The Boat (27 page)

She listened to their conversation. Her mum had been
deathly
worried about them. Her father started talking about the Cortina and the journey and her mum said, ‘I take it you told her then?’ And the strange thing was she
still
gave a little laugh at the end of her question. They were both traitors; they were both in on it. She was the only idiot.

She couldn’t make out what her father said and then they went into the kitchen and closed the door so she had to stand on the loo and open the little window and stick her head out. Her mother was asking whether Clemmie had had any tea and what the food was like in the hotel. They were chatting about avocado and prawns as if this was just an ordinary day. Perhaps she had got it all wrong and this was part of the trick. She stayed in the loo though; she wasn’t going to risk looking any more stupid unless she heard her dad laughing.

A little while later she heard her dad calling for her. But she didn’t move. She carried on sitting on the toilet seat without the light on. The hall light went on and she heard his footsteps coming up the stairs, past the loo and up into her bedroom. ‘Clemmie?’ he called and she knew that he was checking all the cupboards. She heard him go into their room and open the sliding door of their wardrobe, calling her name. When he came down the stairs again he stopped outside the loo. She could see his trousers through the great big hole he once made sawing off the handle when she’d got locked inside years ago.

He turned the door knob and then gave a little knock on the door. ‘Clemmie?’ He sounded tired. Maybe he was going to change his mind. ‘I’ve got to go, darlin’. Aren’t you going to say goodbye?’

She shook her head.

He knocked again. ‘Clembo? You coming out?’

She shook her head again and waited. She wanted him to bash the door down and beg her forgiveness.

‘OK, love. Well, I’ll see you soon.’ She stared through the hole, willing him not to go. The blue of his suit trousers was there and then it wasn’t.

That night, Clemmie was awoken by a peculiar sound. She lay in bed listening, blinking up at the ceiling. It was a creaking, dragging sort of a noise that came in short bursts. She sat bolt upright. She knew what it was. It had to be the sound of the pretend world going up. As quietly as she could, she pulled back the bed covers and crept out of bed, tiptoeing across the floorboards towards the curtains where she stood very still. Gingerly she reached out and touched the fabric with her fingertips. Then quite suddenly she whisked back the curtain, fully expecting to catch them red-handed putting up the scenery, lots of men in boiler suits looking round at her guiltily, scurrying down ladders. But the orange London sky and the backs of the gardens were all in the right places. Even the rain had been turned on; she watched it falling in streaks across the glare of the far streetlight. Then she heard the noise again and turned around: it was coming from her parents’ room.

She crossed her bedroom and stopped at the door, opening it in that special pushing-pulling way that meant no one could hear. Peering out, she could see that her parents’ bedroom door was ajar. She heard the noise again, louder and clearer, so she crept out of her room on to the carpet in the hall, avoiding the squeaky bit. She hovered by their door and then pushed it a little wider. There was a shape in the bed on her mother’s side. The other side was empty. Her dad had gone. The strange noise was coming from her mum, a smothered hiccoughing sound.

Quietly she tiptoed into the room up to the side of the bed where her mother was curled up, facing out, only Clemmie couldn’t see her face because it was pressed into a pillow that she was hugging tightly, her body shaking as though she might be laughing. But she wasn’t laughing; Clemmie knew that. She had never seen her mother cry before and she stood and watched her for a bit. Slowly it began to dawn on her that this wasn’t pretend, it was all real. She pulled back the cover and climbed into the bed, forcing herself into the pillow’s place, her mother’s sobs all loudened without it, its wetness dampening her neck. She put her arms around her mother as far as she could reach and she felt her mum hold on to her so tightly that on another occasion it might have hurt.

‘We’ll be all right. We’ll be all right,’ Clemmie said, wondering whether it was true and slipping her thumb into her mouth. Most alarming of all was that her mother didn’t even try to pull it out.

