Lifeboat

by Zacharey Jane

  THE LIFEBOAT

  Zacharey Jane was born in Newcastle, England, and migrated with her family to Australia in 1965. After finishing school she travelled, worked in the film and television industry, sang in bands and exhibited paintings. The Lifeboat is her first novel, conceived on a ferry off the coast of Mexico. She lives in country Queensland, with her husband and two children.

  Contents

  Cover Page

  Author bio

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Day One

  Day Two

  Day Three

  Day Four

  Day Five

  Day Six

  Day Seven

  Day Eight

  Day Nine

  Day Ten

  Day Eleven

  Day Twelve

  Day Thirteen

  Day Fourteen

  Acknowledgements

  Imprint Page

  To Chris,

  with love and a car chase.

  The tale I am about to tell is a strange tale, and true. It happened in the year of my twenty-first birthday, that lighthouse into adulthood, and has remained with me throughout my life. Now as life’s end draws near, childhood seems closer to my heart than any grown-up time and I am urged by some inner voice to recount this story, though a history of my life it is not.

  DAY ONE

  I graduated from university knowing five languages, but little of the lands from which they came. Thus armed I found employment as an interpreter for the government of an island nation, not my own. Most of my work took place in an office, in the port of the small capital city, far from those places whose languages I spoke.

  When they brought them in, the couple looked older than anyone I had ever seen before. They had been rescued, or at least found, in a wooden vessel, a lifeboat, two miles off shore, washed into our waterways with the bottles, barrels, dead birds and the other flotsam and jetsam of this planet.

  She was tiny, taloned and translucent, razors for fingernails that could slice a flying fish in mid-air to bring it in for supper. Her hair was grey, tangled into tendrils that wrapped about her shoulders like a stole. Her clothes were a man’s and old, worn, roped into obedience over her barbed-wire frame.

  The man was slow, big, wide like a canopy and distant like a fog-covered hilltop. I peered up into his heights and mist-grey eyes. The clothes he wore were of no importance and told me nothing, like something bought by a mother for her long-grown-up son. His bare feet sank into the earth, leaving footprints on the linoleum like tracks in wet sand.

  He spoke my languages and some more besides – I never did count how many – but in fragments, like a sentence lost to the wind. She said she dreamt in Spanish.

  I said: ‘So you are from Spain?’

  And she said: ‘Child, we dream in any language of passion.’

  He dreamt in his sleep, he said, and we got no more from him that hour.

  Their lifeboat was old, but strong, resigned to the battering seas. Apart from those two, it held six large glass bottles of water, corked; a rope, a shade cloth, a fishing net, a compass, two oars and ten packets of dry biscuits in an unmarked tin. Packed to survive, he said, but the compass was broken. We couldn’t say for how long they had been drifting and they would not tell us. From their appearance it must have been weeks. I said: ‘Madame, please tell me the story of how you and your husband come to be here.’

  And she replied: ‘Child, I have never seen this man before in my life.’

  *

  ‘I awoke to bright sunshine,’ the woman said. ‘The water whispering in my ear like a shell, sparkling like a counterpane laid about me, and a more beautiful blanket I have never seen, except maybe the stars at night.

  ‘My mind was untroubled, as if I had slept in my mother’s arms through a storm now departed. Land was nowhere in sight.

  ‘I lay there, still, staring upwards. A flock of birds passed high above, a gliding arrowhead across the sky. Good luck, they say. I closed my eyes to the sun and my lids melted gold into my mind, empty of thought but full of warmth. I felt that I had never known such peace, but that now it was mine forever. Then a shadow fell across my face and there he was, bowing down to me like a tree branch.

  ‘“You’re awake?” he asked and held out a cup of water. I felt no surprise at his presence. He sat beside me and watched as I drank. It did not occur to me to ask why or how – simply we were there and the water was beautiful. I thanked him for my drink and offered him the remainder, which he took and drank whilst looking at me over the rim of the cup. When he finished he moved away, returning to something he had been doing at the back of the boat.

