The Boat (37 page)

On the third day the weather turned for the worse. Clem and Smudge stayed down below, both unable to function now with the seasickness. They lay in a huddle on the lee berth, barely able to raise their heads except to puke bile, looking unbearably grim, almost comatose. All he could do was make sure that they were warm and try to keep them drinking fluids. He never thought of finding an island and stopping. Always lurking at the back of his mind was the thought that Frank was not far behind him. The weather raged; squalls and gusts between forty and fifty knots. All he could do was run downwind under bare poles, but still he refused to seek shelter. Instead he harnessed himself on to whatever was at hand and carried on in a mindset beyond sense. In the distance he saw shadow islands, barely distinguishable from the sky itself, grey smudges in the black cloud. He kept them on the horizon.

By the fourth day, Clem and Smudge were barely keeping water down, and he himself was utterly exhausted. When at last they came to the more westerly Greek islands, the sun began to melt through the white stormy sky and he could at last put up some canvas. When he looked back at the patchwork of caves on the leeward side of one particular island he finally began to feel that Frank was not going to find them. Only then did it hit Johnny quite how exhausted he was.

At last he dropped anchor and went below deck to brew up a saucepan full of ginger for Smudge and Clem. He made a pot of pasta for them to eat before he crashed. He was so tired his eyeballs felt as if they were shaking in his skull. Clem would have to take watch for a while. But there was still one more thing to do before he could rest.

The late-afternoon sun shone softly down on the boat as he painted over the looped lettering of the
Little Utopia
on with some gloss paint he had found underneath the cockpit seat. It felt good to wipe over those wretched words; Frank’s sick little utopia was no more. He let it dry a little, dipped the brush in the paint and leant over the stern again.

‘What are you doing?’ He turned around. Clem was up. She was standing in the companionway looking pale and tired. She’d not eaten a thing for forty-eight hours, nor spoken a word for longer.

‘How are you feeling?’ he asked, paintbrush in hand. ‘There’s some ginger tea down there for you both and some pasta.’

‘What are you doing?’ she said again looking at his paintbrush.

‘I’m painting over the name.’

Her face was expressionless. ‘You can’t do that.’

‘Clem, we can’t risk it. We have to change the name.’

‘Johnny,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘You can’t change the name of a boat. You must never do that.’

He turned his body round to face her, pot in one hand, brush in the other, his eyes red and scratchy with sleeplessness. ‘How much more bad luck could we possibly get?’ he said. But he was glad to see she cared about such things again.

‘OK. OK,’ he said. ‘What if we leave her with no name?’

She nodded and looked away. He finished painting over the letters and put the lid back on the pot and wrapped the brush in an old bit of plastic bag with an elastic band and went down to the galley. Smudge was feeling better too; they drank their ginger tea and ate the pasta slowly, their empty stomachs fragile. Smudge was sitting on the companionway step looking just like her mother but pale and tired, even Gilla hanging at her side seemed to have taken on the general air of misery. She sat there watching as Clem washed up and Johnny unclicked the kitchen table .

‘I want my daddy,’ Smudge said and Johnny paused as he slotted the table into a bed. ‘Are they coming back soon?’ she asked. He would rather have this conversation when his brain was working. He just needed a little tiny sleep; forty minutes, half an hour, that was all, then he would be able to cope.

‘Not yet,’ Clem said. Johnny turned around and caught her eye then. Lying to Smudge wouldn’t help matters. After he had slept he would tell her that they weren’t coming back.

‘Do you think they found the horse?’ Smudge said, coming down the steps.

Clem took the plate from her hands. ‘Maybe,’ she said and Smudge jumped on to the saloon seat, grabbed a handful of books from the shelf and took herself through to the forepeak, shutting the heads door behind her. She often took herself off for hours at a time to look at her books – she was her father’s daughter after all. Clem stood there at the sink still staring at the closed door as Johnny pulled out the bedding and started taking off his oilskins. ‘She knows, Johnny.’ He turned around.

‘She knows what?’ he said, taking off his two jumpers in one move.

‘She knows what we’ve done.’ Her big, dark eyes had huge shadows all around them; she looked so delicate, so vulnerable.

‘Don’t be silly. Of course she doesn’t.’

