In fact, he could not wait until the first shark turned up just so that he could punch it on the nose.
“Scuddle blocked sons of sail makers!” he spluttered angrily, “I will have my vengeance on you all, or my name is not Mad Dog Jenkins, and that’s the truth.”
He considered for a second lighting the candle in his hat in anger but he did not have a light. Or a candle. Or a hat, come to think of it.
Sighing deeply, he looked up into the bright blue sky, the sun blazing overhead as he bobbed along on the waves. There did not appear to be any land in sight anywhere. Well, not now that the ruddy island had sunk.
“Gazooned bloatfishes intestines!” he shouted at the top of his voice. It had no effect of course, for there was nobody there for it to have an effect on.
Jenkins continued to bob along the sea, the sun beating down on him. He squinted up into the sky and then blinked again as a small golden shape appeared in the sky far, far above him. He stared at the shape as if he was daring it to reveal what it was, but he could not quite make it out. Slowly the shape descended, getting nearer, and now he could also see flashes of red and blue on whatever it was. Sighing, Jenkins watched as the shape flew lower and now he saw it was a parrot. A relatively familiar parrot in fact.
The bird descended and then with grace and just a little sense of derision, landed on the plank of wood and glared at Jenkins, looking him straight in the eye before edging along the wood, claw by claw until it was very nearly in arms reach of him. Nearly but not quite.
“Your keys are in your pocket.” it said suddenly, preening itself with its beak before its full attention was focused on him again.
“Fell bellied talk monger!” spat Jenkins and the parrot just blinked, watching him carefully. The bird settled into silence, and Jenkins floated there staring at it as the waves lapped at his plank. The bird shuffled nervously from foot to foot, and Jenkins just watched it; waiting.
Hopping just a little closer the parrot looked at Jenkins and appeared as if it was about to open its mouth and say something.
“Just a word of caution.” said Jenkins loudly, a rare bout of clarity descending upon him that was no doubt the effect of his current circumstances. Interrupting the bird before it could speak, he continued. “If you are thinking of asking me what I have done with the island then I would advise you in fact not to do so.”
The parrot’s beak slammed shut and it bobbed slightly, as if annoyed before shuffling from foot to foot again.
“Seriously.” whispered Jenkins, “For your own safety I really wouldn’t.”
The parrot closed its beak once again and sniffed loudly as if offended.
Without a word it flapped its wings and rose from the plank, giving Jenkins one last haughty look as it ascended silently in the sky, sulking as it went.
Jenkins watched it rise higher, higher in the air until it disappeared into the sun and then finally as the sun blinked down, it was gone.
Acknowledgements
This has been a very long book to write. Two and a half years more or less in total. In fact, I have written two other full length books during the writing of this one. (“Anyone” and, “The Waiting Room”.) It seemed almost as if I would write anything at all rather than finish this at one point, but finally I am done.
This is surprising really, because the entire idea for the book popped into my head one morning shortly after I had woken. Don’t get me wrong - I don’t mean the plot, the character, the premise or the pitch or indeed anything like that. I mean everything.
It has never happened before - usually I get an idea or even sometimes a line; so on and so forth. This was the whole damned thing. All I had to do was write it.
It may have been what may have caused me to take so long doing it I suppose, because it has never worked like that before. (Whatever “it” is, of course!) Or perhaps I am just making excuses for taking my time - who knows?
So. My usual thanks. My quality control team are as always to be thanked most heartily, and I pity the poor person who on an ongoing basis continued to ask me every time I presented them with a new book to read with the words, “Yes. Thanks. But what about Overboard?”
I am also deeply conscious that I have missed at least three “International Talk like a Pirate” days, (September 19th - check it out!) the approach of which would usually be greeted by myself saying that “the book will be finished by then”.
Well here it is and September is months away. Sigh.
One day…… One day…
(Michael White 11/8/2012 – 10/7/2016
NOW READ ON…
AVAILABLE SOON:
“INTO THE LIGHT
BOOK ONE:
LOST IN TRANSLATION”
Chapter One
“Too Many Declan’s”
As far as Paul was concerned it had all started with the impossible woman. The woman who could not be; the woman who wasn’t, the woman who wandered into his life one day and then wandered back out just as silently as she had arrived, apparently never to be seen again.
Pausing on the footpath and shrugging the pack off his shoulder, Paul nestled down against a convenient rock, sheltering from the wind that blew across the cold April Cumbrian fells. Reaching into his waterproof jacket he produced a small wind shielded lighter. Pulling a cigarette from a packet stored in his pocket he lit it. Almost casually he exhaled the smoke and it dissipated quickly in the stiff wind that whistled around him. The smoke had gone just as soon as it had appeared, he thought to himself. Just like the impossible woman.
