‘Worse than this one?’
‘A thousand times worse.’
‘I doubt that.’
The boat was moving where it chose now, pitching high on the peaks of waves, and Kel knew that the here and now was about to go one of two ways.
‘Might not be so bad,’ she said to Rose and when the girl couldn’t hear her she shouted it and she leaned forward a little to see if she believed her.
‘I doubt that too,’ said Rose and Kel shrugged.
‘What are we going to do?’ asked Rose.
‘Wait.’
‘And then what?’
‘Wait some more.’ Kel wanted to tell Rose that things would be all right, same as her two older sisters used to say to her, but just like then she knew things weren’t right, so instead of soothing words she stared down the storm because to know your enemy was to have some understanding of the intricacies of fate.
The pattern of weather had turned toward them. It spun the boat and twisted it and hollowed out a well of water for it to drop right into. Down into the depths of the ocean they crashed, all the way down to the sea bed and up to the clouds and back they bounced like sinking, throwing stones.
‘Hold on,’ Kel shouted to Rose and she jammed herself into the belly of the silly rubber boat. Nothing but thin rip material sat between them and the deep and Kel knew it was only a matter of time before the towering waves climbed so high there would be no space left in the clouds for building and they would tumble down around them.
‘We’ve had it,’ shouted Rose and she clambered toward Kel in an attempt to talk.
‘Stay put,’ shouted Kel above the roar. ‘Stay put and wrap the baby to your back or else you’ll have us tipped completely.’
‘We’ve got to bail out the boat,’ Rose shouted. ‘Look.’ She shifted her weight so Kel could see the puddle of water she was sitting in and they worked with the oars to splash what they could from the dinghy. Nothing else mattered in that last moment but the rallying for survival. Kel knew she had it in her to keep digging the water from the boat longer than all the puff the storm had in it.
There were times when the rain fell lightly and played out on the wind and Kel was sure the waves had lessened slightly and this was when they stopped to catch their breath. They sat with the lamp relit and glowing dumb-dull between them and watched the scrawling morning clouds circle the horizon like a pack of wild things stalking their prey.
‘Do you think the storm’s coming back?’ asked Rose.
‘I know it,’ said Kel and she nodded toward the splinters of light that cracked the dawn into two parts, night and day.
‘I guess there’s no point paddling.’
‘Paddlin where?’
‘Away from the storm.’
Kel shook her head, she knew it would get them no matter what. She wished there were words that could be said to ease Rose’s worry. Something with the ‘all all right’ stuffed into it. She opened her mouth but all that sounded was her clicking, tutting tongue.
They sat like good-kid schoolkids and looked out at the mute morning that flashed black and then white. The storm was something for staring at and something for staring down. Maybe if they didn’t blink the storm would blink first and implode suddenly a good distance from the boat, spiral into the sea and go cold, become a drop in the ocean like a dead thing nothing thing.
Kel couldn’t take the chance and she took her bag from the place she had hidden and secured it days earlier and she put her notebook and the things not lost in the bounce into the plastic sack that once stored food and tied it tight and knotted to her belt. A last-ditch attempt at survival because survival was in her. Nothing else remained but to do the thing that might save her, the thing that had saved her her whole life over, to be calm because calm kept some kind of head upon her shoulders.
She gave Rose the spare carrier bag and told her to fill it with air and to hang on to the rope that threaded its way around the edge of the dinghy and she did the same till her wrists were bound blue and cutting. To hold on to the boat was to have the boat because without it there would be no second chance. Kel looked across at Rose and she could see panic pooled in her eyes and she told her to zip the baby into her mac and not to think of anything past the here and now. She shouted hard above the deafening din and her mouth ripped wide with salt-water filling and she coughed and spat it back in defiance.
The boat pitched and rolled as the wind and waves bloated and coiled and crashed around them. A monster thing and a devil thing soaring high above as they ploughed into the green water darkening, pulling them under.
Beneath the waves the storm was nothing but silence. Silence and movement. Everything that was out was in and everything that was in was out. They were a part of and apart from the gale force skin-strip winds that finally hooked the boat and flipped it, silent dark and wondering.
Deep dark down they remained for the longest time at the bottom, top, middle of the nowhere ocean. It was and then it wasn’t all the same. Another world entirely that Kel had no option but to let in; the salt leeched into her veins and the weeds stuck to skin and everything was filling and strangling, pulling her down further into the chasm and weighting her gut with sand and grit and stone.
Kel let her limbs fall free of fighting and she gave herself up fully to the float. There was no point battling the inevitable. She would succumb to the fate the stars had inked out for her before birth and leave nothing but the remaining space.
Kel Crow would either die or she would live. To know that the end was close was to be at peace with that knowledge and she let the warm salt water sting her flesh and shrink her down to the size of what remained of her heart, a floating bag of not much at all. Perhaps in death she could work at the penance set for the crimes she had committed, exorcise the badness from her. Then maybe the forgiveness she yearned for would finally come good. At times Kel sat bobbing in the soapy sup and she wondered if death was merely the same rewind over and over. Silently waiting and then silently waiting all over again, with no beginning to mark and no end in sight. What did it matter if she lived or died? Nobody would miss her, she had no one in her life except the baby.
