Jack should have looked away, and watched the sailing rather than George, but he found himself smiling at the sight of her standing there, her eyes closed, with the wind flapping her shirt against her and that orange-streaked hair whipping like a banner above her head. With each wave her body would rise, find a moment of exquisite weightlessness, then sink into the trough in a glorious, elliptical swoop. Yes, he knew she was his wife’s girlfriend. That also meant she was probably gay, but he was just watching, and trying to unpick a complicated set of thoughts.
Jack was lost in guilty admiration when the wind veered without warning, sending the boom swinging across the deck in a vicious gybe that sent Draca rolling almost broadside to the wind. As they broached in the trough of a wave, Jack unbalanced and lost his grip on the tiller. He spun round, grabbing at the cockpit coaming for support, and glimpsed the boom sweep George off the deck like an enormous cricket bat, tumbling her towards the rail before the mainsail blocked his view. As he fought to bring Draca back under control he kept glancing back at the wake, fearing to see George’s head passing astern and all too aware that her life jacket was at his feet.
When they righted, George was hanging overboard with one arm hooked around a stay, the other hand grasping the gunwale, and her legs trailing in the water. By the time Jack brought Draca back onto a safe course, she’d hauled herself back on board and was working her way aft, soaked to the waist, holding the skylight grab handles and swearing beneath her breath.
‘George, I’m so sorry.’ Jack felt really bad. That had been close.
She jumped into the cockpit, and slammed the edge of her fist into the cabin hatch.
‘Bitch!’
‘I didn’t see it coming…’
She threw herself onto a cockpit bench, trailing rivulets of seawater, and shook her head.
‘Out of the blue. Literally.’ George’s smile was weak, and Jack could see that she was shaken. ‘She has a few tricks to play, doesn’t she?’
‘It was a gust. The wind veered.’ And he should have seen it coming.
‘Yeah, sure.’
‘I think it’s time to head back.’ Jack felt a fool, and the mood was broken. Nobody likes a near miss, especially when they’re in charge. George nodded, and put on her life jacket before reaching for the ropes. They were both quiet as they turned towards the harbour entrance.
Half an hour later they’d made little progress. Jack had forgotten how slow Draca could be into the wind, and the tide was taking them to the east, away from the harbour.
‘Let’s start Scotty.’ Jack had switched from delaying their return to accelerating it.
Of course Scotty wasn’t going to start. The bloody boat was playing with them. No matter how hard Jack heaved on the crank, the engine would only wheeze like a smoker’s laugh before it died, coughing dirt. Jack gave up after fifteen sweaty minutes.
‘We could anchor in the lee of the castle.’ George lifted her chin towards a long sand spit on the horizon that ended with the squat, ugly shape of a Napoleonic fort. There was shelter and a safe anchorage beyond. ‘Wait for the tide to turn in our favour.’
‘Which will be the middle of the night.’
‘Just after 4 a.m. It will be getting light by four-thirty.’
Like many people whose lives are framed by the tides, George had that kind of information in her head.
‘Looks like we’d better get an early night then.’
Jack’s mood lifted with the satisfaction of coming to anchor under sail, sailing as his grandfather would have liked, without a motor or any modern aids. Even the anchor light he hoisted up the mast was an old, kerosene hurricane lamp, to save on batteries. Back to basics.
After they’d secured the boat, George called Chippy Alan at the yard. He’d have raised the alarm if they hadn’t shown. She sounded stilted and at pains to emphasise that it wasn’t a situation that either of them had sought. When she killed the connection they looked at each other, awkward at being thrust into each other’s company in this way.
‘I haven’t much in the way of food, I’m afraid. Some tinned stuff. Soup, coffee, the remains of a packed lunch. Whisky.’
George smiled at him. She seemed more relaxed than he was.
‘Whisky.’
