The Boat

by Clara Salaman

  They sailed in silence, lifting and dipping with the waves. He was stretched out now, his arms behind him, holding on for support, his legs parted, his feet planted firmly on the other cockpit seat, his mind on something new.

  ‘Did you know that most early civilizations considered suicide as a completely honourable means of escaping an unbearable existence?’

  She did not know this, but she liked him talking. It normalized all this. Sometimes she just wanted to listen to the sound of his voice, telling her things, educating her, making her see things differently, being objective.

  ‘There never used to be any judgement attached to such a death,’ he said, looking back out to sea. She could see that he was more comfortable pondering the ethics of suicide than on the coal face of Annie’s misery. ‘Not until Socrates did anyone even question the morality of suicide.’

  ‘I’m not saying suicide in itself is wrong,’ Clem said, wanting to be a part of his logic, to be of some help. ‘Johnny and I once made a pact that if one of us should ever get diagnosed with a terminal illness, we’d get in the car and fume ourselves together.’ The idea now sounded slightly ridiculous to her; she couldn’t picture it any more. She supposed Frank must think her very childish.

  ‘Why not?’ he said, as if he didn’t really care one way or the other. ‘Suicide is a perfectly noble alternative to suffering.’

  Clem stared at him. It seemed an extraordinary thing to say given the state of affairs on the boat. ‘But what if Annie had succeeded? Would you still be saying that?’

  He held her eye. ‘I don’t think she wanted to succeed.’

  ‘But if Johnny hadn’t got to the boat…’

  ‘She knew someone would. It was a cry for help.’

  Sometimes his objectivity made him seem callous. ‘But why is she crying for help?’ she asked.

  ‘Why do any of us cry for help? Because we want comfort.’

  She couldn’t imagine him crying for help. It would be an impressive figure whom he sought comfort from; she would like to be privy to that. She wanted to see him weak and vulnerable, needing someone. Her, for example. He paused and tapped out a cigarette. He stooped to light it, cupping the flame from the wind. Then he reached out his hand and passed the cigarette to her. She liked it when he did that. She took it from his fingers, feeling the warmth of his skin as he turned his body around to face her. She could feel the hairs on her arm responding to his touch.

  ‘I suppose you’re leaving me now,’ he said gently and the way he said me made her heart beat a little faster and she wondered whether this was it, this was his cry for help. She took a drag of the cigarette.

  ‘Johnny wants to.’

  He nodded, looking down at his hands. She knew it was wrong, what with his wife down there with her slashed wrist, but she couldn’t help remembering the feel of that hand, those fingers inside her, his touch, moving to her rhythm, digging deep. She shifted at the helm. She could feel a little current running through her breasts to her nipples.

  ‘And you, Clemency? What do you want?’

  No one called her Clemency. It felt fiercely intimate. He pinned her with his eyes and the current darted right down her body to between her legs.

  ‘Well?’ he said.

  ‘I think I want to stay longer.’

  The cockpit doors swung open. Johnny came out with coffees and a small bottle of brandy and the intimacy seamlessly embraced him. ‘Johnny,’ Frank said, watching the way Johnny’s eyes went straight to the shore, forever searching for escape. ‘I’m going to miss you guys when you go.’

  ‘You’ll find some other couple to enjoy,’ Johnny said, taking the tiller from Clem, stooping to the compass to check the bearings. She wished he hadn’t said that. She didn’t like to think they were replaceable.‘I don’t think we’ll be entertaining for a while.’ Frank said. ‘Not after this. And I didn’t even tell you about the Australian couple we had on board…’

  ‘What Australian couple?’ Clem asked, not liking them already.

  ‘We were on the Yugolsavian coast somewhere near Dubrovnik and we invited this nice couple on board for a barbecue. I nipped off to get another bottle and when I came back Annie had the tongs in her hand, was standing in the cockpit barbecuing the meat and these guys were sitting there right on the edge of the boat, as white as sheets…’ Frank laughed. ‘It turned out Annie had told them that I’d killed her mother, cut her up into pieces and put her in the freezer.’