He leaned back against the rock, relaxing after the steep descent from the fell tops above him. Now there were wide open barren hills to traverse and he knew, for this was a path he had travelled many times before, that this would be the case for several miles now before the hillside levelled off and he reached the road far below him. After that hopefully he would have time for a swift drink in the inn he knew was not far along the road before making his way to the hostel he had booked a room in for the night and a well-earned sleep.
He glanced at the horizon, the thick clouds scudding across the steel grey sky. Further to the south he noted from his vantage point that thick black clouds were gathering on the horizon.
“Storm blowing in.” he muttered under his breath and exhaling more smoke he reluctantly rose and began to make his way further down the hillside, shouldering his pack as he did so.
Yes. The impossible woman with her long red hair, knowing eyes and swan-like way of almost gliding across the room. Had he ever known her? Not really, he thought. She seemed to be as much of an enigma to him as she was to everyone else.
“Who is that?” Paul had asked as the woman had entered the work dining room alone before slowly making her way to a table on the far side of the room and taking a seat.
“No idea.” Richard had mumbled through a mouth of sandwich, “She must be a newbie or something.” Paul remembered nodding his head, but all of his attention was focused on the woman who sat alone at the table across the canteen, staring into space. She did not appear to be eating, which made Paul wonder why she was in the canteen in the first place.
The wind almost settled a little during the next twenty minutes of Paul’s descent, but now the black clouds were getting nearer, a vertical line of grey rain falling across the fells as they rapidly drew near. Gathering his pack tighter against his back he freed his hood and began to cover himself for the deluge that was surely about to commence. Ominously, from far away he heard the deep slow rumble of thunder from across the mountains.
“Looks like it is going to be a belter.” he sighed aloud, dreading the rain that was rapidly heading towards him. “Or perhaps I am making my way towards it”, he wondered, a smile crossing his face at the idea.
Trying to ignore the fact that he was almost certainly about to get soaked to the skin Paul increased his pace a little as he remembered sitting in the canteen, watching the tall red haired woman just sitting staring into space, not even
bothering to eat, as if she was lost in thought. She did not seem to even have any food with her either.
“Why come into the canteen if you are not going to bother to eat?” Paul had said out loud, and Richard had just waved his sandwich in the air nonchalantly, the subject of the woman already forgotten by him in favour of yet more talk about football with the other people gathered about the table. They seemed to be as oblivious to the woman as Richard was.
Paul grinned to himself as he thought about work, mostly because he was not actually there at the moment. He had three more days of his walking holiday left and after that he had a few more days before he had to drag his reluctant self across the threshold of Regulus Data and return to his job as an online trainer for the company. It could be said that “online training” was quite a new concept to many of the people Paul trained, but then so too was electricity and running water to a lot of them Paul suspected.
It wasn’t a bad job really. The database Regulus sold detailed precisely planning applications across the country and it was purchased primarily by companies eager to get in touch with people building things so they could target and sell them their wares. Bricks and mortar. Solar panels. To say that the customers who subscribed to the database were technically challenged was merely stating the obvious. Had Paul not been so patient he would have spent most of the hours he spent at work gritting his teeth. The worst ones were the web conferences, where Paul had to quickly and efficiently guide up to thirty different people all over the country through a set of technical hoops that would allow all of those people to see his screen. Then he could show them how to operate the database. On a good day it was like trying to herd particularly mentally challenged sheep through a minefield. On a bad day it was much, much worse.
Not that it was a bad job he reflected as he continued down the hill, the fells beginning to open up all around him; just repetitive. There were also the people he had to train over the telephone numerous times every day of course, and that was where the hard part of his job lay. The customers’ he trained IT skills were at best rudimentary.
“Open a new browser window. Or a tab.” Paul would say.
“Do you mean Google?” would come the almost universal response.
“If it is Google then that’s fine.”
“Well it’s the BBC really. Should I try Google?”
And so on it went.
It was a common remark around the office that Paul had the patience of a saint, and yet even Paul knew that this was definitely not true. He was always the one to be found tutting at the back of the queue for the checkout, or usually the person with a sarcastic response to the checkout operator when eventually he did actually get served.
“I’ve been waiting so long I thought you were going to charge rent.” Paul would say, his only response a withering glare from the man or woman operating the till. To say that Paul was a master of the over-loud mumble was an understatement of monstrous proportions.
Yet when he was talking to the almost without exception grey matter lacking customers, from somewhere deep within himself he did actually manage to drag patience from his inner being with an ease that sometimes scared him. Even the boldest challenge to his training would send him off on tangents of all kinds to ensure that the customer did not feel either embarrassed or confused. He never could quite understand why.
Quite simply, he did not know where his extraordinary patience came from, but it was a very rare occasion for him to feel even vaguely rattled when trying to explain something over the telephone to a customer whose computer he was remotely connected to and was showing them exactly what he meant. Some of his co-workers, even though they worked on sales and therefore had no requirement for either patience or knowledge remarked upon it and so Paul decided it was just a talent he had, and it was best not to dig too deep into either how he did it or where it came from.
