After the Storm (8 page)

About an hour later Rob spotted a group of large purple-blue jellyfish floating by the boat.

‘Come look at these,’ he shouted.

They gathered round him and looked to where he was pointing.

‘Those are Portuguese man-of-wars,’ Owen said. ‘You have to be careful around those. They have these long tentacles that float below them; can be thirty feet long sometimes. And even dead man-of-wars can give a sting.’

‘Yep, we had a buddy who brushed by a dead one and he got a nasty sting from it,’ Kim said.

They all gazed fascinated, almost mesmerised, as the purple-blue colony moved rhythmically across the surface of the sea and they watched until they were out of sight.

‘Now I understand “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”,’ Anna said. ‘You are so glad to see any sign of life in this huge vastness.’

‘The sea can be a lonely place,’ Owen said.

‘We need food. I’ll get cooking,’ Kim said.

She cooked them spicy vegetable stew with rice. She sliced onions and red peppers and fried them with garlic and spices, then added a can of tomatoes and a can of kidney beans to the pan. It was quite a thing to watch her cooking under those conditions. She used a canvas strap to clip herself to the crash-bar in front of the stove. This allowed her to keep on her feet as the boat rolled. She unlocked the gimbal on the stove so that it pivoted and remained level as the boat moved up and down.

‘I couldn’t cook without my bumstrap,’ she said.

They sat in the cockpit and ate her stew.

‘This is making me feel better. You’re a miracle worker,’ Rob said.

‘My pleasure, and it should be an easier night for us all tonight.’

‘I’ll stay on watch with Kim. You two try to get some sleep,’ Owen said.

Anna and Rob went to their cabin and undressed in silence. They lay side by side while the boat pitched, though less violently than the night before. They were both awake and Rob was brooding. All she had said to him in the last hour was that she had a chapped bum. Usually they would have laughed about this. They hadn’t this time. He was learning how tensions were intensified when you lived in such a small space. There was nowhere to go and reactions that needed to come out had to be pushed down and contained. He was still feeling rough and her silence was weighing on him like a judgement.

‘Sometimes I find your negativity so oppressive you know. It’s like a burden I have to carry,’ he said.

‘That’s not fair.’

‘You’ve been making it clear from the beginning that you think this is all a big mistake. So when things go wrong, like last night, you make me feel guilty.’

She knew there was some truth to his complaint. She
was
feeling resentful that he’d persuaded her to board the boat. The problem was that she didn’t know how to shake herself out of that feeling because her fears would not be stilled.

‘I’m scared, OK? I don’t feel safe with them.’

‘So you give me the silent treatment.’

‘They said they knew these waters but we’re completely lost. They haven’t got a bloody clue where we are.’

‘We’ve been blown off course,’ he said.

‘Yes but he should still know roughly where we are.’

‘His GPS is down.’

‘Well we’d be a bloody sight safer if his GPS wasn’t down,’ she hissed.

‘You always make such a big thing about everything Anna. Grow up!’

She sat up quickly and banged her head against the roof of the cabin. She rubbed her head crossly.

‘We’re in the middle of nowhere with two people we hardly know in a boat without the proper equipment – that’s not a small thing.’

‘That’s life Anna, trying out new things. I want to do this and I don’t want you to make me feel bad about it.’

‘I’m not trying to make you feel bad—’

‘Oh no? Giving me the silent treatment? It’s a good thing to be out of our comfort zone, to be tested.’

‘I’m on my holiday. I don’t want to be tested.’

He was about to retort when they heard a cry of joy from Kim up on deck. They both leaped up and rushed out of the cabin and into the cockpit.

Owen and Kim were standing on the foredeck looking out. For the last half hour Owen had been watching an intermittent glow on the horizon. He had said nothing until the light had become clearly visible over the horizon, the flash of a lighthouse.

‘Thank heavens,’ Anna said with far greater emphasis than she intended. Did Owen realise that she’d been sure they were done for? They joined them on the foredeck and watched as Owen used his watch to time the flashes of the lighthouse.

‘That’s a group of four flashes every thirty seconds. I’ll check it on the chart.’

