The Boat (36 page)

The trouble didn’t really start until they reached the church where it became apparent that someone else was also having a wedding that day – someone else with a hundred friends. She and Rob had got off the bike and run up the path under the arch to join Johnny and all of their party huddling in the porch out of the rain while, to her bewilderment, hearty singing, coughing and wedding noises were coming from inside. They waited until the other service was over and the multitude had drifted off round to the other side for photographs – something else that they’d forgotten to organize – then they cornered the vicar. He seemed most surprised to find another bride at his church. He said he couldn’t possibly marry them, they hadn’t confirmed the booking and the banns hadn’t been read out, aside from anything else. This was puzzling, not least because they had no idea what banns were. Clem suggested to the vicar that the banns might be read out this very minute. There was much kerfuffle and pleading but the vicar was adamant: no banns, no wedding. Then there was the other business of Clem’s dad not turning up. And Rob had left the ring on the kitchen table. So in the end instead of a wedding the lot of them had gone across the road to the Falcon Inn for a pint or five before Johnny’s dad had had the brainwave.

The weather had turned again. By the time they got to Padstow harbour, the dark blanket of cloud had slowly slipped off the edge of the sky leaving a chilly sharp blue in its place. The wind was light but biting and the low winter sun cast long shadows across the oily harbour water. Their wedding clothes were now tucked into wellington boots and covered by jumpers and scarves and mismatched oilies that they’d found in the boathouse box. The five of them stood on the steep slope of the jetty ready to launch the old wooden Fireball off the trailer and into the rising tide, its rigging tinkling excitedly in the wind. Sarah and Rob were on one side standing in the freezing shallows and Johnny and Clem on the other while his dad wheeled the trailer back up to the boathouse. Clem hopped into the boat, her white skirt sticking out over the wellies, her make-up fallen in streaks down her face from where she had been crying earlier in the pub. Nobody mentioned it. Everyone pretended they hadn’t noticed her crying because it had seemed too callous to point out the reason – but they all knew exactly what it was. And it wasn’t the fact that the wedding hadn’t happened – they could get married any time – it was the fact that her own father hadn’t turned up. Just this once, he might have pulled out the stops. Johnny was so livid he couldn’t even say his name. She had been so thrilled when Jim had said yes, that he’d be delighted to give her away and Peter and Tim could definitely do page-boyish things. She had leapt about the flat doing naked dancing. And now the bastard hadn’t even shown up. Johnny saw how Clem would not accept the truth – even two hours in she was still making excuses for him, said
he’d probably got lost
and then later when he still wasn’t there she’d gone on about
how incredibly busy he was at the moment with his new job.
But Johnny saw how every time the Falcon door opened she turned around expectantly and how later she pretended she had something in her eye when it finally dawned on her that he wasn’t going to show up.

Clem sat herself near the mast at the bows of the Fireball, her heart racing with excitement. She zipped up her jacket to the neck and pulled her cuffs down over her fingers. It was colder on the water. Johnny took off his woolly hat and chucked it to her across the boat. She pulled it on and looked up towards the boathouse. Her mother was standing there waving down at them, incongruous in her high heels and puffy blue dress and the yellow oilskin Johnny’s dad had given her to keep warm. She was too polite to say no but Clem could see she didn’t want to spoil her outfit. But she looked good in it; she looked as if she was part of them all now. She wanted her mother to see how magical life was with the Loves; something had struck Clem that afternoon when her father hadn’t turned up: she had taken for granted the only person who had always been there in her life. She blew her mother a kiss just as Sarah rolled into the boat awkwardly, laughing, and the Fireball rocked from side to side. Johnny’s dad jumped in next and Rob and Johnny gave the boat a final shove into the water before neatly stepping on board themselves, Johnny having managed not to get wet at all. After much shuffling about and rope pulling and manoeuvring and leaning out and ducking down and pushing off and fast tacking, the Fireball smoothly slipped along the water and out of the harbour mouth into the estuary beyond, the wind a gentle south-westerly, the sun sharp and golden on her sails. Clem looked back and saw her mother still waving from the harbour wall. She waved back.

They sped through the water, Puffin Island on the sharp horizon ahead, past the cottage on the grey, craggy shore, the sun hiding behind the hills. Despite the squash and the weight the Fireball moved at a lick through the chilly November air. Johnny had Clem wrapped in his arms on the starboard side, kissing her cheek, one eye as always looking up at the sails despite the fact his dad was at the helm. Sarah was shivering, looking up at the sky and Rob was leaning out beside her. They changed tack and Sarah looked at her father. ‘Can you get on with it, Dad, it’s freezing,’ she said.