  ‘I watched him work. Occasionally he would look over and smile. Some time passed this way. Our day moved into night slowly, taking its time, as we did, until the sun set the sea on fire. He stopped his work and watched with me, then sent out a net for our dinner.

  ‘Just before dark we pulled in two fish, which I sliced. In Japan they eat it raw and so did we – the oceans all run together after all. He stared into the sky.

  ‘“That star,” he said, breaking a silence of some time, “points a way for us to go. See how it is low in the sky? We’ll go that way.” He took up the oars and rowed. I fell asleep beneath the canopy, watching him watch our star and row us onwards.

  ‘It was not until the seventh day that he caught the scent of leaves upon the wind and snuffed the air like a great carthorse.

  ‘That was how it was, child, I can tell you no more.’

  They took the boat away to be tested.

  ‘Why?’ asked the woman. ‘It floats.’

  I told them that the numbers on the hull or the paint on its bow may hold the secret of the lifeboat’s origin and therefore theirs. He looked lost as we watched through a window and saw the small craft being pulled from the water.

  ‘There are no numbers,’ he said. ‘I have already checked. But they could scrape her hull and give her a coat of paint if they care to.’ The water dripped from a good growth of weeds that had been hidden beneath the waterline.

  ‘I’ll see what can be done,’ I replied, feeling for those two as they saw their only world being taken away. He turned from the window and sat down. She moved to the other side of the room and lay down on one of the hard benches. Her face looked grey; she didn’t speak for the next hour. I looked over from somewhere in my conversation with the man and saw that she had fallen asleep. He stood and padded softly to her side. He took off the light jacket he wore and placed it gently over her shoulders.

  ‘I don’t think she would be used to the coolness in here,’ he said. I nodded and we resumed our conversation.

  ‘I can tell you little more than she did,’ he said, which told me that although quiet, he was attentive. ‘She slept for two days after me. Little changed in those two days. I watched over her as she slept, as I tended the boat. She dreamt often and cried out in her dreams, but I could do nothing – she was a stranger to me.’

  He ran a hand through his unkempt grey hair and down to his beard as if searching for an answer in the bones of his face.

  ‘I awoke on the boat. I do not know how either of us came to be on board. I do not know why I am here. I do not remember where I came from.’

  ‘Do you remember anything at all?’

  His eyes were half closed, his face shut.

  ‘Yes. Although whether it is my memory or something dreamt I cannot say.’

  ‘Tell it to me – maybe in the telling something will occur.’

  ‘Another time.’

  I let it go, although his disinterest surprised me. He didn’t seem to care about his circumstances; he seemed to accept his plight without question and I wondered why. But in the beginning I never thought to question their memory lo
ss: it seemed unthinkable to me that anyone would wilfully walk away from a past that must have known family and love at some stage, for few men are islands. And with the short-sightedness of youth I could not imagine a life of danger or intrigue belonging to anyone over fifty.

  That day I explained his diffidence as the after effects of exposure and whatever accident had reduced them to these circumstances, as accident I believed it must have been.

  To help them orientate themselves, I described the country in which we found ourselves: an island colony, peopled by immigrants who had claimed it as their own by warring with the previous inhabitants, who themselves had taken it from the people before them. A common occurrence. Upon this many-layered graveyard they forcefully created a nation of peaceful, carefree folk, who guarded their island possession with a righteousness found only in the guilty.

  I described the jungle-covered mountains, once impassable, and the farmland plains. I told them of the bays and bleach-white beaches, my great loves, that which had drawn me to the country. It was not a backward place, just remote, set aside from the main stage of international politics by its sultry climate and lack of mineral resources. Farming and fishing were all that was on offer and would suffice until the seas were fished out and the rain stopped falling. Then these people would have to look at the world around them and ask why.

