‘I’ll bloody row for Joe then!’ Mick, up in the prow, shambled slowly to his feet. He and the skipper along with Fraser and Slim had been part of the crew rowing in the early morning and it had been their turn to take some rest. Joe and I had rowed in the small hours until first light, rested, and then been recalled at the changeover. Joe had failed to take his place with Mac but I had just assumed that he was slow in getting himself together.
‘No, Mick. Sit down.’ The captain sat up too then. ‘Mac’s right. It’s too blasted hard. Give it up. We start again at sundown. Doesn’t really matter. By the look of it, we’ll still be there by morning.’
No one took issue. Pulling up the oars, each man ambled to his own unsatisfactory refuge and collapsed. All were beyond desperate to push towards the land but energy and even enthusiasm blanched before the physical impossibility. Not one among us had the strength to row against the glowering heat.
As Mac made to step over Joe, he stopped and, peering down at him, shook his head. ‘Poor bastard. Goin’ the same way as Murack, isn’t he?’ He didn’t even bother to lower his voice and oddly, this discourtesy to Joe offended me more than his prognosis. It scored across my nerves and made me wince. Joe remained oblivious.
‘Fuck off, Mac,’ I snarled, the words snaking from my mouth. ‘Just fuck off out of it.’
His eyes narrowed, half closing, ‘Sorry, Cub, but it’s obvious…’
‘Fuck off!’ I screamed, springing to my feet and taking one step towards him. I would not hear it. Mac stared at me, at my disintegration, and then shrugging, left us both alone.
Later, in the afternoon, Fraser came to see how Joe was doing. He bobbed down next to me. For a while, he didn’t speak. He just squatted by me, watching the tremors rack Joe’s body and listening to the cadence of his ramblings. ‘He’s in bad shape,’ he said eventually.
‘But he didn’t drink the sea water!’ Somehow I felt it necessary to leap to Joe’s defence, as if by denying his culpability for the sickness, it would acquit him from a sentence as miserable as Murack’s. ‘It’s just a fever. He’ll be OK.’ I needed to believe it but my voice belied the assurance of the words. It came out high and plaintive, betraying the appalling, hovering sense of dread that threatened, swift and dark, to overwhelm me.
Fraser shook his head, ‘Maybe it wasn’t sea water that took Murack. Moses didn’t take it either and he can’t have been right in the head the other night.’ Fraser gazed down at Joe again and started to tease a piece of flaking skin from his top lip with his teeth. It began to bleed. ‘Joe is big. Bigger than most. Maybe he needed that bit more. More water maybe. Could he eat?’
I rubbed my hand over my face, pinching my thumb and fingers together at the bridge of my nose. ‘No more than me. Maybe less. He tried.’ Fraser, still crouching, his elbows on his knees, let his head fall low so that his chin rested on his chest. There was no helping it. We did not know why and it didn’t seem that there was anything left to say.
Most of what Joe muttered was unintelligible. I heard Maggie’s name a couple of times. My own. He called to Moley that he’d never make it and in more frenzied, frantic moments he wrestled and writhed in the seeping water, struggling breathlessly to take in air and cried out that he was drowning. I tried to soothe him, to keep him still and cool him but he did not seem to know that I was there. Almost imperceptibly, he began to quieten. His mumblings became less audible and for longer intervals, his lips stopped moving altogether. The muscles in his face, around his eyes and mouth, slackened and his body slowly ceased to strain. This peacefulness, stealing softly through his being, I told myself, was heartening. A revocation of the fever; sleep would be restorative. But in the stricken hollow of my heart, I knew that he was dying.
As the sun began to dip and melt, powdering the sky with a gentler palate of softer hues, I went up to get his water. No one asked and none sought to catch my eye. By the barrel, Clarie and the skipper were talking of our prospects when we got to land and of the probable need to hydrate slowly. Sickened, I returned to Joe. Inching my hand underneath the side of his head and tilting it slightly, I put the cup up to his pallid lips and tipped it, watching the water trickle purposelessly past them, splashing over and around my wrist beneath. There was nothing more that I could do for him. I knelt down beside him on the floor and heaved his broken body up on to my knees. I put my arms around him and sat there, waiting for him to die. He did not object or fight against me. He lay, head bowed low against my chest, fighting in and out each shallow breath.
