by Chris Simms
The master raised a hand. ‘What are you doing?’
‘Getting rid of them,’ the man with throat scars replied.
‘What?’
‘We lock them back in their containers and dump them over-board.’
‘You cannot.’
Still looking at his colleague, the man motioned with his chin.
‘Marat, go.’
‘Wait,’ the master blustered. ‘I am in charge here. I will not let you do this.’
The edges of his charts began to flap furiously as Marat stepped out into the gale. Once the door had clicked shut, the man turned to the master, eyes sliding contemptuously over the insignia on the shoulders of his white shirt. ‘Your rank means nothing to me.’
‘I am master of this ship!’
The man took a step closer and the open collar of his khaki shirt parted slightly, showing more of the ugly latticework of scars that enmeshed his throat. ‘You answer to Mykosowski, same as me. My orders are to ensure that nothing puts the delivery of that container below deck at risk. Nothing.’ He glanced down at the huddles of people clinging to whatever they could find on the deck below. ‘Not them. Not any pirate ship off the African coast. Not even you.’
‘But you can’t just throw them overboard,’ the master whispered.
The man stepped closer, his bottom teeth showing like points.
‘You want maybe to join them?’
The master’s eyes dropped and he turned away without another word.
Cut Adrift - Chapter One
Sixteen days later
Using the main blade of his penknife, Oliver Brookes worked at the tablet of driftwood. The machinations of the sea had worn its edges smooth, salt water had bleached and softened it. He prised a rusty nail out, shaved the burr from the rim of the hole and then looked into it. An eye. The hole would make a good eye.
He held the piece of timber at arm’s length, looking beyond the flow of its faded grain to the very nature of the thing. It was a turtle, he decided. That was the shape trying to get out. Tomorrow he would pare the extraneous wood away and watch the animal gradually emerge.
In the corner of the room, an ancient-looking radio played soft music. There was no television, computer or phone. There was no electric toaster, microwave or coffee-making machine in the narrow kitchen off to the side. No halogen lights, stereo system or burglar alarm.
Every available surface was covered by driftwood sculptures. Dolphins, basking sharks, hermit crabs. Gulls and puffins and kittiwakes hung from the roof’s low beams. Shoals of sea bass, herring and mackerel milled in the corners of the flagstone floor.
The front door was open, allowing a breeze to blow in off the sea just beyond. He placed the piece of wood on the table to the side of his tatty armchair and stood, feeling the stiffness in his hip bones as he did so.
The sun had almost set and the brine-filled draught swirling round his front room now carried with it a pinch of cold. Time to shut the door, draw the curtains and climb into bed. As usual, he paused in the doorway to survey the bay that curved away on each side of his cottage. To the right, the nearest sign of human life were the twinkling lights of Combe Martin, a good mile along the jagged coast.
He was just about to pull the wooden door closed when he spotted a dark form in the shallows. His eyes narrowed. A moment later there was movement as the whale raised its fluke in a futile wave. To Oliver Brookes it was a beckoning; a plea for help.
Leaving the door open, he walked straight through to his bedroom, yanked the eiderdown from the bed and peeled the sheet from the mattress. He reached down and removed a second, folded sheet from the drawer built into the base of the bed. Leaving them on his armchair, he stepped into the kitchen where he dragged out the bucket and hurricane lamp from below a trough-like sink. Then he marched back through the cottage, dumping the sheets into the bucket on the way.
His front garden was crowded with larger sculptures, some of driftwood, others incorporating the flotsam and jetsam regularly washed up on the beach. Gnarled lengths of rope, plastic containers of all shapes and sizes, fragments of sack bearing the remnants of foreign words. He removed a large shovel from the stone shed that held his supply of wood for the winter, slipped through the waist-high gate and was immediately on the strip of grass that bordered the beach. He stepped down the gentle bank and on to the expanse of coarse yellow sand.
After ten strides he reached the band of seaweed deposited by that afternoon’s unusually high tide. Stepping across the spongy bed, he reached sand again and walked slowly towards the stranded whale, the fast-retreating tide now two metres behind it.
