The Boat

by Clara Salaman

  She looked out at the sea and listened to Mr Bowie. Poor old Major Tom floating in his tin can. She thought of her dad, how he used to sing this song, how he used to strut about being Bowie or Jagger to make her laugh.

  ‘They still together, your mum and dad?’ Frank asked. It was uncanny how he did that – knowing what she was thinking about.

  ‘God no, they divorced years ago.’ She could hear the nonchalance in her own voice. She had perfected that over the years.

  ‘Siblings?’ he asked.

  ‘Two half-brothers.’ She used the same careless tone but it didn’t trip off the tongue quite so easily, it had the ring of risk in it. It was being on the boat, it was the Little Utopia; she’d noticed how unbidden memories kept rising to the surface. There was something about the absence of distraction and the empty horizons that allowed dark, sunken things to pop up into the light like bubbles from the deep.

  They sat in silence. She watched a bird swoop by, searching for fish. Frank shifted at her side, reaching for a cigarette, and she couldn’t help but notice a large scar running down his back, glossy and smooth in the sunshine. His right shoulder blade had deep, rippled indentations down the bone as if some of it had been cut out. She found the disfigurement strangely beautiful, a stamp of his uniqueness. She wanted to reach out and touch it.

  ‘It’s not pretty, is it?’ he said without turning around, feeling her eyes upon him. She looked away, embarrassed.

  ‘Still, I’m lucky to be alive,’ he said. He stretched out his legs and she caught sight of the scar on his calf. ‘I spent six months at the Hotel NHS.’

  She wasn’t very good at telling when he was joking – she spent a few moments wondering why he’d stay in a hotel before she understood. ‘Six months? How terrible,’ she said.

  ‘Not so bad in the end,’ he said, picking up his coffee and taking a sip. ‘I got around to reading all the books I’d been meaning to read for years.’

  She swatted away a fly that was buzzing about in the heat and looked down at her line. She’d only recently started reading. As a child she had always been a doer, not a reader. ‘Books like what?’

  ‘Oh – the classics: Ovid, Hermes, Ficino. The philosophers.’

  She hadn’t heard of any of them but hoped her face didn’t give this away. She wished she knew a little bit more about everything; it was beginning to dawn on her how badly educated she was. ‘Did you study philosophy, Frank?’

  ‘Not officially.’

  ‘I want to study philosophy,’ she said on a whim. ‘I’d like to do some reading. I don’t feel I’ve read very much in my life.’

  He reeled in his line a little and shifted his position. ‘What do you want to know about?’

  ‘I want to…’ I want to be like you, know all the things that you know. ‘I suppose I want to start looking for the truth about things.’

  ‘Ahhhh! The truth!’ He turned and smiled at her and it was hard to tell whether he was mocking her. ‘You’re on a quest for knowledge.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said cautiously. But he didn’t say anything else. ‘Where do you think I should begin?’

  ‘If you’re looking for answers, I suppose the first thing is to start asking the right questions.’

  Her mind went blank. She couldn’t think of any questions at all.

  ‘I don’t mean now, Clem.’ He smiled, looking at her so fondly that she didn’t mind him laughing at her.

  ‘Johnny and I are going to work our way to India. I thought maybe I’d go to a few ashrams.’ He didn’t proffer an opinion. ‘Maybe find a guru,’ she added, not exactly sure of what a guru really did, but Rob had met one and had raved about him.

  ‘You don’t need a guru, Clem. You’re the one that has to answer your own questions. That’s the beauty.’ He winked at her and they fished for a while, which meant that they did nothing at all.

  ‘Have you heard of Krishnamurti?’ he asked her.

  She pretended that she vaguely had and took a guess. ‘Should I read him?’

  He rested his arm on the guard rail. ‘He was a fabulous man, a truly original thinker.’ He was smiling at the mention of this Krishnamurti and she wondered whether Frank knew him, whether they were friends, what sort of things they got up to, whether they fished together, what kind of discussions they had.

  ‘Wherever he went people wanted to know more, always asking him questions, until he had developed this immense following. Then one day, in front of three thousand hard-core disciples, he declared the whole thing finished. Told them all to piss off and get a life.’ Frank seemed to find this incredibly funny. He was chuckling. ‘People were weeping and wailing… it was like the end of the world. What were they going to do? Who were they going to follow?’

