The Boat (39 page)

‘Clem?’ Johnny said, but she didn’t hear him. He looked down; Smudge was tugging at his wrist, talking about sweets, and he let her drag him away, turning back just as he reached the end of the aisle, but Clem had disappeared and the large man was now trying to push past him. He looked out for her down the next aisle, loading up cereals and pasta as he went, but she had moved elsewhere.

When he got to the checkout he was surprised she hadn’t joined them and he left Smudge with the trolley and wandered the width of the supermarket but he couldn’t see her. The girl at the till began totting up his wares so he sent Smudge off to look for her. It took the girl a while to put everything into bags; he’d bought food enough for the trip to Corsica where his plan was to stop for a while, to get their lives back on track.

He was paying with Frank’s cash when Smudge came sliding down the aisle saying she couldn’t find Clem anywhere. He left her with the bags and went to look again himself, walking up and down the aisles, this time a little quicker, but to no avail. He and Smudge picked up the bags and went outside. She wasn’t there either. He looked up and down the main street but there was no sign of her anywhere so he presumed that she must have returned to the boat. Between them they carried the heavy bags all the way back to the marina, with much complaining and stopping from Smudge. When they got to the gate and entered the marina they could see from the end of the pontoon that the boat was still locked up, that she wasn’t on it. He walked down the decking, eyes scanning the place – she might be sitting down somewhere, staring into the water, taking a look at the other yachts. But she wasn’t there. He checked the boat. She was not on the decks and the door was still locked. He had the only key. He thought of the last moment he had seen her in the supermarket staring into space. His heart started to beat fast as a terrible idea took hold in him: she had gone.

He dropped the bags on the wooden pontoon decking, told Smudge to wait on the boat for Clem while he ran back out of the marina and along the road towards the supermarket. He ran as fast as he could, his chest aching. He knocked a woman out of his way as he ran inside, double-checking the aisles – running up and down. He paused at the very place where he had last seen her and turned to see what she had been staring at. Cereals.
Cornflakes.
Home, she was trying to get
home
. But he was her
home.
There was nothing at home for her. But maybe
nothing
was preferable to this.

He ran out into the street and down the road into town, his legs shaking beneath him. It was late afternoon now and the shops were all opening, the streets filling up. He wove his way between the people. He was looking out for the green bag, looking left and right, inside shops, down side streets. He came to a crossroads, looked up and down all ways and ran towards the sea. Eventually he found himself at the port, where ferries were coming and going, people were embarking and disembarking, going to Sicily and the other islands. He ran through a queue, crying out, ‘
Chica
,
bolsa verde
,’ useless Spanish words coming into his head. He jumped on to a small ferry, knocking people out of his way.

‘Clem!’ he was calling, ‘Clemency!’ his voice rising with increasing panic.

People were looking at him as though he was mad and the ticket man asked for his ticket and ushered him off the boat. He jumped on to another one and ran up and down, calling out her name, searching the faces, banging on the toilet door. People were shouting back at him now, shuffling about around him, out of his way. ‘
Mi femme
,’ he kept saying. He was causing such chaos a policeman on the quayside stepped down on to the pontoon. He couldn’t have the police involved – he jumped off the boat, darted back down the main street, calling out, crying, running until his legs could move no more.

Night was falling by the time he hobbled breathlessly back to the boat, his last hope extinguished as he got to the edge of the pontoon and saw Smudge alone on the cockpit sole surrounded by sweetie wrappers – Clem was long gone now. Smudge was looking up at him expectantly. He hadn’t even opened the cockpit doors for her. He looked down at her, shaking his head, the dreadful reality sinking in.

‘Oh dear, Johnny,’ she said. ‘Why do we keep losing people?’

He found the key and opened the cockpit doors. ‘Clem?’ he called forlornly, knowing full well there would be no response.

