And Grandpa, smelling of sweat and cigarettes as he knelt beside Jack, one arm across his back while the other reached for fragments of porcelain.
There, there, no harm done, I never liked that bowl anyways. Don’t shout, son, he only dropped it ‘cos you shouted.
Had it always been like that, him and Grandpa against the rest?
And on the day that his grandpa died, Jack carried raspberries to his father. He told himself he was honouring Grandpa rather than needling his father, who’d have forgotten the incident long ago. Harry sat in Grandpa’s front room at the kneehole desk in the recess between the fireplace and the dining room wall, and Jack waved the bowl towards him, lifting his shoulders in a half-shrug that made light of the moment. Nearly fifteen years since he’d left home and he still had to resist that urge to placate, with an apology ready in his mouth like a bad berry that he might have to spit out.
Harry grimaced, irritated, and turned back to the papers spread in front of him. The drawer hanging open by his knee looked as if it held bank statements and savings passbooks. It didn’t seem right, somehow, picking over Grandpa’s life so soon. Jack would rather have pulled a bottle of Eddie’s elderflower wine from the cupboard under the stairs, sat in the garden with the bowl of raspberries and drunk to him, wherever he’d gone.
In the silence, Harry threw one of Grandpa’s diaries backhanded towards a plastic recycling crate near his feet. That didn’t seem right, either. Nearly forty years of diaries were in those cupboards, all in cheap, hardback, half-page notebooks, all labelled with the year and a ‘volume’ number. Volume 35 hit the edge of the crate and fell onto the carpet, fanning pages covered in Grandpa’s awkward script. Jack did a mental calculation. Four years ago. He’d taken a week’s leave and they’d sailed round the Channel Islands together. The last long voyage together. Good times. Jack bent over, quietly, and pocketed it.
‘You could check the loft.’ Harry didn’t look up. He was hunched over the desk, shoulders tense, and he didn’t want Jack there.
Jack found a corkscrew instead.
The tide had turned. The mudbanks glistened blue–brown but the boats moored out in the harbour were pointing seawards. Draca used to swing with the tide at a buoy in Freshwater Bay, between the cottage and Witt Point, but the mooring had been empty since arthritis kept Grandpa ashore and Draca was laid up in the boatyard. Grandpa had changed, after that. He’d always been old, to Jack, but somehow vital, the sort of guy who’d laugh into the storm with spray running down his face and white hair plastered to his scalp. But it’s hard to sail if you can’t grip a rope, and without his boat he became just an old man with salty stories to tell, a man who cursed as his hands fumbled at woodworking tools or a corkscrew.
The pop of the cork sounded muffled, as if the heat had robbed the air of its resonance. Grandpa’s elderflower wine was fragrant, floral and sweet enough to sharpen the raspberries. It seemed appropriate, somehow, to have a moment of reflection, to sit in the garden and toast him in his own, tepid wine, eating the first raspberries of the summer. Here’s to you, old man. Thanks for the good times. He took another pull at the wine, forcing his mind onto good memories, away from Eddie’s screaming end and his own humiliation. Rages weren’t him. Hadn’t been. He’d been trained to kill but he didn’t take swings at people. Never before. These explosions of anger were getting worse.
Grandpa had understood. He’d been gentle, when Jack first came back. Not in the cloying, gosh-it-must-have-been-awful way most people have, but with a quiet tolerance as if he’d been there. He seemed to understand that sometimes people don’t need sympathy; they need time to work out how to live with the shit inside them. Homemade wine, a boat seat and silence between friends, staring out over the inlet. Good therapy for both of them. On one of Jack’s first visits back, Grandpa had broken the silence to tell Jack he had cancer. Aggressive. Terminal. Soon. After that, Jack had come over a lot, usually on his own. Charlotte was probably glad to have him out of the house.
Jack leafed through the diary, looking for entries about their voyage. Each entry started with a weather report, like a ship’s log. He’d forgotten that that was also the year that Eddie found the carving.
20 th April. Wind ESE Force 4. Fair.