Its slender body was about five metres long and dark grey in colour. The fluke moved again, the pointed tips gouging deep ruts in the sand. The sea water filling them was red with blood. He examined the hooked dorsal fin set far down its back, the white band on the upper side of each flipper and the fringe of porcelain white which he knew covered its underside. A young minke, just a few years old.
Putting his things down, he slowly approached the head of the animal, gaze moving along the ridge that stretched from its blowhole down the head to the midpoint of its upper jaw. A mass of dents and nicks covered the animal’s shiny blubber, reminding him of the bodywork on a battered car.
An eye, so small for such a large creature, stared at him without blinking. He looked into the black pupil, barely darker than the iris which surrounded it. What places you’ve been, he thought. The crushing silence of lightless depths. Air exploded from the animal’s blowhole and moments later he felt a few specks of moisture settle on his face.
‘Calm now,’ he cooed in a deep and gentle voice. ‘Shush.’ Slowly, he extended a hand and placed it on the smooth, warm flesh above the animal’s eye. ‘I’ll not hurt you, my friend. I’ll not hurt you.’
The eye slowly closed and he felt the creature had somehow understood him. Brookes straightened up and looked out to sea. The sun had now almost dipped below the horizon and he knew the tide would not return for another twelve hours. He turned to the distant lights of Combe Martin, the hill called Little Hangman looming high above the village. To get there involved climbing the steep cliff path, walking through wooded slopes and then following sheep trails across empty heathland. By the time he had made it to the village and persuaded whoever was in the Focsle Inn to help, the whale would be dead. Looking back at the creature, he sighed at the enormity of the task before him.
He walked round to the fluke, quickly spotting the small lacerations to the right-hand edge. He knew the blood was mixing with sea water, making the bleeding appear far more serious than it actually was. Still, the object causing the wounds needed to be removed. Ready to move back at the first twitch of the tail, he reached into the crimson water and quickly felt around. His fingers closed on a thin, jagged lump and he dug around it, pulled the thing out then scrabbled clear. It was slate, common to that stretch of the north Devon coast.
After flinging it far away, he picked up the bucket, walked down to the shallows and tipped the sheets into the water. Once they were soaked he fished them out, walked back to the whale, lifted one up and tore a hole in its middle. He draped it over the whale so the dorsal fin protruded through the slit. The other sheet he draped further up the animal, positioning the corners of the dripping cloth over the fins. That left only the head exposed, along with the areas around the creature’s eyes and blowhole.
He trudged back up the beach, scooped an armful of damp bladderwrack, carried it back to the shrouded whale and began stringing it across the creature’s head. An eye opened, following the movements of his arms before more air burst from its blowhole.
‘I know,’ Brookes murmured. ‘As wigs go, it’s not fooling anyone.’
He stepped back then looked at the spade. Have I got the strength to do this on my own? He put his hands on his hips. You’ve got no choice. There’s no one else to help. He stooped to pick the tool up.
By the time the eastern sky began to lighten
, Brookes was sitting by the whale, arms resting on his knees. His head lolled slightly as sleep momentarily took him. The whale’s breathing had grown more and more ragged as the night wore on. Now it coughed and Brookes’ head came up. He looked at the blowhole, saw the lumps of white phlegm sliding down into the wreath of seaweed that circled it. The animal didn’t have long left.
He studied the pit he’d dug round the creature then examined the channel, flanked by piles of sand leading down the beach. At last the tide had turned: water was starting to creep into the far end of the channel. Turning his head, he saw the eye watching him.
‘Soon, my friend, soon. Are you feeling a bit dry, there?’ He picked up the bucket, stepped down into the pit and filled it with brackish water. ‘Here you go,’ he said, smoothing his wet palm around the animal’s eye. Slowly, it closed, allowing him to dribble water over the lids. He walked round, moistened the creature’s other eye then sluiced the remaining water across its back, worried at how hot the animal had become.
By now a tongue of sea water was pushing up the channel.