It was a few hours later, he was at the kitchen table, his head in his hands, when he looked up and saw the matchbox sitting right in front of him. It was a Swan Vestas matchbox, one from her collection. He reached out and took it in his hands. His name was written in tiny writing along the edge. He stared at it and then slid it open. Inside there were tiny pieces of broken shells and lying on them was the heart necklace, the heart he had given her all those years ago when she was just a child. That was it – that’s what he had noticed when he saw her walking down the pontoon – she’d taken off his heart. That was why she had kissed him. A kiss goodbye. He took it out and smoothed the slate in his fingers, just as he had done on the beach when he’d first fallen in love with her. There was something else in the box, beneath the broken shells: a tiny scrap of paper. He took it out and unfolded it. In tiny lettering she had written:
I can’t do this anymore, J. I can’t wait until the stars have all gone out for you to forgive me.
Very slowly he put the matchbox back down on the table. He stood up, turned around and pulled open the chart-table drawer – at least she’d taken some money with her. Her passport was missing. He shut the drawer again and climbed the companionway, stepping out into the cockpit. She wasn’t coming back. Their love was broken; he knew it as well as she did. She was right: he would never forgive her, not properly, not entirely. He didn’t have it in him. Tears welled up in his eyes as he looked out at the watery night sky and for a moment he thought the sun had flung itself out of orbit for he hadn’t noticed it getting dark. It seemed quite natural that Time itself should have stumbled to a halt – he could see no reason for the Earth to spin right now.

The human spirit is cursed with survival and after what might have been days or weeks, he must have stopped waiting for her to come back, he must have got himself up off the saloon berth, stopped staring into the yellow flower on the fabric of the cushion covers and started functioning again, because he left the island, the wind took them west and the sun set and rose as if everything was exactly the same. He watched aimlessly as it journeyed across the timeless sky. At night the stars carried on their usual business prickling the sky with false hope. Meaningless days passed. Alcohol was his only friend. He drank all the hours he could.

He had no idea what month it was. It might have been August or September: it meant nothing. He saw other boats, day trippers. Some sailed close and he stared dazed and confused at their smiling, waving faces. He wondered what they saw. He remembered Smudge then, but she was a stranger to him. She was as brown as a nut, her once dark hair now streaked by the sun. He knew he wasn’t fit to look after himself, let alone her. Truly, he just didn’t care; where there should have been a hot and sentient heart, there was nothing, only numbness. He watched Smudge feeding herself, opening jars, eating jam with her fingers, licking biscuit crumbs from the floor, squeezing cartons of old juice that she had ripped open, scooping out powdered milk with her fingers, her face covered in the white powder like something out of
Scarface
. She would sit at the bows clutching her spear, looking as feral and as crazy as he presumed he did, but he couldn’t feel anything about it. Sometimes he caught her staring at him and once or twice he thought he had heard her whispering in his ear, singing songs, but on the whole she left him alone and mainly he just didn’t notice her at all. He knew he frightened her with his mumbling. Sometimes, in his sleep, the numbness was pierced by a hot white fury and he would rant and rave and wake himself up in a furious sweat. Frank, Annie, Clem – all three of them had fucked him over. He was full of loathing.

And yet he couldn’t rid himself of all the love. What was he meant to do with this left-over love inside of him, where was it meant to go. Her absence hit him again and again, a hundred times a day, never lightening its touch. There was no point to anything. Nor would there ever
be
any point, he knew that. He kept his eyes focused on the horizon because that was all he could do – he kept moving because there was no other choice.

Only when Smudge spotted the island did it strike him that perhaps he did have a choice. The choice had been there all along. He’d taken the binoculars from her and had a look. They were a long way off. He could see that it was like most of the islands they had passed: mountainous, the tip of some ancient volcano exposed to the air, the landscape so dry and scorched that human life seemed an impossibility. He wondered vaguely where they were, what island this was, what language the people spoke, but not enough to find out. He was better off not knowing. They were somewhere off Africa, that was all he needed to know. It crossed his mind to start working out the longitude and latitude, perhaps he should drag the sextant out – it was probably about midday, perfect for a bearing. But ultimately, he saw no point.

