The Boat

by Clara Salaman

  Start Reading

  About this Book

  About the Author

  Table of Contents

  www.headofzeus.com

  For Paul.

  And for David Sanders RIP.

  Drowning

  Johnny went about the business of suicide with a remarkable soundness of mind. When he was satisfied that the entire sea was his alone, land being so far away that even birds had been dropping and dying with exhaustion on the deck, he took his hand off the tiller and let the bows of the boat nose round into the wind. He stared out at the red-tipped waves, lit by a dawn that beckoned nothing good. The sails were thrashing about furiously above his head but he didn’t hear them. After a long while he turned and looked up at the flapping canvas with eyes that had already died; they shone a dull green from his dark, sun-beaten face making him appear much older than his twenty-one years.

  He stood up, rolled in the genoa, uncleated the mainsheet and stepped up on to the deck. He began heaving down the heavy mainsail, folding it back on itself, tying each sail-tie with methodical care, his body balancing easily on the rolling deck while the dark water beneath winked pinkly up at him. When the sail was neatly packed away for the last time he went back down into the cockpit and disappeared below deck.

  The saloon was a mess: spilt food all over the floor, clothing that he only faintly recognized tossed here and there, cups and glasses, empty cartons and plastic wrappers, the detritus of various lives strewn across the boat. He wondered that he hadn’t noticed the mess before. The dividing panel between the galley and the saloon had a big dent in the cheap wood, a scar he vaguely remembered. He went through the boat, picking up armfuls of rubbish and chucking it into black bin bags before stuffing the bags into the lockers underneath the saloon seats. He emptied the shelves and put the books and other assorted obsolete things into his old sleeping bag, which he bundled inside a cupboard.

  The only thing of any beauty on board was the brass sextant. He picked it up and held it in his fingers; it was no more than a relic now, much like himself. He stepped out into the cockpit and stood at the stern facing the rising sun, which was hanging precariously above the sea, a bold pink globe carrying on regardless. He threw the sextant as far as he could out into the water, the red light bouncing off the brass as it spun through the air. He didn’t watch its splash but turned and went back down to the saloon to get on with what had to be done.

  When everything was cleared away, pots and pans in lockers, cushions stuffed into crevices, he caught sight of himself in the bathroom mirror and was surprised by what he saw: he was wearing a black suit and a dicky bow as if he’d stepped out of some fancy party. Both the jacket and the trousers hung loosely on his skinny frame but they seemed as good as any other clothes to die in. He kicked off his trainers and went through to the galley, breathing in deeply, looking out at the dawn light beyond the cockpit, his body as always in tune with the irregular movement of the boat; from the soles of his feet to the tips of his fingers, he was primed and balanced to the rhythm of the waves, the muscles in his core always that one beat ahead of nature’s drum. Only his eyes were unmoving, focused somewhere beyond horizons.

  His fingers moved first and reached for the galley drawer. He pulled it open and found the big kitchen knife. It had served many purposes and now had one more vital role to perform. But it needed to be sharp. He sat down on the galley step and spent a few careful minutes sharpening the blade, watching the sun dance about on the gleaming surface.

  Then he paused before making his way through the saloon to the heads. He bent down on his knees beside the toilet and hung his head as if in prayer, despising the weakness of his own body – he was trembling all over. He took another deep breath, raised the knife and determinedly cut through both the outlet and the inlet pipes, watching as the water began to pour in. There was no going back now. Slowly he stood up, eyes fixed on the gushing pipes, the coldness of the seawater reaching his feet. It sloshed about the floor as the boat rolled in the waves. He watched, mesmerized, as it filled the cubicle floor, rising over his toes, immersing his feet and spilling over the base of the door frame and into the saloon. He turned, sloshing through it, and went back to his seat on the companionway steps, detached and yet fascinated as the water swept noisily from side to side, filling every cranny, darkening all in its path, seeping fast across the naff carpet, consuming everything in its way. It rose up the table legs and continued its journey in silence. He sat there quite transfixed, feeling the sun burn on the back of his neck, knowing that he would be next; he too would soon be swallowed up.

