The Boat (11 page)

In the unforgiving daylight, both Frank and Annie looked older than they had last night – he might even be forty. Unlike Johnny, Frank seemed unhampered by a hangover. He had a fag on and looked like he hadn’t bothered with bed at all. Annie on the other hand did look hampered; she was in the corner with her knees up drinking coffee, her eyes shielded by large sunglasses, trying to ignore Captain Hook who was climbing over her shoulders. ‘Stop it, Smudge!’ she said wearily, gently wrestling her daughter off her.

‘I don’t think anyone’s going to find you now,’ Frank said.

‘No. But where the hell’s the next village?’ Johnny looked out into the nothingness.

‘Have a look at the charts,’ Frank said.

Clem joined them up on the deck, clutching her cup of coffee. ‘Morning!’ she said over-cheerily. Johnny could tell she was trying hard not to be bothered about the greenness of things and the whistling and the leaving port on a Friday. She sat down slowly on the starboard side of the cockpit, looking out at the barren surroundings.

‘Johnny’s good luck on board a boat,’ she said apropos of apparently nothing.

‘Is he?’ Frank asked, turning towards her.

‘He was born lucky.’

‘Ah, well then…’ Frank said, bending over, putting his hand on the lever adjusting the throttle slightly.

‘He was born in the caul. He came out in the sack. It was completely unbroken. His dad said he looked like he was covered in clingfilm.’

‘That’s good luck, is it?’ Frank asked, tipping his ash over the side.

‘Kept me fresh,’ Johnny said, stepping down the companionway steps to have a look at the chart laid out on the chart table.

‘It means that he’s never going to die from drowning,’ she said.

Johnny spread the chart out on the table. It was unbelievably rudimentary, not a lot more helpful than a postcard. Villages were not marked, but now, looking out at that barren scenery, he was beginning to wonder whether there were any. The bigger towns, the ones that would have bus stations and possibly train stations were on the next bay, Datça and Marmaris, and he thought he remembered Frank saying last night that they ‘coast-hopped’. They would surely pass a village – they could get out, find a road and hitch a lift. It wouldn’t be a problem.

‘No. It’s true,’ Clem was saying as Johnny stepped back out into the cockpit. ‘In the olden days sailors would go to a lot of trouble to get someone like Johnny on board. It meant that as long as he was on the boat, it was never going to sink.’

‘Am I in a coal?’ Smudge looked up at her mother from her lap.

‘
Caul.
No, darling.’

‘You believe in luck, do you, Clem?’ Frank asked her, an amused expression on his face.

‘Don’t you?’

‘No. How’s it looking, Johnny?’

‘Well, villages aren’t really marked but there’s bound to be something along here soon, we’ll just get off and hitch.’

‘Eventually we’ll hit Datca, won’t we?’ Frank said.

‘We’ll be off before that, thanks, Frank.’

‘But some things just
are
lucky,’ Clem was saying to Annie. ‘And some things aren’t. Everyone knows that.’ But no one backed her up. ‘You don’t believe in luck at all?’ she asked Frank, unable to fathom the idea; even Johnny never whistled on boats.

‘I don’t believe in anything that aims to inspire fear in people. Good luck and bad luck, they’re just a means of control. They create fear. Religion does it. Governments do it. It’s just another form of manipulation by the authorities.’

Clem stared at him, wondering whether he was serious.

Johnny had forgotten quite how much he had liked this man last night and suddenly remembered how off his trolley he’d been – he had a vague embarrassing recollection of weeping. ‘Sorry about last night,’ he said to them, rolling himself the first fag of the day. ‘I think the raki got me.’

‘Never apologize for the way you are, Johnny,’ Frank said, flicking his cigarette overboard and looking Johnny right in the eye. ‘That’s bullshit.’

‘So you think that we make our own luck then, Frank?’ Clem asked, still working things out, her eyes focused far out to sea.

‘Indeed I do,’ he said, turning to her. ‘Cause and effect.’ And with that he started to whistle again.