Lumps of sand were beginning to collapse into it, leaving behind a light froth which was then carried towards them. ‘Come on, come on,’ Brookes whispered.
A few minutes later, the sun cleared the crest of the moors behind him, bathing the pale sand in a golden glow. Water had begun to fan out into the pit, trickling around his bare feet. Five minutes later, it had reached his ankles. He splashed his way over to the animal and rubbed gently above the whale’s eye. Slowly, it opened. ‘Now, you have to try. I can’t shift you.’ He pointed to their right, towards the open sea. ‘That way, OK? That way.’
Water was now sloshing at his calf muscles, lapping at the whale’s belly. The creature’s fluke moved. Brookes lifted off the damp sheets and threw them onto the mound of sand behind them. He swept the seaweed from the whale’s head.
Slowly, he walked backwards to the top of the channel, water pushing at the backs of his knees, soaking the turn-ups of his trousers. He clapped, beckoning the creature towards him, watching as the level of water inched over its flippers, then up to its eyes. Soon just its dorsal fin and upper back were showing.
He clapped louder. ‘Come on! Come on! To me, to me, to me!’
Water churned and the fluke broke through, thrashing from side to side as the creature struggled to swing itself round in the shallows.
‘Yes! Yes!’ Brookes roared, slapping the waist-high water with his palms, trying to guide the animal from the circular pool.
The dorsal fin inched towards him, fluke struggling to power the whale forward. He stepped to the side and reached out a hand, trailing it along the animal’s smooth side as it sensed the deeper channel and began nudging its way down it.
‘Go!’ he shouted tiredly, wading along beside it and weakly punching the air. ‘Go!’
The animal made the sea proper, and with its fluke finally able to work freely, quickly disappeared beneath the waves. About thirty metres out, it resurfaced, blew a cloud of vapour into the air then sank from sight once more. Hands on hips, Brookes waded backwards out of the sea, eyes continually scanning its surface. Minutes later, his face broke into a smile as the sun lit another cloud of vapour, this one rising about two hundred metres out to sea.
As he turned to retrieve his things from the rapidly encroaching tide, something bumped against his ankle. He looked down and saw a yellow duck bobbing its way past him. He spotted another, looked along the shoreline to his left and realised there were perhaps a dozen more of the things being washed up on the beach. Stiffly, he bent down and picked it out of the water.
The yellow plastic had been bleached by the sun and the blue paint at the edge of one eye had come away, giving the thing a cross-eyed look. It grinned up at him. Frowning, Brookes turned it over, feeling the faint rattle of droplets within. He studied the lettering stamped on its underside. Trademark and copyright stamps, then lettering: Kyou Inc, Made in China. No surprise, he said to himself. Everything seems to be made there, nowadays. He stepped clear of the water, dropped the duck into his bucket alongside the hurricane lamp, scooped up his sheets and spade then trudged slowly back up the beach.
Cut Adrift - Chapter Two
Jon Spicer leaned back in the hot water. A bath after work, he thought. Never in a million years would I have believed this would become a regular habit. But since Alice had kicked him out the previous year, retreating into a small room and lying there in silence somehow felt right. He listened to sounds as they lost strength and blurred in the steamy air. The high tones of a siren somewhere close by in the city centre, the noise of a band rehearsing in the renovated warehouse behind the apartment building he was in, muted voices from the television in the next room.
The song which carried across the narrow alley separating the two buildings suddenly collapsed, drums being the final instrument to fall silent. Shit, that was me. Sorry. Sorry. The female vocalist’s voice. Jon imagined the woman to be somewhere in her early twenties, a mess of dyed hair held back by a brightly coloured band. Maybe a piercing through a nostril or her upper lip. OK, let’s go again from the start, a male voice announced and the keyboard started up an instant later.
As usual, he tried to straighten his legs so the warm water covered his knees. No chance, he thought. The baths in these new-build city-centre apartments weren’t designed for someone well over six feet tall. Instead he pressed his chin into his sternum and watched the coating of black hair covering the thick muscles of his chest shift and sway beneath the surface. A drip slowly detached itself from the tap at the other end of the bath, hitting the water with a delicate noise.