He stopped what he was doing and slowly came towards her, gently putting his arms around her and he pressed her body to his, feeling his own need as well as hers. He felt her arms go around his waist as she leant her head against his shoulder. This was the first time he had held her in a long time. He could feel her chest rise and fall as she took deep breaths. He kissed her forehead and she lifted her face up to his. He kissed her cheek, her nose, her eyelids, her mouth, her tears. Then she started to kiss him back. It was as though they were remembering each other, their bodies getting reacquainted; their lips were their fingers. They kissed urgently, as if time itself was running out. They pulled off each other’s clothes and there against the sink they fucked hard because they had to, it was the only way of reaching each other.

The tenderness came afterwards as they lay down together on the saloon bed, still and satiated. He ran his fingers over her smooth brown skin, over the bleached blond hairs, the dimples at the base of her spine, up the ridges of her back, breathing in the woody smell of her, the softness of her shoulder on his lips, feeling the wonderful fullness of love again, the promise of peace at last. But it was a brief respite; even as his eyelids closed and sleep dragged him under, he could feel her slipping away from him. She had turned her head aside and was staring up through the hatch, her thoughts a million miles from his. He wanted to turn her face to his, to look her in the eyes and tell her that everything was going to be OK but his body was leaden and the words never made it to his lips. He fell into a deep and exhausted sleep.

He woke slowly, his body in just the same position as when he’d fallen asleep but the world around him changed. Clem was no longer in his arms. The light was different; it was a new day. He turned and glanced at the clock; he’d slept for eleven hours straight. His neck was stiff; he hadn’t moved a muscle all night. He blinked and stretched, his eyelids and fingers still swollen with sleep. His head and his eyeballs no longer ached. The exhaustion had at last left him. He knew by the lazy roll of the boat and the half-hearted flop of the sail that they were becalmed and he didn’t care – they should be far enough away now. He turned towards the cockpit where he could see Smudge’s crossed legs on the portside seat, a book in her lap; he could hear her faintly singing some song, and above her the boom was swinging indecisively across the coachroof with a heavy thud, one way then the other.

He got up on his knees and peered out of the window, rubbing his neck. The sea was glassy still, the island barren and craggy, uninhabited. He wondered vaguely where on earth they were. No boats. No Frank. It wasn’t until he turned back that he saw Clem sitting in the corner of the bed, totally motionless, knees up to her chin, arms wrapped around them, watching him.

‘Hello,’ he said, smiling, slowly sitting back down as he rubbed his neck.

She didn’t move. ‘I have to go, Johnny,’ she said, her voice low and calm.

He looked at her, puzzled. ‘You have to go where?’

‘I have to go back.’

‘Home?’

She shook her head. He waited for her to say something else, trying to read her features as he did so, but her face was expressionless. She was giving nothing away.

‘Where then?’ he heard himself ask but he knew exactly where she meant and he didn’t want to hear her say it. He wanted to lean forward and put his hand over her mouth and seal up her lips to stop the words coming out; he wanted to press as hard as he could and not stop pressing until she could no longer even think those thoughts.
Don’t say it
.

‘To Frank.’

Everything stopped except one muscle pulsating in his jaw.

‘We did wrong,’ she said. ‘I’ll take Smudge with me. We’ll wait at Datca. Go up to Bodrum. He’s a survivor. I have to find him.’

She’d got it all worked out; she already had a plan. Her mind was made up. She had been thinking about this while he had been resting falsely in the arms of sleep. He wondered when she’d first hatched this plan – before they’d had sex up against the sink? It had been nothing but a mercy fuck. He was way behind her.

‘Why?’ he said.

She looked away then, out through the Perspex window and he felt a chill slink over his skin. He pulled the sleeping bag up around him, but the silky sheen offered no protection. He didn’t want to hear what she had to say; he had to put a stop to this right now before she could think any more. ‘It’s all right, Clem,’ he said, the words tumbling out. ‘We’re going to carry on. We’re going to head up to Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica. We’re going to dry dock the boat, it’s going to be just—’

‘I have to find him,’ she said, his words petering out into nothing.

‘Why?’

She said nothing.

‘Are you in love with him?’

She shrugged, unable to meet his eye. ‘I don’t know.’

