The Boat (20 page)

‘Well? Did you?’ he said as flippantly as he could.

She paused and took a cigarette of her own. ‘It was different,’ she said.

Wrong answer
. He looked up to check whether the sail was luffing or if the wind had dropped or if the sky had fallen in or anything just as long as he didn’t have to look at her.
He wasn’t even looking at you; he was looking at me.
This was awful, ugly, being at war with her.

She sighed and turned her back to him, tucking her knees up to her chin. He couldn’t see her face but he saw her wipe her eyes roughly as if they were betraying her. ‘You started it…’ she said.

He had made her cry. He wanted to reach out and touch her but he couldn’t do it.

‘You started it, Johnny. You did it too. And now you’re acting like I’m the one that’s done something wrong.’

It was true. He tried to tell her he was sorry with his eyes.

‘Let’s get off this bloody boat,’ she said and he leant forward and wiped away a tear from her cheek with his thumb. He had meant to do it tenderly but it didn’t come out that way. He didn’t seem able to reach his tenderness any more.
Yes, they must get off the boat.

‘We need wind,’ he said quietly. ‘We’re really low on diesel.’

By the afternoon the wind had completely died and the water had become flat and glassy for miles around. They were prisoners of the open sea. The sails flopped about and the boom banged. The boat barely moved and his head still ached. There were dolphins everywhere, a stream of them leaping and diving across the expanse of sea – the lucky things needing no wind. A pod of mushroom-coloured whales with bulbous noses passed by not more than a hundred yards away. Frank had looked them up in a book and Johnny had wondered out loud why everybody wanted to know the names of everything, couldn’t it be enough just to see things, did we have to attach labels to everything? Frank had been watching him carefully since then, as if he were worried about him.

Annie was in the cockpit. Her back was slightly sunburnt so she had put her clothes back on, a flowery sundress that Johnny hadn’t seen before. She was plucking the chicken; her dextrous and able hands firm and strong as she ripped out the feathers and flicked them overboard, leaving a trail behind the boat, piles of them getting caught on the bows of the tender, a soft, gingery moustache sitting on its wooden lip. Smudge was seated with Clem at the bows; they were singing together some repetitive nursery rhyme as they painted their toenails to match Granny’s, the waft of acrylic hovering on the boat, being blown nowhere.

Frank was clattering about in the galley making coffee. He passed Johnny and Annie up a cup and then joined them in the cockpit with the guitar. He looked out over the glassy sea and began to strum it lazily as the boat drifted nowhere, the sound tripping far across the water and he wondered whether anyone on earth could hear them. Johnny squinted at the horizon. It was a bitch of a day. They were becalmed; they could be stuck here for ever.

‘I don’t think you
should
leave us, Johnny,’ Frank said, once again reading his mind.

‘It would be an impossibility under present circumstances,’ Johnny said, eyes as ever scanning the water for signs of wind.

‘You and she will be fine,’ Frank said quietly, glancing down the boat at Clem. ‘You can’t force solutions on problems, Johnny. Solutions emerge by themselves.’

Johnny picked up his tobacco, glancing at Frank as he did so, glad of the conversation. Annie ripped off another handful of feathers and chucked them overboard. Johnny watched them floating on the water, balancing on the surface, drifting with the boat.

‘You two, you’re at the beginning of your journey,’ Frank said. ‘And there’s always pain with birth.’ He tapped out one of his cigarettes, catching it in his mouth.

‘Not that you’d know,’ Annie said, rolling her eyes.

‘Don’t be annoyed with her,’ Frank continued, ignoring Annie’s remark, lighting his cigarette. ‘Or us,’ he said.

Johnny looked up at him. He didn’t want Frank to stop talking.

‘When you’re feeling frustrated or upset by a situation or a person, Johnny, you’ve got to try and remember that it’s
not
the person or the situation you’re upset by, it’s
your feelings
about them.’

He leant forward and lit Johnny’s cigarette. Johnny sat back and inhaled deeply. ‘Maybe sometimes it
is
someone else’s fault, Frank,’ he said.

‘Yes, but they’re still
your
feelings. They’re not someone else’s. You are responsible for your reactions, Johnny. And responsibility means not blaming anyone or anything for your situation.’ He smiled again, his eyes full of kindness and understanding. ‘Not even yourself.’

