The Boat (24 page)

His solitude did not last. He could hear cries and hollers – Smudge had spotted the opportunity for some fun and was swimming her way towards him. He shook the water from his hair, his ears. ‘Johnneeee,’ she cried. ‘Wait for meeeee!’

She looked so small and vulnerable, splashing her messy jumping doggy paddle his way. He swam towards her and held out his arms for her. She was way out of her depth, so trusting, so reliant on the goodness of others, so easy to betray. He could see Frank watching them from the shore and wondered whether this was all part of some perverted plan, whether this was what lay ahead for her, to be passed from hands to hands. Of course Johnny could save Smudge if he really wanted to: get Clem and Annie in the dinghy, leave Frank under some pretence, get in the boat and abandon him. But Smudge was not his problem. She was Annie’s. His priority was Clem.

Smudge clambered into his arms laughing, slippery, wriggly and naked. He wondered why someone this happy needed saving at all. ‘I found a monster, Johnny!’ she said.

So did I.

‘Did you kill it with your spear?’ he asked.

‘No. I let it go.’ Her eyelashes had matted together like a doll’s eyes; she looked so perfect and fragile. ‘Be the monster, Johnny. Be it!’

He dived under the water, staying still for a moment before grabbing her and lifting her high into the air, throwing her up with a monster growl. She screamed with a delighted terror. He could do this. He could pretend for just one day.

Johnny lay on his towel on the other side of Clem, who was reading her book – something Frank had given her by Krishna someone. The emptiness had subsided now; he was beginning to inhabit himself again. He rolled himself a smoke and watched Smudge lying dreamily in the shallows of the water, humming to herself. He was looking at Frank from the corner of his eye – he was turning the chicken on the spit – those tipless fingers, those dents on his back constant reminders of his crimes. Annie, trying hard to hide her drunkenness, was overdoing the sobriety. She had sat herself down inelegantly on the rug and was pouring coffee into cups, like a sloshed Mary Poppins, singing snatches of lift-music. She passed Frank more coffee. She was trying to please him. It was pathetic to witness. Christ, they
had
to get out of here.

His gaze returned to the horizon, to escape. There were faint wisps of cloud smeared along the edge. Smudge came running up out of the water and jumped on to her father, pressing her wet body up against his back. For different reasons both Frank and Johnny flinched. Frank put one hand behind his back instinctively to support her. ‘Yuck! You’re cold and wet!’ he cried. ‘Get off!’ Johnny looked away.

‘Is that the chicken that made the egg for my cake?’ Smudge asked, sliding down the side of him, looking at the chicken upside down.

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘The chicken that the old lady killed?’

‘That’s right.’

‘The chicken in the bucket?’

‘The very one.’

‘But I want it alive again.’

‘Well, it’s too late. It’s dead now and we’re going to eat it in about an hour,’ he said.

She slid right off him and on to the ground and turned on to her tummy in the sand, chin in her hands as she looked at the roasting chicken. ‘So we just took everything away from it, its baby eggs and its feathers, we breaked its neck and we drowned it, and then we’re going to eat it?’ she asked, matter-of-factly, wanting to get the sequence of events straight in her head. There was no judgement in her tone: her father had taught her that all right.

‘It’s a nasty old world,’ Johnny said, flicking the wet sand off his legs. He couldn’t help himself; the water had unfrozen him.

Annie looked round at him, nervously. Clem yawned and stretched and put her book down. ‘I think I fancy a swim,’ she said and he watched her getting up, her lovely, strong golden body. He didn’t want her to take her clothes off for Frank’s dirty eyes to feast on her. But he could only blame himself for he had handed her to Frank on a plate. Now he suspected that whole escapade had been deliberate, that seduction of him by Annie on the hillside: it had been intended to feed his guilt so that he would want to make amends. He’d been taken for ride after ride. He’d been a total fool.

‘Coming, Smudge?’ Clem said, holding out her hand. ‘Shall we jump off the rocks?’

Johnny watched the pair of them skip down the beach. Clem was doing cartwheels in a perfect straight line and Smudge was trying to copy her, both of them carefree and oblivious. He wanted it to stay that way. He noticed that Annie was uncomfortable now that it was just the three of them; he could see her hands trembling, but that might well have been the alcohol.

