Shining Sea (15 page)

There are no permanent fixtures within the boat's shell apart from the benches and foot braces. No wheelhouse or shed or equipment box or anything. The floor is an open plaid of long, thin, light-colored wooden slats and curved-rib frames. More than anything, the currach looks like an oversize wooden bassinet.

“We're going to cross open sea in this?” he says.

“We are,” Rufus says.

He doesn't bother telling Rufus how crazy he is. “Who's the last bench for?”

“My daughter,” the boat refitter says, pointing. “She's your spare man.”

He turns to look. The moonlight shines on her long nose, round face, and frizzy red hair as she lumbers down to the dock, waddling from the weight of a fifth small plastic barrel. She stops a few feet from them.

Holy fuck.

“She's a
kid,
” he says.

“You need someone fae the island,” she says, avoiding his eyes in the same way she used to in the shop. “You need someone to represent Iona.”

“Katie isn't regular crew,” Rufus says. “She's our escort, a set of hands should someone need a break or have an accident, and she knows how to handle a steering oar. It's brilliant she's offered to join us.”

He's spent five weeks minimizing contact with this underage girl, and now he'll spend at least five days trapped on a boat face-to-face with her. If he weren't half asleep, he'd fall down laughing. As though this trip weren't fucked enough already. He looks in Ghislaine's direction, but she's busy with the boat. Where is Georgina when he needs her—she'd die laughing. Well, Eamon can't be more than twenty. Maybe the girl will fix her attention on him. As for how the boat refitter can let his daughter go on such a journey or how Rufus can be ready to accept the responsibility, it's not his problem.
He's
not responsible for her. He's not responsible for anyone on this journey. As Rufus said, he's
just a body
. As far as he's concerned, his guitar's the
only
thing on the voyage he has to look out for.

Still, she's a kid. He has a red-haired little sister somewhere. Sissy is a lot older now than this girl is, of course, but it's hard for him to think of her as more than eleven or twelve—her age when he last saw her. There aren't many ways to keep track of people, people like little sisters, without being seen.

“We'll take care of her,” he says to the boat refitter, because it feels as though someone should.

“Oh, she's Rufus's now. He can do what he wants with her,” the refitter says, stroking the side of the boat. “Though I'm lookin' forward to hearin' how the new paint works out. It was Rufus what told me to try it. He read they were trying the bitumen on roofs in England.”

“If it can handle the weather in England, it can handle the sea,” Rufus says.

It sounds like a jingle, in a way that bothers him. “I meant your daughter,” he tells the refitter. “Not the boat.”

“Who, me?” Katie helps Eamon lift their water supply into the boat, then turns to stare him down, as though he's a crab nipping at her rubber boots. This time she looks right at him. “I know the sea here like I was born right in it. Take care of
you
is more like it.”

At 3:00 a.m., Rufus takes one last look at his watch and compass, and they set out. Ghislaine, Eamon, Rufus, and he, with their backs toward the open sea and their hands, in fingerless gloves, gripping the boat's long, slender oars. Fifteen-year-old Katie on the bench at the back of the boat facing them and the great expanse of the Atlantic ahead. Her expression holds the sternness of an ancient grandmother.

Eight long pale oars, their tips painted red, dip into the black sea like drunken, uncoordinated spider legs. The boat swivels over the sea's calm surface in an ungainly fashion, spinning slightly east, then west.

“Francis,” Rufus says, “the trick to rowing a currach is to go deep into the water, as much as five feet. You saw how the oars have almost no paddle? That's because the currach is designed for rough seas, and in rough seas a large paddle can get tripped up on the waves. The trade is that you need to get further down in the water.”

He doesn't need anyone to tell him he is the problem. He's off stroke from the others and can't seem to find their rhythm. It feels like the story of his life. He's sleepy and a little cold and would be glad to be still in his bed. He doesn't particularly appreciate hearing that the boat is designed for rough seas, either.

The impulse to get up and walk away comes over him like a terrible itch, but the deep, dark Atlantic surrounds them. He is stuck in this damned boat.