Sometime before the end, he had a moment of lucidity. His body, suddenly stiffening, jerked involuntarily away from me, and I grasped at him to stop him sliding. His hand found my wrist and clasped it and I was startled to find him staring up at me, with eyes apparently that understood. I felt his fingers tightening around my forearm, clenching with all the strength he had left in him, and I smelt the stinking breath of death. I could feel the burning heat from his head against my body and I could see the wavering of his eyes as he sought desperately to hold them steady, to stop them rolling. ‘Maggie,’ he breathed. His eyes were wide and raw and red. They fixed me: I could feel the effort in the tautness of his neck as he willed them straight. He tried to lick his lips, sandpaper over sand.
‘Cub…’ he struggled. ‘You make sure…’ He paused to swallow, grimacing with the effort, ‘you make sure of Maggie.’ He tried to smile, a depth of gaping darkness. Done.
‘Joe…’ But the sharp glimmer of perception in his eyes, as they began to roll, receded as I watched, to be replaced again by dim opacity. A calm passivity settled across his features, fixing them as they had become and though he still breathed, there was little left of Joe.
I don’t know when he actually died. Or why. I only knew that I had never thanked him. With that regret consuming, I held him until I recognised that night had come and both of us were cold. What had he not done for me? He had stood beside me, made me take my chances, preserved me from my own rash choices and, in keeping his, insisted I keep faith with my humanity. I am not particularly religious. I am not superstitious. But from the moment I had met him, he had watched over me. He had fought for me, guarded me, protected me. He had believed in me. There was no reason why he should. A self-appointed older brother. The briefest snapshot of a person who had flashed across my life when I had most need and influenced me more than any other. If I had believed in guardian angels, I would have believed that Joe was mine.
I was nineteen. I was immortal. But when he died, I thought that my immunity from death had been taken too. He had been it. Vulnerable now, alone at the bottom of the boat with his stiffening corpse, as others got on around me, enthralled within the cages of their own separate purgatories, despair unbound me. Despair and rage and fear and pain. For the first time, I saw that I was going to die. There was no point. He and I were never going home. This inhospitable sea, this wretched boat, which would not make it through the breakers. The tantalising hope of land. God knows what we would find there even if we made it. There was no point. I cried then. For the first time, I cried. The strange, dry, racking crying of youth with nothing left. No tears, no spit, no life. I all but gave it up.
And yet, even while his breath was failing, Joe had given me a point, a reason to endure. He wanted me to get to Maggie. He wanted me to let her go. There was something, something still, that I could salvage from this waste. I knew that he had done all that he could have done for me. I owed him only the same courtesy.
I carved out his notch myself that night. The twentieth notch. And then I went to row.
CHAPTER 10
JOE’S LAND
The boat broke up around us. It bowed and creaked and twisted, threatening to split apart almost as soon as we hit the drawing waters. At the waves’ conception, they began to swirl and tug us forwards, our course inexorably set now for the shore. The end. Breath held back in tight anticipation, we felt the menacing power beneath us, its rising fury, building slowly, pushing us ominousl
y on and upwards. With absurdly optimistic forethought, some among us sought frantically to find some useful purchase, grasping at the boat’s side, the oars, the mast. But I grabbed on to Joe. Even as the wood began to cleave around us, I clutched him by the shirt at his shoulder with some idea that I could hold him, that I could keep him with me and not surrender his body over to the avaricious tyranny of the sea.
At last our little boat, skewed sideways, was lifted, teetering on the crest of the first enormous wave, to be flung far forwards, wreaked apart before it even fell in shattering pieces on the furious foam. The heavy, lifeless weight I held was wrenched away as soon as I hit the water and my cry of anguish at its loss was drowned out as I was dragged beneath and backwards, only to be cast up again and whipped forward by the next. Time and time again, the great Atlantic’s mighty rollers, merciless, hurled me over, thrashing me out in front, to suck me then back under, before I’d even had the time to snatch a gasp at breath. At first I kicked and fought and struggled, thinking I could make some difference, thinking I might have some sway, and my presumption was not unpunished. The harder I sought to keep my head above the water, the more insistent the sea’s reproof, pulling me beneath. My body soon exhausted and I gave myself up to the water’s greater will.