  ‘Were you there?’

  He turned round to look at her and laughed a little louder. ‘I might be old, Clem, but this was in the nineteen twenties.’

  She laughed too.

  ‘But I’ve read the speech he gave. It’s a beautiful speech; you should read that. I’ve got it somewhere.’

  ‘I will,’ she said. ‘What did he say?’ The fly that had been buzzing around her was now buzzing around him, dancing on his skin, and she felt a pang of envy for its boldness. He brushed it firmly aside.

  ‘He told them that Truth was a pathless land, that they couldn’t get to it via any religion or sect. He said that truth was limitless and unconditional, it couldn’t be contained or organized and the moment that it was, it became crystallized and deadened. He told them that belief was an individual matter and if they followed someone else, they would cease to follow the Truth.’

  She stared down into the water, empathizing with those weeping and wailing followers. How on earth were you meant to find your own truth?

  ‘Do you think Jesus must be turning in his grave at the mass following that he’s inadvertently created?’ she said, hoping Frank might be rather impressed with her. Frank turned to her and smiled. ‘Spinning like a top, Clem.’

  They sat in a happy silence. David Bowie was still trying to get in touch with ground control and though she didn’t want to have her dad in her head – he didn’t deserve to be there – she found he kept popping up.

  Frank tapped himself out a cigarette, caught it, lit it and passed it to her. ‘It’s hard to be true to yourself. Sometimes you have to go against the great majority.’

  She rested her chin against the guard rail and caught the gash where she had cut herself. She sat back on her wrists, listening to Frank, wondering what majority he had gone against.

  ‘Governments and religion need to control us. Believe me, I know,’ he said in his easy, rolling voice. ‘So we live by their rules.’ He lit his own cigarette and turned to her, blowing the smoke up in the air above the bows. ‘But whose benefit do you think those rules are really for?’

  ‘For us all, I presume,’ she said, striking out, trying to go against his majority.

  ‘Maybe,’ he said, leaning back on his hands but she could tell he didn’t think so. ‘Why is it illegal to kill a man who burgles your house and rapes your wife but perfectly legal to kill a total stranger in a war over oil that’s nothing to do with you?’

  She hoped he wasn’t expecting an answer; she’d run out of strong opinions.

  ‘You see, society needs us to think in a certain way for it to function, for it to use us. It needs to tell us who to point the finger at, who are the “victims” and who are the “perpetrators”.’ He was looking her directly in the eyes and she felt that he could see right through her. ‘You have to set your own compass, Clem. Never forget that.’

  His eyes were so dark and intense that for a moment she didn’t notice that something was tugging at her line.

  Clemmie was sitting in the front of the blue Cortina. She had never been on a trip with her dad, not just the two of them. Normally the three of them went on trips together so her mum would have been in the front and Clemmie would be sitting in the back holding her breath between the lamp
-posts, listening to her mother talking and laughing. Sometimes she would lean forward to hear what she was saying after a particularly laughy laugh but she never got the joke and went back to her breathing tasks. They could make her feel a bit left out, her mum and dad, the way they laughed and talked all the time, not really including her in their conversations. If she tried to join in, pushing herself into the middle, taking both their hands, her mother would end up brushing her hair or wiping her mouth with a spitty handkerchief or tugging at her skirt or pulling her thumb out of her mouth. But today, this time, it was just her and her dad and he didn’t care about those kinds of things. He cared about getting to the bar before closing time, not missing the match, England winning the cricket – sensible things.

  The road was narrow with high hedges; she could only see through the windscreen kneeling and she had to keep her hands on the dashboard because her dad kept stopping to look at the map. He’d been to the hotel before but he liked to try different routes and time himself. The sun was shining straight into their faces so they both had the visors down and she kept glimpsing her own face looking down at her. Her mother had brushed her hair so that the top was flat and now she was worried that she looked like Violet Elizabeth Bott from Just William. She tried to pat down the curls.