He went down to the saloon and came back with his chart.

‘Every lighthouse has its own characteristic flash and that lighthouse is at Punta Sal. That explains it. We’ve been blown along the Honduran mainland. Land is about twenty miles away I reckon, best not to approach till morning.’

‘Should we heave to?’ Kim said.

‘Let’s do that. We can see more in daylight.’

They adjusted the sails so that the boat was side on to the wind and Owen lashed the tiller. This caused the boat to shift and stop its forward motion. The four of them sat in the cockpit and celebrated the sighting of the lighthouse with mugs of rum.

‘It’s been a tough two days for you both, a baptism of fire,’ Owen said.

‘And you did OK.’

‘I didn’t,’ Rob grimaced.

It was to be another night of rolling and pitching although the boat didn’t move very far as the storm had spent itself. Owen stayed on watch up above while the others tried to sleep below.

At sunrise they knew it was going to be a glorious day. They sailed towards the lighthouse through a calm sea and followed the line of the shore. Now they could see land rising in front of them: steep and rocky mountains that were thick with green trees, palms and shrubs.

‘That looks like the Garden of Eden,’ Rob said with feeling and it did look marvellous to his land-hungry eyes.

They all laughed as they stood and drank the hot sweet black coffee Kim had made them. Owen spotted a fisherman in his cayuka rowing fast through the water and he signalled him over. The fisherman rowed up alongside their boat and they spoke in Spanish for a few minutes, the fisherman pointing back towards the lighthouse nodding his head and gesticulating. He rowed away.

‘We’ve been blown sixty miles off course and we’re headed towards Tela. I reckon we all need a day on land before setting off for Roatán again,’ Owen said.

‘Yes please,’ Anna said.

He looked at his chart.

‘We’ll head for Triunfo de la Cruz. We’ve been there before Kimmie.’

They sailed close to Triunfo and anchored. From the boat they could see a long beach fringed by palm trees that shone bright green in the brilliant sunshine. There were modest houses along the beach and small boats and canoes at the water’s edge. Kim stripped the damp sheets off the beds and hung the sheets and quilts out to dry and Anna helped her. Two men rowed over to the
El Tiempo Pasa
. They were in a pongo, a shallow canoe, a smaller frailer version of the cayuka and they had fruit and fish with them which they offered for sale. Kim bought some small yellow mangoes and Owen asked the men to come back in an hour and he’d pay them to clean the boat.

It was going to be their hottest day yet. Anna put on her bikini and had a shower on deck using buckets of cold water. Rob watched her as she shampooed her long hair and lathered it, her eyes shut tight. Her bikini was made up of two small triangles of bright blue that just covered her breasts, and tiny panties that stretched over her bottom. She was tall and slim and he loved the way her belly stuck out a bit over her hipbones. He sometimes wondered why meeting Anna on the tube with the blood trickling down her chin had made such an impact on him. He thought it was because he was drawn to her intensity, both the intense way she was reading her book and the intense way she looked at him when their eyes met for the first time. Maybe it was the mole between her eyebrows that gave her eyes their extraordinary power. Of course some people might consider that mole a defect. His classically beautiful mum probably did, though she’d never said anything about it. He remembered the first time he introduced Anna to her. They had been invited round to lunch and Anna was dressed simply in jeans, a white shirt and ankle boots. She had put her little silver earrings in but wore no other jewellery. She wasn’t a woman for bangles or necklaces. As he rang the bell on the house in Crouch End, which his mum shared with Elliot and Savannah, Rob had looked over at Anna to give her an encouraging smile and at that moment he thought her the most beautiful woman on earth.

His mother opened the door to them. She was wearing one of her flowing white linen outfits and a turquoise necklace with heavy uneven stones which complimented her brilliant blue eyes. She was scanning Anna over his shoulder as she leaned forward and embraced him and then she took Anna’s hand. Anna held out a bunch of Sweet Peas to her. She had insisted on getting those particular flowers and they’d had to go to two flower shops to find the blooms. Later his mum had told him that she approved of Anna as his girlfriend. She thought she was a young woman of substance and that if anyone could straighten Rob out then Anna could.