They chugged along all morning enjoying the peace and solitude, watching the blueness of the sky take hold. As the sun began to shine Annie helped Clem hang up the contents of their sail bag along the guard rail with washing pegs, their entire wardrobe hanging out for inspection. There was very little of it: a couple of shirts, a couple of pairs of trousers, two jumpers, the prayer mat and their sleeping bags drying in the weak morning sunshine. Smudge was tagging along copying them and when they’d finished they took cups of tea to the bows and spread out towels and Johnny could see Clem chatting away earnestly with Captain Hook while he and Frank sat in the cockpit smoking cigarettes and drinking milkless tea, eyes scanning the coast for signs of life. The further they got from habitation the more Johnny began to get that strange yet familiar feeling of isolation, of slipping over the edge of the world.

From the saloon Cat Stevens sang about first cuts and bad luck on the car cassette-radio that was rigged up to two speakers.

‘So you’ve done a bit of sailing, have you, Johnny?’ Frank said.

‘Mainly dinghy… but I’ve done a couple of crossings.’

‘Crossing what?’ Frank asked, looking up from his tea-stirring.

‘The Atlantic.’

Frank paused, spoon and eyebrows raised, nodding his head, impressed.

Johnny rolled himself a cigarette and Frank chucked him the lighter and they sat in silence for a while looking at the women, the sea and the scenery, sipping their drinks. Johnny was never happier than on a boat. Something changed inside him when he was on the water. It felt fundamental, as if there were shifts going on at a cellular level. He had always felt far more comfortable on the sea than on land, ever since his dad had taught him how to sail the Mini-Sail down in Cornwall when he must have been about Smudge’s age.

Johnny sighed, put his feet up on the cockpit seat and stretched out, thinking that life was good, that this was the best way to travel by far; they’d get off at the next place, hitch a ride and go wherever the driver was going as long as it wasn’t back to Bodrum. He scanned the water for evidence of wind, itching for Frank to get the sails up. It would be a shame to be on a sailing boat and not get a bit of sailing in.

The sun was shining brightly now; it had swallowed up all the haze. Johnny was watching the little girl pouring way too much suntan lotion on to Clem’s back, getting the white liquid all over her yellow bikini straps. Her mother was clearing up the mess, scooping handfuls off Clem’s back and rubbing it into her own body. It always intrigued Johnny to see how free and easy women were with each other’s bodies; the three of them were like grooming primates.

He sipped at his tea watching Clem shift around, lying down on her tummy. Annie began to smooth the extra lotion into Clem’s thighs and up the steep rise of the start of her buttocks and he could feel himself getting hard. He looked away briefly but when he looked back, Annie had put down the bottle and to his great surprise, pulled her T-shirt clean off over her head and was sitting there bare-breasted looking out to sea, rubbing the remaining lotion into her chest. The tea hovered at Johnny’s lips. It was unignorable: she had unexpectedly glorious tits.

He stared for a little too long and then turned away just so that it didn’t look as if he was staring and he put all his energy into being fascinated by several large birds flying fast by the boat, almost skimming the surface of the slate-grey waves in their search for fish, swooping and lurching inches above the water.

‘Wonderful, aren’t they?’ Frank said, putting the cup to his lips. ‘Boobies.’

Johnny turned sharply and looked at Frank. ‘The birds, I mean,’ Frank said, looking back at Annie. ‘They’re called boobies!’ Then he threw back his head and roared with laughter; they both did. Frank laughed so much he had tears running down his cheeks.

‘They’re pretty wonderful too,’ Johnny said, because they really were but then he wondered whether he’d gone too far. However Frank was laughing so much that Annie and Clem were looking round at them wondering what the joke was.

All afternoon they motored on with barely any wind at all. They passed no signs of civilization and Johnny went down below deck to examine the chart again. There was a small town, possibly a village, at the innermost point of this small bay but it appeared to be quite a way inland so that was no good. He went back out with the binoculars and scanned the hillsides: miles and miles of nothing, barren scrub dotted with the occasional goatherd or shack. He watched skinny black beasts ambling up and down the hills. He swung the binoculars back round and took a surreptitious look at Annie’s tits again. He refocused and moved the binoculars down her body. She was powerfully built, strong and fit. She had her legs up and he zoomed in on a series of small white scars along the inside of her thigh. He lowered the binoculars, turned around and leant back against the coachroof and found himself drifting in and out of sleep, dozing in the warm sunshine, his mind ablaze with breasts and legs.

