Crackdown (16 page)

I like the sounds of a boat sailing at night. The sounds are the same as those of daylight, yet somehow the night magnifies and sharpens the creak of a yielding block, the sigh of air over a shroud, the stretching of a sail, the hiss of water sliding sleek against the hull, the curl of a quarter-wave falling away, and the thump as a wave strikes the cutwater to be sheared into two bright slices of whiteness. I like the purposefulness of a boat at night as it slits a path across an empty planet. I like the secretiveness of a boat in the blackness, when the only thing to dislike is the prospect of dawn, which seems like a betrayal because, at night, in a boat under sail, it is easy to feel very close to God—for eternity is all around.

I tacked the ship shortly after midnight, doing the job by myself and enjoying the work. Ellen was still awake, talking in the stateroom with Rickie, but everyone else seemed asleep. I wished that Ellen and Rickie would go to their beds, for the soft mutter of their voices was an intrusion on the dark and star-studded infinity through which I steered
Wavebreaker.

I had just winched in the staysail’s port sheet when the explosion sounded, or something so like an explosion that I instinctively cowered by
Wavebreaker
’s rail as my mind whipped back to the crash of practice shells ripping through the sleet in Norway.

The sound of the explosion melded into a terrible noise that was like an animal dying in awful, bellowing pain, but beneath that sound of agony was a harsh metallic scrape and clash that punched at my belly and eardrums. If anything the sound seemed to become louder as I ran down the deck. The noise was a foul but apt accompaniment to the schooner’s fitful motion for, with her wheel lashed and her sails only half trimmed,
Wavebreaker
was bridling and jerking into the short hard seas that were driving through the North-East Providence Channel.

The noise rose to a scream; like the sound that a beast would make while being disembowelled. I stepped over the coaming and down into the cockpit where I cannoned off the binnacle before snatching open the companionway hatch. I put both hands on the rails and vaulted down to the accommodation deck. I slipped as I landed and fell against the bulkhead. I scrambled up and reached for the eject button on the cassette deck. I punched the button and was rewarded with a blessed, ear-ringing silence as the offending cassette slid out.

“Shit! What is this?” Rickie, apparently still vibrating to the music, sprang up from the stateroom couch. “Hey! That was my tape, man! I was listening to that!”

Ellen was grinning from the other couch, but I was in no mood to humour her amusement. “Thessy’s sleeping for the morning watch, for Christ’s sake!” I accused her, wondering why she had let Rickie play such an appalling din at such volume at such a late hour.

“We’re just listening to music!” Rickie was suddenly truculent, twisting off the sofa and dancing towards me on the balls of his feet. An inch of ash spilt from his cigarette as he raised his hands in a threat to hit me.

“Rickie!” Ellen called warningly.

Some grain of self-preserving sense must have penetrated Rickie’s skull, for he suddenly dropped on to his heels and offered me a placatory grin. “You should like that sound, Nick!” he said happily. “It’s really heavy English music.”

I looked at the cassette which claimed to be music recorded by the Pinkoe Dirt-Box Band. “New shipboard rule,” I said, “no English music on this boat, unless played very softly or through earphones.” I tossed the cassette to Rickie who, turning away and thus leaving his blind eye facing me, fumbled the catch.

He stooped to pick up the tape. “Are you saying I can’t play my music?” He was suddenly spoiling for a fight again.

“The man is saying that you keep the noise down, and I am saying that you do what the man says.” Jackson Chatterton had appeared in canary yellow pyjamas at the far end of the stateroom. His looming presence utterly cowed Rickie who whined something about only wanting to play Ellen a little night music, and that he had not meant any harm, and what was a guy supposed to be doing on this boat anyway? It wasn’t the goddamn navy, really, and he went on muttering all the way past Chatterton’s impassive gaze and so into the cabin that the two of them shared. Thessy’s scared face appeared at the other cabin door, but I shook my head at him, mimicked sleep, and he ducked back inside.

“Sorry, Nick,” Ellen said, though not with any great contrition.

