‘You are not strong enough!’ he cried. ‘Look at you.’ But instead I looked at him. He was not yet quite thin but he was shrunken, bowed and stiff. His mighty body sagged. Muscles, sucked dry, flapped loosely from their wiry sinews, concave against the starkly prominent lines of smooth, flat bone. Parched veins stuck up from under crisped and scaly skin, at his temples, on his forearms, down his legs, throbbing their thirst. His mad, wild hair had overtaken half his face but it could not hide the exhausted, staring tension of eyes forced open in almost constant wakefulness. It could not hide the strain of keeping hope and heart alive when both were dwindling down to glowing embers. He stood before me, a much older, careworn version of himself.
‘And neither am I,’ he groaned. ‘We neither of us could get to him and bring him back. He’d fight us all the way.’ His half-bent hand hovered around his eyes as he shook his head with reluctant disbelief. ‘And if you go in, I don’t think I could get to you,’ he added more vehemently. We gazed at one another, at the shocking truth. I couldn’t speak.
I looked from him back up and out across the unrelenting waves which rocked us with merciless monotony. We no longer even noticed the peaceless sway. I scanned, eyes darting over and all around the area I thought that I’d seen him last, waiting to decide, half hoping still. But Moley was no longer to be found.
I don’t know why it was. Perhaps burnt and shrivelled lips, a spitless mouth and tightened skin made it unfeasible but looking back, from that time on, I don’t remember that Joe whistled any more.
CHAPTER 7
THE WATER MEN
On the evening of the ninth day, I could not sleep. I knew it was the ninth night because I reached up to the rowlock beside me and felt my way down on to the wood below it, finding the notches that Joe had started. My fingers found the first and worked their way slowly down the row. Nine. The soothing cool of nightfall had closed in around us and as ever brought relief. The agitated drowsiness enforced upon us in the hideous heat of day gave way at dusk to the chance for real rest. Until the early hours, when cold came in to wake us.
The sounds of other men struggling to sleep around me, the deep drawing and letting of breath, restless shuffling and the occasional mumbling had, at other times, been comforting, but that night it was irritating. The rhythmic stroking of the rowers, Big Sam and Mick, the others and their murmured conversation distracted me. I needed quiet to think. For once, it was not anxiety for my situation, cold discomfort or the nagging want for water that kept me wide awake. It was the clear and constant call of an idea that would not be silenced. It had been pulsing intermittently but with increasing clarity from the corners of my mind all day, but when I tried to hide in sleep, it had begun to sound with such insistence that I knew that I would have to speak, despite the bitter arguments that would undoubtedly ensue.
‘Hey!’ I poked Joe in the lower back. He was trying to lie still, head on the seat, hunched body in the bowels of the boat. ‘Hey, Joe… Joe!’ I pushed his shoulder.
‘Gerroff. Asleep,’ he mumbled, shucking me off. I waited.
‘Joe.’ I shoved him again.
‘Bloody hell, Cub. What?’ he said, raising his head and turning, not to look at me but up towards the stars above us. I could see just a dim profile of his face working on being awake. His wiry thatch of hair stuck out at every angle.
‘I’ve got an idea,’ I whispered.
‘What about our rowing shift? Can’t it wait till then?’ he grouched, exasperated that having almost reached the hard-won refuge of numbing sleep, he had been woken up again to our collective nightmare.
‘No.’ I insisted.
‘Well, it better be a bloody good one. I was this close to being asleep for once,’ he muttered and he grumbled, all the while manoeuvring his great body, mashed in between the benches and hampered by other men’s limbs, round so that he could face me. His legs were particularly problematic as he had to bring up his knees from under the bench in front of us and squash them painfully past it to release them again beneath on my side. He swore crossly.
‘Well?’ he huffed, finally.
‘It’s water. I think maybe we could make some.’
He was rubbing his big hand back and forth across his eyes but he stopped abruptly when he registered what I had said. ‘Make some? How?’
‘If we could boil up sea water, we could drink it. It would be clean.’ I could see it plainly and was eager.
