The Boat (15 page)

‘You can touch them, if you like.’ She said the words so quietly he thought about pretending that he hadn’t heard. But they both knew that he had. She started to undo the buttons of her shirt, slowly and steadily, keeping her eyes on his, and he sat there not sure where to look or what to do, so he did nothing; she was smiling slightly as if she found him amusing. When she had finished undoing all the buttons she opened wide the shirt and, because it would have been humanly impossible not to, Johnny looked down at her breasts and felt his heart quicken. She had the sort of tits that a man might risk everything for. When he looked up again at those pale eyes of hers, he saw something new in them: a boldness, a determination. Frank was right.
Only naked can we truly reveal ourselves
. ‘Touch them, Johnny,’ she said.

He must have signalled something because she reached out and took his bilberry-stained palm and pressed it to her breast. It felt warm and slightly moist and unbelievably full in his hand. His fingers moved across her skin and he gently pinched her nipple between his thumb and forefinger and she tilted back her head and gave a little sigh. He hadn’t seemed to consciously make any choices at all and yet his mouth was wet and his cock had gone as hard as rock.

‘Mama!’ Smudge’s voice came from further up the hill and he pulled his hand away quickly. ‘Mama?’ she cried. ‘By mistake accidentally I think I’ve broken Granny…’

Johnny leapt to his feet, knocking over the water bottle and righting it as Annie calmly and methodically did up her buttons, keeping her eyes on him and a teasing smile on her lips.

Clem had caught two fat fish which were, as far as she could tell, pretending to be dead in the bucket behind her. Frank had caught five. They were motionless but if she prodded them they flapped about a bit then went back to playing dead. She was sitting at the bows ready to catch her third, holding her line expectantly, looking out at the beautiful, glistening sea, humming along to ‘Space Oddity’ as Frank came along the deck with a couple of cups of coffee. He’d taken his shirt off and was surprisingly fit and tanned, an imposing figure. He bent down and put one of the cups on her prayer mat and then sat down at the starboard bow next to her and picked up his rod, his back to her. She looked away. She hadn’t seen him topless before and it felt oddly intimate.

She looked out at the sea and listened to Mr Bowie.
Poor old Major Tom floating in his tin can. She thought of her dad, how he used to sing this song, how he used to strut about being Bowie or Jagger to make her laugh.

‘They still together, your mum and dad?’ Frank asked. It was uncanny how he did that – knowing what she was thinking about.

‘God no, they divorced years ago.’ She could hear the nonchalance in her own voice. She had perfected that over the years.

‘Siblings?’ he asked.

‘Two half-brothers.’ She used the same careless tone but it didn’t trip off the tongue quite so easily, it had the ring of risk in it. It was being on the boat, it was the
Little Utopia;
she’d noticed how unbidden memories kept rising to the surface. There was something about the absence of distraction and the empty horizons that allowed dark, sunken things to pop up into the light like bubbles from the deep.

They sat in silence. She watched a bird swoop by, searching for fish. Frank shifted at her side, reaching for a cigarette, and she couldn’t help but notice a large scar running down his back, glossy and smooth in the sunshine. His right shoulder blade had deep, rippled indentations down the bone as if some of it had been cut out. She found the disfigurement strangely beautiful, a stamp of his uniqueness. She wanted to reach out and touch it.

‘It’s not pretty, is it?’ he said without turning around, feeling her eyes upon him. She looked away, embarrassed.

‘Still, I’m lucky to be alive,’ he said. He stretched out his legs and she caught sight of the scar on his calf. ‘I spent six months at the Hotel NHS.’

She wasn’t very good at telling when he was joking – she spent a few moments wondering why he’d stay in a hotel before she understood. ‘Six months? How terrible,’ she said.

‘Not so bad in the end,’ he said, picking up his coffee and taking a sip. ‘I got around to reading all the books I’d been meaning to read for years.’

She swatted away a fly that was buzzing about in the heat and looked down at her line. She’d only recently started reading. As a child she had always been a doer, not a reader. ‘Books like what?’

‘Oh – the classics: Ovid, Hermes, Ficino. The philosophers.’

She hadn’t heard of any of them but hoped her face didn’t give this away. She wished she knew a little bit more about everything; it was beginning to dawn on her how badly educated she was. ‘Did you study philosophy, Frank?’

