After the Storm (11 page)

Kim washed the dishes and tidied the galley. She rubbed rich Vaseline into her hands. Like many cooks she had stopped noticing the burn marks on her fingers a while ago. She made up her berth and climbed into it. Her anger towards Owen would not go; it was like a hard little undigested ball in her stomach. She remembered a skipper they knew on Roatán. He was a Texan and had once owned a fifty-foot boat, which he chartered and which made him a good living. Then one winter his boat was blown by a hurricane and now lay under a hundred feet of sand. Like them he was not insured. He had to work as a freelance skipper on other people’s charter boats now. He’d said to her:

‘I used to be fat and dumb and happy. Now I’m just fat and dumb.’

At the time she had marvelled at his attitude, to have lost so much and to be able to joke about it. She knew she would never be able to joke about losing their boat. It was their only asset, the key to her café, the key to their life on land. How she longed for them all to reach the safety of Roatán.

Through the night Owen and Rob sat on deck alert to the sound of any approaching boats. They passed a rum bottle back and forth and kept each other awake with their talk. Rob explained how you made good beer. Owen explained the differences between sailing a sloop and sailing a ketch.

Anna was lying below in the forecabin, unable to get to sleep. She could hear the low rumble of their voices from their desultory chat and understood how close Rob had grown to Owen. Belize City, which had seemed threatening at the time, now seemed a lot less dangerous than these treacherous waters.

Many hours later the sun rose above the rim of the horizon and the sea was empty.

‘Blessed light,’ Owen said.

Anna and Kim slept on later than usual, exhausted by the events of the night before. When they got up they took the day slowly, lingering over a breakfast of bread and jam and coffee. Kim was quiet as Owen outlined the next stage of their sailing. She looked down at her plate and wouldn’t make eye contact with him.

‘We’re still a day-and-a-half sailing from Roatán. I can’t pinpoint exactly where we are because this tiny place isn’t shown on my chart.’

He went down to the saloon and used his GPS to re-calculate their route and they set off again.

As they sailed past the atoll they could see how small and exposed it was. If the men in the black boat had come looking for them there would have been no escape. This made Anna feel shaky and Kim feel angry. Owen in contrast was buoyant; they had escaped any harm and he still had his boat, the cases of liquor and Raul’s package. But he was worried that this was their seventh day on board and they should have reached Roatán by now. Raul would have been in touch with Money Joe to check on the delivery of his package. Well there was nothing he could do about it. They would get there in the next day or two.

Anna sat on the deck with her back to the mast, out of the way of the others, and wrote in her notebook. She couldn’t write if she felt she was being watched because her journal was the place where she put down what she truly thought about things. Too often, when she spoke her deeply felt opinions aloud, she noticed that they jarred with other people, as if she saw the world differently from them. It sometimes made her feel like an outsider. Now she took time to describe the terrors of the night before and Kimberly’s strange reaction to Owen asking for her knife. They had all been deeply shaken but so far had said little to each other about it. She wrote:

Maybe we are afraid to talk about our fear of death; about how we would confront it if we knew we were going to die last night. I keep thinking that once we reach Roatán these difficulties will fade and it will make this journey seem worthwhile. I’m hanging onto that thought. Today has been pleasantly uneventful and we’ve all needed a day to calm down. Sunny all day and the wind picked up this afternoon and we’ve had the best day of sailing so far. We’re headed for a larger Cay, which Owen showed me on his chart. He said it will be our mooring for the night.

There is such an easiness now between Rob and Owen and Kim. You can see it in the way they banter together. It doesn’t extend to me and the fault lies with me I’m sure. I must be projecting my uneasiness. I guess it’s not easy for them being around someone who is not completely trusting and accepting.

I like Owen a lot. He’s an interesting man, a deep man. And I feel for him because he suffers so from his insomnia. Sometimes he just goes missing. We can all be talking about something and he’s sitting there with us but his mind is somewhere else completely and it’s somewhere that makes him unhappy. A look of suffering comes over his features, like a little boy who is hurting badly. I think Owen has moments of calm but never true contentment. I can’t shake off the feeling that he may do something that will endanger us all.

