The Boat

by Clara Salaman

  ‘We’ve got money,’ Clem added.

  The bear man and his wife looked at each other. ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘I don’t see why not.’

  ‘Oh, thank you!’ Clem cried. ‘Thank you so much! I could kiss you!’ she said and the bear man and his wife laughed.

  ‘Feel free!’ he said, raising an eyebrow, giving a flash of his neat white teeth and raising his charged glass.

  It didn’t take much to get Clem drunk. Johnny watched her blow kisses to their hosts across the table. The raki had made her cheeks flush and her dark eyes shine. She looked truly lovely. And the bear man too saw her loveliness. Johnny watched it happen. Frank was leaning forward to pick up his lighter when her beauty struck. He was momentarily thrown; his smile froze before slipping slowly from his lips. Occasionally, when Johnny witnessed how her beauty could disarm people, he thought of it as a sort of weapon. Frank looked as if Clem had just pulled a gun on him – there was the briefest flash of pure helplessness in his eyes.

  ‘You two look like kids, if you don’t mind me saying,’ Frank said, looking away, back to the safety of his guitar.

  ‘Well, we’re not. We’re married,’ Clem said proudly, draining her glass, oblivious to her effect on people. ‘I’m nearly eighteen.’

  ‘I noticed the ring,’ Frank said. She looked down at the tiny sapphire on a sliver of gold on her finger. Johnny had won a game of poker and they’d bought it for thirty-six quid in Kensington market before they left.

  ‘We’re on our honeymoon actually,’ she said, suddenly remembering that herself, a wavelet of melancholy passing through her as she recalled the night’s events. She took Johnny’s hand, which was no longer damp but warm and flushed like hers. She ran her fingers over his, smoothing his skin, pressing away the bad things. ‘We’re travelling east – going to try and keep on going. It might be the longest honeymoon ever,’ she said.

  ‘Before you go home and settle down?’ Frank asked.

  ‘Oh no, we’re never settling down.’ She laughed, fiddling with one of the plasters on her ankle.

  ‘Don’t you want children?’

  ‘Of course we do. I’ve got all their names ready. We’ll have loads of children.’

  ‘Not loads,’ Johnny said, flicking his ash into the butt-piled ashtray. He wanted to wait to have kids, wanted to buy a boat for them to live on first – a proper boat that needed a bit of work: a sleek wooden ketch or a big Dutch barge, not a bucket like this. Boats like this should be banned. Any boat designed by a potato brain should not be allowed to set sail.

  He looked up. He was as drunk as a skunk and not quite sure what he was saying out loud and what he was keeping to himself.

  ‘Soon,’ Clem said, taking the cigarette out of Johnny’s fingers and stealing a drag. ‘We’re going to have babies soon.’

  ‘In about ten years,’ Johnny said. The man and his wife laughed although he’d not meant it as a joke. Frank offered Clem one of his cigarettes. She took one and leant forward with that extra concentration that drunkenness requires and he lit it for her.

  ‘Do you want boys or girls?’ Frank asked her.

  ‘Both.’

  ‘Girls are good,’ he said. It was hard to judge the sobriety of a stranger but Johnny reckoned the bear man was pretty sloshed too. They all were. Raki should carry a health warning. ‘Are you going to have more children?’ Clem asked, turning to the woman. But she didn’t answer. A shadow crossed her large, pale eyes and the rain rattling on the coachroof rattled that little bit louder.

  Behind Clem a beautiful brass sextant was resting on the chart table. Johnny reached for it. ‘Nice sextant,’ he said, changing the subject. ‘Where did you get it?’ Johnny’s dad collected sextants; he’d like this one.

  ‘It was on the boat when we bought her. I don’t think it works.’

  Johnny felt its heavy weight in his hands and peered through the glass. He saw no reason why it shouldn’t. ‘Where did you buy the boat?’

  ‘France,’ he said.

  ‘Was your daughter born there?’ Clem asked Annie.

  ‘No. Here,’ Annie said.

  ‘In Turkey?’

  ‘No. Here on this boat.’ She laughed. ‘Right where Johnny’s sitting actually.’

  Johnny instinctively flinched and they all laughed; he’d been inadvertently funny again. He didn’t mind them ganging up on him, was quite happy to play the joker. He was rather enjoying making this woman laugh, seeing the light switch on in her face.