II: GEORGE
George knew, like anyone who’s done a lot of sailing, that boats have characters. She noticed it more with older, wooden boats. Modern, fibreglass boats might have characteristics, but classic boats had characters. They had moods, and they could be quirky. Someone who’d spent their life ashore might laugh, but no true sailor would scoff at the idea that a boat could have attitude and, by the time they anchored, George was sure that Draca was playing with her.
What was more, George was going off Draca. Sure, she was lovely, all vintage lines and polished teak. Pilot cutters like Draca were built to ride out the weather off a port, waiting for a ship that would hire the pilot. The cutter’s crew would put him aboard, follow the ship into port, pick him up and do it again. Week after week. They were all-weather, working boats, without the lines of an ocean racer or the belly of a fisherman, but graceful enough to turn heads in a harbour. George had expected Draca to be a bit of a bruiser, but she hadn’t expected that mean streak. Maybe that gybe had been a fluke wind, but it felt nasty. Malevolent, even. Draca was a bit like some men she’d met who were handsome on the outside but dangerous on the inside. In that way, Draca was the opposite of Jack. He was dangerous on the outside but probably dead gentle on the inside, like he was wearing a suit of armour, or a shell, like a crab.
George stood on the foredeck, ready to drop the anchor, as Jack sailed her into the anchorage, leaving just enough way on the ship to turn into the wind before he told her to let go. As George slipped the pick she could swear that figurehead was looking at her over its shoulder.
‘I’ve got my eye on you too,’ she muttered at it as the chain rattled through the pipe and dragged out as they drifted astern on wind and tide.
She knew Jack felt bad. She would have done as well. He’d almost put her overboard and now they were stuck there waiting for the tide, but George didn’t really mind. If Jack hadn’t been married she’d have been quite pleased, in a way. Jack was interesting: all that brooding, hunky silence and a smile like sunshine through cloud. As it was, they’d have an evening getting to know each other a bit better, and then she’d go into the forward cabin and shut the door.
She’d known Jack was watching her before the gybe, but she had stayed there and kept her eyes shut. There was a floating, almost weightless sensation as they fell off the top of a wave that was a bit like swimming under water. Just before the gust hit and they broached she’d been wondering whether to take her shirt off to top up her tan. After all, she had a bikini on underneath. She’d let her mind drift, and maybe she shouldn’t have felt so safe. Jack seemed younger when he was sailing, like those little lines had been shaken out of his face. The way his hand gripped the tiller had bunched the muscles in his forearm. Big hands. Did Jack know that Charlotte fooled around?
That gust took them both by surprise.
People open up when they’re watching a sunset from a boat, especially the kind that can only come after a storm, when the sky is washed clean but the clouds are still piled up on the horizon, greys on pinks. There was just the sound of the seabirds coming back to roost on the sand spit, all crying out to each other. Gull noises, and the steady slap of the halyards against the mast. Even that’s a different sound, in an old boat. Rope on wood, not polyester on aluminium. Jack and George sat sipping whisky with their backs to the cabin, one on each side of the cockpit, with their legs stretched out on the benches. An eddy of the tide had turned the boat, conveniently, so they didn’t have to crane their necks to watch the sun go down in glory, and the sight gave George the kind of feeling she had once had in a church, all full and happy and almost weepy. But then she was starting her third whisky.
‘Your granddad would be pleased. With the way you�
��ve done up Draca, I mean.’ They’d been quiet for a while, but the silences were comfortable.
‘He liked you, you know. If he’d have been forty years younger he’d have been after you.’
George grunted, remembering Eddie’s hand on her backside. ‘Sometimes he forgot his age.’
Jack stared. ‘Did he cause problems?’
‘I can look after myself.’ Jack waited, watching her, and she shrugged. ‘Eddie was a ‘patter’. He’d touch my bum like it was his way of saying hello. A bit sad, really. He was just a lonely old man. If he’d have been a bit younger I’d have kneed him in the balls.’ Besides, she knew Eddie was going to die. She’d seen the darkness around him.
Jack laughed, a little nervously, and turned back to the view. The light across his jaw made his evening shadow look like the crust of seeded bread.
