The Boat (31 page)

‘Time to go!’ Johnny said, standing up, fumbling about in his pockets for some money for the raki. ‘Clem, we’re off.’

She was still seated, looking down at the red sail bag on her lap. ‘But, Johnny,’ she said. ‘If it’s quicker and easier by boat I think we should just go on the boat.’

Johnny held her eye. ‘But that’s not the plan, Clem,’ he said.

‘We’ve got wind now,’ she said. There was a nervousness in her eye. Smudge had appeared at Clem’s side and was tugging at her sleeve.

‘Yes, yes, please stay with us, please stay.’

Johnny didn’t look at the others at all. He stared at Clem, unable to fathom how she could betray him like that when she knew how badly he needed to get off the boat, how claustrophobic he had become, how their trip had run its course. ‘Well, it’s all fixed now. We’re going by car,’ he said, reaching to take the bag out of her hands. He had always decided what they were going to do, where they were going to go, and she had always willingly followed. That was just the way it worked.

‘I don’t want to,’ she said. ‘Why can’t I meet you in Datca?’

Johnny stood there, frozen to the spot, quite astonished by what she had just said – the idea that they might split up even for a day. He became suddenly aware of everyone in the bar watching them,
Banana Cool
and his brother hovering at his side. He stood and waited for her to get up until his pride could take it no longer. He turned and walked out of the restaurant, tripping fast down the steps. He walked along the beach as fast as he could, his feet making squeaking noises in the fine sand. He didn’t turn back and when he got to the privacy of some rocks he slid down into the shade, muttering obscenities under his breath. It was Frank. It was fucking Frank. She didn’t want to leave
him
. She had chosen Frank over him. He hated her. He hated Frank. He fucking despised the pair of them. He rolled himself a cigarette but his hands were shaking with anger. He tore the roach from the Rizla packet as he always did, rammed it into the end and lit the fag and he sat there sucking in the bitter smoke, blowing it out like a missile in a line of fire towards the ugly tub of a boat out there in the water. He hung his head and stared at the sand as if the answers might lie there. A shadow darkened the sand and he looked up.

Clem was standing there, holding her shoes in one hand. She was out of breath: she’d been running. Johnny looked away from her, glad she was upset. She
should
be upset: she had done wrong. ‘I’m sorry, Johnny,’ she said and slowly she slid down the rock and sat at his side. There was nothing to see but sea, sky and the boat, so they both looked out and waited while she got her breath back. Even now when he hated her like this he couldn’t help but want her. He was totally at her mercy.

‘What’s happening to us, Clem?’ he said.

‘I don’t know,’ she said, shaking her head as if she had no idea.

‘Is this about
him
?’

She kept her eyes on the sunlight bouncing off the water. ‘It’s not just him,’ she said sadly, unaccustomed to being the cause of such cruelty. ‘It’s Smudge too. And Annie.’

But he wasn’t interested in Smudge and Annie. ‘Are you in love with him?’ he asked and she left a pause long enough for it to speak volumes and for his stomach to curl up into a ball.

‘Oh, Johnny, it’s not about that,’ she said eventually, irritated because he was always trying to put everything into boxes when surely if they’d learnt anything on this trip it was about taking things out of boxes.

‘What is it about then?’

She shook her head, trying to find the right words. It was about not letting people down in life, not deserting them when they needed you most, not when their mother or wife was lying comatose in bed; it wasn’t right to be there one moment and gone the next. No warning. It just wasn’t fair. People couldn’t be abandoned like that. They had to give Smudge warning. It
was
about Frank too, of course it was. Maybe she did love him, but it wasn’t how Johnny thought, it wasn’t in a sordid, exclusive kind of way. They owed him some loyalty for his kindness. But she didn’t say any of these things to Johnny. She didn’t know how to explain herself any more. He wouldn’t understand. Recently she had found herself tiptoeing around his feelings; she had to censor herself and the things she said. She had to keep her thoughts locked up. Sometimes, like now, it felt as if she was being smothered by him. She tucked her knees up to her chest and hugged herself tightly.

Johnny looked beyond her out to sea, at the white diamonds of shining light, almost deliberately blinding himself. He understood that this was one of those pivotal moments that needed acknowledging; the rest of life would hang on it.