Later in the afternoon Frank asked him to take the helm while he took Smudge down for her afternoon nap. Johnny and Clem played cards with Annie by the tiller. She taught them how to play Five Hundred, an incredibly complicated game, like Bridge but even more confusing, where the two of diamonds was the big bad trump. It involved partners, bidding and dummies. He noticed the scars again as she dealt the cards; they were all over both thighs, fine white lines like little caterpillars crawling up towards her crotch.

The breeze did come in the late afternoon but Frank preferred for them to find a bay and hunker down for the evening. Johnny would have much preferred to have got the sails up now that the wind had arrived, he loved night sailing, but it wasn’t his boat and another night on board sounded just fine to him. The further away they got from Bodrum the better. They were bound to come across somewhere tomorrow. Even if they found a house with a car they could pay for a ride; they still had all Charlie’s money.

So
the
Little Utopia
chugged in closer to the coast and nosed about for a suitable harbour as the sun slunk down the sky. It didn’t take long to find one. They motored in, the vast mountainous scrub sheltering them from the wind. Johnny and Clem stood at the bows checking the depth of the water with Captain Hook pointing out fish. The bottom was rocky with sandy patches and when Johnny dropped the anchor it caught quickly and the boat swung round, nose to the breeze.

When Frank at last turned the engine off the sudden peace was blissful. Johnny forgot how much he hated engines; people had managed for hundreds of years without them and somehow they had now become indispensable. A couple of years ago, Rob, Clem and he had delivered a boat from Gibraltar to Falmouth without an engine in it at all. It was such a rare event that they used to get rounds of applause as they sailed into harbours.

For a while the four of them stood about the boat, silenced by the silence, just staring out at this stunning piece of nature they had found themselves in, listening to the breeze rippling on the water, the waves lapping against the boat, the occasional cry from a bird of prey on the sloping golden mountains. They were in the middle of a beautiful piece of nowhere, the sinking sun on their backs, their shadows long and lean reaching over the water, up the rocks to the foothills.

There was a general clearing up of the cockpit and the deck and Captain Hook had a tantrum at the removal of her grubby pirate jacket and the attempt to put other warmer clothes on her naked goose-bumping body. Johnny managed to distract her with the very important job of looking out for the ‘green flash’, the mythical moment when the sun disappeared below the horizon and a green light shot up into the sky. He told her how he had spent his whole life looking out for it but had never seen it because his eyes weren’t clever enough. Smudge had stopped crying then and climbed on to his lap and stared at the sun with wide eyes, trying hard not to blink while Annie had put some warm clothes on underneath the Captain Hook jacket, brushing a hand through Johnny’s hair in thanks.

The sky became streaked with pinks and purples that spread out like long, tapering fingers over their heads towards the east where the first stars were already out. Frank and Clem, bearing thick jumpers and tumblers full of red wine, joined them in the cockpit and the five of them sat and waited for the green flash as the red ball sank down the sky. Captain Hook was the only lucky one – she saw it several times, she said, when the others must have been blinking. She described it in some detail, how the colours of the rainbow flashed as well, how very clever her eyes must be. But for the rest of them the sun kissed the horizon and slid out of view without a hullabaloo.

As the stars prickled the sky and the moon got into its swing, they ate pasta on plates on their laps. Annie put Captain Hook to bed; she fought it briefly, they could hear a tired protestation from the forecabin but shortly Annie joined them again with fresh supplies of wine. Clem made room for her, getting up to join Johnny on the other side of the cockpit, lifting his feet and placing them on her lap, her knuckles gently massaging the balls of his feet. Frank was sitting next to Clem at the stern, his legs hanging over the tiller, his eyes looking up at the heavens, his finger following the trajectory of the orbit of the stars in the galaxy. It was impossible not to talk about the tiny scale of their little lives on Earth. If Betelgeuse, visible over there, was the size of an orange, he said, planet Earth was smaller than a pinprick. Clem was leaning in close to see exactly which star he was pointing at. She was wearing Johnny’s polo neck and her hair was caught down the back of it, with just a few coils springing out around her face, and Johnny was thinking how much he’d like to have sex with her right now. He even thought of getting up and taking her hand and saying,
Excuse me, guys, I’m going to go and have sex with my wife, won’t be long.
He was pretty sure no one would mind. He drank from his glass and saluted Annie who was topping up her own glass in that quiet way she had. Their silences were comfortable; they sipped at the warming red wine listening to the waves lapping at the boat.