‘Grandpa had his demons.’
‘Don’t we all.’ That slipped out. Frigging whisky. George had been thinking about colours, that trick she had of closing her eyes and linking people with colours. They go black towards the end, like her mum’s had, though she hadn’t known what she was looking at then. It just frightened her. Mad Eddie had walked in his own shadow on that last visit, and she knew.
Jack looked at her sharply, but she kept her eyes on the seagulls massing over the sand spit and silhouetted against the sky. She wondered how to dig her way out of that remark. The sun had dropped below the horizon, and the undersides of the clouds were turning from pink to peach.
‘And what are your demons, George?’ He sounded surprised. She’d have understood if he’d said that in a way that asked what could possibly be as bad as having your foot blown off, but he didn’t. He sounded kind. Interested.
It took George a while to answer while she gathered her thoughts. The whisky was warm in her gut and the sky swayed backwards and forwards with the motion of the boat, gentle here in the shelter of the anchorage.
‘I’ll trade you. One of yours for one of mine.’
In the time it took him to answer, a solitary gull side-slipped across the sky, hovered and soared back again without moving a feather.
‘Go on.’ Jack made the words sound heavy.
She took a deep breath. Whisky and the sunset made it easier to talk.
‘Not belonging. Being the outsider, being different.’
‘Different?’ Jack looked at her, hard enough for her to shut her eyes. His outline stayed printed in her mind, now lighter than the sky beyond rather than silhouetted against it, echoing the sunset in pinks and blues: friendship and sensitivity. The colours encouraged her.
‘Lots of schools. Several foster homes. I’ve always been the outsider, looking in.’
‘But how “different”?’
Looking at the last touch of light in the sky is a bit like staring into a fire. Truths come out. Another deep breath.
‘I told you in your garden. Me mum said I was psychic. I’m sensitive to things other people don’t see.’
‘What sort of things?’
‘Atmospheres. Moods. Motivations. I can see quite a lot about someone’s character. Not with everyone, though, and I have no idea why it’s there with some people and not with others.’
‘Does it work with me?’
George swallowed. ‘Very well.’
Jack looked away. An eddy was turning the boat around its anchor, and distant street lights began to appear beyond his shoulder, hooped in tiny necklaces along the shore. Behind them the land still loomed between sea and sky, a featureless grey mass in the gathering dark. Jack spoke towards the lights rather than her.
‘I’m not sure I’m comfortable with that.’
‘Nor were the kids at school, if they found out. They called me The Witch. I learned not to talk about it.’ The headlights of a solitary car made their way along the line of lights. ‘Don’t worry though. I like what I see. In you, I mean.’ Was that a bit pushy?
‘And what do you see?’
‘Oh, you’re trouble!’ It was time to lighten the mood. ‘As much to yourself as other people. All that energy, and it’s all turned inwards.’
He snorted, but didn’t say anything. Over on the sand bar the seagulls were calming down after their last squeal of the evening. Soon it would be too dark to see his face.
‘It’s almost…’ The whisky let her blunder on.
‘It’s almost what, George?’ Jack’s eyes were shadowed. He didn’t seem angry, just sad.
George took another sip, then pushed her glass away, realising she’d reached that dangerous stage where you think you can keep drinking.
‘It’s almost like you’re folded round your own pain.’
Jack’s shoulders lifted and dropped in a great sigh, and he turned his face away again. She needed to change the subject before she wrecked a friendship.
‘Why did you make me stand on the path by your cottage?’
Another pause.
‘I saw something there. Something I can’t explain. You’d said you were psychic…’ His voice trailed away, then picked up again. ‘Actually, I was a bit disappointed when you didn’t feel anything.’
‘But I did. Not from that spot though, just from that frigging carving behind me, like it was about to stab me in the back.’
‘I think I’ll get rid of it once we’ve scattered Grandpa’s ashes. Give it to a museum or something. Can you feel it now?’