‘Brilliant, Cub, quite brilliant. And how the bloody hell are we gonna do that? Boil it? And anyway, the water would burn off. You’d be left with salt.’
‘Like a kettle,’ I said. ‘You know. The steam condenses back to water when it hits something cold. If we could boil some sea water and cool the steam that comes off it, the water would be okay.’ There was silence. ‘Well, wouldn’t it?’ I pushed.
‘Very good, Cub. But there’s one slight drawback to your otherwise quite excellent plan. We don’t have a bleeding kettle,’ he pointed out, good temper, as always with Joe, resurfacing.
‘No, but we have the fuel tanks in the engine. We could use one. We could use the fuel pipe as the spout. If we could boil sea water in the tank and douse the pipe all along with cold water while it was boiling. Well, surely fresh water would drip out of the end?’
He regarded me quietly for a few moments.
‘Would mean dismantling the engine. Getting rid of it.’ This wasn’t a question but I nodded.
‘Might need the engine again. When we get to land, we’re gonna need the engine to get us in to shore.’
I nodded again. His objection was one I had battled with all day, racking my brains for some alternative but I was sure now that there wasn’t one. I had my answer ready.
‘We’ve hardly any fuel. And anyway, if we don’t get some water soon, we’ll never even get to see if we’re ever gonna need the engine again.’
‘Skipper reckoned on making land tomorrow. Or the day after. Be taking apart the engine just when we might want it most. Mayn’t be any need.’
‘And if we don’t? What if we never even got as far as the Canaries? You heard Clarie – could be one helluva lot longer than a couple of days.’ I swallowed and for a moment, both of us shrank away from the spectre of protracted suffering that loomed huge and dark before us. ‘We’re almost out of water, Joe.’
He scratched behind his ear and, screwing up his eyes, considered for a moment.
‘What the hell could we burn, though, to make a fire?’ he asked slowly, his voice thick with thought and I knew then, with a sharp surge of unexpected relief, that he had seen it. My arms, which had unconsciously encircled and gripped my knees up tight, suddenly relaxed and each hand, clasping either forearm, let go, sliding down my shins to rest loose about my ankles. I realised how much I had been pinning on his opinion. That he had stopped throwing up the rational objections I had fought alone all day, and had already begun to see the plan as viable, soothed the anxious isolation I’d felt at its conception. It was not, after all, the madcap idea I’d begun to fear it might be, with glaring flaws that, in absurd naivety, I had been all too eager to overlook. As it was, Joe, with typically open-minded and pragmatic optimism, had given it credit, had grabbed it with both hands and was busy now, wrestling with the questions of how the two of us might actually achieve it.
‘That’s the only thing I can’t work out,’ I admitted ruefully. Frowning, I let my forehead fall heavily forward onto my knees and, knuckling the sockets of my eyes hard into their bend, I rocked my head rhythmically across them, frustrated. ‘I think it’s the only real problem. That’s why I woke you up. See what you reckoned to it.’
For a minute or two, he didn’t say anything and, raising my head, I had to wait for the blotching yellows behind my eyelids to fade before I could find the outline of his face again in the shadows not two feet from me. He was wide awake now, alert and thinking, casting around up the boat, weighing up and rejecting possibilities. ‘Sail maybe? Nah, burn too quick. The mast?’
I shook my head. ‘Be madness, wouldn’t it? To take apart the engine and then burn the mast as well. Would leave us with nothing but the oars to get us anywhere.’
‘That’s just about all that’s getting us anywhere anyway, isn’t it? The engine’s not much better than dead weight. Propeller’s just dragging back there in the water. Making it harder if anything. And what use has the bloody mast been so far? Even if there was a bit more wind to get us going, the sail’s never gonna catch much like it is.’
In the moonlight, I followed the direction of his eyes, which rested thoughtfully on the broken shaft in front of us. Reduced in the darkness to little more than a spindly sliver and a little less than three-quarters of its original length, it seemed unlikely that it would afford us much in the way of firewood.
‘Wouldn’t last us long enough,’ I concluded doubtfully. ‘Even if we could chop it up. A knife isn’t gonna do it.’