She might just as well have got out the old kitchen knife and stuck it in his guts. He shook his head, snatching at the air for breath. He thought he was going to be sick.

‘I’m sorry, Johnny,’ she said, biting her lip. A single tear slipped from her eye and rolled down her cheek briefly giving him comfort; he saw it as a salty drop of hope but then as she wiped it away with her arm it struck him that she wasn’t crying for him, she was crying because her love was dead. And he thought of Annie’s voice, how her song had sung of this.

‘Why?’ he heard himself say, for he was reeling now, not quite feeling the impact of her blow. ‘Why are you doing this?’

She shook her head and looked up out through the window, searching for the right things to say, her face red and tangled with misery. ‘I feel dead inside, Johnny… like I’m being suffocated.’

He tried to speak, to say
no, it wasn’t so
, but all he could feel was that icy chill whistling around his insides.

‘ I miss him,’ she said, heedless of Johnny.

‘But we’re married…’ he said. He sounded pathetic even to himself. ‘You made promises… until the world ends…’

‘I know, I know…’ she said, waving her hands with irritation as if she didn’t need him to remind her of that dreadful fact. ‘I don’t know what I feel any more… You’ve changed, Johnny. You’re always criticizing me. I can see it in your eyes. You’re always judging me. You don’t actually even
like
me any more… and I’ve changed too. I’ve stopped seeing things in the same way, I’ve got this new inner life now…’

‘
I’ve
got an inner life!’ he cried. ‘I have so much inner fucking life. You’re wrong, I love you so much, Clem.’ His voice was breaking, his throat closing up, trying to plug the pain.

‘I know you do,’ she said as if his love didn’t really count, as if it was cheap.

There was nothing more to offer her. She didn’t want his everything. She was prepared to gamble his love for Frank’s. She was cutting him off and he didn’t know what to do because he was still attached, hanging on. The pain really got him now; it sliced across his belly, sharp and deep; he found himself rocking back and forth clutching his stomach, suddenly aware of Smudge up there in the cockpit, swinging her legs, oblivious to this carnage. He tried to take deep breaths to steady himself, to regain some composure, to keep his pride.
Fuck you, Clemency Bailey
.
Fuck you.

He wiped his face on the sleeping bag and sat himself up, mustering what was left of his dignity. ‘You’d better be sure about this, Clem, because I won’t have you back,’ he said, almost believing it himself. ‘You leave me and I swear to you, I won’t take you back. Do you understand?’

She turned her bloodshot eyes to his, her lids red and swollen. Then she nodded. The final blow. He could see it then: she had already severed her connection to him and he hated her for her complete and utter betrayal.

‘By the way,’ he said, the chill had reached his voice now; the words came out all curt and cold. ‘Does it even bother you that he’s a paedophile? Because I’m beginning to think that it doesn’t.’

She glared at him for a moment and then got off the bed as if
he
was the one saying the terrible things. Despite himself, he didn’t want her to go. He wanted her back in the bed naked and close and cruel. She stepped into the heads and closed the door firmly behind her.

It was much later on when Smudge came up into the cockpit and sat herself on Johnny’s lap. ‘I don’t like Clem,’ she said.

Good, he thought, I don’t like her either. I don’t even recognize her. He held on to Smudge and tried to smile. How odd it was that the muscles in his face were still working, that he could sail the boat and make tea and look out for other boats when inside he had been quite felled.

He swept her hair over her head, as a parent might, smoothing out the matted wildness.
He would not let Clem take Smudge back to him. He would not let it happen.

‘I need Gilla and Clem won’t let me in the forepeak,’ she said crossly. So Johnny reluctantly found himself going down to the forecabin. He stopped outside the door catching sight of himself in the mirror hanging above the basin and got a shock. He looked old and hardened, with lined, dark skin and black stubble on his chin, his hair long and bleached, sticky with salt; his eyes looked different: they were tinged with bitterness. This was a Johnny he didn’t yet know and behind the door was another stranger. He pushed the door open. ‘Smudge needs Gilla,’ he said perfunctorily. Clem was sitting there in the middle of the bed, her back to him, cross-legged, her shirt slipped off one shoulder, her heart necklace hanging the wrong way round against her skin. It seemed symbolic that it was all back to front.