by Irvine Welsh
It’s still there. The boat. Chet is leaving the harbour master’s office. Tianna is …
She is over on one of the gangways, watching a big pelican standing on a mooring post that protrudes from the water.
Chet sees the breathless Scot first. — Come on, Lennox, we’ve been waiting on you. Thought you’d run out on us!
Just as he savours the palpable relief on Tianna’s face, Lennox realises that he hasn’t called Trudi. The whole purpose of going was to call her, he ticks in self-flagellating remorse as his respiratory system regulates. I sometimes think you care more about Hearts than me, Ray. She knew not to say that again after the way he’d responded the last time: I care more about Hibs than you. It was a shabby old joke handed down through the generations, but the humour was lost on her. Perhaps Chet would have a phone on the boat or a cell he could borrow.
Climbing on to the craft, they cast off, Lennox this time assisting Chet, who informs him that the birds crushed on the road and which patrol overhead are black vultures. There is a funereal beauty to their languid circling and sudden, explosive swoops. Chet provides a band with crocodile clips on each end, for the purpose of attaching the Red Sox cap to the back collar of Lennox’s T-shirt. — Old sailor’s trick, he explains, — you lose a few of these at sea otherwise.
Lennox gratefully accepts the offering as they head on to the canal system, rather than traversing straight across the harbour to open sea. — It’s a short cut, Chet, at the helm, says. They coast past glass-fronted homes with big orange-treed gardens backing on to the labyrinth of waterways. The water is a muscular greeny blue. The shade-splotched route is lined with palms of various shapes and sizes; cabbage, royal and coconut. Huge pelicans sit in mangrove trees, easily supported, Chet informs him, due to their slight mass. Again, Lennox thinks of the gulls he and Les Brodie had blown away in that spirit of adolescent cruelty that some are never quite able to shed.
A beam of white light falls under the Red Sox visor into his eyes, briefly obliterating the deific comedy. As his vision is restored, the birds’ noises and colours make him think of romance and he wishes Trudi was here to share this with him, to see how good it all worked out. He thinks back to Edinburgh, the ornithological experience generally limited to scavenging seagulls, oily cooing pigeons and cheeping sparrows bouncing like shuttlecocks along slate pavements.
Chet Lewis is telling Ray Lennox how he and his wife Pamela, who died two years ago, retired to Florida from Long Island. They’d always loved to sail and had purchased a plot of land, building their own home on it. It was partially destroyed by Charlie, he explains. Lennox, thinking of cocaine, is about to say ‘it happens’ before realising that Chet is referring to the hurricane.
In spite of his superficial good cheer and health, Lennox can now discern that Chet’s withering in the void left by his wife. There is a hollowed-out aspect to him, denuded by a terrible sadness that has settled in his eyes.
The banked homes and gardens are soon supplanted by the mangroves, which thicken to form a dense swamp. Chet explains that the bushes actually live on fresh water: rain, dew and the stuff in the earth, their roots going down deep. Then Lennox is startled as, only a few feet from the boat, a diving duck suddenly slams head first into the canal.
As they approach open water, a group of men are fishing from a pier. Lennox envies their easy camaraderie, envisions them getting older and fatter without bothering too much. Maybe age gives you that grace, where, with mortality looming, you really do learn not to give a fuck about anything other than the sun coming up and you and yours being able to draw breath every morning. Or perhaps they’re miserable suffering bastards inside, and death pounces when we finally see the futility of fronting it. He’ll find out soon enough, God willing. For the first time he wants to fast-forward into old age, at least how he perceives the good version of it; to drive out the vestiges of desire, ego, bullshit and insecurity. To have found that well of contentment that you want to drink from, and to just do that each day.
Tianna is sprawled on the front deck’s lilo, reading Perfect Bride. Ray’s here and Chet’s here, and they are on the boat and at sea, away from Johnnie and Lance and the rest, but there is unease in the sunken well of her guts. It’s not Ray, it’s not Chet, but it’s the boat itself. Ocean Dawn is making her sick, for the first time.
Chet yells for her to come down. — Gonna kick things up now, he says, sly and knowing. Tianna shakily joins them at the enclosed rear deck, while Lennox wedges himself in the seat next to Chet as per the skipper’s instructions. Chet pulls the throttle forward and the motor roars into action as the boat tears over the water.