‘We’ve Mick’s axe, haven’t we, in the kit box?’ he countered, his confidence growing by the minute as enthusiasm took hold. ‘Anyway, you saw the way it fell apart in Fraser’s hands. So rotted it’d break up pretty easy. Not sure many of the others’d have it though, even if we can persuade them to dump the engine.’ He paused, contemplating for the first time the prospect of their reaction, before adding grimly, ‘Gonna have enough of a job convincing some of ’em to do just that much.’
‘I know,’ I breathed apprehensively, ‘but I’m about as sure as I can be that it’s worth a shot.’
He turned his head to look at me then and, seeing in my face what the dim light must have only half concealed, he suddenly reached out to place an amiable paw upon my shoulder and he shook me gently. ‘Some of ’em are gonna make a helluva fuss,’ he said quietly. And then he smiled: a great wide grin. I knew he was smiling because I could see the flash of whiteness of his teeth and I could hear it in his voice when he said, ‘But bloody hell, Cub, I think you might have cracked it!’
Joe was the first up in the morning and just as grey light began to steal across the shivering bodies and scanty belongings of the crumpled men, he began to rouse them. He was excited and therefore, much to their annoyance, he was loud.
‘Get up. You’ve gotta listen to this. Come on, wake up. Cub’s got an idea.’ He wandered around the boat, rocking it at the edges, stepping over people and leaning down to shake them awake.
‘Sir. You’ve gotta listen to this. Cub’s got an idea about how we can make some water.’ If he had been my father, I don’t think he could have been more proud, though I was slightly disconcerted as the rowers stopped and the rest of the crew were suddenly wide awake, sitting up at the mention of water, rubbing their faces and looking down the boat, expectantly, at me.
‘It’s just an idea,’ I said, hesitating. ‘It might not work.’
‘Course it’s gonna work,’ enthused Joe, beaming around the boat and nodding encouragingly. ‘Of course it is.’
‘Come on, lad. Out with it then,’ the skipper, wispy-haired and weary, sighed. Clearly, I wasn’t inspiring him with very much confidence.
‘We could make a kind of kettle,’ I said, all too aware of doubting eyes around me ready to dismiss before I had begun. Any kind of tipping of the balance, to some, was worse than lying back and waiting here to die. Some, I knew, had staked their all on the certainty that today, tomorrow, there would be land. That the skipper and Mick between them had been right, that the Canaries were behind us and that by bearing east from where we’d been, the African coast could not be far away. Failing that, we were sure to be picked up, our signal had been sent and somewhere, just beyond the ever-moving circumference of thin-lined blue, someone was surely looking for us. And if not, well then, at least we knew our fate. Change, to them, no matter how desperate our present situation, could only bring us worse. But then I thought, what could possibly be more harrowing than dying like this? Disintegrating beneath a spiteful sun, starving apathetically through an inability to eat, degrading slowly in vicious and corrosive thirst.
‘Out of the fuel tank in the engine,’ I went on. ‘If we could boil up sea water in the fuel tank, if we could make a fire beneath it and boil it up, we could collect clean water that comes off it. The steam.’ I finished in a rush as all about me voices rose in protest.
‘Christ, the cub’s a flaming physicist now,’ Mac crowed. ‘The bloody fuel tank! He’ll have us drinking fucking petrol next!’
‘You can’t be taking apart the engine now, now can you? How’re we to get to land if you take the bloody fuel tank! Jesus!’ Mick, incredulous, turned to Clarie for support and Clarie, shrugging, shook his head, as though sorry to have to call into question the stability of my mind.
‘You’ve had too much sun, Cub. Sit down,’ he said, before turning dismissively on Joe. ‘You’re bloody mad, the both of you.’
‘How’re you planning on catching steam? Got a fucking net?’ Mac raised his eyes to Billy, hoping to bring him in on the sarcasm and add his voice to the resounding denunciation but Billy’s head was down, thinking. If nothing else, Billy Rawlins was never one to miss an opportunity.
‘Wait, wait!’ Joe cried. ‘You need to hear him out. Listen!’
