The Boat (12 page)

‘This has been the most unexpected and wonderful day,’ Clem said to no one in particular.

‘The best kind of wonderful day,’ Frank said to her, his eyes still on the sky.

She sighed heavily, pleasurably, and hung her head back, looking out at all the millions of stars above them. ‘I suppose one day mankind will discover all the mysteries of the universe,’ she said, her fingers pressing into the arch of Johnny’s foot. ‘Even work out what black holes are.’

Frank made a quiet sound of agreement, ‘Hmmm,’ as did Johnny, but his was to do with the massage.

‘When we
do
know all the answers, that’ll probably be it – the end of the world,’ she said.

‘I bet you we already know the mysteries of the universe,’ Frank said in his low soothing voice. ‘They’ll be staring us in the face.’

She repeated his sound of agreement: ‘Hmmm.’

‘I think that’s the divine joke,’ Frank said. ‘That we actually know all the answers already.’

‘Maybe,’ she said, not convinced, pausing in her massage, as if it were too much to listen and rub at the same time. Johnny wriggled his toes a little to remind her. ‘Or we once knew them and then we forgot them.’

‘Yes,’ Frank said, turning his head to get a better look at her. ‘Exactly! Perhaps our whole purpose here is to rediscover them.’

‘Or maybe we don’t have a purpose,’ Johnny added and heard Annie chuckle.

‘Oh, Johnny,’ Clem said, pressing her knuckle hard into the sole of his foot. ‘Don’t be ridiculous, of course we do. Otherwise what’s the point?’

‘Ah, we agree on something, Clem.’ Frank flashed his straight white teeth in a smile.

‘What do you think the point is, Frank?’ she asked. ‘You said “divine joke” a moment ago. So you do believe in God?’

Frank was looking up at the sky as he spoke, picking each word as carefully as if choosing a particular chocolate from a superior selection. There was something about the way he spoke that made you have to listen, not to miss a thing. Frank would have been a great teacher. If schools had had teachers like him, Johnny might have paid a bit more attention.

‘I don’t believe life is pointless,’ he said slowly. ‘I don’t believe in God as such but I do believe in a universal force, that there is an order to the chaos.’ He was looking at Clem but including them all. ‘And I most definitely have faith that one day human civilization will return to a second Golden Age.’

Clem picked up his cigarette packet. With the slightest tilt of her head, Johnny saw her asking whether she could take one of the cigarettes. Frank must have signalled yes but it was too dark for Johnny to see, because she took one out of the packet and Frank twisted his body round and lit it for her. He looked surprisingly old in its red flame; his brow fell in creases over his eyes and Johnny wondered whether Clem had noticed that.

‘What
is
the Golden Age?’ Johnny asked him.

‘Ahh!’ Frank said, as if recalling a fond memory. He swung his legs off the tiller and pushed himself upright. He picked at the cuff of his holey old jumper. ‘According to many ancient texts it was a period in history where we human beings lived in accordance with the Natural Laws.’

Clem was listening attentively, inhaling her cigarette. She had become an elegant smoker over the years, like a twenties’ film star.

‘A time when bliss and harmony reigned supreme – man in utter harmony with nature,’ he continued.

‘What’s a Natural Law?’ she asked.

‘A Natural Law is a law set by nature but whose ramifications exist in everything.’

‘I don’t understand. Like what?’ she said.

‘Well, probably the most obvious one…’ Frank replied slowly in his low, gentle voice; Johnny had to strain a little to hear, he didn’t want to miss a single word, ‘…is that we are all part of the same thing. We, us, planet Earth, the universe, are all made up of the same chemical elements. There is the same potential in you as there is in a star being born trillions of miles away up there.’

Johnny began rolling a cigarette, slowly as he always did, nice and thin, the tobacco evenly distributed along the paper, tearing himself a little cardboard from the Rizla packet for the perfect roach. What Frank was saying was perfectly obvious really, that there were a finite number of elements from which the universe and everything in it was made, but it was the
way
he said things that made them sound original and fresh. Johnny felt glad that they had this extra night on board; he wanted to hear more. He also rather wanted Clem to start massaging his feet again but she appeared to have forgotten about them; her attention was now entirely on Frank.

