The Boat (14 page)

‘That wasn’t an OBE,’ she said. ‘It was a CBE. One up.’ It was a fact not a brag.

‘Blimey.’

‘
Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream,
’ Smudge started to sing. Johnny listened to her sweet voice. She was leaning over the water, her face inches away, looking down into the depths. He knew what she was doing; she spent quite a lot of her time looking for monsters. ‘
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream,
’ she sang, her clear voice tripping across the water and bouncing off the rocks.

‘He never gives up on anything,’ Annie said, her voice as flat as the water. ‘You ought to be aware of that.’ Johnny had no idea what she was talking about but he had no trouble believing her; everything about Frank was different from other people. He watched Annie row. She was tall and strong and it took no time to reach the rocks. She pulled in on a scrap of chunky sand. Johnny and she jumped out and heaved the boat with Smudge still inside up on to the crunching shore. He felt slightly reckless away from the
Little Utopia
, here on dry land, just the three of them, some space between them and the boat. He chucked the rope round a rock, wondering whether he still remembered how to tie a one-handed bowline. Yep. He did.

‘Flash bastard,’ Annie said, getting the bags out of the tender, leaning over, flashing a look up at him. He could see her cleavage beneath her chequered shirt as she did so.

He pretended to strut a little. ‘You’ve either got it or you haven’t, babe,’ he said, making her laugh, making her face light up again.

‘Where did you see the berries?’ he asked, looking up into the scrubby landscape. It was warmer on the land; he could feel the difference in temperature immediately, a wave of heat seemed to be slipping down the hillside and hitting them front on. It was going to be a warm day.

‘Up here,’ Annie said, taking Smudge’s hand and setting off up the hill. Johnny followed behind Captain Hook, who was as quick and nimble as her mother, her red costume shining in the light, Gilla dangling at her side, one paw dragging through the prickly scrub. The earth was a pale orange and surprisingly lush – the storm must have soaked everything. Hundreds of tiny flowers seemed to be unfurling around them and small birds darted in and out of the bushes. A lizard scampered across their path and Smudge spent some time trying unsuccessfully to catch it.

As they trudged up the hillside, the sun came out properly, the haze disappeared and the sky became a rich blue. They stopped halfway up to have a drink of water and looked down at the boat and the small figures of Clem and Frank at the bows, one so much smaller she looked like a different species altogether. They were sitting separately now, either side of the bows, and Johnny felt better about that.

‘Daddy!’ Smudge shouted down, waving at the boat, but neither he nor Clem looked up. They were playing music down there; a faint beat echoed across the water but he couldn’t tell what song it was: the stern was facing away from them. The water around the boat was a turquoise blue, so clear and crisp that from up here he could see the anchor line and the pile of rocks it had caught on.

‘See!’ Johnny said, turning to Smudge at his side, crouching down to her level. ‘No monsters today.’

‘They hide in the daytime,’ she said all matter of fact. She turned her face up to his. ‘Have you ever seen a monster, Johnny?’

He looked down at the water. ‘No,
I
haven’t. But I once sailed with a man who’d definitely seen a monster. He was out in the Pacific, thousands of miles away from land. He told me that he was on watch one dark and moonless night and out of the water, right in front of the boat, two big luminous green eyes rose up, either side of the bow. Then the eyes went higher and higher as the monster came out of the water. Up, up, as high as the mast.’

Her eyes were getting bigger and bigger as she listened, her lips parted. ‘What did it do?’

‘Nothing. It just stared at him and slowly went back down.’

‘Did he catch it?’

‘No.’

‘I would have caught it in my net,’ she said, putting her little hand in Johnny’s and hanging on a bit tighter than before.

Annie was absolutely right: there was an abundance of berries up here, hundreds of them wherever he looked. He bent down and started to pick them off the spiky little bushes and soon his bag began to fill up. For a while Smudge stayed at his side and helped although the majority of her berries never made it to the bag, just the occasional squashed handful she peeled off her palm.

‘Save some of them for lunch, Smudge,’ Johnny said.

‘I’m not eating them,’ she said, looking up at him, her mouth and chin smeared with black juice.

He ruffled her already ruffled hair. As soon as she was full up she got bored of berry-picking and wandered off a little; she squatted down to play in the earth and began humming a little song to herself. Annie was further along, higher up, picking fast and furiously in the sunshine.