  ‘You look very pretty,’ her dad said with a wink and that made her feel better. Apart from her hair, she had to agree with him. She had dressed with great care. She was wearing her corduroy turquoise smock dress with her favourite red tights underneath and so far no spills on either. However, her toes, tucked underneath her bottom, felt a bit squashed because she was growing out of her best shoes: her brown, size eleven, lace-up Start-rites. The ones that made the exciting clickety-click noise on the pavement and turned her feet attractively inwards like Sarah’s. Pigeon toes were all the rage at school.

  Her dad was singing along to the radio. ‘My sweet Lord…’

  He was wearing his shiny blue suit with a wide-collared pale green shirt and the sun kept glinting off his gold necklace. His chin was covered in stubble. She didn’t like him all prickly; he’d said he hadn’t had time to shave and she wondered how long shaving took. He had his Starsky sunglasses on and was swaying with the music, dancing as he drove, making her laugh.

  He was copying the singer exactly, pleadingly, desperately, making fun of him but serious all at the same time. He pretended to pass her a microphone and she joined in on the Alleluia bits.

  ‘OK, are you ready?’ he said after a while and she beamed at him. This was the best bit, the bit where her mother would say, ‘Really, Jim, I’m not sure this is a good idea,’ and he’d ignore her. They’d been doing it since she was tiny. Clemmie knew her cue. She clambered across the gear stick on to his lap and carefully took hold of the steering wheel. He let go, his hands raised in the air. ‘She’s all yours. Left a bit! Good girl, Clembo. Straighten up! Corner coming up…’ He changed down a gear and she bumped up and down on his knee, peering over the wheel as she turned to the right. ‘Round the corner, there you go! Give a hoot!’ She was driving the Cortina, his pride and joy, for a good ten minutes or so all by herself except for the feet bit.

  The sun had dropped low in the sky by the time they pulled up outside the hotel. Clemmie had fallen asleep and was momentarily confused to find herself at the seaside. They parked at the back of the tall, dark building and walked round to the grand entrance, carrying their bags. She stepped carefully in her Start-rites through the splatterings of white seagull poo on the steps up to the swirling glass door.

  There was an old man in a uniform who seemed to know her father. ‘Hello, Jim,’ he said. ‘And who’s the beautiful young lady?’ For a moment she wondered whom he was talking about and then when her father said, ‘This is my daughter, Harry. The most fabulous, cleverest, gymnastic young lady in the northern hemisphere,’ her chest swelled with pride and she had to keep swallowing in case she looked like a smarty-pants – and no one likes a smarty pants, her mother was always reminding her of that. She couldn’t help the smile so she turned it up to the old man in the uniform. She had never felt so grown up in her life and suspected it might have something to do with her red tights and the clickety-click noise.

  The old man tried to take her spotty case off her but she held on tightly and he kind of dragged her through the lobby to the desk. Up above them in a high domed ceiling hung a giant chandelier and over on the left was a large lounge with three ladies sitting in a row at the bar, drinking from triangular glasses, all of them in fur coats though it wasn’t even cold. Her father said hello to them as they checked in at the desk – he always said hello to everyone – and she liked the way the ladies all looked at her as though she was the luckiest girl in the world, which she probably was.

  The bedroom had two enormous double beds in it on to which her dad flung the cases. He unpacked his own while she bounced on the bed near the window. Then he opened her suitcase and they both noticed that she’d forgotten to pack any clothes. She’d insisted on doing her own packing. She’d remembered the main things: her roller-skates and her Whimsy set and some boxes for collecting things but no nightie or toothbrush or clothes. She could see that he was annoyed with her but was trying not to be.

  Her dad went through to the bathroom to have a shave while she carried on bouncing. He’d taken his shirt off. He was quite fussy about his clothes; he’d folded it up and hung it over the loo seat. He had a white foam beard like Father Christmas and was talking out of one side of his face.

  ‘Where first? What do you fancy? A walk on the beach?’

  ‘Ice cream,’ she said, attempting a somersault.

  ‘Good shout. Ice cream on the beach.’

  ‘Yippee!’ She tried again, succeeding this time. ‘Can I have two?’

  ‘As many as you want.’

  ‘Six?’

  ‘You can have all the ice cream you desire, Clemency Bailey.’ Spin, spin, spin she went.