‘Think of an acorn!’ he was saying, leaning forward, looking at them now. ‘In that tiny little seed is the capacity to become the mighty oak tree. Surely life is just the realization of our potential, the unmanifest becoming manifest.’

Both Clem and Johnny were quite still. He had entranced them. He was looking into their eyes, his own lit up by some internal fire. ‘Or think of it like this: deep inside each of one of us is a mine full of precious stones. All the riches of the Earth are available to us. Perhaps our duty as human beings is to excavate those mines, bring those diamonds out into the light. It might be perfectly possible to live in a state of sparkling bliss all of the time if we so chose.’

‘How do you get down there?’ Clem asked him, her voice breathy with wonder.

‘Simple. You tap into your potential.’

‘And how do I do that?’ she asked, suddenly tiring of the weight of Johnny’s feet altogether, pushing them away and tucking her knees under her chin. Frank sighed a sigh full of unknowable longings and shifted his body slightly towards her.

‘You have to follow all of the other Natural Laws and it will happen automatically. The first thing to understand is that you are in control of your life. You are not a victim. The world is what you want it to be. I always tell Annie that. Don’t I, love?’

He wasn’t expecting an answer; he didn’t even look at her. Johnny did. She was knocking back the wine as though she’d heard it all before. There was an attractive feistiness behind that sorrowful façade that he was warming to. But Johnny hadn’t heard it all before and he wanted to hear more. In all his life he had never heard anyone talking in this way.

‘You have to start taking responsibility for yourself and by that I mean for all your responses to life and to do that you have to break down your own defences.’

‘I can’t control my responses to things, I just respond,’ Clem said.

Frank laughed and sat back. ‘You’re absolutely wrong. Of course you can.’

‘I can’t.’

‘Just try
witnessing
the choices you make as you make them.’

‘What do you mean?’

He sat still, leaning forward again, his legs apart, his fingertips and the two stumps tapping together as he thought. Then he looked at her, straight in the eye – they were close. ‘I mean this quite sincerely, Clem,’ he said and then paused. Both Clem and Johnny leant forward a little more. ‘You are one of the most beautiful women I have ever come across,’ he said, not taking his eyes off hers.

There was a hiatus, a tiny moment when Time’s pendulum hovered. Johnny noticed the way Clem tried to hide her delight; the corners of her mouth tightened a little and she looked away from Frank, her eyelashes fluttering. She tossed Johnny a careless glance as if she were embarrassed. If there had been daylight he would have seen her blush. And Johnny himself felt a wave of something new and bitter wash through him.

‘OK,’ Frank said, pulling out his packet of cigarettes. He tapped one out and caught it in his lips and lit it in that snatched, hurried but easy way. ‘You chose to be flattered,’ he said as if it had been nothing but an experiment, the compliment false. He lit the cigarette, leant back and blew out a steady stream of smoke. ‘It was a choice you made. You could have chosen to be insulted by that remark.’ He turned to Johnny. ‘And, Johnny, you too, your ego might well feel dented by another man calling your wife beautiful.’ He paused. ‘But it is
still
a choice.’

Johnny didn’t want Frank to think that he was like other weaker men whose egos were easily bruised. He wanted to be better than other men. Clem
was
beautiful, that was a fact, and Johnny
wanted
other men to think her beautiful: he revelled in it. He chose to forget about that wave of bitterness and the moment he made the decision he could feel it subside. He chose
not
to be offended. It felt good. He felt in control. He suddenly understood what Annie had meant when she said that Frank could
see things
. He looked over at Annie; she was slumped, her hair fallen over her eyes.

‘I shall choose to take it as a compliment to my astonishingly good taste,’ Johnny said, lighting his roll-up. Frank smiled at him and nodded approvingly, which made Johnny feel even better, as if he’d most definitely passed some kind of test.

‘OK, I get it, Frank,’ Clem said, putting on a voice that Johnny hadn’t heard before, like a student trying to impress the teacher, all combative and feisty. ‘I’m not flattered. So someone thinks I’m beautiful. So what?’

‘That too is a choice, Clem.’ Frank was still speaking slowly and carefully as if he only had a limited supply of words, as if the chocolate box was almost empty. ‘But you’ll find that there is always the
right
choice to make in any given situation.’

‘How do you know what the right choice is?’ she asked.