‘OK, you win,’ he said. ‘But we leave at Datca.’

When they returned to the boat, all was quiet from the forepeak. Johnny went below deck and dropped the bag on the saloon seat and looked about at the clutter: the books, the sextant, the hairbrush and clips strewn about the place, the coffee cups in the sink, the utter familiarity of it all. He felt like a criminal returning to the scene of the crime. The other Johnny, the one who made the right decisions, the one who Clem adored, the one without self-doubt, was up in
Banana Cool
’s car somewhere in the mountains on a bumpy road. He’d got the hell out of here. Whereas this Johnny was moving to the rhythm of a different drum – Frank’s drum which Clem seemed bound to follow. This Johnny was at Frank’s mercy for a little longer, stuck on the
Little Utopia
for another twenty-four hours.

When he pushed open the bathroom door and looked in on Annie, his heart lifted a little. She was sitting upright, her legs crossed, her eyes open, and when she saw him, she looked surprised. He thought the corners of her mouth twitched a little as if she was trying to smile. He had not deserted her after all, that’s what her face said. He remembered suddenly how much he had loved to see her face transform with happiness, how her eyes would crease up and the light would fill her. There was just a faint glimmer of that, but at least he could see that she was still connected to the source. He looked away and left, shutting the door behind him.
I’m going, Annie, but just not today.

He stood in the galley looking around him. Up on deck he could see Frank through the Perspex windows on his knees scrubbing, whistling as he worked. Clem was unperturbed by this; she seemed to have forgotten all about bad luck and omens; it seemed that there was nothing that Frank could do that would meet with her disapproval. She and Smudge were tidying up the decks as if everything was just perfectly normal, she was behaving as if she belonged here, as if they were never going to leave. Smudge was coiling the ropes, completely wrongly, singing as she worked. It was only Johnny and Annie whose hearts had sunk and shrunk; the rest of them were whistling and merrily going about their businesses without a care in the world. He took a deep breath, sat down on the saloon seat and rubbed his head. He had no choice but to accept it. He could see the sense in sailing the last leg and not taking the road. He had been stubborn and had lost the battle. Of course he could put up with Frank for another day, knowing that from Datca they would take a bus east, get to Cappadocia or Göreme and then hitch onwards.
It was only twenty-four hours.

They left in the late afternoon, a gentle wind blowing on the beam. Johnny didn’t talk; he had nothing to say. He helmed the boat, glad that everyone was in their own private worlds, snoozing, reading and drinking coffee as the boat slipped through the water, no one expecting anything of him but to sail. Johnny listened as Frank and Clem talked of Annie, how Frank was lessening the sedatives, how he’d order more drugs, get them delivered to various Postes Restantes along the way. He had no doubt she was getting better; it usually took about a fortnight. All the while as they talked, Johnny sailed the boat, getting the most out of every breath of wind, never letting the sail luff, tacking up the coast, getting on with business of getting to Datca. This wouldn’t take long. At some stage Clem got up and took her sketch book down to the bows and Frank immersed himself in a book.

Fifty miles later, the moon had risen and was shining silver streaks on to the water, the boat doing a steady four knots in the gentle breeze, Johnny left Frank and Clem for a moment as he went down below deck to try and sort out the spinnaker which had jammed in the forepeak locker. He knocked gently before going in, expecting to find Annie sleeping like Frank had said. Instead, she was still sitting cross-legged, her hands curled together in her lap, looking up through the open hatch, a light spray from the waves coming in. She was covered in a watery ethereal light.

‘Sorry, Annie, I thought you’d be sleeping. I need to get to the locker.’

Slowly she dragged her eyes away from the hatch and looked at him; underneath the layers of unhappiness she was definitely more present. She even moved out of his way a little so that he could crawl across the bed and open the locker. He talked to her as he did so, not expecting a reply. ‘We probably won’t even use it but I want to be prepared. When we round the headland we should get a nice run on the way in to Datca…’

As he sat back up, he felt something hard pressing into his knees. He felt underneath and pulled out a couple of yellow and red pills. He held them out in his hand towards Annie and she took them from him. He watched her slip her hand behind her back and push them underneath the mattress, flashing a glance at the door.

