The Boat

by Clara Salaman

  ‘Don’t worry, Clem,’ Frank said gently, his words low and soothing in the darkness. ‘You don’t have to play these games.’

  She stared at him, motionless.

  ‘No, go on,’ Johnny heard himself say. ‘Kiss him, Clem…’

  And he watched as his wife stood up and bent down to kiss Frank; he heard the wet soft noises of them kissing, saw how his gentle giant hands held her head with such tenderness, the way those hands moved slowly down her back and how she pressed her body into his, giving herself to him.

  6

  Sickness at Sea

  There was barely any wind and the sails were flopping about. It had been like this for forty-eight hours. Every now and then a warm gust from the west would take the boat up the backside and she would pick up a little speed, enough for Johnny to think about putting the spinnaker up, but just as he decided that he would, the wind would drop and he’d stuff it back down through the hatch. They were moving slowly, about two knots; everything felt lazy, hazy and still. Occasionally an insect buzzed by or a bird swooped languidly past but everything had been stifled into quietness by the heat and lack of wind. Frank had said he wanted to save the last of the diesel for motoring in and out of bays.

  Clem was lying on her prayer mat on the deck, feeling the warm sunshine on her skin, her feet resting on the boom, ostensibly to stop it gybing but more for her own comfort, her toes and hips moving almost imperceptibly to the Stevie Wonder drifting up through the open saloon hatch. She was thinking about what had happened two nights ago, her head still awash with moments and sensations, her body still buzzing, her face still tender from the scratches of Frank’s beard. She had never kissed a man with a beard before – at first it had felt odd and cave-mannish after the extreme softness of Annie’s face and lips. Then again, she had never kissed a woman before. She had never been with anyone apart from Johnny. She wasn’t even sure that she found Frank physically attractive – he was so much older and bigger, a man not a boy. He definitely wasn’t attractive in the same way that Johnny was. Yet there was some other connection that had turned her on, had made the sexual act seem something other than physical. She was aroused again, just thinking about it.

  Johnny was watching Clem, his thoughts the only turbulence in the omnipresent stillness of their surroundings. His head ached. She was naked save for the heart necklace, thumb in mouth, right hand lazily seeking out the hot spots across her body. Her hands were like two little birds, the left nesting as the right flew off purposefully to find succour and bring it back. Usually, when clothed, she concentrated on her facial supply of hot spots, the bone beneath her eyebrow, her temple, the dip in her upper lip, the secret cave under her jaw bone, but lying there stark naked she evidently felt quite free to explore the warm softness of her breast or her hip or her armpit. This was only ever done when they were in bed. Alone. But for the last couple of days, she had clearly felt free to do it out in the daylight in front of anyone who was watching. Johnny didn’t like it. He felt that she was being deliberately provocative, stroking herself here there and everywhere. She was doing it to titillate him. But the thing was, the fact that she hadn’t seemed to have noticed was that Frank wasn’t even watching her. He was sitting over by the genny engrossed in some history book. She was making herself look ridiculous.

  His head was full of crap. He needed some wind to clear it all out.

  ‘Hey, Smudge, need a hand?’ he asked, envying the simplicity of her child world. She was standing on the galley step heaving various things over the lip and out into the companionway: a bowl full of water, various lotions and potions and towels and flannels and then Gilla, whom she’d strapped into her bikini – an ironic sight, since most of the humans weren’t bothering with clothes. Then last but not least she brought out Granny who was sporting a colourful ribbon tied around her middle. She was wearing Frank’s CBE as a belt.

  Smudge plonked Granny down on the towel, which she promptly used as a toilet. Then Smudge herself climbed over in her Captain Hook coat which was looking even grubbier than normal. ‘Naughty Granny doing a poo,’ Smudge said, turning over poor Granny, exposing her pale underbelly to the world. She undid the ribbon and dabbed cotton wool in the water and started cleaning Granny up as if she were a baby.

  Granny waved her legs in the air hopelessly, her little neck straining round, her wrinkled, old-man eyes blinking at up at Johnny.

