If You're Reading This, I'm Already Dead

by Andrew Nicoll

  I can see myself sitting at the tiller with Varga, and Sarah is coming up the little wooden stairs from the kitchen with coffee on a tray for us. Varga wouldn’t have taken it from Tifty. He didn’t like Tifty, and he knew she didn’t like him, but he was nice as pie around Sarah, and he took the coffee and thanked her like a gentleman. Of course Varga didn’t like me either, but he knew I wasn’t going to spit in his coffee and he knew that I was serious. I was going to get to Albania or die trying, and we had to get along.

  I suppose, considering that he tried to murder me and considering how often he’d been slapped and punched and cruelly squeezed, we got along pretty well.

  He got a bit upset when the camel discharged some ballast all over his nice deck and he started shouting and screaming about his lovely varnish, but Max shoveled the whole lot over the side and sloshed a bucket of sea water over the spot and that calmed him down again so, on the whole, we got on pretty well.

  Varga stayed at the helm all through the afternoon and long into the evening, leaning on the tiller as he guided us down the passage between the islands, and in that time he taught me just about everything I needed to know about sailing a boat. There’s really only two difficult things about a boat: making it start and making it stop. I couldn’t get one started and I couldn’t get one stopped—well, not without ramming into something, which isn’t a good way of stopping, or just hauling in all the sails and dropping anchor, which will also work. The trick is to stop neatly at a quayside so you can get off without getting your feet wet, and I couldn’t do that. But keeping it going wasn’t too hard. The wind was steady and Varga showed me two little cranks to turn to let the sails out a bit if it started to blow too strong or pull them in a bit tighter if the wind dropped. I think that was it. It might have been the other way around. There’s another bit of useful knowledge that I’ve misplaced.

  Anyway, the important thing was not to let the wind blow us too far over to one side, just keep things steady, not to try and race ahead too much and, I must say, that made sense, because if the boat tipped over, the camel might fall off. Apart from that, all we had to do was keep heading in the same direction. Varga showed me the point on the compass—not that I took his word for it, I checked with the Professor first—and then I got a turn at steering.

  It was harder than it looked—the waves tried to knock us off course and the boat wanted to turn out of the wind like a weather-cock—but with a bit of effort I could get it done.

  And then, after a bit, it wasn’t hard at all. Have you ever worked with a horse when it’s working, but not too hard, when it’s hauling a load or pulling a cart and that horse is almost laughing out loud because the work is easy? It’s like he’s saying, “I could do this all day and, if I wanted to, I could knock you down and kick you over the rooftops and still haul this load, but I won’t because I like you, and anyway this is fun.” That’s what it was like sailing that boat. Out at sea she was a living, breathing thing with a heart beating under her masts and muscles pulsing through the water. You could feel the strength in her, feel the waves passing under her and vibrating through the tiller, feel the wind thrumming through the ropes and buffeting the canvas. I swear, sitting there, I could see the air swelling the sails, filling them up and pouring out over the edges in torrents, like water from a bowl as the boat panted through the waves.

  We smiled and we laughed, sitting there together drinking coffee, me and Sarah and Varga, or sometimes all of us in a row, Max and Tifty and the Professor too, because Max had to learn how to steer as well. Max was better at the hard work of steering but, with Tifty there to remind him about looking at the compass and letting the sails out and in, he did all right. You could rely on my mate Max.

  So there we were, all of us sitting in a row and bouncing along, just like we did on that bench at the picture show except without the tickles this time. Strange to think that only a day had passed and yet everything had changed.

  Only the day before we were all together in the dusk of Budapest and now, a day later, we were on a boat in the Adriatic watching the stars come out, still together, but changed. In Budapest I had a girl on each arm. On the boat I sat with Sarah, but Tifty sat with Max. Something had changed. I had changed. I had spoken harshly to Tifty, not once but twice, and I’d put my foot down with the Professor.

  We were still friends. We still loved each other, but something had changed. Everything was the same, but everything was different, as if we had gone to bed at night and woken up to find all the furniture moved round—the same old comfortable furniture, but in a different place entirely.

