The Boat (34 page)

She glanced up at the pink and red sky and the sinking orange sun; the light would be gone soon. The water was as black as oil between the streaks of colour.

‘Whatever you do, don’t turn the engine on!’ Johnny said to Frank, smiling through the mask, his brown toes gripping the edge of the stern. ‘Clem, keep her head to wind.’ She nodded.

Johnny stepped on to the transom step, knelt down and put one hand on the tender for balance as he slipped into the water. He gasped with the cold. He resurfaced, gripping on to the tender. He put his face in the water and looked down at the prop with the three of them on the boat all leaning over the stern trying to get a view of it.

Johnny took a deep breath and dived underneath the hull for a good ten seconds, the others silent as they waited looking down into the darkness beneath. It was impossible to see anything except their own broken reflections and a shimmer of flesh. Johnny resurfaced, panting for breath, grabbing the transom and looking up at their faces, adjusting the mask as he did so. ‘Hang on,’ he said and dived again. To Clem the seconds felt like minutes, but this time he came up shouting.

‘It’s a rope caught right round the blades. I can’t see it properly – it’s too dark down there. Can someone shine a torch from the tender? And I need a screwdriver.’

Frank rummaged around in the cockpit seat, found the torch and a screwdriver, pulled the tender close to the boat and climbed in to get a better view of the propeller. He turned on the torch, placed it in the water and shone it at the prop. Johnny dived again and disappeared, resurfacing not long later, gripping the transom, his back to Frank. Annie was leaning over the stern, as was Clem, with one hand on the tiller, keeping the boat heading into wind.

‘OK, Frank,’ Johnny shouted above the noise of the sails, turning round to him in the tender. ‘Shine it on this side of the prop if you can.’

Clem looked down into the darkness as Johnny dived down again. She could see bits of frayed rope rising to the surface as Johnny hacked away at it.

‘He’s doing it!’ she cried, keeping her eyes focused on the beam of light from the torch. ‘Go on, Johnny!’ He was underwater for ages; surely he had to be out of breath. Then up he came bursting into the air holding a short piece of frayed rope.

‘Any luck?’ Frank asked. Clem looked up at the tender. The sunset behind Frank had begun to shine a rich red; his hair burned as if on fire. He was kneeling, trying to angle the torch correctly through the waves. ‘Do you need the screwdriver?’ He held it out towards Johnny.

She noticed how Johnny ignored Frank’s outstretched arm and slowly pulled himself up on to the transom and out of the water and stood up, wet and dripping in the red light, his face expressionless as he pulled off the mask.

‘Have you done it?’ Frank asked.

And still Johnny said nothing.

‘Have you, Johnny?’ she said. She looked over at Frank. The tender had drifted a good ten feet away from the
Little Utopia
and Frank began pulling in the slack rope. Only it wasn’t slack: it was loose, no longer tied to the boat at all.
He stood there looking confused, holding the wet, frayed end in his hand, the tender drifting further away with each passing second, rising and falling in the tiger-striped swell.

‘The knot’s come undone!’ he said, throwing it back to Johnny on the transom. Johnny didn’t move to catch it; he watched as it landed in the water a few feet away from him with a feeble splash.

‘Johnny!’ Clem cried. ‘Pick it up!’ But almost as she said the words, it was too late – the end of the rope was out of any reach. Frank began to pull it in again. She stared at Johnny, utterly confused.

‘Johnny! Get the rope!’ Frank called, throwing it again. But still Johnny didn’t move, he continued to stand there on the transom, just staring at the tender as it drifted, maybe twenty feet away now.

‘Bring the boat round, Johnny!’ Clem called but he did nothing. ‘Bring her round, Johnny!’ she cried again, letting go of the tiller, looking about for something to throw to Frank instead but Annie was sitting on the cockpit seat where the ropes were and instead of getting out of Clem’s way Annie was just staring at Frank, gripping the sides of the seats, going nowhere.

‘Get off the seat!’ Clem cried. But Annie ignored her, she didn’t even look at her.

‘Get up! Throw him a rope!’ Clem cried, trying to pull Annie off the seat.

