He rowed long, even strokes, keeping the blades at just the right angle for maximum speed. He was always after speed, he realized. He squinted as the sunlight bounced blindingly off the water. He got to the Little Utopia as fast as he could, dragging one oar and swinging round to her stern. He could hear the faint white noise of the tape deck being left on: a background scratching. He tied the tender to the stern with a one-handed bowline and climbed on board. She’d left the cockpit doors wide open and he peered down into the saloon. She wasn’t in there and the heads door was shut. She’d be passed out on the bed. He went down the companionway steps.
‘Annie?’ he called, rolling himself a cigarette. ‘It’s time for the cake. We’ve got wind. We’ll be leaving soon so we’ve got to have it now.’ She didn’t respond so he went through the saloon and knocked on the forepeak door.
‘Annie?’ he said, licking the glue strip of the paper. ‘We’re going to light the candles.’
He tried the handle but it wouldn’t budge so he pushed his weight against the door and it opened slightly, revealing a glimpse of naked flesh. She was crashed out in a crumpled heap beside the toilet.
‘Annie?’ he cried, now really pissed off with her that she couldn’t hold herself together at all, if only for her daughter’s sake. What sort of a mother was she? What did he even care any more? What concern was it of his? The wind was here and he and Clem were on their way. He went back out through the saloon and up the steps, glancing back at the others, at the mountains, at an eagle rising in a thermal, as happy as him to have wind again. He went down the deck and lifted open the forehatch and stuck his head through.
‘Annie?’ he called. ‘Get up! Cake time!’ She was crumpled up on the floor,, her back to him, wet and naked, unmoving. Then he saw the blood.
He slid through the hatch head first and on to their bed and crawled forwards, falling off the bed on to the floor, reaching for her shoulder and turning her towards him.
‘Annie?’ She rolled over heavily, a terrible red stripe down the whole left-hand side of her legs, her face white and drained, her eyes rolled back into her head. She was holding the large kitchen knife in her right hand and her left wrist had a deep gash across it. Blood was spilling out in a steady stream, pouring on to the floor and spreading around her body.
‘Jesus Christ! Annie! Jesus fucking Christ!’
She moaned. She was still alive; she was still conscious. He grabbed a shirt and, slipping in the warm wetness of her blood, heaved her body up on to his and wrapped the shirt around her wrist, trying to stem the bleeding. ‘It’s her fucking birthday,’ he kept saying. ‘It’s her fucking birthday.’
He lifted her up in his arms and put her on the bed, put a pillow under her head. She moaned and opened her eyes slightly and tried to focus. When she saw him her face puckered a little, as if she was about to cry but lacked the strength. Her lips were trying to form words that he couldn’t make out.
‘I can’t understand you, Annie,’ he said, panicking, pressing his forehead to hers, looking into those dazed, weak eyes. He could taste blood on his lips, rusty and rich on his tongue. ‘Just hang on, Annie. Just hang on.’
‘Heads…’ she whispered. ‘Cabinet…’ He got off the bed and stepped back into loo area and opened the cabinet door.
‘In here?’ he asked but she didn’t respond. There were two medicine tins in the cabinet. One was locked. The other was the tin they had used on that first night. He pulled it out and put it on the bed. She was moaning now, shaking her head, her eyes rolling back in their sockets. ‘Nooo…’ she cried.
‘Come on, Annie,’ he said, holding her head up, utterly terrified that she was going to die on him. ‘Stay awake, please. Don’t give up… You’re not a bad person… Think of Smudge… You’re not a bad person…’
Then something inside him switched. The panic took a back seat. He became clinically practical. He moved about the boat efficiently trying to mend her. He bandaged up her wrist. He put a blanket around her. He propped up her arm on a pillow. All the while she was moaning and crying out with the pain. He crushed up four aspirins and made her swallow them with some water. He tried to tidy things up. He didn’t really know why he was covering up for her; it wasn’t the sort of thing you could hide but he felt he had to do it for Smudge. A child should never see her mother in such a state.
