Draca

by Geoffrey Gudgion

  There was a small crumb of comfort in knowing his grandfather was with him, riding Draca on her final dive.

  Jack, my boy, let us go.

  Grandpa’s voice in his head was gentle, kindly and unmistakable. Jack’s midriff began to heave with the instinct to breathe, like the spasms before vomiting.

  Don’t worry about me, my boy, I’m in good company. Now let us go.

  Jack began to hallucinate. His eyes were shut tight against the rush of water, but he could visualise the dragon ahead of him, now rising high above the deck but plunging ever deeper, while a warrior rode its neck with his hand stretched forward like a charging cavalryman with his sabre. And below them, a vast, sea-grey woman waited, mermaid-naked and terrible in her beauty. She smiled, baring teeth like storm-washed rocks, and swung her arm to cast her net.

  Now, Jack.

  The net spread high and wide, engulfing the ship as the line slipped through Jack’s fingers. Its edge draped over him, jerking him downwards again, pulling against his life jacket. It rasped across his shoulder, became a terrible, back-arching burn, and was gone.

  Jack knew he was losing consciousness. The darkness was more than the blackness of deep water. He could feel himself going, with his breath bubbling out, riding upwards with him, but his first, lethal gasp came as he erupted through the surface into a turmoil of salt spray. He hung retching in his harness, drifting in and out of awareness.

  He was forced back into consciousness by spatters of stinging sea being driven into his face, and he looked up through narrowed eyes at the red and white underside of a search and rescue helicopter. The sea’s surface was beaten almost flat by the downdraught, and a winch line swayed into view with a helmeted crewman and another figure already on it, their feet skimming the water towards Jack. The second man twisted to watch him and Jack closed his eyes with relief on seeing it was his father. He may have fainted again, wondering who could have been on the foredeck if Dad was on the winch line. It was all a bit confused.

  Harry gripped Jack’s arm as they were hoisted up, shaking him. He was close enough as they dangled in the loops of the harness for Jack to see a small patch of stubble behind Harry’s jaw that he’d missed when shaving. The stubble stretched and glistened with wet as his mouth moved, soundless amidst the swamping vibration of the rotors, and Jack tried to smile back at him not because he understood but because the concern on Harry’s face was warming. It was like being a kid again.

  The concern didn’t last of course. There were moments on that wire, and then in the helo, when they came close to showing emotion. But the two aircrew paramedics on board went into emergency mode and pushed Harry aside while they peeled back Jack’s trouser leg. His false foot must have been pulled off in the sea and Jack realised they expected to find major trauma. One of them shouted at him but Jack couldn’t understand, even with the crewman’s face close to his ear. Jack didn’t want to try anyway. Too exhausted. The gentle probing for pulse and blood pressure, and the lights in his eyes, were slightly irritating barriers to sleep. After a while they wedged him half upright and pushed a mug into his hands, and Jack was conscious enough to wonder how they had hot soup in a helicopter. The crewman tried to talk again, but although his lips moved, all Jack could hear was the vibration of the aircraft. When Jack handed back the mug they gave him a helmet with earphones and a mike, although only one earphone seemed to be working.

  ‘Helmand?’ The crewman nodded at Jack’s leg.

  Jack shook his head and told him where. His voice sounded strange in his head, as if his ears were full of water. The crewman’s eyes narrowed, and he nodded. He knew. He was of the brotherhood.

  ‘I got him out,’ Harry shouted, loud enough for Jack to hear. They’d given him a headset too.

  The crewman ignored Harry. ‘I did two tours in Afghan.’ He told Jack his unit.

  ‘And switched to SAR?’ Maritime Search and Rescue was a civilian organisation.

  ‘I’d rolled the dice too many times.’

  ‘Rolled the dice’. Jack nodded, understanding. ‘It was always good to see you guys.’ Throwaway lines by each of them, lightly spoken but heavy with meaning. They were the real heroes, him and his type, the ones who’d fly a lumbering helicopter into the edge of a firefight and sit on the ground, exposed as the biggest target for miles around and sometimes taking fire while the wounded were loaded.

