Revenge of the Tide (9 page)

I
ate toast for dinner. It was the first solid food I’d had for more than twenty-four hours, and even so it was a struggle. It felt dry and rough and tasted of nothing.

I was sitting at the dinette, looking at the bit of paper that Carling had given me, with his phone number on it. Next to it on the table was Andy Basten’s business card.

Why didn’t Carling have a card like the other one? And which one should I ring, if I was worried? Basten’s neat, official card, with the crest of Kent Police? Or Carling’s number hand-written on a bit of paper, scrawled but legible? Just a mobile. I wondered what he did when he was off-duty. Did he go home to his wife? Wife… and kids, maybe? And a dog. There would have to be a dog. And a wife with a noble profession, maybe a teacher. Or a nurse. Or maybe she was a police officer too. And two children at the dining table busy doing their homework when he got in from his hard day chasing criminals. He would kiss the tops of their heads – a boy and a girl – and he would ask his wife what was for dinner, while the dog chased around his feet wagging its tail with delight. He would open a bottle of wine and they would finish it – Jim Carling and his wife – when the kids were in bed.

Or he was divorced. He had that pissed-off look about him, I decided. Maybe his wife had run off with someone else – another police officer; they all did it – and left him behind to try and look after a great big house all on his own.

Or he was married, and yet he had affairs with people, people like me, vulnerable women he’d come across in his day job. Victims. He picked ones he fancied and got them to sleep with him.

I wasn’t a victim, though, was I? Not yet, anyway.

For some reason, my next thought was of Ben. He could have phoned me, at least to say thanks for the party. None of them had. None of them had any idea about the nightmare that had followed their departure. They’d all fucked off to the pub and thence God knows where, back to London in the end, without so much as a thank-you-goodbye. Shits, they were, all of them. Especially Lucy. I remembered what she’d said to Malcolm, the tone of her voice when Malcolm told her she’d be jealous of my boat one day.

‘I don’t think so somehow.’

I didn’t care what she thought about it, anyway. Her opinion had ceased to be valid for me a long time ago.

Lucy was one of the people who’d had a real problem with me dancing.

It had been Ben who’d told her, of course; she would never have known about it otherwise. I think it was his revenge for my ending our stupid pointless disaster of a relationship. Lucy and I were in the pub one Friday after work, drinking big glasses of chilled white wine and unpicking the nightmare of selling high-end software solutions to boardrooms full of men. We took a lot of shit for it. The blokes on our team were highly competitive, driven, occasionally downright nasty. Lucy got by because she was the daughter of the managing director, but she was bitter about all the testosterone she had to deal with. I wasn’t as bothered as her about the gender thing because I got by through working hard, which usually meant I hit my bonus targets. We had an alliance, of sorts, because Lucy needed someone to moan at. But beyond that we had little in common.

‘Ben told me where you were last night.’

I drank my wine and looked at her. We’d been out with clients last night, and I’d disappeared early instead of staying on as we usually did and getting pathetically drunk. I’d told her I had a headache, but instead I’d gone to the Barclay.

‘You’re a stripper,’ she said.

‘I’m a dancer.’

‘You take your clothes off for money.’

‘Good money.’

There was a flicker, I saw it – a moment where I’d almost justified it to her. She knew about money and the pursuit of it. She was about to ask the question:
How much money?
But then the moment passed.

‘It’s exploitation,’ she said. ‘You know how hard we bloody work, twice as hard as some of them, and we still don’t get the same recognition.’

‘That’s got nothing to do with working in the club. I’m there because I want to be there,’ I said. ‘And if anyone’s being exploited, it certainly isn’t me. Men come in and spend all their money watching me do something I enjoy. It feels great, to be honest.’

Just at that moment three of the guys on the sales team had come over and joined us and the conversation turned to the normal topic of who had the biggest car, the biggest sales deal, the biggest set of balls. Lucy had never mentioned it again, not until last night at the party. Despite her supposedly feminist convictions, I couldn’t shake the notion that, actually, she was a little bit jealous.

Apart from Lucy and Ben, most of my friends hadn’t known what I did every Friday and Saturday night and sometimes Thursdays and Sundays too. I didn’t need to be at the club until eleven, so I carried on with my normal social activity and when they went off to clubs, or back home to bed, I went to the Barclay and earned myself a fortune.

It had crossed my mind to tell them, more than once. If any of them had asked me a direct question, I wouldn’t have lied. But none of them seemed bothered; when I said I was going somewhere else, they just said things like, ‘Okay, cool,’ and waved me goodbye as they disappeared off to some club or other, or back to someone’s house, or off to another party.

I was lying awake, in bed. The skylight was a square of black that was somehow lighter than the black in the rest of the room. When I closed my eyes, I could still see it. It was like the opening, the entrance to a tomb.

I was physically tired, but my mind was spinning. Malcolm was right: I was scared. During the day it was easy to pretend this wasn’t really happening, easy to believe that maybe the body hadn’t been Caddy after all. I’d only caught a glimpse of her face, the dirty water of the Medway washing over it, a flash of white in the beam of my torch. It could so easily have been someone else: a body from upstream after all, a suicide, a missing person.

At night, things were very different.

From the first day in the marina, I’d never really felt alone. Even after dark you heard noises from the other boats, the faint voices from someone’s television, shouts from Diane and Steve’s two children, traffic on the motorway, the rattle of the Eurostar or the Javelin rocketing along the high-speed rail link a mile or so away. The other liveaboards were never more than a shout away; I’d proved that last night, I tried to reassure myself. I’d screamed, and in under a minute at least five people had come out of their boats to see what was going on. And yet I couldn’t relax.

A mobile phone was ringing.

I sat up in bed, my whole body tensed and alert. It sounded a long way off, as though it was coming from one of the other boats.

I pushed back the duvet and opened the bedroom door. The noise of the ringing grew louder.

In the saloon, it was louder still. It wasn’t my phone, which was charging on the dinette table – it was Dylan’s.

Finally I found it, buried down the back of the sofa, where I’d thrown it when Carling came down into the cabin. It was still ringing. The name on the display:
GARLAND.

I had a surge of joy, overwhelming relief.

‘Hello?’

There was silence on the other end of the phone.

‘Is that you?’ I said, my voice trembling.

Still nothing. Someone breathing? I was certain someone was there. ‘Talk to me,’ I said, ‘please, say something. Please.’

Nothing.

I disconnected the call and threw the phone back on to the sofa, and cried. I waited a second to see if it would ring again, but it didn’t. There was nothing, just the silence of the boat and the sound of my own sobs.

Even though he’d not said a single word, it felt like a goodbye. He knew about Caddy; he must have some idea of the spinning chaos of my life… why wasn’t he here? Why hadn’t he called to tell me what to do, to arrange to meet, even? He didn’t care about me at all, not really. Whatever it was we’d had, that one single night together that I had interpreted as magical, had been nothing to him, nothing.

I went back to bed and buried my face in the pillow until the tears were gone.

Hours later, still lying awake staring at the skylight, dry-eyed and too tired to move, I had worked my way all around the theory that he didn’t care about what happened to me and found myself in a different place entirely.

He had called, after all. And he hadn’t, despite my miserable self-doubt, said goodbye. He’d said nothing at all. Why would he do that? With a rush of fear I wondered if he was in trouble. Had he tried to call, but been prevented somehow? Did he need help? And what could I do about it if he did?