  ‘Now, Granny,’ Smudge said bossily, turning her back over and dangling her over the bowl full of water. ‘You can stop all this. I’ve had quite enough of your antiques. It’s bathtime whether you like it or not.’ She did a pretty good impression of Annie; she certainly had an ear on her.

  Granny wasn’t so keen. Smudge might have been a little more sympathetic to Granny’s plight when she herself kicked up a notable stink at bathtime.

  She picked Granny up and put her down in the water and poured some shampoo into her hand.

  ‘Not shampoo, Smudge,’ Johnny said, taking the bottle out of her hand. ‘Granny’s not got any hair. Just let her have a little dip… Smudge?’ he said, bending down. Granny’s feet had caught his eye, they had messy dabs of red paint on her claws. ‘What have you done to her?’

  ‘Oh. She wanted to play Beauty Salons,’ Smudge said, shaking her head as if she herself had attempted to persuade Granny otherwise.

  He sat back at the tiller, glancing over at Frank who was still engrossed in his book, sitting on a towel near the bows. Annie was sleeping down in the saloon, curled up on the seat, a sheet over her. There was always at least one of them asleep at any given time. Clem was still sunbathing. She’d stopped stroking herself now and was turned away from him. He was still reeling from what had happened, how quickly everything seemed to have changed and yet no one was referring to the fact that they had all fucked each other. Only naked can we truly reveal ourselves. Frank was right about that; they had reached a new level, the four of them. There was not a lot to hide now; the barriers had been removed. Nothing could be more intimate than watching another person orgasm. He was surprised by how quickly nudity had been normalized, how unselfconscious the others were, whereas he himself had categorized things: he was fine with it when they were sunbathing or washing or having sex, doing things where nakedness was an obvious choice, but he needed people to be wearing clothes when they were eating or having discussions or cooking. Yes, he liked boundaries; he liked a public and a private persona.

  He couldn’t work out quite how he felt about it all now. He’d been all right at first, even the day after, but today everything was odd. He couldn’t help feeling as if he’d been robbed, or that he’d been careless, that he’d mislaid something precious. When they were lying about the boat like this, all in their own little worlds, it was hard to believe that it had actually happened, that he had willingly taken part and openheartedly given his wife to another man. Not that she had put up any resistance; he had watched as Frank had laid her down on the cockpit seat under the stars, his mouth pressed to hers; how she’d pulled up her skirt and pulled down her knickers and opened her legs as if she’d been waiting for him, dying for him, gagging for him. Johnny had felt proud of her, how beautiful she looked and how keen she was; he’d wanted Frank to be impressed by her; he’d wanted her to please him and for Frank to feel the gift of Clem from him, Johnny. I give you my wife. Then of course, it meant that Johnny could have Annie; his guilt was erased. She had got down on her knees and undone his jeans and taken him in her mouth and all the while Johnny had kept his eyes on Frank and Clem getting it on, watching as Frank had slipped his fingers down between her legs into her wetness. How he kept saying over and over, ‘You little thing, you little gorgeous thing,’ as he fucked her with his hand. How she had arched her back and moaned at his touch, or was it his words? But the thing was, the thing she hadn’t seen, the thing that made her look foolish lying there touching herself in the sunshine, lying on her bloody prayer mat, was that while Frank was fucking her it was Johnny he was locking eyes wit
h. When they were inside each other’s wives, when Frank was coming, as he shuddered and juddered, at that point of pure abandonment when a man looks helpless and pathetic, it was Johnny Frank had been staring at. And Johnny, who was shortly to climax himself, had been half appalled and half aroused by it.

  ‘Have you got me a birthday present?’ Smudge said. She had wrapped a resigned Granny in a towel and was applying talcum powder liberally – no tortoise in the history of tortoises had ever been so pampered.

  He had momentarily forgotten that her birthday was coming up. ‘Maybe we do, maybe we don’t,’ he said, making his eyebrows dance up and down with suspense. ‘You’ll just have to wait and see!’

  ‘Oh I can’t,’ she said, grinning her baby-toothed grin, crawling across the cockpit sole to him and climbing on to his lap. He ruffled her tangled mess of hair.