  ‘It’s all right, I washed the covers,’ she said, gently tapping herself out a cigarette, one eyebrow raised. ‘Frank delivered Smudge himself,’ she said looking proudly up at her husband.

  ‘Are you a doctor then?’ Clem asked.

  ‘No,’ Frank said, strumming the guitar again as he spoke, his head cocked a little as if the chord he was searching for was just out of reach somewhere. ‘But I’ve watched enough of them do their stuff,’ he said and it sounded almost like lyrics to the tune he was playing.

  She waited for him to illuminate them further but he was lost in his music now. She thought he might be an artist of some sort; he had those abandoned kind of good looks, like a film director, perhaps, or a set designer. They listened for a while and knocked back more raki. Frank stopped playing; he laid the guitar flat on his knee, picked up his cigarettes, shook the packet in his big hands and tapped one out, catching it in his mouth again. He was properly flash.

  ‘I like how you do that,’ Clem said and Johnny knew she’d be practising it for hours, choking and gagging on fags until she got it right. She leant over and lit it for Frank.

  ‘What do you do about school?’ she asked. ‘Does Smudge go to school?’

  ‘Bollocks to school,’ Frank replied, taking a deep, hot drag, sucking the life out of the cigarette. ‘Over-rated.’

  Johnny liked that. That had always been his thinking too.

  ‘We teach her ourselves,’ Frank said, emptying the dregs of the bottle into their glasses. ‘She can get by in three languages. She can pretty much read, add up, knows about history. What can school teach her that I can’t?’

  ‘Are you all right?’ Annie was looking at Clem who was trying to open the hatch.

  ‘I’m just a bit hot,’ she said, feeling a little worse for wear now.

  ‘You’re drunk,’ Johnny said cheerfully.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Oh, Johnny, I’m very drunk and very hot.’ She sat down again and he took off her cardigan for her.

  ‘You do look a bit flushed,’ Annie said, leaning across the table and tenderly pressing her silver-ringed hand against Clem’s forehead, her pale blue eyes blinking with concern. It was an intimate, feminine gesture and through the foggy drunkenness that had rapidly taken hold in him, Johnny found that it had cut him to the quick.

  ‘You feel OK,’ the woman said to Clem, sitting back down next to her husband. ‘It’s probably the raki. Have a little lie down.’

  Clem took her advice instantaneously and lay down right where she was, resting her head on Johnny’s lap. She sighed heavily and curled on to her side, putting her thumb in her mouth, her other hand fiddling with the slate heart around her neck. He knew she’d be asleep within a minute or two; she had an uncanny ability to fall asleep the moment she chose to. He positioned the cardigan around her legs and ran his fingers through her hair, letting the ringlets spring back into shape like the suspension springs on his dad’s old Norton.

  ‘My mum used to do that,’ Johnny said, looking up at Annie. ‘My mum used to do exactly that when I was a kid.’

  ‘Exactly what?’

  ‘The hand thing.’ He copied the way she had put her hand on Clem’s forehead.

  ‘Did she?’ Annie said smiling at him. ‘I guess it’s just something mums do.’

  ‘Maybe.’ He hadn’t thought of his mother for a long time. The drunkenness had made him nostalgic. ‘I used to have a radiator by my bed and sometimes in the mornings if I didn’t fancy going to school I’d press my head again
st it and kick the sheets about and moan a bit and Mum would do that; she’d lean down and feel my head with her hand just like you did and she’d look all concerned and say, “Yes, you are hot, Johnny, I’ll ring school.” And hey presto! I’d get to lie in bed all day masturbating to my heart’s content.’

  Annie and Frank both laughed. He was quite the joker today. ‘There we go,’ Frank said. ‘That’s exactly why I don’t want boys.’

  Annie turned to a pile of laundry at her side and picked up a little dress and began pressing it down on her lap, smoothing it with her palm, ironing it flat. Frank leant forwards against the table, one giant paw gently wiping the surface as if he’d spotted some crumbs. Then he looked up at Johnny, his smile gone now. ‘So you lost your mother, did you, Johnny?’ he said. And Johnny, quite taken aback, could only stare back, confused. He didn’t remember saying anything about her dying. But then again he wasn’t quite sure what he was saying at all.