Georgina used to say,
Love, you got a song going through your veins instead of blood.
He sets up a tune in his head to the rhythm of the oars and lets it take over his body, digging into the sea with each stroke until he can find unison with the others.

“That's my man,” Rufus says. “We'll make a sailor of you yet.”

“Rufus,” he says. “In the interest of peace, I shall not knock you into the sea.”

Within little time, Iona is swallowed up by the darkness. All that is left is the light of the lamp hanging over the dock. After a while, that, too, disappears. Occasionally, to the east—on his right—he can make out a flicker of light or shadow of shore. The coastline of Mull.

“This will be our longest day,” Rufus says. “Our longest crossing.”

“We're heading straight for Colonsay? We're not going to hug Mull?” Katie asks. They are seated single file, Ghislaine directly face-to-face with Katie, he behind Ghislaine, then Eamon behind him. Rufus claimed the bench after Eamon, in the front of the boat but behind all the other rowers, undoubtedly to keep an eye on and be heard by all of them. Rufus is just the sort of assertive nut whom people either adore or run from.

Born into a different family, a different circumstance, Eugene might have been like that. Wiry-haired, wiry-bodied Eugene in his silver-rimmed glasses, waiting in grade school to be picked by the boys, then waiting in high school to be picked by the girls. In the end, being picked by Uncle Sam.

He digs his oars into the water. He pulls. He circles. A seabird flies overhead, its underside huge and white; probably a gannet awakened by their passage.

“We can stop somewhere among the Torran Rocks, catch our breath while we're still warming up,” Rufus says, “if we need to.”

Katie clicks her tongue. “You cannae do that.”

“Can't do what? Tie up along the Rocks?”

“You don't know the Rocks.”

“It'll be day by then. We'll see anything in our way.”

The frizzy red tendrils of hair around Katie's round face shake. “There are smaller rocks,” she says, “stickin' up the surface o' the water, like the stones on a dragon's tail. One minute they're there, and another they are under water. Meanwhile, the sea churns up around them like a washin' machine. Haven't you ever read
Kidnapped,
man?”

His body tilts forward and back, forward and back, forward and back. He wants to ask Katie what Robert Louis Stevenson's novel has to do with her argument, but he can't bring himself to address her directly. Wasn't there a shipwreck in
Kidnapped
? He should have read the stupid book back in school instead of relying on Eugene.

“Try tae keep starboard,” Katie says. “Just pass 'em by.”

“Look,” Rufus says. “The sun is rising.”

To the east, the island of Mull is a blackened but discernible silhouette. Dark, waterbound rocks lie like flat, benign sleepers. To the west, dusky orange glows in an ever-growing band where the deep violet sky plunges into the sea. Pulling hard on her oars, Ghislaine glances over her left shoulder, and he follows suit. A landmass, not large enough to be inhabited but large enough to be called an island, has materialized in the distance ahead.

“Are those the Torran Rocks?” Ghislaine asks. “It seems calm enough.”

“We're not halfway to the Rocks yet,” Katie says. “That's Soa. My da sometimes takes lobsters from there. The Rocks are more like chips. Not the tattie kind. You'll see. You'll be sorry if you don't listen to me, Rufus. We'll all be sorry.”

Where is Katie's mother when her father's out trapping lobsters or laying boats together? Could she be dead? He's seen the father on the island but never at the shop; the shop is clearly left up to Katie, and so, apparently, is her life. No mother would agree to let her fifteen-year-old girl go off on a journey like this.

“Katie,” Rufus says, “the sea is calm, the sky is clear, the forecast is mild. It should take us about eight hours to get to Colonsay. If everyone is holding up fine once we get to the Torran Rocks or we can't find an anchorage, we won't stop. But we're on a mission of peace. It won't do to have discord on our vessel.”

Eight hours
. In the rush of getting ready, it hadn't occurred to him to ask how long they'd row each day. In the gathering light, Ghislaine's back, arms, and shoulders slide effortlessly.
A wall of trophies,
she told him. Under the loose sweater she wore to dinner, her body remained a secret to him. The life preserver she now wears over a ribbed long-sleeved shirt still keeps him from seeing much, but her upper arms are full and hard, and so is her ass, on the bench in front of him. She's bigger than he initially thought, but tight. A slender woman who has packed on lots of muscle. She must be very strong.