They surge away under a white and hazy midday sky, while Lennox looks back to the dwindling marina, baking and shimmering at the water’s edge. White boats sit immobile in their slips, like racks of training shoes in a sports store. An ibis flock glides over the bay as if they are formation jets, combusting into an ethereal magnesium glow as the sunlight hits their plumes. Then it’s suddenly dark, as the boat passes under thick, swirling clouds. Chet explains that the light is often murky from late morning to early afternoon. He cuts the engine, plunging them into an eerie silence, and drops anchor. Lennox has been keeping an eye on the navigation device and the sonic scanner, which reveals the distance between the hull of the boat and the seabed. In the strip of water between the Florida coast and the Ten Thousand Islands, he’s noticed that the gap from the bottom of the boat to the briny floor could fall to just over one foot, and seldom exceeded thirty.
Chet hoists up his creel and seems pleasantly surprised that it contains only lobsters and his pot just a variety of crabs: spider, horseshoe, blue, calico. He turns to Tianna and Lennox, who are watching his activities, delighting in the satisfaction moulding his weather-beaten face. — Usually you get the whole darn lot gushing out; sea horses, pinfish, tunicates, parrotfish, jellies. I even had a ray in my creel once.
Tianna points at Lennox as laughter peals from her. A reciprocal chortle works its way out of him. Chet appears a bit nonplussed, but figures it’s a private joke and sets about boxing his catch and throwing the smaller ones back. On completion, Tianna opts to go downstairs with the magazine as he restarts the engine, and the vessel rips across the sea. Soon, what appears to be an island comes into view.
As they draw closer, Lennox can just about make out the remnants of an old village, which lies on the right-hand side of the bay, next to yet another new marina and planned community. Chet moves the boat away from the lights, coming into an unmarked and barely posted inlet. It opens up to a concealed, antediluvian harbour and it’s like sailing into a lost world. As they cruise past the old wooden homes and jetties, a decrepit boatyard with some grubby fishing vessels and an aluminium boat shelter lie to the fore, and some shacks behind rising to the higher ground. From the left, the big condos of the new community look ominously over a small hill, a giant ready to devour everything around it.
Tianna has emerged from down below, holding a solitary baseball card. She wears an intense frown of concentration. Her expression disturbs Lennox. He is going to say something, but Chet needs help to moor the boat. As he ties up his end, he watches her pull the rest of the cards from her woolly bag and stick the lone one in the pack. The ibis birds hang around the boatyard. From an overhead tree, an osprey cheeps like a budgie.
In a pondering silence Tianna steps from the boat on to the wooden walkway. Her hand forms a fist as she bites on her knuckle. Lennox feels something swimming inside him. Thinks he’s perhaps imagining things. He looks around, the air appreciably warmer after being out at sea.
The grizzled encampment gives off a sense that its days are numbered. The bar-restaurant, a tin-roofed, grey-painted wooden structure, and the hub of the creaking settlement, is propped defiantly on stilts, on a semicircle of mudflats that form the harbour. With its adjoining glitzy sister, the aged bay curves away towards the dark grey mist of the Ten Thousand Islands that buffer Florida’s mangrove coast from
the Gulf of Mexico.
The restaurant is an old school Florida cracker joint, the sort of place Lennox has heard much about but which are now almost as impossible to find, without a guide, as good fishing grounds. As they climb up the steep wooden steps, Tianna dragging behind, lost in thought, Chet says that, despite its island ambience, they have actually docked on a peninsula. — Although it might as well be. All the proper roads lead to planned communities and marinas full of swish boats. Apart from the sea, some of these old places can only be reached by dirt tracks. It’s so easy to drive past those turn-offs on the highway.
Inside the restaurant, a large white woman greets and seats them at a table. Lennox takes the tendered garish, colour-clashing laminate and reads the welcome at its masthead.
FISHIN’ FOR FRIENDS
SEAFOOD BAR AND RESTAURANT
‘If seafood tasted any fresher we would be serving it on the ocean bed.’
