The Boat

by Clara Salaman

  ‘What are you saying?’ he said.

  ‘I… want…’ Her voice was weak, almost inaudible. He leant in; he could feel her breath on his cheek, but the words wouldn’t come.

  ‘You want what, Annie?’

  ‘I want to die,’ she whispered. She looked away, back out of the hatch, her eyes two wells of sadness. He took her hand in his and smoothed it with his thumb.

  ‘Don’t say that, Annie. Think of Smudge.’

  Oh God, he thought selfishly. Please get better. We’re leaving you. You have to get better.

  ‘Smudge.’ She seemed to smile a little but in a deadened kind of a way, still staring up at the moon. ‘Smudge is all I think about.’

  Something about the way she said it scared him. ‘Annie,’ he said, moving forward, cupping her chin with his fingers, forcing her her head to face him. ‘What are you planning? You leave Smudge out of this…’

  She held his gaze. ‘You didn’t even look in the cabinet, I told you to look…’ she whispered. There was no accusation in it, just a deep weariness. Then she lay back down on the mattress, turning her back on him and curling up into the foetal position.

  He paused for a moment, looking at that soft, downy hair on the back of her neck, then slowly he got off the bed and turned on the heads light. He got down on his knees and opened the cabinet doors. He had no idea what he was looking for. He couldn’t see properly. He switched on the little light above the basin. The cabinet was full of medicines and plastic bottles: shampoos and sun-block, various lotions and potions. He pulled out the medicine tin and the other locked one. He was pretty sure it was full of Annie’s medicines; Frank only kept it locked to protect her from harming herself. He felt around towards the back but there was nothing there. He crouched down as low as he could and peered in. At the very back he could see a red fabric pressed against the hull of the boat behind the plywood. He reached in and felt the sides. It was a book of some sort. It was wedged in, in a fixed position. He got his fingers around the edge and pulled it out and stepped back holding it under the basin light.

  It was just an old book with faded gold lettering on the spine: Gulliver’s Travels. He opened it and flicked through the pages but there was nothing of any interest.

  Then right at the back of the book he saw what she had wanted him to see. And as the sickness rose from his stomach, the thought struck him how very nearly he had got away today – he and Clem – they had so very nearly made it.

  10

  Lights Going Out

  Johnny liked it when the others were all out, when he had the whole house to himself. His dad and Rob had gone to Sarah’s school play to try and pretend that life was carrying on as normal while his mum was dying upstairs.

  Johnny sat downstairs and watched the snooker while the guinea-pigs flung themselves around the floorboards like they were on a skating rink. They were the only beings in the house that weren’t pretending; they just carried on doing what they always had – skating and making more guinea pigs. He kept finding himself staring out at the garden; he’d borrowed a couple of hundred quid off his dad and bought a load of old Lasers and Wayfarers from a sailing school in Datchet and they were strewn about on the grass waiting to be repaired. He should have been sanding them down right now and repairing them but he had found it hard to do anything recently. The four of them were tiptoeing around in a twilight world of sickness.

  After a while he made two cups of tea and took them upstairs. He knew her cup was just symbolic, she never drank any but she always said yes please – it was part of the whole pretence, she was in on it. Nobody wanted to mention what was really going on, everyone was still talking about getting better and which pills to pop and what a nice day it was. He thought that suffering seemed to separate a family rather than unite it. Or perhaps it was just that suffering was a private affair.

  He pushed open their bedroom door and the now-familiar scent of illness hit him; it seemed to have infused everything with its clinical, musty odour, a mixture of medicine cabinet and clothes left in the dryer too long.

  She was motionless and his heart skipped a beat as it always did when she was sleeping. He’d overheard the nurse telling his father that she might only have another month, but no one really knew. No one knew anything; they were all totally out of control of the situation pretending not to be. He moved towards the end of the bed and stood quite still until he saw the slow, unsteady rise and fall of her chest. She was breathing. He breathed too. She looked calm, facing away from the window, her face thin and pale, her hands resting at her sides, palms open.

  Outside was a bright, sunny day but the curtains were half drawn. They whooshed out a little as a breeze blew through the window and he could see the shimmering leaves outside on the trees. It was a good sailing day. She would have liked it if things were different.