  They walked along the shingle eating ice creams as the waves lapped the shore. He didn’t tell her off when she mistimed a wave and got her Start-rites soaked. He said it didn’t matter – he could dry them with the hair dryer when they got back. They started collecting special pebbles and the ones she didn’t want in her box they threw back into the sea. It was much quieter without her mother. There wasn’t all the talking and the laughing, just more wetness and ice creams and staring at the sea. Her mother wouldn’t have gone in for any of that.

  Clemmie was working her way through a Raspberry Mivvi, still chewing the bubblegum from the Screwball when she looked up at her father. He was looking up at the sky, frowning, a faraway look in his eye, his mouth like an upside-down smiley face. It made her feel all mistaken; she had presumed that they were having the best day of their lives but now she realized that it was only her. She could tell that he’d rather be somewhere else, with someone else, with her mother. She hated her mum then, for being such fun, for being so laughy, for having the love of Jim Bailey, for taking away some of the attention that rightfully belonged to her. She tried to think of something interesting to say.

  ‘Did you know that sneezes come out of your nose at three hundred miles per hour?’

  ‘No,’ he said, his eyes off the horizon now; he was looking down at her. ‘I didn’t.’

  ‘Yes, it’s true. Sarah’s brother Johnny told me that.’

  ‘Did he now?’

  ‘Yes. Sarah’s brothers have magic bums – they can set off jets of fire.’

  ‘They sound charming,’ he said, taking out his cigar tin. She knew he’d give her the box when he’d finished them and she wondered how many he had left.

  ‘Yes. I wish I had a big brother. They’ve got a shed in the back garden that smells of cigarettes. It’s got a pool table and a dartboard in it. Johnny got one hundred and eighty.’ She said one hundred and eighty in the same voice that Rob and Sarah had used, all sing-songy and hilarious. She remembered feeling a little left out then, when they’d all done that. They had p
roper family jokes that she wasn’t party to. ‘Daddy, can we get a pool table and a dartboard? Johnny said you can get them at Barkers.’

  He was looking at her askance. ‘I think someone might have a little crush on this Johnny…’ He was nudging her arm, teasing her.

  ‘No, I don’t,’ she said, not liking it. That wasn’t what she had meant at all. He was spoiling things. Johnny was just a nice brother. That was all. She wished she hadn’t said anything. She wished she hadn’t tried to cheer him up.

  They were walking along the front now, past the dark, tall houses covered in seagull poo. ‘Hey, look!’ he said. The lights of a funfair were in the distance twinkling temptingly against the sweep of sunset mauve behind. Clemmie forgot about his jibes immediately. She grabbed his hand and tried to pull him along, her damp feet beginning to warm up, the excitement rising in her chest as the wafts of toffee apple and candyfloss filtered through the air, with the snatches of music, the faint siren-like screams, beckoning them in.

  Then there they were: the big wheel, the swing boat, the coconut shy, the bumper cars, the kids, the huge men with tattoos, the litter, the toffee apples – all the fun of the fair. A fat woman in high boots and mountains of hair eyed her father as they passed her stall, a small booth with painted-on curtains and ‘Fortune Teller’ written in fancy lettering on the top. She spoke without removing the cigarette from her lips, like a film star. ‘Hey, handsome, wanna get your fortune told?’ She sounded like a man. Clemmie squeezed her dad’s hand to stop him walking on by. ‘Oh please, Daddy!’ she begged. ‘I want my fortune.’ She liked fortunes and things: she’d once had a red plastic fish on her hand that curled into a ball, which meant that she was passionate. So they followed the woman into her little hut and squeezed around a small table. A little brown dog raised its head from a basket underneath and blinked sleepily up at her but growled when she bent to touch it. The fat woman wanted money first and wasn’t really bothered that the ash from her cigarette was falling all over her lacy tablecloth. Then she put on some reading glasses, which didn’t seem very gypsyish, and asked for Clemmie’s hand, breathing all over her, smelling just like the vicar at Christmas when he’d been drinking Christ’s blood. Obediently Clemmie unfurled her palm and the woman twisted it this way and that, screwing up her eyes, which might well have been because the smoke was getting everywhere – she’d not taken the fag out of her mouth once. ‘Yes indeed,’ she said in her man-voice. ‘I see a young and handsome prince… many children…’ Clemmie stared at her, brimming with belief.