  ‘Only one more sleep and you’re five years old! Just think! Such a big girl!’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, a tremble of excitement running through her. ‘Daddy says that five is the most important age in the world.’ She swung her legs against his and turned round to look at him with a frown. ‘What can big girls of five do that little girls can’t?’

  ‘Well, big girls can… swim, can’t they?’ he said. He didn’t really have any idea about five-year-old girls.

  ‘Yes they can,’ she said, eyes wide with possibility. ‘Will I be able to swim tomorrow?’

  ‘Well, maybe not tomorrow but soon.’

  ‘What else can big girls do?

  ‘Um… big girls can read and write.’

  Her eyes widened in wonderment at all the amazing opportunities that age was going to bring her. ‘When I was a little girl of four I couldn’t really write properly, could I?’ she said as if it were already a distant memory, curling a lock of matted dark hair maturely round her ear. ‘I just did really good scribbling…’

  He laughed and looked up at Frank, who was watching them with a smile on his face. Johnny waved.

  ‘If you wanted I could have my present early? Now, even?’ she asked hopefully.

  The day before, they had actually passed a bay that was occupied. It had two houses in it. Johnny had peered through the binoculars to examine it carefully. There was no vehicle that he could see but the houses were inhabited; there was washing hanging up on the line. They’d rowed ashore and a little old woman had come out from the far house to meet them. She welcomed them inside her extremely humble abode. There was one stone room with a fireplace in the middle and a stone sink. There was no running water but there was a stream running down from the mountain that divided the two houses. The woman lived a completely isolated life; there was nothing in the whole premises to hint that Christ had come or gone. At the sight of a few lira she had gabbled away through rotten wonky teeth and taken them through the stone room to the back garden where an old, skinny donkey blinked dolefully at them from underneath the shade of a tree. She’d got down on her hands and knees and scrambled into a chicken coop, reversing out with a scrawny-looking chicken in one hand and an egg in the other. She’d handed over the flapping bird and laughed at their blank expressions, gabbled some more, taken it back and cheerily snapped its neck in two. When she’d spied Johnny rolling a cigarette, she’d helped herself to his tobacco and rolled herself a cigarette the size of a small baguette with her nimble chicken-killing fingers. On the beach where they’d left the tender, Johnny had found a piece of driftwood and Clem had collected a load of shells which some creature had thoughtfully drilled holes into and in the evening, as Smudge had slept, she had threaded the shells together into a necklace on a piece of fishing line and Johnny had sharpened the wood into a spear for killing monsters. So now Smudge not only had a necklace and a spear but it looked like they’d have chicken and a cake for her birthday as well.

  Johnny looked up from Smudge, out on to the glassy water. ‘Gybing!’ he said. Smudge jumped off him and picked up Granny. Frank shifted as the genny flapped across him and Clem stirred, took her feet off the boom and sat up hugging her knees to her chest, ducking her head as the boom swung over and the Little Utopia dozily shifted through the non-existent wind. Clem got up from her prayer mat and wrapped a sarong around her naked body. Slowly, Johnny noticed, deliberately; she wanted Frank to be watching her.

  ‘Bloody wind, where are you?’ Johnny muttered under his breath, his headache banging at his temples.

  ‘Bloody wind,’ Smudge repeated, tucking Granny underneath one arm and Gilla under the other, standing up, looking out to sea, trying to pull the same frustrated expression that Johnny was pulling. Then she spotted her father and tottered down the deck to join him. He put down his book and lifted her into his arms, squeezing her tightly, blowing a raspberry on to her belly. ‘And who is going to be five years old?’ he cried in a booming, scary voice.

  Clem stepped down into the companionway and put on her shades. Her hair was now so curly and bleached and her skin so dark, she looked quite different to the Clem he remembered in England; he felt slightly nostalgic for the other one, the one he knew really well, who was his and his alone. She slid down the side of the seat on to the cockpit sole out of the sun and smiled at him. It didn’t feel like a real smile to him, it felt like a testing-the-water smile, a gauging-his-mood smile. They had been in some unspoken struggle ever since it had happened. She yawned.

