He let his head fall back until he was looking at the world upside down; he was swimming in the stars. He knew his place in the universe.
He heard it first, something coming up out of the water. At his upside down three o’clock he saw a shape looming out of the sea up into the moonlight about ten yards away. He blinked and stared, lifting his head as high as he could, trying to turn around, to spin the world back into shape. He thought it was a fish or a whale or a dolphin. Then he thought of Smudge and her sea monsters. Maybe it was a sea monster come to gobble him up. Oh, Smudge. But to his utter amazement he realized that it was a human being. He watched, with some wonder, as the person slowly began to swim towards him, a steady breaststroke unnaturally high in the water. How on earth had they found him?
He recognized the garment first, the old crocheted poncho. He’d forgotten all about that poncho, the one with holes in it big enough for him and Rob to put their arms through and pretend they were fish trapped in a net. He realized who it was then and his heart leapt like a flying fish and he knew for sure that he wasn’t dead yet. She swam towards him, smooth and fast, smiling at him all the while, her face silver in the moonlight.
‘Mum!’ he cried, filling up with the exquisite warmth of his mother’s love.
Her eyes were glinting in the moonlight and when she got near enough, she dipped under the water and came out as elegantly and easily as an otter up on to the fender. She was slightly out of breath, the water streaming down her pale face. He stared into her eyes, which were green with dark lashes, just like his own; she was so utterly familiar to him it was like looking at himself.
‘Mum,’ he said, overcome with happiness, and she laughed and leant forward a little, her bare elbow underneath the spider-web fabric of the poncho brushing his skin.
‘Hello, Jonty,’ she said, bending her head down and kissing his hand, her lips cool against his skin. He was burning up. If he had the energy he would like to have taken off his clothes.
‘Oh, Mum,’ he said a catch in his throat. Her eyes were full of water; he could see the moonlight dancing inside them. ‘I missed you.’
She was smiling. ‘ I told you I’d see you again,’ she said, her cold fingers against his cheek. ‘I told you so. I live in you. You came from me.’
‘That’s right,’ he said, puzzled. ‘I was born in the caul, wasn’t I?’
She nodded and smiled with those eyes that could have been his.
‘Then how can I be drowning?’ he asked, remembering then how horribly wrong everything was.
‘You mustn’t give up,’ she said, droplets of water falling down her face, little moons running down her cheeks.
‘But I have given up, Mum. That’s why I’m here,’ he croaked because he was crying now. ‘I lost her.’
She put her arm around him and he rested his head against her shoulder and cried. ‘Shhh,it’s not over yet,’ she said, her fingers running through his hair, the coolness of her palm pressing against his forehead, the hardness of her rings. ‘Stay awake, you’re going to be all right!’
But I don’t want to be all right, he thought, but he was so tired, he could barely keep his eyes open. He could feel her pushing him away from her, lifting his head, her fingertips on his chin.
‘You mustn’t sleep, Jonty, my love,’ she said and he could feel her kisses on his face. He tried to focus; he opened his eyes. He’d forgotten the way her eyebrows went up like that, the little freckle on her forehead. But it was no good; his eyelids were too heavy, he was drunk with the tiredness.
He was asleep.
When he first heard the music he barely registered it as music at all, for the place he was in was so remote and beyond all sensation, a delicious worm hole of peace that he had fallen into, that it took a long time for him to realize that the music was not part of him but was a separate thing and in so being demanded something other from him, an outline perhaps, an edge or an acknowledgement.
The music, so implausibly faint, was right on the circumference of his consciousness; he had to listen with every cell of his being to be sure it was there at all. When he did recognize it as music – it wasn’t that he heard the tune, for it seemed to bypass his senses altogether, heading straight into his essence, to the dot that he had become – he felt it drag him outwards to the periphery where the rest of the world must surely be lurking. Then when he understood what the notes were doing, a flame lit up in his darkness and the vast void that he had always known existed – even as a child – was suddenly filled with her love again, just as he had been filled that very first time, on the beach, in the waves, holding her in his arms. It was Otis. It was Otis Redding singing ‘These Arms of Mine’.