The north-easterly blew a steady six and the boat sped through the water. They were running from the wind, the waves hitting them from behind; they were surfing down them at a fair old speed, goosewinging, the mainsail out to the starboard side, the genoa to port. Johnny’d had the spinnaker out earlier, a massive canvas of red and green, ballooning out at the bows. But now the sun had swung across the sky, dipped beneath the waves and left the stars on patrol. Clouds sped by, low and fast, obscuring and revealing them. Johnny was at the helm, standing up, his body balancing, dancing almost, as if he were riding a horse while the boat bucked and kicked in the waves, his eyes fixed on either the compass or the sails, for there was nothing else to see, only the soupy darkness lit by the smudge of the moon, just enough to steer by. All he had to do was keep on sailing, get the maximum out of the boat. He’d been standing there for four hours straight. He was quiet and focused; his only concern the wind and Clem who had been sitting at his side for hours. She knew everything now; she knew everything he knew.

She had stood leaning against the cockpit doors as he tried to explain things that he didn’t understand, how Annie was not all that she seemed, how unbalanced her mind was, the accusations she had made against Frank. He’d used Frank’s words:
pathological liar,
criminally insane
; he spoke of
medication
and
institutions
. He told her not to worry, said they would be gone soon, away from these people. All the while she had stood there listening, pale and shocked, and he fancied that he saw something leave her then, something subtle that he couldn’t put his finger on. It was as if she had been dimmed, some of her light stolen.

For an hour or so she took herself off to sit at the bows, watching the sun set, trying to make sense of things. Madness scared her. She’d seen the madness in Annie’s eyes; she’d stared it in the face. She’d been reading to Smudge in the saloon, just as Frank had asked, trying to keep her out of the forepeak where Annie was sleeping. She’d brushed Smudge’s hair and done her best to comfort her after the loss of Granny on the rocks but just as she was leaning over the table to reach for another book, the saloon door had swung open and what she had glimpsed she couldn’t unglimpse: a semi-naked comatose Annie sprawled uncaring on the bed, her great doleful, unblinking eyes staring straight through Clem’s, not recognizing her, gone into some distant and private world, her arms outstretched, her wrist red and raw, slashed open, glistening in the hideous intimacy of the side light. Clem had frozen to the spot. Frank was in the heads cutting up a bandage, a packet of pills clamped in his teeth. He’d caught her staring and he had shut the door on her, gently blocking her out.

She had stood there wondering how on earth something like this could have happened, how on earth everything had gone so wrong, what had been going on in Annie’s mind to do such a thing. But mostly she had wondered why no one had thought to tell
her
,
why no one wanted her help, why she was always to be the last person to know anything.

She and Johnny sat in silence in the cockpit, the blanket of night enveloping them. The only sounds were the thumping of the boat on the waves and the steady rush of movement through the water. She watched him sail the boat, his eyes constantly checking to the port side, into the darkness. She knew he was searching for signs of civilization and she looked too. ‘It’s not our problem, Clem,’ he kept saying as if she’d been asking him. He sat at her side, lit a cigarette and it occurred to her how awful it must have been for him to find Annie lying in a pool of blood.

‘We’re just getting out of here. We’re getting off as soon as we can. The moment I see the lights of a village we’re heading in.’ Even as he spoke he was looking out for those village lights but there were none, just the hazy blur of the moon up above and the dark shoreline.

‘Is that the right thing to do, Johnny?’

‘What do you mean
is that the right thing to do
?’

‘Should we leave them right now?’ she said.

‘What?’ The clouds briefly parted and his face was lit with a sharp silver glow; the furrow etched on his brow was deep. He looked different, older.

‘Shouldn’t we wait until Annie’s a bit better? It’s not really fair on Frank and Smudge.’

‘Clem,’ he said, looking her in the eye. ‘We’re leaving.’ That was final. He didn’t even ask her what she wanted, what she thought. Her opinions meant nothing. She looked away and up at the moon.

Shortly Frank came out. He opened the cockpit doors bearing oilskins and jumpers. He too looked tired. She didn’t know what to say. She put on a jumper and an oilskin. He sat down opposite her, blinking a little as his eyes adjusted to the darkness. ‘She’s out,’ he said.