  It grew dark. From up in the prow the camel gave a contented belch and sank to its knees, ready for sleep, jawing away like an old man with a plug of tobacco and looking up to count the stars.

  Varga rubbed his hands together and turned his collar up against the wind. “Now,” he said, “I wouldn’t want you to use this as an excuse to throw me over the side and seize the ship and, bearing in mind possible emergencies and the finer points of pilotage, reading of charts, lamps and signals and so forth, that would probably be a very bad idea anyway, but I’d say you’ve turned into a very able crew.”

  “So you reckon we could sail her,” said the Professor.

  “Well, I wouldn’t want to throw you out in mid-Atlantic in the teeth of a nor’easter with the waves as high as steeples but, for a cruise like this, you’ll do.”

  “But we could keep her running on this course, saving emergencies,” I said.

  He looked a little nervous. “But that doesn’t mean you can make me walk the plank. Emergencies. You have to bear in mind emergencies.”

  “Exactly, and for that reason I want you close at hand and fresh and alert. I suggest you turn in, Herr Fregatten-kapitän. Get some sleep. I am relieving you of command.”

  He stood up and saluted and hurried down the stairs into the boat, pleased that he was going to bed and not going overboard. “Keep her on her current heading,” he said. “There is nothing between us and Dubrovnik. Watch out for the lights of other vessels. The slightest difficulty—the slightest difficulty—call me at once.”

  As soon as he was gone, I gathered the others around. “Do you remember that puzzle from when we were kids, the one about the farmer with a fox and a goose and a bag of grain and he has to get them all over the river but he can only take one at a time? Well, that’s us now, and Varga is the fox. He’s bent over backward since we left port, but I don’t trust him. I want him watched at all times, whether he’s down below or up on deck. Professor, why don’t you bunk up with him? For all we know he’s down there right now pulling the plug out. Your eyes are as good as his below decks at night. Make sure he puts all the lamps out, and watch him like a hawk.”

  The old man seemed happy to be useful. He found the stairs easily with his cane and wished us all a good night.

  The nights are not long at that time of year. I fixed it with Tifty and Max that they would get some rest while I stayed at the tiller with Sarah.

  “I’ll wake Varga in a few hours and he can share a spell with me and then, a few hours after that, you can take over and watch him. If he gives any cause for concern, just shoot the little bastard.”

  But Max said, “Otto, mate, I don’t think I’m much of a killer,” which was good because I wouldn’t have liked him nearly as well if he had been. Still, it made me think about this king business. The day before I was running away from an angry daddy as fast as my legs would carry me, and now I was blithely issuing orders to have a man killed. Max was my conscience. Every king should have a conscience, and Max was mine.

  “Don’t worry,” said Tifty, “I’ll do it. It would be a treat.” She had a rare gift for bearing a grudge, that girl, and she gave me a wink and took Max by the hand to lead him downstairs into the dark ship.

  “Go to sleep, you pair. I mean it. Get some rest.”

  “Yes, Your Majesty. Soon, Your Majesty,” and she laughed that laugh, that gorgeous, filthy caramel la
ugh that came echoing up from below deck.

  And then we were alone, just me and Sarah, with no noise but the noise of the wind rolling in the sails, the camel’s gentle belches and the strange musical ripple of the water disappearing behind the boat, sparkling and bright, like an endless, unbroken apple peel, unfolding itself from the prow.

  Sarah took my arm and leaned in close, with her cheek in my coat collar. I could smell her hair and it was wonderful, sweet as a night garden. “Tifty doesn’t mean it,” she said. “She’s not a killer.”

  “I’m not so sure.”

  “Then the job’s done. If you can’t be sure, then Varga can’t be sure, and so long as he thinks she might do it, he’ll be good. It’s not what’s there that counts, it’s what people think is there. You know that. You work in a circus.”

  “I used to. Now I’m a king.”