  He put her cup down on the bedside table by the alarm clock which ticked and tocked too loudly. He sat himself down on the old leather chair beside the bed and it too breathed out as if it had been waiting to be sat on. It was a good place to sit. He could see the trees outside and at the same time see her, safe in the knowledge that he wasn’t going to miss anything should anything happen. Although he wasn’t sure that he wanted to be there when she actually went. He wasn’t sure he’d be able to handle that. The bed was high and her body was at his eye level and he watched the gentle upping and downing of her tiny frame. The bed had a wooden back and a tall wooden plank at the other end. It was tomblike the way it swallowed her up. It had been his grandmother’s bed and one day it would be Sarah’s – generations of women had been born in it, made babies in it, given birth in it and now she was dying in it. Why should the bed keep surviving and not her?

  He couldn’t cope with the ticking of the clock, the horrible rapid countdown to the inevitable. He got up and put it in one of the drawers – what did his mother need a ticking clock for – Time was meaningless now. He looked around the room at the army of pills stacked along the mantelpiece, half-empty glasses of water, cotton wool, flannels: ill-person things. The bowl of fruit on the little table was slowly disintegrating, he’d noticed it change day by day, the subtle smell of decay increasing, and he had begun to think that they were inextricably linked, his mother and the rotting fruit. He should have thrown it out or someone should have, but it felt like a callous thing to do, to dispose of something just because it was no longer fresh and ripe. She would have thrown it out; she wasn’t sentimental in any way. There were so many things that weren’t getting done now that she was lying here. All those little things – he wasn’t sure what they were exactly, only that the cumulative effect of them not being done had made the house seem like a different space. All the order had gone. There was no longer structure, or clarity, or surprises. And they wouldn’t be coming back.

  Staring out at the leaves he suddenly felt wildly helpless. He could feel the sadness that had been sitting inside him expanding at such a rate, growing and growing, filling him up until he thought he might burst. His eyes began to sting with tears.

  ‘Hey,’ she whispered, her voice dry and husky.

  ‘Mum, you’re awake,’ he said, quickly wiping his eyes, leaning forward, moving close to her. Her mouth was dry again. Her mouth was always dry. He took a piece of cotton wool and dipped it into the water and dabbed it around her mouth the way the nurse did. She licked at it thirstily then laid her head back down as if the effort of drinking had exhausted her.

  ‘Try not be too sad, darling,’ she said.

  ‘I’m not,’ he said with the stupid false cheer that they were all using with her.

  They stared at each other; words were inadequate and they both knew it. ‘You will look after Dad, won’t you?’

  ‘Don’t say that.’ Suddenly he could do nothing about the tears; they began to fall freely down his cheeks.

  ‘Oh love…’ she said soothingly trying to make him feel better, squeezing his hand in hers. He took a deep, juddering breath, trying to contain hims
elf but he just couldn’t. ‘I don’t think I can bear it, Mum, without you.’

  ‘Jonts,’ she whispered and he could feel the tight grip of her thin, cool hand. ‘My brave, kind boy, you’ve got your whole life ahead of you! You must live it to the full!’ It was hard for her to speak; her mouth had dried up again. She closed her heavy lids and he saw a tear fall sideways down her temple. ‘You have to be a man now, my love.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, trying so hard to be a man. But then he couldn’t help himself, he cried out like a little boy. ‘Don’t die, Mum!’

  He hung his head forwards, sobbing openly, pressed his face to hers, her hand still gripping his. ‘I’ll live on in you, darling,’ she whispered.

  ‘Don’t die, Mum. Please don’t die,’ He laid his head against her chest and his tears fell in streams on to the thin cotton of her nightdress.

  ‘My love,’ she said, stroking his hair, waiting for his sobs to cease. ‘We’ll meet again one day. I promise.’

  ‘We won’t.’

  He tried to pull himself together. He had to be stronger. He took a deep breath and sat back. Outside birds were singing and the faint chimes of an ice-cream van could be heard. The world was just carrying on. Slowly he felt the sadness subsiding a little as if the tears had emptied some out. He looked at his mother’s tired, gaunt face and dabbed her lips again, glad of something to do. She was watching him, a strange expression on her face, a look he hadn’t seen before in her eye, her blinks slow and heavy. ‘Do you want something?’ he said. She managed to shake her head without moving. She was trying to tell him something. ‘What is it, Mum?’