He thought about his life and the now-familiar sense of not being able to control it. Despite all his promises to change things, Alice had refused to allow him back. Even if he gave up the job.
She’d shaken her head with a sad smile when he’d offered to do that.
‘And what would you do instead?’
‘I don’t know,’ he’d replied. ‘Retrain as something. Boiler technician – I saw an ad by British Gas the other day. They pay for you to do the course. You end up with your own van, covering a set area.’ Even as the words were coming out of his mouth, he could tell they sounded absurd.
Alice didn’t even meet his eyes. ‘It’s your fortieth later this year. You’re a policeman, Jon. It’s all you’ve ever wanted. Anything else would leave you miserable.’
‘Not if it costs me my family.’
He watched another droplet slowly swell, the bulb of water stretching a fraction before it fell. He sighed, mind moving to giving evidence the next day. He and his partner, DS Rick Saville, were due in court at two fifteen. A rape case with all the potential for the attacker to walk away because, at the end of the day, it was his word against hers.
He hoped his part in the agonisingly slow court proceedings wouldn’t take up too much time. It was Friday the day after tomorrow and he had his daughter, Holly, for the night. He needed some time to prepare: buy in some of her favourite foods, visit a toy shop and get her some stuff to play with.
In barely two weeks it was her fifth birthday. Where had the years suddenly gone? Nearly five and she was showing anxiety- related behavioural problems. He shifted slightly, his body pushing out a little wave that rebounded off the side of the bath then hit his shoulder with a quiet slap. For the past few months he’d had to endure the fact his daughter spent more time in the company of Mummy’s new boyfriend than with himself.
Dr Phillip Braithwaite. Jon felt his jaw grow tight. Maybe if the man applied some of his psychiatry skills to Holly, he’d realise that his presence in the house was part of Holly’s problems. A short burst of air escaped his nostrils. Why couldn’t the twat just piss off? Fat chance. The bloke was ingratiating himself, easing his way deeper and deeper into their lives.
The knock on the door caused him to flinch and he almost sat up, the instinct to cover himself strong. The door opened, dragging steam out with it, and Carmel Tod
d, thirty-year-old crime reporter at the Manchester Evening Chronicle, stepped into the tiny bathroom. ‘Brought you a brew.’
Jon lifted his eyes, took in her long, willowy figure and smiled.
‘Cheers.’
She lowered the lid of the toilet at the side of the bath, sat down and then placed the mug of tea on the corner. Jon leaned back, trying to appear at ease with being naked in front of her. How bloody ridiculous, he thought. You’ve been sleeping with her for weeks. What’s the big deal about her wandering in when you’re having a bath?
Her fingers began to caress the cropped hair covering his head. A thumb strayed down, brushing lightly over the thick scar that bisected his left eyebrow. ‘Which musical feast are we being treated to this evening?’
His eyes flicked towards the frosted glass. ‘Sort of Pink Floyd, but a bit faster.’
‘Any good?’
‘A bit ambitious. The singer keeps losing her thread halfway through.’
Her hand worked its way to the side of his head and a finger began stroking his ear. Don’t, he wanted to say. I can’t stand my ears being fiddled with. Instead, he stopped the movement by raising a hand to give her fingers an affectionate squeeze. She returned the pressure and he raised himself up slightly so he could reach for the mug. ‘What are you watching on the telly?’
‘Oh,’ she said half-heartedly. ‘Channel Four news. A special report about human-rights abuses in China. Your boxes are still by the stereo. You’re allowed to unpack your stuff, I hope you realise?’ A playful tickle at the back of his neck. ‘Especially if Holly’s sleeping on the sofa this weekend.’
‘Yeah, sorry. I’ll try and do it later.’ He thought about his last attempt to sort out his collection of albums and films. The way he’d packed when leaving the family home amounted to little more than scooping the uppermost DVDs and CDs off the shelves, placing them in a couple of old cardboard boxes then putting the remainder of his collection on top. As a consequence, music he hadn’t listened to in years was now uppermost in the untidy stack.