I’m soaking the dragon in an old bath, in the shed. Had to trim the burnt end so it would fit. Kept it in seawater, first, then polyethylene glycol. Had the devil’s own job to find that stuff. Six more months, I reckon, before it’s safe to take it out. It looks up at me through the chemicals the way a sick patient looks at a doctor.
Maybe it’s Danish, from one of Guthrum’s ships. He raided this coast in the time of King Alfred, him and his army.
Guthrum the oath-breaker, the Saxons called him, but then the Saxons wrote the histories so they’re bound to have made him out the bad guy. I’d like it to be Viking.
‘I thought you were going to help. There’s still the loft to do.’
Jack slipped the diary out of sight. His father frowned into the sun by the seat, holding up an envelope to shield his eyes. Jack remembered that tone. It hovered between disappointment and mild contempt, and it was the voice he’d used to express disapproval when Jack became too old to be ordered around. It still made him feel like a teenager who wouldn’t tidy his room.
‘Have some wine. Lighten up.’
Jack had brought a spare glass and slid it along the shelf inside the hull.
‘Too early for me.’ Harry sat down, anyway. The silence stretched. ‘Bit jumpy, are we?’
‘Just a touch. It’ll pass.’
A different kind of silence grew between them, the kind when you wonder what to say.
‘How much leave you got?’
Jack took a deep breath. His father had to know sometime.
‘I’ve left the marines.’
Another silence. Maybe a slight nod, as if this was only to be expected.
‘Your decision or theirs?’
Jack took another breath before he answered. ‘Mutual.’ Technically, a medical discharge, but Harry didn’t need to know that. This time, there was a definite nod beside him.
‘A step too far, was it?’
For a moment the rage surged back, hot and furious, but Jack took another breath and focused on a pine tree out on Witt Point. He couldn’t see the traces of the old chapel from here, but it was still one of the most peaceful views he knew and he stared at it until he could pick up his glass, without shaking, and take a sip that tipped into a gulp. There, he was learning.
‘That’s right, I couldn’t hack it.’ Jack refilled his glass, hoping he’d put enough derision in his voice to make Harry wonder if he was lying. He wasn’t going to try to explain. Harry had served twenty-two years in the Royal Engineers without being shot at, always managing to be somewhere else when things got nasty, like being in Germany during the Falklands War. A warrant officer second class when he retired, a parade-ground sergeant major. Sure, he’d been to trouble spots. Northern Ireland, even peacekeeping in the Balkans, but he’d never seen action. He wouldn’t understand.
‘So what are you going to do?’
‘Odd jobs, while I work out the next steps.’ And living off his resettlement grant.
Harry breathed deeply a few times, as if he was working up to something.
‘Pass us that glass then.’
Great. They might even have a conversation. Harry held the glass, not drinking, sitting upright and square so his shoulders filled the space between Jack and the figurehead, crowding him into the corner.
‘Here’s to Grandpa, then,’ Jack prompted, and drank. Harry made a token sip.
Another pause.
‘You always was close,’ Harry said after a while. It was a statement, not a question, and it hung in the air with an implied criticism. ‘Closer than you was to us,’ he might have added. Shit, did he really wonder why Jack had spent his boyhood weekends on the water with Grandpa rather than at home, enduring the salad-crunching silence of Sunday Tea?
‘We got along OK. I wasn’t frightened of him.’ Jack let Harry digest that for a while, and then waved the bowl of raspberries at him. Peace offering. Harry shook his head. Another long pause.
‘Will you sell this place, Dad?’ Jack would miss it, if he did. His father had no siblings to share the inheritance, and the cottage must have been worth a bit. Ten or twelve miles away by road, two across the water, Furzey was a playground of the rich, all smart yachts and apartment blocks. The same distance the other way, over the ferry at the narrow harbour entrance, was some of the most expensive real estate in the country. You’d pay more for a sea view round there than the average person would earn in a hundred years. Grandpa’s cottage was small, one half of a semi-detached pair, and too remote from the bright lights to command top prices, but it was the sort of place a City family would snap up as a holiday cottage, like the one next door. Plus there’d be a huge premium for a mooring in the only deep-water inlet on five miles of shoreline.
