Authors: Jane Lythell
After the Storm
To my courageous brother Michael Hilborne Clarke
Some nights Owen Adams tried to sleep next to his wife Kim in the saloon of his boat. He rarely lasted a whole night there. The slightest sound would wake him and, in an instant, he would be hyper-alert and watchful. Kim had suggested he use ear plugs. He’d tried them a few times but had given them up because he did not like the sensation of not hearing what was going on around him. It was better to be aware of the slightest noise in the boat or a disturbance on the water, even if it meant that his sleep was disrupted. Most nights he went up on deck and lay there with his blanket around him, looking up at the sky.
When he did fall asleep the nightmare would come. It was not every night but it was always the same one. When he first started having sleepless nights he worried, knowing that lack of sleep could send a man mad. He devised a way of dealing with it: he would imagine that he was floating above his body looking down on himself. Tonight, as he lay stretched out on the deck, he visualised looking on his prone figure and seeing the outline of his boat, the
El Tiempo Pasa
with its tall wooden mast. Then he imagined himself moving higher up into the sky so that he could see how his boat was floating in the sea edged by the distant lights of the mainland. As he rose ever higher, he shrunk to nothingness, the boat becoming a speck and the horizon a dark curve. This exercise always calmed him even if he did not sleep.
Occasionally, if they had no guests on board, Kim would come up on deck and lie with him through these nights. He didn’t like her to lose her sleep and would tell her to go back down to the comfort of the saloon. She would say, always making the best of things, that when they were back in Florida they would remember these nights as special ones, lying on deck and looking at the stars and the moon while the
El Tiempo Pasa
rocked them back and forth. There were places he went to in his mind where Kim could never follow. He didn’t understand why she loved him but he was glad that she did. Kim was his anchor, holding him to earth.
Anna helped the old man down from the coach. His hands were rough and dry and stained a deep purple. As they got off the air-conditioned bus a blast of hot air hit them. Rob had gone ahead and was standing with the other passengers waiting to retrieve their rucksacks from the undercarriage of the bus. She watched as the old man crossed the square slowly and lowered himself onto a bench. He settled himself carefully as if he was in for a long wait. He looked frail and she hoped someone was coming to meet him. Rob lifted her heavy rucksack onto her back and they walked away from the coach station. Stagnant, mud-filled, mosquito-clouded waterways criss-crossed the city.
‘We’ll find a hotel, dump our stuff and get down to the water for a cold beer,’ Rob said.
He was in front of her and she kept close to him. It was always difficult arriving in a new place. You had no bearings and had to make sense of the sights and sounds that flooded your senses. This part of the city looked poor. He stopped at a shabby hotel that had a sign saying rooms were available.
‘Shall we look inside?’
She nodded. They were taken to a room on the first floor. It was high ceilinged and might have been an elegant room once. Now there was crumbling plaster, a double bed in an iron bedstead, rickety drawers and a cubicle shower in the corner. They were tired and decided to take the room for one night only. They could find something better the next day. It was not the kind of hotel where you would leave your money or your passports. Rob peeled off his clammy T-shirt. He put all their dollars into a small fabric bag that hung low around his neck and then put a clean T-shirt on top. He zipped their passports into the leg pocket of his long khaki shorts and they left the room.
They headed towards the water. Large wooden colonial buildings faded on the quay. They saw a pub on a corner called O’Brien’s with the name written in a green Celtic font.
‘You’ll find an Irish pub wherever you go in the world,’ he said. ‘We won’t go in there.’
Further along there was a small bar that looked local.
‘Let’s try in here.’
They took their bottles of beer out to the pitted metal tables and plastic chairs that stood at the water’s edge and looked at the gaggle of boats tied up in front of them. The beer fizzed in Rob’s glass as he poured it.
‘It’s not very cold,’ he said, disappointed after his first sip. He held the glass up to the light and assessed its colour then picked up the bottle.
‘Belikin, the beer of Belize…’
‘Did you see how his hands were stained purple?’ Anna asked.
He looked at her, not understanding.
‘The old man on the coach; his hands were dark purple.’
At the table next to them a couple were drinking beer. The man was tall and thin with long limbs. He looked over at them now and said:
‘That would have been the vegetable dye. He’d have been making and dyeing hammocks. They use a vegetable dye out here.’
‘Oh I see,’ said Anna.
‘You see the hammocks all over, purple and turquoise, drying between the trees.’