  ‘Hauled him out of a burning boat.’

  Harry didn’t seem to like being ignored.

  ‘We’ll be with you in a moment, sir.’

  That ticked Harry off. By the time they had landed at the hospital, he was his old, aggressive self. The questions started as soon as they were clear of the helicopter noise.

  ‘What the hell were you playing at?’ Harry shouted over his shoulder. He walked ahead of Jack, trailing wet footprints and holding a shiny space blanket around himself like a Native American squaw. His voice was strangely tinny and Jack could only hear him on one side. They’d put Jack, who was also huddled into a space blanket, in a kind of reclining wheelchair and were pushing him along behind Harry.

  ‘You damn nearly killed us!’

  Jack ignored him. He was thinking about Draca and didn’t want to talk to anyone, let alone try to justify the unjustifiable to Harry.

  ‘Did you mean to do it? Hey?’

  They put them in separate bays in Accident and Emergency, with a plastic curtain between them. It didn’t stop Harry shouting through it until a nurse asked him to shut up. Jack’s mother arrived within an hour and Harry started again, telling and retelling his version of the story, but an injured drunk was raving in a nearby bay, so there was a lot of background noise and Jack could only understand fragments of what he said. One shout ended in the lifting tone of a question, and when Jack didn’t answer Harry pulled back the plastic curtain between them and bellowed it again.

  Harry stood there barelegged in a knee-length, unisex, hospital gown with little blue flowers on it, and Jack burst out laughing, almost hysterically. All Harry needed was an outsized nappy on his bottom and a dummy in his mouth, and he’d be a baby having a tantrum. Jack’s mum tugged at Harry’s hem where little sleeves puffed out from his shoulders, and her mouth formed the words ‘put your clothes on, love.’ She’d brought a small case.

  She came and sat with Jack while Harry changed, her face tight with worry, squeezing her own fingers fretfully in her lap. Her mouth moved again and Jack shook his head, tapping the ear nearest to her.

  ‘Can’t hear you, Mum. Burst eardrum.’

  She spoke more loudly, and more slowly, so Jack would have understood her even if the drunk hadn’t finally shut up.

  ‘How. Did. You. Do. That?’ She formed the words with comical, exaggerated movements of her mouth, rolling her eyes as she spoke.

  ‘Dad’s shouting?’

  The curtain was ripped back again.

  ‘Listen to him!’ Harry stuffed a shirt into his trousers. ‘I saved the boy’s bloody life! Bloody hero, I was. Pulled him out of a burning boat, and listen to the thanks I get.’

  At least, Jack thought that was what he said. Once the drunk started shouting at Harry to keep the noise down, Jack lost the thread.

  ‘Mum.’ Jack gripped her arm as they were about to leave. ‘Call George, will you? At the boatyard? She’ll be worried when we don’t get back.’

  ‘Of course, love.’ She rolled her eyes again and made an outsized nod. ‘And Charlotte?’

  She looked relieved when Jack shook his head.

  *

  After they went there was nothing to keep Jack from his thoughts. ‘You can go,’ the doctor had said to Harry. ‘You’ll be right as rain after a hot bath.’ But he told Jack he’d be admitted for observation. ‘Just a precaution. Concussion, shock, smoke inhalation…’ Jack didn’t mind. Apart from the suitcases and the stuff in George’s store, all he had left was a pile of soaking clothes and his foul-weather gear.

  George. God, Jack wished she were there.


  It was another two hours before she turned up, looking almost as drowned as Harry had. It must have been raining hard outside. George’s hand brushed over Jack’s head and he felt it rasp against patchy stubble. Her fingers came away greasy from the ointment they’d put on the burns.

  ‘That’s quite a haircut.’

  Jack had watched her lips, and understood.

  ‘You’re frigging ugly, Jack.’

  ‘I love you too.’

  After that she didn’t say much, just sat beside the bed, held his hand and left him to talk himself out.