Annie reacted then. She let go her grip on the seat and grabbed Clem’s shoulders, her nails digging into her back, her grip so hard that Clem saw the fresh red blood seeping through her wound. ‘We have to help him, Annie,’ Clem said, scared by the look in her eyes. Annie leant forward and whispered into her ear. ‘You can’t help him,’ she said, her voice level and low. ‘You can’t help us. People like us – we’re not fit for this world.’

There was something deeply frightening about Annie, slowly she let go her grip and Clem stepped back, both of them returning their gaze to Frank in the tender. He was panicking now; he started frantically looking about the boat. Water was pouring in. ‘Where are the oars? Where are the fucking oars?’ he yelled. Clem turned to Johnny because it was dawning on her then that there weren’t any fucking oars.

Only then did she understand what was really going on. This was no accident; the rope had been deliberately cast off and the corks removed. This had been organised.

Frank was a good thirty feet away now, maybe more, and already his voice was sounding distant. She could see that he was thinking of jumping in. He couldn’t swim and he would have to rely on her to help him out and she wouldn’t be able to. She watched as he scrabbled forwards on his knees and started paddling furiously with his hands; his progress was negligible. ‘Go on, Clem, get the boat hook!’ Frank yelled. There he was vulnerable and needing her, just as she had wished for, only she couldn’t help. She made a dash for the life-belt and tried to unhook it but Johnny was on her. ‘Sit down!’ he yelled, pushing her back.

‘Come back here!’ Frank screamed. But nobody moved. ‘You leave me here, Johnny, I will find you! You take my daughter I will fucking find you! I swear to fucking God, I will find you and I will kill you!’

Clem stood there aghast. She had never even heard him raise his voice before; he was roaring like a bear.

Johnny was leaning out on the transom shouting right back at him. ‘I know what you are! You don’t deserve to have a daughter, you monster!’

‘You know nothing!’

‘I know what you are, Frank! How could you? You don’t deserve either of them.’ Johnny turned his back on Frank and stepped over the guard rail back into the boat and nudged the tiller with his knee. The sails filled with wind and the
Little Utopia
began to fly away from the tender.

‘Annie!’ Frank was standing up, yelling but his voice barely carried, he was downwind. ‘Annie! I will find you! You know I will!’

Annie stood up slowly, hatred and misery written all over her face. ‘We are rotten people, Frank!’ she screamed across the water at him, her voice hoarse and breaking. ‘We are rotten to the core!’

Clem grabbed hold of Johnny. ‘You can’t do this!’ she cried. ‘You’ve got it all wrong!’

‘No, Clem. You listen to me!’ He was shouting at her now, as mad and angry as Frank, shaking her off him. ‘
You’ve
got it wrong. Wake the fuck up!’

Then behind him Clem saw the blur of Annie leaping from the boat into the water. ‘No!’ she cried out and Johnny turned round in time to see Annie landing with a splash in the wake of the boat. Johnny slammed the tiller over into a crash-stop heave to. The boat halted dead in the water.

‘She jumped, Johnny!’ Clem was screaming. ‘She just jumped in!’

‘Annie?’ Johnny cried, straddling the rail. But Annie was making no effort to get back on board; she was floating away from the boat. ‘It has to be like this, Johnny!’ she cried. ‘Smudge is safe with you.’

‘Annie, what are you doing? Get in!’ he said, one hand on the guard rail, the other leaning out as far as he could. ‘Here! Take my hand!’

But she didn’t. She was stationary, doggy paddling in the red, fiery water just out of his reach, staring at him with those pathetic eyes as the boat slipped away from her. ‘Take my hand! Do it!’ If he leant out any further he’d fall in. Clem, trembling all over now, terrified by all of them , opened the cockpit seat and grabbed the boat hook and passed it to Johnny, who held it out to Annie.

‘Take it!’ he cried. Clem heard the desperation in his voice and it scared her even more. He was trying to hook Annie in but she was too far out.

‘Swim to me, Annie!’ They could hear Frank shouting at her and the awful thing was that she was obeying him.

‘Don’t go with him!’ Johnny cried. ‘The tender won’t make it. Come with us!’ She looked back at Johnny, at his outstretched hand, at the boat hook, at the sheer panic in his eyes.

‘Annie, get back in! What are you doing?’

But Annie did nothing. She looked up at him with those big, pale eyes full of a resignation, a horrible acceptance of her fate and they both knew that she wasn’t coming.