The choices on the menu dance in front of their eyes. — What do you fancy, Tianna? Lennox asks her, wondering if he can manage some more catfish. Then the red snapper catches his attention.
— Reckon I’ll have chicken, she says, without enthusiasm.
Chet scowls at Tianna and shakes his head at Lennox. — That is sacrilegious in a place like this, young lady. My God, you can take the girl out of Alabama …
Lennox feels like protesting on Tianna’s behalf, but he’s only joking; trying to impart some grown-up sophisticated ways. Chet catches his scrutiny and is gracious enough not to take offence and spare his embarrassment. — So what line of work were you in? Lennox quickly asks him.
— Not very popular work, Lennox, Chet confesses in glum cheeriness. — I was an investigator at the IRS. Corporate stuff. A much-hated man on Wall Street.
Lennox squints at the thick forearms and powerful biceps. — You don’t look like a desk man.
— Ah, well, I was a powerlifter for many years. Competed all over. Chet’s jovial reminiscence dissolves into a lament. — Missed out on the Munich ’72 Olympic team by a whisker, which was probably a blessing. I got selected for Montreal the next time round, but I busted my shoulder and had to withdraw. He raises and massages it for effect. Perhaps it still bothered him. — Guess it wasn’t to be. I still try to get to the gym at least twice a week, and usually manage it, the fates and the tides willing. You look in pretty good shape. Do you work out?
— Kick-boxing, Lennox replies in some guilt, thinking Chet is being generous in his assessment, — although I’ve let myself go a bit recently.
— I’m not saying I’ve lived like a monk, but I try to keep in shape. You realise in your later years that you get the pay-off, he smiles, putting down the menu and scanning the board for the specials. — I think I’m going to have the dolphin.
Lennox winces at him, disgusted at the idea of eating dolphin. Those poor cunts have sonar power. They’re not thickos like sheep or cows. It’s worse than eating a dog. The Septics are crossing the line here.
Chet senses his disquiet. — Don’t worry, Lennox, not the mammal dolphin. It’s an old name for a large green fish, commonly called mahi-mahi but we refer to it as dolphin here. That was the Spanish term before the English-speaking settlers came by and gave the intelligent mammal the same name. It causes no end of confusion with British visitors. Not that we get that many on this side of the state. So tell me, how is the insurance game?
— It’s a job.
Chet’s baleful half-smile indicates acceptance of that gallows camaraderie that implicitly bonds those who work for bosses. — Is it as lucrative in the UK as it is here?
Before Lennox can answer, his host has, in an instant, launched into a spiel about hurricane damage, and the ineptitude, venality and avarice of the Federal and State governments. Both Bush brothers, particularly Jeb, are being slated. — … the corruption; the greed of their profiteering associates. Is it the same in Britain, Lennox? Is it?
Lennox gives a non-committal shrug. His job has made him averse to discussing politics with strangers as his own were generally out of sync with those expressed by everyone else. But then a single, simple motion from Chet ices his blood. He touches Tianna. Only smoothing out a tangle in her long brown hair, but it makes him sit in upright rigidity on his chair. Because he catches the sting of tension creasing her face and the brief glimpse of appeal towards him before the laminate rises to conceal her.
Both reactions have escaped Chet, a prisoner of his own concerns. — I fear for the children. I really do, he continues. — What a legacy we’re leaving them, Lennox. People like you are still young enough to change the world for the better, but I’m an old fella now. I just want to sail my boat, do some fishing, and at the end of the day put my feet up with a good book and a nice glass of red wine. Not so wrong, is it?
Lennox concedes that it isn’t, but this doesn’t seem to satisfy Chet. — What can we do, Lennox? he asks sadly.