‘What are you saving them for?’ he asked. She looked at him as if she had been found out. Then she opened her mouth as if to say something but the words wouldn’t come out, it seemed like too much effort. Johnny moved closer to her.

‘What are you saying?’ he said.

‘I… want…’ Her voice was weak, almost inaudible. He leant in; he could feel her breath on his cheek, but the words wouldn’t come.

‘You want
what
, Annie?’

‘I want to die,’ she whispered. She looked away, back out of the hatch, her eyes two wells of sadness. He took her hand in his and smoothed it with his thumb.

‘Don’t say that, Annie. Think of Smudge.’

Oh God,
he thought selfishly.
Please get better. We’re leaving you. You have to get better.

‘Smudge.’ She seemed to smile a little but in a deadened kind of a way, still staring up at the moon. ‘Smudge is
all
I think about.’

Something about the way she said it scared him. ‘Annie,’ he said, moving forward, cupping her chin with his fingers, forcing her her head to face him. ‘What are you planning? You leave Smudge out of this…’

She held his gaze. ‘You didn’t even look in the cabinet, I told you to look…’ she whispered. There was no accusation in it, just a deep weariness. Then she lay back down on the mattress, turning her back on him and curling up into the foetal position.

He paused for a moment, looking at that soft, downy hair on the back of her neck, then slowly he got off the bed and turned on the heads light. He got down on his knees and opened the cabinet doors. He had no idea what he was looking for. He couldn’t see properly. He switched on the little light above the basin. The cabinet was full of medicines and plastic bottles: shampoos and sun-block, various lotions and potions. He pulled out the medicine tin and the other locked one. He was pretty sure it was full of Annie’s medicines; Frank only kept it locked to protect her from harming herself. He felt around towards the back but there was nothing there. He crouched down as low as he could and peered in. At the very back he could see a red fabric pressed against the hull of the boat behind the plywood. He reached in and felt the sides. It was a book of some sort. It was wedged in, in a fixed position. He got his fingers around the edge and pulled it out and stepped back holding it under the basin light.

It was just an old book with faded gold lettering on the spine:
Gulliver’s Travels.
He opened it and flicked through the pages but there was nothing of any interest.

Then right at the back of the book he saw what she had wanted him to see. And as the sickness rose from his stomach, the thought struck him how very nearly he had got away today – he and Clem – they had so very nearly made it.

Johnny liked it when the others were all out, when he had the whole house to himself. His dad and Rob had gone to Sarah’s school play to try and pretend that life was carrying on as normal while his mum was dying upstairs.

Johnny sat downstairs and watched the snooker while the guinea-pigs flung themselves around the floorboards like they were on a skating rink. They were the only beings in the house that weren’t pretending; they just carried on doing what they always had – skating and making more guinea pigs. He kept finding himself staring out at the garden; he’d borrowed a couple of hundred quid off his dad and bought a load of old Lasers and Wayfarers from a sailing school in Datchet and they were strewn about on the grass waiting to be repaired. He should have been sanding them down right now and repairing them but he had found it hard to do anything recently. The four of them were tiptoeing around in a twilight world of sickness.

After a while he made two cups of tea and took them upstairs. He knew her cup was just symbolic, she never drank any but she always said
yes please
– it was part of the whole pretence, she was in on it. Nobody wanted to mention what was really going on, everyone was still talking about getting better and which pills to pop and what a nice day it was. He thought that suffering seemed to separate a family rather than unite it. Or perhaps it was just that suffering was a private affair.

He pushed open their bedroom door and the now-familiar scent of illness hit him; it seemed to have infused everything with its clinical, musty odour, a mixture of medicine cabinet and clothes left in the dryer too long.

She was motionless and his heart skipped a beat as it always did when she was sleeping. He’d overheard the nurse telling his father that she might only have another month, but no one really knew. No one knew anything; they were all totally out of control of the situation pretending not to be. He moved towards the end of the bed and stood quite still until he saw the slow, unsteady rise and fall of her chest. She was breathing. He breathed too. She looked calm, facing away from the window, her face thin and pale, her hands resting at her sides, palms open.