Dance On My Grave (2 page)

I had spent so much time messing about on the beach this year—I even revised for the exams there—that for the first time in my life I was tanned all over, something I was secretly proud about.
(Correction
: I was tanned
almost
all over.) Of course this is nothing exceptional in a macho-spa like Southend. (Being tanned I mean. Or, come to think of it, being proud of it too.) But my normal skin colour till then had been somewhat on the pale side of chickenbreast white, so I used to keep all but my extremities hidden from the public gaze. I even used to wear a track suit for gym class if I could get away with it so as to avoid unseemly comments about my spectral hue. A favourite quip bellowed across the changing room was ‘Hey, Dracula did a good job on you last night.’ For a while after I arrived in Southend I was widely known as the Bleach Boy and it was rumoured that I was hooked on Domestos.

Having juggled with tiller, mainsheet and jib sheet while removing my jeans, I thought I should check my sailing condition. Maybe my (to be honest) very few marine excursions crewing for the succulent Spike had already taught me some of the precautions necessary for sea-going survival. Like knowing at all times what your own boat, other people’s boats, the weather and the sea are all doing. Or maybe some unconscious premonition
of approaching calamity was already blinking a warning in my head. Whatever, I looked around.

Ahead, all was well. Sun crinkling on gentle waves. Very few other craft about and none near me.

But behind: Big Trouble. And fast approaching. A heavy black curtain was being drawn across the sky. I had never seen a cloud as menacing. It was a monstrous tumescence. A Thing from Outaspace.

In the one double-take glance I allowed myself before my body splintered in panic, I saw too that the sea beneath the cloud was shining an aggressive gun-metal bright, and that a leading edge of angry waves was churning over white, as if the monster had teeth and was snapping at the tide.

My nerves fused. I did, though, know enough about Southend weather to realize that the space between the snapping waves and the black cloud would be filled with a pretty feisty wind. Also that this unwelcome gust would arrive like a rocket-powered wall of expanded polystyrene—soft and warm to the touch but a knockout just the same.

Not only had my father raised me from an early age to act on the principle that a man must face what a man would rather run away from, but it also seemed obvious at that moment even to my addled brain that safety lay in pointing Spike’s little boat into the coming wind, rather than being blown along by it. Therefore, what now looked to me like my frail and inadequate vessel had to be turned to face the gathering tempest fast. There was also the question of whether Spike’s beloved
Tumble
was a suitable sparring partner for the rusting iron stanchions that support Southend’s famous pier (all of one and a third miles long) among which we were likely to get tangled if the wind took hold of us and carried us away.

Of course if we were lucky enough to avoid that fate, a
worse lay in store. Beyond the pier stretched the real and vasty North Sea. I was not yet tired enough of life, I decided, to wish for a trip into that certain grave. Death I was interested in; being dead I was not.

At all cost I must come about and face the gale.

So much, at any rate, for the theory. The problem was that I had never yet put the theory into practice, and performed the tricky manoeuvre necessary to turn a boat from running before the wind to heading into it, a 180 degree about-face requiring not a little skill. And performing it for the first time at panic stations is not to be advised.

I had seen it done many times as I lay browning on the beach, watching some show-off expert. But only practice makes practice perfect; and this was not an auspicious moment to start practising.

Not that there was any option. Or that I really gave it much thought.

With the decisiveness of desperation, I yanked the tiller over to port and let go all sheets.

Both actions were fatal errors.

I should have pushed the tiller to starboard and kept control of the mainsheet.

The results were technically complicated and instantly dramatic.

Herewith a guide for the non-naval. When running before the wind, a boat’s sail spreads out to one side of the boat or the other, thus:

When coming round into the wind, a wise sailor brings his vessel about in such a way that the sail and its boom (that all-too-solid ‘arm’ sticking out to the side onto which the bottom of the sail is attached) does not sweep
across the hull but remains safely on the same side, thus:

Only a confidently skilled helmsman, or a fool, brings a boat about the other way. Because if you do the boom crashes across the hull dangerously. This event is called making a gybe (sometimes spelt jibe). Only when this has actually happened to you do you really understand why the word ‘gibe’ also means to mock, to scoff, to make fun of. When a boat gybes it frequently makes a mockery of its crew. Viz.:

The gybe has three dangers. One: you can dismast the boat if the boom smashes across with such force that it jars the mast to breaking point. Two: any unwary sailor can be hit by the boom when it sweeps across, thereby injuring the idiot or knocking him/her overboard, or both. Three: the whole operation can get out of hand and the boat capsizes, endangering the life of the vessel and all who sail in her.

A fourth possibility exists. All three of the aforementioned calamities can happen together: dismasting, capsizing, injuring/killing the crew.

You guessed it: I gybed.

Consolation
: I did not dismast Spike’s treasured dinghy.

I did, however, capsize.

Consolation
: The boom missed me.

The boom missed me because I was not in the boat when it swung across. I had already been flung overboard by the violence of the wind-borne turn which whipped the boat onto its side. I landed in the sea six feet from the wallowing hull.

Consolation
: I did not even get my hair wet.

I didn’t get my hair wet because I was so nut-cracking scared that as soon as I hit the briny I was dogging it for the wrecked but floating
Tumble.
Even a disabled boat is better than no boat at all. I scrambled aboard its upfacing side before my hair had time to dip beneath the surface.