  I had to lean into the tiller for a moment to keep the needle in the compass lined up just so and, as I leaned, Sarah leaned with me, her weight against me, holding on to my arm, pressed against me down the length of my body, smiling up at me as the candle in the compass-house made pretty shadows on her face. “That’s quite a promotion,” she said. “How are the wages?”

  “Pretty good.”

  “Do you get your own caravan?”

  “I hear there’s a house comes with the job.”

  “And who will live with you in your new house, King Otto?”

  “Oh, palace guards, advisers and ministers, my grand vizier of course, Max and Tifty and the camel and dancing girls, lots and lots of beautiful, fat dancing girls with their hair in ringlets.”

  She punched me. “Anyone else?”

  “No. Nobody in particular.”

  She punched me again. “Nobody?” Punch. “Can’t you think of anybody a king should have with him?”

  “Apart from fat dancing girls with their hair in ringlets?”

  “Yes,” punch, “apart from fat dancing girls with their hair in ringlets. Cat goes with mouse, cheese goes with crackers and king goes with …?”

  “Dancing girls?”

  “Otto, do you want another punch?”

  “Queen! Queen! I meant ‘queen.’”

  “Of course you did, Otto. I will be your queen.”

  “Thank you. I was afraid to ask.”

  “I know. It’s the only reason I was forward enough to apply for the post.”

  “Consider yourself hired.”

  “Thank you, Otto.”

  That girl. My God, but she was pretty. She lay there with her head on my chest, letting her hand trail the length of the tiller to play with my fingers and back again to brush my face in the dark. And somehow she had decided to marry me, and somehow I had agreed.

  “What are the duties, Otto?”

  “Of the queen? Oh very light. Almost negligible. Mostly they include keeping the king happy, seeing to his wants.”

  “Blimey, I thought you got your wants seen to last night. I don’t call that ‘light duties.’”

  “Oh, very light. And don’t say ‘blimey.’ Queens don’t say ‘blimey.’ Say ‘my word’ or something like that.”

  “My word, Otto, I don’t call that light duties.”

  “Very good.”

  “Thank you, Otto. What else, Otto?”

  “Well, obviously, there’s number one on the list: the supply of an heir.”

  “I think that’s probably a natural consequence of ‘light duties.’”

  “Probably, yes. And there will be the business of curtains to make up for the royal palace. Miles and miles of curtains and bedrooms to decorate, and there’s forks and knives to choose and plates.”

  “Otto, they must have plates!”

  “Maybe, but this is the good stuff for when the King of England comes to visit—and the President of America.”

  “Will they come?”

  “Sure to, love. And the Sultan. Maybe even the Czar. Everybody loves Albania now. They will all want to woo us to one side or another.”

  “And will you be wooed, my king?”

  “I will act always and only with the interests of the loyal and loving Albanoks at heart. I will be immune to the blandishments of the Great Powers, except in so far as they extend to harbor improvements, railways and model farms, caring only to secure for the people of Albania their rightful place on the stage of world affairs. And, since we start with ‘A,’ that’s pretty close to the front.”

  “And while all this wooing is going on, and all the blandishments and stuff, what will I be doing—aside from providing heirs?”

  “You’ll be in the garden, dear, talking to the queens who come calling. You must discuss pug dogs and the difficulties of successful rose growing and dull books and boring music and how difficult it is to bring up little kings and the charitable home you have established for the rescue of fallen women.”

  “I have?”

  “We’ll make Tifty the matron.”

  Sarah laughed then. She held on to me and she laughed until she cried and then she kissed me and cried some more, still in a happy way but a different kind of happy.

  I made a lot of crazy promises in between those kisses, stuff about palaces and plenty and peace and bread on tables and children in schools when, all the time, we were sailing to murder and greed and ice-cold lust.

  We met the last of those three devils in Dubrovnik. It’s a beautiful spot, all honey-colored stone and pantiled roofs and great, round towers standing guard over the harbor and, behind them, a million crazy little lanes that run through the town like mold through cheese, and each little lane has a thousand blank doors opening on it, some of them painted green, some of them where the paint fell off a hundred years ago, some of them never painted at all but oiled and polished so the wood glows and the edges have all been rubbed off the carvings.