The trembling guitar, the crescendo, it filled his entire being with boundless love, which was music. The music was her; he knew that. She was there and he felt her love and his whole body smiled. It spread beyond him, up into the sky, out into the whole universe.
There was something else there too, something aside from the music. He could hear it faintly: water. And the moment he knew that it was water he remembered that she was gone, that he was left without her and the music stopped abruptly.
He opened an eye. He listened. No music. No mother. No Clem. And yet something of them all lingered. He tried to turn his head but nothing happened. He couldn’t feel his face any more, or his hands, or any part of his body; he was solid all over, without sensation anywhere except one eye, which still looked and saw the rolling heavens as he rose and fell with the waves. Two large moons bounced about him, one high above and one in the water nestling by his face, linked only by the jagged white path of his mind. The red morning star was rising up the hem of the sky, twinkling promises of dawn.
Then he saw it, just beneath the star on the horizon: a tiny slash of a sail, white in the moonlight. He blinked and blinked again. He was still hallucinating. No, it was there, a boat on the horizon. He watched the sail move onwards, quite subjectively, as a thing of beauty, wondering who was on the boat, where they were going, what they were talking about. It struck him that he had never seen anything so beautiful in his life as this boat gliding through the water with the wind on her shoulder, governed by nature’s breath and nothing more.
It was not until the boat changed tack and he realized that she was coming towards him that his heart began to stir. His mouth filled with a sweet sharpness. Hope had a taste. It tasted of pear drops. He couldn’t deny it – somewhere in the very core of him he had not given up. His lips moved faintly, soundless words of need tumbled out of him on to the prayer mat.
He tried to pull himself higher up the fender, his blue fingers twitching a little but it was no good, his body was useless. He could barely keep his eye open. He watched through a slit as the waves lifted and dropped him, hiding and revealing the yellowing flag like a cruel game of peek-a-boo.
The sail was no longer a slash now but a triangle, perhaps half a mile away, glowing a brilliant blood-orange, reflecting the rising sun behind him. She was stunning, this boat, truly she was. She was the boat he had always dreamt of: the wooden, double-ended, Scandinavian ketch, flying through the water, her sails shining against the dark blue of the sky. When she changed tack again, heading south now, he thought he glimpsed a man in a red jumper at the helm. The boat was going to pass him on the beam, but with the sun behind his lifeless body, there was a chance the man might not see him.
The flicker of hope had become a flame now. He wanted to live. He needed to live. He made a deal with a god he didn’t believe in: if he lived he would make amends. He promised that if that boat rescued him, he would go back and rescue Smudge. He swore on that prayer mat, he would find that island.
Then something extraordinary happened. Although he couldn’t move a muscle and his eye would no longer open and the breath had left his body, inside he felt movement of a kind he had never experienced before. It was as if he were being reached into; there were hands on his heart, gently opening him up like an unfolding flower, turning hi
m inside out. Love and peace and forgiveness were being poured into him and he was filled with a lucidity that he had never encountered before, a total absence of fear. With all fear gone, there was nothing left but love. An all-encompassing love – it was without attachment or judgement; there were no criteria, no barriers, no divisions. He thought of Frank and Annie and the love permeated them too. He thought of Smudge, of his mother, of Clem, all of them were enshrouded by it. They were all safe; he knew that. All was well. The boat hadn’t seen him. The last thing he saw before he slipped away was the elegant port bow pass by not fifty yards away, close enough for him to catch the name: The Maid Marion. And somewhere deep inside his rigid body, he laughed and wept and believed. Maid Marion.