  But she didn’t say anything. He leant in. ‘Are you scared?’ he asked in a whisper.

  She bit her lip and she gave the faintest of nods. ‘I am, Jonts. I’m scared.’

  And he kissed her hand, her cool hand with the loose rings on it and he didn’t let go until she had drifted back to sleep.

  Clem lay on the saloon bed with Smudge sound asleep beside her. She could hear Johnny up on deck changing the sails, the squeaks and thumps and rumblings of sailing. He had insisted she sleep down here with Smudge. But she couldn’t sleep; her head was whirling, her thoughts tacking all the time but getting nowhere, replaying events from earlier in the day in her mind over and over until she didn’t know what she felt at all. In the late afternoon when she had gone down to the bows of the boat to sketch, she had passed the open hatch and caught sight of Annie sleeping peacefully down below in the forepeak, her bandaged wrist limp by her face, the bandage greying and frayed, the dried blood a rusty brown. She’d gone on and sat herself down on the anchor hatch and settled down to draw, looking about at the vista, trying to decide what she wanted to capture: the mast with the sail above billowing out in the wind, or Annie sleeping in the forecabin, or Johnny and Frank in the heeling cockpit, Johnny as ever looking up at the sails or out at the horizon, Frank with his nose in a book. She had decided on the sail, the view directly above, and had opened up her pencil case and begun to sharpen her pencils, watching the shavings drop into the white surf of the bows. A while later Frank had popped his head up through the forepeak hatch with a cup of sweet tea and passed it to her. ‘Hi,’ he’d said. ‘Let’s see your picture!’ She had turned the opened sketch pad round so he could see. She was rather pleased with it, the blue of the sky, the great white sail, the shadows where it was luffing a little at the top – Johnny wouldn’t have liked that but she’d wanted to make the point that imperfection was part of life. Frank had held it out smiling and nodding, impressed with her work.

  ‘You’re seriously good, Clem. Have you thought of art school?’ She’d laughed and hadn’t responded but she had thought of art school actually, before they got married, before she realised that a regimented sort of a life wouldn’t really be possible with Johnny. He needed to be on the move. When Frank handed back the sketch, his hand had touched hers, his fingers stealing around her own. ‘I nearly lost you back there, Clemency,’ he’d said quietly and she’d felt her heart contract a little, his proximity suddenly making her breathless. She’d looked over at Johnny at the helm, his focus on the sails. She hoped Annie was still sleeping and couldn’t hear him. ‘I don’t want that to happen again,’ he’d said, his eyes glued to hers, intense and serious and suddenly she hadn’t cared whether Annie was listening or not. ‘‘I want you, Clem,’ he’d said. ‘But you know that.’ The way he spoke excited her; she’d felt her mouth watering, her breath quickening, that same electric current running through her body. Then, because she felt treacherous and could feel Johnny watching her, she’d pretended to sketch again. ‘I promised we’d leave at Datca,’ she’d whispered, flashing him a look. He’d nodded and slowly turned away from her, looking out to sea, leaning his weight forward on to his elbows, his palms flat along the deck. He’d sighed and smiled at her. ‘It’s your decision, Clem. You need to make the decision that is best for you and for everyone around you. Feel it, your gut. You’ll know what to do.’

