The Boat (3 page)

The fishing vessel had turned south now, only its port light visible. They were sitting very close, watching it progress, the warm westerly wind blowing the hair off their faces.

‘Johnny,’ she said quietly, her dark eyes looking up at his. ‘Will you marry me one day? When your girlfriend dies?’

He laughed.

‘I’m serious,’ she said.

His laughter ebbed away and he became serious too – she was exactly the kind of girl he would marry some day. ‘OK, ’ he said.

‘Promise?’ she said.

He nodded.

‘You have to give me something, so it’s a real promise.’ She seemed to know, even then, that time needed to be marked.

‘I haven’t got anything.’

Then he remembered. He put his hand in his pocket and brought out the little heart-shaped piece of slate he’d been smoothing on the beach.

‘Jonathan Love, will you marry me?’

Johnny was standing in the hall by the kitchen where the phone was. She’d rung during supper and his dad, Rob and Sarah were all listening in case it was for them.

‘It
is
Johnny, isn’t it?’ she said.

‘Speaking.’

‘It’s Clem.’ He must have paused. ‘Clemency Bailey. Remember me?’

He certainly did.

‘Clemmie,’ she said. ‘Only I’m Clem now.’

‘Well, hello there!’ he said. ‘Of course I remember you.’

She sounded different to how he remembered: her voice was deeper. Then again she was probably just grown up. If he was seventeen now, she would have to be fifteen. Her family had moved out of Putney years ago but had recently returned and presumably she’d rung up to speak to his sister.

‘Has your girlfriend died yet?’ she asked.

He didn’t know what she was referring to but he didn’t fancy being overheard so he shut the hall door with his body, spinning the flex around his finger. It was pure chance that it was he who’d answered the phone rather than Rob or Sarah. He’d only just got back from crewing on a delivery to the Caribbean and was shortly off to take another boat over so he felt lucky to have caught her.

‘What are you talking about? I haven’t got a girlfriend,’ he said.

‘You said you’d marry me when your girlfriend died.’

‘Did I?’ He was smiling. ‘What girlfriend was that then?’

‘The married one.’

The affair with his mother’s friend was long over. Her husband had found Johnny’s sock under the bed with his name tape on it and had gone a bit mental.

‘Well?’ she asked.

‘I am indeed available for marriage,’ he replied. ‘How about meeting up first though, just to go through dates and times?’

He met her in the Blue Anchor by the river in Hammersmith just as the sun was setting. The tide was high and the ducks were swimming in the trees. He’d come on his bike, a Triumph Tiger Cub he’d bought for a song in
Loot
which he was now doing up. Although he’d put brand-spanking-new spark plugs in, she’d stalled on the bridge and he’d had to push her to the pub, so he was a bit late.

He recognized Clemency Bailey straight away. She was sitting at a table outside, smoking a cigarette – like a pro, he noticed. She stood up when she saw him and waved. He was dazzled by her as he had hoped he might be. In some way she seemed responsible for, or at least a part of, the magnificent pink altostratus cloud display behind her. She was wearing jeans and a loose white top and he could see her cleavage, the soft roundness of her little tits, and he remembered with a pang how he had once held her naked body in the sea. Only she had been a child then. ‘Hi,’ she said.

He ran a hand through his helmet-flattened hair. ‘Well hello, Clemency Bailey,’ he said, putting his bike helmet down on the table. He leant forward and kissed her cheek. She smelt musky, like linseed oil, like freshly laid teak decking.

‘Hello, Jonathan Love. You’re looking well.’

So was she. She looked bloody amazing but he wasn’t going to tell her that – you had to keep girls like her on their toes. ‘I make an effort,’ he said. He meant it sarcastically; his T-shirt was streaked with engine oil. But she wasn’t looking at his T-shirt, she was staring him straight in the eye.

‘I’m sorry to hear about your mum,’ she said.

His mum had died the year before – from cancer. It had spread everywhere by the end. The only good thing about it was that no one had commented on him failing all his exams and dropping out. ‘You saw my sister?’

She nodded.

He didn’t want to talk about his mum. ‘What are you drinking?’ he asked.

‘I’ll have whatever you’re having.’