He cleaned the knife and chucked it in the cockpit. He used towels to mop up the blood from the floor and put them in a bin bag. Then he cleaned up himself, wiping her blood from his own body, scrubbing his hands clean in the sink. When he came back through to the forepeak, she was lying there, propped up, her glazed eyes staring out through the hatch at the small patch of sky.
‘Annie?’ he called but she wasn’t listening. She was lost in the sky, perhaps in the wind that might have taken them with it. He told her not to move, but it was perfectly obvious that she wasn’t going anywhere. ‘I’m going to go back for the others, OK?’ She didn’t respond. ‘I’ll be back soon.’
He closed the door and went back through the saloon up into the cockpit, picked up the knife, dropped it into the tender and climbed down on to the transom and into the dinghy. Only then did he notice that his legs and hands were shaking so much he could barely hold the oars.
He rowed, his eyes locked on the knife; he’d missed a bit of blood on the wooden handle. He glanced behind at the shore. The three of them were standing at the edge of the water, shading their eyes from the sun, watching him row back, presumably wondering why Annie was not with him. He gripped hard and carried on rowing until the bottom of the boat ground to a halt on the sand. His knees were shaking so much he could hardly climb out of the boat. He kept his back to them as he pulled it up on to the dry sand.
‘Where’s Mummy for the cake?’ Smudge asked, running over to help him.
‘She’s not feeling good. She’s lying down,’ he said, not looking at anyone. And they all believed him, not noticing the fact that his whole being trembled.
‘Did you bring the knife?’ Clem asked and he looked up at her, momentarily unable to fathom her meaning. She saw it in the boat and bent to pick it up, the sunshine glinting off the wrist-slitting blade. He followed them to the blanket and shortly found himself standing round the cake with its five flaming candles mouthing the words to ‘Happy Birthday’. He had no voice. His body juddered. He couldn’t eat. He must tell Frank. Up in the sky there were wisps of cloud being blown above his head. There was wind but he was static.
‘We must go,’ he said. ‘We must get moving.’ Then he wondered whether he’d said it out loud because no one seemed to have heard him. There was a commotion going on: Smudge was crying, Clem and Frank looking anxious. They knew. They’d guessed. But no, Smudge had lost Granny. Please stop crying. They were all running about looking for a tortoise when Annie lay bloodless on the boat. He wanted to reach out and pull Frank back but still his body wouldn’t move. He saw Clem and Smudge sprint off and Frank searching around the little tree while he himself stood at the water’s edge looking out at the Little Utopia, his quivering fingers trying to roll a smoke, unable to comprehend how on earth everything had gone so horribly wrong, how he had not seen any of this coming. It made no sense. Frank’s words tumbled about inside his head: psychotic, delusional, schizophrenic, insane, a mythomaniac…
He became aware of Frank standing at his side. ‘You’ve got blood on your arm, Johnny.’
Johnny turned sharply, twisting his body to examine his arm; it was true he had a great smear up the back of his left forearm. ‘We have to get back to the boat,’ Johnny said. ‘She cut herself, Frank. She needs a doctor.’
Frank seemed neither surprised nor upset. ‘Where did she cut herself?’
‘She’s OK,’ he said even though Frank hadn’t asked. ‘Across her wrist. She slit her wrist, Frank.’ It felt good to tell him, to share the burden. His mouth was so dry the words stuck on his tongue. He thought he was going to cry or scream.
Frank squinted out to
sea at the Little Utopia, annoyed. ‘On her birthday? It’s her fucking birthday, for Christ’s sake.’
Johnny was glad Frank said that, glad he was angry. He’d felt just the same. ‘Why would she do that?’ Johnny said, running a clammy hand through his hair, eyes fixed on the boat.
‘Vertically or horizontally?’
‘What?’
‘Her wrist.’
‘I don’t fucking know, Frank. I’ve bandaged it up.’ His knees were shaking so badly it was as if they were trying to escape. ‘Diagonally, maybe.’
‘I’m so sorry, Johnny. I should have told you earlier,’ he said with a sigh.
