listened in relative silence to the outpouring of Jack’s misery. We all knew too well now that the confusion brought on by hallucination was utterly disorientating but as the explanation for Moses’ suicide, it made such involuntary lapses of control all the more terrifying. If Moses’ mind had been so thoroughly addled that it had persuaded him to jump from the boat in the belief that he was doing something completely unconnected with his physical presence, then who knew what any one of us might do similarly, at the next bout of mental vulnerability.
Mick sat wearily down on the seat at Jack’s side and then leaned forward with his elbows resting on his knees and his hands clasped together so that they almost touched Jack’s hair each time his head came forward.
‘Don’t take it so hard now, lad,’ he murmured. ‘If he didn’t know what he was doing, he couldn’t’ve been too frightened, could he?’
Jack either could not hear or would not, for he continued on in his private ululation, rhythmically sobbing out the blackness of his sorrow and in doing so, pulling all of us frighteningly close to the gaping emptiness at its heart.
‘Don’t take on so, Jack. Think that he was thinking he was home,’ pleaded Mick, the soothing softness in his voice struggling to defy his own crushing awareness of the pointlessness of words in the face of such inconsolable anguish. ‘He weren’t afraid. Perhaps he’s better off. Come on, now, Jack, shush now. Shush…’
Mac, who rowed by Joe in the stern, jerked round suddenly, angrily, unable any longer to bear the raking torment of Jack’s grief across his taut, thinly flaying nerves.
‘Shut up. Just shut the fuck up, the pair of you!’ he yelled. ‘He was just a fuckin’ nigger, for God’s sake! He knew what he was doing. ‘Course he did! No fuckin’ strength of mind them darkies. Couldn’t face it, that we mayn’t make it. So he jumped. Easy way out. Typical nigger thinking. Now stop your friggin’ wailing. I’ve had about enough.’
There was a sudden, massive roar from the seat by the first oar, which clattered heavily on its rowlock as Big Sam shot up onto his feet. Arms bent and out in front, ready for the fight, he began to move towards the centre of the boat and I saw, in the silver line of light reflected down the length of blade, that he held his knife. Despite his loss in body weight and though now stooping slightly, his size was still formidable and as his enormous frame towered in the darkness, the boat bobbed gently at the jerky impetuosity of his action. His heavy head swung slowly from side to side so that at intervals, from where I sat, I could see the enormous whites of his eyes, caught in the moonlight, rolling in apoplectic fury. ‘I’m gonna fucking kill you Mackingtosh! I’m gonna slit your scrawny little throat. I swear I will. I’m gonna fucking kill you, you filthy piece of fucking shit, and then I’m gonna throw your bastard little body overboard.’
Provoked to a pitch beyond conscious control, he began to sway down the centre of the boat, paying no heed to w
hoever he knocked and stamped on in the process.
Fortunately for Mac, Big Sam had to make his way over two rows of seats and the bodies of most of the crew before he could get at him. It slowed his progress. Time enough for Joe to get to his feet and turn around, putting himself in front of Mac who cowered willingly behind him, crouching, ready to dive into the stern sheets or if necessary, judging by the stricken look of horror on his face, into the sea. I took a deep breath and, swallowing my reluctance but not my fear, got up slowly too and took my place a shoulder’s width from Joe, though he was swift to put out an arm to ward me back as Big Sam, storming onwards, was joined by Wallace, who got up to follow in his wake. Sam came to an abrupt, aggressive halt a foot away from Joe.
‘Get out the way, Joe.’
‘No.’
‘I’m fucking warning you. You get out my way.’
‘No.’
‘You think us fucking worthless niggers too?’ The steely-edged warning in Sam’s low tone promised predetermined violence. ‘Thought better of you, Joe.’
‘No.’
‘Did you hear what he said? I don’t want to kill you too, you bastard. But I will. For what he said. For the last time, you get out my way.’
Making Shore Page 15