  This is how it seemed to me then and I spoke with the assurance of youth and education, and the cynicism of an outsider. One was a foreigner for at least two generations here. But as I’d felt a stranger in my homeland, I found it easier to live where my sense of alienation was more easily explainable.

  After an hour or so, having discovered nothing more about the man, we woke the woman and I escorted them to the security compound where they were to be held. Being surrounded by sea, this country was used to refugees washing up on their shores and provided secure premises in which to house the undesirable arrivals. The quarters were Spartan, making it clear that no one should be sure of his or her welcome, yet.

  She was put into the women’s section, he the men’s, and their doors locked. I thought it a shame to separate them, but as they were both adamant that they were strangers to each other, as well as themselves, I could not argue for keeping them together. Although they always did, and still do, present themselves to me in my mind as a pair.

  At twenty I accepted a job offer on this warm island, a long way from the cold of the country I’d been born in and the nuns who’d raised me. I sailed away from everything familiar, choosing a long boat ride of nothingness to prepare me for my new world. I hoped to be washed clean, to present myself as a blank canvas ready for a history that was to be of my own making. Life, I felt at the time, was a serious matter. Upon my own two feet I stood, with self-righteousness strapped across my shoulders like a setsquare. I was upright, responsible, setting out on life’s trek with a shining beacon burning fiercely from my forehead, blinding most people who crossed my path, and myself.

  I was a clean girl, dark hair parted neatly through the centre of my scalp, shoes shining and watch set five minutes fast – I left time no chance to be late. My hair was cut to stay out of my eyes and I didn’t shape my eyebrows, although it was the fashion of the day. I’d tried once on the instigation of a roommate, but stopped when the sophistication it lent my face scared me.

  My eyes are large and my face is small, like the rest of me – slight is possibly a better description. The nuns described me as ‘interesting looking’ but I didn’t mind – the pretty girls got too much attention for my taste. I often wondered which of my parents I resembled the most.

  I was born during the war, when stoicism was a virtue upheld as a national trait. So I stored my longing for a family away with childish dreams of chocolate and bananas. But secretly I imagined my father to be a handsome officer, captured behind enemy lines, who would one day return to rescue me, appearing at the door of the convent classroom silently, his identity obvious to all thanks to the amazing resemblance between us. When the nuns took us to returned servicemen parades to cheer the troops, I would scan the lines of faces, hoping to catch a glimpse of an eye, the slant of a nose, or shape of a chin familiar to me.

  My mother was a more fraught figure about whom I did not fantasise because, to the best of my knowledge, she was still living.

  For want of anything dearer to me, my work became my mission, but of the crisp white files and smooth dark desks that decorated my days then, I remember little now. Little of their content that is, although I have a feeling that with each new useless page I added, margined and correctly collated, I buffered myself more from the embarrassment of my own humanity, which seemed far too personal to me.

  I wanted to look the other way when every day I was forced to clean and scrub and scrape: skin, teeth, hair, nose, eyes, persistent and demanding. I was dying with life. If only my skin would fold neatly like my underwear into my drawer, or hang like a shirt on a rack to be worn when appropriate.

  And that I was female was a joke at my expense; I had no time for women’s biology. I felt branded, a red cross smeared over my door and the recurring memory of the first time when truly I thought I was dying. I ran to the sister, blood on my hand, and she looked away, disgusted. The other girls giggled behind my back. I was bundled off in disgrace – nothing was said. I cried on my bed, curled about my aching abdomen as the muscles churned, dragging my reluctant body into womanhood.

  ‘The Curse,’ whispered one of my roommates later, enlightening me in the dark, and so I felt it was. That night I dreamt of my mother, whom I had never known, who the nuns said cursed as I was born: cursed life, cursed them, cursed my father away at war and cursed the pain that brought me into this world.

  I have observed that this shared trial gives many women a feeling of solidarity, sisterhood, but for me it always felt too personal to discuss and too inconvenient to accept.

