The Boat

by Clara Salaman

  ‘The knot’s come undone!’ he said, throwing it back to Johnny on the transom. Johnny didn’t move to catch it; he watched as it landed in the water a few feet away from him with a feeble splash.

  ‘Johnny!’ Clem cried. ‘Pick it up!’ But almost as she said the words, it was too late – the end of the rope was out of any reach. Frank began to pull it in again. She stared at Johnny, utterly confused.

  ‘Johnny! Get the rope!’ Frank called, throwing it again. But still Johnny didn’t move, he continued to stand there on the transom, just staring at the tender as it drifted, maybe twenty feet away now.

  ‘Bring the boat round, Johnny!’ Clem called but he did nothing. ‘Bring her round, Johnny!’ she cried again, letting go of the tiller, looking about for something to throw to Frank instead but Annie was sitting on the cockpit seat where the ropes were and instead of getting out of Clem’s way Annie was just staring at Frank, gripping the sides of the seats, going nowhere.

  ‘Get off the seat!’ Clem cried. But Annie ignored her, she didn’t even look at her.

  ‘Get up! Throw him a rope!’ Clem cried, trying to pull Annie off the seat.

  Annie reacted then. She let go her grip on the seat and grabbed Clem’s shoulders, her nails digging into her back, her grip so hard that Clem saw the fresh red blood seeping through her wound. ‘We have to help him, Annie,’ Clem said, scared by the look in her eyes. Annie leant forward and whispered into her ear. ‘You can’t help him,’ she said, her voice level and low. ‘You can’t help us. People like us – we’re not fit for this world.’

  There was something deeply frightening about Annie, slowly she let go her grip and Clem stepped back, both of them returning their gaze to Frank in the tender. He was panicking now; he started frantically looking about the boat. Water was pouring in. ‘Where are the oars? Where are the fucking oars?’ he yelled. Clem turned to Johnny because it was dawning on her then that there weren’t any fucking oars.

  Only then did she understand what was really going on. This was no accident; the rope had been deliberately cast off and the corks removed. This had been organised.

  Frank was a good thirty feet away now, maybe more, and already his voice was sounding distant. She could see that he was thinking of jumping in. He couldn’t swim and he would have to rely on her to help him out and she wouldn’t be able to. She watched as he scrabbled forwards on his knees and started paddling furiously with his hands; his progress was negligible. ‘Go on, Clem, get the boat hook!’ Frank yelled. There he was vulnerable and needing her, just as she had wished for, only she couldn’t help. She made a dash for the life-belt and tried to unhook it but Johnny was on her. ‘Sit down!’ he yelled, pushing her back.

  ‘Come back here!’ Frank screamed. But nobody moved. ‘You leave me here, Johnny, I will find you! You take my daughter I will fucking find you! I swear to fucking God, I will find you and I will kill you!’

  Clem stood there aghast. She had never even heard him raise his voice before; he was roaring like a bear.

  Johnny was leaning out on the transom shouting right back at him. ‘I know what you are! You don’t deserve to have a daughter, you monster!’

  ‘You know nothing!’

  ‘I know what you are, Frank! How could you? You don’t deserve either of them.’ Johnny turned his back on Frank and stepped over the guard rail back into the boat and nudged the tiller with his knee. The sails filled with wind and the Little Utopia began to fly away from the tender.

  ‘Annie!’ Frank was standing up, yelling but his voice barely carried, he was downwind. ‘Annie! I will find you! You know I will!’

  Annie stood up slowly, hatred and misery written all over her face. ‘We are rotten people, Frank!’ she screamed across the water at him, her voice hoarse and breaking. ‘We are rotten to the core!’

  Clem grabbed hold of Johnny. ‘You can’t do this!’ she cried. ‘You’ve got it all wrong!’

  ‘No, Clem. You listen to me!’ He was shouting at her now, as mad and angry as Frank, shaking her off him. ‘You’ve got it wrong. Wake the fuck up!’

  Then behind him Clem saw the blur of Annie leaping from the boat into the water. ‘No!’ she cried out and Johnny turned round in time to see Annie landing with a splash in the wake of the boat. Johnny slammed the tiller over into a crash-stop heave to. The boat halted dead in the water.