‘The right choice is the one that makes you and everyone around you happy,’ he said, his dark eyes glinting at them, first Clem and then Johnny. ‘You know it in your gut. Start trusting your gut: it always knows the answer.’

No one had ever told Johnny to trust his gut before – his Dad always told him to use his initiative, which was firmly based in his head. He had no doubt that what Frank was saying was right.

‘The pair of you, if you start doing this, I swear you’ll be amazed at the outcome. The usual barriers that enclose you will drop like clothes from the body.’

‘Talking of which,’ Annie said. Johnny had thought she was asleep but she pulled herself abruptly to an upright position. ‘Frank says we shouldn’t be wearing clothes at all. They were all naked in the Golden Age.’

‘You’re drunk, love,’ Frank said to her, not unkindly.

‘Sorry,’ she said, hanging her head again, looking down at her feet. He leant over and took one of her hands in his, looking up at Johnny.

‘Annie’s had a difficult life,’ he said tenderly. ‘Haven’t you, my love?’

She looked up with her pale, sad eyes but said nothing.

‘Is that true what you said?’ Clem asked quietly after a pause when it was clear Annie was not going to enlighten them any further. ‘Was everyone naked in the Golden Age?’

‘Yes, it’s true,’ he said, letting go of his wife’s hand. ‘Wearing clothes is just another form of division. Clothes are yet more defences, more barriers between us and the world. Only in nakedness can we be truly open, can we begin to let go of our psychological inhibitions. Only naked can we truly reveal ourselves.’

‘Wouldn’t everyone just be having sex all the time if we were naked?’ Johnny said, both appalled and excited by the idea of a general abandoning of clothes. He flicked his cigarette overboard and watched it fly like a burning comet into the sea.

‘Initially perhaps they would, but I don’t think it would last,’ Clem said. ‘Not if that was all you ever knew.’

‘I agree,’ Frank said.

‘Maybe you’re right,’ Johnny said. ‘We’d get pretty blasé. We’d have stripteases in reverse – the big finale in a woolly jumper.’ Only Annie laughed at his joke.

‘Are you naturists? Do you normally go around naked?’ Clem asked them.

‘Alone on this boat, if it’s warm enough, we’re always naked, aren’t we, Annie?’

Annie nodded. The image of her breasts swung back into Johnny’s head; he flashed a look at them as he knocked back the last of his wine. He glanced over at Clem, who was fiddling with a coil of her hair, looking at Frank, smoking, thoughtful. He liked the general idea of nudity and revelation but knew in reality he wouldn’t fancy sharing Clem’s nakedness with other people. Her body was his alone.

Annie stumbled into a standing position and ruffled his hair. ‘Don’t look so worried,’ she said to him. ‘Bed… if Smudge isn’t hogging it!’

Not long after Frank followed her down and Johnny and Clem retired to their quarters all of two and a half feet’s worth of toilet away from Annie and Frank. Johnny spent a little while brushing his teeth in the cockpit, glad for a moment alone; there was something niggling him that he couldn’t quite put his finger on. He looked up at the moon. It was almost full, just a wedge off the right-hand side; it lit a jagged path across the water linking them in white light. The stars were out in their billions and he felt the smallness and insignificance that he momentarily sought. ‘Drop it,’ he said to himself, ‘just drop it.’ He spat out the toothpaste into the water and returned to the saloon.

When he came back in, Clem had made up the bed. She was zipping together their two sleeping bags and had pulled to the dividing door. Johnny took off his clothes and climbed in, making himself as comfortable as he could. But he found that he couldn’t just ‘drop it’,
it
lingered. He didn’t feel like waiting for Clem as he normally did, pulling back the cover to let her in and then covering her up, warming her in his arms. He didn’t want to turn away either, that would have been too much of a statement, so he lay there still on his back while she took out her earrings and did all that night stuff that seemed to take women so much longer than men. He put his hands behind his head but he was longer than the berth so he had to tuck his knees up.

She turned the light off before going out to brush her teeth and he was glad of that, he didn’t particularly want to be visible. He thought of feigning sleep but she would know something was up; he never went to sleep before her. Instead he lay there listening to the gentle lapping of the waves against the boat, the thoughts tossing about his head, the bright moonshine flashing across the saloon as the boat rose and fell in the water. Next door he could hear Frank’s rumbling voice come to a halt.