  Johnny and Clem laughed too, taking their cue from him but their laughter was just a release. It wasn’t funny. It was fucked up. They passed around the brandy in silence from one to the other; it felt almost ritualistic, the sharing of the succour. They were soon lulled by the irregular rhythm of the boat, at last offering them some distraction from the day, forcing them into present-moment awareness, rising and falling, falling and rising with the unpredictability of the waves, the salty spray from the crashing bows splashing them every now and then as the wind blew steadily from the stern.

  As the night continued the atmosphere up on deck seemed to change. The moon had shrugged off the clouds and was now burning a ferocious white light on to them and the awfulness of the day was slipping further from their consciousnesses, left behind in some dark cove as they sailed onwards. The waves were getting bigger and the bows rose way up into the night and fell thumpingly back down into the water, drenching them, spray dropping like firecrackers on to the decks. Up and down went the Little Utopia, ploughing forwards to pastures new, her crew beginning to whoop as they surfed down the silvery slopes, riding the waves as though they were on horseback, on one beast, lifting and falling together, yelling as they sped through the water, heads back, laughing like lunatics as the salt spray soaked their faces. Briefly the absurdity of their little lives was the only thing that mattered.

  There was electricity in the air, a kind of buzzing thrill. Johnny could feel it crackling around him. Even the water sparkled with phosphorescence, giving a luminous hue to the night, as it fizzed around the boat. He could feel it – this charged moment, the intensity of the now, the past and the future bearing no weight at all – he felt an extraordinary empathy for Frank and Annie, for everything they had gone through. The craziness of the day was over, Smudge was safely sleeping down below and as much as Johnny cared about the suffering of Annie lying sedated in the bows, they were all up here on the decks busy being alive. He felt quite drunk on life. He’d seen Annie teetering on that gossamer thread between life and death and together they had cheated death. And that deserved celebrating. He felt the blood pumping round his body and the wind blowing on his back and briefly he felt invincible.

  Later, the delirium settled into a breezy quiet but no one was tired, no one wanted to go below deck. It was better up here in the fresh, clean air. Clem was looking over at the different shades of darkness between the sea, shore and sky and she felt a sudden dread at the thought of being out there, leaving the Little Utopia. She wasn’t sure she was ready at all; she wasn’t sure she could cope with being just the two of them again. They were a family now, a unit. She thought of Frank and Annie and Smudge travelling on without them, and whether they would pick up other people. She couldn’t picture it. She’d forgotten all about other people, the rest of the world. It was the five of them as if no one else had ever existed. They had to wait for Annie to get better; Johnny must see that.

  ‘What happened to Annie, Frank?’ she asked.

  ‘Dawn’s on its way,’ Johnny said. He didn’t want to talk about Annie. Couldn’t they not talk about things, just for once – maybe later, in a week or so, when he and Clem were on the other side of Turkey, they could talk about it. But for now, couldn’t they all just keep quiet?

  Frank let out a deep sigh and seemed to think hard about the question. ‘Some people just have heavier crosses to bear than others.’

  ‘Poor Annie. Having a monster for a father,’ Clem said.

  ‘He was a mess of a man,’ Frank said sadly. ‘But wha
t can I say? She adored him. She insists that for years, as a child, she thought her life was perfect.’

  ‘How on earth could she say that?’ Clem asked.

  ‘I know. It’s extraordinary but that was the word she used: perfect. In her eyes the trouble didn’t start until they were about eight and something her sister said at school got social services involved. That was the first time Annie realized that she wasn’t supposed to feel this way about her father. She was supposed to call herself a victim and call him an abuser. Society had spoken: he was a bad man.’

  ‘But he was a bad man. He’d just brainwashed her,’ Clem said.

  ‘It was the word abuse that bothered her,’ Frank said, in his usual analytical manner, ‘with all its connotations of pain and suffering – when all she had experienced was love and pleasure.’

  ‘That’s just twisted,’ Clem said.

  He smiled at her and nodded. ‘Nevertheless, Clem, that’s what she felt. She realized then, as a child, that morally and socially she was not allowed to voice these things. They were unacceptable. So she learnt to keep quiet, to feel guilty about her feelings. She felt different. She was an outsider. Worse than that – a freak. Then Social Services separated her and her sister and put them in different care homes away from the man they loved. For their own good, of course, but it didn’t feel that way to her.’

  ‘Poor poor Annie,’ Clem said.