“Forget it.” I was still angry, but there was no point in pursuing what was over, so I went back topsides to trim the ship, and five minutes later I saw the stateroom lights go out, and half an hour after that the lights in Ellen and Robin-Anne’s cabin were doused, leaving only a light in the forward starboard cabin to show that either Rickie or Jackson Chatterton was still awake. I wondered if they had simply forgotten to turn off the bulb which annoyingly cast its brightness through a porthole and on to the swirl and rush of white water, and I was half tempted to pull the fuse out of the circuit and thus surround
Wavebreaker
with darkness, but resisted the impulse.

The night became quiet again.
Wavebreaker
settled on her new course and, by the time the small hours were growing, we had left the island’s lights well behind and I was cutting her prow hard into real ocean waves. We were on the starboard tack, fighting into the trades as we clawed our way out from the Bahamian shoals into the deep waters of the Atlantic. The difference in
Wavebreaker
’s motion was extraordinary. She had disdained the smaller waves in the shelter of the islands, but now she seemed to tremble as her hull soaked up the ponderous force of the ocean. This was proper sailing.

And, as if to celebrate her freedom, she dipped her cutwater into a sudden trough of the sea and then sprayed white water high over her bows. The shudder of the bigger wave sent a shock wave through the long hull, and I laughed aloud with the pleasure of it. Then, as I often did when I was alone at sea, I began to recite Shakespeare. I knew reams of the stuff, yards and yards of it, learned from my father; the one absolutely true gift of my childhood. I liked to hear the verse, and enjoyed declaiming it, but only if there was no one to hear me, for I knew that my voice held all the fine cadences of Sir Tom himself.

That night I belted out one of my favourite speeches, the one from the second part of
Henry IV
in which the new king, Henry V, rejects the friendship of Falstaff.
 

I know thee not, old man: fall to thy prayers;

How ill white hairs become a fool and jester!

I have long dream’d of such a kind of man,

So surfeit-swell’d, so old, and so profane;

But, being awaked, I do despise my dream.

I stopped abruptly. A movement had startled me and I turned to see Robin-Anne Crowninshield, dressed only in a white nightdress, standing in the main companionway.

“That was really great,” she said. She was shivering violently.

“You’ll find an oilskin jacket in the locker at the foot of the stairs,” I said, “and you’ll also discover that Ellen has left a Thermos of coffee on the stove, and I like mine without sugar but with milk. You may have to unscrew the stove-fiddles to release the Thermos, and you’ll find the milk in the fridge to the right of the stove.”

She nodded grave acknowledgement of all my instructions, then disappeared below for five minutes, eventually returning swathed in one of the vast, padded and multi-layered foul-weather coats, and carrying a mug of coffee. “I assume it’s caffeinated?” she asked in her thin voice.

“It is indeed proper coffee,” I confirmed, “but if you insist on the wimpish unleaded kind then you will find a jar in the locker above the sink. Are you hungry?”

“I’m OK.” She sat at the edge of the cockpit, curled her legs into the warm shelter of the jacket, then hunched down into the thick collar so that all I could see of her face was her enormous, moon-silvered and lemur-like eyes beneath the pale gleam of her short bright hair. She yawned. “How long till dawn?”

“An hour. Couldn’t you sleep?”

“I set an alarm. I wanted to be up. Mom said I shouldn’t miss the dawn at sea, she said it’s kind of beautiful.” She rested her head against a cushion so that she could stare straight up through the network of rigging and past the light-blanched sails to where the stars wheeled their cold fire beyond the mastheads. “Where are we?”

“We’ve just left the North-East Providence Channel and we’re in the open sea now. Did your brother’s music wake you earlier?”

She shook her head, then seemed to shrink even lower inside the enveloping jacket. “You look happy,” she said, almost accusingly.

“That’s me. Just a dim, shallow and happy Brit.”

I had meant her to laugh, but instead she frowned as though my happiness was a puzzle that needed to be understood. “Are you going to recite any more of that poetry?”

“No.”

“It was Shakespeare, right?”

“Right.”

“It was good,” she said.

“He was a great poet,” I said, as if she needed to be told.

“I mean your voice and delivery,” Robin-Anne said fervently. “It was good.”