‘You seem pretty detached today, Johnny,’ Frank said after a silence, leaning back, his posture the exact echo of Johnny’s, their ankles crossed, eyes out at sea. Detachment seemed a pretty straightforward choice right now, the best way to cope while partaking in this ugly little charade. He said nothing.

‘Not that it’s a bad way to be,’ Frank added. ‘Quite the opposite. Without it we’re prisoners of helplessness and hopelessness, victims of mundane needs—’

‘Will you just shut up for once, Frank,’ Johnny said and it sounded so good to his own ears. He wasn’t angry; it was just that he could no longer pretend. He was tired of all the bullshit. Frank turned around, taken by surprise, and Johnny shifted forward, picking at an old bite on his shin. He felt freed by Clem’s absence. He didn’t have to play this game any more.

‘You can stop it all now,’ Johnny said, turning to him, looking him right in the eye. ‘I
know
.’

‘You know
what
?’ Frank asked, defenceless, intrigued.

‘I know what you are,’ Johnny said, lighting up a cigarette, his hand trembling a little, one eye on where the girls were. He saw Annie reach out for the black bag with the bottle in it.

‘And what am I?’ Frank asked. There was a faint smile on his lips.

Johnny blew the smoke out slowly. ‘I don’t care what you do. I don’t care how you justify it, because I know you will. But I want nothing to do with it. Nothing.’

Frank took a breath as if he was going to say something but thought better of it. He took his focus out to the sea and uncrossed then recrossed his legs.

‘By the way, you keep your filthy hands off my wife,’ Johnny added. ‘That’s all over now.’

Frank held his hands up in a mock-hostage way. ‘Whatever you say, Johnny.’ Then he leant back against his palms, nodding to himself, working things out. Annie was cowering. She had the bag clutched in her lap; her hand had snuck inside.

‘Annie, darling,’ Frank said, not unkindly. Annie cowered further, hiding behind her hair and Johnny saw the immensity of her fear, just a flash of it as she glanced at her husband. ‘What have you been saying to Johnny?’

‘Nothing,’ she said. Too quickly.

‘Don’t blame her,’ Johnny said.

‘Nothing at all, love?’ Frank said, ignoring Johnny.

‘The truth,’ Annie whispered. Johnny saw her summon all her bravery. ‘He knows the truth,’ she whispered in a mouse-like voice.

‘Oh, Annie,’ Frank said, hanging his head and rubbing his eyebrows with a sigh as if this was all a great joke. ‘What has she been telling you?’ The way he looked up at Johnny was so resigned, so amused, as though this had all happened many times before, that temporarily Johnny was confused. ‘What? That I was some kind of super interrogator? That I was the leader of some high-powered paedophile ring?’

Johnny took a drag of his fag. He could see Clem and Smudge holding hands jumping into the water from the rocks. ‘That’s right, Mr Samaritan.’

There was the briefest pause. ‘Mr Samaritan?’ He laughed. ‘I haven’t heard that one before. That’s what they called me, yes? Was it the IRA?’ He turned to Annie. ‘Not the Foreign Legion, love? Not the SAS? Not SO19? There are so many versions, I forget where we are.’

‘Please don’t,’ she whispered, unscrewing the lid of the whisky.

‘I should have seen this coming,’ he said to Johnny. ‘I apologize. She does this every now and then. I should have noticed. It’s all part of her… condition,’ he said, waving his hand as if Johnny knew what he was talking about.

‘Darling,’ he said gently, turning to his wife. ‘You should have told me. Have you stopped taking the yellow pills?’

She nodded. She was staring at Frank, her eyes full of some fresh torment. ‘Please don’t,’ she whispered and they glared at each other, locked in some ancient battle. ‘You mustn’t, Frank.’

‘I have to tell him, Annie,’ he said gently and he turned his back on his wreck of a wife. She drank from the bottle.

‘Did she tell you about herself, Johnny? No? How she’s spent more of her life inside institutions than outside of them? How she’s been sectioned more times than you could possibly imagine? How we had to leave in a hurry before they locked her up again? How living on this boat is the only way we can stay together? Do you know how many labels she’s been given in her life? Psychotic, delusional, schizophrenic, pathological liar, criminally insane, a mythomaniac… the list goes on.’ He spoke the words as carelessly as if they were ingredients for a recipe.

Annie started to sob. ‘Is this true, Annie?’ Johnny asked, utterly bewildered by the pair of them. She threw him a glance of inconsolable wretchedness. Then her head sagged, her hair strung across her face and her shoulders began to heave.