  They call it “the Pearl of the Adriatic,” but the thing with pearls is, every single one of them starts out with a nasty little bit of dirt at the middle of it and years and years of pain.

  I’ll say this for Varga—he was a sailor. He took us into the harbor with barely a ripple. I remember standing on the side of the boat, hanging out a necklace of woven rope bumpers, but there was no need. Varga brought us to a stop a hair’s breadth from the harbor wall without so much as a scuff in his pretty varnish, and I jumped and Max jumped and we got her tied up fore and aft.

  The place looked dead, as if a plague had struck it and all the people had buried themselves alive and each door was a shut coffin lid. But there was one little boy, I don’t know, maybe ten years old, a beautiful child, clean as a fish, with hair that gleamed like cut coal, an angel of a boy who looked as if he had folded his wings and fallen from the sky and landed, right there in a pile of nets to sleep. He lay there, so beautiful and nearly naked. No shirt. Trousers he must have put on two winters before, halfway up his leg and worn through in the seat and, on his hip, a long, gleaming knife, like a claw. That’s why I remember him, because he looked like a killer.

  My mate Max was busy getting the camel off the boat. The creature looked pretty keen to get back on dry land, but he didn’t want to make that little step across the gap at the quayside where the water gleamed down below so, instead, like the rest of us, he stood and grumbled about all the things he wanted but hadn’t the courage to do.

  All the grunts and bellows woke the kid. He sat up from his nest, took one look at the camel and ran off, his little feet slapping on the dusty cobbles as he went.

  “So it’s that way to town,” said Varga. “We need some supplies. Bacon, bread, coffee, the usual stuff.”

  “And forage for the camel,” said Max. “I’d like to find a little bit of growing grass he could crop.”

  “Oh, fish! Look, Otto, love, fish!”

  Sarah was standing on the edge of the pier, looking down into the water, and I went and stood beside her. It was like looking down into a melted mirror with ribbons of bright green weed streaming out from the harbor wall like fairy flags and flotill
as of little fish moving in and out amongst them, in and out, in and out, like breath on a winter morning. I couldn’t take my eyes off them and I stood there, watching and beckoning behind my back to, “Come and see, come and see,” but nobody came and, when I turned to see why, they were all just standing there with the same stupid, stunned look on their faces.

  I looked at Tifty and she put her hand to her mouth and turned away. I looked at Max and I said, “What?”

  And Max looked at me and he said, “Otto. Love.” And then he found something interesting to do with the camel’s bridle.

  “And brandy,” said Varga. “We need more brandy. In fact, I always seem to need more brandy. Isn’t it time for lunch?”

  I’ve got to tell you, that seemed like a bloody good idea to me so I said that, yes, it was time for lunch and the camel was paying, so we loaded him up with the broken cash box on his back and set off the way the little fisher boy had gone, following the sound of distant music.

  That was a mistake. We wandered about like Hansel and Gretel, but what started out as a no-more-thanordinarily narrow lane quickly wound its way by twists and turns deep into the town walls and, just like a river winding between cliffs of stone, the further we got from the entrance, the narrower it became. Before too long there was no room for the loaded camel to pass and still no sign of any place to eat and the music seemed as far away as ever.

  Max ducked down between the camel’s knees and took him by the bridle, “Come on, boy,” he said, “back up. Back up.”

  We all stood back a bit, where the alley was a little wider, to give him room to work, but the camel’s patience was exhausted. He had behaved like a gentleman on the train and, by the way that he took to the water, you might have believed he came from a long line of ducks but, this time, he’d had enough. Nothing Max could say—and they were firm friends, Max and that camel—would persuade him to move. He stood there like a rock, not even bothering to belch or spit, just calmly chewing the cud, blocking the passage and looking at a spot on the wall above Max’s head as if he was concentrating on doing long division in his head with no remainders.