Normally, the gamines like Georgina are the ones who catch his attention, but what would it be like in bed with Ghislaine? Is she tight everywhere? Would they row along under sheets, finding the same sort of rhythm as they do in the boat?

“If you kept your eyes on your rowing and off my body,” Ghislaine says over her shoulder in a low voice, “you might not create such a drag on the boat.”

He laughs, hoping Katie won't have heard. “You have eyes in the back of your head, Ghislaine?”

But she's right. He's fallen off unison again.

Dawn opens up the sea around them, moving through deep blues to a sweet dusky azure. There's comfort in being able to see land out there. It helps him to gauge the steady pace they are keeping, with the low northwesterly wind and tide in their favor. His hands already feel stiff, but his arms and shoulders are moving better than during the first hour.

“We got lucky with the weather,” Ghislaine says.

“God is on our side,” Rufus says. “Or at least the weather god. Remember that time down in Devon, and big pieces of hail started to fall from the sky?”

“Pouah,” Ghislaine says. “Don't remind me. That wasn't hail. They were like frozen lemons.”

“I wouldn't mind a lemon right now,” Rufus says. “Or, more precisely, a tall glass of lemonade.”

“Bah, lemonade. A nice cup o' tea,” Katie says.

“We know that's what Eamon's dreaming about. Aren't you, man?” Rufus says.

Eamon grunts.

“What about you, Francis? A cup of tea or a glass of lemonade?”

They were drinking lemonade when his father dropped to his knees, crumpled like a doll, nothing like the tall, steady hero who was his real father. The taste of lemons always used to bring that moment back to him, that slice in the wall of time between before and after, when his cheerful mother suddenly shouted
Stay with us!
But his father didn't.

“Water,” he says.

But then, one night in Mallorca, he and Georgina ended up squeezing lemons over each other, licking the juice, laughing. They'd begun by slipping raw oysters into each other's mouths preceded by gulps of cava and followed by squeezes of lemon.
You
have
to have the lemon,
Georgina said.
You need the bitter to make the sweet taste so good.
After they ran out of oysters, they just kept going. Lemon juice in each other's hair, on their shoulders, down his smooth chest.

A few years ago, I spent two months in Greece picking lemons,
he told her, dripping beads of lemon juice the length of her leg. Her ankle, her shin, her knee, her thigh.
Seven days a week, ten hours a day: pull, twist, pull, twist. Finally, I caught a ride north through Yugoslavia and Italy into France. The driver stopped in Menton. Nice town, he said. You'll find something here. So I got out, so happy to be done with all that. It was March. Turns out that's Menton's lemon-picking season
.

Sounds like sour luck to me,
Georgina said, laughing hard, drawing her leg up and around him.

That night, lemon juice didn't taste so bad to him.

There are moments when he wishes things could have been different. That he could have been the kind of man who would have stayed and helped Georgina. That he could have been the kind of man who was able to help her.

He leans on the oars, stroking away the rush of loneliness that overcomes him, beating it out of his body. His tongue sticks a little in his mouth. His lips feel swollen. A tall glass of water or lemonade or anything would be nice. At the same time, his lower abdomen has slowly been tightening. The piss bucket is in the front of the boat behind Rufus. He doesn't want to pull his dick out in full sight of Katie.

The sea tugs on his oars. He glances over his shoulders: up ahead is a scattering of dark rocks, some almost large enough to be called islands or at least skerries, others more like giant teeth jutting out of the sea. The boat is suddenly moving faster, almost, than they are rowing.

“The start of the ebb tide,” Rufus says. “On its way out from Mull it splits up on the Rocks and doubles its strength. You'd best get hold of the steering oar, Katie.”

The once placid sea is now rumbling, splashing against the rocks. The boat is moving at twice the speed it was ten minutes earlier, as though it has been lifted onto a liquid conveyor belt, almost beyond their control. They pass a first skerry where three seals, their mottled gray backs shiny with water, raise their heads to look at them. A fourth seal, a large shapeless body reclining on an adjacent rock, shakes a flipper.