The Going Down of the Sun (28 page)

I wouldn't have made it. I'd have died there, tumbling in the alien dimensionless mayhem of an inverted wheelhouse with my lungs bursting and then flooding, my brain lanced by horror and hurt and my eyes filling up with blood, except that as I spun lost and out of control I collided with another bulky weightless body, clothes ballooning softly round it, and while I struggled insanely to fight it off, it fastened a hand in my collar and hauled me backwards out of the dark.

Light exploded around me, air gushing into my starved lungs, as we surfaced among leaping waves that tossed us all ways until we fetched up against something solid and comparatively still, and my scrabbling fingers found and clutched at a handhold. My eyes hadn't cleared enough yet to confirm it, but my brain was ticking over again and realised what it had to be: the rubbing strake along the underside of
Flag's
hull, at the junction of vertical and horizontal chines. It was there to protect her bottom when she took the ground, but, as if he'd had some presentiment of this moment, the man who built her so long ago pierced it through at intervals. My fingers locked round it, and I think if I'd died there I still wouldn't have floated away.

As if I needed telling, a voice in my ear rasped, “Hang on—hang on there while I get your mate out.” It was only then that I realised who I owed my life to: Barry, the big man from the wrong side of the Glasgow tracks, who had been more scared than any of us in the maelstrom I'd brought us to, but who had somehow swallowed his fear when the great strength of his bulky body was the only chance any of us had.

My eyes were clearing. I saw him suck in a deep breath and dive again, more effective than graceful, and disappear into the darkness at my feet, under the upturned hull. I stayed where I was, the water slapping round my shoulders, both hands fastened in the strake, wondering what he meant. The water was very cold, and I had banged my head, and it was a moment before I remembered Alex.

It was moments more before I thought of Duncan Galbraith, lashed unconscious into a bunk in the flooded cabin. The door had been open—there couldn't even have been much of an air-pocket. Poor, poor Duncan. He had to be dead, and maybe Alex dead with him, wrestling one-handed with the retaining straps we'd improvised while
Flag
lifted her keel to the sky and the black waters of the overfall crashed in on them. And it was my fault. Not because I hadn't been good enough, but because I'd got careless. Cocky. I'd thought that when I had the gun I'd won.

A few feet from me the broken water boiled suddenly and vomited two dark heads. One was Alex. His need for air was so urgent that he was whooping it in, along with some spume, as he broke the surface. Veins stood proud on his forehead and his eyes bulged. Reaching the surface had taken the last of his strength. His cheeks were white and hollow; under the half-dropped lids I saw his eyes rolling back. He wouldn't have made the boat alone.

Barry towed him over to me, took his good hand and clapped it onto the strake, heaving him halfway out of the water to make sure. He shouted at him to hold on but Alex just moved his head vaguely. Already his fingers were slackening. Barry cursed him. Then, treading water energetically, he tugged off his own belt and buckled it in a firm figure-of-eight round Alex's wrist and the pierced strake. If he passed out he'd hang there, half out of the water, until his senses returned. The big man turned to me. “Has Willie come up yet?” Had he? I couldn't be sure. “I haven't seen him.”

“Damn. I'll go down again. About your reporter friend: I'll get him out if I can, but it's been too long.” He nodded at Alex. “He was trying to get him out of the cabin. When he starts coming round he'll want to dive again. Don't let him. He's done in, and anyway if I can't find him right now there'll be no point. I'll do what I can.”

I mumbled, “Thanks.” I wasn't sure how appropriate it was but I needed to say something. Afterwards I was glad I had, because I never saw him again.

Flag's
upturned hull, with me clinging to it and Alex Curragh lashed to it, drifted back the way we had come. Angry waves continued to beat at her, throwing spray clean over her keel, keeping her passengers wet through and fighting for breath. The deathly cold ate its way into our bones. I couldn't feel my hands, wasn't sure what prevented me from sliding off into the black depths. What strength I had ebbed into the cold water, quickly followed by my ability to think and then any strong feelings as to whether I lived or died.