All afternoon he tacked towards the island, then the wind swung round and he found himself approaching it on a gentle run. As they got closer it became clear that he had been wrong about human life: the occasional stone house stood on the hillsides and his idea began to grow roots. He kept checking through the binoculars and soon saw a small port, which he avoided; he had no desire to be seen or to see people, he barely felt human himself any more. Instead he sailed around to the western side. The coastline was sheer, punctuated by the occasional turquoise cove, but mainly the beaches were made of black volcanic sand: the kind the tourists didn’t like.

The moon had begun to rise now and it was huge and yellow, stealing the light from the sun as it slipped down the other side of the sky, both of them glinting in competition.

When he saw the church everything fitted into place. At least one of them could be saved. A cross, even at a subliminal level, is a strangely comforting sign. It stood out, propitious and blaring above the small arched building at the top of a hill. Beneath the church a few houses were scattered about around a sheltered bay. Ten or so colourful fishing boats bobbed up and down by a pontoon in the golden evening light. They were still a good couple of miles out and he sat there at the tiller knowing what he had to do; he was filled, for the first time since she’d gone, with a purpose.

He sailed past the church and took refuge in a small inlet on the other side near a natural arch in the rocks. The moon had won the battle for the sky. It was shining up high, had got smaller and turned silver but was glowing brighter than ever. In fact it was so bright, the water so clear and the seabed so sandy, he watched the anchor sink and take hold beneath him. The boat swung round into a comfortable position and Johnny sat on deck and rolled the last of the cigarettes. He picked up the binoculars and studied every cranny of the shoreline, spotting a path over beyond the rocks on the far side of the beach.

He told Smudge that they were going to dress for dinner on the boat. She looked up, surprised to hear him speak directly to her. Her face lit up, so like her mother’s he felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand up on end. He told her that they would wait until tomorrow to go ashore; in the meantime they would have a dinner party.

Below deck, Smudge wandered down to the forepeak while Johnny examined the non-contents of the food cupboard. There was one packet of pasta left. He rifled around for more edibles and found a tin of sardines under the saloon seat. He didn’t think either of them had had anything resembling a meal for a long time so he pulled up a bucket of seawater and got it on the boil over the weak gas flame.

He went through the saloon, where Smudge was now taking off her filthy clothes, and into the heads where he found a hairbrush lying by the sink. He noticed little specks of blood on the mirror. Annie’s blood. He picked them off with his thumbnail, looking through them into the reflection beyond, which shocked him. He was terribly thin and wasted with a look in his eye so grim that he wasn’t surprised that Smudge cowered from him.

He went through into the forecabin and leant over the planks of the bed and opened one of the lockers. He rummaged around and grabbed a few handfuls of Smudge’s clothes, picking up the hairbrush from the washstand as he came back through. He chucked the clothes in the corner and tried to brush her hair but she didn’t like it so he didn’t bother, instead he put her old woolly hat on her head. He ran a flannel over her filthy face and it turned out that most of her tan was dirt. Her freckles emerged one by one like the first stars
of the night. He couldn’t avoid her big, watery stare as he wiped clean her little heart-shaped face.

‘Hello, Johnny,’ she said quietly and he felt an unfamiliar tugging at his heart.

He tried to smile but the muscles in his face felt strange and unused. ‘I’m so sorry,’ he said.

‘What are you sorry for?’ she asked as he concentrated on getting the dirt off her neck. ‘Why are you cleaning me?’ she said.

‘Can’t have a dinner party looking like shit, can we?’ he said.

‘You look like shit too,’ she said.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You’re right. Shall I shave?’

‘Daddy has a suit you could wear.’

‘Does he?’

‘And a twiddly tie. I think he met the Queen in it.’

Johnny nodded. ‘Did he now?’ He tweaked her cheek. ‘Well, what’s good enough for the Queen should be good enough for you. I’ll put it on.’

He went back through for a shave. He could see her in the saloon going through her bag of clothes with great deliberation, humming all the while. He marvelled at her capacity for happiness, the resilience of childhood, for she too had lost everything. He saw her pick out her blue, stripy pyjamas and he watched as she carefully put them on back to front and went up into the cockpit to wait for him.