  ‘It was an accident, George.’ Having her there was like pulling a cork from a bottle and the words came tumbling out, sounding inside his head as much as in his ears. ‘Dad thinks I did it deliberately, but the mainsail came down when, when…’

  George squeezed his hand, and waited.

  A memory had come back, of picking up Grandpa’s old lighter as it fell from the chart-table drawer, and for a moment being mesmerised by it. There’d been a wave afterwards, a tumbling, thrown-across-the-cabin type of wave.

  ‘It was an accident…’ Jack repeated himself, as if he needed convincing. George stretched to stroke his face, and her lips formed a ‘shush’ shape.

  ‘We were bloody lucky, though. Guy on the helicopter told me. Some fisherman saw us go down and sent out a ‘Mayday’ call. Stayed nearby and fired flares to guide them in.’

  George sat on the bed with her back to the gap in the curtains, still holding his hand.

  ‘I lost her.’ George was unlocking the emotion within him. Soon he’d crumble, and he didn’t want to crumble there. ‘And it was my own stupid fault.’ Jack was sinking towards emotional collapse as inevitably as he’d been pulled down by Draca.

  Another ‘shush’ face. George looked over her shoulder to make sure she was shielding him, and pushed his fingers inside her jacket, opening layers with her spare hand until he could feel her heat in his palm. The surprise stopped him, as cleanly as if the rope had been cut. George leaned forward, and that ridiculous orange quiff flopped forwards, dropping water onto his face that was as salty as tears. She pushed harder into Jack’s palm until their lips were close enough to touch.

  Chapter Twelve: Hēr kemr ā til sævar

  (Old Norse: literally ‘here the river reaches the sea’, but with the figurative or poetic meaning ‘this is where it ends’)

  From the Anglo- Saxon Chronicle for AD 876 – 7

  And this year the [Danish] raiding army stole into… a fort of the West Saxons. The king ⁠ [Alfred] afterwards made peace with them; and they gave him as hostages those who were worthiest in the army; and swore with oaths on the holy bracelet, which they would not before to any nation, that they would readily go out of his kingdom. Then, under colour [sic] of this, their cavalry stole [away] by night… while the navy sailed west about, until they met with a great storm at sea, and there perished one hundred and twenty ships.

  I. GEORGE

  It was a ritual, on George’s day off. She’d make a mug of tea and take the newspaper back to bed. The regional rag, not a national, with stories about real people, not posturing politicians, and news of local events, not gloomy economics.

  Jack didn’t stir. He’d had a bad night and woken up shouting again. There were still the ‘break right’ or ‘get me out of here’ nights, but he was getting better. It had been about a week since the last one, and George had learned how to handle them. It was best if she held him, so that he came out of the nightmare with her arms around him. If he was deeply under, it was better to lie on top of him, holding him down and stroking his face until he was calm. What followed after, sometimes, was like their first time: tender, and in a way more loving than any raunchy athletics.

  Afterwards he might lie with his head in her lap, spent but still needing her, and George would stroke his head. His hair was growing back: it was no longer scratchy against her palm, but still a crew cut. ‘Like a new recruit’, he said. In the darkness she would imagine she could see his colours again. They’d been thin, after Draca sank, like paint dripped into water, but they were stronger now. A little different though. The red was softer and not so primary, except in his belly. She liked that. Jack had a few more things to feel bad about, and they got in the way sometimes, but he was coming back to her. What’s more, he was coming back as the Jack she always knew had been in there, the laughing Jack on the hillside. She guessed that she and the dragon had both won. The dragon and his frigging awful, groping friend had got whatever watery grave they wanted off Anfel Head, and she had got Jack back. Result. Sometimes she felt just a bit pleased with herself for seeing the real Jack through the darkness, and fighting for him.