After Alex regained consciousness and before we both started to lapse again, we tried to keep one another interested in survival by talking. It wasn't much of a conversation: we shouted encouragements, always unduly optimistic and often downright fatuous, over the noise of wind and wave. We assured one another that the Coastguard would be looking for us right now, and it could be only minutes before a lifeboat or helicopter came to pluck us to safety. We could last another few minutes. When the minutes had passed without sign of rescue, we chided each other for failing to allow for the distances involved. Obviously it would take a few minutes longer to reach us here. The main thing was that someone must have seen
Flag
turn over, maybe from a boat that would take a little time to reach land and raise the alarm. But they'd be here before nightfall.

Night fell.

In the end we owed our survival to no human agency so much as to the contrariness of that old sea-cow, the
Fairy Flag
, who wouldn't steer straight with two of us trying when under power and the right way up, yet revealed a gentler streak when cruising slowly backwards and upside down, buffeted by the tides of Corryvreckan. Unaided even by prayers, she picked her way through treacherous rocks and races towards the Jura shore and found a tiny scrap of stony beach, first with the stumpy mast rising from the potting shed roof.

I have no clear memory of how we got ashore. I can't say if it was me or Alex who noticed first the change in
Flag's
motion, the grating noise from the mast, the rumble and phosphorescent flicker of nearby surf. I don't know if I dragged him through the last dangerous yards of tumbling water or if he dragged me. All I know for sure is that we ended up on the beach, crawling ashore on our hands and knees without the strength to lift our heads clear of the breaking water, still swallowing the stuff when there was no more of it under us than a toddler could safely paddle in.

And when there was even less than that we found we couldn't move at all. We'd been in the water for hours—I don't know how many but too many. We were too weak to support our own weight on dry land. As long as there was water under me I could crawl, but when my belly touched bottom I was as helpless as a stranded whale. I lay in the shallows, the foam creaming over me with every wave, and I thought I'd have to die there if it was the only alternative to climbing up the beach out of reach of the tide.

Alex got a little further, not much. I was dimly aware of him beside me, of his bare feet—God knows where his shoes had gone—by my face as he hauled himself on his elbows out of the hiss and surge of the sea. When only his legs were awash he twisted round and tried to pull me after him. But I couldn't help, even a little, and soon his meagre strength was exhausted and we slept side by side while the quiet sea withdrew and left us, half dead and draining under the summer stars.

I woke with a start and couldn't think why. It was still dark, still cold—too cold to ease the cramping chill that had invaded me from the sea. I was still wet, though some of the water and its weight had drained out of my clothes. Nothing else had changed. I listened and heard nothing but the sea. Nothing was moving but the waves.

That was it. The tide was rising again. My feet were already afloat.

It made every muscle in my body scream but I got my hands and knees under me again and made them move, mechanically if they couldn't manage an animal grace, until I was once more clear of the water. I wasn't being soaked again, not for anything.

I found Alex's shoulder and shook it. Nothing happened. I pulled his hair, gritty with salt, between my fingers, and he mumbled a sleepy complaint. “We have to move now. Get up. Get up and walk.”

He did, eventually. We both did, leaning on one another like a couple of old drunks. We stumbled up the beach, beyond the wrack that marked high tide, and found a bank clad in wiry tussock-grass where the thin earth still held some of the day's heat. It wasn't much. You needed to be as desperate as us to appreciate it. But we had no dry clothes, no shelter and no means of making a fire, and that bank with its memory of sunshine and its dry grass, and the shape of it folding round our bodies while we clung together for what comfort we could find, felt to be saving our lives. Perhaps it was.

The sun rose early but for an hour there was no heat in it. I ached with cold. But I wasn't far off dry now; and where our bodies touched there was a small reservoir of warmth where a hand could be thawed out. We took it in turns to draw on this small joint account, at first instinctively, then, as our awareness of our own and each other's survival heightened, with amusement and affection. We had made it. We had passed between Scylla and Charybdis, and emerged, if not unscathed, still essentially intact. It was a communion of experience that would be between us all our days, exclusive and intimate and inexplicable.