‘She’s fucking crazy…’ Johnny said. His words came out in breathy snatches; he couldn’t control them. Then very tenderly Frank put his arm around Johnny’s shoulder and pulled him in. Johnny couldn’t help it. He didn’t pull away; he wanted the comfort. He rested his head against Frank’s great chest, needing the support of Frank’s big, capable bear body to hold him up. They stood there, Frank rocking him gently.
‘I’m so sorry you had to see that. I should have gone to get her. She does this from time to time, Johnny. Don’t worry. She knows just how far to go.’
Johnny pulled away, trying to regain himself, nodding, taking a drag of his fag. ‘I think she might need a doctor. I don’t know. I’ve stopped the bleeding.’
‘You’re a good lad. I’ll go to her,’ he said, rummaging for his soft packet of tabs in his back pocket, but going nowhere.
‘I’ve cleared up the mess. Just keep Smudge out of the forecabin.’
‘Thanks, Johnny.’ Frank tapped the packet and caught the cigarette in his customary manner. It seemed somehow inappropriate. ‘I presume she told you all those scratches on her thighs were from falling through a glass roof?’
Johnny looked out at the horizon; there were more clouds now. The wind was getting on fine without him. He had a low foreboding feeling that he would never catch it now. He breathed in the faint scent of pine trees that the wind carried: the promise of other things and other times. He shut his eyes and let it wash over him. Annie had indeed told him about falling through a glass roof. He hadn’t thought to question her.
‘She’s always been this way,’ Frank said, tapping about his person for a light. Johnny got out his own lighter and passed it to him, still with a faint tremor in his fingers. Frank took Johnny’s whole hand in his and pressed it firmly between his own, trying to press the fear out of him. ‘She’ll be all right,’ he said.
They stood there in silence, looking out at the boat, Johnny’s trembling hands calmed once Frank had let go. The waves were breaking on the rocks. He listened to the sounds of the sea, at last a language he understood. It calmed him.
‘What about when you first met her? Was she like that then?’Johnny asked.
Frank raised his eyebrows, rubbing the back of his neck, his face full of some sweet sadness. ‘ I heard her before I ever saw her, you know,’ he said. ‘I heard her singing – singing like an angel – this voice so heavenly it stopped me in my tracks. It quite derailed me, the sound of her unhappiness. Then when they unlocked the door, there she was, this beautiful, tormented creature lying on the floor all strapped up in a white jacket.’
Johnny stared at him. ‘I thought you met in a pub in Islington?’
Frank looked at him askance and frowned. ‘A pub in Islington? No, she’d been done for assault, found wandering naked in the high street. I met her in Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum,’ he said, flicking his cigarette far out into the water.
8
Unbidden Things
The next day, on the way home from the seaside, Clemmie’s dad kept tapping the dashboard with his knuckle. He seemed to be in a different mood from yesterday. He was all quiet and serious and annoyed by things, particularly other drivers and the dashboard. He’d asked her not to mention almost falling out of the Waltzer to her mother and she promised that she wouldn’t – though it seemed a little unfair not to be allowed to talk about the most dangerous thing that had ever happened to you. He was in no mood for argument. She tried not to do anything that might irritate him. She was slowly working her way through the pear drops in the glove compartment and staring out of the window, watching the way the wind flung itself through the trees and the fields instead of in the litter and the dustbin lids like you see in London. Then, not even an hour into their journey, the car began to judder and her dad began to say rude words and eventually the car ground to a halt in the middle of a long, straight, empty road with barely enough room for another car to get past. Her dad banged the steering wheel so hard that the crows in a nearby tree all flew away and his hand went red. She knew better than to say anything.
He got out of the car, slamming the door, which made the smelling fern tree hanging round the rear-view mirror spin in circles. She watched as he took off his Starsky sunglasses and his suit jacket and had to open the door again to place them neatly folded on his seat. He didn’t look at her at all. Then he went to the bonnet and opened it up. She pinched a sneaky handful of pear drops and stared at the shiny blue of the bonnet, which was now the windscreen. After a while her dad reappeared from behind it and walked round to the boot of the car and clanged about a bit before coming round to her side and opening the door. He was holding a plastic red petrol can.
‘Fuel gauge has had it. We need petrol. We’re going to have to get back to that garage on the main road.’ He was looking up and down the road. She did too, for supportive reasons.