After a while Johnny asked Clem to take the helm, to stay on this course, to keep a lookout; he wanted to check the charts. She felt the chill of his hand as he passed her the tiller. He was freezing; his teeth were chattering. She watched him go below deck, his movements smoothly counterbalancing the sway as he shut the cockpit doors behind him.

She hadn’t been alone with Frank since the beach and was wondering what she was meant to say to a man whose wife had just tried to kill herself. ‘I’m so sorry, Frank,’ was all she could muster and then wasn’t quite sure whether he had heard her. He didn’t move; his eyes were fixed on the horizon.

‘Yes…’ he said eventually as if he were still trying to make sense of it. ‘She doesn’t normally cut quite that deep.’

Clem wanted to ask what it was that Annie
normally
did but it sounded morbid. She could think of nothing to say; her mind kept returning to the gash, the blood shining in the side light, those dazed eyes looking into that different world. ‘I just don’t understand why she would do that…’

He turned and looked at her and she felt better under his gaze; things made more sense when he looked at her. ‘The irony is that cutting herself makes her feel alive.’

Clem tried to understand this, but it was nonsense. ‘She has
so
much to live for. She’s so lucky… She’s got what other people would die for…’ She stopped herself short, realizing how insensitive was her turn of phrase.

He was looking at the water, the fuzzy white ribbon leading back to the moon. ‘It’s not about what you’ve got on the outside though, is it,’ he said and stretched his legs a little.

She glanced up at the sails. She wanted to believe him. ‘It is a
bit
though,’ she said because surely it was just a little bit. She’d made him smile and it gave her hope. ‘If she really thinks you and Smudge are better off without her that’s just mad.’

‘Well…that’s what they say.’

‘But she’s
wrong
.’

He smiled, but it was half-hearted. ‘There you go again, Clem, with your rights and wrongs.’

She pulled in the mainsail a little, not quite sure whether she needed to; she was copying Johnny really, but it was a useful means of punctuating her sentiments. Annie
was
wrong. Smudge and Frank were not better off without her. He should just admit it. Sometimes judgements were necessary.

They sailed in silence, lifting and dipping with the waves. He was stretched out now, his arms behind him, holding on for support, his legs parted, his feet planted firmly on the other cockpit seat, his mind on something new.

‘Did you know that most early civilizations considered suicide as a completely honourable means of escaping an unbearable existence?’

She did not know this, but she liked him talking. It normalized all this. Sometimes she just wanted to listen to the sound of his voice, telling her things, educating her, making her see things differently, being objective.

‘There never used to be any judgement attached to such a death,’ he said, looking back out to sea. She could see that he was more comfortable pondering the ethics of suicide than on the coal face of Annie’s misery. ‘Not until Socrates did anyone even question the morality of suicide.’

‘I’m not saying suicide in itself is wrong,’ Clem said, wanting to be a part of his logic, to be of some help. ‘Johnny and I once made a pact that if one of us should ever get diagnosed with a terminal illness, we’d get in the car and fume ourselves together.’ The idea now sounded slightly ridiculous to her; she couldn’t picture it any more. She supposed Frank must think her very childish.

‘Why not?’ he said, as if he didn’t really care one way or the other. ‘Suicide is a perfectly noble alternative to suffering.’

Clem stared at him. It seemed an extraordinary thing to say given the state of affairs on the boat. ‘But what if Annie had succeeded? Would you still be saying that?’

He held her eye. ‘I don’t think she wanted to succeed.’

‘But if Johnny hadn’t got to the boat…’

‘She knew someone would. It was a cry for help.’

Sometimes his objectivity made him seem callous. ‘But why is she crying for help?’ she asked.

‘Why do any of us cry for help? Because we want comfort.’

She couldn’t imagine him crying for help. It would be an impressive figure whom he sought comfort from; she would like to be privy to that. She wanted to see him weak and vulnerable, needing someone.
Her
, for example. He paused and tapped out a cigarette. He stooped to light it, cupping the flame from the wind. Then he reached out his hand and passed the cigarette to her. She liked it when he did that. She took it from his fingers, feeling the warmth of his skin as he turned his body around to face her. She could feel the hairs on her arm responding to his touch.