‘Probably.’ Harry sipped his wine, a larger pull this time, and rubbed his spare hand on his trousers like he was wiping sweat off his palm.
‘Oh, there’s a letter for you.’ He handed over an envelope with Lieutenant Jack Ahlquist, RM in Grandpa’s script. Not any more, old man. It was still sealed.
‘Can I ask a favour?’ Jack held the letter loosely in his hand, unwilling to open it beside his father.
‘Depends what it is.’
‘I’d like something to remember him by. That photo of him in Draca. Maybe the model of a longship that he made. Perhaps his diaries, if you’re going to chuck them?’
‘Yeah. S’pose. But let me think about the diaries.’
Harry spoke without enthusiasm. Jack stood and took the letter down the garden.
He felt the intensity of Harry’s scrutiny as he came back, but his father was too proud to ask what was in it. Jack gave it to him anyway and watched his eyebrows fold as he read it.
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Neither do I.’ Jack took the letter back and read it again. It was dated three months previously, so he’d written it after he knew he was dying.
Jack, my boy. He always called Jack that.
I have a request, something they wouldn’t let me put in the Will. That, by the way, is with Cartwright and Johnston in Furzey.
Draca is in the boatyard. George Fenton runs it now, and will show you where to find her. She don’t look in great shape any more, but then she don’t need to for what I have in mind.
See if you can find a way of putting me on board, will you? Then take the old girl out to sea and sink her. Best of all, burn her. Somewhere off Anfel Head. Draca will know where. It’s where she wants to be, and I quite like the idea of going out like an old Viking chieftain.
There’s a challenge, eh? See what you can do.
Thanks for being around, these past few months. It’s helped a lot.
Be strong, Jack. You always were the best of us, and still are.
Love,
Grandpa
*
That last sentence raised a lump in Jack’s throat.
‘He’s mad.’ Harry still used the present tense.
The anger flared, and died as Jack realised his father wasn’t talking about ‘the best of us’. Mad? Yes, ‘Draca will know where’ was a bit strange, but the cancer had spread to Grandpa’s brain by the end. He could act strange, sometimes, but Jack didn’t think he was mad. He’d loved that boat. He’d rebuilt it from a wreck, with his own hands, and it was a part of him. Some people want their ashes scattered in a place that’s special. Grandpa wanted to go down with his boat. Jack could understand that.
‘I’d better go and talk to that solicitor.’ When Harry stood up, he needed to duck to fit under the bows of the boat shelter.
‘I’m not driving anywhere.’ Jack poured more wine. ‘I’ll sleep here, in my old room.’ He’d done that a lot while Grandpa was sick. ‘And the offices will be shut by the time you get there.’
Harry snorted as he left. Jack didn’t blame his father for the lack of emotion. Not really. Harry and Eddie had never been close. They lived ten miles apart and hardly saw each other. Strange how life repeats itself. A couple of times Jack had been here when his father rang, maybe after Jack had taken the old man out for a birthday pint, and the half of the conversation he could hear always sounded stilted, a duty performed and received, technically connected but not connecting in any personal sense. Soon Grandpa would say ‘Jack’s here – want a word?’ like he was keen to hand over the phone. Afterwards the cottage would be quieter, as if some sadness or regret had settled on the place, and Grandpa would go and sit on his dinghy seat, even in winter, and smoke.
*
29 th April. Wind SW Force 3. Showers.
It must be Harald Guthrumsson’s. The saga fits. This is the only deep water inlet in miles.
After I finished translating, I spent a long time looking at the dragon as it soaked in its bath of chemicals. I even took a bottle of elderflower wine with me to help me think. I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to keep it. I know what it’s done now, what it has seen.
Maybe I should do what Jack says and give it to a museum. I fell asleep sitting on the floor of the shed, thinking, and I dreamed of blood and killing. There was a moment as I woke when I understood, but the wisdom faded like a dream. It was something to do with all deaths being steps towards Ragnarök, when even the gods must die and the world will drown, but I can’t explain why that seemed beautiful.