Finally, it chose to spew me up, smashed and barely conscious, into the shallower waters where my flailing legs floundered on the shifting ground. I stumbled, half crawling, clawing with my hands up towards the shore as far as I could manage and then collapsed onto the fluxing sands. I retched and sucked for air and retched again. Easing slightly, I felt the smaller, tugging waves of the foreshore caressing up against my limp and battered body, and so I crumpled then, down into the gentler rivulets of water. I laid my head upon my arm and closed my eyes. Land.
Darkness started at the corners of my mind to hurry in, encroaching on my consciousness, closing over me, pulling me gently under with promises of quiet and sweet, seductive peace. A blackness without pain or even sense. Without sorrow. It would be so easy.
My eyes flicked open. Joe.
From where I lay with my head upon the sand, I became aware of other bodies being washed up around me. Some lay, half-prone and spluttering, a little further up the beach. A few were sitting up and heads in hands were struggling to bend their minds to understanding, to grasp the realisation that it was done. One or two were even trying to stumble to their feet but fell, unable to make their legs believe that the ground was flat and stable, that they should forget now to accommodate the constant swaying of the lifeboat that had become their natural stage.
One, within my line of sight, lay twenty yards or so up from me along the sands. His clothing moved with the ebb and flow of water, his shirt at the shoulder fluttered lightly in the breeze, but otherwise, he lay quite still. Even from this distance and this angle, I could see his crazy hair being fanned up and outwards, splayed upon the small, insistent fingers of the waves. It stood on end and then washed down repeatedly to cling about his face.
Bits of wood and planking from our boat nudged towards the shore around us, until the waters, finally deciding where to dump them, snagged them up on arbitrarily prominent creases in the sand. Our water barrel bumbled in and broke apart, the last of our fresh water seeping eagerly away, inseparable from its salty origin. The remnants of our temporary home, half the mast, tarpaulin, bits of sail, locker doors and canisters thrashed in and were settled here and there down the beach for as far as I could see.
I thought I could hear shouting. I raised my head and, ignoring the popping colours behind my eyes, I strained to focus. Squinting up the beach, blinded by the sunlight, I could make out someone, maybe Mick, kneeling down, with his back to me. His arms were held aloft. The thickness of the heat made his outline hazy but I could see others now, wavering down the beach to join him. I propped myself up on one elbow and wiped my other arm across my eyes. Adjusting slightly, though stinging raw, my vision sharpened and despite my inability to keep my mind from blurring, I understood then that the shore was barren. The beach, sprawled across the feet of huge, imposing dunes, was wide, but it was bare. I scanned the length of it but could see no end to its featureless monotony. There was no tree, no grass, no vegetation. Scorched and arid, pitted with craggy rock and crooked slabs of stone, the sand looked little more than coarse, grey ash. I knew it meant no water. Apart from us, there was nothing here.
I began to inch my way forwards but also sideways, away from the gathering group of men, to get to Joe. The wet sand gave way beneath me, dragging at my every movement. My hands and knees sank heavily each time I made to haul myself a little further but I fought against it, wriggling and writhing, breathing hard until it occurred to me that I might make more progress if I could get up on my knees. I did not know if I had the strength. My legs shook uncontrollably and my hands went down onto the sucking sand to steady myself time and time again. I had to stop after almost every single, interminable movement to gulp at breath, shaking my head in a constant effort to keep my bearings, to keep my will. I tried to clench my teeth but, despite the blazing heat, they began to chatter and I could not stop them.
By the time I reached him, I knew I could not possibly get him out. I was dizzy and disorientated, and his lifeless form lay curled heavily into the sand. The water swirled around him softly, rocking him slightly this way and that, laying its claim to him still.