She was underage of course, but so was he come to that – landlords never seemed to give a toss. He went in and got two Ram and Specials, brought them outside and sat down opposite her. She watched as he poured them both out and pushed one glass towards her. They chinked their drinks.

‘So,’ he said, looking into her lovely eyes. ‘Down to business… will you be wearing white?’

Later, when a few drops of rain had turned into a torrent, they went inside and sat in the corner. There was a telly on at the bar with the sound down showing the cricket, the first Test match at Edgbaston and the West Indies were making mincemeat of England. Johnny hadn’t met a girl who liked cricket before; he even felt faintly jealous when her attention truly switched from him to the telly. And he loved cricket. She told him how she preferred to listen to it on the radio, how she loved the commentary, how she could lie in bed for hours listening to the plummy tones of Henry Blofeld. While she spoke, Johnny’s mind wandered; he pictured her lying in bed listening to the cricket, with him lying next to her caressing those little tits of hers, admiring that smooth, taut stomach, running his hands over her body.

He watched as she rummaged around in her bag. It seemed to contain a mammoth amount of crap. She started dredging through it, pulling various things out and placing them on the table: bangles and chewing gum, an assortment of pens and sketches she had made on random bits of paper. Eventually she found what she was looking for: her bulging wallet. She took it out and began going through it with the same thoroughness. It was hard to believe that one person could carry around so much junk – he’d come out with a tenner and a spanner.

‘That’s him,’ she said with some awe, producing a rather tatty-looking photograph. Johnny looked at it: a tall man in stupid glasses wearing a big foppish bow tie standing underneath a palm tree in the Caribbean somewhere holding a bat.
To Clemency
was scrawled across the bottom of the photo.
Battings of love, Henry Blofeld
. Johnny, who wouldn’t have minded being the recipient of such wonder, thought he looked like a bit of a git.

‘In my opinion,’ Clem said, eyes back on the screen where Botham had just hit a six, ‘Botham has single-handedly saved England from total embarrassment.’

Johnny got up, smiling at her, tapping his pockets. He wanted to put a song on the jukebox. ‘I like your strong opinions,’ he said.

She was slightly taken aback, not quite sure whether he was criticizing her or not. ‘Well, they’re always open to change,’ she said, her voice lilting optimistically. It was true, she did have strong opinions but usually she was just trying them out, seeing how they sounded, so much so that sometimes she wondered whether she really had any opinions of her own at all. She certainly hadn’t intended to make him laugh. She watched as he wandered across the room with a smile on his face. He leant against the jukebox flicking through his choices and he looked so handsome and so familiar to her. She remembered how kind he had always been to her as a child, how mortified she had been when he’d found her in the middle of the night in the bathroom in Putney. She’d wet the bed and was trying to dry the sheet with bits of loo paper; he’d put the sheet in the laundry basket and given her a towel and told her to put it on the wet bit and just go back to sleep. She used to go home from the Loves’ house aching to have a brother of her own. But now she was glad that he wasn’t her brother.

He put on a song, something she didn’t know, and came back over to the table, sitting slightly closer to her than he had been before. She liked the way he knew the words and was singing along as he drank his beer. She liked the sound of his voice. She liked the way he looked at her, with those eyes which were as green as dirty bathwater. In fact she liked everything about him. She thought that whatever happened, this song would always remind her of him.

Later, Johnny got up and ordered a couple more Ram and Specials from the bar, tapping his foot along to Aztec Camera. She’d put ‘Oblivious’ on four times in a row – he wished he’d never started it. As he turned back to the table with the drinks he caught her slipping her thumb out of her mouth and was momentarily embarrassed for her. He’d forgotten that she sucked her thumb. He remembered her down in Cornwall sucking away, the way her other hand lazily fondled herself as she did so.

It was irrelevant anyway; he was already hooked by then. He returned to the table, placing the bottle and the glass in front of her and picked up the photograph that was still lying there amongst the beer rings. ‘I sailed there last year,’ he said casually, dropping the photo back down.
Beat that, Blofeld
.

‘Where?’ she asked, her attention all his now, her eyes shining that wonder on to him.

‘The West Indies. Barbados.’