Kim came up onto the deck and this stopped his reverie. She was also in her bikini which was acid yellow. She looked good too he thought.

The men from the village came back to clean the boat and Owen told the others to go ahead and he would join them in a while. They got into the dinghy and made the short journey to the beach.

‘We’ll eat here today. There should be places where we can get some good fish,’ Kim said.

She tried not to show it to Rob and Anna but she was feeling miserable and out of sorts with Owen. She watched as they strolled in front of her through the village of Triunfo de la Cruz. It was a clean, well-kept village with traditional wooden houses that had thatched roofs of palm and one or two modern concrete bungalows too. She remembered the time she and Owen had come here before, about a year into their adventure. It was a happier time then and they had been more united.

Triunfo de la Cruz was a Garifuna community and Rob was telling Anna about how the Garifuna were descendants of Caribbean and West African people. Rob was pleased at everything he saw: the chickens scratching at the grit, a pile of coconut husks outside a bar, the smoky bonfire smell of the village. The streets were sandy and children were playing outside their houses and calling out ‘
Hola
,
hola
’ to them as they walked along. Rob called back to them and there was the inevitable ‘
Ingles?
’ from the children and his reply ‘
Si, Ingles
’.

At the end of the main street he spotted a bar and suggested they go in. He bought them cold beers and they carried them outside and sat on a wooden bench by the side of the bar. The wall was hot against their backs.

‘It was a tough two nights, wasn’t it?’ Rob said as he sampled the local brew.

Anna stretched her arms above her head.

‘The night of the storm seemed to go on for ever.’

‘I can’t wait to get to Roatán though. It will all be worth it when we get there,’ Rob said.

Kim nodded her agreement but said nothing.

A while later Owen found them seated outside the bar. He put his arm around Kim and she said at once:

‘You
must
buy batteries for the GPS today.’

‘Sure,’ Owen said dropping his arm.

Rob had noticed that she’d been quiet all day, had said very little as they drank their beers and her voice sounded tense now. They set off back to the shoreline to find a place to eat.

‘Let’s see if I can find one of my favourite dishes,’ Owen said.

‘What is it?’ Anna asked.

‘Raw conch with lime juice and hot pepper sauce…’

‘You can eat conch?’

‘It’s delicious. You must try it.’

They found a restaurant not far from the beach which had a large verandah covered with a thatched roof. They sat at a table outside and Owen ordered his raw conch dish and the others chose the conch stew. They drank rum with fresh pineapple juice and looked out from the verandah to the beach below. The sea was as calm as a millpond.

‘You see how quickly things can change at sea,’ Owen said.

‘It was
so
sudden,’ Anna said.

‘It was, but we were never in any real danger. We’ll moor here tonight and set off at sunrise. We have at least two full days of sailing before we get to Roatán.’

After they had eaten Kim and Owen headed for the general store in the village and Anna and Rob ambled along the beach until they found a secluded spot near the edge of the sea. They swam lazily in the warm clear water. Later they stretched out on the sand side by side with their legs in the sun and their faces shaded by a mature palm tree.

‘This is more like it,’ Rob said.

‘I’ll teach you a relaxation exercise I know,’ Anna said.

She started to speak slowly and sonorously as her teacher had done:

‘Close your eyes and feel your body sinking into the sand. Your legs are getting heavy and are sinking into the ground. Your back is heavy and…’

He chuckled at her affected voice.

‘Where did you learn this?’

‘Shh, no talking… at my yoga class…’

‘Your arms are getting heavy, your shoulders and neck are getting heavy, your head is getting heavy. You are letting go completely. The ground is supporting you completely. Now listen to the sounds around you. Just lie and listen.’

Rob lay and listened. He could hear the whisper of the sea as it spread itself onto the sand. The palm trees were making all kinds of noises. He could hear them crackle, rustle, creak and sigh. And there was a clicking noise as a single dry palm frond hit the trunk of their tree. There was the faintest sound of scurrying as some insect or crab scuttled over the hot sand. There was the sound of their breathing. Anna could feel herself relaxing into the moment. Her fears had melted away. They both fell into a delicious, much-needed sleep.