I sat back beside him in the shallow channels running out from his embedded frame, and laid my arms across my knees. I had no thought at all that I must do something next. I just sat, as if to keep his company. I sat and watched the ceaseless turning of the waves, understanding no more of their fathomless convolutions than I could hope to understand why it had been him.
After a while, I became aware that the others were calling to me but I did not need to answer. I wondered why they could not just let us be. It was Fraser who splashed up towards us in the end, and he went to stand on the other side of Joe. He let his hands rest one on top of the other at his stomach and waited in silence for me to speak. But there was nothing at all that I could think to say.
‘We’ll have to bury him,’ he said eventually. ‘I’ll get some of the others.’ When he came back, seven or eight of them were with him. Big Sam and Mick. Mac. Clarie. We struggled in the first place to lift him even from the water. The initial hoist caused us to weave and stumble for though his body was half the size it had been, thin and wasted, he was big-boned and he was heavy. Fraser tried to steady us, barking breathlessly short, clipped instructions to keep us straight. Even so, our weakened legs, unaccustomed to walking firmly, could barely support our own, let alone the cumbersome, unwieldy weight of Joe’s saturated frame. We staggered apart, lurching one way, then another, stumbling through the water out of step and time, so that Joe’s leaden body was pulled and dipped and crushed between us. Straining, almost against one another, we slogged on until we reached the thick, dry sand and started up towards the dunes. Our feet singed and sank into its heat. The ground gave way at every step, forcing us to bend our knees which, already too vulnerable, could scarcely resist the overriding compulsion to give in and fold. More than once, one or other of us fell or stumbled over, dropping his part of the burden. We had to keep on stopping. It made me want to scream.
About halfway up, two of the others let go at once and Joe’s body, at the waist, creased sharply, tipping towards me so that I too, let go and fell backwards on to the burning sand. As I did so, I watched it drop, almost slowly, from his gaping pocket, catching glints of sunlight on its casing as it fell. The small, gold disc. Maggie’s compass. I spun on to my knees and scrabbled forward, ‘Stop!’ I howled, ‘Jesus! Stop!’ and snatched it up. The others laboured to an unruly halt. ‘Wha’ the fuck?’ Mac swore, exasperated to have his gritted efforts arrested yet again. Trying unsuccessfully to work my mouth, I faltered to my feet and held it out before them, across his body. ‘It’s Maggie’s,’ I said, shivering.
‘It’s ’is compass, isn’t it
?’ Oblivious, the harshness in Mac’s voice betrayed his frustration to get on. He spoke over me. ‘Might need that.’
‘It’s his!’ I shouted hoarsely, as vehemently as the constriction in my throat would allow. My voice, dropping, cracked into a low, thin whisper. ‘It’s his.’
Mac shrugged, uncomprehending, impatience written through every line across his face. They watched me as I closed my hand and, struggling with Joe’s trouser pocket, shoved the compass as far down as I could inside it. We lumbered on.
We dug a shallow grave up beyond the water line, using bits of wood from our boat as spades. Each feeble effort at scraping out a hollow proved more ineffective than the last, for the sand would slip and slide continuously back around our makeshift tools so that eventually we took to grubbing it out with our hands. We lined it with the longer bits of planking that had been washed up and, wrapping him in a tattered piece of old tarpaulin, we lowered him in.
I did not think that I could bear to watch him covered, so while the others filled it in, I wandered vaguely up and down the beach, weaving in the throbbing heat, and clinging solely to the purpose of finding two small bits of wood so that I could make a cross. I forced my mind to concentrate entirely on that single task, that one distracting exercise, the thought on which might hinge my reason. For numb with pain and guilt and sorrow, I could not look upon what reigned within me nor listen to its long, low, keening cry of grief, which, constant and all-conquering, deprived my own salvation of any sense.
Eventually I picked two pieces that would do and, tying them together with a frayed and knotted piece of rigging, I worked it into the ground at the head of the new, low mound of sand. The rest of them gathered at Fraser’s bidding and the captain murmured some old, familiar words of prayer, which brought no ease or comfort.
Making Shore Page 17