‘Rose,’ she whispered. She lifted her head high above the water and said the girl’s name again and then she shouted it, ‘Rose, Rose, Rose.’ She looked across the rolling waves and wished she could see what it was that was beauty about the girl. Sometimes she swam but mostly she merely hung like a peg-line rag and watched the rain ping about her and tasted the drops as they clung to her face. She untied the bag from her belt to hold. The air that she had made sure to trap there kept her afloat.
There were times when she thought she heard Rose call out her name and she shouted that she was here here here but then nothing. The girl was gone and not just gone but struck absolutely from the earth complete. When the time came for the storm to dig its claws in someplace else, Kel had settled into a belly bubble of sleep. Exhaustion had her and it had her completely. Mostly drifting was better than mostly sinking and she kept her fingers twisted to the plastic wrap and rested her head sideways to the cushion. The warm waves carried Kel from where the boat had capsized and slowly she closed her eyes to the black and blue of them. Pain and fear combined gave way to letting go and when the last of the buoyancy in her belly bubbled from her lips she felt herself drop like a stone. If this was it then this was it. Death in the dark relentless depths of a billion acres of ocean; a gut full of empty and then a gut full to heaving with seawater splutter and it was all the same. The wet rot would get her after all and she would turn inside out and slack-skinned and Kel Crow would be no more.
There was something about setting her name loose that made her think about her bastard kin, and then she thought about the baby Crow and she wondered what name might go on its gravestone if it had one, and if not a stone then perhaps a cross of wood meant for kindling. It was then that a tiny light sparked up in her and it gave her such a jolt to think the fight thing was still in her
that she kicked her feet and fired her arms pointing up back towards the surface. One more breath to stay alive and then another to have her work stuff through. Her life was not over, would not be until she said so. She drifted wherever the waves dictated, occasionally catching the air in a vice like gristle between her teeth and she chewed it over and in and made the most of breathing before being pulled under once again. Minutes felt like hours and hours like days. Her bundle of things was buoyant in her arms like the baby she had lost and she talked to it as if it were so. They were in this together and they would live it and fight it and they would survive it together too.
Soon a little morning light soothed the sea and Kel took comfort in its lullaby rocking. Anything that took her mind off the shrivelling wet was worth something and she hummed some kiddie tune that was all songs of childhood combined. Songs that she had heard sung and had memorised through the spying and listening at the windows and doors of good god-fearing folk.
When morning arrived properly Kel greeted it with relief. A bit of storm light was better than no light and it returned the grown-up to where the child had begun to show. She told the sack not to expect any kind of conversation today because it was just a sack and she used the brief moment of clarity to look for wounds. She felt for the cut on her head and the big plump-berry lump that it had become. She looked over her hands in turn and everything was shedding and falling away. The rot had settled in as she knew it would; the skin dividing into scaling flakes and the nails raised and stirring in their beds. If rescue did not happen today she doubted she would get through another night.
When the wind picked up, Kel knew for certain that she would not.
For a girl who liked to plan, waiting on nothing much more than the sureness of death was hard. Without control she was driftwood, something bitten and rubbed out fully until nothing remained but water. She might as well be back at the shack, beat and tied and too tired to fight when Dad came drunk and sniffing.
She closed her eyes because they burnt with the effort of staring down the waves and she settled her head into the bin-bag bubble and it was a pillow on a bed in a house that she would never know.
Chapter Ten
Kel lay with her face half buried in silver grit-flick sand. She opened an eye and saw daylight glimmer in the tiny specks and she knew the sun was smiling behind the clouds above and she was glad to feel it through her damp rag clothes.
She sat up and brushed her face clear of the sticky grains and checked herself over for damage done. There was nothing to show for a night in the breakers but a few salt-sting scratches and her skin that felt loosened like a well-worn suit. She watched the surf crawl tentacles up the beach toward her and she asked it for news of Rose and the baby, but it had nothing to give but frothy tight-lipped silence.
‘Rose?’ She got to her feet and waited for a reply.
‘Rose,’ she shouted again, ‘where the hell are you?’
Across the cove from left to right she could see there was no way around. The cliffs were huge, sliced into the sea like a boomerang, everything circled, thrown back. Where was she? Was this the mainland? Nothing looked familiar.
Kel spotted some of their things strewn about the beach and told herself she should collect them because there was nothing else to the place besides sand and rock and the damn ocean surround. She wondered if anybody was about. What part of Cornwall was this?
She walked the cove a little and when she stood to face the cliff she eyed it for possible climbing splits in the rock but there were none. Nothing but slippery block levels of pink and grey slate and the fall-away scree that pooled in the ridges.
For the billionth time in her life Kel Crow was alone. More than that; it was as if she were the last person standing. She was just a dead-beat girl alone on the planet, not the battle-hungry battle-scarred warrior she thought. She was tired and hungry and worn through to her weak strangling bones. She kicked about in the sand and flicked it at the cliffs and she bent to pick up the oddments of torn clothes and busted nothings and brought them together in a bundle, the only things to bring colour to the slate-grey landscape.