‘Her mother left when she was little. Her father was a doctor.’ Frank leant in towards Johnny and continued confidentially. ‘Both she and her sister had sexual relations with him for many years. She gets it all muddled. Don’t you, love?’ he said, placing a hand on her back. She was curled up into a ball with her head between her knees, racked with silent sobs.

‘Annie? Look at me!’ Johnny cried. ‘Is this true?’.

‘She was whimpering. ‘Yes…’ Frank looked like a beaten man. He sighed gently. ‘I don’t suppose she told you any of that. I’m sorry, Johnny, it’s my fault. I should have noticed. I need to get her back on the right medication. Please don’t be hard on her.’

Johnny stared at them both, unable to fathom what the hell was going on. He sucked on his cigarette and looked out at the horizon.
Wind, please come. Get us away from these dreadful people.

When Clem returned from the rocks, Smudge having run on ahead, she was surprised to find Annie curled up on the blanket crying, with Johnny and Frank sitting near by not taking any notice of her tears. Smudge had tucked her little body tightly into her mother’s and was faintly humming a tune. Clem turned to Johnny for some sort of explanation but he didn’t meet her eye, he was looking out to sea as always obsessing about the wind. She looked at Frank who was seated on the blanket beside his wife, reading his book, one hand resting comfortingly on her hip. He caught her eye.

‘She’s just tired and emotional,’ he said and Clem looked back at Johnny who shrugged his shoulders dismissively as if he didn’t care what the hell was wrong with her and went back to looking out at the horizon.

Clem crouched down beside Annie. ‘Are you all right?’ she asked, stroking Annie’s arm, trying to smooth away the pain. ‘Shall we go down to the water, Annie?’

Annie didn’t respond. And when she did, she turned slowly to look up at Clem as if she had no idea at all who she was, so lost was she in her own unhappiness.

‘Come on, let’s freshen you up,’ Clem said helping her to her feet. She slowly led her down to the water’s edge and sat her in the shallows, gently bathing her, splashing the cool water over her thighs, cupping handfuls and washing her face. It worked; the water seemed to revive her. Soon she stopped crying.

‘What’s wrong, Annie?’ Clemmie asked but Annie shook her head.

They sat there for a while. Eventually Annie mumbled something and Clem asked her to repeat it, leaning in to hear what she was saying. Annie echoed Frank’s words in a whisper, ‘I’m just tired and emotional.’

‘OK. Do you need to sleep?’ Clemmie asked.

Annie nodded and got herself to her feet. ‘I think I’ll go back to the boat now.’

Annie was a strong swimmer, Clemmie watched her slip into the water, in her clothes, and take powerful, steady strokes towards the
Little Utopia,
leaving only ripples and a peculiar sadness in her wake. Clem stood there at the water’s edge watching until she reached the boat. Annie hauled herself up on to the transom out of the water, before disappearing below deck, not once looking back. Soon the dulcet tones of Roberta Flack began to trip across the water and Clem turned back towards the others. How silent and miserable everyone had been after that; all the unsaid things seemed to weigh down the air until one by one they had all lain down and fallen asleep.

The buzz of a fly vaguely woke her. She was dozing on the blanket, feeling the warm sun on the backs of her legs, her shoulders, her arms. Clem prised open her eyelids. Johnny’s sleeping body was turned away from her, his brown shoulders moving gently with his breath. She waved her fingers in some sort of dreamy reverie, profoundly comforted by the sight of him at her side; he was as familiar to her as her own body. Sleep had temporarily closed the distance between them. She shut her eyes again, not wanting to think about her own treacherous heart or the oddness of the afternoon.

The light had changed; the sun had moved; new shadows were strewn about the beach. The only sounds were the gentle lapping of the waves on the shore, an occasional distant bird cry and a heavy breathing coming from somewhere behind her. She sleepily turned her head to the side. Frank was propped up under the shade of a tree, a book open on his lap, snoozing in the shade. He looked more fragile asleep; there was a vulnerability to him she rarely saw. He looked old and unfamiliar to her but despite this her disloyal heart stirred a little at the sight. Smudge was soundly sleeping too, lying on her back next to him, half in the sun half in the shade, her little body star-fished out on the sand. It was as if they’d all been struck down, smitten by slumber, here in this bay of tranquillity. Clem closed her eyes, shifted a little closer to Johnny and drifted back into the safety of sleep.