  I grew up surrounded by girls, which should have made making friends easy. To a small child everyone is a friend, but after the war it was different. Many of the girls were returned to their families; new children came, younger than me, but they were adopted or sent on to government homes, but because my mother had never formally relinquished her guardianship to the state, I was left in a no-man’s-land, waiting.

  Christmas time, aged seven, I made a card with a star and a picture of Baby Jesus.

  ‘What’s that, dear?’ asked the sister, looking up from her desk where she was sorting the Christmas mail.

  I gave her my card. ‘For my mother,’ I said.

  She read the inscription. ‘Lovely, dear. I am going to put it here, so all the other girls can see how to spell “affectionate” correctly.’

  She lifted the card up to the shelf, the position of honour for children’s work. But I wanted it mailed with the other cards.

  ‘What is it, dear?’ she asked again when I did not resume my seat. ‘Go and sit down and wait for the others to finish.’

  I didn’t want to ask. I wanted her to take one of those beautiful white envelopes from the pile and pass it to me. She followed my eyes, moon big over the horizon line of her desk to the envelopes. A shadow blew across her round white face, dismissed with a blink. She looked sad and I wondered what I had done amiss. She pushed the mail aside and reached into her desk, withdrawing one sheet of stiff white paper.

  ‘There’s no mail for you, dear,’ she said kindly. ‘But,’ said she, lifting her voice to a trumpet tone, ‘you have come top of the class this year and this is your certificate of achievement. Congratulations, dear, we are very proud of you.’

  I returned to my desk, certificate clutched in my hand. I hated that certificate; when no one was looking I stamped on it, I tore it up, I threw it out the window into the snow; I hoped I hurt it.

  Ten years later I left the convent to take up a scholarship at Oxford, studying languages. By then I had transferred my energies from coveting beautiful white envelopes to collecting a perfect set of certificates of achievement. That
was the only year missing.

  The position of interpreter had been created to cope with increasing international trade. Being a department of one, I was placed with the clerical staff in Immigration, mostly women. Although they welcomed me, I think that, given my nationality and education, they expected someone more cosmopolitan. However, they were not unkind and would often invite me on their onslaughts to bars and parties. But I always declined and they never pressed, thinking me disinterested. They were wrong, I wasn’t disinterested. I just didn’t know how to do it and was too scared.

  I have heard it said that some people ‘lose themselves in their work’; I found myself. I took on as many extra duties as I could and was soon labelled a career girl by the typists and secretaries. This was a modern term, gleaned from the occasional glossy magazine left behind by a summer tourist; it held an alien mystique that added to my separation. So I hid amongst my books and languages; when one speaks so many different tongues it’s easy to find one not to be understood in.

  But not everything was work, for the journey to the island revealed in me a secret passion: the sea. Its voluptuous folds and heady perfume. The promise of discovery beyond the horizon and in the dark, hidden depths. To send myself to sleep at night I imagined myself floating alone in the middle of the ocean, out of sight of land, quiet, rocked by the swell. The image comforted me. I know now that the ocean is not always so benign, but in those days I had only experienced a storm from the safety of a warm house on land. In light of this fantasy, I suppose my attachment to the lifeboat pair was not surprising; maybe I even envied them.

  Each day, on board the ship that carried me away from England, my passion shook free of its landlocked past, moved within me and grew. Each morning I awoke at dawn to walk the decks, revelling in the grey nothing to either side of the boat. The books I brought with me, measured out carefully to see me through the long journey, were left in the cabin.

  This discovery of mine seemed appropriate, in keeping with a unique characteristic of my own. I have never suffered from seasickness, but am affected by a stranger physiological phenomenon which began at puberty: I can predict the weather. Or, more specifically, I know when a storm is approaching. Long before the weathermen broadcast warnings, my stomach begins to cramp and ache, a feeling not unlike indigestion, increasing relative to the size of the storm. It has proved useful many times; one twinge tells me rain is on the way and I can bring in the washing or cancel a day out. After I learnt to sail, that feeling in my stomach saw me turning about for the safety of the nearest harbour.