‘Not officially.’

‘I want to study philosophy,’ she said on a whim. ‘I’d like to do some reading. I don’t feel I’ve read very much in my life.’

He reeled in his line a little and shifted his position. ‘What do you want to know about?’

‘I want to…’
I want to be like you, know all the things that you know
. ‘I suppose I want to start looking for the truth about things.’

‘Ahhhh! The truth!’ He turned and smiled at her and it was hard to tell whether he was mocking her. ‘You’re on a quest for knowledge.’

‘Yes,’ she said cautiously. But he didn’t say anything else. ‘Where do you think I should begin?’

‘If you’re looking for answers, I suppose the first thing is to start asking the right questions.’

Her mind went blank. She couldn’t think of any questions at all.

‘I don’t mean now, Clem.’ He smiled, looking at her so fondly that she didn’t mind him laughing at her.

‘Johnny and I are going to work our way to India. I thought maybe I’d go to a few ashrams.’ He didn’t proffer an opinion. ‘Maybe find a guru,’ she added, not exactly sure of what a guru really did, but Rob had met one and had raved about him.

‘You don’t need a guru, Clem. You’re the one that has to answer your own questions. That’s the beauty.’ He winked at her and they fished for a while, which meant that they did nothing at all.

‘Have you heard of Krishnamurti?’ he asked her.

She pretended that she vaguely had and took a guess. ‘Should I read him?’

He rested his arm on the guard rail. ‘He was a fabulous man, a truly original thinker.’ He was smiling at the mention of this Krishnamurti and she wondered whether Frank knew him, whether they were friends, what sort of things they got up to, whether they fished together, what kind of discussions they had.

‘Wherever he went people wanted to know more, always asking him questions, until he had developed this immense following. Then one day, in front of three thousand hard-core disciples, he declared the whole thing finished. Told them all to piss off and get a life.’ Frank seemed to find this incredibly funny. He was chuckling. ‘People were weeping and wailing… it was like the end of the world. What were they going to do? Who were they going to follow?’

‘Were you there?’

He turned round to look at her and laughed a little louder. ‘I might be old, Clem, but this was in the nineteen twenties.’

She laughed too.

‘But I’ve read the speech he gave. It’s a beautiful speech; you should read that. I’ve got it somewhere.’

‘I will,’ she said. ‘What did he say?’ The fly that had been buzzing around her was now buzzing around him, dancing on his skin, and she felt a pang of envy for its boldness. He brushed it firmly aside.

‘He told them that
Truth
was a pathless land, that they couldn’t get to it via any religion or sect. He said that truth was limitless and unconditional, it couldn’t be contained or organized and the moment that it
was
, it became crystallized and deadened. He told them that belief was an
individual
matter and if they followed someone else, they would cease to follow the
Truth
.’

She stared down into the water, empathizing with those weeping and wailing followers. How on earth were you meant to find your own truth?

‘Do you think Jesus must be turning in his grave at the mass following that he’s inadvertently created?’ she said, hoping Frank might be rather impressed with her. Frank turned to her and smiled. ‘Spinning like a top, Clem.’

They sat in a happy silence. David Bowie was still trying to get in touch with ground control and though she didn’t want to have her dad in her head – he didn’t deserve to be there – she found he kept popping up.

Frank tapped himself out a cigarette, caught it, lit it and passed it to her. ‘It’s hard to be true to yourself. Sometimes you have to go against the great majority.’

She rested her chin against the guard rail and caught the gash where she had cut herself. She sat back on her wrists, listening to Frank, wondering what majority
he
had gone against.

‘Governments and religion need to control us. Believe me, I know,’ he said in his easy, rolling voice. ‘So we live by their rules.’ He lit his own cigarette and turned to her, blowing the smoke up in the air above the bows. ‘But whose benefit do you think those rules are really for?’

‘For us all, I presume,’ she said, striking out, trying to go against his majority.

‘Maybe,’ he said, leaning back on his hands but she could tell he didn’t think so. ‘Why is it illegal to kill a man who burgles your house and rapes your wife but perfectly legal to kill a total stranger in a war over oil that’s nothing to do with you?’

She hoped he wasn’t expecting an answer; she’d run out of strong opinions.