Epilogue
Stu was the skipper. He was a sandy-haired Irishman, a fine sailor and a fine linguist. He rarely bathed, had often crossed whole oceans without changing his clothes and had an unfortunate skin condition because of it. His first mate was a Spaniard named Emilio and they worked for a Frenchman who ran his yacht-delivery business from a bar in Bermuda. Together they had delivered boats all over the globe through all kinds of seas and all types of weather. This was their eighteenth joint delivery. Their French boss knew he could rely on them to turn up on time with minimum damage. Most of the boats they delivered were standard charter boats but they’d lucked out with this one: a forty-eight-foot Scandinavian wooden double-ended ketch that sailed like a dream and even had a state-of-the-art autopilot on board. She belonged to a wealthy German racing driver who was expecting her in Crete within the next week for his holiday.
They had left Narbonne in the south-west of France later than expected due to foul weather. In the end, with the wind showing no signs of abating, the Mistral coming off the Pyrenees being a tricky customer, they’d had to depart in a force nine. So they were slightly behind schedule by the time they hit the Tyrrhenian Sea. They had stopped once en route at Bonifacio on the southern coast of Corsica where they’d got so shit-faced Emilio hadn’t made it back to the boat at all and Stu, who had consumed his own body weight in alcohol, had to be pulled out of the marina by the port authorities.
Emilio was a few years Stu’s junior and a different character altogether. He liked the ladies, as did Stu, but the ladies liked him in return. They liked the way he danced and they liked the way he looked and they liked the way he smelt as fresh as the morning breeze. And Stu liked the way the ladies all piled back to their boat of an evening and they both liked the way their boat moved on pretty sharpish the next day. Aside from both being formidable sailors and lovers of women, they shared an unbridled passion for rum and Moroccan hashish.
They’d left Bonifacio a couple of days before and were enjoying the calmer weather. The boat was moving beautifully under full sail on a comfortable beam reach. Emilio had been on watch for the last four hours until dawn and was now down in the galley making some coffee for Stu, dancing about the kitchen to the Jackson Five on the all-mod-con stereo system. He stuck his head into Stu’s cabin. Stu was sound asleep on his back fully clothed, snoring and snorting.
‘Rise and shine, Stu baby,’ Emilio said in his thick Spanish accent, discoing back out over to the chart table to turn up the weather report. He never stopped dancing. He had once danced for three weeks solid from the Azores to Barbados.
Stu staggered out of his berth and stood in the doorway looking wild and haggard, his hair standing upright, his red-veined eyes blinking blearily. He headed straight to the fancy fridge and pulled out an early-morning heart-starter. The can opened with a click and a fizz and he took a long, thirsty gulp of cold beer.
‘Any traffic?’ he asked.
‘Couple of trawlers and a cruise ship. Pero nada màs.’
Stu stretched out his limbs and sat down at the chart table to listen to the melodic tones of the woman reading the weather report, one ear cocked, a dreamy smile resting on his lips.
‘I’d give her one,’ he said and belched violently. He stood up, ran a hand through his mop of hair with one eye on Emilio, who was doing a nifty half-turn with jazz hands. He listened to the woman’s soft voice warning of a change of wind coming their way.
‘Easterlies, you big feckin’ poof. We’re changing course. We’re going south of Sicily instead.’
‘Aye aye, skipper,’ Emilio said, shimmying out of his way.
Stu leant across the table, grabbed his red jumper, which was so salty and dirty it still held his form. He put it on, lit himself a fag and took his can of beer out into the cockpit. He had a quick look about. It was a beautiful morning; the red rising sun was so bright he had to squint. He yawned again, finished the beer, crushed the can in his hand and chucked it overboard. Then he reset the autopilot to head due south for the next hundred miles or so, sat down by the tiller, farted loudly, and got out his little silver box of hashish as the boat sped off across the water.
He spent a while adjusting the sails before sprinkling some of the finest Moroccan hash all over the entrails of a Marlborough cigarette. He called down to Emilio.
‘Come and have a little smoke with me before you lay down your sweet head, Emilio.’
Emilio finished making the coffee in the galley and brought it out into the cockpit. ‘Beautiful day,’ he said, his face a golden red in the morning light. He sheltered his eyes, looking over at the fiery sun bouncing off the water. Stu passed him the big fat reefer and Emilio took it up on to the deck, leaning against the boom to appreciate the full glory of the morning.