  He sighed. ‘I suspect that that was when she first started raging against the world.’

  ‘It’s interesting though,’ Clem said, ‘I hadn’t thought of it like that. I know that in some cultures incest is perfectly acceptable. ‘The Ancient Egyptians were always marrying their sisters and brothers.’

  Johnny glanced at her. This new affected manner she had was really beginning to grate, the way she was trying to impress Frank with her open-mindedness.

  ‘You’re absolutely right,’ Frank said, duly impressed. ‘In fact it was de rigueur in high society.’

  ‘Do you think it’s that basic? It’s all a question of what is fashionable?’ she asked.

  Johnny could feel the green-eyed monster raising its head; he hated it when they talked like this. It sounded to him like a pretentious form of foreplay. ‘Annie’s father was an abuser, whatever confused feelings she had about it,’ Johnny said. ‘The law is there to protect the children. That’s all there is to it.’ But they weren’t listening to him.

  ‘It’s unfashionable in our society to even refer to the fact that children are sexual beings,’ Frank said, sounding most aggrieved by society, as ever. ‘More so these days than fifty years ago – Huxley talked about it in Brave New World. He had young children going off for allotted erotic play-time. Did you ever read it?’

  Clem took out her tobacco, casually resting her foot against the portside seat. Johnny knew that she hadn’t even heard of Brave New World.

  ‘He was making a point. The subject of children’s sexuality is a modern taboo. We’re absolutely terrified by it. I’ve always admired Annie’s honesty about what she experienced. Must we make children doubly culpable for enjoying the experience? I don’t think we should. I think society does children a disservice to react that way.’

  ‘Society doesn’t blame the child. It blames the abuser,’ Johnny said, keeping his eyes on the coast, the dark bay slipping into view. But there were no lights and his disappointed heart sank still further.

  ‘Yes but it ignores the child. Freud believed every child is in love with the parent of the opposite sex and that every child experiences sexual jealousy towards the same-sex parent,’ Frank continued, tapping himself out a cigarette.

  ‘I wonder if that’s true,’ Clem said and Johnny really didn’t like the way she was demonstrating her wondering, waving her hands about as if she had more to say – when he knew that she didn’t.

  ‘Did you never experience sexual jealousy as a child, Johnny?’ Frank asked.

  ‘Nope,’ he said, looking over at the mountains, which were a sharp black now that the crack of dawn was breaking somewhere over the edge of the planet behind them. He didn’t want to bring either his jealousy or his mother into this conversation.

  ‘It’s perfectly natural to have had those feelings,’ Frank continued. ‘We even have words for it. Little princesses, daddy’s girls, Oedipus complex…’

  Frank was looking at Clem now and she found herself turning to the mountains, looking away from him, ambushed by a dirty kind of embarrassment, for she had once been a daddy’s girl. And worse than that, if she looked into the whole incest taboo she had to confess that she found something quite titillating about a brother and a sister doing it. She herself had always wanted a good-looking older brother, not to have sex with of course, but one that her friends wanted to have sex with, which didn’t seem entirely removed. Frank made her feel as if she had never been entirely honest with herself before and that it was perfectly acceptable to examine the darker side of human nature. Frank passed her the brandy, a smile on his lips. ‘You can say what you like on this boat, Clem. We’re not going to judge you.’

  She took a fleeting glance at Johnny and wasn’t so sure. ‘Technically you were abused,’ she said, turning to him. She didn’t want to be the only guilty one.

  Johnny looked at her, baffled. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘You were abused,’ she said. ‘You were having sex with a thirty-five-year-old woman from the age of fourteen.’

  Johnny laughed and looked up at the sails. ‘That wasn’t abuse! That was pleasure!’

  ‘Ah!’ Frank said, raising a finger, his cigarette glowing as the life was sucked out of it. ‘The murky business of drawing lines: pleasure or abuse?’

  Then the boat hit a big wave and the water sprayed about them, landing like shrapnel on the decks, but no one was whooping and hollering now.

  Clemmie found the crisp white envelope on the doormat when she got home from school. It was addressed to Miss Clemency Bailey in squashy, inky handwriting. Her heart raced about her chest; she had never received a letter that wasn’t on her birthday before. She bent down and picked it up from the immaculate doormat. She examined the envelope. The writer had made a spelling mistake and corrected it: ie instead of a y at the end of Clemency. It was obviously from someone who didn’t know her, which made it all the more exciting. She sniffed the envelope for clues. It smelt of important things.