‘Oh yes, sorry. Got carried away. Such a beautiful day! Ready about…’ he said. They were almost parallel with the headland now, sheltered a little by the hills. ‘Lee ho!’ He tacked again; they ducked and the sails shook briefly as they snapped into their new positions. He bore away and the wind took them from behind on to a nice calm, balanced run.

‘As captain of this vessel,’ Johnny’s dad said in his booming voice that both Johnny and Rob had inherited, peering beneath the sails as he spoke in case some other lunatic might be out pleasure sailing today, ‘I am about to perform a marriage ceremony.’

‘Is it legal, by the way?’ Sarah asked.

‘Of course it’s legal,’ he said, looking up at the sail. ‘It’s more than legal. It’s elemental. Now, Sarah, you and Rob are witnesses. Clem, Johnny, you need to be either side of me. Have you got the ring this time, Rob?’

He was a man of eccentric authority. All eyes were on him. He fell quiet for a moment – he often forgot completely what he was talking about and they were all wondering what he was doing when he took his gaze up to the sky. ‘I wish your mother was here,’ he said. ‘She’d know how to do this properly. I can’t even remember the vows. I’m going to have to make them up.’

He brought the boat slowly up into the wind and backed the jib to heave to. He cleared his throat. ‘Here goes. Jonathan Love,’ he boomed above the flapping mainsail. ‘Are you crazy about this woman?’

Johnny smiled, looking straight across his father at Clem. ‘I am.’

‘Louder! We all need to hear. The sky, the sea, we are your witnesses.’

Johnny raised his voice. ‘I am!’

‘Do you love her more than anything in the world?’

Johnny laughed. ‘More than the world,’ he said and reached out and took her hands in his.

‘Do you promise to cherish, protect and worship her?’

‘I do.’

‘In sickness and in health?’

‘Absolutely.’

‘In plain sailing and stormy weather?’

‘Yes.’

‘Because life is hard, Johnny. Staying together is bloody hard. Walking out is easy.’

‘Yes, Dad,’ Johnny said, throwing his father a quick glance and then looking back into Clem’s beaming dark eyes. ‘I’m never walking out, I swear on my life.’

‘Where’s the poetry in you, lad? A woman needs poetry.’

Johnny smiled. ‘I love her. What more do you want?’

‘I’ll go to the next bit then,’ his dad said. ‘Do you take this wonderful woman as your wife?’

‘I do.’

‘Excellent. And you, Clemency Bailey?’

‘Oh yes,’ she said, leaning forward and kissing Johnny’s lips. The make-up was running down Clem’s cheeks again in black streams but this time unplugged by happiness.

‘No, wait,’ his dad said. ‘No kissing yet. I have to ask you first. Do you love my son, Jonathan David Love?

‘I do.’

‘A lot?’

‘Dad… get on with it.’ Johnny said.

‘I love him more than I can bear. I ache with love for him.’

‘You say that now, Clem, but are you going to love him when things aren’t so rosy? Are you going to love him when life throws slings and arrows at you?’

A shadow seemed to pass over her for she had never considered such an idea. It was inconceivable that anything life could throw at them would ever damage their love. It was indestructible. ‘Yes. Oh yes, I am,’ she said and turned to his dad, serious and intense. ‘I’ll love your son until the end of time, until the world has stopped and the sun doesn’t rise, until all the stars have gone out. You’ll see!’

Johnny squeezed her hand in his; he could feel a kind of burning in his chest and a lump in his throat.

‘Oh, I like that,’ his dad said. ‘That’s much more like it.
Until all the stars have gone out.
Clemency Bailey, do you take this man as your husband?’

‘I do.’

‘Ring, Rob?’ Rob leant forward and passed Johnny the ring and he slipped it on to Clem’s frozen finger. ‘Then I pronounce you man and wife! May the heavens shine on you now and forever!’

The heavens did. At that moment the golden sun peered out over the dip in the hill and lit up the boat. There was a quick little cheer and clap before Sarah said, ‘Right, can we go now? I’m frozen solid,’ and Rob was quick to grab the jib sheet. But neither Johnny nor Clem moved; they weren’t cold at all, they were lit by the same fire from within. They stared at each other. They were married now.