  When the water rose to his knees, he stood up. Everything that was going to float was doing so. The toilet brush was bobbing about with the salt and pepper pots by the shelves; a small armband floated through from the forepeak cabin. He stared at the cartoon dolphins on the transparent plastic, watching as it bobbed jauntily across the chart table. He turned around and climbed the companionway steps and stood in the cockpit looking out into the empty sea: 360 degrees of nothing. He looked up into the pale morning blueness of the sky, aware of a throbbing in his body as the blood pumped around him noisily; it seemed ironic that right now he should be feeling more alive than he had done in a long time, as if life was giving him a little reminder out of pure spite. If he could have wept he might have wept then but his eyes were dry, all spent.

  It didn’t take long before the detritus spilt out into the cockpit and pretty quickly the weight of the water began to gently but firmly tug the stern downwards. Johnny stepped out on to the transom and smoothly slid his body into the water where the coldness took his breath away, biting at his skin. He should have been prepared for that. He kicked his legs and swam away from the boat. He didn’t want to go like that, sucked down with her and her dirty cargo. He turned to watch her sink, feeling the weight of his clothes clinging to his body, dragging him down. On her stern he could see where he’d painted over her name: a futile gesture; as if he could ever have erased that curled looped lettering from existence: Little Utopia. Then suddenly the bows began to tip up into the air as the pull of the deep overwhelmed her, the top of the mast plummeting towards him, pointing accusingly as it fell. He trod water as she began to sink, dipping his head beneath the waves, the rush of the cold sea filling his ears and eyes. He blinked into the blue. There she hung half suspended, the wrong way round, belly up, leaning to the port side. He came up for air; they were almost graceful, her dying moments, her nose proudly sniffing at the sky, the last rise before the fall. Then she began to drop, quietly and smoothly slipping beneath the waves.

  All that was left was a vortex of bubbles and a faint pulling at his legs. He snatched another breath and ducked his head beneath the waves to see her dropping fast, like a stone, pitching and rolling as she waltzed to her death. He watched until she was just a shadow and the blue became an inky black and he could see her no more. He lifted his head out of the water and gasped for air, staring at the surface where a foamy flatness had taken her place. Two large bubbles, final belches from the deep, burst into the air and then there was nothing – just him and the knowledge that his own absence would be next.

  He could hear the sharp outtakes of his own breath as the waves lifted and dropped him like a piece of flotsam. He wondered then whether perhaps he should have weighted himself down, tied himself to the mast or strapped himself to a berth, but the very idea of being forever entwined with that boat made him glad he’d not thought that far ahead. He wouldn’t last long, he was sure of that; he’d taken all the aspirin left in the medicine tin. He would drift off soon. He closed his eyes, laid his head back into the water and opened out his body to the sky.

  He wasn’t cold any more. His body felt unusually weightless. As he lay there he could feel the water bec
oming his ally; it carried and caressed him, was as soothing as a balm. He let himself move as one with the waves like a turtle floating on the surface, his spread-eagled limbs seemingly indistinguishable from the water itself, the same temperature, formless, merging together. The warmth of the sun was the same as the warmth of his own body; there was no divide between himself and his environment and he didn’t remember ever feeling such extraordinary unity with his surroundings. Except with her, of course.

  He must have drifted off for when he opened his eyes again the sun had slunk right down the sky and he’d forgotten that he was drowning in the Mediterranean Sea. He thought for a moment that he was lying on the sand dunes or in the back garden, a cool wind rousing him from his slumber. He gazed up through the canopy of blue, his mind seeking the blackness beyond. Thousands and thousands of feet above him he could see the faint white trail of an aeroplane. He thought of the people up there, all dry and safe, going about their businesses, opening sachets, adjusting headrests, shuffling newspapers, snoozing, heads full of meetings or mergers, leading their lives, being alive, unaware of the end of his small existence. Then the feathery trail melted too quickly into the blueness and an intense, unbearable loneliness took root in him.