The path meandered down across the empty moors and led off into the distance, the well trodden way eroded by the passage of many feet into the hillside itself. Yet today the mountain was all but deserted. There had been rain forecast of course, and it could be said by the fair weather walker that it was a little too early in the year to be out fell walking, so the lack of any other walkers did not surprise him greatly.
He had taken, as was his habit, the time to check in with the local mountain rangers and had left his route with them, as well as the anticipated time of his return. It wasn’t just good manners; in case of mishap it was more or less essential. Possibly life saving.
The solitary nature of his walk did not concern him though In fact he was rather enjoying it. Having the hills all to himself was much better than having to have to make small talk with someone he met on his travels, and all of the embarrassing silences that would no doubt ensue.
No, he was his own best company and he preferred it that way most of the time. He pulled his mobile phone out of the pocket and made to take a photograph and thinking better of it pushed the arrow that pointed the camera to face towards him.
“Selfie time!” he smiled, pressing the button to capture a photograph of himself and then peering at the resulting picture he had taken. He smiled as he saw he had managed to place himself in the picture quite firmly in amongst the hills that showed behind him. He peered closer at the photograph of himself, stopping on the path almost in mid-step as he did so.
He looked at the smile he was presenting to the world in the picture; wondering. He was about six foot tall, hair greying and looking, he thought, every one of his thirty five years. Neither young nor old, he thought, trying to forget about the grey in his hair that seemed to grow a little greyer every month. This was the same person he saw every morning in the shaving mirror, the same sad smile on his face.
He knew he did not make friends easily. He never had. Not even when he was in at school. His mother had always scolded him for not mixing with the other children in the playground, and even now he realised that he had yet to start listening. He was a loner; plain and simple. Always had been, always would be. He knew his workmates found him to be stand-offish, but it did not concern him. Not that he considered himself to be solitary or even lonely. He knew he had a ready laugh and a keen sense of fun. He was just best suited to being on his own. He rarely felt lonely or unloved. In fact, it didn’t enter his mind at all.
It wasn’t always the way, of course. The very first time he had walked these fells he had been with his school friends, Roger and Peter, and they too had walked a route of several days from hostel to hostel. He laughed aloud as he seemed to recall on one occasion that they had all got drenched in an almost biblical rain shower at more or less this very spot where he was walking right now. He had a vague recollection of trying to light a cigarette in the pouring rain to no avail at all. That was until Peter had come up with the less than brilliant idea of smearing the end of their cigarettes with Paco Rabanne aftershave.
“How does that help?” Roger had asked, sniffing the now violently fragranced cigarette, the rain running off his hood and down his nose.
“Flammable, is aftershave.” Peter had proclaimed gleefully.
Nevertheless, three minutes later they had all been forced to admit defeat, the only result of the cigarette dousing being that the still unlit fags seemed to have absorbed a heady aroma of cheap aftershave. To this day the very faintest sniff of Paco Rabanne had him reaching for an umbrella.
Paul smiled at the thought of those good times. He never saw either of his school friends now; he led a much more solitary existence since his divorce, though he had never quite managed to shake off his attraction to the Lake District, the memories of the beautiful lakes and mountains that had never failed to take his breath away when he was younger...
Yet not now. Paul knew he was a changed man; damaged in some way and in the quiet hours, the time when sleep seemed unattainable he tortured himself. Perhaps he did not deserve friends? Roger and Peter had been special friends; people he confided in and cared for. Those he had spent time wi
th ever since they had met at school. He thought that perhaps when he met his wife Denise he had changed a little. Perhaps he had replaced his friends with her, and so it was inevitable that he and his school friends had begun to drift apart. Peter had married twice; Roger never, and although Paul knew that there was a very good reason for that, it was a reason that was never mentioned and therefore he did not feel that it coloured their relationship in any way whatsoever. They still saw each other of course, though mostly they spoke on the phone but over time it became less and less common and slowly they drifted apart as he knew sometimes old friends did.
Over the course of a ten-year marriage it became almost inevitable that it would be that way, and Paul found himself wondering sometimes if he had been selfish with his friends; not just that he let them drift away, but also there was the stark truth that they were his only friends. When they were gone he had nobody else, and he had invested so much time in his relationship with them he knew he was a getting a little long in the tooth in life to start again. There were work colleagues he liked of course, but they never socialised. The age gap was too broad for a start, though he knew the main reason of course was quite simply that they were not Roger and Peter. He had made them in his mind a difficult act to follow.
Denise, his ex-wife, knew this of course and to her credit she had encouraged him to keep in touch with his friends, but sometimes Paul would look at her and just know that she envied them and her insistence on them forming an ongoing bond involved more than a little jealousy on her behalf, something that she was very careful to hide, but Paul knew that it was there nonetheless.
Overboard! Page 38