His eye was caught by something in the water. He stood up to get a better look.
‘Stu?’ he called down. ‘Your nine o’clock. What’s that in the water?’ he said, pointing due east.
Stu stood up and looked out. It was hard to see anything because of the glare of the sun. He leant forward and picked up the binoculars from the coachroof and peered through them. ‘A turtle maybe?’ he said, passing the binoculars to Emilio, who took another look.
It wasn’t a turtle. Emilio was pretty sure about that. He stood up and steadied his feet for a better look.
‘Joder!’ he said, lowering the binoculars and squinting out. He checked again. ‘Get the engine on!’
Stu leant down and turned the engine on and spun the wheel, the bows shifting round, heading towards the object in the water.
By the time they came up alongside, they knew exactly what they were dealing with. A human body was strapped face down to a fender. It wasn’t moving. Emilio had the boat hook ready and leant out and hooked the body in by the trousers, pulling it in towards the hull.
Stu rushed along the deck and the pair of them got down on their stomachs and hauled the heavy soaked corpse up on to the boat. He lay motionless face down on the deck, his rigid arms clinging on to a scrap of carpet.
Emilio heaved the body over on to his back and they both sat back at the sight of his lifeless face.
‘Holy mother of God,’ Stu cried, crossing himself. The expression on the boy’s face was extraordinary; he looked like an angel dropped from the sky. He appeared to be in some blissful sleep. Despite the blue hue of his skin, he had a beatific smile on his lips as if lost in some divine reverie, peace emanating from him.
Emilio too crossed himself and stared. ‘Is he dead?’ he asked.
‘I’d say so.’
Stu got on to his knees and picked up the boy’s cold grey wrist and felt for a pulse. ‘Jesus, he’s just a wee boy,’ he said. He looked up at Emilio and shook his head.
Emilio leant over the body and pressed his lips to the boy’s smile and tried to give him mouth to mouth, his fingers pinching his icy blue nose. Nothing happened.
Stu started to pump the boy’s chest. One two three four. One two three four. But there was no response. He stopped pumping and looked up at Emilio. There was no need to say anything. They lifted the corpse, the water pouring on to the deck from his clothing, noticing then that he wearing a suit and bow tie. He must have fallen from a cruise ship. They carried him along the deck, down
the companionway and into the saloon, Stu sweeping the table clear with his elbow as they laid him out. They cut off the fender and the ragged little mat that was attached to it and ripped off his soaking wet clothes to reveal a thin, grey, ice-cold body. His hands, lips and feet were a pale but vivid blue. Stu dashed through to the cabin and returned with an armful of blankets and towels.
‘Come on, lad,’ he said, covering the boy’s naked body with the bedding whilst Emilio filled water bottles with hot water and proceeded to put them underneath the blankets against the boy’s skin. Emilio tried again with the mouth to mouth and they pumped his chest several times but still the boy didn’t respond.
After what felt like a long time, they stopped trying and sat down either side of the body, staring at each other, shocked by what the sea had coughed up. Stu reached round for the rum from the shelf behind. He unscrewed the cap and knocked back a glug. He leant forward and poured a little into the dead boy’s mouth and watched as it dribbled down his chin.
‘I should have seen him earlier,’ Emilio said eventually, reaching across the body and taking the rum from Stu.
‘Poor kid,’ Stu said, lighting up a cigarette, staring at the boy’s fine-featured face. ‘Look at him. Why’s he so feckin’ happy?’
Emilio shook his head. ‘What do we do? Chuck him back in?’
Stu shrugged and nodded.
Then, all of a sudden, the corpse coughed and spluttered. They both jumped to their feet, staring down at him, turning him on to his side, watching the colour creep back into his parted lips, his skin changing from blue to grey to a pale yellow as the blood began to flow.
Then the corpse opened his vivid green eyes and sat up suddenly and took a great gasp of air. ‘The stars have all gone out!’ it cried, looking from one man to the other. ‘The stars have all gone out!’
The Boat Page 32
