by Wilbur Smith
‘I hate this drying-out period.’
‘It’s your own rule to have no liquor on board – you’ll have to wait until South America or India, or whatever.’ She ducked down into the saloon, but before she reached the galley the radio above the chart-table squawked.
‘Zulu Romeo Foxtrot. This is Cape Town marine radio. Come in, please.’
‘Jan, that’s us. Take it,’ Craig yelled. ‘Someone at the yacht club saying goodbye, probably.’
‘Cape Town marine radio, this is Zulu Romeo Foxtrot. Let’s go to Channel 10.’
‘Is that the yacht Bawu?’ The operator’s voice was clear and undistorted, for they were still on line of sight to the antenna above the harbour.
‘Affirmative. This is Bawu.’
‘We have a radio-gram for you. Are you ready to copy?’
‘Go ahead, Cape Town.’
‘Message reads: “For Craig Mellow regarding your typescript A Falcon Flies STOP we wish to publish and offer advance of $5,000 against 12½ per cent royalties on world rights STOP reply soonest congratulations from Pick chairman William Heinemann Publishers London.”’
‘Craig,’ Janine shrieked from below. ‘Did you hear? Did you hear that?’
He could not answer her. His hands were frozen to the wheel and he was staring directly ahead over Bawu‘s bows as they rose and fell gently across the distant blue horizon of the Atlantic Ocean.
Two days out, the gale came out of the south-east without any warning. It laid Bawu over until solid green water came in over the rail and swept Janine out of the cockpit. Only her safety-line saved her, and Craig struggled for ten minutes to get her back on board, while the yacht paid off madly before the wind and the jib sail burst with a crash like cannonshot.
The gale lasted five days and five nights, during which time there seemed to be no clear dividing line between mad wind and wild water. They lived in a deafening cacophony of sound as the gale played on Bawu‘s hull like a crazed violinist, and the Atlantic grey-beards marched down upon them in majestic succession. They lived with the cold in their bones, soaked to the skin, and with their hands white and wrinkled like those of a drowned man, and the soft skin torn by harsh nylon sheets and stiff unyielding sails. Once in a while they snatched a dry biscuit or a mouthful of cold congealed beans, and washed it down with plain water, then crawled back on deck again. They slept in turns for a few minutes at a time on top of the bundled wet sails that had been stuffed down the companionway into the saloon.
They went into the storm as greenhorns and when the wind dropped as suddenly as it had attacked them, they were sailors – utterly exhausted and gaunt with the terror through which they had lived, but with a new pride in themselves and the vessel that had borne them.
Craig had just sufficient strength to heave the yacht to, and let her ride the smooth but still mountainous swells on her own. Then he dragged himself to his bunk, dropped his stinking wet clothing on the deck and fell back naked on the rough blanket and slept for eighteen hours straight.
He woke to a new tumult of emotions, uncertain of what was fantasy and what was reality. Where before there had been no sensation at all, his lower body was locked in an agonizing spasm. He could feel each separate muscle, and they seemed pitted against each other to the point of tearing or bursting. From the sole of his foot to the pit of his stomach, his nerve-ends felt as though they were scraped raw. He cried out as the pain threatened to swamp him, and then in the pain found suddenly the beginnings of exquisite, almost insupportable, pleasure.
He cried out again, and heard his cry echoed from above him. He opened his eyes and Janine’s face was inches above his, her naked body pressed against his from breast to thighs. He tried to speak, but she gagged him with her own lips, and moaned into his mouth. Abruptly he realized that he was buried deeply in her heat and silken elasticity, and they were borne aloft on a wave of triumph higher and fiercer than any that the Atlantic had hurled at them during the gale.
It left them both clinging to each other, speechless and barely able to breathe.
She brought him a mug of coffee once he had Bawu sailing again, and she perched on the edge of the cockpit with one hand on his shoulder.
‘I want to show you something,’ he said.
He pointed at his bare leg that was thrust out in front of him on the deck cushion, and as she watched he wriggled his toes back and forth, then from side to side.
‘Oh, darling,’ she husked, ‘that’s the cleverest thing I’ve ever seen anybody do.’
‘What did you call me?’ he asked.
‘Do you know something?’ She did not reply to the question immediately. ‘I think that you and I are going to be all right—’ Only then, she laid her cheek against his, and whispered in his ear, ‘I called you darling, okay?’
‘That’s okay by me, darling,’ he replied, and locked in the yacht’s self-steering vane, so that he had both arms free to hold her.
Endnotes
1 ‘Kaffir’ is derived from the Arabic word for an infidel. During the nineteenth century, it denoted members of the southern African tribes. Without any derogatory bias it was employed by statesmen, eminent authors, missionaries and champions of the native peoples. Nowadays its use is the sure mark of the racial bigot.
2 Zimbabwe People’s Revolutionary Army.