‘We need the fuel pipe. Boil the water in the tank and have the pipe lead off it but keep it cold, really cold. The steam would turn to water in the pipe. If we bent it down, collected it in something, it would be clean enough. We could drink it.’ I was sure of it.
‘And what are we without the engine? Bloody dead is what we are. We won’t ever get to land if we take apart the engine,’ Mick would not let up. ‘And we must be close. Should be any day now.’
‘Ah, for Christsakes, Mick. There ain’t no land and we’re out of fucking water,’ Billy spat out suddenly. ‘If we don’t get some water some’ow, we’re bloody dead anyway. Fuck the engine. We need the water. You’ve no way of knowin’ how long it’s gonna be. We don’t know where we are, for fuck’s sake! It could be bloody days. So if we don’t try something, anything, now, we’re gonna bloody die.’
‘Jesus Christ, fellas, will you let Cub finish?’ It was Fraser. He had got up onto his feet slowly and was standing with a hand up to his chin, his other arm folded across his chest.
‘How do you propose to make a fire?’ he said, looking directly at me.
‘I’m not sure,’ I started to reply. ‘We thought maybe the mast might…’
‘The mast! Jesus Christ! First the engine, now the bloody mast!’ Mick, throwing up his arms, erupted. There was no mistaking the country of his origin now for his tone, fast, furious, increasingly Irish, left none of us in any doubt as to the strength of his objection. ‘I’ve bloody heard it all now.’
‘Mick, wait!’ Joe put out a placating hand towards him. ‘Just listen, would you? The engine, that propeller, they’ve been holding us back anyway. And what use has the mast been to us so far? There’s hardly any wind, for cryin’ out loud. We make far more progress rowing.’
‘Jesus, Joe! For fuck’s sake. Would you just listen to yourself?’ interrupted Mac. ‘You’ve fucking lost it. You think we’ll ever make it out of here alive without an engine? Without an engine or a sail? Hellfire. Of all the fucking hairbrained schemes…’ He looked round for backing and found it most immediately in Clarie who stood behind him, hands on hips, and eyes and mouth working in soundless disbelief that there were some among us who could even begin to entertain this lunacy. That we might consider chucking out more or less all that was left to us in terms of serviceable equipment was, to him, utterly incomprehensible, and he could do little more than nod with speechless vehemence his wholehearted agreement with Mac’s dissent.
Joe put his head on one side and, looking Mac directly in the eye, replied as calmly as he could manage, ‘Mac, all I know is that we’re not going to make it out of here alive without any water.’
Clarie suddenly found his voice, ‘And if it doesn’t bloody work, we still won’t have any water, Joe, but we won’t have a bloody engine e
ither. Or a mast. It’s bloody madness!’
‘For pity’s sake, will you give the boy a chance?’ And again Fraser turned to me. ‘Cub?’
‘If we could shift the engine and leave the metal plate, on the bottom there, we could burn something on it. Put the tank a bit above it. I don’t know… need to burn up something.’
‘If you’re gonna smash up the engine and burn the bleedin’ mast, how about the bloody oars as well?’ yelled Mick, sarcastically. ‘Or why not the bleedin’ life jackets. If you’re gonna get rid of the bloody engine and the mast, you may as well burn the bloody life jackets too! Let’s get rid of all our assets!’
There was a moment’s silence and Joe looked across at me and then at Fraser, eyes alight and dancing at the answer having been so unexpectedly given. The captain, Fraser, even Billy, stared at Mick, arrested by the obvious, if inadvertent, brilliance of his suggestion.
‘Arh, now, no, I didn’t mean it!’ he cried, understanding suddenly our appraising attitude and staring wildly round from one thought-struck face to the next.
‘It’s a good idea, Mick! I’d rather have a sail if we’ve no engine to fall back on. Kapok’d do much better,’ Fraser congratulated him, nodding slowly as if having come to his decision.
‘What’s he on about?’ I hissed at Joe.
‘Kapok. It’s what’s inside the life jackets,’ he answered, hushing me with a flapping hand, as he leaned forward, straining to hear what Fraser was saying to the skipper.
‘Cub is right. We’ve got a chance. It could work. In theory, it should work,’ we heard him say.
Making Shore Page 11