Small blue butterflies swooped around him, some landing on his shirt mistaking him for a flower. He watched a couple of lizards darting about his feet and a large spider scurrying away from them. The place was teeming with life. Soon his bag bulged heavily with bilberries; he had the knack now and could get eight or nine in one picking. He liked the feeling of being self-sufficient, getting produce from the land and the sea; this was a good way to live. He could see himself and Clem doing this one day on their own boat, their double-ended, teak-decked wooden ketch. He wiped the sheen off his forehead and looked round for Annie. She was higher up the hill busy picking.

‘Johnny,’ whispered a small voice over in the bushes.

‘What?’ He made his way over to Smudge, who was crouched down in the scrub, her Captain Hook jacket caught on various brambles; it stood out like a tent revealing her naked bottom underneath. She was cradling something in her hands. ‘What have you got there?’ he said.

She opened her palms and inside was the tiniest, most perfect miniature tortoise. At first he thought it was a toy but then it lifted its little head up at him. He knelt down beside her. It must have only just come out of its egg, and it was exquisite. ‘Captain Hook!’ he whispered. ‘You’ve found treasure!’ He ran his finger along its soft shell. ‘Where did you find that?’

‘Over there. There’s lots of them,’ she said, pleased at her own cleverness.

‘Show me!’ he said. She leapt up and jerked her jacket off the brambles, making an additional hole or two, and she skipped off. He followed in her quick little footsteps as she jumped through the bushes, stopping to scratch the occasional itch.

‘Here!’ she said, stopping suddenly. Sure enough, there at her feet a large mother tortoise was ambling through the scrub with five little babies following her, struggling to catch up, taking ten steps to her every one. Johnny silently crouched down to observe them. Smudge came up to him, put her arm around his neck and balanced herself against him, still holding one of the babies in her hand, the other ruffling his hair in much the same way he had ruffled hers. She smelt of bilberries and soap. He watched as she squatted down and tried to ram a bilberry into the baby tortoise’s mouth, mumbling words of encouragement to it. She was such a little thing herself with her turned-up nose covered in freckles, her baby soft skin, the bilberry-stained lips, her big, dark eyes so wide and clear.

Annie was much further up the hill, her back to them, picking away. Down on the water he could see Frank and Clem in the same places still fishing.

‘I don’t think she wants it,’ Smudge said, looking up at Johnny. ‘Do tortoises drink milk?’

‘No,’ Johnny said. ‘They’re reptiles.’

‘Orangina?’ she asked.

‘No.’

‘Does it bounce?’

‘No.’

‘It looks bouncy.’

‘Well, it doesn’t bounce.’

‘This one is my pet.’

‘You’d better keep it with its mummy,’ Johnny said.

‘No,’ she said as if that was a very bad idea. ‘She’s mine. I’ve given her a name.’

‘Oh, what’s she called?’

‘She’s called “Granny”.’

‘Granny?’

‘Yes.’

‘That’s nice,’ Johnny said stroking one of the other little tortoises. He sat down on the earth. ‘Do you have a granny, Smudge?’

She shook her head. Then she nodded, scrunching her nose up as she thought about it. ‘Well, I do have one. I heard her on the telephone. She doesn’t like us.’

‘I’m sure she does.’

‘No, she doesn’t. She called my mummy a
stupid bitch
and said my daddy should be
locked up and they should throw away the key
.’ She shouted out the last bit in a slight Irish accent and then bent down to shove another bilberry into the mother tortoise’s mouth.

‘There’s a good tortoise,’ she whispered into her cupped palm. ‘We’ll have a nice bath and a cup of tea.’

Johnny looked up. Annie was waving at them, holding up the bottle of water. He beckoned her to come over. ‘What about cousins?’ Johnny asked Smudge but she shook her head. ‘No other family?’

She shrugged her shoulders. ‘I want a big brother but my mummy doesn’t want another baby but my daddy does.’ She looked up at him, squinting into the sun. ‘I know how you get babies. Four million sperms have a race – you can’t see them coz they’re teeny weeny weeny – but they’re all trying to get to the egg that the lady’s hatching in her winkle.’

‘I see,’ said Johnny, pretending to be suddenly fascinated with what the tortoises were up to and shortly Annie came over and joined them, her bag full of berries. She’d tied her hair back into a ponytail and her skin was glowing with perspiration. Her face lit up when she saw the tortoises.