‘No! On your own?’

‘There were two of us. Me and the skipper.’

Her eyes widened as she took this in. She stared at him; he was actually living his dreams. Nobody
did
what they said they were going to do when they were fourteen. He had sailed across the Atlantic. He was the real thing. He was everything and more than she had hoped he would be.

‘Weren’t you scared?’ she asked.

He laughed. ‘Of course not.’

‘I would have been. What was it like? Travelling all that way, arriving by sea? Was it incredible? Is it paradise?’

Johnny took a sip of his beer, almost thrown by her intensity, Blofeld blown right out of the water now.

‘Well… it was something else!’ he said. It really had been. Seeing Barbados appearing on the horizon after weeks of being becalmed in the Atlantic had felt like a miracle. He’d gone a little bit mad, but he wasn’t going to tell her that.

The crossing had taken six weeks; they’d barely had any wind, and the isolation had really got to him. He’d become convinced, for one reason or another – a nuclear explosion perhaps or a collision with a comet – that life on planet Earth had ceased to exist. He had become so embroiled in his own apocalyptic fantasy he was quite sure that the boat he was on was the last vessel left on the planet and for the first time in his life it hit him with acute clarity, now that they were all dead, how much he loved his friends and family. Clem wouldn’t know it, but even she had come into his thoughts then, as an example of all the opportunities missed, how life had to be grabbed by the balls. He’d smelt the land before he saw it. It had never occurred to him that land would have such a strong smell: rich, lush and earthy. Planet Earth smells of earth. He’d come out on deck as they approached the island and when he saw the greenness of the mountains and the turquoise waters of the shores he’d searched frantically for evidence of human life. Then when he found it through his binoculars, the boats and the bars, a little plane in the sky, he had felt an exquisite happiness and love for the human race. Barbados had indeed seemed like paradise – not for the reasons she might have thought, but for the fact that the human race was still going.

‘It
is
paradise,’ he said to her. ‘I’m going there again in a couple of months’ time.’

A little wind was knocked out of her sails. It didn’t make any sense, she knew that; she had gone for years without seeing him at all, yet suddenly the imminent prospect of his absence filled her with bleakness. ‘Can I come with you?’ she asked but he laughed and she felt foolish. She’d got carried away; she’d have to watch herself, she was always leaping ahead. He was an adventurer and adventurers went on adventures. She would just have to do her adventuring on her own. She would be as brave as he.

‘Maybe we can meet up. I’m going travelling too,’ she said, pouring her Ram into her Special from a height, watching the top turn into a creamy froth. ‘I’ve got to see the world, Johnny. I don’t want to be stuck here for the rest of my life with my mum.’

He’d been watching her carefully and had a strong desire to lean forward, turn her face to his and to kiss those lips. For the first time it occurred to him that he might actually rather be doing something other than sailing.

‘I tell you what, Clem. Sod the delivery. Let’s go travelling together,’ he said and he thought that he might do or say anything at all just to see that look in her eye. ‘After the wedding, of course.’

She laughed, not quite sure which bits were the joking bits. But it didn’t matter. Sitting here with him making make-believe or real-believe plans made her happiness so acute it almost hurt.

‘Where do you want to go?’ he asked her, clinking her glass, his fingers brushing against hers, his eyes soaking her up.

‘Let’s go east,’ she said.

Everything about her turned him on: how comfortably she wore her own skin, the way her top lip rested on her bottom one, the naughty glint in her eye when she looked at him, the way she wore her clothes, the woody smell of her. It was visceral. When Botham hit another six and she gripped his thigh and let her hand rest on his leg for a moment, he thought she might notice his stonking great hard-on. He’d had it for hours.

When it was dark and they were middlingly pissed, he said he’d take her home on the Tiger Cub – assuming he could get it started. They walked around the corner to where the bike was. She seemed impressed with his handiwork, or pretended she was. He gave her his leather jacket and his helmet and did up the strap for her, his fingers touching her cheek. He wanted to kiss her then but she was too excited about getting on the bike and he knew he’d have to wait – he should have done it in the pub. He climbed on the bike and told her to get on behind him and hold on tightly, which she did. The Tiger started first go, the faithful beast.