George turned her senses inward, listening. ‘No.’ She was relieved. It would have spoiled the mood.
Jack sipped again and reached for the bottle. George had the impression of ropes knotted across his back. Not just ropes: cables, the thick, ugly ones they use to moor ships. She shook her head as Jack waved the bottle at her.
‘There was something else my mum said about me.’
Only the slightest lift of his head showed that he was listening. He was just an outline now, with paler patches where the last of the light touched his cheek.
‘She said I had a healing touch.’ George thought that if she put her thumbs into those knots she could smooth them away, reach inside his protective shell and let the real Jack out. She was probably too pissed to think about what might happen afterwards.
Jack lifted his bad leg a little so the heel moved over the bench with a noise like a wooden block shifting on a deck.
‘You’d need to be a miracle worker to fix that.’
‘Not all wounds are physical.’
He rested his head back against the cabin roof. It was too dark to see his expression, but there was a shine where the last of the light caught his eye.
‘True.’
‘Your turn.’
Jack was quiet for a long time, but George didn’t prompt him, knowing that some truth was working its way to the surface. The first of the stars were appearing in the sky and when he spoke it was upwards, towards them, with the whisky cradled on his stomach.
‘After this happened,’ he shifted his injured leg without looking down, ‘I was almost happy.’
George waited. He had to explain that.
‘The first time you come under fire, and don’t get hurt, you feel almost ecstatic. You learn that you can survive. Then there’s the second time, and the third time, and people are wounded or killed, and you realise it’s all a gamble. You roll the dice with each contact. You lose a free ‘life’ with every passing bullet or bomb. Eventually, statistically, you’re going to get hurt. When they took off my foot, or what was left of it, part of me was happy because I wouldn’t have to roll those dice again. Deep down, I’d wimped out.’
The shine in his eye was brighter. George looked away, and tipped the last of her whisky into her mouth. This guy needed a hug, but she didn’t know him well enough for that. Besides, she felt too much chemistry of another kind.
‘Come over here.’ She scrambled out of the cockpit to kneel on the deck, facing him, and patted the timber coaming between her knees. ‘Sit with your back to me.’
Jack’s outline shifted, angling towards he
r, but he stayed where he was. She tapped the wood again.
‘Sit! Don’t worry, it’s not a come-on.’
Jack was probably pleased she’d changed the subject. His silhouette moved, ducked under the boom and slumped onto the seat in front of her knees, his movements whisky-heavy. His back rose above the coaming from his shoulder blades upwards, and his presence was suddenly very physical, very close. He smelled of salt and sweat and damp wool.
‘What are you planning, George?’
‘Shush.’
He’d put on a fleece against the evening chill, and at first George worked through it, starting with the trapezius muscles between his neck and shoulders, squeezing them between her thumbs and fingers, smoothing away the tension. His shoulders dropped and he arched his neck, sighing, but George wasn’t getting to the real knots. You can’t do that with a frigging great lump of teak and a fleece in the way, but she dug deep until her knuckles and then her fingertips reached over his collar onto his neck. There was an area of soft skin with downy hair on his nape, and when she touched that she stopped, embarrassed and a bit confused. They’d reached a moment where things either happen or they don’t.
Jack stood, holding on to the boom, still looking away from her.
‘I’m sorry.’ George meant it. She was spoiling two friendships: one because she was getting too close and one because she wouldn’t let Charlotte get closer.
‘No.’ He said that as if he meant ‘it’s all right’.
‘I didn’t mean…’
‘It’s OK. Really.’
‘I think I’ll go to bed. We’ve an early start.’
‘There’s a fresh duvet in the sleeping cabin.’ He spoke like he was reading from a script. ‘You’ll have more privacy there. No sheets, I’m afraid. I hadn’t planned…’
‘It’s all right.’
‘I’ll stay up here until you’ve finished in the heads.’
‘Sure.’
He didn’t turn round as she climbed down into the chart-room.
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