  ‘You shouldn’t be tired, all you do is sleep,’ he said. Everything he said to her seemed to have an edge to it today.

  ‘Didn’t know I was being monitored so closely.’

  ‘Oh? I thought you did,’ he said. ‘I thought that was why you were lying around naked touching yourself.’

  She paused. She turned her face up to his, taking her sunglasses off to see him better.

  ‘He wasn’t even watching you,’ Johnny said, adjusting the tiller slightly. He wasn’t proud of himself. He wasn’t quite sure what he was even jealous of any more; he was just trying to pick a fight. She sat back up on the cockpit seat and glared at him. She’d never looked at him that way before. That was a look he’d seen her give her father.

  ‘Why don’t you just ask what you really want to?’ she said. ‘Why don’t you ask me whether I prefer having sex with him or you?’

  They had never spoken like this to one another – but then again, these were exceptional circumstances. Johnny reached over and picked up Frank’s packet of fags, which was lying on the seat. He lit himself a cigarette, his fingers trembling just a little, hating her but hating himself more.

  ‘Well? Did you?’ he said as flippantly as he could.

  She paused and took a cigarette of her own. ‘It was different,’ she said.

  Wrong answer. He looked up to check whether the sail was luffing or if the wind had dropped or if the sky had fallen in or anything just as long as he didn’t have to look at her. He wasn’t even looking at you; he was looking at me. This was awful, ugly, being at war with her.

  She sighed and turned her back to him, tucking her knees up to her chin. He couldn’t see her face but he saw her wipe her eyes roughly as if they were betraying her. ‘You started it…’ she said.

  He had made her cry. He wanted to reach out and touch her but he couldn’t do it.

  ‘You started it, Johnny. You did it too. And now you’re acting like I’m the one that’s done something wrong.’

  It was true. He tried to tell her he was sorry with his eyes.

  ‘Let’s get off this bloody boat,’ she said and he leant forward and wiped away a tear from her cheek with his thumb. He had meant to do it tenderly but it didn’t come out that way. He didn’t seem able to reach his tenderness any more. Yes, they must get off the boat.

  ‘We need wind,’ he said quietly. ‘We’re really low on diesel.’

  By the afternoon the wind had completely died and the water had become flat and glassy for miles around. They were prisoners of the open sea. The sails flopped about and the boom banged. The boat barely moved and his head still ached. There were dolphins
everywhere, a stream of them leaping and diving across the expanse of sea – the lucky things needing no wind. A pod of mushroom-coloured whales with bulbous noses passed by not more than a hundred yards away. Frank had looked them up in a book and Johnny had wondered out loud why everybody wanted to know the names of everything, couldn’t it be enough just to see things, did we have to attach labels to everything? Frank had been watching him carefully since then, as if he were worried about him.

  Annie was in the cockpit. Her back was slightly sunburnt so she had put her clothes back on, a flowery sundress that Johnny hadn’t seen before. She was plucking the chicken; her dextrous and able hands firm and strong as she ripped out the feathers and flicked them overboard, leaving a trail behind the boat, piles of them getting caught on the bows of the tender, a soft, gingery moustache sitting on its wooden lip. Smudge was seated with Clem at the bows; they were singing together some repetitive nursery rhyme as they painted their toenails to match Granny’s, the waft of acrylic hovering on the boat, being blown nowhere.

  Frank was clattering about in the galley making coffee. He passed Johnny and Annie up a cup and then joined them in the cockpit with the guitar. He looked out over the glassy sea and began to strum it lazily as the boat drifted nowhere, the sound tripping far across the water and he wondered whether anyone on earth could hear them. Johnny squinted at the horizon. It was a bitch of a day. They were becalmed; they could be stuck here for ever.

  ‘I don’t think you should leave us, Johnny,’ Frank said, once again reading his mind.

  ‘It would be an impossibility under present circumstances,’ Johnny said, eyes as ever scanning the water for signs of wind.

  ‘You and she will be fine,’ Frank said quietly, glancing down the boat at Clem. ‘You can’t force solutions on problems, Johnny. Solutions emerge by themselves.’