  *

  Western Morning News

  30 th November

  Celebrity Turns On The Lights

  Reality TV star Sophie Connerie pressed the button to illuminate the Christmas lights on Thursday night…

  *

  Christmas. George and Jack had accepted an invitation to Jack’s parents for Christmas day. They were both a bit nervous about that, but it was a start. They’d all met at a pub a few weeks after Draca went down, and Jack and Harry had walked off to talk alone. Mary Ahlquist had reached for George’s hand as they watched the two men squaring up to each other at the far end of the beer garden, gesticulating. Mary told her that Harry felt unappreciated after pulling Jack out of his burning boat. They both came back to the table more subdued, and it can’t have been too bad because the invitation for Christmas followed. At least Tilly and her kids would be with her in-laws. Mary seemed quite pleased at the way things were turning out, and she and George were getting along just fine.

  George hadn’t told Jack about her role in the rescue, and Chippy was sworn to secrecy. Maybe it would come out one day, but Jack had enough to deal with and she wanted him to stay with her because he loved her, not because he owed her.

  George turned the page. Jack lay face down with his cheek on his forearms. The line across his shoulder where the rope had burned through his clothes was a pale, glossy streak that would probably always be there. The duvet lay across the hollow of his waist so that he looked all broad-shouldered and muscly, and George wondered if she should forget the newspaper and slide her hand downwards over his bum…

  Nah, let him sleep.

  *

  Fisherman Catches Sea Monster

  Cornish fisherman Dan Trenowden had a surprise catch when he found a Viking carving floating past his lobster pots. Dan and his son William spotted the strange artefact from their boat the Sweet Susan…

  *

  It was on the inside pages, with a photo of a grinning man holding that evil frigging dragon. The sodding thing had floated nearly a hundred miles west.

  Jack stirred and turned over. ‘Hey.’

  ‘Hey.’

  He shuffled his body closer so that his face was against her arm, and began to stroke her thigh with a touch that was hardly there. Jack could be quite gentle, for a big guy. Any other time, George would have been distracted. This time, she pulled the pages closer together before Jack could see inside.

  Plymouth City Museum Director Peter Thornbury admits he’s baffled. ‘It has been professionally preserved but we have no record of any museum losing such an item,’ he said. ‘Carbon dating would be difficult because of the modern chemicals used in its preservation, but it is almost certainly a longship’s figurehead and could be anything from one thousand to fourteen hundred years old.’

  ‘Anything good in the papers?’ Jack’s hand moved higher, crumpling the bottom of the page.

  ‘Nothing exciting. Usual stuff. Christmas lights. Nativity plays at kids’ schools.’ She’d take that page out and burn it. No way Jack should see it. George lifted the paper to finish the article, but Jack took her movement as encouragement and slid his hand higher. He knew exactly how to touch her and she began to lose concentration.

  ‘We’ll keep it on board while we wait to see if someone claims it,’ says Dan
. ‘If not, it probably belongs in the Maritime Museum.’

  How the feck could she warn them without involving Jack?

  ‘Can I offer a little local excitement then?’ His fingers teased her. George sighed, pretending to be cross, folded the paper and turned on her side to put it carefully out of sight under the bed. Jack moved in close behind, pushing his urgency against her, spooning her as he ran his hand over her body. Big hands. George made a happy little groan as she squirmed her backside into him.

  Dan Trenowden could wait.

  Acknowledgements

  Several years ago, Charles Style invited me to crew for him in his lovely boat Discovery. The idea for Draca came one evening in Discovery’s cockpit, anchored in an isolated inlet on the south coast of England, where we watched the bones of dead ships appear as the tide ebbed. Charles always kept his good humour despite my incompetent sailing, and has been generous with his critiques of Draca’s nautical passages. Any remaining errors are wholly mine.

  Katharine Kelly, Mats Anderson, Richard Sutton and Marcus and Susie Bicknell read and provided invaluable feedback on an early draft.

  Editor Debi Alper told me some much-needed hard truths.

  My agent Ian Drury and his team at Sheil Land were as constructive as ever when I thought the book was ready.

  ‘Holistic healer’ and friend Kerry Slade was the inspiration for George’s healing skills.

  Andrew Smith, Head of Research & Development at Bainbridge International, offered excellent advice on technical aspects of sails.