‘You see, society needs us to think in a certain way for it to function, for it to use us. It needs to tell us who to point the finger at, who are the “victims” and who are the “perpetrators”.’ He was looking her directly in the eyes and she felt that he could see right through her. ‘You have to set your own compass, Clem. Never forget that.’

His eyes were so dark and intense that for a moment she didn’t notice that something was tugging at her line.

Clemmie was sitting in the front of the blue Cortina. She had never been on a trip with her dad, not just the two of them. Normally the three of them went on trips together so her mum would have been in the front and Clemmie would be sitting in the back holding her breath between the lamp-posts, listening to her mother talking and laughing. Sometimes she would lean forward to hear what she was saying after a particularly laughy laugh but she never got the joke and went back to her breathing tasks. They could make her feel a bit left out, her mum and dad, the way they laughed and talked all the time, not really including her in their conversations. If she tried to join in, pushing herself into the middle, taking both their hands, her mother would end up brushing her hair or wiping her mouth with a spitty handkerchief or tugging at her skirt or pulling her thumb out of her mouth. But today, this time, it was just her and her dad and he didn’t care about those kinds of things. He cared about getting to the bar before closing time, not missing the match, England winning the cricket – sensible things.

The road was narrow with high hedges; she could only see through the windscreen kneeling and she had to keep her hands on the dashboard because her dad kept stopping to look at the map. He’d been to the hotel before but he liked to try different routes and time himself. The sun was shining straight into their faces so they both had the visors down and she kept glimpsing her own face looking down at her. Her mother had brushed her hair so that the top was flat and now she was worried that she looked like Violet Elizabeth Bott from
Just William
. She tried to pat down the curls.

‘You look very pretty,’ her dad said with a wink and that made her feel better. Apart from her hair, she had to agree with him. She had dressed with great care. She was wearing her corduroy turquoise smock dress with her favourite red tights underneath and so far no spills on either. However, her toes, tucked underneath her bottom, felt a bit squashed because she was growing out of her best shoes: her brown, size eleven, lace-up Start-rites. The ones that made the exciting clickety-click noise on the pavement and turned her feet attractively inwards like Sarah’s. Pigeon toes were all the rage at school.

Her dad was singing along to the radio.
‘My sweet Lord…
’

He was wearing his shiny blue suit with a wide-collared pale green shirt and the sun kept glinting off his gold necklace. His chin was covered in stubble. She didn’t like him all prickly; he’d said he hadn’t had time to shave and she wondered how long shaving took. He had his Starsky sunglasses on and was swaying with the music, dancing as he drove, making her laugh.

He was copying the singer exactly, pleadingly, desperately, making fun of him but serious all at the same time. He pretended to pass her a microphone and she joined in on the
Alleluia
bits.

‘OK, are you ready?’ he said after a while and she beamed at him. This was the best bit, the bit where her mother would say, ‘Really, Jim, I’m not sure this is a good idea,’ and he’d ignore her. They’d been doing it since she was tiny. Clemmie knew her cue. She clambered across the gear stick on to his lap and carefully took hold of the steering wheel. He let go, his hands raised in the air. ‘She’s all yours. Left a bit! Good girl, Clembo. Straighten up! Corner coming up…’ He changed down a gear and she bumped up and down on his knee, peering over the wheel as she turned to the right. ‘Round the corner, there you go! Give a hoot!’ She was driving the Cortina, his pride and joy, for a good ten minutes or so all by herself except for the feet bit.

The sun had dropped low in the sky by the time they pulled up outside the hotel. Clemmie had fallen asleep and was momentarily confused to find herself at the seaside. They parked at the back of the tall, dark building and walked round to the grand entrance, carrying their bags. She stepped carefully in her Start-rites through the splatterings of white seagull poo on the steps up to the swirling glass door.

There was an old man in a uniform who seemed to know her father. ‘Hello, Jim,’ he said. ‘And who’s the beautiful young lady?’ For a moment she wondered whom he was talking about and then when her father said, ‘This is my daughter, Harry. The most fabulous, cleverest, gymnastic young lady in the northern hemisphere,’ her chest swelled with pride and she had to keep swallowing in case she looked like a smarty-pants – and
no one likes a
smarty pants
, her mother was always reminding her of that. She couldn’t help the smile so she turned it up to the old man in the uniform. She had never felt so grown up in her life and suspected it might have something to do with her red tights and the clickety-click noise.