And it was that strangely innocent intimacy, that spiritual closeness born of mutual peril, striving and success, which led to what happened next. Perhaps not only that. Eluding death so narrowly had left us with an urgent need to reaffirm life. We were hungry—for movement, for contact, for warmth. We had been badly scared and needed to repair the loss of self in our close encounter with oblivion by vigorously redefining the space we occupied. We needed to re-establish our own reality, mentally and physically and emotionally and biologically.

So I seduced him.

Afterwards, warm for the first time in twelve hours, I slept while the sun rose higher.

I dreamed. I heard again the roar of the maelstrom around me. I felt the lurch and pitch and the slow incredible toppling as the
Fairy Flag
rolled to her death. I whimpered at the image of Duncan Galbraith, strapped in his bunk all unknowing, rolling to his among the gnashing rocks of Corryvreckan. He was a good and gentle man, and deserved better.

Real violence interrupted the remembered violence of the dream. A kick in the ribs you wouldn't get from a Delhi mule shocked me awake and rolled me bodily out of the little hollow where I had found a kind of comfort. Once again tumbling out of control, with no perception of what was happening to me beyond the clear understanding that it wasn't good, I had rolled to the foot of the bank and onto hard skittering pebbles before I was able to brake my progress with spread hands and sit up and see what was going on.

I thought then that I had gone mad, on three separate grounds. I thought I could see William Mackey, and I knew he'd drowned. I thought he was pointing his gun at me, and I knew that had been lost when
Flag
turned over. Most bizarre of all, I thought he was wearing a hand-knitted Norwegian cardigan with red reindeer trooping across it, approximately half as wide again as he was.

But somebody had kicked me, and if it wasn't a dead gunman in a reindeer cardigan, who was it?

“What's the matter?” demanded William, his voice high and strident. “You look like you've seen a ghost.”

Alex, whose first instinct had been to get to his feet, thought better of it and subsided onto one knee in the wiry grass. “Where have you been?” he asked quietly.

William waved his free arm, fitfully and rather vaguely, towards the strait. “Over there. Didn't you hear the helicopter?”

That was the roar I heard in my dream: not the angry waters but the rotors of Frazer McAllister's executive transport. It must have been up at first light looking for us, and Mackey, who had spent the night resting rather than exhausting himself further, had been awake enough to attract the pilot's attention.

He had been behind me, in the open end of the wheelhouse, when
Flag
turned over, and he was flung into the boiling water. Ignoring the first rule of capsising—which is that you stay with the boat, whichever way up it is and however close the shore and however strongly you can swim—he struck out for the bit of land he could see and somehow kept going until he reached it. He must have been well on his way to safety when his big friend dived again in search of him. He showed no remorse and almost no interest in his companion's fate.

From the Scarba shore where he dragged himself out of the water, he watched the dark hull of the
Fairy Flag
drift south and east until at length he lost sight of it in the twilight. But it hadn't been far from Jura then, and when the sun rose he could see it nestling among the rocks of the southern shore less than a mile away. He tried to make out if she had brought any survivors safe ashore, and just once he thought he saw movement.

“I knew then who it would be,” he spat. Every word he said was aimed my way; the gun, though, was mostly levelled at Alex. His gaze flickered between us, burning with malevolent fire. I could feel his hatred licking at me. “You bitch. You tried to kill me.”

Clearly the boy had no sense of irony. Laughing in his face would be unwise, so I shrugged. “I did what I had to in order to survive.”

His eye glinted. “You reckon?”

Alex was looking at the gun. He was closer to it than I was. “Where did that come from?”

My heart sank. I'd assumed it was the one he had aboard
Flag
, in which case it had to be caked with salt and sand and at least as dangerous to fire as to face. If it was another gun we were in worse trouble than I had thought.

Mackey grinned at me, vividly but without much humour. “From the helicopter. I've travelled with that pilot twice a week for two years, I know all about his anti-hijack kit. I could have taken one of the sporting guns from the rack at the back, but the old devil's funny. I wouldn't want him going soft on me. Better if he doesn't know until you're dead.”