The food has arrived but Lennox, while ravenous, has taken heed that Tianna is barely touching hers. Her fork distractedly jostles a leg of chicken around her plate. — Wish I knew, he says, passing off the question with another shoulder feint, reassessing the situation by the second. Adjusting and fine-tuning; correcting, with the regularity of Chet’s satellite navigation system. He can’t figure it out. His Scottish polisman’s reductive and misanthropic view of the world seems an inadequate lifebelt. The old certainties he’s entertained: the morally bankrupt, malevolent rich; the ignorant, feckless poor; the fearful, petty, repressed bourgeoisie – even aggregated they don’t appear impressive enough in their cretinism to fuck up the world to the extent it now seems to be. And he is too tired to even think about God. What was Robbo’s world view? Fifty per cent of people are honest. You could forget all about them. They might commit minor misdemeanours, but they basically lived their lives toeing the line. The other 50 per cent were divided between the evil, around 10 per cent, and the weak and stupid, the other 40. Again, the evil weren’t that important in the calculation; they were just there to be hunted down. The key group was the weak and stupid. They were the main perpetuators and victims of crime.
The older he gets, the more inclined he is to cling to such banal paradigms, as someone drowning might with a piece of soggy driftwood. It depresses him and he’s aware that he wants a line of coke again. For a heartbeat or three it’s all he wants.
— Can I get some more Coke? Tianna asks the waitress as ‘Home Lovin Man’ plays in ringtone, signalling a call coming up on Chet’s mobile, reminding Lennox again that he needs to phone Trudi.
— Excuse me, Chet rises quickly, heading outside. His haste gives Lennox and Tianna the impression that the call is an important one; they track him through the windows of the restaurant as he wanders by the quay, past the aluminium boat shelters, phone talk underscored with feral gesticulation.
Lennox notes her face reflected alongside his in the glass. He becomes aware that she is mirroring him, copying his actions. He feels both troubled and honoured to be a mentor. Is he any better than Robbo had been to him? Because it has to stop now: this suspicion of Chet. Like the guy in the car hire, or Four Rivers on the boat; they cannae all be nonces. Everybody in the world with a cock – or with a minge, cause there was Starry – they cannae all be beasts. The poor kids in the garage! Trudi was right. He is tired. Jaded. Not himself. Scared even. Seeing things that aren’t there. The ghost of Britney. His hands shake. He needs his antidepressants. He’d been a fool to discard them. He’s ill, clinically depressed, and no amount of winter sun can fix that. Chet is kosher. Surely. He turns to Tianna. — He seems a nice guy. I just had to be certain, given the company we were in the other night. You understand?
— Thanks for looking after me, she says to him, but in a voice so small, her face a younger child’s now – a surfeit of emotion over calculation – that he feels his essence vaporising. Something isn’t right; hasn’t been since she went below deck.
— Aye. Lennox swallows some saliva down. A terrible, po
ignant vision of taking her to Scotland floods his mind. She should be at a good school, with proper mates, having a laugh at Murrayfield Ice Rink or the Commie Pool, gearing up for Standard grades, doing family things. Not with him and Trudi. Not his Scotland; that would be out of the frying pan and into the fire for her. Lennox is realistic enough about his own circumstances, but he enjoys the Uncle Ray tag. Jackie and Angus have the two boys. He likes them, had taken them to Tynecastle, but they weren’t that interested. Once she’d told him, before Angus got the snip, that she’d really wanted a girl. He doesn’t have the stuff for the twenty-four/seven, but he could be a positive influence; the fun uncle, taking the kid on the odd outing. They could be pals.
He jerks himself out of his storybook fantasies. The best Tianna could hope for was a good set of foster-parents here in Florida. Even then, she has a lot of work to do if she isn’t going to turn out a miserable wreck like her mother.
Chet returns, with a sombre nod to Lennox. He counts out some quarters and hands them to Tianna. — Put something good on the jukebox, honey, before the place fills up with crazy ol Crackers and their mad country songs. Maybe some Beatles or Stones.
Tianna silently takes the money and goes to the big Wurlitzer by the restrooms.
— That was Robyn, Chet now grim, but wild-eyed. — She got herself in a whole heap of trouble and ended up being detained. But I got my lawyer on the case, and she gets out tomorrow morning. So I’ll take care of Tianna tonight and get her to Robyn tomorrow.
Lennox feels a trickle of unease from breastbone to belly. Cop instinct or drug-fiend paranoia, he doesn’t know or care. He’s just less than convinced by what Chet has said. — Robyn … I want to speak to her.
Chet’s face adjusts to civil-servant archetype. — I’m afraid that’s not possible.
— Why? Why can’t she speak to me or Tianna?