6/
ACTION REPLAY

Everything happens in a couple of seconds.

Yet from the moment I make my mistake with the tiller to the moment when I scramble on to the sloughing hull, everything seems to take place out of time.

I see now that as I put the tiller over, the storm hits me. The wind grabs the sail, slams it as far forward as it can go, then hurls it back again. The boat starts swinging round, responding to the rudder. As it slurs in a tight circle, the sail comes across the hull. On its way, the mainsheet, flapping loose, fouls the tiller.

Once across the hull, the sail fills with wind again. The mainsheet is strained tight, which therefore tugs the tiller, which in turn steers the dinghy on to a tack so close to the
wind that the boat cannot withstand the force and is pushed over. I see the bellying sail dip like a scoop into the waves. Water fills it. Sails, mast, and hull slice into the sea, rudely exposing the boat’s red bottom above the surface.

I am a useless instrument of jangling nerves sounding in a drum-tight stomach cinched in fright. As the boat goes over I am thrown out and up, somersaulting through the air.

As I perform the curving trajectory common to all catapulted objects, I think: The boat is capsizing. God, what a twit I must look.

My mind refuses to acknowledge what my senses tell me.

I am watching myself. I smile, a kind of crazy, there’s-nothing-I-can-do grin of abandon and terror.

I am descending now, emotions shocked by shock into shock-proof numbness. Will I float? I am thinking. Will I drown? Will this be the end? Is this the start of Death?

I am all deflating questions.

But now comes the water. The thick, soupy, solipsistic sea. I enter feet first, a body committed into His Hands. A clean incision that hardly makes a noticeable splash. A neat dunking.

Not unnaturally—but to me at that moment unexpectedly—the water strikes me (literally) as wet. Cold. And surprisingly (why surprisingly?) supportive. Like a large soggy mattress. A sea bed. (Sorry!)

I am sure that if my head is engulfed beneath the surface I will surely meet The End as the sea will meet mine. My feet and hands are piston-props as soon as they feel the water.

At which point, slow motion switches to double-speed timelapse life.

I have not thought of it

and before I can think

I have done it

or know I have done it

I have covered

the distance between me

and the wallowing boat

on its side, the turbulent waves washing sometimes right over

the forlorn sail rippling in the water like a drenched shroud

I grab the gunwale

pull myself round to the dinghy’s centre-board keel

use it as a step

clamber on to the hull’s whale-back side.

A shipwrecked mariner.

Real time returns.

I shiver violently, cannot stop this water-logged goose-pimpled trembling.

All I can manage to do is hang on.

For dear life.

7/So there I am, sat like a ninny on this dying boat, dressed only in my Thames-dyed wet-look T-shirt and briefs, feeling refrigerated, not to say sorry for myself, when a shining yellow charger with the name
Calypso
white-lettered on its razor bow comes slicing through the waves to my rescue. An eighteen-foot racing dinghy surging to my rescue, its sails straining at their seams.

This yellow slicker executes a neat unshowy spin into the wind—the kind I have just demonstrated how not to do—and loses way with disgustingly precise judgement, slipping quickly to a heave-ho stop beside me, a safe
boat’s length away. (Nothing is as impressively humiliating as seeing someone do something well when you have just done it badly yourself.)

Hear:

Much cracking and smacking of now impotent sails flapping in the already (wouldn’t you know it) abating wind.

Accompanying syncopation of sucking and splashing waves slopping against our supine hulls.

See:

Overcast gloom above a bellicose sea.

Glancing splinters of metallic light shining from the still sunbright east.

And in the cockpit of ‘Calypso’:

A head of streaming jet-black hair above a broad and handsome face split by a teasing grin atop a tidy body, medium height, with the build and frame that can dress in worn and weather-bleached blue-jean shirt and pants as if in this year’s flashiest marine gear.

Enter Barry Gorman, eighteen years one month. Further details throughout what follows. This is he who becomes it. The Body.

In his yellow flasher, he was grinning, and holding up for my inspection one pair of dripping jeans.

Mine. Like me, lost overboard during the troubles.

8/That image is on instant replay in my head.

It was the beginning; and the beginning of his end.

9/‘Yours?’ Barry shouts.

I nod, resigned to humiliation.

‘Need any help?’

I look helplessly around.

‘Get her upright. I’ll tow you ashore.’ Upright? This collapsed jetsam?

‘Done it before?’

Own up. What gains dissemblance now? ‘No.’

‘Do exactly as I say.’

Instructions come with firm clarity. Not to be gainsaid, never needing repetition.

Automaton creature of this pelagic Svengali, I meekly follow orders.

10/Trippers crowded round us on the beach, gawping. Lined the esplanade, pointing, laughing. An unexpected spectacle, seeing an idiot ditched and then rescued. Something to add a little pep to their day out and to tell the folks at home about afterwards.

Only when Barry with cavalier gesture handed me my jeans did I realize the real cause of the mirth.

‘You’d better put these on,’ he said, ‘before you’re arrested.’

God, they were cold! Clinging, sticky, gritty from sand. Putting them on was the lowest point in the entire fiasco. At that moment all I wanted was to be home; yet the thought of getting there and of dealing with Spike’s dishevelled
Tumble
was more than I could bear.