Frank had a way of calming him; his words worked as balm on Johnny’s splintering thoughts. He only felt troubled when he felt out of control, that things were happening
to
him. He looked back at the scattered feathers in the glassy water; they lay in a straight line as far as the eye could see. The
Little Utopia
was moving. She had left a feathery wake. Time was slipping by just fast enough for the naked eye to miss it.

He shut his eyes and took a deep breath and when he looked inside himself, he found that his jealousy had lost its sting and he wondered why he had felt so fearful. After all, what
was
his big fear? That Clem might stop loving him? That she might love Frank? She would always love him. Wasn’t that what his father had said after his mother died:
you can’t lose the love
. So what if she loved Frank too? Johnny himself loved Frank. Everything was going to pass anyhow. One day they’d be looking back at all this. It was as transient as the blue cigarette smoke hovering over their heads.

Frank was strumming on the guitar again, playing something new, something familiar. A Beatles’ song his mother used to play on the big old record player.

Johnny leant back and listened, his eyes as always scanning the water for wind. How did Frank manage to see through situations, to the core of things and find what was real in there, the seed of truth behind the bullshit? His mind worked like a sieve, straining out the waste. Annie was right; he did see everything. He wondered what Frank had been like when he had been his age. He would have liked to know him then.

Frank was watching him as he strummed. Then he stopped suddenly. ‘Hey, Smudge?’ he called down to the bows of the boat. Both Smudge and Clem looked up. There was something similar about them, not just their hair and nails, but their expressions. They could have been sisters: what with Clem being so small, the age gap seemed less.

‘Why don’t you give us a show?’ her father said. Johnny knew that Frank was trying to cheer him up. He smiled. Smudge’s face had lit up.

‘Yes! Yes!’ she cried, leaping up and down. She ran down the decks and into the cockpit, leaning over her father whispering something in his ear. He whispered back.

‘Yes! Oh yes!’ she cried. ‘I have to get ready! I have to put my costume on!’ With that she scampered down into the galley, shutting the cockpit doors behind her.

Frank reached across and rested his hand on Johnny’s thigh. ‘Stay with us,’ he said quietly. ‘You want to go east? Let’s go east. Let’s go through the Suez Canal, head for the Indian Ocean.’

When Frank said things like that Johnny couldn’t imagine ever leaving them. It would be insane to turn down such an offer. Yet he would; they had to move on. He and Clem both knew that; they had agreed that. But the pull to stay was great; Johnny felt that he was halfway through some kind of metamorphosis, that if he left now, his transformation would be incomplete. He could see it clearly – his old life, lived in a happy kind of ignorance, and the new one, where wonder after wonder seemed to unfold before him. It was all a question of risk, stepping into that uncertainty.

‘Sometimes you have to take risks to get the real rewards,’ Frank said, those dark eyes looking right into him and reading him like a chart, the tip of his cigarette crackling fiercely as he sucked the life out of it. Annie was watching him from her husband’s side, willing him to stay; he could see it in her face. Frank was almost whispering. ‘When you start making the right decisions moment to moment, everything falls into place with absolutely no effort at all, Johnny. Don’t force those solutions. This moment, the one you are experiencing right now, is exactly as it should be. It is the result of all your other choices.’

Johnny looked up at the sky and felt the moment, the one right now, and it felt fine. He smiled and watched as Annie tossed the plucked chicken into the bucket of seawater and began to wash it down. Johnny stared at the corpse, white and puny underneath all those feathers, like an old man’s scrotum.

Then the cockpit doors opened slightly as Smudge pushed her nose and mouth around them. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, take your seats!’ she yelled. Then the doors were firmly shut again and Clem came down from the bows, put her book aside and sat down next to Johnny. He took her hand and she let him. They were all right. They were going to be fine. That night had just been a shock for both of them.

The cockpit doors flung open and Smudge was posing on the companionway steps dressed in some pink frilly knickers of Annie’s and a matching bra stuffed with several pairs of socks and a pair of way too big wedged shoes. She looked extremely funny, especially because her expression was so focused, so intent. Johnny tried hard not to laugh.