  ‘She jumped, Johnny!’ Clem was screaming. ‘She just jumped in!’

  ‘Annie?’ Johnny cried, straddling the rail. But Annie was making no effort to get back on board; she was floating away from the boat. ‘It has to be like this, Johnny!’ she cried. ‘Smudge is safe with you.’

  ‘Annie, what are you doing? Get in!’ he said, one hand on the guard rail, the other leaning out as far as he could. ‘Here! Take my hand!’

  But she didn’t. She was stationary, doggy paddling in the red, fiery water just out of his reach, staring at him with those pathetic eyes as the boat slipped away from her. ‘Take my hand! Do it!’ If he leant out any further he’d fall in. Clem, trembling all over now, terrified by all of them , opened the cockpit seat and grabbed the boat hook and passed it to Johnny, who held it out to Annie.

  ‘Take it!’ he cried. Clem heard the desperation in his voice and it scared her even more. He was trying to hook Annie in but she was too far out.

  ‘Swim to me, Annie!’ They could hear Frank shouting at her and the awful thing was that she was obeying him.

  ‘Don’t go with him!’ Johnny cried. ‘The tender won’t make it. Come with us!’ She looked back at Johnny, at his outstretched hand, at the boat hook, at the sheer panic in his eyes.

  ‘Annie, get back in! What are you doing?’

  But Annie did nothing. She looked up at him with those big, pale eyes full of a resignation, a horrible acceptance of her fate and they both knew that she wasn’t coming.

  11

  Loss

  The waning moon shone brightly, the clouds making silvery shapes as they danced around it and bounced off the waves a hundredfold. Johnny could see, off the starboard bow, a pod of dolphins playing in the surf and he watched them twisting and turning, jumping and diving in their blissful, stupid ignorance. The phosphorescence was so rich and sparkling that when the dolphins leapt out of the water their shapes were perfectly silhouetted as if outlined by millions of liquid diamonds. He sat there staring, but the gap between what he saw and what he felt was now so large that he barely registered it at all.

  They had sailed away from the tender until Frank’s cries had become indistinguishable from the wind itself and Johnny knew, even as he fled, that he would forever hear him in the wind. Afterwards, his hands had trembled so violently that he had had trouble gripping the sheets. They were still trembling now. His whole body juddered with shock, no matter how many jumpers he put on. That Annie could have thrown herself into the water and swum back to Frank was unfathomable to him; he could not get it out of his head, the sight of her swimming back to the tender, to a certain death. She hadn’t even given a backward glance. He had done this for her, for her and Smudge. He thought how stupid he had been – she must have thought this up from the moment he’d said he was going to help her, the photographs still in his hands. He recalled how her face had lit up, tears of relief and happiness in her eyes. Smudge, she’d kept repeating. Smudge is going to be all right. And he had felt full of a focused, dangerous kind of rage. He promised her that Smudge was going to be safe, he would not leave her alone with Frank for one more minute. The solution had been quite obvious to him: sail out into the open sea and leave Frank in the tender far away from any human being. Leave him in the hands of his fucking great god Karma. Frank was an evil man. Then it had just been a question of how to get him in the boat. Now all he could think was that he had saved Smudge from her fate and in so doing had made an orphan of her. He was twenty-one and he had not one but two people’s lives on his hands. He looked down at his trembling fingers. His chest was so tight it felt like he had a great weight pressing
down on him and he didn’t think he was ever going to feel any other way. He could never go back from this.

  The sun had dropped fast and now the darkness had swallowed up the light. Perhaps they wouldn’t die. There was a slim chance they might make it; they might be rescued or possibly they’d find some sort of paddle or get caught in a favourable current. But these were faint possibilities, he wasn’t kidding himself. If they did survive, as long as the Little Utopia headed west, there was little chance Frank would find them. He was pretty sure of that; there was no communication between the Greeks and the Turks. He let these thoughts flit to and fro across his mind, but underneath it all, he knew the tender would sink down to the bottom of the sea like all the other things he’d thrown overboard. Once he’d changed course and set the sails, Johnny tried not to look round at where they had come from. They were heading northwest now, eventually towards the Ionian, as far from these troubled waters as was possible. Every time he glanced around, he was half expecting the looming figure of Frank to be upon them but he saw nothing but the zigzagging white path that led to the moon.