He had an American accent and the longest legs. His face was thin with high cheekbones and his dark hair curled under his jaw. In spite of his thinness his shoulders were broad and strong-looking and he would have been strikingly handsome, Anna thought, if it wasn’t for the deep shadows under his eyes which gave his face a haggard look. He was dressed in a grey T-shirt and washed-out jeans and was wearing boat shoes on his long bony feet. Sitting next to him was a petite tanned woman with a mass of curly dark blonde hair that she’d tied up with a rainbow-coloured bandanna.
‘Yes I saw some hanging in the trees, from the coach. And they were selling the hammocks too at the roadside,’ Anna said.
Rob raised his glass to them.
‘We just got in.’
‘We did too,’ said the man. ‘Sailing for three days from Honduras.’
‘You have a boat?’
The American man got up and pointed to a yacht moored a few yards away from them.
‘That’s ours – the
El Tiempo Pasa
. I’m Owen.’
‘Rob, and this is Anna.’
The blonde woman said:
‘Hey, I’m Kimberly, pleased to meet you.’
She had a fluty voice with a southern lilt to it. The two women smiled at each other uncertainly, as you do when you’re thinking: shall I continue overtures with this stranger?
Rob asked Owen:
‘Does that mean: Time Passes?’
‘Time Marches On; do you wanna take a look at her?’
‘I’d love to.’
The women stayed sitting at the tables to finish their drinks and watched as the men headed for the boat. Owen walked with a long easy stride and he jumped onto the boat and helped Rob aboard. It was an old wooden sloop, thirty-seven feet in length that looked as if it had sailed through many rough seas. They stood on the deck and Rob touched the tall wooden mast and looked up at the night sky. Then the two men disappeared down into the cabin. Kim put her glass down.
‘So how did you guys get down here?’
‘We came on the coach. We’ve been in Mexico for a week and decided to come down and look around Belize,’ Anna said.
‘You may be disappointed. Belize City is the pits. But you can get everything you need here and we gotta get provisions for the boat.’
‘I don’t think we’ll stay here long, more a stopping-off point while we decide where to go next.’
Kim nodded thinking that Anna was a pretty woman but with a noticeable defect. She had large grey eyes and there was a mole right between her eyebrows and while this did not quite turn her eyebrows into a mono-brow it did give her eyes a kind of weird intensity. If it was Kim she would have paid to have that mole taken off as soon as she hit her teens. It was the first thing you noticed about Anna. She also had one of those classy English voices and there was a reserve about her that Kim associated with English folk.
The men were now up on deck again and beckoned to them to come on board. Owen helped Anna get into the cockpit. This had seats around the sides and was roomy with a canvas roof over the top. Kim went below and came back with a half-full bottle of rum, some limes and four plastic glasses on a tray. She poured a generous amount of rum into each glass. She had cut the limes already and she squeezed them and the smell lingered on the air.
‘Sorry I can’t offer you any ice,’ she said handing a glass to Anna first.
‘Thanks so much, lovely smell of lime…’
They touched glasses.
‘Cheers.’
‘This morning some kid stole one of the oars from our dinghy. I’d forgotten to tuck it away. Brought it back this evening and said he’d sell it to me for three US dollars. No way was he gonna take Belize dollars,’ Owen said.
They all laughed. Owen explained that they were from Clearwater in Florida and had been sailing around the area for three years, chartering their boat to travellers who didn’t mind that it was an old wooden boat and fairly basic. It was certainly no fibreglass gin palace he said. Rob said he much preferred handsome old boats like this.
‘Where are you headed?’ Owen asked.
‘We want to see as much of Central America as we can. We’re thinking we’ll maybe go to Guatemala next. We’ve got three weeks left.’
‘There are some special islands off Honduras, the Bay Islands. Do you dive?’
‘I do.’
‘It’s sensational there.’
Anna sipped her rum and looked on as Owen described the islands. Roatán was the largest of the Bay Islands he said and it was ringed by a coral reef, the third largest reef in the world. Too many tourist ships came into Roatán now, but if you knew where to go you could still find pristine reefs and the clearest waters in the Caribbean. And he knew where to go. There was Mary’s Place which had this narrow cleft in the reef. You swam through the cleft and there in front of your eyes were huge sponges and seahorses and shoals of brilliantly coloured fish. Anna recognised the expression that was growing on Rob’s face; he was being well and truly seduced by Owen’s descriptions. She looked over at Kimberly who hadn’t said much since they sat down.