It was a beautiful blustery day and she felt as if they were on an adventure, walking down the centre of the deserted road. She had Monkey in one hand and was swinging the petrol can in the other. Her father was still huffing and puffing, turning this way and that, looking for cars and checking his watch. She was jogging a bit to keep up with him and she kept getting distracted by the high tops of the cornfields surrounding them and the way the green leaves waved about angrily in the wind. If she shut her eyes, they sounded like roaring monsters. Her dad said they were sweetcorn. She’d thought sweetcorn was made in a sweetcorn factory by the ho-ho-ho Jolly Green Giant. But it made sense. A giant could easily hide in these dark fields. She peered into the blackness beyond the thick stalks and quickly trotted to catch up with her father, putting Monkey in the can and taking a firm hold of his hand.
After a while, her dad seemed to relax a bit and actually started talking and looking about the countryside. He knew about everything; if there had been a cleverest person in the country competition he would have won it. When they came across a squashed rabbit in the road, he pointed out all the bits of blood and guts, told her what the different things did, how the little heart worked, whether the rabbit had been a smoker or not, all sorts of things. Then he told her how the pylons took the phone calls all over the country, how they laid Tarmac on the roads, how birds sometimes used human hair to make their nests. They were talking so much they missed a car drive past and her dad ran after it. He was cross about that and when she caught up she joined in with his crossness though she didn’t really mind. They were a real team.
‘I might as well tell you now, Clemmie,’ he said after a long, happy silence. ‘I was going to stop somewhere nice for tea and tell you…’
He stopped to pull his cigar tin out of his pocket and she saw that there were only two left. She noticed how his hand was all trembly as he lit up, cupping his hands together. She liked the way the smoke slithered up into his nostrils like a slippery blue snake. She wondered whether he was going to tell her she could keep a pony in the garden. She took his hand again, squeezing it, and they walked onwards. ‘I’m going to be living somewhere else for a while.’
She looked up at him and followed his gaze. He was watching some birds flying in the V formation that Miss Bradley had taught them about in school. ‘Where are we going?’ she asked.
‘Just me, love.’ Briefly he looked down at her.
‘And me,’ she said, sure that that was what he had meant to say.
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‘No. You and your mum will stay in the house.’
‘Oh. Does Mummy know?’ she asked. It seemed a rather odd arrangement.
He nodded. ‘I’m going to Somerset.’
‘What’s Somerset?’
‘It’s a place.’
‘What’s so good about Somerset?’
‘A friend of mine lives there.’
‘Well, why don’t we come with you?’
He took another drag. ‘You just can’t.’
She stopped then and so he had to as well. ‘Well, I want to. How long are you going for?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘A weekend?’
‘Look, your mum and I… we’re not going to be together any more.’
‘But if you stayed in the house then you would be.’ She smiled at him but he didn’t smile back. He looked away, over her shoulder, down the lane and sighed.
‘We’re getting a divorce, Clemmie,’ he said.
‘What’s a divorce?’
‘For God’s sake, you know what a divorce is.’ He suddenly sounded irritated by her. ‘Like Uncle Tim and Sandy. We’re splitting up.’ He started smoking in a rush, sucking and blowing. She stared at him. She was confused. He must have made a mistake. ‘But Uncle Tim and Sandy don’t like each other. Sandy threw Mark’s Etch A Sketch right through the window. You and Mummy, you don’t throw things.’
She expected him to agree, to say, Yes, that’s right, I’m just playing a trick on you. But he didn’t. Instead he kept looking down the lane, this way and then that.
‘I’ll still see you,’ he said and he flashed a smile at her but it wasn’t a relaxing smile: it was too quick. Besides, of course he would still see her, he was her dad. His words began to worry Clemmie and she didn’t like the way he was looking at her in a sad slopey-eyed kind of way. Somewhere inside of her she could feel a horrible falling away, as if she was losing her grip, just like yesterday on the Waltzer. She knew she had to cling on hard. Don’t let go! She grabbed his hand in both of hers, the panicky feeling taking over.
The Boat Page 20