  Clem had not said a word. She had her back to Johnny; she was refusing to look at him, her eyes permanently fixed on where the tender had been, her body shaking all over, flinching from his touch. She had watched it disappear listening to those cries until there was nothing to see or hear but a wailing dot in the wind. Every now and then she sat up straight, reached for the binoculars and scanned the water but the only sights now were the sea and the dolphins and the only sounds were those of the boat moving through the water. She never turned around, never faced forwards at all; she just stared out at where the ghost of the tender would always be.

  ‘Where’s Daddy?’

  They both jumped. Smudge, the unknowing victim of all this, appeared just before dawn in the companionway, wearing her Captain Hook coat with a blanket wrapped round her, dragging Gilla in one hand, the moonlight bouncing off his glazed, scratched eye. They were both surprised to see her for somewhere in the drama they had forgotten that she was the unwitting protagonist.

  There she stood, with her father’s colouring and her mother’s face, to remind them lest they should ever forget. She had slept right through the casting off of her parents in a drugged stupor but now she was awake, rubbing her eyes, looking round at them, totally unaware that this day was shape-defining. Her life would always be before and after this.

  ‘Come and sit here, Smudge,’ Johnny said to her.

  She rubbed her eyes again and scuffled across the cockpit, looking about herself. ‘Where’s my mummy?’ she asked, looking down the deck and turning back to Johnny. ‘Where’s my daddy?

  Clem looked at Johnny. He and she hadn’t had this conversation yet. They hadn’t had any conversation at all. Clem picked up Annie’s cardigan, which was lying on the seat, and wrapped it around Smudge. ‘Here, put this on!’ she said. ‘It’s cold out here.’

  Smudge let Clem wrap the cardigan around the blanket and then knelt on the stern seat and peered over the edge, Johnny and Clem both watching her.

  ‘They’ve taken the dinghy,’ Smudge said.

  ‘Yes,’ Johnny said. ‘They’ve gone ashore for a while.’

  She looked out to sea. ‘Without me?’’ she asked, confused. ‘When are they coming back?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said.

  ‘Have they gone to find Granny?’

  He’d forgotten all about Granny. ‘I don’t know, Smudge. They just left.’

  ‘I think they’ve probably gone to find Granny,’ she said, sitting down next to him, swinging her legs. ‘Or maybe…’ she added, brightened by some new idea, ‘… they’ve gone to find me a new pet.’

  Johnny put his arm around her, squeezing her gently towards him. ‘Maybe,’ he said quietly. He had no idea how to handle this.

  She looked up into his eyes. ‘Do you think it might be a horse?’ she asked.

  He paused. ‘I’m not sure about horses on boats,’ he said.

  ‘Horses like boats.’ She seemed pretty sure of it.

  Clem bit her lip and looked over her shoulder, away from Smudge.

  ‘There were dolphins at the bows just now, Smudge,’ he said. ‘Go and have a look.’ And he watched as she tripped merrily down the deck and lay down on her tummy at the bows talking to the dolphins.

  Johnny looked over at Clem. He saw her wipe her cheeks. She was shivering. It was getting very cold up on deck. Shortly she got up and went down the deck to get Smudge and the pair of them went below into the saloon, shutting the cockpit doors behind them, leaving Johnny to sail the boat alone. We’ll get through it, he said to himself again. But really he was wondering how the hell they were meant to do so. He had done a terrible thing. It had had to be done, there had been no alternative, he knew that, but still, he had done a terrible thing. He would have to live with that. And now he had a child to look after, something that he had never ever anticipated. He had to take deep breaths. Moment to moment.

  Far away on the horizon he watched a cruise ship making its way somewhere, the row of little lights like lanterns on a wall. He pictured them dancing, sipping cocktails, listening to some old crooner, slipping between clean sheets, and he wanted to be someone on that ship, someone who wasn’t him.