  So now she lay there trying to listen to her gut, to make the right decision for herself and for everyone around her. But whichever way she looked at it she couldn’t see the right decision and it never worked for everyone. Her gut was lurching one way and then the other. Johnny would never be persuaded to stay on this boat; she knew that ultimately it boiled down to a decision between Johnny or Frank. Johnny was a given and yet her thoughts kept going in one direction, I want you, Clem, to that warm feeling, those sexual stirrings Frank could trigger with a look or a comment. She had felt a melting in her core, a visceral desire for him that was impossible to ignore. Ever since the night they had all made love in the cockpit, she’d not been near either of them physically. It would be different now if she were to make love with Frank. It would be different with Johnny too because she did have feelings for Frank now – big feelings, she could see that; there was no point in denying it and the feelings didn’t feel like things that should be covered up: they felt pure and good. Johnny would never understand this. He’d barely said a word since they’d come back on board, since he’d gone down to fix the spinnaker. He’d come back out to the cockpit, no longer bothered about putting it up at all, and had told them to go down and get some kip; he wanted to sail the boat alone. Then he had held her back as she stepped on to the companionway step, gripping her arm, whispering urgently in her ear: ‘You sleep with Smudge,’ as an order, as if he was worried that she might have slept with Frank. She was tired of his jealousy. She wished lovers could be entirely truthful to each other – the real truth, all the doubts and fears as well as all the love. She could say anything to Frank – anything at all, without fear of judgement. Perhaps that was real love. Perhaps she and Johnny had married too young. Everyone had thought they were too young to get married, too young to be feeling such adult things – maybe they were right. She wished they could all live together – the four of them could be lovers. Now that she was growing and learning she knew that it was perfectly possible to love two people at once; living with several lovers should be normal. Her life had been so sheltered prior to this. She had been so conditioned by society, just like everyone else.

  How these thought made her head ache. But she must have dozed off for at some point she woke with the feeling that the boat had stopped, the water was sloshing against the hull and she could hear the flapping of the sails. He was taking a long time changing tack, or perhaps the foresail was caught on the stay. Then, presently, the boat moved off again but heeling over now, on a new tack, landing Smudge’s weight almost directly on top of her, and she sat up and looked out at the dark sky through the scuffed Perspex window. She untwined Smudge’s arm from around her waist and got up off the saloon seat and went to the galley. She heated up the coffee, opened the cockpit doors and went out.

  ‘Johnny?’ she said, blinking as her eyes adjusted. ‘I’ve got you some coffee.’ He loomed forward out of the darkness; he was so still he had been indistinguishable from the night itself, the silver glow of the moon c
oating everything alike. But now she could see him clearly and he looked at her strangely; there was something different about him. Or maybe it was her.

  ‘I can take over if you want to get some rest,’ she said. ‘You must be tired.’

  ‘I’ll be fine.’

  He still hadn’t forgiven her for making them get back on the boat. He knew her so well. He knew that she loved Frank before she knew it herself; his jealousy was justified. ‘Johnny?’ she said, moving towards him, looking at his hair; it was wet and shiny. ‘Has it been raining?’

  He moved slightly away from her, running a hand through his hair.

  ‘I washed it,’ he said. ‘I got some paint in it.’ She looked at him curiously and passed him the coffee and sat down on the dry portside seat, feeling the distance yawning between them. He was lying. She held her tongue; she wasn’t going to start accusing him of things when her own guilt was so prevalent. It was one thing her having secrets from him – she could control that; but she didn’t like this, not knowing what was going on in his mind. Perhaps he felt the same about Annie as she was beginning to feel about Frank. It made her feel uncomfortable. She looked back at the horizon. The wind had shifted, or the boat had. She leant over and peered at the compass. ‘Have we changed course?’ she asked looking carefully round the 360 degrees, unable to spot any land.

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘Are we still heading for Datca?’

  ‘Yes. Just making the most of the wind, going out to sea before heading in,’ he said in a quiet voice, not looking at her. ‘It might take a little longer.’

  She was glad for it She didn’t have to make any decisions right now. She would go along with Johnny’s decisions for the moment, just as she always had. He didn’t say anything else and she knew there were things he wasn’t telling her. She wondered when they both started having secrets from each other and whether this was the beginning of the end. It frightened her that thought: the end. She couldn’t imagine a life without Johnny in it. The prospect filled her with panic. They were inseparable, like trees grown together, their roots entangled. She suddenly wished for things to be how they were before they had stepped on to this boat. She wanted everything fixed and secure again. She wanted certainty. She reached out for his hand on the tiller. His was cool. He took hers, covering it with his own. Even if their hearts and minds were hiding things, their hands spoke a different language. Her fingers clutched on to his for dear life and his pressed hers hard into the warm wood of the tiller and she wanted to stay like that for ever, squeezed between the wood and him. They sat there for a long time, listening to the boat going through the water, the wind in the sails, the spray hitting the deck, their hands entwined.