Then Frank began to strum his guitar and it only got funnier. Smudge wasn’t remotely distracted by their muted giggling; she began to wiggle her hips with the music, her face deadpan, one eyebrow raised. She had struck a pose and was going to keep it. Her arms held wide the cockpit doors, her knees were bent forward as she wiggled, her bottom sticking out, her sock-cleavage thrust forward, her head tilted back, her lips forming a kiss.

‘
I wanna be loved by you…
’ she sang in a breathy, sultry, perfectly mimicked voice. She was doing a Marilyn Monroe impression and she was doing it uncannily well. It was quite the most extraordinary thing that either Johnny or Clem had ever seen: the sophistication, the perfect pitch, the sizzling expression. Smudge was mesmeric. Clem covered her mouth to contain herself, to plug the laughter.

Smudge must have seen the film because she struck the poses and sang the words with an incredible and almost disturbing accuracy. She was pointing her finger at Johnny and bouncing up and down when a pair of socks rolled out of her cleavage. But being the pro that she evidently was, she seamlessly bent down to pick them up again and stuffed them back inside and just carried on singing in that sweet child voice, hoiking up the giant knickers
.
Johnny wiped the tears of laughter from his eyes, trying desperately to keep a straight face, which he failed to do when during the instrumental she turned a little circle clunking in the heels before striking the finale attitude, hands on hips, lips pursed. They clapped and cheered and Smudge kicked off the shoes, looking quite thrilled by how well she had gone down. ‘I’ll do another!’ she said and scurried back down into the galley.

‘I think that’ll do!’ Frank called down after her.

‘Oh my Lord,’ Clem said, still laughing. ‘She’s going to be little performer. She’s incredible!’

Frank, a big grin on his face, turned to the pair of them then and laid down his guitar. ‘So are you two going to stay with us a little longer or what?’

Johnny and Clem looked at each other, the laughter dissipating. ‘We’ll see,’ Johnny said. After all, decisions meant nothing right now floating in a motionless boat without a breath of wind.

Much later and in renewed spirits, Johnny turned the engine on and
the
Little Utopia
spluttered into yet another deserted bay for the night. They’d barely travelled ten miles all day but Johnny had spotted vague wisps of cloud on the horizon and was sure there was wind on its way; wind that would carry them forwards. The hills were gradually getting higher; great mountains surrounded them on three sides and birds of prey swooped down the slopes looking for rabbit or rodent or whatever it was that they ate. The sun set and they drank wine in the cockpit and listened to the eerie howls of the wolves in the hills from the safety of their floating home.

By the early hours of the morning, the four of them were seated around the kitchen table, happily drunk but playing a game of Five Hundred in a concentrated silence. They’d been playing for hours, knocking back the wine. Five Hundred was a difficult game but Johnny and Clem had got the hang of it now. Clem had been dealt the mother of all trumps, the two of diamonds, three hands in a row and both she and Johnny were proving to be excellent players, giving Frank and Annie a run for their money. There was something refreshingly straightforward about cards that Johnny loved: there were clear rules, no room for negotiation, you won or you lost. He had always liked numbers, the precision of mathematics. He was partnered with Annie while Clem and Frank were together. Three of them were fiercely competitive; only Annie’s modus operandi was all about trying not to mess things up for her partner. Johnny noticed that for some reason she had dressed up, she had a clean white shirt on, no bra, mascara on her eyes and some shiny stuff on her lips, as if she was going for a night on the town, which was certainly out of the question – God knew where the nearest town was.

Frank and Clem had won the last two hands and Frank was now dealing a new hand. Clem was busy sucking her thumb as the cards landed in front of her, her right hand determinedly stroking a hot spot just behind her earlobe as if her life depended on it, and yet her focus was entirely on the hand being dealt. Johnny poured the last of the bottle into their glasses.

‘You look about Smudge’s age when you do that,’ Frank said to her. ‘What are you doing with that other hand?’ he asked. Johnny was wrong, he
had
been watching after all.

‘Hot spots,’ she said, reluctantly taking her thumb out to speak. Johnny thought he’d been unfair earlier. She hadn’t been doing anything deliberately; her thumb was her comfort, it aided her concentration. Alcohol made him a much kinder gentler person: he must never forget that. He loved her fiercely then, in that moment. Everything was going to be just fine, moment to moment.