“It was imitation,” I said in self-disparagement, “just imitation.” I suddenly heard my father’s voice telling me that all acting is mere imitation. “That’s all it is, dear Nick! Only imitation, mere mummery. Why do people take it so seriously?” The wheel suddenly pushed into my left palm and I could feel all the thudding pressure of the sea and the wind concentrated into that one polished spoke. I eased the wheel up, drawing
Wavebreaker’s
bows harder into the sea and wind, and I was rewarded with another shattering of white spray that exploded prettily about our bows before I let the hull fall away once more. I laughed for the sheer pleasure of playing such games with God’s strong world, then remembered the senator had told me that Robin-Anne liked to sail. I asked her if she wanted to take the wheel.

She seemed to shudder at the very thought. “I’d be frightened.”

“But you can sail a boat, can’t you?”

“I used to sail a little cat-boat in Penobscot Bay, but that was a long time ago. Grandmother lived there in a house that looked over the water, but she’s dead now.” She spoke sadly, as though to a twenty-four-year-old there really was a time of lost innocence, and I suppose, if the twenty-four-year-old was a cocaine addict, then there was indeed such a time.

“I’ve never understood the appeal of a cat-boat,” I said, “all that great big undivided sail and weather helm and barn-door rudder. It must be like going to sea in a haystack.”

Robin-Anne nodded very earnestly as though she truly cared about my opinion, but her next question showed that she was paying no attention to my inanities. “What do you think of us?” she asked instead.

I glanced at her, trying to hide my embarrassment with a swift and flippant response, but I could think of nothing to say and so I looked back at the binnacle, then up to the long moon-burnished sea ahead.

“I feel really awkward, you see,” Robin-Anne explained her question, “and ashamed.”

“I’m just the skipper of this barge,” I said, “so you don’t have to explain anything to me.”

“I feel like a circus animal”—Robin-Anne ignored my disclaimer—”because you’re all expecting me to perform my antics, and I’m not sure I can do it.”

“What antics?”

“To stop using cocaine, of course.” She frowned at me. “You’re all watching me, waiting to applaud.”

“Is that bad?”

“It’s patronising, and it’s my own fault that you can all patronise me, and I hate myself for it.”

“Come on!” I said chidingly. “We all like you!”

“That’s what I mean.” She fell silent for a moment and I saw she was watching the long heaving waves slip past our flanks. Then, with a rustle of the stiff jacket, she looked back to me. “Did you ever try cocaine?”

“No.”

“You’ve not even been tempted by it?”

“No.”

For a moment she was silent, staring at the sheen of night on the crinkled sea, then she smiled. “You’re lucky. You’re a cocaine virgin. Stay that way, because it’s the most addictive substance on the planet.”

Her last words had been spoken very portentously, and I rewarded them with a dubious shrug. “Heroin? Alcohol? Nicotine?”

“You have to persuade a laboratory animal to become addicted to any of those drugs, but you only need to give an animal one dose of cocaine and it’s hooked.”

The luff of the flying jib had begun to back and fill and so I let the ship’s head fall away.

“But the real danger of cocaine,” Robin-Anne continued softly, “is that it provides ecstasy, Mr Breakspear.”

“Call me Nick.”

“What cocaine does, you see, is to make the brain produce a thing called dopamine. That and a whole lot of other chemicals, but dopamine is the main one.” Her voice was very earnest, as though it was desperately important that I understood what she said. “I know it’s weird,” she went on, “but pleasure is merely the result of naturally occurring chemicals secreted in the brain, and cocaine can turn those chemicals on like a faucet. Can you imagine a day of pure pleasure, Mr Breakspear?”

I did not need to imagine such a day, I could remember plenty. I remembered lying in bed with a pretty girl while the rain fell on a Devon river outside our window. I remembered the honesty of
Masquerade
in a force five wind, and then I thought of all the good days to come; days of Ellen and me and
Masquerade
in far seas, and I must have smiled, for Robin-Anne nodded approval of whatever silent answer I was framing to her question. “Think of all that happiness,” she said, “and understand that a single hit of cocaine, just a single hit, will produce a hundred times as much pleasure-making dopamine as that one happy day. A hundred times! It’s like making love to God. It’s euphoria.”

I looked at her, but said nothing, and she must have mistaken my silence for disbelief for she hurried to explain her evident knowledge about the drug. “I studied cocaine, you see. I had to. I wanted Rickie to stop using it, and I wanted a friend to stop using it as well, and so I learned everything I could.”