‘Oh, look!’ she said, crouching down to examine them.

‘I found them,’ Smudge said proudly.

‘Aren’t they sweet? Oh, Smudge, clever you!’

‘This one’s my pet.’ She opened her hand and showed her mother the tiny tortoise on her palm.

‘No, love, you can’t keep it. It belongs with its mummy.’

‘No, it doesn’t.’

‘Well, you can look after it for a while,’ she said.

‘It can be my birthday present,’ she said as if this was the obvious solution.

Annie kissed her forehead. ‘Drink this!’ she said, holding up the water to Smudge’s lips. Smudge drank a little and then dribbled some out into her palm for Granny, who dipped her head obligingly.

They watched the tortoises for a bit longer and then Annie and Johnny moved over into the shade of a large olive tree, sitting down and leaning against its trunk, shoulder to shoulder, the crickets pausing their cacophony. Annie offered him the water. ‘After you,’ he said and watched her drinking thirstily. She passed it over again and he drank.

The view was beautiful. Only the tip of
the
Little Utopia
’s mast was visible from here; it swung from side to side over the top of the rocks like the pendulum of a metronome. The water in the bay was a patchwork of turquoise and green and further out where it turned into a darker blue Johnny spied a boat with its sails up, a white triangle slipping along the curve of the Earth; there was a good breeze out there and he yearned to be in it. He shut his eyes and listened to the crickets, which had started up their racket again, comfortable with their presence now. In the distance he could hear Smudge’s tuneful little voice singing her made-up hums to the tortoises. He drank more water, one eye on the dozens of blue butterflies fluttering by. He wiped the sweat from his brow, his elbow brushing Annie’s arm.

‘When’s Smudge’s birthday?’ he asked her.

She’d been dozing and opened her eyes. ‘In a couple of days.’

‘She said she was going to be five and a half.’ Annie smiled and shut her eyes again. He watched the smile drop slowly from her face, like melting wax, as the sadness took hold. Life had disappointed her somewhere along the line and he wondered
how
life could disappoint, whether it happened suddenly or insidiously. She opened her eyes and he quickly looked away.

‘You must think I’m a rotten mother, Johnny,’ she said. ‘A sad old drunk.’

‘No, of course I don’t,’ he said, sitting up a little. ‘Besides, I don’t know you.’

‘No, that’s right,’ she said quietly, putting her hand over his, patting it gently. ‘You don’t know me.’

She took the bottle out of his hand, unscrewed the lid and took a swig. He looked over in the direction of where Smudge was playing. He couldn’t see her from here but he could still hear her humming.

‘He saved me, you know,’ Annie said. She’d been looking far out to where the sea met the sky but she turned her eyes to his. ‘I will always put him first, you know. Always. Whatever else Frank’s done, he saved me.’

She’d lost Johnny now; he ran his hand through his hair. ‘Saved you from what?’

She smiled at him and shook her head as if she’d been foolish to expect him to understand. ‘From myself,’ she said, looking back at the pendulum mast. Johnny was the one who felt foolish for not realizing what she’d meant.

‘Well, he seems like an amazing man, your husband.’

She dragged her eyes from the mast back to Johnny’s. ‘Yes, he is.’ She had that same flat tone to her voice and they sat there saying nothing for a while.

‘I could never leave him, you know. Never.’

‘No,’ Johnny said, confused. ‘Why would you want to?’

She made a sound like a little laugh but it got stuck in her throat somewhere. ‘I’m a bad person, Johnny.’

He had the feeling that she was going to cry and he had no idea what to do about it. ‘Of course you’re not.’

She looked away, out at the bay again, and so did he. He wanted to help her, to cheer her up, to stop this melancholy that he couldn’t fathom. He pulled out his tobacco and rolled a cigarette, lit it and passed it over to her.

‘Thanks,’ she said, touched by the gesture. He could feel her watching him as he rolled himself a cigarette and it made him slightly self-conscious. When he looked up to light his own cigarette she was still watching him. This time he didn’t look away.

‘I’ve seen the way you look at my breasts, Johnny,’ she said, exhaling the smoke, moving nothing but her lips, blowing cool air on to his skin. He paused, flicked his lighter off and took a drag. He wasn’t sure if she was mocking him or not. He felt short of air, his breathing was high and quick and he thought that if he spoke his voice might come out cracked.