Kimberly has picked up that I’m not completely trusting of them and it’s awkward between her and me. She is so loyal to Owen and would see my uneasiness as a reproach. We’ve hardly said a word to each other today. The truth is I feel under a lot of pressure. Usually I would tell Rob how I’m feeling but this time I’m not. He was irritated when I tried to voice my fears before.

She closed her journal and looked over at Owen who was sitting in the cockpit steering the tiller. His handsome face was impassive.

Owen was thinking about his father Jim Adams. His father had joined the US Air Force when he was eighteen years old. He was proud to be a serviceman and believed a man should be self-reliant, discreet and know how to defend himself. So when Owen was eleven years old his dad had signed him up for a course of Karate lessons in Clearwater. Owen had enjoyed the classes and shown an aptitude for the martial art. When his dad was home on leave he would go with Owen to the classes and watch his progress, taking great pride in how well his son fought. After the class his dad would often take him for a burger and then they’d walk down and look at the boats in the marina. He’d rest an arm around Owen’s shoulders as they discussed which boat they liked the best.

Anna stepped carefully across the deck, hanging onto the lines, to join Owen in the cockpit. Over the last week they had fallen into a rhythm where Owen and Rob did the sailing and Kim did the cooking. Anna did not have a role as such. She sometimes did the washing up, but she felt she should contribute more to life on the boat. She sat down next to him.

‘Is there anything more I can do to help on the boat Owen? I feel I’m not pulling my weight.’

‘It’s not a problem.’

‘I feel I should do more.’

‘You can be Keeper of the Boat Journal,’ he said nodding towards her notebook.

‘I’ve had plenty to write about.’

‘Do you write all the time?’

‘No, not when I’m at work; too busy. But I always start a journal when we go away and this is turning into my most dramatic tale by far.’

‘Glad we could oblige,’ he grinned at her.

She smiled back at him. Kim had come up and was hanging a towel on a line to dry and she watched Anna talking to Owen. Anna had this habit of catching a hank of her long dark hair and twisting it round and round down its length and then curling the hair at the end around her fingers as if she was going to make a plait. But she never followed through. She would shake her twisted hair out and start at the top again. The gesture irritated Kim intensely for some reason, maybe because Anna only did it when she was talking to Owen. She had read in one of her magazines that it was a sign of attraction when a woman played with her hair while talking to a man. Here she was telling Owen she wanted to contribute more to life on the boat. And Owen had said there was no need for Anna to do anything more, just write your journal he had said. What he meant was be decorative and write your dumb journal. She was so out of sorts today, everything was making her pissed. She left them to it and went to find Rob in the saloon. He was making coffee.

‘Do you want one?’

‘Thanks.’

She sat down at the saloon table. He thought she looked tense, almost unhappy. He handed her a cup.

‘You OK?’

She guessed her face was giving her away. She couldn’t tell him that his girlfriend was getting on her nerves big time. She liked him too much to hurt his feelings in any way.

‘It was horrible last night and it spooked me,’ she said.

‘It was scary. Modern-day pirates, eh?’

‘There are some dangerous folks around these parts.’

‘You ever had any real trouble?’ he asked.

She looked thoughtful.

‘We’ve had a few close shaves. When we first came out here we didn’t know the score and we got ripped off a few times. And you have to be careful on Roatán. Everyone is connected one way or another. We’ve wised up over the years.’

‘But you still like it out here?’

‘Less than I used to if I’m honest.’

‘Why is that? It’s so beautiful here.’

‘You get so you don’t notice the beauty any more, you just notice the difficulties. And I think Owen and I want different things. He loves this life but I’d like more security. I’d like a proper home I could make pretty and comfortable for us both.’

‘But I love life on your boat,’ he said.

She smiled at his enthusiasm.

‘Mr Positive you are. Now I’m trying to decide what to cook for us tonight.’

In the early evening a fisherman rowed close to their boat and Kim beckoned him over. He had a good catch of lobsters and Kim bought seven small live ones from him. She was excited with her haul. Rob helped her carry the lobsters down into the galley and they put them in the sink where they writhed and crawled over each other with their claws opening and closing. It was difficult to stop them climbing out of the small sink.