  ‘Don’t worry, Johnny,’ Annie said, pausing in her ironing, looking up at him with those wide, sad eyes, seeing his confusion. ‘Frank can see things other people can’t see.’ She looked at her husband with a strange mixture of pride and defeat. ‘He sees everything.’

  ‘Yes,’ Johnny said, looking into Frank’s dark eyes. ‘My mother died.’

  ‘You were what, mid-teens?’ he said and Johnny must have nodded. Frank’s voice was so gentle it was as if he was inside Johnny’s head, swirling around with the raki, drowning in the stuff. He felt as if he was melting from the inside out; he’d tell this man absolutely anything if he asked.

  ‘Hard for you,’ Frank said quietly. ‘Boys need their mothers.’

  Johnny nodded again. He remembered her touch more than he remembered the details of her face: that cool, loving hand against his forehead, the coldness of her rings, the hardness of her nails. They were always painted a shiny pale pink. He was overwhelmed by the clarity with which he could remember those hands.

  Annie stopped her folding and moved her fingers cautiously across the table and rested them on Johnny’s. He couldn’t help himself, he was too drunk to care; he lifted her hand and pressed her palm to his forehead, all self-consciousness gone. He smiled and shut his eyes. He felt so overwhelmed by everything now – the evening, their escape from those men, this haven they had found, the kindness of these people, taking them in, tending their wounds, the raki, the music, being here so far away, his love for Clem and his dead mother – that his eyes began to sting and the table swirled about the cabin in a watery flurry and he thought that he must be crying.

  ‘It’s all right, Johnny,’ Frank said softly. ‘You’ve had a bad night. You found yourself in a tight spot. But you’re safe now.’

  Then Johnny felt Frank’s great hand smoothing his hair gently, femininely. No man had ever touched him like that before. ‘It’s OK,’ Frank said in that low, soothing voice of his and Johnny laid his head back against the shelf and closed his eyes, feeling the weight of Frank’s hand on his head, Annie’s hand on his wrist and Clem’s head on his lap; he was surrounded by touch. He listened to the rain on the deck, which was softer now, like drumming fingertips beating out a complicated rhythm. He thought that he must be very drunk indeed. He felt Frank take his hand off his head, heard him pick up the guitar again and start playing some chords. Both of them were humming now, softly, a very long way away, and Johnny let their voices dance through his head and he thought what a strange and wonderful time he was having. He felt as if somebody had taken the plug out of him and he was pouring out. How good it was, this sweet release.

  When he opened his eyes they were both smiling at him. He smiled back and Annie returned to her pile of laundry, ironing with her palm.

  ‘This will be me and Clem one day,’ Johnny said. ‘This life – living on a boat with a kid.’

  Frank rested one elbow on the table and grinned at Johnny. ‘Good lad. It’s the only way.’

  ‘Is it?’ Johnny sat up straight, all his melancholy gone as quickly as it had arrived. ‘Tell me!’

  The bear man’s dark eyes twinkled at him and he sighed heavily. ‘Well,’ he said mysteriously, as if he were about to reveal a secret. ‘We’re on a boat, aren’t we? We’re under the rule of no land. We live how we want to live. We’re free of all those ridiculous values that society places on us, rules that other people live their lives by: how to behave, how to conform, how to treat each other, how to bring up our children. Nobody should tell us how to live, what children should or shouldn’t be learning, how they should or shouldn’t think. Here on the Little Utopia we think for ourselves. No rules, no fetters, no chains, no labels. You know what this is, Johnny?’ he said, slamming his glass down, the raki spilling on to the table. He was drunk all right. ‘It’s the fucking Golden Age.’

  Johnny slammed his own glass down too. He didn’t know what the fucking Golden Age was but it sounded fucking fantastic. He was grinning now; he’d not met a man like Frank before in his life. Everyone else seemed to have compromised somewhere along the line. Not this man: he was living on his own terms. Johnny swore to himself that he would be like him, never settling for less. He’d never live a half-arsed life in a half-arsed relationship with a half-arsed job like so many people. Even his dad had compromised. Frank was brave. Johnny would be brave.

  Frank tapped out another fag and caught it in his lips – how cool was that – and lit it in that snatched, hurried way and then passed it to Johnny. He then tapped out another for himself. No man had ever done that to him before.