When they got back to the quayside and were pulling the heavy Fireball out of the water, all of them trembling with cold but full up with new warmth, Johnny was surprised to see Clem’s father up by the boathouse leaning on a car, smoking a cigarette and waiting for them. He was wearing a brown shoulder-padded suit. Johnny had hold of one of the trailer handlebars and Rob had the far side and the others were pushing up from the rear. Jim was watching them. Johnny turned to see whether Clem had spotted her father but she hadn’t; she was at the back, head down, pushing with all her might up the slope. He took a deep breath. Nothing was going to spoil this day. No one was ever going to make his wife unhappy again. He could sense Jim moving towards him but he didn’t acknowledge him. As they swung the trailer round back on itself along the quayside, towards Jim and then away from him, Johnny glanced quickly at him as they approached. ‘What took you so long?’ he said.

‘Yeah, so sorry about that,’ Jim said, smoothing his hair, hovering, taking a drag of his cigarette. ‘Peter fell off the climbing frame and we had to take him to A and E and then…’

He never got the rest of the sentence out. Johnny’s right fist came out of nowhere and smacked Jim right between the eyes without his feet missing a single step. The accuracy and ferocity of the punch took even Johnny by surprise. It was so quick that the others, except for Rob, seemed to have missed it altogether and they all just carried on heaving the Fireball up into the car park with their heads down, not one of them noticing the man in a flash suit lying on the cobbles with a bleeding face.

By dawn the rain had begun to fall and Johnny put Frank’s oilskins on. The wind had picked up and was blowing so hard it felt personal, as if it was trying to blow the hair right off his head. The bows smack-banged on the water like a frying pan. Smudge, having slept through the pounding in the forepeak, had woken early and crawled up into the cockpit full of tales of her dreams. She had dreamt she had springs instead of legs and she had been jumping hundreds of feet high across the sea, bouncing off the waves. She said she had been very good at wave-jumping and wondered whether she could do it out of her dreams as well. Then she promptly leant over and vomited.

Johnny chucked a bucket of water over the vomit and got her in her oilies and clipped her on with the harness and she’d sat there clinging on to the side puking over the edge every so often but otherwise not unhappy. She didn’t ask about Frank and Annie but they permeated everything, they were everywhere, in every cranny of the boat. As the wind blew harder and the sea got rougher there was less and less room for thinking of them; hard sailing demanded present-moment awareness and seasickness was too debilitating for anything other than being sick; there was room for nothing but survival and Johnny was grateful for that. He had decided that they weren’t going to risk stopping until the water tank was empty; he was going to get them to Sardinia or Corsica, somewhere very far from here, where they could paint the boat, dump her or sell her and start again.

Clem too crawled up into the cockpit at some stage. She was vomiting as well but she took the helm while he went to lie down for forty winks in the chart-table berth. He didn’t bother taking off his oilies or boots, he clambered into the hole of a berth and closed his eyes, hovering at the edge of sleep where the squeaks and thuds of the boat in the water kept turning into Frank’s screams and cries. Johnny was beginning to understand that Frank would never let him rest; even when he did drift off and the roll of the boat pushed his body up against the inside of the cockpit, Frank was there. The hardness of the fibreglass became Frank’s body pressing up against Johnny’s. Twice he’d woken up aroused and ashamed, having dreamt of Frank’s tipless fingers brushing the base of his spine. When he heard the low, soft rumble of Frank’s voice up in the cockpit talking to Clem he almost flew out of his berth and up into the cockpit ready to take him on. Clem had watched bemusedly as he ran up and down the decks shouting and swearing against the spray of the waves. But there was no one there, just a phantom. And yet
Johnny couldn’t shake the feeling that he was being watched.
He sees things.
Yes, he could feel those dark, inscrutable eyes following him wherever he went.

He stopped trying to sleep after that and became obsessed with erasing Frank from the boat. He had to get rid of all traces of him. He bagged his clothes. He kept the cash – Frank had hoards of it around the boat. He went through their things: the paperwork, their passports, noticing that Smudge’s name was in Frank’s passport not Annie’s. He wrote Smudge’s name beneath his own: Imogen Love. Who would suspect otherwise? A young couple on a boat with a child: he saw no reason for suspicion. He took out the scissors and cut their papers and passports into pieces and bagged them with a couple of tins of soup and chucked them overboard.