The waning moon shone brightly, the clouds making silvery shapes as they danced around it and bounced off the waves a hundredfold. Johnny could see, off the starboard bow, a pod of dolphins playing in the surf and he watched them twisting and turning, jumping and diving in their blissful, stupid ignorance. The phosphorescence was so rich and sparkling that when the dolphins leapt out of the water their shapes were perfectly silhouetted as if outlined by millions of liquid diamonds. He sat there staring, but the gap between what he saw and what he felt was now so large that he barely registered it at all.

They had sailed away from the tender until Frank’s cries had become indistinguishable from the wind itself and Johnny knew, even as he fled, that he would forever hear him in the wind. Afterwards, his hands had trembled so violently that he had had trouble gripping the sheets. They were still trembling now. His whole body juddered with shock, no matter how many jumpers he put on. That Annie could have thrown herself into the water and swum back to Frank was unfathomable to him; he could not get it out of his head, the sight of her swimming back to the tender, to a certain death. She hadn’t even given a backward glance. He had done this for
her,
for her and Smudge. He thought how stupid he had been – she must have thought this up from the moment he’d said he was going to help her, the photographs still in his hands. He recalled how her face had lit up, tears of relief and happiness in her eyes.
Smudge,
she’d kept repeating.
Smudge is going to be all right
. And he had felt full of a focused, dangerous kind of rage. He promised her that Smudge was going to be safe, he would not leave her alone with Frank for one more minute. The solution had been quite obvious to him: sail out into the open sea and leave Frank in the tender far away from any human being. Leave him in the hands of his fucking great god Karma. Frank was an evil man. Then it had just been a question of how to get him in the boat. Now all he could think was that he had saved Smudge from her fate and in so doing had made an orphan of her. He was twenty-one and he had not one but two people’s lives on his hands. He looked down at his trembling fingers. His chest was so tight it felt like he had a great weight pressing down on him and he didn’t think he was ever going to feel any other way.
He could never go back from this.

The sun had dropped fast and now the darkness had swallowed up the light. Perhaps they wouldn’t die. There was a slim chance they might make it; they might be rescued or possibly they’d find some sort of paddle or get caught in a favourable current. But these were faint possibilities, he wasn’t kidding himself. If they did survive, as long as the
Little Utopia
headed west, there was little chance Frank would find them. He was pretty sure of that; there was no communication between the Greeks and the Turks. He let these thoughts flit to and fro across his mind, but underneath it all, he knew the tender would sink down to the bottom of the sea like all the other things he’d thrown overboard. Once he’d changed course and set the sails, Johnny tried not to look round at where they had come from. They were heading northwest now, eventually towards the Ionian, as far from these troubled waters as was possible. Every time he glanced around, he was half expecting the looming figure of Frank to be upon them but he saw nothing but the zigzagging white path that led to the moon.

Clem had not said a word. She had her back to Johnny; she was refusing to look at him, her eyes permanently fixed on where the tender had been, her body shaking all over, flinching from his touch. She had watched it disappear listening to those cries until there was nothing to see or hear but a wailing dot in the wind. Every now and then she sat up straight, reached for the binoculars and scanned the water but the only sights now were the sea and the dolphins and the only sounds were those of the boat moving through the water. She never turned around, never faced forwards at all; she just stared out at where the ghost of the tender would always be.

‘Where’s Daddy?’

They both jumped. Smudge, the unknowing victim of all this, appeared just before dawn in the companionway, wearing her Captain Hook coat with a blanket wrapped round her, dragging Gilla in one hand, the moonlight bouncing off his glazed, scratched eye. They were both surprised to see her for somewhere in the drama they had forgotten that she was the unwitting protagonist.

There she stood, with her father’s colouring and her mother’s face, to remind them lest they should ever forget. She had slept right through the casting off of her parents in a drugged stupor but now she was awake, rubbing her eyes, looking round at them, totally unaware that this day was shape-defining. Her life would always be
before
and
after
this.

‘Come and sit here, Smudge,’ Johnny said to her.

She rubbed her eyes again and scuffled across the cockpit, looking about herself. ‘Where’s my mummy?’ she asked, looking down the deck and turning back to Johnny. ‘Where’s my daddy?