  ‘I’m with you,’ Johnny said, a major slurring of the tongue going on now. ‘What the hell happens to most people as they get older?’ he cried, feeling pretty heated now, pretty let down by the rest of the world. ‘Why do they just opt out?’

  ‘Fear,’ Frank said. ‘People live in fear. Not us, my friend! Not us on the Little Utopia!’’ And he tipped his raki glass against Johnny’s.

  ‘To the Little Utopia!’ Johnny cried, with one too many t’s. Annie knocked her glass against his and Johnny noticed then how pissed she was; her eyes were as skew-whiff as her fringe and her pile of laundry looked like the leaning tower of Pisa.

  ‘To international waters!’ Johnny added, suddenly thinking of the moose’s head staring into the darkness from out of a chest of drawers somewhere in the deep, the white keys of the Steinway piano tinkled by no one and the satnav pointing the way to nowhere, all down there in the dark, at the bottom of the deep blue sea sea sea. Could that really have only been twenty-four hours ago?

  ‘Under the rule of no land!’ Frank cried, standing up to chink Johnny’s glass and in so doing catching a glimpse of Clem sound asleep now on Johnny’s lap, flat on her back, her chest rising and falling under his hand, her thumb hanging loosely from her lips as Johnny’s fingers twirled the little slate heart hanging around her neck.

  ‘Look at her!’ Frank gasped, amazed, wobbly on his feet. ‘She’s sucking her thumb!’ Johnny nodded and Frank laughed and fell back down into his seat heavily, a seriousness taking hold of his rather fine features.

  ‘I like you two,’ he said. ‘You have something rare and precious.’

  ‘Too bloody right we do,’ Johnny said. He was unattractively drunk now. But it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. This was a new kind of freedom.

  Frank slowly blew out a jet of smoke and put his cigarette down. ‘Yes,’ he said, staring hard at Johnny, pinning him with his dark, intense eyes. ‘I like you two very much.’

  Then he snatched up his guitar again and strummed loudly and sang with abandon the same old song about that bad moon that the mermaid had been singing – he sang of nasty weather, of an eye for an eye, of getting things together, of being prepared to die and Johnny cocked his head to listen.

  Not until then did the lyrics strike Johnny as strange.

  At night, the house in Putney had creaked and breathed in a different way to its daytime life. Johnny lay in bed and listened to the rain lashing against the rattling windows and the asthmati
c groaning of the boiler in the cupboard. But it wasn’t the storm that had woken him up. He kicked off the covers and got out of bed. His room was next door to the bathroom and he could hear someone retching through the wall. He opened his bedroom door and quietly leant against the bathroom door. He pushed it open.

  His mother was on the floor on her knees, head in the toilet bowl, being quite violently sick.

  ‘Hey, Mum!’ he said and knelt down beside her. He put his hand on her back and felt her heave. He pulled back her hair from her face and held it back while he waited for her to finish.

  She sat back and wiped her mouth, exhausted and pale. ‘I must have eaten something…’

  Johnny leant over and flushed the toilet and then filled the red plastic toothbrush holder with some water and gave it to her. She rinsed out her mouth and spat into the toilet bowl. He helped her up and she sat on the edge of the bath. He ran the flannel under the tap and gave it to her. She wiped her mouth and hands.

  ‘Sorry I woke you, love,’ she said.

  ‘You’re shivering,’ he said and went into his bedroom and got his dressing gown. It was way too small for him, he’d had it since he was twelve, but it almost fitted her.

  ‘Go back to bed,’ she said.

  ‘I’m not tired.’

  She was still perched on the edge of the bath. She looked him in the eye, a smile on her pale lips. ‘My lovely boy,’ she said quietly.

  ‘Are you going to chuck again?’

  ‘I bloody hope not. It’s exhausting,’ she said and rubbed her face. Outside the rain was hitting the window in loud gusts and they both looked towards the frosted glass.

  ‘Fancy watching the storm downstairs?’ she asked.

  A while later they were settled into the low armchairs, angled towards each other, under the glass refectory at the back of the house in the animal room. They were silhouetted against the darkness, snug and warm, listening to the howling wind, watching the rain fall in sheets against the glass. His mum had a blanket wrapped around her and was leaning back looking up through the ceiling at the torrent of water as the guinea pigs and gerbils roamed freely at their feet. The room smelt of sawdust.