  He tried to keep hold of the good feelings, the unity, the lack of otherness he had felt a while ago, but the good feelings were all gone now, replaced with a hollow kind of dread. His body had lost its lightness; the weight of the suit was dragging him down. Even the elements had turned hostile: the waves were breaking over his face and the chill of the water had begun to sting his flesh and the shadows of clouds crossing the sun kept stealing his warmth. The sun itself was abandoning him; he watched it bounce about on the edge of the world like a great orange ball. He lifted his head and with each rise of the waves he checked the horizon: snatches of emptiness everywhere. There was nothing and nobody at all to die with. And it would be dark soon. A tiny flag of panic waved from somewhere in his gut; such smallness and insignificance could terrify a man who didn’t want to die. He hadn’t thought it would be like this; he had thought that drowning was meant to be swift. But he understood that the guilty do not deserve the luxury of an easy death. He should have tied himself to the mast and sunk to the bottom where he belonged.

  He looked down at his hands shining greenly through the water. He was aware now of the roughness in his throat and the stinging of his lips. A pain jabbed across his middle; he needed to pee but felt incapable of doing so; his stomach was tight. At last he felt the warmth of his urine spread across his thighs and only when he had finished did it strike him how incredibly cold he had become. The sky in the east was already darkening and the wind was up, white horses dancing on the sea.

  Then something else caught his eye. He thought he saw the pale hull of a cargo ship on the horizon, dipping and bobbing in and out of his sight. Instinctively he kicked his legs, his body betraying his mind. What did he care about rescue? There was no salvation for him. He stopped moving, laid his head back in the water and looked up at the sky. A wave broke over his face and he coughed and spluttered for air, downing a mouthful of sea water. He caught a flash of the ship again, this time realizing that they were on the same bearing. Only he’d got the scale of it wrong: it wasn’t a ship at all. It was a fender – a white fender that he recognized. It must have come up from the deep, risen from the wreckage. He felt an affinity with it. There they were, two floating things in a watery wilderness.

  He could barely move his limbs even if he’d wanted to, they’d become leaden and useless, waving like planks of wood as the coldness rattled in his bones. Panting and spitting water he watched as the fender bobbed towards him, only a matter of feet away now, taunting him with a brief respite from this struggle. He couldn’t stop himself, he reached out and grabbed hold of it, hauling it in towards his body, resting his head against its scratched, solid surface, gasping for air, his eyes focusing in on all the scuffs and stains, wondering whether this was going to make dying easier or harder.

  Something soft brushed against his legs and he looked down at the trailing fender rope. He pulled it up with his clumsy, frozen fingers. The rope was caught on a heavy piece of fabric. He brought it up to the surface. A small, cracked cry escaped from his throat and his heart thrashed about violently in his chest, briefly pumping life into the numbness. It was her prayer mat, all darkened and made heavy by the water, but most definitely it was her little prayer mat! A tiny piece of her had come back for him. She would have called it a sign.

  His fingers, rigid as rods of steel, made heavy work of untangling the rope. His juddering teeth proved more capable and he bit his way down it, loosening the carpet inch by inch until eventually he worked it free, heaving it out of the water and on to the fender, passing the rope behind his body, his hands grabbing uselessly at each other. He tried jabbing the end of the rope through the eye at the top of the fender. By chance he succeeded and tightened off the slack, but it was dark by the time he’d tied the two half-hitches needed to keep him there and his body had begun to tremble uncontrollably.

  1

  The Beginning

  Johnny’s dad had asked Rob and him to look out for the girls on the beach while he went to the chandler’s in Padstow. They’d intended to do the brotherly thing, but Rob had ended up buying some dope off the lifeguard and they’d sat on the sand dunes getting stoned in the sunshine. They’d lost track of the girls hours ago. The last Johnny had seen of them, they were mucking about in the rock pools doing whatever it was that eleven-year-old girls did.