‘I should cook these straightaway,’ Kim said. ‘Can you give me a hand Rob?’

Anna had followed them down into the saloon and she saw Rob trying to keep the lobsters from escaping from the sink. Kim was filling her large stock pot with seawater.

‘Seawater?’ he said.

‘Always use seawater to cook lobsters if you can,’ Kim said.

Anna fled from the saloon. She didn’t want to see the lobsters being boiled alive. She went into the cockpit and then, because she was still able to hear the noise and the hilarity of the cooking below, she removed herself further away and went and sat at the front of the boat.

Down below it was mayhem. Four of the lobsters were about a pound in weight and the other three were larger. With Rob’s help Kim was able to get the three larger lobsters into the heating seawater. Rob held the lid down as the lobsters struggled to get out. Kim was standing guard over the four smaller ones in the sink and they were joking and laughing.

Kim let the big ones cook for eight minutes. She took the three cooked red lobsters out of the pot with a pair of large tongs. Rob placed each of the four smaller lobsters into the boiling seawater and held the lid down again.

‘They’ll need six minutes,’ Kim said.

‘We’re in for a feast,’ he said.

Up on deck Anna had opened her notebook again and started to write:

I can hear Rob and Kimberly shrieking with laughter below as they boil the live lobsters. It makes me feel uncomfortable. I know I’ll eat the lobsters with the rest of them so I’m being a big hypocrite. Kimberly is quite clinical about it. She used to work in a restaurant and must have seen lobsters cooked many times I suppose. I can see that Rob admires her gutsy attitude to gutting fish and cooking lobsters. And they seem to be getting even more matey recently. Owen is staring out at the sea. He’s said nothing for ages. There is something so contained and secret about him.

The sun was setting as they ate the lobsters with melted butter as the only accompaniment.

‘This lobster flesh is so sweet,’ Rob said.

Butter was dripping down his chin.

‘I have to agree,’ Anna said. ‘This is one of the best things I’ve ever tasted.’

When the last piece of lobster flesh had been consumed and Kim had collected and thrown the shells over the side of the boat and Anna had washed out the big stock pot and the plates, they sailed the last stretch to the uninhabited Cay where they were going to moor for the night. Owen put the engine on to bring them in and he heard the engine stutter again. It choked, spluttered and died.

‘Aw goddammit the engine’s gone again,’ he said to Rob.

He banged the side of the boat with his fist in frustration.

‘I spent an age fixing it in Belize and now it’s died, after only seven days. That storm would have churned up the gunk in the bottom and it’s blocked the injectors again.’

‘Can we manage without it?’

‘We’ll have to. We’ve done it before.’

He reached for his chart and showed Rob.

‘Here’s Roatán. With a good wind like today we could reach there by tomorrow evening.’

He shrugged.

‘It’s a challenge when you’ve got no engine to fall back on. We’ll be reliant on the wind and the sails.’

They sailed the boat into position. It was a larger Cay than the night before and presented a long stretch of sand, abundant palm trees and the usual cluster of straggling mangroves.

‘Still I guess sailors made do without engines for hundreds of years,’ Owen said once they were safely anchored.

Later the moon climbed the sky and there was a track of silver light across the calm water.

‘That is so beautiful,’ Anna said.

‘Let’s have a swim, now,’ Rob said.

‘It’s so late.’

‘Oh come on, a swim by moonlight, let’s do it.’

Owen and Kim were in the cockpit and he was rolling a joint. Kim said she wouldn’t join them. Anna and Rob went to their cabin, got into their swimming things and dived into the water over the side of the boat.

‘The water’s still warm,’ she said as she swam towards the track of moonlight that rippled in front of her. They kept close to each other as they moved through the water. Then they flipped onto their backs and floated in the sea and looked up at the sky which was a black meadow picked out with stars.

In the cockpit Kim sat opposite Owen. He handed her the joint and she didn’t look at him. They had hardly spoken all day. She took a deep draw from the joint.