  She took it through to the kitchen and sat at the table staring at it, enjoying the delicious suspense for as long as she could bear. She thought of waiting until her mother got home from work but that could be another hour or so and there was no way she could hold out that long. She went and got the letter opener from her mother’s desk, the one that used to belong to her grandfather, and very carefully she cut the letter open and peered inside. There was a thick card with glittering gold around the edges. She carefully pulled it out of the envelope.

  At the top of the card her name was written in the same inky handwriting, only it was spelt the wrong way this time and with no correction. In beautiful swirling print it said: James and Elizabeth invite you to the christening of Peter Arthur Steven Todd-Bailey at St Michael’s Church on Saturday July 27th followed by a reception At Home.

  At first she thought it must be a mistake, she didn’t know any Jameses or Elizabeths or Peter Arthurs. But then of course she remembered and though she should have felt happy for Peter getting blessed by God and all that, she didn’t. Everything on the card made her feel unhappy. James should have been Jim. Elizabeth should have been her mum Jackie, and Peter shouldn’t have been there at all. But the worst bit was the At Home. He had a new At Home and it was a place she didn’t know at all. Nowhere near her. She was right out there on the chilly edge of his life when once she had been at the cosy middle.

  She was nervous about showing the invitation to her mum. She didn’t want her mother to see that her dad had forgotten how to spell her name; she didn’t think she could bear the double disappointment in him and so for two
whole days she kept it hidden under her pillow and only looked at it at night. She could recite the whole invitation off by heart, the address and all her half-brother’s names and everything. On the third day she deliberately left it out for her mother to find. She knew she’d found it because she was doing the washing up with a lot of banging; then when she broke a cup she blurted out that Two’s far too old to be christened. Clemmie had worked out the maths a while ago. She knew that Liz had been pregnant when her dad left them. She knew that he’d left her for a baby he hadn’t even met.

  Clemmie pretended that she didn’t want to go to the christening, out of loyalty to her mum. But she did want to go. She wanted to see where her dad lived. She wanted to see Peter whom she’d only met once when he was a baby in the hospital with a black poo in his nappy. Also, though she would never say this to her mother, she wanted Liz to get to know her. She wanted Liz to like her and include her in their plans. She had guilty private thoughts of moving there one day and them all living together happily as a family, of her being really helpful and popular. Something else was bothering her: she was beginning to forget what her dad looked like because what with him being so busy with his new job and the baby and stuff, she hadn’t actually seen him for a year and a half. He sent cards at Christmas and on her birthday and she had spoken to him on the phone, but it was difficult to actually make arrangements what with school and them always going on foreign holidays. She could remember his eyes and his mouth but the middle bit was all blurry, probably because the only photograph she had was one where his hand was covering half of his face.

  All this aside, there was another major reason she wanted to go to the christening: Sarah’s mum, Mrs Love, had said she could pick Clemmie up on their way down to Cornwall and if Jackie wanted, Clemmie could come with them and Jackie could have some time to herself. Clemmie had overheard this on the telephone – she’d been listening in on the phone upstairs. The mums had been organizing pick-ups from Donna’s birthday party when the suggestion was made. Clemmie had let out a little squeak and had to clamp her hand over her mouth. She wanted more than anything to go down to Cornwall with Sarah’s family especially as she hadn’t wet the bed for nearly a month now. She loved everything about the Loves. They were all disorganized and happy. They could spend the whole day deciding what to get at the shop at the bottom of the hill, sitting on each other’s laps and making jokes and cups of tea. And no one ever said what a waste of time. Sarah’s dad was always tinkering around on motorbikes and boats with the boys – he let them do whatever they wanted; once, when Johnny was only eight, they had sailed a dinghy each from Newquay round to Padstow all by themselves. Sarah’s mum was the coolest mum at school. She wore black and had clangy jewellery and cooked with garlic. She was always saying things like The more the merrier and Stay the night! and I’m sure we can fit in one more whereas Clemmie’s mum wore bright floral dresses and was always counting things up and deciding that there wasn’t quite enough.