  Johnny lay there sifting hot sand through his fingers, turning a perfect heart-shaped little piece of slate over in his hand, feeling the warm sun on his back, discussing the merits of trimarans versus catamarans with Rob, when his attention was caught by Sarah’s little friend over Rob’s right shoulder, up high in the sand dunes beyond. She was perched at the very top, back to the sea, poised, knees bent, arms stretched out in front of her. He wondered what she was doing. She looked like an animal about to pounce, her attention firmly fixed on the whispering grasses in front of her. Then, to his immense surprise – he was pretty wrecked – she threw herself backwards high up into the air, forming a perfectly piked backwards somersault, gracefully flying through the blue Cornish sky. She landed neatly on her feet at the bottom of the dune, facing the sea, before skipping forwards on to the harder wetter sand.

  Johnny choked on the spliff. ‘Rob! Did you see that?’

  Rob gave a cursory glance over his shoulder. ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘Watch Clemmie!’

  So they both watched as she climbed back up the dune, scrabbling nimbly up the sand, like a sun-kissed nymph in her blue and white stripy swimming costume, Johnny noticing the tan lines on her perky little bum. She jumped sideways to avoid Sarah who was doing rather heavy forward rolls down the dune.

  ‘Wait for it!’ he said to Rob, leaning on one elbow, making himself comfortable, eyes on this new vision: her strong, brown limbs, her copper hair blowing about wildly in the salty breeze. How on earth could he not have noticed her before? Even the sunlight seemed to be lighting her differently today, as if she were something that had to be highlighted. Two minutes ago she hadn’t even registered in his mind – of course he’d known her for years as his little sister’s friend, and she’d been down to Cornwall a couple of times, but he’d never paid her any real attention. For the first time he was seeing her, as if he had borrowed some binoculars and there she was in sharp focus, Sarah’s friend, a whole new species: a ‘Clemency Bailey’. Once again, she took her position, frozen, poised, and then threw herself backwards fearlessly, arching and twisting against the sky but this time, open-bodied, slow and leisurely.

  Rob sat up and wolf-whistled her. She turned around then and saw them watching her and she took a deep, flourishing, theatrical bow before scrabbling back up to the top again.

  ‘She’s going to be a right little heartbreaker,’ Rob said, but Johnny could tell that his mind was back on tri
marans, which suited him just fine; he preferred watching her over his shoulder, having her all to himself.

  Then later that night everyone had gone for a walk along the surf because the moon was full – his mum was always coming up with hippie reasons for excursions – and on the way back to the cottage Clemmie had declared that she was going to go swimming and he had found himself deliberately dawdling, saying to no one in particular, ‘I’d better keep an eye on her, there’s a rip tide.’ Even when she’d said she didn’t need an eye on her, she was almost twelve, big enough to swim without eyes on her, still he’d sat down on the dry sand at the water’s edge as the others wandered back.

  ‘I’ll have a smoke then,’ he said and she’d shrugged her shoulders.

  ‘It’s a free country.’

  And he’d been quite taken aback by the carefree way she had pulled her dress over her head and taken off her knickers without so much as a backwards glance at him. Then he’d watched her run into the sea, shrieking in the waves as they knocked her over, the moonlight shining on her naked body.

  ‘Come in!’ she yelled to him as he sat there on the sand and it had felt good to be invited into her watery world where all the fun was going on. She wasn’t to know that Johnny never went in the cold British sea, only on it. Even when capsizing dinghy sailing, he prided himself on never getting wet; he’d neatly step on to the centreboard, straddling the hull and righting the boat, barely wetting a toe.

  ‘Chicken Licken!’ she shouted, diving under a wave, disappearing into the water, the starry night her backdrop.

  ‘Come in, Johnny!’ She was waving at him, slippery and shining. He felt for the first time as if he was in the wrong place, here, dry on the beach, when it looked so much better over there with her in the water.

  ‘Help!’ she cried, pretending to drown. ‘Shark!’ She went under and stuck her legs up in the air, walking on her hands.