Afterwards I felt strong and young again. I split logs with the axe, sending the pieces spinning over the garden until the sweat ran and my hands ached and told me I was old.
Maybe I’ll keep it. A dragonhead for Draca. We were meant to be.
*
Jack rested his hand on the top of the figurehead, wondering what his grandfather had discovered, and why the carving had become so important to him. Jack hadn’t sailed in Draca many times since Grandpa fitted it. By the time he came back from his first, long deployment, to Afghanistan, Draca was laid up. But he remembered going out with Grandpa once, just before he deployed, and seeing the dragon’s scaly head snarling down and out at the ocean for the first time. Grandpa’s hands were already troubling him, and he let Jack do most of the sailing, but he took the helm for a while and sent Jack forward to watch that carved head soar over the sea. ‘Look at it,’ Grandpa had said, eyes shining, ‘it’s happy. The dragon’s happy!’ So Jack braced himself against the forestay, with the boat heeling over and the foresails swelling in the wind beside him, and looked down. As if to prove a point, the ship put her shoulder into a trough so that the sea came in green around his legs, and the dragon rose with water streaming from that gaping jaw as if it had just eaten the wave. Yes, he could persuade himself that the dragon was happy, in a brutal, in-your-face kind of way.
He’d heard that Grandpa’s sailing style grew more aggressive after that. It cost him a few friends.
And on the day that Grandpa died Jack let his fingers trace the scales on the dragon’s head while he stared at the view, drowsy with wine, remembering the loving sea dog rather than the mad old man of recent weeks. The garden was in shadow now the sun had dropped behind the hills, though it still turned the yachts and far shore into sharp and dazzling colours. When Jack was a boy, Grandpa had read him stories on this seat. Sea stories. Sagas. Once he’d read Jack a saga in Old Norse, just to let him hear the music of the ancient, Viking tongue. He’d read poems of the sea with the passion of an orator in his voice, and he’d given Jack his love of books. That evening the old hull ticked with minute contractions of the wood as it cooled. It was a friendly, whispering sound that eased Jack into sleep with the memory of companionable silences on this seat.
*
He’s standing in Draca’s bows, and in the scrambled way of dreams there is no bowsprit, but the dragon rises high above the stem. Impossibly, though naturally, Draca is propelled by great sweeps of oars, a motion he fe
els through his cheek where it rests against the dragon. It’s a slow surge–pause, surge–pause that has water bubbling under the forefoot with each stroke. On the port side, vague in the mist, Freshwater Bay stretches beneath the shelter of Witt Point, and he knows but does not know this harbour that he has sailed since childhood; he only senses that the inlet is a place where deep water comes close to the land. Ahead of him, unseen in the mist, must be Furzey. Furze Oy, in Anglo-Saxon, Fyrsig in the old tongue, the island of gorse.
Surge–pause, and the pause is marked by the sound of water raining from the blades as the oars swing back to bite again. There is a tension, an excitement in the ship as they approach the land; the same, creeping, hunter’s bloodlust that he’d felt with the troop around him, awaiting his command in the moments before action.
The carving against his cheek jolts to a blow, a sound so loud that they must have struck a rock, and his first thought is of failure; he had not foreseen such dangers in this place of soft mud and winding channels.
Jack grabbed the dragon for support, his eyes flying open and blinking, disoriented. His father stood above him, framed by the arch of the boat seat, with fury tugging his jaw into angles that were sharp as broken porcelain.
IV: HARRY
Harry Ahlquist found it strange that Old Eddie had finally gone. It wasn’t like they’d been bosom buddies, not like some blokes are with their fathers, but it was still, well, strange. It made Harry think of an apple tree that used to grow in his garden. It was there before the house was built, and it was old and twisted and a bit ugly. Nice blossom, though. Then a branch dropped off in a storm and it was even uglier, all lopsided, until one autumn there was a bit of a blow and the whole thing fell over. Harry hadn’t even liked it very much, but then when he’d cleared up the mess the place was different. A bit emptier.
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