Kel piled the detritus into the opening of a scoop-out cave that she thought would make a great shelter later and then she entered the low-ceiling cavity for the water she might find there and she was right. Fresh water funnelled in a lifeline drip from a fissure deep within the rock and she lay on her back to let it fill her mouth and she swallowed it down as if it were the last thing on earth worth knowing because it was. It tasted of summer dew and summer rain combined. Kel thought of the fields and plants that might have captured that rain above the mountainous cliffs and the thought of dry land had her smile a little. Maybe this really was the mainland, perhaps at any moment somebody would call down to her from the clifftop, throw down a rope and tell her to hurry up and climb, that they had a fire going, food cooking. She was alive and maybe Rose and the baby were alive the same. It had only been a few hours since the boat capsized. Perhaps they had already been rescued and were warming themselves by the fire, waiting for Kel.
She drank until her stomach clenched with hunger and then she rolled free of the spring and crawled from the cave and looked toward the cliff, nobody yet.
‘Food,’ she said.
Kel returned to the shoreline to find something to chew on, picked a fistful of fingering bladderwrack seaweed from the beach and flicked it free of grain and she thought of all the ways to eat the stuff other than ripping and chewing but in the end that was just what she did. It wasn’t much, but a country girl like Kel knew that somewhere in that plant lived life. Life enough to have her climb the cliff that would bring her to the clifftop and perhaps lead her to Rose. Kel knew the girl was alive though all her unconscious senses said otherwise, she told herself Rose was breathing still because she had to be. The girl was hers for caring and more than that she was hers for saving.
She settled back down into the damp sponge grit with the taste of salt in her mouth and everywhere else besides and pushed her toes deep into the sand. Her boots were long gone and her one good pair of socks gone the same. They were out there floating somewhere. Maybe the tide would wash them close, but more than likely they were gone forever. They were great boots and Kel felt sorry for their passing, a million miles of walking had been trodden into the story of those boots. A few good runnings had been stamped there too.
She watched the sun hang in the balance between two banks of cloud and as its thin-reed light fired down on to the beach bay its reflection sparked from the sudden revelation rocks. The light put movement into everything solid and when Kel leaned back to stop the spin, she wondered if she had hit her head on the rocks as she was swept ashore. She felt her head for new bumps and closed her eyes to stop the giddy, but when she opened them the rock in front of her that had moved most was moving still.
Another chance offering itself up as good fortune, Kel thought, and she jumped to her feet and she ran to the rocks with the girl’s name pinned to her lips. But it only took one bad-beat moment more to see her hope dashed against them.
She stood at the edge of the rocks and stared at the dolphin that balanced there. She supposed it was better to be looking at a half-living animal than a half-dead girl and she climbed out on to the rocks to see if there was any way to save it.
Kel squatted beside the creature and when she cupped what little water was contained in the rock pool to wet its back she could see the red in the water darkening to black. What it was to be a stranded animal in the middle of the relentless ocean, stranded and injured and afraid. Kel knew what it was to be all those things, and when she took her knife from her belt and bent to the beautiful beast she recognised everything in its eyes because it was all in hers too; it was fear and it was fear of the known. What had been and what was to come were both the same.
The part of Kel that was human was sorry to do the thing she was compelled to do now, but to know suffering and to witness the slow-peel burn of death for the sake of clea
n hands was not in Kel’s character, and so with all her strength she buried the knife into the strange satin flesh and she made the job quick.
She sat with the dead animal a long time and something of its selfless spirit entered her. Its existence out there on the rocks was company of a kind. She was not alone; animal dead or alive, she was not alone.
Kel looked up at the cliffs and the thought of Rose out there somewhere set a small spur fire beneath her and she washed the blood from her hands and climbed from the rocks and went off back toward the cliff.
She stood at the foot of the precipice and toed the purple slate shingle that had fallen on to the beach in drifts like heavy snow. She walked it back and she walked it forward. No matter how she went about it she would have to scramble on the giveaway surface: and that meant hands and knees all in for the climb of her life. She knew if she could get past the slip and fall she would be able to use her strength to power up the rock face and she told herself it was a cliff just like any cliff she used to climb as a kid. The secret was to keep going, dig bare toes into every crevice and fingertips into each ridge for clinging no matter how narrow the hold.
To keep moving was to be winning in the fight for height and Kel would keep going until the strange new world below made sense to her. To sit at the summit of her surroundings would be to map them and conquer them in some way. So she took a deep breath and shifted forward and made a start at grappling the cutting oddment stones.
There were parts to her that ached a little and other parts that gave way completely and those were the times when she fell flat and sliding into the smack bang and she let the earth move beneath her because what else was there? Occasionally Kel let the ice-marbled shards press too close into her check and in those moments there was something of both life and death within her. The pain sharpened her senses and comforted the same and if it wasn’t for the girl in her care and perhaps the baby she really would have given up on the whole survival thing. Maybe there was no point to living for living’s sake, Kel didn’t know, but there was so much hope in her gut wishing on a better day that there was no argument to it.
Only the Ocean Page 13