  He watched the morning star come up. It was so bright and red at first he thought it was the port light of a huge ship but as the hours went on it crawled up the mast and went the way of all the other stars. When it went over the top of the sail he hove to and went down to make some coffee; his eyes were scratchy with tiredness. There was no point in trying to sleep. He knew sleep would evade him now.

  Clem was lying motionless on the port side, her back to the saloon, the small reading light on behind her head. He stood next to her and looked down at her. The skin on her temple was so dark now, and even the inside of her upper arm was the same colour as the rest of her body; the sun had forged itself into her very hairline. He would once have been unable to stop himself bending down to kiss her but he couldn’t do it now; they had grown so far apart. He knew that they were breaking and he didn’t know how to mend them; it seemed so low down on the list of his priorities right at this moment. He went past her and through to the forepeak and opened the door. Smudge had taken her mother’s place. Clem had tucked her in, ramming her into the port side with the other pillows. She looked so tiny and vulnerable, her lips parted in sleep, the deep, gentle sounds of her breathing. The full impact of the responsibility he now found himself with hit him like a gybing boom. She was theirs now. She was his. He had to do his best for her. He took her little curled fingers in his own and promised her that he would always put her first and her fingers seemed to tense in response and somewhere in his hardening heart he felt a melting. He bent over and kissed her cheek.

  When he came back through the saloon, Clem was sitting up with the blanket tight around her, watching him as he passed. ‘I thought you were asleep,’ he said as he got to the galley, picking up the kettle.

  ‘How can you look her in the eye?’ she whispered in a voice he didn’t recognize, as if he disgusted her. He paused a moment before pumping the tap with his foot, looking over at her and deciding to ignore her. He filled the kettle with two cups’ worth of water and turned on the hob. He wondered how big the tank was; they’d have to stop at some point.

  ‘You killed her parents,’ she said blankly, a statement of fact.

  ‘They’ve got a chance of making it.’ He bent over to light the hob. ‘Besides, it was Annie’s choice to jump.’

  ‘But it was your choice to kill him.’

  ‘I left him in the tender, in case you hadn’t noticed.’

  ‘You as good as killed him and you know that.’

  He banged the kettle down on the flame. ‘What choice did I have?’ he said.

  ‘You could have not killed him. It’s not up to you to play God.’

  ‘Could I?’ he said, looking over at her. ‘Let me tell you something’ He took a step tow
ards her and leant on the sink, trying to keep his voice down. ‘Do you know how badly Annie wanted to get away from her husband… what lengths she was planning on going to? She’d saved up a stash of pills and this time she was going take Smudge with her.’

  Clem stared at him for a moment then shook her head. ‘I don’t believe you.’ But he saw a flash of fear in her eye.

  ‘You tell me why would a woman want to do that? What awful thing must she be trying to escape from?’

  ‘She’s insane, Johnny.’

  ‘Tell me what I should have done then, Clem?’ He was quiet, fixing her with his eyes.

  ‘You should have just taken us to Datca.’

  ‘I tried but you didn’t want to go.’

  ‘No, I mean the second time.’

  ‘Oh, and you’d be OK with that, would you? Leaving him to it? Leaving Smudge in his hands?’

  ‘Yes. Of course I’d be OK.’

  He stared at her, incredulous. She was in total denial, deliberately refusing to believe him. ‘That man has sex with his five-year-old daughter. Don’t you get it?’

  She paused. ‘She’s a lunatic, Johnny. It’s all bullshit!’ she was shouting now, not caring about Smudge next door.

  ‘Oh my God! Clem!’ he said, wiping his brow. ‘Open your fucking eyes!’

  ‘She’s a mad fucking bitch! You know that!’

  He hadn’t wanted to tell her this; he hadn’t wanted the depths of Frank’s depravity to reach her. He had wanted to protect her from him for as long as he could. He leant against the sink and held her eye. ‘There’s a book in there with a load of photographs of things I don’t think you ever want to see. But I think you’re going to have to take a look.’

  He saw her back away, her lips part, her eyes widen, the blood drain from her cheeks as the ugliness of what he was saying drowned out all other thoughts. She couldn’t defend him now.